Part Eighteen
They were twenty-five minutes out of San Fernando, making a low, slow sweep of the search zone en route to Dominga, when Vaughan's satellite phone rang yet again. Travis, leaning against the window, scanning the featureless ocean with hopeless eyes, wasn't planning to react until he heard the older man gasp, audible even above the police helijet's engine noise.
"You're sure?" Vaughan's eyes were shining, too many emotions mingled there for Travis to easily read. He held the phone to his ear, eyes wide as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"Fifteen minutes," the NASA man snapped. "Send back-up."
Travis was already sitting up and facing him when Vaughan flipped his phone closed and pulled back the curtain separating the cabin from the startled pilots.
"Turn this thing around. San Fernando. Top speed. The best you have."
The police pilot didn't hesitate, recognising the urgent tone, even if its source and accent were unfamiliar. The helijet began to turn immediately, acceleration throwing Travis against the side of his chair.
"Vaughan…?" Travis stared in astonishment as Vaughan reached down to his ankle, revealing a compact pistol that Travis had never suspected was holstered there.
"Does this thing have a weapons locker?" the older man demanded, voice deadly.
Travis eyed him warily for several long seconds. Crossing to the back of the cabin, he typed a code into a number pad there before placing his palm flat on the glowing panel beside it. The panel slid aside, and Travis lifted down an assault rifle he'd only ever used on the police firing range, checking it over. Given the anger flushing his NASA contact's face, he felt a little better for being the man with the larger gun.
"Why?" he asked coolly.
Vaughan gave him a look of cold rage that Travis had never expected to see from the calm older man. "Is kidnapping a strong enough charge for you? Kidnapping, attempted murder, hacking a secure system, threatening world stability. We needed evidence and Scott Tracy just gave it to us." He spoke across Travis' gasp. "We're taking Villacana down, Travis. We're taking him down hard, and we're taking him down fast."
Travis studied him with deep caution. His mind was still spinning from the reference to the missing boy, but too well trained to get distracted when a man in front of him, even another officer of the law, was armed and angry. The co-pilot had turned to watch the confrontation, the uniformed officer careful to keep his body behind the bulkhead and his head low as he peered into the rear cabin. Travis gestured for him to remain still, keeping the movement small. Vaughan was out of his seat, pacing, but his gun – now checked – was once again holstered at his ankle.
"Tell me," Travis ordered, dropping back into his own seat, the assault rifle across his lap.
Three minutes into Vaughan's explanation, when Travis' phone rang and Chief Inspector Coates demanded to know why NASA thought he needed police backup, Travis didn't hesitate.
"Chief, I need you to authorise an island search warrant. I need it now!"
Auguste Villacana was a furious, burning mess of conflicting emotions. He strode into his control room, his sanctum and refuge, wound so tight that he felt he would snap.
How could everything have gone so wrong, so quickly? Two hours the arrogant fools had kept him talking. Two hours in which they had almost tricked him into revealing everything, before he realised how little they actually knew and how much less of it they understood.
How had they found out about the radio dish? He had been so careful, opening the camouflaged cover only for a couple of tests of the mechanism and then for the few hours before his own, fateful, live test. Had one of his men been talking? Villacana dropped into his chair, clenching his fists and bringing them down hard on the arms in a shocking display of his fury. If one of his servants, that fool of a captain maybe, had so much as breathed a word, flaying would only be the start of their misery. Villacana would peel back their skin one flap at a time, rubbing salt into the wounds, before hanging them, muscle and bone exposed to the hot sun, to biting insects and the salt wind.
His own passion surprised him. He'd always prided himself on his restraint, on doing what needed to be done to show the world how much it had lost when it turned its back on him. He'd built everything on his plan, working steadily towards its climax, ignoring chaff that fell away to either side as he did so. Always before casualties – that first gossipy servant, the straying fishermen, even the children that had drowned – had been no more than irrelevant necessities. Now, he truly wanted to hurt someone.
To come so close, so near to achieving his goals, and then to have his careful precautions, all his planning, fall apart on him? It was near intolerable.
He glanced up at the screen, rubbing his left hand against his trousers, wondering irritably where it had picked up a smear of dirt. The view from the Weather Station seemed to reflect his own tension. Usually, at this time of day, he would expect two, maybe three, of the station personnel to be on the command deck, the rest of the on-duty technicians working elsewhere in the satellite. Instead, a full complement manned the control consoles, Commander Dale at the focus of the room. As Villacana watched, the man strode out, saying something about routine diagnostics and his office. Villacana watched him go without any particular interest. His home had been invaded unexpectedly, his plans and routines disrupted. It was hardly a surprise that the steady, dependable rhythm of the Weather Station's routine had also faltered. It was as if the universe itself was trembling.
