Seven Grams of Lead (27 page)

He and Mallery took turns sleeping beneath the red waterproof boat cover that transformed the bow into a low-slung cabin, giving the Zodiac the appearance of carrying only one passenger.

Toward the end of his next shift at the tiller, Thornton squinted through a noon haze at what appeared to be a blue whale on the horizon. Given the distance, he ruled out anything smaller than a cruise ship. As the
Zodiac drew closer, the blue mass grew, and browns and greens emerged, along with inequities on its surface. It was Barbados, he realized. Soon he made out high cliffs of sandstone and jagged coral, with towering waterfalls pounding the bay and raising a mist that blurred a forest of every conceivable shade of green. There was no maritime activity on this side of the island; the sheer cliffs precluded landing. Closer still and the vapor subsided to reveal trees dotted with oranges, lemons, and limes. Hundreds of varieties of flowers covered the hillsides and meadows.

For some reason, Thornton had an edgy sense but dismissed it. In the absence of scientific evidence to the contrary, he believed premonition to be purely psychological. And, in this case, perhaps, a function of too much Red Bull.

They say that after twenty years of service, a Special Forces veteran will have a topaz ring, a Harley, an ex-wife, and a job as a Walmart greeter. Carlton Busby thought he was way ahead of the game. Just a year out, and he already had a hot second wife, Ryota—he met her at the bar she was tending on Koh Samui—plus a gig with Macedon, the private military company, at fifty grand more than what old Uncle Sam had been paying him, plus a complimentary three-bedroom condo in a sweet gated community in Boca de Río, Venezuela, just a few clicks from the base.

Most of Macedon’s business was assisting the
Venezuelan Army and the Fuerza Aérea in Operación Centinela, the fight against drug smugglers from Brazil and Guyana. But sometimes the private military company’s clients were American services with operational objectives identical to the Venezuelans’: deploy a drone and turn a cigarette boat into ash. Today the client was the DEA. Or so they said. Someone pays you a million bucks to play a video game, the right question is,
Who do you want shot?
Today the answer was a Brazilian couple with a boatload of meth they’d cooked out on one of the uncharted rocks east of the Caribbean. What’s more, the meth heads had raped and murdered a kindergarten teacher.

Busby was eager to pull the trigger—actually a red button atop a joystick. But first, he had to find the couple’s Zodiac boat.

He piloted the Hornet unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV—what civilians call a drone—from a ground control station, though it sounded like he was in an actual cockpit, because the speakers played the buzz of the props and the chopping air. The place was a combat vet’s dream: big dark room with the thick kind of carpeting that makes you want to walk around with your shoes off, arctic AC, and, best of all, the base chief’s cook, Señora García. The old lady brought in fresh coffee or anything else you wanted, and she was one badass baker.

In the middle of the room were two consoles, one for the person serving as the UAV’s sensor operator
and a second for the pilot. Each console was furnished with a supercomfortable leather chair, a desk with a computer keyboard, and a cluster of monitors that showed real-time video from the aircraft’s nose camera, feed from the variable-aperture infrared camera—for nighttime or low-light viewing—and synthetic aperture radar that could provide a picture through clouds or smoke.

An hour into the sortie, the sensor operator told Busby that she’d picked up a craft whose peripherals matched the specs. Using a standard flight stick that transmitted commands over a C-band line-of-sight data link, Busby lowered the bird to 3,000 feet above sea level, high enough that the targets wouldn’t be able to see or hear a thing. From that height, the Hornet could let you read the brand name on a pint of whiskey. The big capital letters stenciled onto the side of the fourteen-foot Zodiac might as well have been the Hollywood sign.

MERMAID III
.

The Zodiac rounded the southern tip of Barbados, sugarcane fields for the most part, bringing into view a line of contemporary resorts and glitzy condos. Thornton used binoculars salvaged from the
Mermaid III
to search for threats. If he and Mallery were intercepted by a patrol craft, they would be calling lawyers from the inside of a detention center—if they
were lucky. The closest thing he saw was a couple of kids fishing from a dinghy.

