Beyond Fearless Page 2

  Now that he was homebound, he was reduced to sending others out to handle the vital job he ached to do himself.

  In the endless hours of pain when he’d lain in the hospital burn unit, he’d come to understand that if he survived, he would start a new phase of his life. God or fate or whatever controlled the universe had spared him for a reason—given him a mission in life.

  Twenty dead and more than two hundred to go. And every time he sent another one of the monsters to hell, he felt a profound sense of satisfaction.

  He must get them all, before they destroyed the human race—the way they’d destroyed the Crandall Consortium.

  He turned to stare out the window into the darkness, feeling the winter cold penetrate his now-fragile skin. All the way to his bones.

  In his previous life, his home base had been a converted mansion on the bluffs above the Potomac River, where he’d worked for the powerful Kurt MacArthur.

  Officially MacArthur had run a think tank with ties to Congress, the military, and the CIA. Unofficially, his consortium had taken on jobs no one else had wanted to touch—whether they were legal or not. Until one stupid decision had destroyed everything.

  When their headquarters building had gone up in flames, Jim had been lucky to escape with his life. And lucky he had the connections to take on a new identity. Now he was Jim Stone. And nobody knew he had been the Crandall Consortium’s most trusted operative.

  Too bad MacArthur’s secret records had been wiped out in the fire. If Jim had had a list of names, he could have proceeded more quickly. Instead, he was reduced to research—and probabilities. Which meant he might make the wrong call.

  But he’d long ago decided that it was better to kill ten innocents by mistake than to allow the guilty to escape. Like in the Middle Ages, when some sinless women had been burned at the stake along with the witches.

  The computer beeped, and he spun his wheelchair back to the desk. The message was from Bill Cody. Wild Bill. His operative on Grand Fernandino.

  While Jim ran the message through the decoding program, he poured a cup of coffee, then sipped the Kona blend as he read the text.

  By the time he was finished, he was 90 percent sure he would order a kill.

  ZACH waited for a horse-drawn carriage and a motorcycle to clear the intersection. Then he stepped onto the cobblestone street, careful not to get horse manure on his deck shoes as he crossed to the row of shops and bars across from the city square.

  A rotund man standing next to four trained parrots on perches called to him.

  “You wanna picture with Ozzie, Harriet, Ricky, and David?”

  “No thanks,” he answered. He needed a drink, not a souvenir photograph.

  He’d intended to go back to the Blue Heron as soon as possible. But the day after the diving mishap, he’d quickly found that his plan wasn’t going to be so easy.

  José and Claude had both been busy spreading the Pagor story, in the island patois. But the message was clear in any language—“stay away from that American, Zach Robinson. He’ll get you on the wrong side of Pagor.”

  So was this whole thing a setup? Had someone paid off José and Claude to make sure he couldn’t hire anyone? And why? Had William Sanford been murdered? And the murderer didn’t want the Blue Heron investigated?

  He might have put José and Claude in the middle of a conspiracy—until he remembered the look of sheer terror in José’s eyes. The man hadn’t been faking his fear. He had been trying to escape the wrath of a supernatural being.

  Unfortunately, since then, José had been talking about it to everyone who would listen.

  With no other alternative, Zach had put in a call to his regular crew, but they couldn’t get there for a couple of days. So he was stuck until they made it to the island.

  Which was why he was looking for a dark, quiet place that matched his current mood, where he could have a few beers and silently curse the trio of José, Claude, and Pagor.

  As he passed a nightclub painted a garish green and yellow, a publicity poster in a glass case stopped him in his tracks.

  The top of the frame said, “Now Appearing at the Sugar Cane Club.” Below it, the picture showed a very attractive young woman with wavy dark hair that hung around her shoulders. She was holding a silver tray in one hand and stretching out her other hand toward him as though waiting for him to give her something. The caption at the bottom of the poster said, “Magic Anna: the woman who knows you better than you know yourself.”

  His first thought was that’s ridiculous hype. Yet he had always believed in magic, at least in some hidden corner of his soul.

  Or he had wanted to believe. You could call it magic if you wanted. Or psychic talent. He wasn’t sure which was the better term. He’d read dozens of books about people who were supposed to possess abilities denied to the likes of ordinary humanity.

  Sometimes he’d felt like he was on the edge of possessing magic powers himself. He had fantastic intuition when it came to finding shipwrecks and other lost objects.

  And yesterday afternoon, that sixth sense had made him whip out his hand and prevent José from shooting to the surface and killing himself.

  But that was the extent of his talent. And maybe it hadn’t been extrasensory perception that had helped him catch José. Maybe it had been a flash of movement at the corner of his vision.

  His attention turned back to the woman who called herself Magic Anna. He liked her body, liked her slender waist, gently rounded hips, and high breasts.

  He’d been drawn to her face, then deliberately focused on the rest of the package to give himself a little breathing room. Now he slowly raised his eyes. She looked to be a few years younger than he was. Her lips were sensual. Her nose was short and straight. But her eyes were her best feature, their blue depths fringed by dark lashes—a very attractive combination.