The other control room settled, the two technicians at the front consoles and their two colleagues at the rear falling into a steady pattern of checks and counter checks. Villacana felt his own breathing level out in sympathy, his mind beginning to work again as he assessed the situation.
Travis was an Islander, a good enough detective perhaps to have spotted a lead and followed it, but without the wit or education to know what he'd stumbled across. He was an irrelevance, to be monitored but more dangerous for the allies he might call upon than for his own sake.
Vaughan was another matter. Villacana didn't know the man, but he knew of him. In circumventing NASA's computer security, the security of the World Weather Control System itself, he could hardly have been unaware of his chief adversary. On the information plane Villacana operated on, amidst the meta-data and beautiful, intricate coding, Vaughan had little presence. Even so, it was his signature on the clearance forms Villacana had circumvented, and his name on the security reports that Villacana had read and laughed at before seizing the Weather Station. A man didn't get to be in Vaughan's position without being sharp, and he was here, now. However he'd found out about the radio dish, it was one datum too many in the man's hands. He'd keep searching, building up enough data to move from wild hypothesis to workable theory.
Vaughan and Travis could prove nothing, but their suspicion was more than dangerous. It was potentially catastrophic. For the present, Vaughan was working within the constraints of the Domingan police system. Give him evidence enough, time enough, and he'd go over the heads of Travis, Kearney and their fellows to World Security. At that point, not even his haven on San Fernando would protect Villacana from an investigation he'd never seriously planned for and wouldn't survive.
The test, the glorious storm that had filled the air with power and sent shivers through Villacana's body, had proven that no matter the detail of his plans, some evidence was outside his control. Time though… That Villacana could dictate.
He'd intended to build the tension – a few stray storms, a flood or two, to whet the public appetite, to start the questions and accusation flying. He'd wanted the world to be in a frenzy before he'd stepped forward, showing the mindless hordes just who held their fate in his hands, who they had used and discarded. He'd planned to stand in front of the desperate populace, recognised for the genius he was, and laughing in the face of their pleas. At that point, it wouldn't have mattered when they came for him, if they came at all. He'd have control of the air routes and seaways, his weather routines programmed and laid in, all the power in his hands.
His name would have been on every pair of lips, his face the most famous on the planet.
Now, with San Fernando already in the spotlight, with Vaughan suspicious and the net closing in around him, there would be no time for a slow start. It was time to call the storm.
Villacana breathed deeply, his eyes on the screen. Dale had returned to the control room, dropping calmly into the seat opposite Villacana's and asking about the status of the EV team. Villacana ignored him. If a few technicians found themselves trapped in the cold outside when the station shut down around them, so be it. The station diagnostic was green, content with its own status and that of the satellite network it controlled. Whatever fine-tuning Dale had in mind would make no difference to Villacana's efforts.
His fingers played with the lid covering the override button, knowing that the slightest brush of his fingertips would send Commander Dale and the others with him into a flurry of useless activity. With this button alone, he could block their controls, activate their com-system and even turn off their oxygen, playing with the station as if it were some giant remote-controlled toy. That wasn't enough though. For the kind of display Villacana had in mind, storm fronts and tornados worthy of a mythical thunderbird, he'd need every bit of data flying between the Weather Station and its constellation of satellites. He'd need far better bandwidth than even his every day communications capacity.
Standing, Villacana moved to the rear of the room, blanking a panel displaying crop aridity statistics from East Asia and tapping instead into San Fernando's internal network. He froze, a slight frown crossing his face, as he brought up the radio dish subsystems. He'd felt the warning throb of an intruder alert from his wristband an hour earlier. Trapped with the detectives, in the face of their relentless interrogation, he'd not had time to investigate it, or even to dispatch one of his men to do so. He'd assumed it was the helijet pilot or co-pilot, snooping on the path, and wondered idly if either would wander off it, into the dangerous jungle. At the time, he'd dismissed the thought. If he'd realised that the alert came from the radio dish's motion detectors, he would not have been so sanguine.
It should have been impossible for anyone to get into the interior of the island, past the house and down towards the inlet. No one had so much as disturbed the detectors on the approaches to the dish, and there were more than a few traps along the one easily traversed route. Most likely, the detectors had sensed nothing more than a wild swine, or some other of the island's larger mammals. There was no time to review the tapes now. Even so, after Vaughan's visit and with the critical point just minutes away, he couldn't take that chance.
