care across the globe. But perhaps not so proud about how he had funded it with an accord with the very organization responsible for her and Jeff’s deaths.
Lang stood, weary of the accusations of the dead, perhaps a little angry. It always ended this way.
“I did the best I could,” he said, not caring whether the old woman heard him or not.
Lang walked back down the hill, stopping for a final look at the three headstones before driving away. For reasons as inexplicable as his failure to tell Gurt of these visits, he felt he had completed a duty.
Cap Haitien
Two days later
Miles and Lang had decided that arrival in Haiti would be less likely observed if made at the north-coast port of entry. With the country’s communications system still somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, there was an excellent chance they would be gone by the time the paperwork associated with their landing found its way into any central system.
Scheduled service to Cap Haitien by commercial carriers having been long abandoned, Gurt and Lang had taken Delta to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands and chartered a flight from there. Lang was in the right front seat of the lumbering antique Beech B18, nervously watching the number-two engine spew oil onto a wing whose white paint had been bleached into chalk by the Caribbean sun. There were more empty holes in the instrument panel than instruments.
Lang had mentioned this when he and Gurt first boarded the venerable old machine nearly an hour ago.
“No worry, mon,” the native pilot had assured them. “Ain’ no radio, no instrument landin’ equipment at Cap Haitien nohow.”
Lang looked apprehensively at the panel. “I don’t see any GPS. How do you find it, the airport?”
The pilot shrugged. “You goes to the first ocean and turns right. Afta ’bout an hour, you looks for de tallest clouds. Haiti be unner ’em. Ain’ but one airstrip on de no’th coast.”
Unmollified but out of objections, Lang had uneasily strapped himself in. Before GPS, before navigational instrumentation, this was how flying was done, right? Lindbergh had made it all the way from New York to Paris with only a compass, right? Jimmy Doolittle had found Tokyo with not much more, right?
None of the above eased his concern in the least.
A flash of green caught his eye and in the next moment the aircraft banked left to parallel golden sands. On the right side of the plane jagged mountains seemed to grow from the beach’s edge and claw at the clouds like the talons of a raptor.
There was a grinding sound and the Beechcraft shuttered. Lang desperately hoped he was experiencing only the lowering of the landing gear into the airstream. As if to reassure him, the plane banked again. When it rolled out, an airstrip filled the windscreen, increasing in size as the plane descended. The paving seemed out of place among what looked like postage-stamp-sized fields of sugarcane. At the runway threshold, and what Lang guessed was no more than a hundred feet, the pilot leveled off, flying the length of the strip without farther descent. At the end, on the edge of the ocean, he added power and began a 180-degree turn back toward the other end.
“What…?”
“Livestock, mon,” the pilot replied nonchalantly. “Natives’ pigs sometimes gets loose and onto de runway. De airplane go over low, scare ’em off. You got any idea what a mess o’ dis plane hittin’ a pig make?”
It was something Lang had rather not consider.
The next approach was uneventful.
The instant the Beechcraft slowed to taxi speed, Lang felt as though he had been covered with a warm, wet blanket. The old aircraft had no air-conditioning and the hot, humid air filled the cabin not only with a cloying, prickly grasp but with a faint odor of sewage and wood smoke.
As the plane taxied back up the runway, two figures emerged from a small concrete-block building on the edge of the tarmac. One wore a guayabera, the short-sleeve, four-pocket shirt worn over the top of trousers, common in the Caribbean. The other was tall for a Haitian, perhaps six feet, and wore a long-sleeve olive drab uniform. Both were black. Not the browns and tans of most islands’ natives but the soot black of undiluted African lineage.
“Customs and immigration,” explained the pilot, hastily shutting down the left engine, then the right.
The temperature and humidity seemed to leap upward as Lang and Gurt exited the plane, followed by the pilot.
On closer inspection, Lang noted the tall Haitian’s uniform was wool, yet he seemed unperturbed by the searing heat and drenching humidity. In his belt was stuck a Webley revolver, the standard British military sidearm for the better part of the twentieth century. This one looked as though it might have seen service in Flanders Fields or in the 1916 Somme offensive. Lang would have guessed, if fired, the weapon would present as much peril to the shooter as the target.
The man in the guayabera accepted a sheaf of papers from the pilot. First-, second- or third-world country, one thing never changed: the paper required by bureaucracy.
“Passports?”
Lang and Gurt each handed over the German passports they had used to exit the United States. The man compared them with the papers the pilot had given him, studying so long Lang was getting edgy even though he assured himself these had been prepared by the Agency’s very talented forgers.
The customs official’s brow wrinkled.
“Is there something wrong?” Gurt asked.
The man brightened, showing white teeth that seemed to glitter against the black velvet of his face. “You speak English!” He held up one of the passports. “I have never seen a Dutch one before.”
Lang and Gurt exchanged glances.
“German,” she corrected.
“But it says, ‘Dutch.’”
Gurt stood beside him, her finger pointing to the word, “Deutsch. It is the German word for ‘German.’ ”
His smile widened as he produced a stamp from his pocket and imprinted both passports. “Dutch, German. Welcome to Haiti. Do you have a hotel reservation?”
Gurt reached into her purse, producing a slip of paper. “No, but we were told the Mont Joli is quite nice.”
“No matter. I do not think either hotel in Cap Haitien is full at the moment. I-”
He was interrupted by the sound of an unmuffled engine. What had at one time been a sixties-vintage Ford sedan, now painted a vibrant blue, rumbled up to the building. Its bodywork looked as though it had been modified with a baseball bat, and the tires showed more cord than rubber.
“Ah!” the customs man exclaimed. “Someone saw the plane come in. This is Andre, my cousin, who has a taxi ser vice.”
He turned to speak to the new arrival in a language Lang could not even begin to understand. Leaving the engine running, Andre dashed for the plane as though afraid it might suddenly take off on its own. He stood by while the pilot opened the nose baggage compartment and handed him two bags.
“Is that all your luggage?” the customs man wanted to know.
Lang and Gurt assured him it was.
Another burst of what Lang gathered was Creole and the cab driver lugged the two suitcases to the rear of his car, set them down and began to unwind the wire holding the trunk shut.
“Do those luggages have any tobacco, liquor or firearms in them?”
Lang and Gurt shook their heads. “No.”
The customs man nodded approval. “Good. That will be fifty dollars American, landing, arrival and customs fees.”
Lang and Gurt exchanged glances.
“That’s over a month’s pay here,” Lang said softly, reaching into a pocket. “You have any dollars on you?”
“I changed some euros in Providenciales,” she answered, digging in her purse, “when I bought a pair of sunglasses.”
“But you didn’t need another pair.”
“No, but we needed someone to remember we had euros in case someone should ask,” she whispered. “We
