Greene stood from his seat and looked back as well, but the hydroplane had traveled so far he could barely see the shoreline through the trees. “What does your gut tell you now?”
Holmes pondered the question as he increased the boat’s speed. There was a faint glow in the water up ahead that he had a theory about. “Actually, it tells me that we’re gonna make it to Africa, and something good is going to happen along the way.”
“Along the way?” Greene questioned. “Why do you say that?”
Holmes extended his finger forward, causing Greene to glance in front of the hydroplane. When his eyes focused on the scene, he couldn’t believe their good fortune.
Paul and Donny Metz were standing on a fallen cypress tree, trying to push the boat into the center of the channel, but their effort was completely useless. The duo, weakened from days of labor in the field, didn’t have the strength to disengage the boat by themselves, and Robert Edwards didn’t have enough experience with the craft to assist them.
No, the slaves weren’t about to free themselves from the tree, and now that Holmes and Greene had stumbled upon them, they wouldn’t be getting free at all.
PAYNE
tried to follow the truck’s tire marks in the grass, but the rocky terrain near the eastern shore of the island limited his tracking ability.
Once he was on his own, forced to locate Holmes with nothing to guide him, he decided to scan the swamps in both directions, hoping to stumble upon a clue. With each passing minute, he knew the chances of finding Ariane on the island were getting smaller and smaller, but he refused to give up hope while there was still fuel in his gas tank and ground to cover.
It wasn’t until he saw Holmes’s truck, slowly sinking into the soft mud of the marsh, that he knew he was too late to make a difference.
The Posse had escaped from the Plantation.
“Son of a bitch!” he screamed while punching the leather seat in frustration. “I can’t believe I let them escape!” He took a deep breath, trying to calm down, but it didn’t work. The extra oxygen simply made him more agitated than before. “Fuck! Fuck!
Fuck!
”
After a moment of contemplation, Payne moved from his four-wheeler to the edge of the swamp. He was tempted to wade out to the sinking truck to search for clues, but the splashing of nearby gators quickly eliminated the thought.
“Think, goddamn it, think! What can I do?”
Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do except watch the vehicle—and his chances of finding Ariane—slowly disappear.
CHAPTER 57
Monday, July 5th
District Office for the FBI
New Orleans, Louisiana
JONATHON
Payne glared at the special agent across the table. He had already answered more questions in the past few hours than he had during his entire time at the Naval Academy, and it was starting to try his patience. He was more than willing to assist the FBI with their investigation, but enough was enough. It was time to speed up the process.
Payne stood from his chair and glanced at the large mirror that dominated the wall in front of him. If he was correct, the people in charge of the investigation were standing behind the glass, watching him give his testimony about the Plantation.
“That’s it,” he announced. “I’ve reached my limit. I’ve done nothing wrong, yet I’m being treated like a criminal. I’m not saying another word until one of you assholes comes into this room and answers a few questions for me. Do you understand? Not another word until I get some answers!”
Payne accented his request by slamming his hand against the two-way glass—his way of driving home the intensity of his message.
His point got through because less than a minute later the door to the conference room opened and the local director of operations walked in.
Chuck Dawson was a distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties, and the power of his position showed in the confidence of his stride and the wisdom of his weathered face. He greeted Payne with a firm handshake and studied him for a moment before telling the other agent to leave the room. It would be easier to get things done alone.
“How’s the arm feeling, Mr. Payne? Can I get you something for it?”
Payne glanced at his injured biceps and shrugged. It wouldn’t get better without surgery, and he didn’t have time for a trip to the hospital. “A beer would be nice. You know, for the pain.”
Dawson smiled at the comment. “If I had some in my office, I’d offer you a cold one. But I was thinking more along the lines of bandages or a pillow.”
“Nah, your doctors patched me up pretty well when I first came in. I don’t think I’m ready for the golf course yet, but I’ll be okay for our chat.”
“If that changes, be sure to let me know. I don’t want anything to happen to a national hero while you’re under my care.”
Payne raised his eyebrows in surprise. The recent line of questioning suggested that he was more of a suspect than a hero. He had been drilled on everything from the murder of Jamaican Sam to his possible involvement with the Posse, and now he was being praised? “On second thought, I might need a hearing test. I could’ve sworn you just called me a hero.”
“I did,” Dawson asserted. He opened the folder that he had carried into the room and glanced at its information. “From what I can tell, you and David Jones saved the lives of eleven prisoners—actually twelve if you include Tonya Edwards’s baby—while killing more than twenty criminals in the process. At the same time, you managed to prevent the future abduction of countless others by shutting down an organization that we didn’t even know existed until yesterday.”
Dawson spotted Payne trying to read the FBI data and hastily closed the folder.
“That makes you a hero in my book.”
Payne leaned back in his chair. “Well, Chuck, that seems a bit surprising. I don’t feel like a hero. In fact, I feel like a second-class citizen around here. What’s up with all the questions and accusations?”
Dawson smiled, revealing a perfect set of teeth. “Come on, Jon. You’re ex-military. You know the way things work.”
“Yeah, you like to burn up a bunch of manpower by asking tons of worthless questions just so you have something to put in your files.”
The FBI director shrugged. “It’s the government’s way.”
Payne grinned at the comment. “Well, at least you’re willing to admit it’s worthless. That’s more than the last agent was willing to do.”
“Don’t be putting words into my mouth. I never said it was worthless. The questions weren’t worthless. . . . Okay, I admit some of them were a little far-fetched, but they weren’t without worth. We often gather more information from a person’s reaction to a question than we do from their actual answer.”
Payne rolled his eyes. He couldn’t believe his entire morning had been wasted on psychological games. There were so many other things he could have been doing with his time. “And that’s why you’ve been harassing me? To see if my answers and facial expressions were consistent during the baiting process?”
