Amelia hadn’t been imagining things. There was a boat, and it was just as she had described it: a steel-hulled shrimper, maybe sixty feet long, booms folded high, rust streaks fouling the vessel’s name, which was painted on its stern. One of the images was an enlargement of the name: Nan-Shan
Port of Cortez Florida
The most striking thing about the vessel, though, was that it carried a human cargo. The deck and the wheelhouse were jammed with bodies. The resolution was so fine and sharp that I could distinguish individual faces. There had to be a hundred people aboard. It reminded me of various refugee boats I’ve seen around the world: Vietnam, Cambodia, Mariel Harbor, Cuba. When people are sufficiently desperate, they will risk any means to escape to what they hope is a more tolerable existence. It makes them easy prey for flesh traders and profiteers.
The Nan-Shan was in the flesh trade. U.S. citizens do not ride willingly atop the wheelhouse of a trawl boat in twenty-knot winds. These were illegal immigrants, of that there was no doubt.
I remembered Amelia commenting on the stench that blew from off that vessel. Now I understood. I understood because I know that stench. I’ve suffered it in many of the world’s dark places. It is the stink of fear and of sickness. It is the stink of animal despair.
The photo keyed a vague memory awareness. It took me a few moments to isolate the reason. Finally, I remembered a newspaper story I’d read several days after Janet disappeared. The story said that immigration police had arrested a couple dozen illegal aliens of various nationalities who’d been jettisoned off the uninhabited Ten Thousand Islands and left to wade ashore.
Thirty of them? Forty? I couldn’t recall the figure. They’d been carried by flesh merchants who’d smuggled them into U.S. waters from Colombia. The people they’d arrested were in bad shape: dehydrated and starving. Several had died.
Suddenly, Bernie’s words- Safe travels. Ours is a dangerous world -assumed meaning.
He had already assembled information that I, presumably, would gather, which was not surprising. And I thought to myself: not South America. Not again.
The obligation to return there, though, was now an uncomfortable prospect. Between 6:23 and 6:31 A.M. on November 5, my friend Janet Mueller was still alive. In a series of four photographs, I could see a shrimp boat closing on three small dots, people adrift.
In the first shot, the three of them were alone in an expanse of gray. The second shot was from the same aspect, but the shrimp boat had intruded into the upper corner of the frame, its bow pointed in the direction of the swimmers.
They’d been spotted, apparently, and the boat was returning to pick them up.
In the fourth frame, the boat sat abeam the three dots.
It was this photo that had been reproduced on the third contact strip in various degrees of enlargement. The resolution was not as good as in the other photographs, so each photo was grainy and indistinct.
The first image was a tight close-up of the three swimmers. I could distinguish Janet’s pale, farm-girl face. Grace Walker and Michael Sanford were close beside her in a tight cluster, faces turned upward, their BCDs still inflated.
There was now no doubt that they were all still alive at the end of that first long night adrift.
Janet’s expression was heartbreaking. She had both hands out of the water, waving, her mouth open wide-perhaps shouting something to the boat but maybe grinning, too.
The next three shots included the vessel.
Aboard the shrimper, among the mass of people, standing at the door of the wheelhouse, was a man wearing a baggy dark cap. Or maybe he had long hair. I played around with the magnification and still couldn’t be certain.
Hair. Long hair. That’s what it seemed to be.
The man was holding something in his hands. He appeared to be reaching out with it to the three swimmers. It was an elongated shape, dark-a boarding hook, perhaps, but thicker. But that didn’t seem right, either, because of the way he held it.
I stopped, turned away from the binocular tubes, rubbed my eyes, then looked again.
Could it be a rifle?
That made no sense. Why would he have a rifle?
My brain scanned for possible explanations. Okay, so put yourself in the place of longhair. He owns the boat. He’s smuggling in refugees. Once they’ve made contact, the three swimmers become witnesses. So he shoots three defenseless and desperate people?
I have witnessed terrible acts of inhumanity in my life, have even participated in a few, but nothing ever as callous as that.
It couldn’t be a rifle.
Or could it?
