The Tourist Trail Read online

  Shelly had waited four weeks before letting Angela handle a bird, but Angela was not as patient, not as thick skinned, and when she first began working with Doug, she was quietly pleased to have a handsome young man spending the day with her. She wanted to be the person Doug would remember for the rest of his life. The woman who taught him everything. The woman who said yes.

  Hold the bird, she’d told him that first time. Firmly. Mind the beak. Grab the neck.

  Doug had been bitten so badly he had to be driven to Trelew for stitches. His natural instinct had been to pull away, but the penguin’s serrated beak had hooked his flesh tightly and held fast as Doug tore what was left of his hand away. It was like a Chinese finger prison, he joked as the doctor sewed together the sinew of his left hand.

  But Angela got what she wanted. He never forgot that day.

  Now Doug used the goncho to pull the bird out of the hole by his feet, then clutched him swiftly by the back of his neck. He clasped the neck with unflinching confidence, ensuring that the bird could not swing around and bite his arm. Angela slid the strap around the bird’s waist, cinched it, and attached it to a hand-held scale. Then Doug let go.

  The bird flapped its wings and snapped at the air as it twisted in circles. Angela read the weight aloud; Doug entered it into the notebook. Then Angela grabbed the bird and held him between her legs, to measure the feet.

  The wind shifted. Angela heard an engine cough, coming up for air between the waves. She looked up, half expecting to see a boat cresting the hill, then heard a scream. Her own. The penguin had bitten the skin between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Doug, take hold of the beak,” she said, trying to remain calm.

  Doug fumbled with the bird’s wings, finally grabbing onto the head and prying the beak apart. Angela snatched her hand back. The bird squirted out beneath her knees and retreated to its nest.

  Angela’s fingerless ragg glove was shredded, and blood was beginning to bubble through the crevices and soak through the fabric.

  She started up the hill, toward the sound. Doug followed.

  “Where the hell are you going?” she said.

  Doug froze.

  “We’re not done measuring,” she told him. “Stay here. Don’t let that bird go anywhere.”

  Angela stomped up the hill, angry with herself for making such an amateur mistake, for letting emotion get in the way of science.

  The first thing she saw as she crested the hill were whitecaps blown backward. She felt her body pushed forward by the stampeding wind, a breeze that had rolled off the Andes and gathered speed over hundreds of miles of nothing.

  Then she saw him.

  A man prostrate on a flat stretch of rocks that extended two hundred yards away from the beach. The remnants of an inflatable boat. It looked as if the boat had exploded, sending him and his belongings in all directions.

  She hurried over sand and mussel-covered rocks, the sound of crunching shells in her ears as she neared him. He was facedown, a large man in a fluorescent yellow jacket and an early beard. The waves washed over his legs. She grabbed his arms and pulled him, as best she could, away from the water. And it was then that the body stirred and opened its eyes. He came to, as if from a deep sleep.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You were in the water.”

  “Goddamn piece of shit,” he said, looking around. “The engine flooded. Wave tossed me.”

  Another wave crashed, dragging him across the mussels into Angela’s shins, nearly taking her down. He spit out salt water and looked up at her, confused. She helped him to his feet, and he leaned on her until they reached sand. She saw smears of blood on his jacket and arms and neck. She sat him down, pawing at his clothing, looking for the source.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “I’m wet.”

  “You’re bleeding. You need a doctor.”

  “No doctors.”

  “But you’re bleeding.”

  “There are people looking for me. People who wish to hurt me. Do you understand?”

  She drew away from him. He had the look of a merchant marine—a reddened face that rarely saw sunscreen and lines on his forehead and cheeks from a life spent squinting. He appeared to be in his early forties, and fit. His thick, dark hair could have used a haircut six weeks ago. He looked her up and down in a deliberate way, as if he only just noticed her.

  “You’re the one who’s bleeding,” he said.