Mallery raised the boat cover a few inches. She had changed into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, both of which hung off her like drapes, which was good. Albert’s clothing, along with effects of the wind and salt air on her hair, had transformed her from a refined cosmopolitan woman to a party chick returning to a hostel after a day at the beach.

Stretching her arms, she yawned. “So back in Nantucket, using my site’s metrics, I calculated that as a couple, we would score only about fifty out of a possible hundred and ten.”

Thornton feared she was about to write off last night to post-traumatic stress. “That high?”

“When I get back to the office, I’m going to have to alter the algorithm to give more weight to escaping a black site together and saving each other’s lives.”

She kissed his knee. A gentle peck, but it sent a frisson of excitement throughout his body.

“Getting back to navigating …” She pointed to one of the maps from the fishing boat. He ducked his head under the boat cover to get a better look. “There’s a small fishing harbor just outside Bridgetown. Good place for us to hide in plain sight?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Also where we’d be expected to go, if there’s a welcome committee for us. Anything else near the city?”

“There are docks along the Careenage, which is
an inlet running right into downtown. Very crowded, though.”

“Crowded is good.”

“I’m not so sure about this place. The map says, ‘Warning! Theft is endemic here. Lock your boat tight if you must leave it unattended.’ ”

“A thief would be doing us a favor. Remind me to leave the motor running.”

“Designate the Zodiac as target.” The velvety French-accented voice of the sensor operator, Nathalie Léglise, wafted into Busby’s headphones. Nathalie was a redhead whose sexiest feature—and she had no shortage of them—was a black eye patch.

“Pilot copies,” Busby said into his pipe-cleaner mic.

“Suspect One confirmed, Suspect Two likely concealed by camo,” came the nasal voice of the mission’s sentinel, Nick Aardsma, from the front office. Aardsma was also Macedon’s cofounder, having gotten into the private military business after a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force a couple of years ago. Already he’d gotten himself a fifteen-bedroom villa in Boca de Río with his own cook, maid, and a genuine limey butler.

“Pilot copies,” Busby said. A tap of his F1 key and an image of crosshairs snapped onto the shaky highangle video of the Zodiac.

In the stern, by the motor, the head of a guy in a baseball cap—designated
SUSPECT 1
—stuck partway out from beneath a red tarp of some sort, under which
SUSPECT 2
was probably guarding her fortune in meth. The tarp, heated by the sun to ninety-eight degrees, fucked the drone’s infrared. A good effort at concealment by the targets. But not good enough. The intel packet said
SUSPECT 1
had an extreme buzz cut. It stood to reason he would hide it. Also the crewmen’s uniform on the
Mermaid III
had included baseball caps with embroidered anchors. Busby zoomed in on the cap. Sure enough: anchor.

Into his mic, Busby said, “Sentinel, please seek permission for tail one-oh-four”—his Hornet’s tail number was 104—“to come south thirty degrees.”

“Sentinel copies,” said Aardsma.

Getting permission for Busby to change the flight plan was a simple matter of Aardsma radioing one of his contacts over at the Fuerza Aérea—the Venezuelan Air Force—and getting a
sí.

Busby dropped the Hornet to well within the three-quarter-mile range of the Mini-Spike rockets. To Nathalie, he said, “Sensor, while he’s doing that, you can lock up the target.”

“Roger,” said the Frenchwoman.

“Pilot, Sensor, one-oh-four is cleared hot on the Zodiac,” came Aardsma’s voice. “Engage at your discretion.”

“Pilot copies,” Busby said. “Spin up a weapon, Nat.”

“Sensor wilco.”

She ran through the prelaunch and launch checklists with him, everything a go. She selected and armed her lasers. He concluded the sequence with, “Three, two, one, rifle,” and punched the red button.

It only clicked. Any old stock rocket-launch MP3 would have been a lot more gratifying. Three seconds ticked off. Long-ass seconds, because there was no audio of the actual Mini-Spike firing. Just the splutter of the drone’s engine and props, same as ever. There was nothing to see, either; the rockets were too fast to track with the human eye, and there was no computer iconography, not even the basic straight line for a missile, like the missiles in the first-generation
Space Invaders.

