Titanoboa Page 7

  She swallowed. The strength in her countenance began to fade, and Mark knew he had hit a nerve.

  “What do you want?” she said quietly.

  “The truth. Who are you, and why are you interested in Billy Gilmore?”

  She placed her hands on the table as a server came over. “Let’s order,” she said.

  She ordered an omelet and Mark just asked for coffee. When the server left, Mark gave her a moment to compose herself. She resembled a child caught doing something they weren’t supposed to do.

  “My name is Riki, but Gilmore isn’t my last name. It’s Howard. I’m an investigative reporter with the L.A. Times.” She fumbled around in her purse a moment before pulling out a press badge. Mark knew it well from his time as a detective. The badge was authentic.

  “What’re you doing out here?”

  She leaned forward, closing the distance between them, and lowered her voice. “I’m looking into a string of disappearances on this island.”

  “What disappearances?”

  “None you’d know about. Are you aware of VN Oil’s plan to drill in the middle of the jungle?”

  “I’ve heard some about it.”

  “Well, I have information that they’ve already begun. They began a long time ago, right inside the nature preserve.”

  Mark shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. That nature preserve is the whole reason this island exists. They’ve got insects and plants there that haven’t even been identified yet.”

  “I know, but they started anyway. Some palms were greased in exchange for cooperation. And I’m talking really powerful palms with a lot of money. VN thinks they found the next Kuwait out here. Allegedly, there’s a lot of oil if you can get to it. Their plan is to drill right through the island and into the bottom of the ocean.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just set up a rig?”

  “Too much attention. They’ve been drilling now for months, maybe longer. They don’t even have the proper permits yet. You couldn’t do that with a rig. So they picked the one place they knew they wouldn’t be bothered. Right in the middle of one of the largest nature preserves in the world.”

  Mark leaned back in his seat. He already distrusted the government, so what she was saying wasn’t much of a stretch. He could easily see some bureaucrats taking bribes in order for VN to begin work. But if they waited a few more months, he was sure they would’ve gotten their permits. “It doesn’t make sense. I don’t doubt some bureaucrat taking bribes, but why would VN risk it? They can just wait. They don’t need the money.”

  She shook her head. “There’s a limit to how much you can take. I don’t know all the details, but they’re not allowed to just take as many barrels as they want. But this way, in secret, they can not only take as much as they want, they can do it whenever they want, without paying a dime to the government.”

  Now that made sense, Mark thought. All they had to pay were bribes, probably elaborate bribes but a pittance compared to how much the government would collect in taxes from them otherwise. So set up a quiet operation, take as much as you can until it runs out, and move on to the next place. And in the meantime, have a small, legitimate operation to justify your presence on the island. Brilliant.

  The outrage clearly written on her face just didn’t exist within him. Sure, the nature preserve was nice, but ultimately, he didn’t care if some oil company was drilling there.

  “Let’s just assume you’re telling the truth. Why lie to me?”

  “I don’t know who I can trust. You don’t understand how powerful these people are. They buy congressional elections back in the States as if they’re nothing. I can’t even imagine the influence they wield out here.”

  “And the disappearances?”

  “When they began drilling, people started going missing. A lot of people. Dozens. And the oil company has been paying out claims to victim’s families if they sign non-disclosure agreements and waive liability. I found out about it from a wife that lost her husband out here. He was an engineer. When he disappeared, she said two oil lawyers showed up and offered her a hundred thousand dollars not to discuss his disappearance with anyone. She took the money, but she spoke to me if I promised not to reveal her name. I thought it was just an accident or something, but when I began digging around, I found at least fifteen families that had been offered the same deal. And if they didn’t take it, the company stonewalled them and threatened law suits if they discussed it with the media. They’re scared of something.”

  Mark rolled that around in his head for a minute. People would go to any limit when money was at stake, he had no doubt about that, but this just seemed too far-fetched. The oil companies already had so much money. Would they really lie, cheat, and cover up deaths just to get a little more? Phrasing it like that, he’d already answered his own question.

  “So who’s Billy Gilmore?”

  “He’s a middle management guy. Not executive, but not blue-collar, either. When I reached out to him, he was open to speaking with me. And then he just disappeared. On the beach, like I said. That part was true. He talked to me, was walking around the beach, and was never heard from again.”

  “Are you suggesting the company had him killed to keep him quiet?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on, but something.” She looked to Ali. “So that’s the whole story. Are you still going to have me arrested?”

  “I’m not sure I totally believe you, but no, I’m not having you arrested. Besides, it’s so much paperwork I doubt Rashan would do it.” Mark motioned to Ali, indicating it was okay for him to go. Ali nodded, finished his cup of tea, and left the café.

  “You know,” she said, “I hired you to do a job. I still need that job done. I need to find out what happened to Billy Gilmore.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “I’ll pay quadruple your normal rate. A hundred dollars an hour.”

