Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [125]
“I do,” he said, grimly. “The bloodsucking Jews.”
Michelle and I flew ahead to Houston, where we picked up another rental and headed down to Galveston. The hand-over of the clinic went nice and smooth. The doc who owned it didn’t want to know anything—just when he could come back.
The Excursion pulled in about an hour before we expected it. But we’d timed it for three in the morning, so we unloaded the old man in darkness, as planned.
“Thanks, kid,” I told Randy. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Burke, you know I’d do—”
“You just did,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Let me finish, okay? I don’t know what you’re up to, and it’s none of my business, okay? But if you need to leave here quick, I’m your man, and you know it. Besides, who’s going to truck the old guy back to Key West? What’s it going to be, a week or two? Let me hang out with the Prof and Clarence, catch up on old times. Please?”
“My man’s hip, and he’s got the chips. I say, let him play,” the Prof ruled.
The old man had a good night’s sleep, thanks to one of the Mole’s potions.
And in the morning, we all went to work.
First we explained to the old man that we’d have to run a lot of tests. Sure, we had his complete medical records—he’d had a copy in his safe—but this wasn’t exactly a routine medical procedure. The clinic had all kinds of incoming communications. Bigscreen TV, radio that could pick up anything on the airwaves, a T-1 line to the Internet. But we only used cell phones, outgoing. We explained that the clinic was off the charts. And any land-line call could be traced. We wanted him to be able to do any business he needed to do, so he was free to use one of the cellulars, but if he had a fax or an e-mail or even a FedEx that needed to go out, he’d have to give it to us, and we’d see it was sent from another location.
He just nodded. Hard to tell if it was from understanding or the drugs.
The Mole showed me how the cellulars would patch through a microphone into the harmonizer. I’d learned my lesson from Max’s daughter, and I wasn’t going to have this whole thing die if the target had voice-recognition software.
The T-1 found it in a few seconds. Darcadia had its own website, very slick and professionally done. But the phone and fax numbers were offshore. And there wasn’t even so much as a PO box for a physical location.
On the surface, it looked not only legitimate, but … possible. Why shouldn’t an island in the Pacific form its own country? Darcadia was nothing but an intersection of coordinates on a map, the very tip of a long archipelago, several hundred miles from its nearest neighbor. And it was unoccupied, so there wouldn’t be any indigenous people to dislodge. It could be purchased outright from the country it was … theoretically … part of. And a sovereign government could make its own laws.
The language of the website’s prospectus was veiled, but so thinly that even a third-generation inbred could figure it out. Strict control of immigration. Specific citizenship requirements. Complete freedom of religion “within the obvious constraints.” No gun control. No taxes—all revenues to be generated from “pre-screened tourism.” Abortion was against the law in Darcadia, which had a no-extradition policy for “citizen warriors charged with acts of revolution against New World Order nations.” Restrictions on “acts of personal or intrafamilial conduct” would not be tolerated. And on and on.
It sounded as if everything was in place. Although it was called “the Republic of Darcadia,” the site said the new country was “a confederation, not a democracy.” It had a chancellor, and a Cabinet consisting of various “ministers,” all of whom were named. I didn’t recognize any of them, and their affiliations weren’t listed.