  She glanced down to discover the source of all that blood. Her ragg glove was saturated and dripping. She felt the sting of salt water. She remembered Doug and glanced up the hill, relieved to see it empty.

  “Let me look at it,” he said. She offered up her hand and he gently peeled back the moist wool. “How’d this happen?”

  “Penguin.”

  He looked up at her. “A penguin did this?”

  She nodded. Though his face was sunburned and rough, his eyes were calm and steady, and for a moment Angela forgot the pain in her hand.

  “And I thought I was having a bad day,” he said.

  Now was the time to return to camp and notify the authorities. Report what she’d seen, stitch her wound, document items recovered, note coordinates, date, and time. Normally that was what Angela would have done. She detested all nationalities of tourists and trespassers.

  Yet this man was neither. He was wet and shivering and needed her help. And she had a soft spot for strays.

  Robert

  At the Buenos Aires airport, Robert held Lynda’s picture, studying the faces of the people walking past, coming through the automatic glass doors that separated customs from the outside world. He himself had emerged from behind those doors only an hour before, weary from a sleepless night, wondering how he would make it through the long day ahead. With one more flight to go, and a partner yet to meet, he’d begun to entertain thoughts of turning around and heading home. He tried to remind himself why he’d agreed to this assignment in the first place.

  He replayed the previous morning in his head, when Gordon had phoned him awake and told him that Aeneas had turned up again. Like a bad penny, Gordon said. He told Robert to pack his bags and get to the office.

  But Robert had stayed in bed, staring at the bare walls of his “no personality” apartment, as an old girlfriend once called it. She’d been right. He used to blame the lack of decoration on living his life on the road. But the truth was, as an undercover agent, Robert had assumed so many personalities over the years that he had begun to question which personality was his.

  Robert’s one meager attempt at interior decorating was a laminated map of the world. He’d hung it in the kitchen, planning to use pushpins to mark every place he had visited—Amsterdam, Oslo, Osaka, Kuwait—but he abandoned the idea when he realized that most of those trips were classified.

  And that morning, after he’d finally gotten out of bed and dressed, he’d wandered into the kitchen and stared at the northern reaches of the map, at the tiny islands of Svalbard, two hundred miles north of Norway, just below the polar ice cap. Places Robert had nearly succeeded in erasing from memory, until Gordon had called and mentioned Aeneas.

  When Robert had entered Gordon’s perennially unlit office, Gordon was reclined in his chair, feet on the desk, keyboard on his lap. People often mistook the posture for laziness, but Robert knew it was intentional. Gordon once said the fastest way to get promoted at the Bureau was to pretend you didn’t want to get promoted. Robert wondered whether Gordon’s emerging paunch was part of the disguise, but he wasn’t about to ask. Gordon was only a few years older than Robert but looked twice that, heavyset, with a balding head framed by wisps of thin blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

  Robert walked to the window and pulled open the vertical blinds to let in some light, revealing the top half of a naked tree. The night’s ice storm had left a sheen on i
ts branches, and they hung low under the weight. A dense layer of clouds threatened more of the same. Robert normally would have welcomed the change in scenery brought about by a new assignment, but not this time. He could feel Gordon watching him but resisted the urge to turn around.

  Don’t you want to know what he did? Gordon asked.

  Not particularly.

  I’d have thought you would relish a second shot at him.

  And I’d have thought I would’ve graduated to pursuing real terrorists by now.

  Oh, he’s real, Gordon said. Aeneas, too, has graduated. To negligent manslaughter.

  Robert turned to see if Gordon was joking. He wasn’t. Aeneas may be good at protecting animals, Gordon said, but he’s not so good at protecting people. He let one of his crew members, a woman, die up in the North Atlantic. Details are sketchy because nobody’s talking. She was estranged from her parents, and they want it kept quiet as well. But they’ve got connections in the Bureau, which is all we need to know. And, frankly, it was just a matter of time before he gave us another reason to come after him.

