Primary Valor by Jack Mars (booksvooks TXT) 📗

up cartel traffic.Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia. Night jumps, surveillance.” He lookedat them with meaning. “Interdiction.”

Luke looked at Ed. Was Edconvinced? It was hard to say.

“More than that, I can’t reallytell you. But yes. Rest assured, I have experience. I can hold my own outthere, and then some.”

Luke glanced at his watch. Theyhad five minutes before the phone call. There was a lot to talk about.

“We’ll let you know,” he said.

* * *

“Jeff Zorn is dead,” Don Morrissaid.

His voice came out of Ed’stelephone, sitting on the generic kitchen counter of his extended stay suite. Thecounter was also covered in papers. The papers came out of a leather briefcase.Downstairs, a man in lime green slacks and a yellow golf shirt had walked up toLuke near the elevators and said, “Sir, I think you forgot your case.”

Luke had smacked himself in theforehead. “Oh yes, that’s mine. Thank you. Wouldn’t want to lose that thing. Mywhole life is in there.”

Now, he and Ed stood over thecounter, sipping coffee and staring down at the various pages.

“Tell me,” Luke said.

“I requested a tail on him likeyou asked for last night,” Trudy said. “The local FBI followed him leaving hishouse in a blue BMW Z3, the same car he previously surrendered to the police. Atsome point, he recognized the tail. He drove around seemingly at random for awhile, then stopped the car on a bridge over the Cape Fear River. He climbed tothe top of the bridge and threw himself off. The local agent followed him upthere, tried to engage, but said Zorn wouldn’t talk. They recovered the bodydownriver about six miles, near where the river dumps into the ocean, caught onan old Army Corps of Engineers retaining wall.”

“What does that tell us?” Lukesaid.

“It tells us he was involved. Turnsout Jeff Zorn and Darwin King are known associates. They used to party togetherwhen they both lived in New York City.”

“Ah,” Luke said. “Do we stillthink the girl is on the island?”

“We do,” Don said. “I don’t thinkthis man’s suicide changes anything, except now we know how King got access tothe girl. So let’s do it. Trudy, tell us about the island.”

One of the pages on the kitchencounter was a large map of the island. Trudy Wellington took the handoff fromDon, and started giving them the rundown.

“St. Simon’s Saw,” she said. “It’sa private island about forty miles north of the Honduras coastline. It isbasically a series of small, very steep hills or mountains rising out of theocean. Hence the name. Early mariners thought the jagged peaks looked like along saw, and named it for Saint Simon the Zealot, traditionally one of the twelveApostles of Christ, thought to have been martyred by being sawed in half.”

“Lovely,” Luke said.

“Beautiful story,” Trudy said. “Itwas a pretty common method of execution for many centuries. I could show yousome nice woodcut images of people being sawed in half during the Middle Ages.”

“No thanks.”

Suit yourself,” she said, andmoved on. “There is a large stone house, Casa del Sol, or House of the Sun, atthe top of the tallest mountain. The house was built in the 1890s by Mexicanindustrial baron Carlos San Patricio. The stone was brought to the island byboat, and was pulled up the mountainside by mules.

“Over the years, San Patricio hadacquired vast tracts of land throughout Central America, including several islandsoff the coast. He was a devout Catholic, and repeated disease outbreaks in theregion—cholera, typhoid, and smallpox, to name a few—led him to believe theworld was ending. St. Simon’s Saw was where he planned to wait for theresurrection of Christ.”

“How long did he wait?” Ed said.

Trudy laughed. “He’s stillwaiting.”

Luke looked at a topographicalmap. The island was a misshapen thing, rounded to the west, with a longpeninsula of what looked like beach at the bottom of some foothills stretchingout to the east. The base of the island, basically an outer ring all the wayaround, was at sea level. The house appeared to sit at an elevation of 1,100feet, the highest point on the island.

“Is that an airfield I see at thenorth end?” he said.

“Yes,” Trudy said. “The islandchanged hands numerous times through the twentieth century. In the mid-1960s itwas an exclusive resort of the emerging international jet set. The house becamea hotel, with numerous smaller cabana houses both on the grounds of the houseand down near the beach. People would fly in on private planes.”

Luke picked up an old, full-color,three-panel brochure. Visit fantastic St. Simon Island. The cover was aphoto of a rambling, whitewashed stone house, surrounded by dense greenfoliage. Inside the brochure, a beautiful woman in a one-piece bathing suitlounged by an inground swimming pool near lush gardens, the ocean visible inthe distant background. Finally, there was an aerial photo, probably taken byhelicopter, of a long, seemingly deserted white sand beach, with wavescrashing.

“Didn’t work, I gather,” Lukesaid.

“It seems that it was up and down,”Trudy said. “The resort changed hands and names several times. The ocean alongthe island’s beaches can be rough. A handful of people drowned whilevacationing there, which didn’t help the place’s reputation. That area alsotends to get pummeled by hurricanes and tropical storms. The beachfront cabanaswere repeatedly destroyed, and the whole beachfront accommodation idea waseventually abandoned.”

“When did King buy it?” Ed said.

“It’s not clear that he everbought it,” Trudy said. “I’ve researched it and haven’t found a deed of sale, aquitclaim, any kind of transfer of ownership to him. It’s officially owned by ashell company based in Grand Cayman, called Heritage Trust Royale, which may beaffiliated in some way with an entity known as Royal Heritage Bank. Theheadquarters of both is the same post office box. The company has owned theisland since 1979, when Darwin King would have been about thirty-two years old.It’s possible he is Heritage Trust Royale, and he bought it as an investmentwhen he was a young man. Whenever and however he came into possession of it, heseems to have started appearing there in the early 1990s. The place had falleninto disrepair by then, and he renovated it, returning to the idea of using itas a