Wild Card

will present the singular opportunity you desire.”

Eckers caught his quick, meaningful glance.

“The shop’s name?” he said.

Chandra clicked her mouse and it appeared over the IP address.

Eckers read it off the screen, grunted as his interest was further stirred.

“Okay,” he said. “Give me a look at the details of what they’ve got scheduled.”

Chandra gave them to him.

They were, as Beauchart had predicted, good enough.

BONASSE, TRINIDAD

Jean Luc winced when his blackline cell phone rang on its docking station first thing in the morning — the caller ID display told him it might only complicate what was set to be a busy day. At the top of his schedule was a ten o’clock meeting in Port of Spain to settle down the apprehensive gentlemen at the Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries. Then it would be across Independence Square to the Finance Building, where he’d no doubt have to apply more verbal palliatives. And then an international call to Reed Baxter, during which he’d be obliged to pass on a filtered and edited version of the gaining worries in the Capitol and tolerate Reed’s whining on about his own. So much nervous energy generated on both sides, and he the transoceanic conductor that made it flow smoothly back and forth rather than build to some dysfunctional system overload. Jean Luc hated to think what might happen if he decided to let it go. The whole shebang, everything. And sometimes he felt he could, even would, inherited alliances and duties aside. He had an ample bequest and many interests. He could travel the globe for the rest of his life and never grow tired of its sights and cultures. The past bore on him only to the degree that he allowed it, and by no means would Jean Luc continue shouldering its burdens if he grew convinced they’d add up to his personal ruin.

Now he entered his study in a robe and slippers, thumbing the cellular’s talk button and shooting a glance at the antique Boulle clock on his mantel.

“Toll, it’s barely eight,” he said. “I’ve got my fingers crossed you’re calling with good news.”

“I wish I was, sir,” Eckers said. “There’s been a development that’s going to need our attention.”

“Involving our elusive islander?”

“Elusive if alive,” Eckers qualified. “The perimeter watch has been maintained around the village, but Team Graywolf gave me nothing to indicate a substantive change in that situation when they last reported in. They’re convinced he wouldn’t have made it out of the southern preserve, and are combing it day and night.”

“Then what’s this about?”

“The visitor from San Jose,” Eckers said, and then paused. “I think this has to be considered highly time- sensitive, sir.”

Jean Luc closed his eyes and released a breath.

“Let me hear it,” he said.

Eckers did, his summary delivered cool-headedly enough — he was a man whose calm outward demeanor rarely if ever gave a read of his true level of concern. Jean Luc appreciated that, considering what little it took to induce fits of panic in too many of his business and political associates. But Eckers’s haste to contact him was itself a measure of the seriousness of what the cameras had apparently picked up at the harbor last night.

“You don’t suppose he could’ve missed the transfer, do you?” Jean Luc said. He was reaching, of course, and could tell from the momentary silence in his earpiece that Eckers knew it.

“We’d have to rule that out,” Eckers said. “Our surveillance video’s close-up, and digital quality. And I reviewed it in various enhanced modes to eliminate any guesswork.” He paused again. “He observed the whole thing, sir. Those were high-magnification surveillance NVG’s he was using… advanced military grade optics. The ships would have been well within their range at the point of rendezvous, and he was looking directly out at them.”

“And I don’t suppose we can gain any comfort by telling ourselves he probably doesn’t know what he saw.”

“He’ll know he saw something,” Eckers said. “If he didn’t realize what it was, he’s going to want to find out.”

Jean Luc sat behind his desk and stared at the glass-door bookcase against the wall to his right. On its upper shelf were four thick, leather-bound volumes that comprised the family record, notably minus the diary pages of Ysobel Morpaign, wife of Lord Claude, which had remained locked away in a vault for over a hundred years after her suicide. The Morpaigns had always revealed more truths about themselves between the lines than in them, but on occasion Jean Luc would read through their handwritten memoirs and try to decipher the reality of who his ancestors had been compared to how they’d wished to show their faces to the world — in some indescribable way, it helped put his responsibilities in their rightful place. He was the family scion. The keeper of its legacy, obliged to oversee its commercial holdings and carry through its immediate and far-reaching goals. A now kind of person, as he’d put it to Eckers. But that was his own outward face. Privately, he dwelled on the past more than he would have cared to acknowledge, and time and again found himself wondering about old Lord Claude, plantation owner, bootlegger, and forerunner of an oil dynasty in Trinidad. Claude, whom Ysobel’s sad, secret writings claimed would have ordered his only son thrown into the pitch lake as a newborn infant, his body left to sink down into the tar with the bones of nature’s failures and discards, had not letting him live been a wiser expedient. Childless in his marriage, Lord Claude had desperately wanted a male heir. That it had been conceived out of his lust for a black slave woman was something he could abide, just so long as the light-skinned son could pass as his legitimate issue, and its birth mother could be made to disappear forever. And so long as fragile, vulnerable Ysobel, who had assumed her husband’s disgrace as her own by blaming it on her infertility, could be manipulated into spending the nine months of a supposed pregnancy in her Spanish homeland to enable the lie.

It was, Jean Luc knew, all dust and cobwebs. Ancient history that shouldn’t matter to him, let alone be a kind of closet obsession. And what did his preoccupation with it signify if not a shameful lack of pride in who he was, a hunger for acceptance from elitists and polite society bigots about whom he shouldn’t give a good God’s damn?

“The visitor,” he said now, turning from the bookcase. “He’s supposed to be staying at Los Rayos a few more days, that right?”

“It’s my understanding, yes.”

“Which means he can be expected to do more poking around.”

“I’m convinced he will.”

“And how do you feel we should handle this problem?”

“Honestly?”

“I rely on you to be honest with me, Toll.”

“We know what he’s up to. We know his background and capabilities. It makes him a threat that has to be eliminated.”

“He’s with his wife, isn’t he?”

“Right, sir.”

“You sound as if you’ve considered that.”

“I have. And it could be to our benefit.”

“How so?”

“I recommend we take care of them together,” Eckers said. “There are scenarios that will give authorities on the mainland a plausible explanation. And that should also take the legs out of any progressive investigation by his people at home.”

“You sincerely believe their suspicions won’t be raised?”

“Of course they will. But they can suspect whatever they want. We just have to be careful not to leave them any solid proof.”

Jean Luc thought a moment.

“The one hitch in all this might be Beauchart. He’s been difficult before—”

“Beauchart’s already aware of what I have in mind.”

“And he hasn’t objected?”

“No,” Eckers said. “And if he does, I’ll quiet him. It wouldn’t be the first time.”