Murder at the Library of Congress - Margaret Truman [14]
“Yes, but just a start. I’ll be back there day after tomorrow looking at it again. I see that Michele Paul never showed up.”
“No, he didn’t,” Consuela said, leaning back in her chair and chewing on a pencil’s eraser. “He pretty much comes and goes as he pleases, although he knows I expect him to keep me informed where he is.”
“I’m sure we’ll meet up one of these days,” Annabel said. “Thanks for everything. As they say, I think I’ve hit the ground running.”
Chapter 5
The road from the hotel to the airport on Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands, was steep, narrow, twisting, and treacherous. It hugged the side of a mountain, with a drop-off to the rock-studded shore five hundred feet below.
Lucianne Huston sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover and fought to stay awake. It had been an exhausting and frustrating three days, beginning with flight delays made more exasperating by a lack of information from the airline. It had taken her fourteen hours to get there from Miami, with a plane change in Puerto Rico. Then came clandestine midnight meetings that failed to materialize, promises of cooperation that were broken, and a couple of veiled threats from a midlevel official whom Lucianne had wanted to punch. She didn’t of course; it would not have been the sort of behavior expected of a TV journalist representing NCN, the world’s leading all-news cable network.
Worse than the fatigue had been the lack of results. Her assignment had been to follow up on information she’d received through good sources that certain government officials in the idyllic British Virgins were on the payroll of South American drug runners. She’d come up empty, with plenty of promising leads but not enough to go with the story. She knew such payoffs existed because not only did she trust her sources, she trusted her own instincts. But you needed facts to make such accusations on the air, and Lucianne didn’t have them—yet.
The Range Rover’s driver had been her guide for the three days on the islands of Virgin Gorda and Tortola. He was a young man carrying too much weight, with tousled black hair, heavy acne, and a pleasant disposition. The network had hired him through an intermediary, and he’d been at Lucianne’s beck and call since picking her up at the airport three days ago. If there was any reason for her to be sorry to leave, it was him. His name was Robert, and he spoke with a lilt, scattering English Creole terms throughout conversations with her, many of which she had to ask him to translate.
They were halfway down the mountain when a battered blue pickup truck appeared coming up the road, which was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass. Robert slowed to a crawl as he waited for the other vehicle to come abreast. Lucianne looked down to her right. They were on the outside, the Range Rover’s wheels on the extreme edge of the road.
When the pickup truck was twenty feet away, Lucianne saw the two men in the cab. The driver laughed as he pointed the truck directly at the Range Rover and gunned the engine. Robert stiffened and applied the brakes, causing the wheels on the right side to slip in the direction of the drop-off. “Stinkin’ bastard,” he said. There was no way to turn away from the truck, no room to maneuver. The pickup’s left front fender hit the Range Rover’s left front fender, causing the vehicle to move farther off the road. The front wheels went over the edge; the undercarriage rested on the drop-off’s crest.
The driver of the pickup shifted into reverse, then roared forward, his right wheels literally climbing the lower edge of the mountain and tipping the truck in the direction of the Range Rover. It passed and roared up the road, kicking dirt and dust into the air.
Robert and Lucianne scrambled from the vehicle through the driver’s door, careful not to step off the edge of the road. Robert shook his fist at the wake of the pickup while Lucianne let loose a string of longshoreman invective and threw a rock. The verbal warnings had turned physical.
Lucianne Huston was used to being in dangerous situations