Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

There’s a gull hanging in the breeze above the terrace, eyeing the paper scraps on the table and, Carr thinks, eyeing him. He waves a hand at it, but the bird is unimpressed. He looks back to Tina. “Even if Rink hasn’t made many changes to Prager’s security-and even if we could verify that-there’s still the issue of my prints. A day or so from now, she’s going to know I’m not Greg Frye. How do you make that go away?”

“ I don’t,” Tina says, and then she picks up her phone and walks to the far corner of the terrace.

She’s on for a long while, walking a tiny square while she talks. The wind carries her voice in pieces. Carr can’t make out the words above the beating of the surf, but her tone is tense and urgent. Her face, when he can see it, is blank, and her shoulders are rigid. The longer she speaks, the tighter his chest becomes.

Tina closes her phone, leans against the terrace rail, and looks out at the waves. For a moment Carr thinks she might throw the phone into the sea, but she slips it into her pocket instead and walks back to the table.

“Boyce?” he asks. Tina nods. “And?”

“We have to wait and see.”

From half a mile out, from beneath the canopy of an open fishing boat rocking gently on flat water, the Prager compound is impressive even to the naked eye. The sweep of sand is like a quarter-mile curve of new snow. The bordering palms are lush, lithe, and synchronized in the breeze. The stone stairs, terraces, and retaining walls are meticulous gray lines. The boathouse, at the end of a spidery pier, is a trim, white chapel. The three-hole golf course is like a velvet swag across the east end of the property, and the corner of a house, visible between palm trees at the west end, is like a slice of pink cake.

“Let me have the binoculars,” Carr says, and Bobby passes them over. Carr adjusts the dial and details emerge in the bobbing frame. Shadowed foliage becomes careful landscaping, dense green with generous dollops of color-hibiscus, bougainvillea, ixora, and red ginger. A swimming pool casts a shimmering web on a striped awning. A gust of wind swirls tennis court clay into a thin red cloud that settles at the edge of a croquet lawn. The slice of cake turns out to be the corner of a guesthouse-a pink stucco confection with a satellite dish. Of the main house, only a section is visible-an acre or so of terra-cotta barrel tile, a length of colonnaded portico, and a line of French windows that catch light off the ocean.

“We got them curious,” Bobby says. “On the beach, at the bottom of the stairs.”

Carr scans the binoculars from west to east and sees them, two security grunts: crew cuts, polo shirts, dark glasses, and earpieces-first cousins to the minders at his hotel. “Didn’t take long,” he says. He drops his sunglasses back on his nose, pulls his ball cap down low, and hands the binoculars back to Bobby.

“I make it six minutes.”

Carr nods. “Me too. Get a head count.”

Bobby peers through the binoculars and Carr steps around the center console, keeping his back to the shore. He fiddles with the fishing rods and the lines that run off the stern.

“I got five,” Bobby says. “The guys on the beach, one more by the guesthouse, and two at the pier, who look like they’re coming to say hello.”

Carr glances up and sees two men donning float vests and pulling at the lines of a red-hulled Zodiac moored near the boathouse. “Plus the two we saw on the gate,” he says, reeling in the lines.

“And who knows how many inside,” Bobby says. “That’s seven-plus on a weekday afternoon, with nothing much happening. With a party going on, it could be twice that.”

Carr stows the fishing rods and returns to the console. He flips a switch and the twin outboards start. There’s a puff of pale exhaust at the stern, an upwelling of foam, and a throaty rumble that echoes across the inlet. He lifts the binoculars and sees thick faces turn, can feel their sharpened interest. The men are climbing into the Zodiac now, and Carr hears their outboard whine.

“I don’t need any more,” Bobby says. “How about you?”

“We’ve seen what we came to see,” Carr says, and he pushes the throttle, turns the wheel, and carves a long white crescent in the ocean.

What they’ve seen is bad to worse, and it’s been the same everywhere they’ve looked the past two days-since Carr agreed with Tina to make a hurried reconnaissance of Isla Privada’s security arrangements. In George Town, at Isla Privada’s back office, the new guards are practically tripping over the old ones. From Boca Raton, Valerie called to report that Amy Chun’s lethargic driver is due to be replaced in the coming week by an armed one, and that her house will be swept even more frequently for unwelcome electronics. Curtis Prager’s personal protection has gone from one paunchy ex-cop to three muscular crew cuts. And here at his compound on Rum Point Drive, the household detail has grown from four to something north of seven. Only Dennis has yet to report in, on the all-important state of Isla Privada’s network security. If that has changed, Carr told Tina, it’s game over.

Carr has the boat planing now, and just coming even with the jagged peninsula that marks the western edge of Prager’s property. He looks back along their wake. The protected inlet is dwindling behind them, and so is the red Zodiac, which has barely made it to the reef, two hundred meters from shore. Carr begins a wide curve around the rocks. He sees the Zodiac slow and then turn back. He looks ahead, and in the misty distance he can make out Rum Point.

Bobby calls to him over the engine and the rush of wind and water. “You want a beer?” Carr shakes his head. Bobby reaches into an ice chest beneath his seat and pulls out a bottle of the local brew. He takes a long swallow and sighs. “This stuff sucks.”

“It’s what they had at the store.”

“No wonder,” Bobby says, and takes another drink. “This Rink chick has been busy.”

Carr nods. “Seems that way.”

“She’s got people nervous.”

“I know, Bobby.”

A third swallow and he pats his mouth with the back of his hand. “I fucking hate surprises.”

It’s pretty much all Bobby has said for two days-how much he hates surprises, how fucked up Boyce’s intel was, and that they should be thinking about packing it in. And Carr has explained, over and over, that if they can’t get a handle on what changes Rink has made, or if she’s changed anything material to their plans, then they would indeed call it a day. The message has a half-life of about five minutes in Bobby’s brain. Dennis is even more anxious but, mercifully, more inhibited about saying so, and Carr is glad he took Tina’s advice and made no mention of Rink taking his fingerprints.

As wearing as Bobby’s and Dennis’s worry is, Valerie’s and Latin Mike’s seeming lack of nerves is somehow even more so. After his initial outburst, Mike has uttered no other word of complaint or concern, but simply set about reconnoitering-an uncharacteristically cooperative soldier. Valerie has yet to say anything.

They are approaching Rum Point, and there are other fishing boats ahead, pushing north out of the sound, and swimmers closer to the beach. Carr eases up on the throttle and turns the wheel a couple of points northwest.

Bobby pulls off his T-shirt, wipes his brow with it, and leans back in his seat. His body is thick and white, a fish from a different sea. “Could be twice the security when he has a party, could be three times-we really don’t know,” he says. “We’re just guessing at what Rink might’ve changed. We don’t know shit.”

Carr sighs. “There was a lot we didn’t know when Silva was in charge.”