Tail Spin

over the water.

The spot wasn’t civilized and touristy like Negril, the closest town. The air smelled wild, the winds blew fiercely, the land baked hot and dry, and the cliffs rose a good seventy feet above the blue blue water that dashed against black rocks below, spewing white foam upward, the sound mesmerizing.

He didn’t move, didn’t say anything, didn’t acknowledge them when Savich sat down on one side of him, Jack on the other next to an ackee tree, although they both knew he’d heard them coming over the loose rubble that crumbled toward the cliff.

He said, “I wondered when someone would come. Are you CIA or what?”

“I’m Special Agent Savich, FBI, and this is Special Agent Jack Crowne.”

The man still didn’t move. He said, “Tourists dive off the cliffs at Negril, but not here. All those rocks below, sticking up like black teeth, and there are more hidden below the surface. They’d tear the flesh off your bones even if you managed to miss the others.”

Savich looked at the young man’s profile, dark complexion, thick straight black hair, a nice, wholesome- looking man who resembled his father, but he couldn’t be completely sure because they hadn’t yet seen him full face.

Savich said, “We haven’t told your father and mother that you’re alive and well and living in Jamaica.”

Jean David Barbeau finally turned to face him. He did indeed look a great deal like his father, but, unlike his father, he didn’t look ghastly pale from grief, his dark eyes weren’t desolate and empty. He looked calm, almost indifferent, as if he didn’t care they were there, and it was all over for him. He said, “How did you find me?”

Jack said, “Since your body was never found, I started thinking about the speedboat that rammed the boat you and your father were in, and why was it there exactly. The reports stated the boat’s name was River Beast. I checked into it and discovered the owner had a nephew who attended Harvard with you. Don’t think he rolled on you easily. We brought young financial analyst David Caldicott to the fifth floor of the FBI building, scared the crap out of him, and he finally admitted that he’d helped you stage your suicide.”

Jean David said, “David called me last night, told me how you threatened him, his parents, said he had to, no choice. He was sorry.”

“I know,” Jack said. “We gave him the phone.”

Jean David’s head whipped up at that. “Why?”

Savich said, “To triangulate your location. We wanted to know if you really were where Caldicott said you were.”

Jack said, “We found out you have a passport under your mother’s maiden name. You used it to come here, the day alter you tried to kill Dr. MacLean in Washington Memorial Hospital.”

“I was afraid you’d accuse my father of that.”

“Didn’t fit,” Savich said. “You’re a young man, you move like a young man, and your father isn’t a young man and no way could he move the way you did on the hospital security video. You had us chasing our tails there for a while, but then again, you’re quite the student of strategy, aren’t you, Jean David?”

His laugh was ironic. “Yeah, that’s me, the strategic expert. I always was smart; people used to tell me so in school and at the CIA. My bosses were grooming me because of my brain, but I’ll tell you, when it came to what was really important to me, my brain didn’t count a damn.”

“You’re talking about Anna Radcliff,” Savich said.

“Yes, Anna.”

“Her real name is Halimah Rahman, not Anna,” Savich said.

“No, damn you, her name is Anna. That bastard MacLean told you her name, didn’t he? And that’s how you got her.”

Savich said, “Dr. MacLean said your father had mentioned an Anna. It wasn’t difficult to find her and a half dozen of her terrorist friends.”

Jean David’s voice shook a bit. “If only she’d listened to me. I told her Dr. MacLean was blabbing about us. I told her she had to leave the country. I swore I’d join her, but she didn’t leave.”

He looked off into the distance, but Jack didn’t think he was admiring the Caribbean. Jean David said, “You know, I still think of her as Anna. That’s how she introduced herself to me in that coffeehouse in Cambridge.” He gave a sharp laugh, pointed to the single petrel swooping down to the surface of the water. “I know her real name is Halimah, but to me she will always be Anna. She confided in me, praised me, was interested in me, interested in what I thought. And she was so damned beautiful. I fell for her, fell hard. The sex was great, but you know, it was how she spoke to me, how she listened to me, laughed with me, admired everything I said. I fell completely in love with her.”

He turned to look at a huge cormorant that had entered the scene, not six feet from the petrel, hovering a dozen feet above the water, lazily scouting lunch. He spotted a surface fish and dove clean and straight. “I’ve watched him before,” Jean David said. “He’s really good. He’s smart. See, that’s a wrasse he’s got. He never misses.”

‘Your parents are a mess,” Savich said. “As Agent Crowne said, we haven’t told them you’re alive.”

“Yes, well, I did what I could, now didn’t I? My father was planning to send me into hiding, God only knows where. He kept making excuses for me, saying it wasn’t my fault, it was this evil woman’s fault, and what did it matter anyway since it was only a bit of American intelligence gone awry. I’m French, he said, who cares?

“But I know my parents, particularly my mother. The disgrace would have been more than she could bear. Hell, I couldn’t deal with it, either.” He shrugged.

Jack said, “You’re saying you tried to kill Dr. MacLean to keep him from talking about Anna?”

Jean David laughed. “Finally, something you’ve got all wrong. Those two attempted hit-and-runs, and the bomb on his plane, I didn’t do those things, I wouldn’t know how. It was Anna’s associates, as she called them. Like I said, Anna didn’t leave the country. She and her friends were doing well here. They believed they could contain any fallout, and so they started off by killing that friend of Dr. MacLean’s. They found out about him because they were already following Dr. MacLean.”

“Anna told you that?” Savich asked.

“She told me everything. Then you arrested her, and she was gone from me, forever. I guess I went nuts. Those guys had three chances to get MacLean and failed. I wasn’t going to fail. But I did. You know, I couldn’t believe that nurse shot me.

“By then I’d already staged my own suicide, of course, to solve the CIA’s problem, my parents’ problem, my problem. Everyone would be happy. Using Caldicott’s speedboat was the only weak point in the plan, but I had no choice. I had to hope the authorities wouldn’t doubt what had happened and dig too deep. They didn’t. But you did.”

Savich said, “Telling your father you were going to kill yourself, that was an excellent touch. You were gone, your parents were safe.”

There was surprise on Jean David’s face. “You got my father to admit I killed myself? I thought he’d go to the grave with that.”

Savich nodded. “He was devastated, he no longer cared about much of anything because his only son was dead. He saw no reason not to tell me. Your mother, however, didn’t want him to.”

Jean David shrugged. “It was better with me dead than standing trial as a traitor. Trust me on that.

“As for my life, it was over once you took Anna. She is the only woman I have ever loved. I’ll bet you’ve got her jailed and being interrogated as a terrorist in some place like Guantanamo.”

“She is a terrorist,” Jack said. “What’s even better is we got her whole group along with her.”

“Yeah, well, I love her. All I wanted to do was kill the man responsible but I even failed at that. I saved myself but I couldn’t save her.” Jean David fell silent, watching two pelicans follow in the cormorant’s trail. He said finally, “I understand that if it wasn’t for you, Agent Crowne, MacLean would already have died, scattered in a hundred pieces in the Appalachians.”

“Both of us would be,” Jack said.

Jean David whirled around to face him. “Dammit, my parents were his friends! He betrayed all of us.” He gave a harsh laugh and threw a pebble over the cliff. “I should have been the one to execute him, but I didn’t. I even told Anna I wanted to kill him, but she said I wasn’t trained, I’d fail. As if training made a bit of difference when her friends tried to kill him.