Chapter 18
The humid day was followed by an equally humid night. The trees and the tangles of undergrowth stirred with the movement of jungle creatures as they roused themselves for another nocturnal round of feeding or being feasted upon.
The town shut down after the government buildings closed and the sun sank into the hills. Guatemala was only twenty-five miles west and yet worlds away. Traffic had trickled down to an occasional vehicle working its way down the small streets as the area’s inhabitants returned home to their families and sat down to dinner.
Sir Reginald Percy had eaten a light meal at seven, as was his custom: baked fish and a side of local fruit with the ever-present dirty rice, spicy and riddled with beans. He’d read a few more reports, watched a half hour of satellite television news to catch up on what was happening in the real world, and then prepared for his nightly swim. His slippers shuffled on the heavy tile flooring of the governor general’s residence. He nodded to his housekeeper as he wended his way through the house to the rear deck area, home to one of Belmopan’s few private swimming pools — a perk for Her Majesty’s appointed representative in Belize.
His security detachment had switched shifts two hours earlier, and now, the three men who worked the night crew were at the front of the house. Their duty of patrolling the grounds ranked highly among the most boring of their careers. Nothing ever happened in Belmopan. The governor general was more of a figurehead than anything else, with no real active role in the day-to-day business of running Belize, although he was charged with selecting and naming the prime minister and his cabinet, and was the vessel through which Britain made its will known.
It had been a tense few weeks following the bizarre shooting not a mile from where he now stood — a murder that remained unsolved, although speculation abounded as to the reason for the public slaying. The inexplicable brutal killing had shaken the city of twenty thousand and had been the fodder for endless gossip since it had occurred. There were no active leads, and now no likelihood that it would ever be solved. In a nation with scant police resources that were overwhelmed with combating a rising tide of crime from drug gangs and the attendant violence that accompanied them, the assassination had received a week’s worth of solid if uninspired effort from the local constabulary, and then had gone into the files with all the other unsolved crimes.
Up until the last decade, most of the violence in the tiny Central American nation had been the usual domestic assault or robbery gone wrong, or fighting, usually over a woman. Murder wasn’t unknown, but it usually fitted into one of the typical buckets, and the police had only to look for an angry mate or one of the known criminals who made their living preying on others. But with the rise of violent crime in Mexico from the ascendance of the cartels, the savagery had spilled over and infected the idyllic little country of three hundred thousand, made worse by the economic crisis that had crushed the tourist trade and left an entire generation of young men with no employment prospects. Some turned to crime, leading to territorial squabbles that had quickly turned deadly. Gang violence had been unknown in the Nineties, but it had quickly become the largest menace in the new millennium, and hardly a day went by when a body wasn’t found floating in a river or decomposing in a ditch.
Sir Reginald stretched as he slid the pocket doors open, loosening up his muscles in preparation for the swim — his preferred form of exercise, and one that had kept him in trim good health well into his seventies. One hour every weeknight, rain or shine, without fail, and then off to bed for some reading before sleep.
He paused to survey the large open field that backed onto the governor general’s residence grounds, uninhabited and separated from his property by a six-foot-high wall. The town’s lights twinkled in the dark as he executed a few knee bends, his silk robe brushing the stone deck surrounding the pool: peach cantera imported from Mexico at his request due to its thermal properties. Any other surface would be sizzling hot from the sun baking it all day, but cantera stayed cool, and he had never regretted the additional expense required to get a semi-rig full of it brought in from Puebla.
The attached hot tub bubbled and frothed as the system cycled, activating on schedule so it would be ready for him to dip in and relax. He slipped the robe from his slight shoulders and placed it carefully on a teak chaise lounge then padded over to the computer control for the lighting. He punched at the buttons, but there was no response; the water remained inky in the dark night. It was a good thing that the black-bottom pool retained the heat — he almost never had to use the heater — the water was inevitably the temperature of bathwater in all but a few winter months. Still, the light control failure was irritating, and he would need to have Virgil, his maintenance technician, stop by tomorrow and have a look at the system — no doubt, the electronics were a casualty of the periodic blackouts that plagued the area.
With a practiced dive, he plunged in and, within a few seconds, was pulling himself through the water with well-defined strokes. Back and forth he would travel until his waterproof watch signaled his mandated time was up.
As he neared the far end, he felt motion below him, then a vice-like grip pulled him under, down towards the bottom in an embrace he couldn’t shake. He thrashed and fought, but to no avail, and it was only a matter of a minute before his last breath of air escaped his lungs, bubbling to the surface as his body went slack.
A masked head broke the pool’s surface, peering around to ensure that nobody was watching. Confident that the struggle hadn’t been noticed, the black-clad assassin moved to the edge and pulled himself out of the water, taking a brief glance at the indistinct shape of the corpse floating in the depths before jogging to the wall and propelling himself over it and into the darkness beyond.
The security guard wouldn’t be back for another ten minutes, enabling him to cut across the field to the waiting vehicle without being detected.
The following day, the nation would mourn the loss of a great man, the victim of a regrettable drowning accident nobody could have foreseen.
Sir Reginald had gone to a better place, and a brief autopsy would confirm the cause of death from the water in his lungs. He should have known better than to pursue his aquatic passion in solitude at his ripe age.
It would be a week before the new governor general was appointed by Her Majesty, the Queen of England, the benevolent monarch who served as the ultimate figurehead of authority in the former British crown colony. In the meantime, a memorial service would be held in Belize City, and dignitaries from the government as well as all of the embassies would crowd the church aisles to commemorate Sir Reginald’s decades of selfless devotion to the young nation.
Rani approached the kitchen, where Jet was getting a soda, and set his physician’s bag down on the dining room table.
“What’s the prognosis?” she asked, popping the top of the can.
“He’s mending. He’s not completely out of the woods yet, but he’s making excellent progress. No sign of sepsis, and the pain is manageable. All in all, I would say our David is a very lucky man,” Rani concluded, eying her as he reached for a box of cookies he had brought, along with lunch meats, fruit, more juice and sodas — plus a plethora of junk food she wouldn’t have eaten if a gun had been held to her head. “You want some? They’re really good,” he offered, holding the box up.
“No, thanks. I’m saving mine for after dinner.”
He looked at her as though he didn’t understand, then shrugged and popped one into his mouth.
She came around the counter and sat opposite him.
“How soon will it be safe for him to move?”
“Realistically, I’d say he can walk around starting tomorrow, and within another few days, he should be good to go, with the provision that he doesn’t overdo it.” He licked his lips in search of stray crumbs, then added, “It’s going to take some time for him to get back to a hundred percent.”
“How long?”
Rani frowned in thought as he dispatched the last morsel of cookie. “A week, maybe more. But he’ll be out of danger by tomorrow. Why?”
“We can’t hang around here forever.”
“Nonsense. Take as long as you need. You’re welcome to stay…well, until the renters show up in a few weeks, anyway. I rent it out most of the holidays and all summer. You won’t believe what people will pay.” Rani stood and took a final lingering look at the cookies. “The good news is that he’s healing and making great progress, and I think we can say he’s turned the corner. Considering where he was a few days ago, that’s a kind of small miracle.”
“I know.”