  Before Mark had even processed the amount of money he could make, a single flash came to his mind. Himself in court with a lawyer, a good lawyer this time, fighting for custody of his daughter. He didn’t have a choice. He could do nothing else for the amount of money she was proposing. “Okay,” he said. “But I want one twenty-five an hour, plus expenses. Give me that, and I’ll find out what happened to Billy Gilmore. There’s no American you’ll find that has more connections on this island than me.”

  “Okay, that’s fair. What do you need from me?”

  Mark left a few bills on the table for the meal. “Just no more lying.”

  He walked out of the café, a gray feeling in his gut telling him this might not have been the best thing to get caught up in.

  15

  Steven Russert had grown up in the oil fields. Back in North Dakota, he got his first job with the oil companies when he was just eleven years old. The field workers worked non-stop for so long they dehydrated themselves. The company hired him at one dollar an hour, under the table of course, to take them water and snacks during the day. He remembered saving every one of those dollars because, one day, he would be the boss in the suit that everyone looked up to. To do that, he would have to pay for college, and his parents weren’t going to do it for him.

  Now, twenty years later, he was a boss, but not as high up the chain of command as he thought he would be. As he stood over the fields in Kalou’s jungles, he was amazed how little that world appealed to him. He’d tried it awhile. He’d entered prep school with an eye toward Harvard, the business school preferred by most of the oil companies for which he wanted to work. But that hadn’t worked out.

  Steven had hated his fellow prep school students. They cared only about what people thought about them. Their appearance, their speech, their careers, who they dated and didn’t date, everything in their lives focused on one goal: making sure they gave the right impression to the right people. They lived their lives second-hand. An inauthentic life wasn’t a real life at all, in his estimation.

  He began getting into trouble
instead of coming to class. By the time he was ready to enter high school, he’d already been kicked out of two prep schools. His father, himself an oilman but one that never rose above the position of foreman, was at a loss as to why the boy wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity given to him. Steven didn’t care.

  He went to a regular high school and, instead of college, joined the military. He fought in the first Desert Storm and was, by all accounts, a mechanic. In fact, he had been in a reconnaissance division of the Marine Corps, something colloquially known as Force Recon, an elite squad used as a precision instrument for one purpose: to go behind enemy lines and gather intelligence by any means necessary. Though missions were considered a success if no shots were fired, killing, he soon found out, wasn’t exactly discouraged.

  When he left the Marines, the oil industry still called to him. Something about pulling the stuff out of the ground, the smell of it, the feel of it, and using it for energy was a passion he’d never gotten rid of. But now he had a different skill set than business. His skill set was protection.

  When he’d first joined VN, he began as a middle manager, hired by another Marine who hated the Ivy League, or as he called them, “fairies” and wanted real men to help run the company. Steven hated the office environment and began asking for the more dangerous posts. Posts in Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, Iraq and Yemen. He longed for the adventure that he saw when he looked to men like John Paul Getty. The Wildcats scouring the world for oil.

  One day, only four weeks into his post in Baghdad, an executive for VN was traveling the various sites as part of a PR campaign to show the public that VN cared about what occurred in Iraq. While traveling in his Limo in the green zone, two policemen stopped the car and asked for identification. As the driver of the limo gathered the papers together, the policemen pulled out semi-automatic weapons and opened fire on the executive. The only other person in the limo was Steven, who threw himself on the executive, catching several rounds in his back that burrowed deep into the Kevlar vest he always wore.

  Steven lay motionless, and just as he thought they would, the policemen inched closer to make sure the occupants were dead. Steven caught one of them with a round in his forehead, crumpling him to his knees. As he fell, he squeezed the trigger on his rifle, hitting the other policeman in the leg. Steven got out of the limo and held the handgun, the largest Desert Eagle he could get his hands on, and fired rounds into the man’s throat then his eyes. He pulled the dead driver’s body out of the limo and drove back to the hotel.

  The executive hired him as head of security for operations in the Middle East. Within four years, Steven headed security for the entire company.

  And though they’d had terrorist attacks, bouts of cholera, and even one disgruntled worker who came to work with a pistol to kill his direct supervisor, they had never had anything like this.

  Sixteen workers on the island of VN had disappeared. Twelve were native islanders, the other four mainland employees of VN. When Steven had gotten the call to come out, he expected some sort of disease, the men probably dropping dead in the jungle somewhere and no one ever finding their bodies. He didn’t think that anymore.

  On a Tuesday night, he was walking back from the worksite to what was basically a tent city set up in the middle of a clearing. The jungle had been carved away, leaving only flat dirt. About a hundred tents, including a medical tent and a mess hall, were placed there. He was inspecting the camp’s perimeter. He’d stationed guards every hundred feet, and he checked in with them. As he was rounding a corner and heading to the next guard, he heard something. Soft, like someone whispering to him from the darkness. He stood frozen, staring out into the darkened jungle. Something was moving in the bushes.

  He didn’t take his gaze from the object, though he couldn’t tell at all what it was. A dark mass taking up so much space he thought his eyes were mistaken. And whatever it was reflected the moonlight. Like dark obsidian stone, a pure black. Darker than night.

