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card and they breezed through without stopping.
"They be bringin' you luggage later," the escort muttered.
"Got a car waiting.", They ducked out a fire exit and down a flight of rusting stairs. For a brief blessed moment they touched actual soil, breathed actual, air. Damp and dark; it had rained. The car was a white Hyundai Luxury Saloon with one-way mirrored windows. Its doors popped, open as they approached.
Their escort slid into the front seat; Laura and David hustled in back with the baby. The doors thunked shut like armored tank hatches and the car slid into motion. Its suspen- sion whirled them with oily ease across the pitted and weedy tarmac. Laura glanced back at the airport as they left-pools of light over a dozen pedicabs and rust-riddled manual taxis.
The saloon's frigid AC wrapped them in antiseptic chill.
"Online, can you hear us in here?" Laura said.
["A little image static, but audio's fine,"] Emily whis- pered. ["Nice car, eh?"]
"Yeah," David said. Outside the airport grounds, they turned north onto a palm-bordered highway. David leaned forward toward their escort in the front seat. "Where we going, amigo?"
"Takin' you to a safehouse," said their escort. He turned in his seat, throwing one elbow over the back. "Maybe ten mile. Sit back, relax, seen? Twiddle you big Yankee thumbs, try and look harmless." He took off his dark glasses.
"Hey!" David said. "It's Sticky!"
Sticky smirked. " `Captain Thompson' to you, Bwana."
Sticky's skin was now much darker than it had been in
Galveston. Some kind of skin dye, Laura thought. Disguise, maybe. It seemed best to say nothing about it. "I'm glad to see you safe," she said. Sticky grunted.
"We never had a chance to tell you," Laura said. "How sorry we are about Mr. Stubbs."
"I was busy," Sticky said. "Trackin' those boys from
Singapore." He stared into the lenses of Laura's glasses, visibly gathering himself up, talking through her to the Rizome videotapes spooling in Atlanta. "This, while our Rizome security still dancin' like a chicken with its head lick off, mind. The Singapore gang ran off first thing after the killing.
So I track 'em in darkness. They run maybe half a mile south down the coast, then wade out to a smart yacht, waitin', so cozy, right offshore. A good-size ketch; two other men aboard.
I get the registry number." He snorted. "Rented by Mr. Lao
Binh Huynh, a so-call `prominent Viet-American business- man,' live in Houston. Rich man this Huynh-run half a dozen groceries, a hotel, a truckin' business."
["Tell him we'll get right on that,"] Emily's whisper urged.
"We'll get right on that," David said.
"You a little late, Bwana Dave. Mr. Huynh vanish some days back. Somebody snatch him out of his car."
"Jesus," David said.
Sticky stared moodily out the window. Rambling white- walled houses emerged from darkness in the Hyundai's head- lights, the walls gleaming ;like shellac. A lone drunk scurried off the road when the car honked once, sharply. A deserted marketplace; tin roofs, bare flagpole, a colonial statue, bits of trampled straw basket. Four tethered goats-their eyes shone red in the headlights like something out of a nightmare.
."None of that proves anything against the Singapore Bank,"
Laura said.
Sticky was a
You think we're pla
He paused. "Too fu
"Well, that goes to show you how we've learned our lesson," David said mildly. "The invasion of Cuba, it failed really...adly. Bay of Pork-Bay of Pigs, I mean. A big humiliation for imperial Yankeedom."
Sticky looked at him with amazed contempt. "I'm talking eighteen ninety-eight, mon!"
David looked startled. "Eighteen ninety-eight? But that was the Stone Age."
"We don't forget." Sticky gazed out the window. "You in the capital now. Saint George."
Multistory tenements, again with that strange plastic-looking whitewash sheen. Dim greenish bursts of foliage clustered the rising hillside, shaggy jagged-edged palms like dreadlocked
Rasta heads. Satellite dishes and skeletal TV ante
George on the hill-the prime minister, live up there."
Behind the fort, a trio of tall radio ante
Laura had been briefed about Grenada's prime minister.
His name was Eric Louison and his "New Mille
Louison was in the unhappy Afro-Caribbean tradition of ruler-patriarchs with heavy voodoo. Guys who were all Papa
Docs and Steppin' Razors and Whippin' Sticks. Looking up the hill, Laura had a sudden clear mental image of old
Louison. Ski
Kleenex boxes .. .
The Hyundai cruised through town under amber street- lights. They passed a few Brazilian three-wheelers, little wasplike buggies in yellow and black, chugging on alcohol.
Saint George had the sleepy look of a town where they roll up the pavements on week nights. By modern Third World standards it was a small city-maybe a hundred thousand people. Half a dozen high-rises loomed downtown, in the old and ugly International Style, their monotonous walls stippled with glowing windows. A fine old colonial church with a tall square clock tower. Idle construction cranes jutted over the geodesic skeleton of a new stadium. "Where's the Bank?"
David said.
Sticky shrugged. "Everywhere. Wherever the wires are."
"Good-lookin' town," David said. "No shantytowns, no- body camping under the overpasses. You could teach Mexico
City something." No response. "Kingston, too."
"Go
Bank-you think we're thieves. No so, mon. It's your banks what been sucking these people's blood for four hundred years. Shoe on the other foot, now."
The lights of the capital receded. Loretta stirred in her tote, waved her arms, and noisily filled her diaper. "Uh-oh,"
David said. He opened the window. The wet-dust smell of hot tropic rain filled the car. Another aroma crept under it, spicy, pungent, haunting. A kitchen smell. Nutmeg, Laura realized. Half the world's nutmeg came out of Grenada. Real natural nutmeg, off trees. They rounded a bay-lights glit- tered from an offshore station, lights on still water, industrial glare on gray clouds overhead.
Sticky wrinkled his nose and looked at Loretta as if she were a bag of garbage. "Why bring that baby? It's dangerous here."
Laura frowned, and reached for a fresh diaper. David said,
"We're not soldiers. We don't pretend to be fair targets."
"That's a fu
"Maybe you think she'd be safer at our home," Laura said. "You know, the place that got machine-gu