  Yet he wasn’t just staring at a good-looking woman. The longer he regarded her, the more he thought she really could look into his mind and…what?

  Connect with him on a level he’d never experienced with any other human being? Even as the notion flitted through his mind, he stifled a laugh—and gave himself points for a vivid imagination. He thought he was going to find the thing he’d been looking for all his life in a nightclub in Palmiro?

  Sure.

  With a mental shrug, he walked down the block to a bar where the main activity was drinking.

  A soft knock at the door of her dressing room made Anna jump.

  “Twenty minutes, sweetheart,” Bertrand called in his soft island accent.

  She’d come to think of that accent as part of a disguise, along with his short-sleeved button-down shirts covered with tropical flowers. On the surface he seemed like a laidback dude—drifting along on an island breeze. In reality, he had the sharp teeth of a jungle cat.

  When he walked away, she breathed out a little sigh.

  From almost the moment she’d arrived in Palmiro, she’d known that Bertrand wanted something from her.

  It had started with the long, speculative look he’d given her while they were waiting at the airport for her luggage to be unloaded. Although he hadn’t made any moves on her, his hidden agenda added to her tension level.

  So what was going on? Did he want her to read his palm? Did he think she could put him in touch with a dead relative—or a dead lover? If so, he was going to be disappointed. Because her powers were limited to what she did in her act. That was it.

  She hadn’t figured him out. Just the way she hadn’t figured out a lot of things that other women seemed to know instinctively about the opposite sex.

  Too bad her psychic abilities couldn’t help her in that department.

  She’d had a few relationships. But nothing deep. Nothing that didn’t lead to a disappointing dead end. Because she’d never been able to really open up with anyone. And more than once she’d thought that fate had granted her a mental power that few other people possessed—and left her with a crippling emotional d
isability as payment.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  ANNA DRAGGED IN a breath and let it out slowly, wishing her talent hadn’t brought her to this place and this time. It had started off as a childhood game, picking up things that belonged to other people and tapping into their memories.

  She’d turned the game into a profession after Mom and Dad had died in a car crash during her sophomore year in college. Dad had been trying to pull off one of his big real estate deals at the time, so he’d left her with a boatload of debts.

  Vowing to pay them off, Anna had started looking for a way to make some money. And she’d never gone back for her degree because she’d been too busy supporting herself. Her first job had been in the nightclub of a hotel owned by one of her father’s creditors, who’d probably figured he had nothing to lose by hiring her. She’d impressed him with her talent, and he’d helped her get hooked up with an agent who had booked her into clubs in several cities. That first agent had given her the name Magic Anna. It didn’t exactly fit. When she’d done some research, she’d found out what she did was called psychometry. But by then she was stuck with the Magic Anna name. And if people came in expecting a magic act, they quickly found out the real deal.

  To be honest, her nightclub act had given her a sense of secret power—until the first jolt of alarm had cut through her like a knife stabbing into her soul.

  She’d found herself facing a man she knew was a rapist. At least she’d clicked onto the picture of a rape when she’d picked up his money clip. And there was nothing she could do about it because she had no proof of what he’d done.

  Damn. Why was she thinking of that now?

  A block away from the Sugar Cane Club, Raoul San Donato watched a customer studying a display of wood carvings in his native arts gallery.

  That’s a live one, he thought from his desk at the back of the shop.

  She was obviously a tourist, with badly sunburned shoulders and a few wisps of dyed brown hair escaping from under the crown of her wide-brimmed straw hat. She looked to be in her midforties, about ten years older than he. The kind of lady who might like some afternoon fun in bed.

  Briskly, he switched his mind from sex to a more practical topic—making a sale.

  He gave her a few minutes to examine the beautiful objects he had assembled in his gallery, then walked over and asked in his most cultured voice, “May I help you?”

  Without bothering to glance up, she gave the standard tourist answer: “I’m just looking.”

  “We have some wonderful buys on works by talented local artists.” He gestured toward a trio of dolphins leaping from waves. “Pablo Ramos is just coming into his own. In a few years, his sculptures will be collector’s items.” As he spoke, he exercised one of his special talents and sent her a silent message urging her to buy something. When he felt a subtle change in her attitude, he smiled inwardly.

  “Really?” she asked, looking him full in the face. He knew she was taking in his island good looks—the combination of Caucasian and African features that had blended so well to make him a striking man with a coffee-and-cream complexion, a Roman nose, and sensual lips.

  He kept speaking smoothly as he silently encouraged her desire to buy, using the talent he’d had since he was a boy. “Or you might consider the work of Thomas Avery. He’s a bit more established, but his prices start off very low, so you can still get in on a good deal.”

  She nodded, considering a black onyx cat sitting with its nose pointed toward the sky.

  “For you, a special price. Three hundred dollars,” he said, knowing he could tip her over the edge if he only had the time.

  She came back with an immediate counteroffer.

  “One hundred and fifty.” Not so low as to be insulting, but low enough to let him know she understood the game.

  “Two hundred.”

  “I don’t know…” she murmured. “How about one eighty?”

  “At that price, I’ll have to give Thomas less. And I know he’s supporting his wife and children on his earnings.”