  And then Steven felt it.

  Smoothness on his calf. He glanced down at the slick surface wrapping around his leg. He didn’t recognize it at first, his mind unable to process what he was seeing. So he did the first thing he always did in that kind of situation. He attacked.

  Withdrawing the Desert Eagle he now preferred, he fired directly into the slick surface twice. It withdrew into the jungle, a loud hiss accompanied by what sounded like a cat dying. Despite everything he had seen, all the combat, death, and chaos, Steven had felt the cold touch of fear. Other guards ran over, debating going into the jungle after whatever that had been, but Steven didn’t allow it. They would wait until daylight. Besides, it was injured and couldn’t get far.

  That night was nearly three months ago, and he hadn’t seen the thing again. Only the effects of its presence in the men that went missing.

  Steven lifted his binoculars and scanned the oil fields. They were the smallest fields he’d ever been to, and in fact, he’d never seen oil fields on an island other than the Falkland Islands. This island was special to his company. And if it was special to the company, it was special to him.

  Truth be told, he wanted nothing more than to abandon this place and pull everybody out. It gave him, for lack of a better word, the creeps.

  “Sir,” his assistant, Derek, said as he ran up to him, “post one hasn’t called in.”

  “How long?”

  “Six minutes late.”

  “Try them again.”

  Derek lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Try them again, Hank, over.”

  “Roger that. One sec.”

  A few minutes passed in silence. Steven found silence more comfortable than small talk. But it wasn’t a trait other people shared. Derek had grown accustomed to it, so he didn’t attempt conversation. The two men simply stared at the surrounding jungle without speaking.

  “Derek,” the radio crackled, “still getting no response. Over.”

  “Roger that. Thanks.” Derek looked to Steven but didn’t speak for a moment. “Well, what should we do, sir?”

  “Send a small team to post one. Have them meet me over there.”

  Before Derek could respond, Steven was already jogging through the thick vegetation. He pulled out the machete strapped to his belt and hacked away the massive leaves and branches that blocked his path. He could’ve run around the jungle on the dirt path the company had carved out months ago, but that wasn’t the quickest route. He wanted to get to post one as quickly as possible.

  The posts were the most dangerous spots on the guard rotation. A good half of the disappearances occurred in one of the ten posts he had set up. The posts were all on the outskirts of the camp, and each disappearance had forced him to bring them closer and closer until they were in their present situation. Where the guards were basically in the camp itself.

  One particularly dense patch of vine and leaves was giving him trouble, and Steven had to hack at it for much longer than he would’ve liked. When he got through, he could see post one up ahead about thirty feet. Each post was marked with a white marker so the guards would know where to rotate.

  No one was there yet, so he stood by the marker. It was possible the guard had wandered off for a beer. The islanders didn’t have incentive for work. They felt they didn’t need much, so work seemed like a waste of time to them. VN had solved that particular problem recently. They simply provided the workers with catalogues of things they could order, should they be able to gather the money. Productivity and longevity of hours increased, but there was still an understanding that they would get away with working as little as possible, should they have the opportunity to do so.

  Three men broke through the wall of green that made up the wild jungle around him, and they stood in silence as he scanned the surroundings. No sign of the guard assigned to this post. They would have to check camp then the city to see if they could locate him before jumping to any conclusions.

  As Steven turned to head back to camp, he glanced down a
t the knee-high white post. A discoloration marred the bottom. Bending down, he could see clearly that it was blood. Blood—actual, fresh, blood—didn’t look like it did in the movies. It was more black than red. The only real color in it was right at the edges of any spatters. This blood was in a spatter pattern of small droplets leading down. He wasn’t a forensic analyst, but if Steven had to put money on it, he would guess something had struck the guard in a downward swing from above him.

  “We’re gonna need more guards,” he said, standing up straight. “Hire whoever you can in town. Once they’re posted, I want volunteers for a hunting party. As many as we can get. Time and a half pay.”

  Derek was standing just off to the side. He waited a moment before clearing his throat and saying, “Hunting for what, sir?”

  “Haven’t you heard, Derek? We got ourselves a damn monster stalking us.”

  16

  Mark stopped the car in front of the old house. The home lay far enough in the jungle that it took almost half an hour of driving on bumpy dirty roads to get out here. Though he’d been on several tours of the jungle before, in general, he stayed away from it.

  Riki stepped out of the passenger side. Mark had tried to tell her he worked alone, but she insisted on coming, reminding him who was paying for this investigation. Under normal circumstances, he might’ve just told her to find someone else, but he couldn’t pass up so much money. Not when he had a chance, a real chance, to get his daughter.

  “You’ve never been here?” Riki asked.

  “No. Stanley never liked anyone up here. I only actually spent time with him once. He was fixing his boat motor, and I brought out a couple beers. We sat on the beach and talked for maybe five minutes, and that was it. When the beer was empty, he went back to the motor. He didn’t enjoy other people.”

  “That must’ve been lonely,” she said as they walked up the small path to the front door.