“Something like that. But it isn’t just self-consistency that we look for. We also check your claim against the claims of others.”
“Like D.J.?”
“And Bennie Blount, and the slaves, and anyone else we can dig up. We make sure that everything checks out before we’re willing to accept things at face value. It’s the only way to guarantee in-depth analysis.”
“Well, Chuck, now that I’ve passed your little test, would you please answer some questions for me? I’ve been trying to get some information all morning, but I keep getting shot down by your flunkies.”
Dawson nodded. His men had been instructed to keep Payne in the dark, but now that they were confident in Payne’s innocence, he was willing to open up. “As long as the questions don’t involve confidential data, I’d be happy to fill you in. Fire away!”
It was a poor choice of expressions, but Payne was willing to overlook the faux pas if it meant getting some answers. “You just mentioned Bennie Blount. How’s he doing?”
“Mr. Blount is in serious but stable condition. He lost a lot of blood from the crash and the animal attack, but your buddy did a great job keeping him alive until help arrived.”
“What about his legs? Is he going to be able to walk again?”
Dawson shrugged. “I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know all the facts. From what I was told, he did sustain a spinal cord injury. They don’t think it’s a devastating one, so, God willing, he’ll be as good as new after some rest and rehab.”
Payne closed his eyes in thought. For some reason, Payne was always more devastated by his partners’ injuries than his own. “And what about the twenty-plus prisoners we saved? Are they all right?”
“Maybe I should ask you the same question. Are
you
all right?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Twenty-plus prisoners? You must have double vision or something. Like I mentioned before, you helped save the lives of eleven captives.”
“Yeah, I heard you. There were eleven people on the island when you showed up and ten on the boat that I set free several hours before. If my math is correct, that would mean over twenty.”
“Shit,” Dawson mumbled. He suddenly realized that Payne hadn’t been informed about the missing vessel. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but we never found the slave boat that you and your partner talked about. The Coast Guard is currently conducting an all-out search of the gulf, but as of right now, we don’t know what happened to it.”
“You’ve gotta be shitting me!”
“I wish I was. But it hasn’t turned up.”
Payne tried to process the new information as quickly as possible, but it threw him for a temporary loop. “So the slave boat could be on the bottom of the gulf? What about Robert Edwards? Did you find Robert Edwards anywhere?”
Dawson shook his head. “He’s one of the missing slaves. His wife and future baby are fine, but he’s still unaccounted for.”
Payne tried to make sense of the information. When he left the island, he thought he had rescued everyone except for Ariane and the unknown captive from the truck, but now he realized that he might have sent a boatload of inexperienced sailors to a watery grave.
“Jon?” Dawson whispered in a comforting voice. “Not to change the subject, but when you pounded on the mirror and called me an asshole, you implied you had a bunch of questions. Did you want me to answer anything else, or is that all for now?”
It took Payne a moment to gather himself. “With the new information that you just gave me, one suddenly leaps to mind.”
“Go ahead, fire away.”
Payne wished he’d stop using that expression. “How in the hell did you find us? I thought the people on the boat must’ve told you about the Plantation, but since they’re still missing I guess they couldn’t have been the ones.”
Dawson nodded. “A couple of planes noticed the house explosion from the air. They, in turn, notified the local authorities. Eventually, word filtered down to us.”
“And you’ve had no luck finding the missing slaves? What about Levon Greene and Octavian Holmes? Any luck with them?”
Dawson shook his head. “We put out an APB and flooded the airports and local islands with their pictures. Unfortunately, if they decided to head south, we’ll have little chance of finding them. Hell, a guy in a sailboat can fart and propel himself to Mexico from here. We’re that close to the border. It makes things kind of tough for us.”
ONCE Payne was excused from the conference room, he rode the elevator to the main lobby, where he met up with Jones. The two greeted each other with a firm handshake, then walked into the bright sunlight of the Crescent City.
“How’d the questioning go?”
Jones smirked like an uncaught shoplifter. “Just peachy, and you?”
“Not too bad. When things started to get sticky, I made a big fuss, and they immediately backed down.” Jones’s smirk must’ve been contagious because it quickly spread to Payne’s lips. “Did they ask you anything about the hard drive?”
Jones patted the pocket of his T-shirt and laughed. “Nope. And to be honest with you, I forgot to mention it.” He stopped on the sidewalk and pretended to turn around. “Do you think I should go back and tell them? Because I could—”
“Nah, I doubt it’s important. The damn thing is bound to be blank.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It probably won’t tell us where to look for Ariane, or Levon, or the other slave owners. And even if it did, it’s not like we’d care.”
“Not at all,” he growled. “Not one bit.”
THE property in Tampico, Mexico, had been in Edwin Drake’s family for four decades, but he never had any use for it until recently. After several years of dormancy, the land was now critical to Drake’s slave exportation business. It served as a makeshift airport in the middle of nowhere, a place where they could load people without interference.
The boat of slaves, piloted by Octavian Holmes, reached the Tampico coast just before dawn and was greeted by two trucks full of dark-skinned guards, all chosen from Kotto’s plantations in Nigeria. The Africans loaded six slaves into each truck, then drove them to Drake’s property, which sat ten miles northwest of the Mexican city. When they arrived at the camp, the slaves were quickly herded into a containment building. They were stripped, hosed, deloused, and clothed, before being fed their first meal in over a day.
The slaves were then examined by Kotto’s personal physician, who treated each of their injuries with urgency—these people were Kotto’s property, after all—making sure that every wound was cleaned and every infection was attended to. After certifying and documenting the health of each person, the doctor gave the slaves the immunization shots they would require for their trip to their new home, Africa.