Buzzard Bay (35 page)

Lena was sure his mind was somewhere else on all his troubles. What she did not know was that his mind was subconsciously consumed with guilt. Today was not a good day, and Bob was very embarrassed.

“I’m going away for a few days,” he said. “I’m worried about you, I wish you’d move in here and let me protect you, Lena.”

“Maybe then you would not have to bug my apartment,” she decided to say.

He smiled, “It was the only way I could protect you, Lena. If that bastard would have stayed one minute longer last night, I would have killed him.”

“To say nothing about my privacy,” she countered, “you left your ring at my place.” She gave it to him and began to dress.

He went over to a drawer and pulled out a beautiful gold chain. He hung the ring on the chain and went over to Lena. “I want you to have this while I’m gone,” he told her as he placed it around her neck.

“You know I’m used to receiving gifts, Mark. I very seldom give them back.”

Mark smiled at her, “We’ll see if you can earn it first.”

Lena’s mind wandered as she got into Mark’s car for the ride back to her apartment. She sat in the back seat watching the city lights go by. “If only I could be like the people living in their secure little homes,” she thought.

“You knew Grundman in Germany before you came here, didn’t you, Lena?” It was the driver’s voice. He sounded different somehow.

“Yes,” she answered, “why do you ask?”

“Can you even remember him talk about a man named Green?”

The question instantly put her on alert. “Who are you?” she asked.

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “I’m a man who needs some questions answered, and I’m not above using painful means to get them. You know what happened to Grundman,” he told her, “the same thing could happen to you. So let us just be comfortable, and we shall chat while I take you home.”

“You did not have to do it this way, Mark,” she thought. “Why can’t you just trust me to tell you all I know?”

Ansly came bursting into surveillance room. “What’s going on?” he asked breathlessly. “Some guy is quizzing Lena, but we don’t know where in hell she is,” the agent told him. Ansly listened for a moment, “Jeez, he must have her in the car. Where’s our driver?”

One of the agents got on the phone to see if anyone knew where he was. “We’ve got to tighten up around here. What the fuck does this guy want?” All they could do was listen, hoping Lena would be all right.

“I worked for Grundman when he was still in Germany,” the driver told her, “but when I saw what he was doing to you and to my necklace, I lost it. I began to realize he was small fish anyway.” The driver went on, “So now, I figure you owe me one. What I want to know is why did he come here? There must have been someone here to set him up.”

“Are you working for Bertrand?” Lena asked.

“I’m not working for anybody right now,” he told her. “Now are you going to answer some questions, or do I stop the car?”

Lena had already thought about what she would say, “All I know is that Grundman was friends with a man named Manly Waddell. I’d like to thank you for helping me the other night, whoever you are.”

“The only reason you stayed alive that night is because I thought you were some bimbo Grundman was playing with. Besides, I don’t kill unless there is something in it for me. I had talked with Grundman earlier that afternoon,” Henekie told her. “He wanted me to kill half of Nassau, but when it came to paying me the money he owed me, he then threatened me. That necklace you almost lost your life over,is a fake,” he told her. “I came back to get the real one and get rid of Grundman, then when I saw how determined he was to kill you, I started thinking maybe you were someone of interest. so I followed your taxi when you left the building.”

He turned to her, “You lead a very interesting life, Lena, and you are no bimbo.” Then he turned back to his driving. “I’m only telling you all this because when a woman travels in the company you do, you know she knows too much and becomes a liability. What I’m saying is that to someone, you are worth money. Whether they want you dead or alive, it does not matter to me.”

Lena shivered; she had no doubts that this man could kill her without blinking, she had to think fast. “ If you go to work for me,I won’t tell Bertrand you took his money.”

“What would you like me to do?” he asked.

“I know the right people,” she told him. “You get Manly Waddell out of the way, and we can run these islands.”

“You’re an ambitious lady!” Henekie told her.

“Stick around,” she told him, “you’ll find out just how ambitious.” She smiled, “Take me to my apartment, and we can talk about this over a drink.” Lena heard the rain begin to pound on the roof about the same time as she heard Henekie’s laugh ring through the car.

