Blount’s statement triggered a smile on Payne’s face. In a moment’s time, he had gone from confused to enlightened, and all because of Bennie. “I’ll be damned! I think I got it.”
“Got what?” Jones questioned.
“The point of the message! I bet Webster was trying to say
but couldn’t pronounce it! I bet he has something in his pocket that he wanted me to see!”
Blount was the closest to the body, so he reached into the dead man’s clothes, looking for anything of value. Even though it was soaked with blood and tattered with holes, he probed the garment for clues, trying to avoid the liquid that saturated it.
“Nope,” he said. “Nothing.”
“If you want to be completely thorough,” Payne added, “check to see if he’s wearing an undershirt with a pocket. He might’ve kept something there for safekeeping.”
Blount slowly unbuttoned Webster’s dress shirt, pulling back the blood-soaked garment like he was peeling a bright red apple. Once he exposed the undershirt, he placed his hand on the pocket and felt for anything of value. “I think there’s something in here!” With newfound excitement, Blount reached into the pocket’s inner lining and removed a portable hard drive, which was two inches long and a half inch wide. “I’ll be damned! You were right! He wanted you to go into his pocket.”
Jones, who’d just finished his work on Payne’s ATV, rushed over to Blount’s side. He was eager to see what had been found.
Blount stared at the object in the dim light. A look of absolute joy engulfed his face. “It’s his computer drive. One day I overheard him talking about it. I walked into his office while he was on the speakerphone. He said if anything ever happened to him, he wanted the guy on the phone to search through his belongings and look for his travel drive.” Blount showed it to Payne and Jones. “He said the drive would contain financial records that were crucial to their business.”
Blount stared at the drive for a few more seconds then handed it to Jones. “The other guy, whoever he was, asked him what type of records he was referring to, but Theo assured him that the information would only be important if he died.”
Jones studied it, making sure that the blood from Webster’s wounds hadn’t seeped inside. “Well, if Bennie’s right, then we hit the jackpot, because one of these drives can hold a couple gigabytes of information. There’s no telling what we might get from it.”
Payne smiled, finally understanding the significance of the find. If they were lucky, they had just acquired the evidence they needed to nail anyone who was associated with the Posse. Holmes, Greene, Jackson, Terrell Murray, and the slave buyers themselves.
All of them could be linked to the crimes of the Plantation through Webster’s data.
AS he drove the truck across the island, Octavian Holmes shook his head at his own stupidity. He couldn’t believe that Greene had convinced him to trade passengers for their journey to freedom. They already had enough money to live on for the rest of their lives. If they had left the Plantation immediately, they would have escaped from the island. So why take the chance of getting caught? To him, it just didn’t make any sense.
But Greene was passionate about it. In fact, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I’m not leaving this place without
my
prisoner,” he had said. “Without him, I’m not giving you a cent.”
And that had done it. Holmes’s greed had taken control of his common sense and convinced him to switch Susan for Nathan. He was threatening his own life, his freedom, everything, for some extra cash. Holmes shook his head repeatedly, thinking of the mistake he was making.
“You’re a greedy bastard!” he said to himself.
As he pulled his truck to a screeching halt, Holmes studied the concrete shed in front of him. It appeared to be in the same condition that he’d left it in. The door was still locked from the outside, the ground was unblemished with fresh footprints, and Ndjai’s dog could be heard patrolling inside. Just like it should be.
The sound of Susan’s whimpering and Holmes’s jingling keys caused the dog to erupt with even more ferocity than before. The barking, which had been relatively restrained, was replaced by bloodthirsty howls as the canine flung itself against the door in an attempt to strike. Time after time, the creature repeated the process, hoping to quench its cravings with a savage battle, trying to get at the intruder before he had a chance to step inside.
The dog’s effort made Holmes smile.
“Hey, Tornado, it’s your Uncle O. How are ya doing?” The Ibizan hound, which had been bred with a larger breed in order to increase its size and strength, responded quickly, going from a ferocious killer to a friendly pet in less than a second. “That’s a good boy. Your daddy trained you well, didn’t he?”
Holmes cracked the door slightly, allowing Tornado to smell his hand.