Impact did come, however. The Zodiac disappeared in a mass of orange fire and black smoke. It looked real enough, but on the monitor the mass was the size of a nickel. The effect was like the rudimentary animated explosions from an early version of
Medal of Honor.
In just two seconds, the flames and smoke completely dissipated into the air. The raft reappeared—that is, what was left of it: charred flecks floating atop the waves.

“Excellent job,” came Aardsma’s voice. “Come on out and get some of Señora García’s
empanadas.
”

Bridgetown was the
urban planning equivalent of a ransom note composed of letters cut and pasted from wildly different publications. Many of the buildings were three- and four-story Georgians or Palladians that would have held their own in any European capital. In and around them were comely pastel Victorians. Here and there was a charismatic wooden chattel house, built on blocks of coral and trimmed with gingerbread fretwork. Then there were the “offshore” financial institutions, bank after bank, some of them sleek constructions of steel and glass that seemingly defied physics, others imitations of the Georgians and the Palladians wedged into tiny spaces that undermined the intended majesty. The rest of the city was filled with the same three-story building, duplicated
again and again, the architectural objective apparently having simply been something that would remain standing for a decent number of years. All were painted in too-bright colors and trimmed with too much chrome. They housed boutiques and storefronts on the street level, apartments or offices on the upper floors. Everywhere Day-Glo signs proclaimed the likes of 50%
OFF
! or
GRAND OPENING
! Crowds swarmed in and out.

“What do you say we go shopping?” Thornton asked.

“How could we live if we passed this up?” replied Mallery.

He joined about twenty customers in Mo’s, a lemon-yellow discount clothing store advertising
SHOES
,
2 FOR 1
. He patted his pocket, feeling the seven $100 bills he’d taken from Albert’s wallet before covering the dead boat captain with a tarp and setting him adrift in the
Mermaid III
’s portside Zodiac lifeboat in hope of decoying any searchers. While packing the
Mermaid III
’s other Zodiac, Mallery found $1,500 more in Albert’s duffel bag. The total of $2,200 ought to go a long way toward the purchase of disguises now.

To minimize the chance of their being seen together, Mallery waited a minute before entering Mo’s, then plucked a blouse off a rack and headed to the dressing rooms. Thornton remained behind, choosing a floral-print shirt for himself in XXL—bulky
clothing veiled stature. For the same reason he also picked out a pair of stoplight-red board shorts with more square inches of material than any pair of long pants he’d ever owned. Next, in defiance of conventional spook wisdom that wearing hats aroused surveillants’ suspicions, he fished an Atlanta Braves cap from a bargain bin. It would keep him from being the only male tourist on the island without a baseball cap. The Braves cap would also serve to hide his unique haircut, with the bill draping his features in shadows. These measures would throw off human searchers.

Cameras were tougher. Baseball caps made no difference to facial recognition software. Even bushy mustaches and beards were useless. In order to fool the machines, Thornton had read, you had to think the way they did. For instance, you could compress or distend a photo and a human would instantly recognize the subject, but a computer couldn’t. Computerized facial recognition applications took into account relative positioning, sizes, and shapes of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw. Accordingly Thornton selected a tube of zinc oxide. When applied, the white sun-protection cream was capable of widening the bridge of a nose so that it boggled a system running principal component analysis or even the latest three-dimensional recognition software. The wraparound sunglasses Thornton chose would accomplish more of the same. He completed his outfit with a pair of Nike knockoffs, leaving part of the balled-up tissue
paper in the toe of one of the shoes in order to alter his stride.

For Mallery, he picked out an extra-long T-shirt, the sort commonly worn over a bathing suit, this one with a silk-screened image of Peter Tosh, designed to divert attention from her face, though he suspected that if the surveillants were male, her bare legs would provide ample diversion. He chose a pair of sunglasses for her too, with frames big enough to negate the pronounced contour of her cheekbones. He also got thick glam-rock-style makeup, which could thwart skin-texture analytics, and a can of mousse to keep tendrils of hair pasted to her face—a monkey wrench to systems running linear discriminate analysis. Finally, he selected something called Dreamscape Instant Blonde.

At the counter, he added a box of on-sale Chiclets. Properly wadded in the mouth, the gum wouldn’t draw a second glance from other humans but could utterly discombobulate elastic bunch graph measurement-based software.