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Approaching, he saw the officer’s eyes continuing to scan the room, without locking on the director’s eyes.
“Good morning,” the director said, trying to get his attention. The security officer did not turn his head, he just kept scanning. “One of my staff is not here. It’s possible she’s been missing since last night.”
The man shook his head. “She is not missing.”
“What…what do you mean?”
Now the man turned his way. “Talk to Cyrus.”
The pair held their gaze for a long moment, and then the director turned away and began heading down the stairs to his workstation.
He had a very bad feeling about this, but he pushed as much worry out of his mind as he could, and then he typed in his message box, asking Cyrus if he knew where his employee was.
There was a short delay, and then the answer came. Fourteen left last night because of a personal issue at home.
The director had been here in the ops center till after three a.m. If Fourteen had to leave her post, why had she not come to him, and why had neither security nor Cyrus made any mention of it? He didn’t ask this question; instead, he typed out an interrogative.
Will she be replaced?
Unnecessary. Drone Pilot Zero One has been paid and is no longer operational.
Understood. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He had so many questions right now. Probably ten of his staff were done with their aspect of the mission, yet they all remained at their desk in case any new targets popped up. What had happened to Fourteen?
He felt protective of his staff, even though he didn’t even know their names. Fourteen was his responsibility.
But, ultimately, he didn’t push it. Fourteen was gone, and that was that.
He stood up and addressed the room. “Fourteen has returned home to deal with a family emergency.”
The director went back to his desk a moment later, all but certain he had not told the truth, but also certain it was his job to do what Cyrus told him to do.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The sixty-foot trawler had appeared on the horizon well before dawn this morning, only visible in the darkness to the crew of the forty-foot open-deck fishing boat several miles to the north after someone in the trawler’s pilot house flashed a light on and off three times, the agreed-upon signal.
The fishing boat had set off from the little coastal town of Pilón, Cuba, a half hour prior, and it was already several miles offshore when the crew saw the lights and adjusted their heading accordingly.
The trawler had come up from Port Maria, on Jamaica’s northern coast, and the seventy-five-mile overnight journey had been difficult for the passengers of the vessel, though the crew was more than used to the waves, the cramped conditions, and the ever-present danger of life on the sea.
After twenty minutes both vessels began to converge, well south of the Cuban coastline so marine radar on the southeastern portion of the island wouldn’t pick up the contacts, and eventually the trawler and the fishing boat came to within fifty meters of each other. The seas were far from calm, but both captains had seen much worse, so the go-ahead was given to the trawler’s passengers, and they loaded into a rigid-hull inflatable boat they’d been towing and set out towards the Cuban vessel.
A few minutes later the pilot of the RIB had returned his craft to the trawler, the boat from Jamaica turned back to the south, and the Cuban fishing boat began heading back to shore, engines blasting at full power.
The new arrivals were a half dozen hard-eyed men, each carrying a backpack, and they sat on the deck, searching the predawn ocean for any potential danger.
The crew of the fishing vessel didn’t know it, but the six Black men were gangsters from the Spangler Posse, Jamaica’s most notorious criminal organization, and they’d been hired to do a job on the other side of Cuba, up near Havana.
But the crew of the fishing vessels were no fools. These Jamaicans were criminals, plain and simple, and they easily discerned that.
Away from the all-inclusive resorts full of fat and happy tourists, the island of Jamaica itself is a violent place, suffering a homicide rate ten times that of the United States, which has a homicide rate five times that of the European Union. And within Jamaica, there are hot pockets with exceptionally horrific crime statistics. The Kingston parish of St. James, for example, has a homicide rate some thirty times higher than that of the United States, one hundred fifty times that of Europe, and from this neighborhood these six men had set off the night before, boarding the trawler, sailing around the southeastern tip of their nation, then hitting the open water as they sailed north.
Thirty-five minutes after climbing into the fishing boat, the Cubans and Jamaicans landed on a spit of land west of the town of Pilón, and here they were met by the driver of a school bus who, just like the boat captain, had been paid in cash by a cutout in a bar in nearby Manzanillo just the day before.
The bus driver asked no questions as the six men vomited in the sand, then recovered enough to load their heavy backpacks and climb onto his vehicle, and the six asked nothing of him as he drove off to the northwest shortly before eight a.m.
The roads across central Cuba are slow going, and they did not arrive at their safe house till after eight in the evening. Here they ate rations they’d brought along from home, checked their equipment, pulled several bottles of rum out of their packs, and had a few drinks while they waited for a signal.
It had been a long day, and it would be a difficult night, but the money offered to each of these men for this evening of work had been orders of magnitude more than what they would make with the Spangler Posse in a year, so to a man they’d agreed.