“I need better references before I make up my mind about who I work for,” he told her. “Who knows, you might not be the high bidder.” He pulled the car over to the sidewalk. “How much money do you have on you?” he asked.

he opened her handbag, felt the revolver, and then pulled out whatever cash she had and gave it to him. “We shall call this bond money on your bid,” he told her. “Now get out. You’re only a block from your home, but I’m a new boyfriend, and your father might be waiting for you.”

he opened the door, “This girlfriend might not want to go out with you again after being treated like this.”

“We will definitely have another date,” he told her. “Whether it is our last one remains to be seen.”

he shut the door and watched the car lights disappear. The rain actually felt good, cooling her skin. She began walking toward her apartment. At least she had kept herself alive for tonight. Tomorrow, she would be worth more dead than alive, and she had no place to run.

“Shit,” was all Ansly could say. He’d had his men wait for Lena and her intruder at her apartment. They wouldn’t get him now, but they’d certainly got an earful. They also had a dead agent. He’d been found in a parking lot; his ID and revolver were missing.

Henekie found Lena’s offer more intriguing than anything else. He hadn’t been in the Bahamas long, but the winds of change were on everyone’s lips. Right now everything that was done on the islands had to be sanctioned by Waddell. A new reform government if elected would leave him vulnerable. Henekie knew Waddell was the drug cartel’s front man here. They might soon be looking for a new man.

Then there was the new man in town, Bertrand. Henekie suspected Bertrand was much like himself, sensing a change in the islands that would leave them ripe for the picking. Bertrand apparently had money and the backing to try and solidify his position before the new government took power. Did he have the power to take out a well-organized drug cartel; that was the question. Then there was Lena, she was playing a dangerous game with both sides. Was she really working for one side or was she trying to sneak through the middle?

Henekie decided to talk to Waddell. He was the only one he could contact right now anyway or the only one who would return his call if he left the right message. Henekie got Waddell’s answering service when he phoned, but it took only minutes before Waddell answered his call.

“You said you had information about a man called Green?” Waddell asked into the phone. It didn’t take Henekie long to convince Waddell that he was legitimate.

“Be on the street in front of your hotel, alone,” Waddell told him. “I’ll pick you up in my car.”

Fifteen minutes later, Henekie watched the limo pull over to the curb, and he got in. Henekie knew he had to get Waddell’s attention right away, so he told him about the botched hit up in Canada and how he had found Grundman.

“I was coming to work for Grundman when he told me to come here. Now I find he’s dead. I still want to get Green,” Henekie told him. “But I can’t do it alone.”

“The American government has him somewhere,” Manly told him. “Grundman was trying to find out where.”

“The point is I think I know where,” Henekie said.

Waddell knew without asking that to find out where would cost money.

“How did you find me?” Waddell asked.

“The night I was to meet Grundman, I saw this woman called Lena leaving his apartment. I followed her and got your name,” Henekie told him.

Waddell frowned. “She talks too much.”

“I decided to let her live till I talked to you,” Henekie said. “Who knows, she might be valuable to us in the future.”

Waddell looked straight ahead. “What’s this so-called information going to cost me?”

“The information is not for sale. What I sell are my services. I have a plan that will get rid of both Bertrand and Green. My services, on completion of this contract, will cost you two million U.S.”

Waddell pursed his lips and thought for a while.

“We’re having a little trouble over on Andros Island right now,” Waddell told him. “The Colombians are coming in to handle it themselves. I would doubt we will have to worry about Bertrand after that. If you do know where Green is, then we may require your services for that job later—that is, if we can negotiate a price.”

“Yeah, well, just in case things don’t work out, remember I told you what I can do and what the price will be.” Both Henekie and Waddell remained silent, lost in thought as the car took Henekie back to his hotel. Henekie decided to head for Andros Island first thing in the morning. He wanted to see what was happening there firsthand.