No… almost had to be some kind of pole or boarding hook. What almost certainly happened was, the boat stopped, the crew fished Janet and the others out of the water, then continued on to the remote backwaters of the Ten Thousand Islands where their human cargo was offloaded.
Then what?
Obviously, the three were not released there. Not alive, anyway-we’d have heard from them. If the vessel had returned to its home port of Cortez, same thing. They’d all be home by now.
Conclusion: Janet, Grace, and Michael had either been killed, or they were being held prisoner, or they’d been abandoned on some remote island where they could not make contact with friends and family.
The indirect linkage came into my mind again, and the word sucked some of the light out of the room: Colombia.
The fourth and final frame gave no clue: water and just the stern quarter of the shrimp boat, with the name in white- Nan-Shan, Port of Cortez. No people. No faces.
I was still studying the third frame twenty minutes later when the images suddenly darkened, faded, then disappeared as the strip of paper turned black.
Speaking on his cell phone, Cmdr. Dalton Dorsey said, “What I don’t understand is, why this sudden interest in a shrimp boat named the Nan-Shan? I’ll help you any way I can, Doc, but you need to be upfront with me.”
An unavoidable consequence of involvement with the intelligence agencies is the obligation not only to lie, but to lie convincingly and plausibly.
I was never good at it, not even when I was duty-bound to lie. I’m still not good at it, so I loathe any social or professional situation that requires it. However, back in the days when lying was a necessary part of my day-to-day life, I came up with a technique that, at least, made duplicity manageable. The method is simple: Speak factually, but omit the larger truth.
It had taken me nearly an hour to reach Dorsey. Now I was outside by the big fish tank on the lower deck of my stilt house, pacing nervously. I said to him, “The reason I’m interested in that particular boat has to do with a newspaper story I read a few weeks back. I don’t know why it took me so long to make the connection. Do you remember reading about those illegal aliens the immigration people found down in the’Glades?”
“Sure, our people worked the cleanup search. There were forty-seven out there lost, mucking around in the sawgrass. Three ended up corpses, and the vultures didn’t leave much. One of them was a child, only three or four years old. Two more adults died later. So what’s the connection?”
“The time window. I’m not certain of the exact date, but the feds-maybe your people-found the refugees a week or so after the Seminole Wind sank.”
“A private plane spotted them, and Naples air traffic control forwarded the information to Immigration. Yeah. Okay, I see where you’re headed with this. The coyote boat that dumped them in the Ten Thousand Islands was in the area at the same time the three victims were adrift.”
I said, “Coyote boat?”
“The boat that brought the illegals. The question is,” he said, “what gives you the idea the coyote boat was a shrimper named the Nan-Shan?”
A perceptive man, my Coastie friend.
“I can’t tell you, Dalt. I would if I could. But it’s good information. You’ve got to trust me on this one.”
A familiar professional restraint had crept into his voice. In the uniformed services, duty always comes before friendship. “I trust you or we wouldn’t be talking. So what are you asking me to do?”
“I’d like to get some information about the boat. A boat that size, it’s a registered vessel. Who owns her, who runs her? And those refugees-where are they? What do I have to do to interview them?”
Dorsey seemed to relax a little-that’s all I was asking? “As far as the boat goes, you could call the federal documentation office in Miami, but I don’t think they’d help you much. Or I can run what we call an EPIC search. That stands for El Paso Intelligence Center-which I suspect you already knew.”
I did, but said nothing. In fact, I’d once had reason to visit that high-security facility out in the New Mexican desert. I remembered soundproof rooms and a forest of satellite antennas.
“The EPIC maintains a database system,” Dorsey said, “that all the federal agencies use. Particularly the agencies that deal with drugs, refugees, that sort of thing.
“Let’s say the shrimp boat you’re interested in was stopped and searched for drugs, five or ten years back. All the information goes into the EPIC database, whether drugs were found or not. Vessels that we know the bad guys own, or vessels we suspect are dirty, all go into the computer, too. Nothing has to be proven. There’s a lot of interesting reading in that file. Can you confirm the spelling of the vessel’s name?”
I did, then added, “And what about talking to some of those refugees? If they saw three people adrift, they have no reason not to tell me about it.”
