through an international agency and are staying here on vacation.”
“How do you know all this? What’s going on?”
“Just listen. I’ve just learned that they’re supposed to leave for New York City today, at any moment. They are registered here, at the resort in Main Sail Tower A, Room 1658.” Lucy thrust the paper with the information into Emma’s hand. “You have to swear not to say how you found out.”
“Yes. Room 1658, Main Sail Tower A.”
“Go before it’s too late.”
“Thank you.”
“It could be dangerous. Don’t go alone.”
“God bless you, thank you!”
“Wait! Wait, there’s something else!” Lucy snatched the tiny blue memory card from her desk and handed it to Emma. “Don’t lose this.”
“What is it?”
“Information. Don’t say where you got it, just look at it later. It’ll help explain everything.”
Emma stared at the memory card, then jammed it into her bag.
“One more thing.”
Emma waited.
“I had no part in this.”
“Thank you for helping me.”
Emma hurried from the center. Once outside, she began running across the courtyard when she spotted Gannon heading in her direction.
“Jack!” Emma held up the slip of paper like it was a winning lottery ticket. “He’s here. Tyler’s here!”
“What? How did you find out?”
Emma updated him as they hurried through the complex, following the direction signs to Main Sail Tower A. They found a private corner in the busy lobby to come up with a strategy. To confirm if the Leekas and Tyler were in the room and to gauge what they might be facing, Gannon would knock on the door alone in case the couple had Emma’s picture. If they were there, then Gannon and Emma would summon police.
“What do we do if they’re not there?” Emma asked as they stepped into the elevator.
“I’ve got a plan,” Gannon said.
On the sixteenth floor, Emma stayed down the hall out of sight while Gannon knocked at room 1658. He tried for thirty seconds. He placed his ear to the door but heard nothing, then signaled to Emma.
“Follow my lead on this,” he said as they walked down the hall and around a corner until they found a chambermaid’s cart parked outside a room.
“Excuse us,” Gannon said.
An older slender Bahamian woman emerged from the bathroom wearing rubber gloves.
“I am so sorry to trouble you but we just stepped out of our room and realized we left our room keys and camera inside.”
The woman eyed them both.
“We’re running a little late-we don’t have time to go to the desk in the main lobby. Is there a chance you could let us in?” Gannon reached for his wallet and produced an American twenty-dollar bill.
The woman sighed and waved off the money.
“This happens all the time, which room?”
“Thank you. This way.” Emma pointed and started ahead of them, smiling at Gannon, then checking the woman’s tag, “Oh, thank you, Matilda.”
“No need to thank me. All the time people are forgettin’ this and forgettin’ that.”
Matilda inserted her plastic keycard in the key slot, a small light winked green, the locks clicked and she cracked the door a few inches for Gannon.
“Please, Matilda, we insist.” He pushed the twenty in her hand.
“Well, with all my grandchildren I have to get a birthday present every other week. Thank you.” She smiled and returned to her work humming.
Gannon allowed her to get a safe distance away before they entered.
Nothing prepared them for what was waiting.
Blood.
The room was drenched in blood.
On the ceiling, walls, curtains, the floor, the lamps, the mirror, the furniture and the bed, where two meaty mounds rested on the blood-soaked sheets. It was as if something had exploded, leaving two sets of adult arms and legs reaching out from the visceral matter.
Emma’s groan morphed into a stifled scream.
She cupped one hand over her mouth and searched the room, bathroom and closet.
“Tyler!”
There was no sign of her son.
She began rummaging through the documents on the desk.
Gannon stood before the wall over the bed transfixed, for amid the splatter he discerned a message scrawled in the blood: “Erase them all!”
62
Deus Island, Exuma Sound
At that moment, sweat beaded on the upper lip of the American military scientist working in Dr. Sutsoff’s secret laboratory.
The biochemistry engineer was part of the elite rapid response team rushed overnight to the island to investigate Sutsoff’s clandestine research.
Working in protective pressure suits, team members took painstaking care. The lab housed such material as rabies, small pox and the Marburg and Ebola viruses. They’d come upon glass cases housing snakes-the deadliest snakes on earth. A venom expert identified them as a black mamba, a king cobra, a Russell’s viper, a taipan and a krait. All could be milked for their lethal neurotoxins, cardiotoxins and hemotoxins.
They also discovered a large clear container with a cluster of roosting pariah bats, a species thought to be extinct. They found containers of autopsied bats and evidence of newly engineered super-lethal agents. The scientist felt her scalp prickle when a team member’s voice crackled over the radio.
He said, “Sutsoff may have booby-trapped this place. Stay calm, be careful.”
The female scientist constantly checked the floor and ceiling in case a snake or bat had escaped its hold.
It was like viewing live coverage of a space mission, Lancer thought, watching via closed-circuit TV in an outer room crowded with U.S. and Bahamian law enforcement agents.
Within the past forty-eight hours, security agencies in the U.S., the Bahamas and around the world had been working full bore. The telephone numbers and information Lancer got from Jack Gannon had broken the case open with several significant leads. Gannon’s first number enabled them to obtain warrants on the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway. Lancer glanced at his watch, figuring that that operation should be happening right about now on Paradise Island.
The second number, the satellite phone number, led to a post-office box in the Cable Beach area of Nassau, which led to a numbered company. Some criminal intelligence work by detectives from the Royal Bahamas Police Force confirmed a link to the Blue Tortoise child-care center and Gretchen Sutsoff. Interviews with seaplane pilots confirmed her flights from Deus Island. Other Bahamian government departments helped with property, tax and other records, which prompted calls through Interpol and help from police in France, Spain and Portugal.
It all led to securing emergency warrants to hit Deus Island with support from the Royal Bahamas Defense Force and the U.S. Coast Guard. Overnight, each group had sent ships to the island, while other resources were flown in by seaplane.