Kent Ansly was an unassuming name. He’d worked his way up the CIA ladder quickly; and when the new Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA, was set up, he was the first to move over. His job was to enforce the area around Miami. He did a good job, not so much by enforcing but by working with the Miami mob. The DEA didn’t care how he did it, as long as they got results, and soon he was in control of the whole Caribbean. He convinced his superiors that the way to control the drugs coming in was to find a man with the experience to liaison with all the people in the region.

They had found the perfect man. He’d been involved with the drug trade in Asia and in no time had an agreement with the main drug cartel in Colombia, run by El Presidente, and with Ansly, the DEA man in control of the southeastern area of the states. The liaison man was situated in the Bahamas, his identity known only to Ansly and El Presidente under the code name the Referee.

The agreement worked on a quota system, and it was so successful that over the years the DEA left Ansly to do basically whatever he wanted without any oversight what so ever. They didn’t care that he received a huge kickback from the cartel and the Miami mob each year, as long as they looked like they were getting results.

As time went by, the suppliers in Colombia got tired of being limited in their operations and created a whole new route into the United States. The Colombians had opened up a whole can of worms. The Mexicans were as ruthless as the Colombians, and soon the drugs entering the United States were a low-grade, low-priced commodity that appealed only to the lower classes. The only people that still demanded top-grade cocaine was the Miami mob, but they looked after their own markets in Miami, New York and the west coast. This diminished Ansly’s take drastically.

He complained to El Presidente, but it was evident he’d lost control of the other cartels in Colombia and was concentrating on the new markets the Referee had found him in Asia and Europe. When he complained to the Referee, he was told to get out and leave the Mexicans to fight it out.

“That’s not a market we should be in anymore, Kent,” he told him. “They have all the Hispanic desert storm vets they need to form an army and all the mules to haul it in cheap. Why bang your head against the wall? Ansly was still young and not ready to retire. He was convinced by his agents in Colombia that if he could get rid of El Presidente, he could bring the other major drug lords under his fold and again control the American market.

He hatched a plan to force El Presidente to come out of Colombia and have a showdown with a rival who was making him look weak and toothless in his own territory.

Ansly went to Sir Harry Chamberlain, who was the Interpol man in the Bahamas, and asked him if he knew of anyone who could carry out the part of being El Presidente’s rival. Sir Harry immediately thought of Bob Greene, whom he considered to be a prime hit by the cartel because he was causing trouble on the farm over on Andros.

Ansly didn’t bother to tell Sir Harry that there would be no loose ends. He just told Sir Harry to get him wherever he was.

At dawn, a turbo prop appeared out of the sun, making a low fast pass over the Andros farm project. The pilot made two more passes before strafing the trees along the runway with the high-caliber machine guns mounted in the nose of the plane. Nothing!

The pilot spoke into his radio. “It is like our reports told us, there’s nothing here.”

“Okay,” his radio crackled, “we’re coming in, cover us.”

A large transport dropped in low over the lake and taxied down the runway. It stopped at the very end of the runway and the cartel’s men began jumping out, securing the perimeters. They soon reported that there was no one anywhere. The pilot in the turbo prop began searching the area, “Nothing!” he repeated, and “Whoever was here has left.”

“There’s no sign of bodies or any damage that we can find. It is eerie, as if everyone just vanished,” the ground captain reported. “The runway is secured. You might as well come in, he told Waddell.

Henekie chartered a plane into Fresh Creek, He found a car to rent and got some vague directions on how to tour the island. He soon realized that this may have been a mistake. There were few roads, and he didn’t find anyone who knew what he might be looking for.

He finally made it to the Andros airport hotel that night. He sat in the bar and started buying drinks. It was usually a good way to get information. He decided to make the hotel his home for a few days. The place just felt right. Sooner or later, he would run into somebody who would tell him what he wanted to know.

“So what are we going to do with Lena?” Ansly asked at their daily morning meeting.

“We’ve given her every chance to work with us,” Carol said.“Now, by the tapes, we just heard she’s in a real jam. I think we should bring her in.”