“You’re out of luck, there. I happen to know the whole group was transported to the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility in Miami. The State Department has the process so streamlined that it takes less than a couple of weeks-unless the refugees happen to be Cuban, and there’s a question of political asylum. They get fingerprinted, photographed, then a quick physical. Couple days later, once the State Department has gotten the okay from the home country, they’re herded onto a military transport and shipped back to where they came from. In this case, it was Colombia. Probably flew them into Bogota.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
Dorsey told me he’d check the computers and give me a call in an hour or two.
I stayed busy in my lab assembling the digitized video camera system. My old stilt house is constructed of heart pine, solid as a small ship, built by the long-defunct Punta Gorda Fish Company back around 1920-many hurricanes ago. I used a rechargeable drill to fix the bracket to a wooden beam in the corner of the room. As the screws burrowed into the beam, they augured yellow wood to the surface, releasing pine resin nearly a century old. That pleasant pine smell mixed with the ozone odor of the lab.
When the bracket was solid, I threaded the camera onto the male base, then toyed with it until the view through the lens, at its widest angle, included the crab tanks, the door to the lab, and some of the aquaria along the eastern wall.
I had to use an extension cord to plug in the 12-volt converter. Finally, I touched the camera’s on switch, allowing the computerized timer mode to take control.
Nothing or no one could come through the door, approach the crab tanks, and avoid the lens of that camera.
I was standing there, admiring my handiwork when the telephone rang. Commander Dorsey had some interesting-and troubling-information.
“Turns out your intel about the Nan-Shan may be right,” he began, then laughed. “So why am I not surprised?”
He went on to tell me that the vessel had been searched by the Coast Guard twice in the last six years, suspected of carrying drugs, and once by agents from the INS because the owner was suspected of being involved in the people-smuggling trade. No arrests were made.
“Internationally, people smuggling gets bigger and bigger every year. Big financial return with a minimum of risk. That’s not my area of expertise, but I’ve got a State Department briefing paper on it. I can send you a copy if you want.”
I told Dorsey I would be very interested in reading the report, then made notes as he told me that the owner of the Nan-Shan was a man named Dexter Ray Money of Sarasota County. The EPIC had him flagged as a career criminal who’d been arrested and charged with crimes that, over a span of two decades, included grand theft, drug trafficking, extortion, assault and battery, and manslaughter.
“Money got off on everything but the drug-trafficking charge. He spent seven years in Raiford for that, but he’s been out for more than ten years. He’s a suspect in three murders, including the manslaughter charge, so I don’t think running illegals would bother him much at all. He owns three trawler boats, all out of Cortez. The Nellie, the Rebel Witch, and the Nan-Shan. A very bad man.”
I said, “Do they have an address listed for him?”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, pal. Do yourself a favor. Do my conscience a favor. Please don’t go looking for Mr. Dexter Ray Money. I don’t know him, but I know his type. The EPIC has him listed as armed and extremely dangerous, approach with caution-those are the exact words from the data bank. You want to talk to him, do it over the phone.”
I kept my tone light. “Give him a call-yeah. Jesus, murder, extortion, plus he’s smart enough to keep getting off. After what I’ve just heard, that sounds like good advice.”
“Doc, how reliable is your information? You tell me the source, let me look into it. If we find probable cause, we’ll go talk to Mr. Money.”
I answered, “I wish I could. I really do.” And meant it.
I asked Dorsey one last question before signing off. In his opinion, if Janet, Grace, and Michael had been picked up by a vessel smuggling illegal aliens, why hadn’t we heard from them? “Give me some possible scenarios,” I said.
“I can think of two right off the top of my head, neither one very pleasant. A bad actor like Money? He kills the man and keeps the women. He keeps them to use for himself, then probably kills them both when he’s done. Or decides to make a profit on them. The white slave trade is no joke. Drug smuggling gets all the press, but the flesh trade is a multibillion-dollar business. You read the report I’ll send you. There’s big money in selling women in places like Brunei, North Africa. Hell, Amnesty International just issued a paper criticizing Israel because people’re kidnapping women from outside the country, smuggling them in, and selling them over there.”
He added, “Either way, the guy’s dead. If someone picked them up-Michael Sanford?-he’d be the first to go.”