Orchid Beach

“I guess not,” he said.

“I don’t know what to do, Jackson,” Holly said. “There’s something going on at Palmetto Gardens, but I just don’t have the resources to figure it out.”

“Maybe it’s time for the feds,” Jackson said.

“Maybe so, but I’d like to feel them out informally, if I can.”

“Like I told you, I know an agent in the Miami office; he’s in the organized crime division.”

“Let’s talk to him.”

Jackson dug an address book from his pocket, looked up his friend, and looked at his watch. “He’s probably on the way home from work. I’ve got a cell-phone number.” He dialed it. “Harry? It’s Jackson Oxenhandler. Yeah, pretty good, how about you? Listen, Harry, can you call me right back from a land line? Yeah, here’s the number.” Jackson gave it to him and hung up.

“What’s his name?” Holly asked.

“Harry Crisp. He’ll call us back soon. If you’re worried about bugging, I thought a land line would be better.”

“What are you…” The phone interrupted her.

Jackson picked it up. “Thanks, Harry. Listen, I’m in Orchid Beach with the local chief of police, a lady named Holly Barker. She’s stumbled onto something extraordinary that I think you ought to know about, and I don’t think we should talk about it on the phone. Could she and I come to Miami to see you? Where? What are you doing there? Well, great. Yeah, I’m buying, and I’ll put you up for the night. You got a pencil? I’ll give you directions.” He dictated directions from A1A. “See you later.” Jackson hung up. “He was at a filing in Fort Pierce, less than an hour away. He’s coming up here for dinner.”

“Great,” Holly said.

“I’ll make some spaghetti,” Ham said, and headed for the kitchen.

Jackson looked at Holly. “What’s the matter? You look worried.”

“I just hope I’m not making an ass of myself,” Holly said.

CHAPTER

40

Harry Crisp looked less like an FBI agent than Holly had imagined. He was fairly tall and skinny, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. She thought he looked more like a bank loan officer than a lawman. He shook everybody’s hand and sat down to dinner, declining wine.

“So what’s up, Jackson?” he asked, twirling spaghetti on his fork. “What’s so mysterious we needed a land line?”

“We’re just being careful, Harry,” Jackson said. “Holly is beginning to worry that there might be bugs at both our houses, and…well, maybe we’re just paranoid.”

“Paranoid about what?”

“Holly, you tell him.”

Holly put down her fork. “Orchid Beach has a lot of upscale residential developments—houses, tennis courts, golf courses, polo, the works.”

“I’m familiar with the type of thing,” Crisp said.

“We’ve got one that’s unusual.”

“How so?” Crisp asked, munching.

“Well, it’s on a good fifteen hundred acres, but it’s only got a couple of hundred houses, and it appears to be already fairly fully developed.”

“Sounds expensive,” Crisp said.

“Extremely,” Holly replied. “It’s also got three eighteen-hole golf courses and its own six-thousand-foot airfield.”

“For two hundred households?” Crisp asked.

“That’s it. And the airfield gets a lot of international traffic. They have some sort of deal with customs and immigration to clear arrivals on the spot.”

“A private airport of entry? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Neither have I,” Jackson said.

“Tell me more.”

“The place is surrounded by a ten-foot-high double fence with razor wire on top, and the inner fence is electrified.”

“Security conscious, huh?”

Ham spoke up. “We tried to get a look at their marina the other day, and they threatened us with automatic weapons and threw us out in a hurry.”

“Touchy.”

“You could say that.”

“There’s more,” Holly said. “The place is nearly completely cut off from any local services, except maybe the food supply. It has an electricity generating plant, its own water and sewage system, and the houses were built by labor imported from somewhere else. Only the basic infrastructure was built by locals.”

Crisp finished his dinner and pushed his plate away. “What else?”

Ham got up and started clearing the table.

“The employees seem all to live on the grounds,” Jackson said. “No locals were hired. We estimate there’s housing for four hundred employees.”

“They’ve got two thousand telephone lines and a communications center you won’t believe,” Holly said, bringing out the aerial photographs and spreading them out on the table.

“How the hell did you get this?” Crisp asked. “This looks like a satshot.”

“Old-fashioned aerial photography,” Jackson replied. “Friend of mine does it for a living.”

Holly pointed out the building with the antennae.

“Anybody got a magnifying glass?” Crisp asked.

Holly found one on Ham’s desk and handed it to him.

Crisp peered closely at the communications equipment. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “This is more stuff than the bureau has on its roof in Miami.”

“Check this out,” Holly said, pointing at place after place. “We think this is all camouflage netting.”

“Covering what?”

“Use your imagination.”

“That’s asking a lot of an FBI man,” Jackson said.

“I’ll do my best,” Crisp said. “Okay, I give up. What could be under there?”

“Ham is ex-army. He says maybe antiaircraft guns or even ground-to-air missiles.”

“Whoa,” Crisp said. “Let’s try to keep both feet on the ground, here.”

“Harry,” Jackson said, “everything about this place defies the imagination.”

“Yeah,” Holly said. “State licensing records show that a hundred and two employees, including a security force of fifteen, have licenses to carry weapons.”

“That’s a lot,” Crisp said.

“Jackson recognized five of the names on the security force as having criminal records, but when we checked the state computer, they were all showing as clean.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Crisp said.

“There’s more,” Holly said. “Today, I ran all one hundred and two gun-toters through the state computer, and they all came up clean. Then I ran the same names through your national computer, and seventy-one of them