Chapter Eighteen

The Sicilian left his room and went downstairs, through the hotel lobby and out the front door. The car waited along the curb out front. The driver—a thick, muscular Dayak with a ring strung in his left earlobe—sat behind the wheel and waited.

The Sicilian got into the backseat and told the driver to drive down to the river. “Drop me off. Then, get lost. Don’t hang around. Just drive away,” he told the driver.

The Dayak nodded and drove through town and then turned off onto a deserted road along the river. In the backseat, the Sicilian adjusted the spy camera on his shirt collar. He was obsessed by it. He liked the new technology. Liked to think he was as smart technologically as the newest computer geek on the block. He turned on the switch and sat up in the backseat. He leaned over and caught the bright lights and digital clocks on the instrument panel. He saw them through the tiny window on the camera.

“Good,” he told himself, “everything’s set.”

A quarter mile away, Seabury heard the car as it sped along the road. His makeshift campsite stood in a remote spot, a half mile down from the bridge. Not a likely spot for a car to travel to, not this late at night. Seabury hurried into the underbrush. He hauled back sticks, twigs, leaves, and parts of tree branches. He found some tangled vine in the brush and brought that back, too. He wound the vine around everything and extended the brush pile out into the shape of a body and covered it with his blanket.

Then, he slipped back into the woods and waited. Back on the road, he heard the car stop. A cloud of yellow dust billowed up in the headlights. The back door on the driver’s side eased open. Then, it shut with the noise of a tiny thunk. The Sicilian scurried back across the road into the underbrush. The car reversed gears, swung around in a cloud of dust and smoke, and headed back in the opposite direction.

Seabury waited. Not long. Just long enough for the man to creep along with panther paws and stop at the edge of the clearing. Through a sliver of moonlight that slanted between the trees, a gun came out. A sleek, dark-barreled Beretta with a long suppressor. The man stepped from the edge of the forest into the clearing, a few feet closer. His shoulders hunched, his elbow locked at a forty-five degree angle. The gun pointed straight down, not shaking, not jittery, but steady in his hand. Pfft…Pfft…Pfft. The gun fired in a quiet, almost muted sound.

In a burst of anger, Seabury shot back through the trees toward the smaller man. He’d been around men like the Sicilian before. Small, compact, athletic men. Men with fast hands, agile head movements, and tap dancer’s feet. In a fight, their speed and foot movement made them more dangerous than much larger men with slow, lumbering blows and stiff, plodding feet.

Lunging from the trees, Seabury grabbed the Sicilian high on his right shoulder. Startled, the smaller man spun away from his grasp, hunched and stiffened his shoulders until they felt to Seabury like stems of twisted rebar. The Sicilian pulled away, but Seabury’s left hand came around like the face of a cast iron frying pan and cuffed the side of his head with the sound of a loud crack. The other hand raked down the front of his shirt. Buttons flew off. The fabric ripped open. Seabury was left with a tiny filament of dark rubber and a tiny camera attached to it in his hand. The Sicilian ripped free of his grasp, pulled back, and turned around. Before Seabury realized it, he had sprinted back into the forest, leaving him staring down at the tiny camera.

Alone now, with a penlight, he saw the switch and the AAA battery that activated the camera. He sat down on the ground, and in the dim light, switched it on. A face popped up inside the tiny, plastic window. A lean, handsome Indonesian face broke from the shadows. Then, a man’s deep basso voice said, “The big guy, Seabury. Kill him.”

Another voice came on. “What about the others?”

The Indonesian said, “Don’t you understand? The secret must remain a secret. I can’t have them meddling around up there discovering things. I want all of them killed.”

Seabury turned the camera off. In the midst of the secluded clearing, he shook his head, amazed and speechless. In the silence and darkness, he stood thinking. It wasn’t hard to figure out. The Sicilian, a paid assassin, was sent to kill him. He was sent to kill Lois, Gretchen, and Hornsby, too. They mean nothing to me, kill them all.

Seabury’s body stiffened now in a cold, chilling sweat. His eyes squeezed shut. A moment later, they popped open as his face filled with contempt and scorn. He needed to find the Sicilian quickly…take care of him. Later, he would find the Indonesian kingpin with the deep basso voice. Who was he? What secret was he hiding? Why did he want to kill him?

A wind rose, and leaves rattled inside the trees. Seabury stood up and crossed over to remove his blanket from the brush pile. In the penlight, he saw three holes punched into the fabric. After a long and difficult day, his body sagged, tired and weary under the weight of spent emotions. Eventually, he laid down on the bed of grass, pulled the blanket over his shoulders, and tried to sleep. He thought about the Sicilian out there, lurking in the night.

Next time, it’ll be different, he told himself. Next time, I’ll be ready. He scanned the clearing, assured of his safety now. The Sicilian was long gone. He wasn’t coming back to plan another sneak attack. Seabury lay back and closed his eyes. He was asleep five minutes later.