backswing had taken off the right arm of a third. A single round from Domingo’s .308 had taken the fourth man in the chest and even with a vest the hydrostatic shock had blown the man six feet back into the jungle. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
“Where the hell is Enrique?” Holliday asked. He pulled back on the slide of the MP5 he’d collected from the man bleeding out at his feet.
“He betrayed us,” said Eddie. “He knew they were waiting here.” He picked up one of the MP5s and frowned. “The weapon has the safety on.”
“Maybe they weren’t supposed to kill us,” ventured Holliday, thinking.
“They were not here to welcome us,” said Eddie.
“No, but they might have been here to take us prisoner.”
“Enrique must have told them we were coming,” said Eddie. “That much is
Having bad memories about a past time and place was bad enough, but having those old nightmares spring to life in front of your face and make you take yet another life to save your own had torn something deep within Holliday that he thought had been dead and buried forever, and now it was back and he was angry. “Someone must have told them,” he said, his expression grim. He unsheathed the bowie knife at his side and stepped up the trail to Domingo’s prisoner. “Let’s find out who.”
Kate Sinclair walked down the long dock toward the seventy-two-foot Grand Banks Aleutian yacht berthed at its end. The name on the yacht’s transom was
Sinclair was escorted by a young man wearing a faux nautical officer’s uniform, but there was no doubt from his demeanor, his dark glasses and the slight bulge on the left side of his pure white jacket that he was in fact a bodyguard to the boat’s owner, Julio Lobo, the so-called Sugar King of Florida.
Lobo’s monstrous two-story wedding-cake mansion stood behind her with its arched colonnades, bell towers that contained no bells, sculptured topiary gardens tended to by an army of black groundskeepers, most of them Dominican, and the requisite turquoise swimming pool that no one ever used but which was a nice focal point for over-the-top cocktail parties.
The elderly woman reached the end of the dock and allowed the bodyguard to help her up the companionway ladder to the open afterdeck of the yacht. She sat down on the long white leather banquette that ran around the stern of the yacht. Two things happened almost immediately.
The engines fired off and they began to ease away from the pier and a white-jacketed steward appeared with a plate of hors d’oeuvres, which he set down in front of her, and then he took her drink order.
Just to be irritating, she ordered a Bloody Caesar, a mixture of Clamato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and vodka rimmed with celery salt—a drink almost unknown in the United States. Three minutes after placing the order, her drink appeared over ice in a tall glass garnished with a stalk of celery just as it was supposed to be. She gave it a sip and found that it was perfect.
Two minutes after the drink appeared, a stocky man in a business suit stepped out of the salon and onto the afterdeck. He had a deeply tanned face carved from granite, a square jaw, high cheekbones and an aquiline nose beneath a broad forehead creased vertically with four deep worry lines. The eyes were black under heavy brows and he had a head of snow-white hair in a widow’s peak swept straight back in the old-fashioned way. He was clean shaven except for a perfectly trimmed mustache as white as his hair. He had to be in his later seventies, but he looked as fit as a man of forty.
Approaching the place where Kate Sinclair sat, he paused, gave an almost military bow, then eased himself down into a chair across from her. He extended a hand across the table. The hand belonged to a butcher or a prizefighter. The fingers were short and thick, the knuckles scarred over, the nails short and blunt. The watch on his thick left wrist was an old Stauer Graves with a sweat-stained leather band. Somehow the look didn’t fit with the huge yacht and the Baskin-Robbins McMansion. Kate Sinclair knew that somewhere half-hidden in his past, Julio Lobo had been a hardworking simple man. She took the extended hand and Lobo shook it, careful not to squeeze her old bones too hard or for too long. He released his grip just as carefully and sat back in his chair.
“Senor Lobo,” she said.
“Senora Sinclair,” he replied. His voice was as dark and deep as his eyes, the Cuban accent strong even though he had not set foot in his native land for more than fifty years.
“You are a great traveler,” said the elderly woman. She sipped her drink and placed it back on the table. “You have homes in New York, London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, even Geneva. I was lucky to find you here.”
The steward reappeared with a tall glass of something clear and bubbly on the rocks. Perrier or Pellegrino or perhaps just soda water. The steward placed the glass in front of Lobo, but he ignored it.
“I was born in Colombia, raised on a sugar plantation in Cuba, went to school in England and returned to Cuba only to be exiled once again. I am the archetypical Wandering Jew, senora; I am a stateless man, a restless soul with no home.” He paused and released a small grim smile. “And you are a woman of great power with resources enough to find me no matter where I was. The real question is, why were you looking for me in the first place?”
Kate Sinclair knew that Lobo was descended from Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century. She also knew that he had not set foot in a synagogue since 1959 when Fidel Castro entered Havana.
“I came to offer you a job, Senor Lobo,” said Sinclair. She took a long swallow of her drink and lit a cigarette.
The steward appeared out of nowhere with an ashtray as well as a small humidor, a cutter and a lighter for Lobo. He chose an H. Upmann Number 2 Torpedo, sliced off the pointed tip and lit it, all the while keeping his eyes on the aristocratic woman across from him.
Kate Sinclair felt a small shiver of fear at the look. She knew that Lobo’s name translated as “Wolf” and she knew he lived up to his name in more ways than one. It was well known that his father, Alonzo “Pepe” Lobo, had been in league with the Camorra in Naples, and who was to say that his son didn’t have equally sinister connections? She was certainly well aware of the truth of the Balzac quotation that “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” when it came to her own family, so why not Lobo’s?
“I am an old man and I am a billionaire several times over,” said the Cuban expatriate. “What job could you offer me that I could possibly be interested in?”
Kate Sinclair paused. It wasn’t a question to answer lightly. “I want you to become the minister of economic development for the Republic of Cuba.”
Lobo studied her for a long moment, puffing on his cigar. The yacht reached Peanut Island and followed the channel markers around it. Ocean Point and the passage to the sea stood on their right.
“I will tell you a story, Senora Sinclair. On the morning of January the second, 1959, the day following Fidel Castro’s entry into Havana, I had to go to the National Bank to get some papers my father needed. Che Guevara was sitting in the president of the bank’s office. I was twenty-four years old. Guevara asked me the same question.
“What he really wanted to know was if I would be willing to run my father’s fourteen sugar mills and refineries after they had been nationalized and my father exiled or worse. I could either become a
“I can guess.”