  Robert had looked back out the window, at the tree, at one sadly sagging branch. He felt the urge to exit the building, climb the tree, shake the ice off. Give the branch a break from the weight. A little temporary insanity might give Robert a break as well, a week off from work, an excuse. He knew he didn’t need an excuse; he could just say no. Gordon certainly owed him. Back when Gordon had been working undercover, with Robert just out of the Academy, an arms dealer in Long Beach discovered a microphone in Gordon’s briefcase—and Robert put a bullet in the man’s head just as he was about to put one in Gordon’s.

  But Robert couldn’t say no. He’d been the one to open this case five years ago, and he knew he needed to be the one to close it.

  Still, he wished he hadn’t been assigned a partner, that he wasn’t still waiting for her at the increasingly crowded airport terminal. He noticed a woman approaching rapidly, pulling a wheeled carry-on bag, and he stepped aside to get out of her way. But she stopped, right in front of him.

  “You Robert?” she asked. She wore a Red Sox cap that covered her short blonde hair.

  Robert looked again at the picture; he’d expected a brunette. The woman smiled. “That photo’s from when I was working out of Boston. I’m in the Miami office now. Gotta blend in with the locals. I’m Lynda.” She gave his hand a quick shake then started off. She was shorter than Robert expected, but she carried herself with a swagger that made up for it. “We’ve got to motor,” she called back to him. “Next flight leaves in ten minutes.”

  Robert followed a step behind. She was still talking, but he couldn’t hear her over the public address system, and he got the sense that she didn’t care if he heard her anyway.

  On the plane, Robert took the window seat and, as Lynda continued her friendly chatter, he watched Buenos Aires disappear beneath the clouds. Then she switched gears, brought up the case, and he started to listen.

  Lynda told him that Brazilian trawlers off the coast of Fortaleza had first sighted Aeneas’s ship, the Arctic Tern. Fishermen were, by nature, a suspicious lot, and they took the boat for a competitor. She said they’d reported that the Tern was headed south. And she had a warrant for Aeneas’s arrest.

  “So what’s your story with this guy?” she asked.

  “I don’t have a story.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Ask Gordon.”

  “I did. All he told me was that you could I.D. him. Can you?”

  Robert nodded.

  “Well, that’s a start. If all goes well, you’ll be pointing him out by nightfall. Gordon pulled some strings with the Argentines. There’s a naval cutter waiting for us in Puerto Madryn loaded with enough men and arms to invade Panama.”

  Everything was suddenly moving quickly, too quickly. The Tern’s coordinates, the Argentine cutter. Success seemed inevitable, which would have been a good thing if they were chasing anyone else. But Aeneas in handcuffs seemed more dangerous to Robert than Aeneas on the run. The stories Aeneas could tell, once captured, to anyone within earshot. How Lynda would react if she learned the real reason Aeneas escaped under his watch five years ago. The new cases Gordon could open just as this one was being closed.

  Robert began to imagine scenarios that would result in the use of lethal force. The images weren’t hard to conjure—Aeneas raising a shotgun, Aeneas playing Kamikaze with his ship—giving Robert an excuse to react with a well-placed round, extinguishing, finally, the man and his stories. Extinguishing the memories, once and for all.

  “You’re not all that chatty, are you, Bobby?”

  Robert turned away from the window. Lynda wore a sly smile, which pulled his mind back to the present. He forced a grin and shook his head.

  “Like my husband,” she said with a shrug. “We’ll get along just fine.”

  * * *

  As promised, the ARA Roca, a four-story gunmetal warship, was waiting for them when their taxi arrived at Puerto Madryn harbor.

  “If only the Bureau moved this fast in getting me a raise,” Lynda said as she and Robert hurried up the boarding ramp.

  Robert looked up at the guns, at the men in uniform, and felt a twinge of embarrassment. He imagined what Aeneas would say at such a display of might—All this, for little old me?—and didn’t know what bothered him more, the veritable army before him or the fact that he had begun imagining what Aeneas would say.