  “All right. Two hundred.”

  “I’ll include a certificate telling about the artist and his work.”

  Just as he was about to clinch the deal, a man wearing an orange T-shirt stretched over a jiggling belly that hung over khaki cargo shorts came in.

  “Honey, come on. I’m hot and tired. And the ship is sailing in an hour.”

  She held up the cat. “I’m buying this. It will look fantastic on the shelves in the living room.”

  When the man started to nix the transaction, Raoul repressed a curse. Instead, he acted quickly, blocking the husband’s negative comment with a quick jab of mental energy.

  The fat man closed his mouth and went back outside while Mrs. Pam Birmingham of Bridgeport, Connecticut, bought a tchotchke from Grand Fernandino.

  After walking her to the door, he stood staring around his gallery with satisfaction. For the first eight years of his life, he’d thought that everyone lived in a dirt-floored hovel, ate rice and beans for breakfast, and crapped out back. Then his aunt had come home from Palmiro to brag about the high life in the port city, where she made solid money in the big hotels—cleaning the rooms of the rich tourists.

  Momma had followed her. And she’d taken Raoul and a couple of the other kids with her. At first, he’d been bugeyed at Palmiro’s grandeur. In the island’s capital, too many people might squeeze into one room at night, but life was nothing like in his village.

  And when he helped Momma clean up after the rich folks in the big hotels, he saw how they lived. Sometimes they left wonderful things behind when they flew back to their homes—candies nestled in crinkly brown paper cups, soft drinks, magazines with pictures of naked women.

  He enjoyed the booty. When he ran errands for the tourists, their tips seemed like a fortune. And he vowed that he would do what it took to live like them.

  He’d started with his speech, imitating their grammar and vocabulary but keeping the soft island tone of his voice and just enough “native” turns of phrase to make himself seem charming.

  Some island kids quit school early. He stayed through tenth grade. And after class every day, he joined the hordes of higglas—street vendors—saving his earnings until he could rent a stall in the marketplace.

  It was about that time that he began talking seriously to Joseph Hondino, one of the local Vadiana priests.

  Old Joe had taught him about the pull toward completeness and divinity in the universe. He’d taught his young disciple that reality is a world of forces in continual process, of energy moving at different rates of speed. Raoul had zoned out on the deep background stuff, but he understood that men and spirits interacted. And if you courted their help, they might be on your side. Or they might not.

  When he’d done a little reading on his own, Raoul discovered something even better—that nothing is completely “good” or completely “evil.” And as far as the universe is concerned, no action is completely “wrong” or “right.” Which meant, in his mind, that the end justified the means.

  Of course, when he talked to Hondino about it, Old Joe was horrified at that interpretation. He’d lectured Raoul on right and wrong. On the proper use of Vadiana and the forbidden.

  Although Raoul pretended to listen, he was already making his own plans. He’d long ago discovered he had special powers—way before he had heard of the Vadiana gods. Hooking up with the Blessed Ones simply added to what he already had. And, he figured, the proof of a course of action was in how well it worked.

  So far, it was working very very well for him.

  A lot of islanders had tied their fortunes to his. More and more people came to the private compound on the other side of the island, where he held his very potent ceremonies on Friday nights.

  With a little smile, he strode to the door of the gallery to flip the lock and then the Open sign to Closed. As he was about to pull down the shade, he stopped short.

  Speak of the devi
l.

  Joseph Hondino was standing across the street, staring at him. The dark skin of his bald head gleamed like he’d rubbed it with palm oil. His white beard was neatly trimmed. And his eyes were sleepy-looking. But everybody on the island knew that he missed very little. If you were stealing goodies from the tourists’ rooms, he knew it. And if you needed a pair of decent shoes so you could get a job as a waiter, he knew that, too.

  Raoul went stock-still. For just a moment he felt like a street kid caught with his hand in a tourist’s pocket.

  He recovered quickly. Manufacturing a grin, he gave the priest a jaunty wave.

  They stood regarding each other for several heartbeats, across an enormous gulf. Raoul broke the spell and turned away.

  Hondino had told him he was perverting the principles of Vadiana, but he didn’t care what old Joe thought. Because he was getting ready to make his big move. And when he did, Hondino was out as the big cheese on the island. And Raoul San Donato was in.

  He pulled the shade, then went back to his cash drawer to count the day’s receipts. Two thousand dollars. Excellent!

  He left the credit card slips in the drawer and hid the money behind a loose board in the shop’s back room. Business over for the day, he stepped into the small rear yard, where the darkness and a high wooden fence gave him privacy.

  In a building that had once been a storage shed, he had set up a small shrine to Ibena. She was one of the Blessed Ones, the deities who ruled over every force of nature and every aspect of human life. To please her, he had decorated the shrine with rich gold, red, and coral. And he had carefully collected some of her favorite objects—fans, tortoiseshell combs, peacock feathers, and a small boat floating in a tub of water because she was the deity of rivers.

  She was also the goddess of love and of sexuality, of marriage and fertility. And she would bring him a woman who was his equal, a woman to share the bounty they would create together.