With a few quick strokes of the keyboard he coded a text order to investigate, dispatching it to Friell in the house above and trusting his senior servant to deal with it.
Satisfied, Villacana sent the retraction command to the canvas roof, and started the dish's deployment sequence. He glanced to his left, to where an apparently featureless wall panel hid a narrow passage leading to the hillside valley. Just a few tens of metres away, on the other side of the tunnel, an immense structure would be unfolding itself, the dish lifting on supports that would rotate and direct it.
The screen flickered an acknowledgement, returning automatically to its mirror of the Weather Station's display. Villacana returned to the control chair, flipping the cover from the override switch and playing with it. Five minutes. Five minutes to deploy and calibrate the dish, and Villacana would summon the greatest storm the world had ever known – a roaring, angry testimonial to the greatest mind the world had ever rejected.
Five minutes.
"We have to stop this." Scott breathed the words, scarcely any sound leaving his lips. Pressed against him in the narrow space, Gordon nodded.
Watching through the grille, they'd both seen the pale man's arrival, both watched him shudder with some deeply-hidden emotion, all the more scary for the completely blank expression on his face. When he'd pushed up from the chair in a single, abrupt movement and come striding towards them, Scott had thought it was all over. He'd closed his eyes, waiting for the shaft cover to be pulled clear and for hands to reach in to grab them. He'd given Gordon a shove, without the breath to tell his little brother to crawl back down the shaft, but willing him to understand. It wasn't until Gordon had shaken off his hand with a small, irritated hiss, giving him a shove back, that Scott realised that the man wasn't coming for them after all. He'd stopped at the centremost control console, working at something out of Scott's sight.
The two boys held still, frightened to move for fear of some noise or reflection attracting attention to the ventilation grille. Scott winced as a metallic clunk echoed up the passage, wondering if Gordon had kicked something, baffled as he could have sworn his brother was as motionless as he was. The man in the control room didn't seem to notice, returning to the control chair. Then Scott felt the faint hints of air moving around him, a sudden breeze blowing into the passage behind them, and understood.
"The radio… it's moving, Gordy," he whispered, directly into his brother's ear. "He's going to use it. Use all this. He's going to make another storm."
Gordon shivered, and Scott automatically pulled his little brother closer in the confined space, trying to see his brother's face with only the dappled light from the grille to work with.
"Daddy…" Gordon whispered, so faintly that even Scott, pressed up against him, barely heard. "We've got to do something, Scotty!"
Scott nodded, keen to hush his little brother as Gordon's voice rose to a more audible level. He glanced back into the control room to check that the man there hadn't noticed. He wracked his brains, automatically assessing his resources, trying not to give up no matter how tired his little brother was, or how little energy he had left himself. Gordon's distress found an echo in his own heart. He wasn't letting this man bring another storm, wreck another boat, shatter another family. But what could he do? While the teenager might out-muscle the other man on a good day, today there was no doubt which of them was stronger. Bursting through the grille and collapsing at the man's feet would do little but draw attention to Gordon. Even on the off-chance that Scott could overpower him, he had no idea what to do or how to stop whatever had been started. The pale man was smarter than Scott, that much was obvious. He could even have a gun, like the men in the jeep, and that would be the end of Scott, and almost certainly Gordon, there and then. Any rescue would arrive too late to save his little brother, and that was unacceptable.
Guns. Now why did that thought spark something in Scott's fuzzy, fever-muddled memory?
A humourless grin spreading across his face, Scott looked back into the enclosed underground room and then down at Gordon.
"The pack… where did…?"
"Back down the tunnel, Scotty. Near the way in." Gordon's near-silent whisper matched his elder brother's, but his expression was quizzical. "Why?"
Scott answered his brother with another gentle shove. "Crawl, Gordy. Quiet as you can. We've got to get out of here."
The helijet's pilot and co-pilot were grim-faced, the two uniformed officers equipped now with small arms from the weapons locker. In the main cabin, Travis and Vaughan were strapped into their seats, waiting tensely for the moment they could leap into action. Another twenty minutes and Kearney and the Chief would join them in a second helijet. For the moment though, Travis and his three companions were alone, and, from what Dale had reported, there was no time to wait for the cavalry.
Glancing over at Vaughan, once again checking his pistol, he shook his head. His blood was running cold, his lips thin with anger. He'd been in Villacana's presence twice now, and known the man was a sociopath. He'd even wondered idly about the stories of violence and booby traps. He'd never for a moment suspected the man was capable of this. Perhaps going in armed and ready for a fight was overkill. Given the ruthless, scheming mind of the man they were facing, his sheer indifference for human life, Travis wasn't about to risk anything else.