  Lynda stopped in the bridge, and Robert heard her talking to the captain in Spanish while he took up position outside on the wing deck, off the starboard side of the bridge, which gave him a panoramic view of the water below. He could still see Lynda inside, laughing at something the captain said. She was flirting with him—a short man in his forties, trim, with dark hair and the matching requisite mustache—and Robert felt his body begin to relax, knowing that she was taking care of things. It was nice, for the time being, to feel as though he were nothing but a passenger.

  Within a few minutes, the boat was in open water, under a cloudless sky. When Lynda joined him at the railing, Robert hoped that the stiff headwind, which made talking difficult, might keep her silent. But Lynda had a loud voice and stood extra close.

  “Captain Zamora says we’re not far,” she said. “A fisherman sighted the Tern just an hour ago, not far from here. We should call Gordon and give him an update.” She looked at Robert expectantly.

  “What do you mean, we?” Robert asked.

  “You’ve got the satellite phone. He’s your boss.”

  “I’ll call him when we’ve got actual news. What’s the rush?”

  “Look, Bobby, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to start scoring some points with upper management. I wasn’t sent down here for my health, if you know what I mean. You do know what happened in Miami, don’t you?”

  “I read the report.”

  “That’s the official story,” she said. “Not the entire story.” Lynda began to tell Robert about her attempt to capture Aeneas in the Port of Miami, much of it a rehash of what he’d already read. So he raised his binoculars, focusing more on the horizon than on her story.

  She’d had only three agents to do a five-agent job—round-the-clock surveillance of the Arctic Tern. It would have been simple, she told him, if only she’d had the manpower: The Canadians had pulled the boat’s registration. The FBI had obtained a warrant on the captain. The Coast Guard was on high alert. All they needed was a positive I.D. of Aeneas, and they would move in and make the arrest.

  And then came the bomb threats, two of them, fifteen minutes apart. Two fully loaded passenger ships—one about to depart and one just arrived—had to be evacuated. More than seven thousand people spilled out onto piers, herded by SWAT teams, bomb-sniffing canines, and TV cameras. The next day, Lynda traced the calls to a cell phone on a ship that slipped out of the harbor dur
ing all the commotion—the Arctic Tern.

  “Now for the part I left out of the report,” she said. “You see, I was the only one on surveillance that afternoon. The only one. And I get this call on my cell. Franklin Bimler, he says his name is, out of Counterterrorist Operations. You know this guy?”

  Robert shook his head.

  “Of course not. Neither did I. Bimler tells me he’s got urgent information but he can’t tell me because he thinks people are listening in via parabolic microphone—because I’m outside at the time. So I leave my post and get into my car, and that’s when all hell breaks loose with the cruise ships.”

  “So?”

  “So, there was no Franklin Bimler. Not on the phone. Not anywhere. I ran a search on the guy, and there’s nobody by that name in the Bureau.”

  “Franklin could have been Aeneas.”

  “I considered that. I did. But how’d Aeneas get my number?”

  “He’s good.”

  “I don’t know. How’d he even know I was working the case?”

  “You think that someone in the Bureau set you up?”

  “Crazier things have happened.”

  “You’re getting paranoid, Lynda. Aeneas will do that to you.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Why didn’t you put that in your report?”

  “Because I left my damn post, that’s why. I got duped. It was bad enough I let him get away. Would you have put it in your report?”

  He wouldn’t have. There were a lot of things he’d left out of his own report on Aeneas. He looked at Lynda, who was still watching him, and wondered how much she knew.

  “It was Aeneas,” Robert said, turning away and raising his binoculars again. “Trust me.”

  “Ballenas!” shouted one of the uniformed men standing below on the main deck. Following the man’s pointed finger, Robert scanned the horizon, then broadened his viewing arc. He zoomed out, then back in, but he did not see any ships. He lowered the binoculars and turned to Lynda.