—
With only one road out of town, it wasn’t long before Jessica caught up with the bright red truck just as it accelerated onto the Seven Mile Bridge, a low, flat, two-lane highway suspended over the ocean. She settled behind at a safe distance and forwarded the photo of the Ford to Sunday back at Langley.
A few minutes later, she received a reply text:
Richard Green, Everglades City, Florida.
“Ricky!” she tsked to herself. “You little liar.”
—
Jessica trailed the truck for twenty more minutes and several more bridges before the Ford finally turned off the main road and headed north on one of the islands, then slowed again and veered down a dirt path cut through a mangrove stand.
Jessica crawled along slowly behind the truck and then parked behind a thicket to hide the Mustang. She stashed her hat, grabbed her phone, binoculars, and a bottle of water and pursued the truck on foot.
On the other side of the mangroves, she found a clearing and crouched in the tall grasses at the tree line to get a clear view. Through her binoculars, she watched the Ford pickup drive over another bridge, which led to a small private island with a single structure. The truck parked in front of the house, an enormous Spanish-style villa of whitewashed walls and a red tile roof. At the front were immaculately trimmed gardens, a tropical blend of elephant’s ear plants, bougainvillea, banana trees, and pineapple bushes. Orchid vines of flourescent pink and purple flowers covered a trellis at the main door.
Ricky exited the Ford with a bucket and walked right into the house without knocking. Jessica scanned the windows, unable to see where he had gone. She aimed her binoculars at the back of the house, where she could see a vast deck with a pool overlooking a small private beach. A ring of orange bouys in the sea marked a swimming area.
With no sign of any activity, Jessica set down her binoculars and took out her phone. She marked her location with GPS and sent the coordinates to Sunday, along with a short note:
ID on this house?
Just as she pressed SEND, she heard the loud bang of a door slamming and a man yelling, “Sunshine! Compadre guapo!”
Through the binoculars, she watched Ricky lumber out to the edge of the deck by the beach, carrying the bucket. He pulled a bloody fish from the bucket by its tail and dangled it for a moment before tossing it into the swimming area, igniting an eruption of white water. The shiny black skin of a shark leapt out of the water and then disappeared again. After a few seconds, the shark’s fin reappeared, cutting through the surface. Ricky threw another fish, which was immediately attacked by the shark.
“Sunshine! Compadre guapo!” he shouted again, a huge smile plastered across his face.
It wasn’t a swimming area, Jessica realized with alarm. It was a shark pen. What kind of lunatic keeps a shark for a pet?
Her phone vibrated with a reply from Sunday to both her questions:
Ruben Sandoval.
25.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, 2:07 P.M.
Ruben Sandoval was bored. Dead bored. He’d been at the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center all week. Stuck in dull seminar rooms, under fluorescent lights, and now on his fifth straight hour sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair.
His stomach rumbled with hunger. He’d paid fourteen dollars cash for a squished ham-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and crammed into a small cardboard box along with a bag of salty potato chips and a bruised apple. He had picked up the lunch, examined each item with mounting disgust, and then had thrown the whole thing in the trash. Even the coffee was unbearable. He licked his lips at the thought of a proper thick, black café cubano, with a twist of lemon, sipping it while relaxing on a chaise longue in the Florida sun.
The woman sitting next to him coughed loudly, a wet, mucousy bellow that jolted Ruben back to the seminar. At the front of the room, a plump man in an ill-fitting suit with a bad comb-over was tediously explaining how to handle classified documents.
“Standard procedures for determining the level of classification are based on Executive Order 13526 . . .”
This wasn’t how it was meant to be. An ambassadorship was supposed to be glamorous. This was to be the pinnacle of his professional life, coming from nothing to be the official representative of the President of the United States of America. His mind drifted again, marveling at what he had done to get here.
—