The inside of the structure was filled with darkness and the overwhelming stench of imprisonment, created by the bodily functions of eleven terrified prisoners. There weren’t windows, vents, or toilets, which meant the unsanitary conditions were bound to get worse as the hours passed. The majority of the room was enclosed by a large cage, made from thick barbed wire and massive wooden posts, that had been placed there for two reasons: to keep the slaves from the exit and to keep Tornado away from the slaves.
Before he stepped into the room, Holmes grabbed a flashlight from above the door and shined the light into the huddled group of prisoners. He moved the beam from slave to slave, studying the dirty faces until he saw the man he was looking for. The chosen one.
Nathan was standing in the back corner of the room, far from the others, his face covered in layers of coarse facial hair. If it wasn’t for the prisoner’s 6’5” frame, Holmes never would’ve recognized him. He was a shell of his former self. His body weight had dropped by at least fifty pounds in the preceding weeks, and his face was haggard. But his failing health was easily explained. He had arrived long before the current crop of slaves and had spent most of his time within the sadistic world of the Devil’s Box. It had taken longer than anyone had expected, but the harsh treatment had eventually broken him.
One look into his eyes revealed it. Nathan was no longer the same man.
The peculiar thing, though, was the reason that they had brought him to the Plantation. He wasn’t kidnapped because of his ancestry or his race. He was there to fulfill one man’s obsession with revenge, nothing more, and as long as the Plantation continued to flourish, his imprisonment would never end.
And thanks to Levon Greene’s orders, Nathan had never been told why.
CHAPTER 54
EVEN
though he had a hole in his left biceps the size of a quarter, Payne wasn’t about to give up. If he was going to rescue Ariane, he knew he had to endure whatever physical pain he was feeling. He simply had to, for he realized the agony in his arm could never approach the sorrow he would feel if he lost Ariane forever.
The body mends quickly. The mind and heart do not.
“Bennie,” Payne groaned over the roar of his motor, “where do you think they took her?”
Blount started his ATV, the lead vehicle in the pack, then answered. “One day when I was exploring the island, I found a boat hidden in the weeds. I’m not sure if the Posse put it there, but I think there’s a chance they did. It was in pretty good shape.”
Jones started the middle Yamaha, completing the thundering chorus of engines. “That sounds like a good place to start.”
With a twist of their accelerators, the three machines sprang into action, tearing up the soft ground in long strips and tossing it high into the air. After getting accustomed to his controls, Payne increased his speed until he was nearly even with Blount, choosing a position near Bennie’s right shoulder. Jones, on the other hand, swung wide and settled on the opposite side, hoping to protect Blount from any outside threats.
But there was nothing he could do to prevent the explosion.
Instantaneously, a loud blast overpowered the roar of the ATV motors as an invisible force slammed into the backs of the bewildered drivers. In a moment of confusion, the three men skidded to a stop then turned to locate the source of the shock wave. It was the plantation house, and it glowed like Mount Vesuvius.
As they stared at the destruction, a second explosion tore through the remnants of the eighteenth-century structure, sending antique meteorites in all directions. Fireballs sprang into the air like popcorn, spreading the inferno to the nearby trees and cabins, igniting them like they were made out of gasoline.
“The detonation was too precise to be an accident,” Payne screamed over the din of the blast. “That means either the house was on a timer or the explosion was set off by hand. And if it’s the latter, that means our friends are still on the island.”
Blount and Jones turned from the fireworks display and studied the surrounding terrain, using the glowing nighttime sky as a giant spotlight.
“Is that the truck over there?” Blount shouted.
Jones looked in the direction that Bennie was pointing and identified the object. “I don’t know if it’s the truck we want, but it’s definitely a truck.” Like a sheriff from the Wild West, he patted the weapon that hung from his hip. “Let’s saddle up, fellas, and teach them boys a lesson.”
DESPITE
Tornado’s barking and the loud rumble of the truck engine, Holmes heard the house’s detonation and stopped to investigate. Looking back, he saw the bright orange flames as they shot toward the sky and felt the concussion of the blast as its shock wave rolled across the island like an invisible stampede.