"The dish-thing is uncovered." The co-pilot's voice drifted back to them. Vaughan's cold expression became a little tighter, and Travis nodded. He peered through his window, taking in the enormous mechanism, its ponderous motion and the jeep barely visible through the foliage as it bounced along a narrow track towards it.
"Get us down," he ordered sharply.
There was only one place in this part of the island large enough and flat enough to take the helijet. Constrained by the cliff plummeting towards the sea, the steeply sloping hillsides and the thick jungle, the pilot had no choice but to land again on the formal garden, settling back onto the marks he'd left less than an hour before.
Five men rushed out of the house to meet them, the creepy servant Tranter and Captain Gardner amongst them. Villacana's live-in servant didn't look happy with the second intrusion of the day, perhaps anticipating his master's reaction. Irritation though faded into total, dismayed surprise though as Travis and Vaughan jumped out, weapons not only visible but already pointed.
The guns took them unawares. Villacana's three general-purpose thugs exchanged one glance before dropping to their knees, hands on their heads. Tranter looked at them in disgust, shaking his head. His left hand moved, touching the band around his opposite wrist before Travis could react. Vaughan took a step forward, raising his compact pistol threateningly as the two uniformed officers piled out behind him.
"What is the meaning of this?" The servant demanded, raising his hands reluctantly. "Mr Villacana will destroy you, your careers, everything you are, for this."
"Mr Villacana is a megalomaniac with ambitions to destroy the world, who is threatening the life of two young children as we speak," Vaughan grated out the words, his finger twitching visibly on the trigger of his gun. Tranter flinched, dropping to his knees beside the lesser servants and shaking his head.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," he said calmly, his words belied by the anger in his eyes.
Travis stepped to one side, gesturing to the armed pilot to cover the five men in front of them, and turning to Vaughan. "There should be four more: Villacana, the other live-in servant and two more of Villacana's men."
Captain Gardner had raised his hands above his head without hesitation, his expression one of genuine confusion, shading to dismay as he listened to Vaughan's accusation.
"Inspector." He flinched as Travis turned towards him, gun still in hand, and backed off a step, hands still well above his head. "I don't know what you're talking about, but Friell just took Jack out in the jeep and Kian is refuelling the boat."
Travis eyed the man warily. His instinct was to trust the captain, but anyone in Villacana's employ had to be suspect. The sun was still high in the sky, the ocean to the north of the island littered with vessels of all shapes and sizes that had yet to be called back to port. "Why aren't you out with the search?"
Gardner swallowed hard, speaking in the level, soothing voice most people used around armed men. "We came in to refuel," he repeated. "Just to refuel!"
There were a few frozen seconds before Travis nodded, lowering his weapon, and the man gasped in a relieved breath. Travis shook his head. "We're wasting time. That jeep was headed down to the radio dish. There could be a control cabin, equipment, something down there, and the dish is already moving into position."
Vaughan nodded grimly. He stabbed a finger towards Captain Gardner, his other hand keeping the pistol levelled at their four less-willing prisoners. "You! Where's Villacana?"
Gardner didn't hesitate. "His lab. Under the house."
Frowning, Travis weighed up the possibilities. Either location was a candidate for the control room Scott Tracy had apparently stumbled across. What was more, with the lab underground and the radio dish set into the hillside below the house, it wasn't unreasonable to assume they were linked. If they tried to get through the basement, their target might escape out to the dish, taking the children with him. If they went after the jeep, the way through the house was going to be clear.
"We're going to have to split up," Travis realised aloud. "Vaughan, you're far more likely to make sense of whatever's in this lab than I am. I'll go after the jeep." He pulled out a handful of the plastic restraints that he'd taken from the helijet before they landed and tossed them at Gardner. "Tie them up," he ordered, nodding towards Villacana's thugs. He pointed at the co-pilot and jerked his finger towards Vaughan indicating he should follow the NASA man towards the house. The pilot kept his weapon trained on their prisoners, and Travis nodded in satisfaction.
Swinging the rifle onto his back, strap across his chest, Travis set off at a run towards the radio dish. It was probably less than a mile down the road from the house, around the slope and down the track he'd seen from above. The distance didn't worry the detective, he'd run further chasing suspects around the docks before. Another thought worried him far more. It was more than twenty minutes now since Scott Tracy and his little brother had cut off communications with the space station, apparently only seconds away from discovery by one of the most ruthless men Travis had ever met. Travis had no doubt that, between them, he and Vaughan would find the two missing boys. As he ran down the slope, ruing every step and every second of the journey, Travis prayed to God that Scott and Gordon Tracy would still be alive when they did.