the ocean. Time to get the attention of Satan’s media, east and west and north and south. The unclean everywhere.
The fisherman let his boat drift farther astern of the tanker, and then headed for a beach only three miles from the outskirts of Malé. From there, the greatest journey would begin: to paradise, with the whole world watching.
* * *
Rick Birk walked out of the minister’s office with as much dignity as he could muster. Ten minutes. And to think he’d also been admonished to not even suggest that the Maldives had its own native-born killers. The minister himself had taken a sudden detour to a lavatory, though Birk suspected the man wanted to free himself from the incisive questions of a brilliant veteran correspondent.
Of course, the denial about homegrown jihad was hardly surprising. In his entire career, which now spanned a half century, Birk had run across no more than a handful of leaders in the developing world who had readily accepted that their country’s problems lay within their own borders—from a sorry lack of resources and the pervasive futility that poverty inevitably spawned. The rest of the riffraff spewed blame on “outsiders” until, of course, the rude reality exploded with bombs and bloodshed. Then they “got” it—but only in the moments before they fled to Switzerland with their national treasury.
These little brown buggers, however, had a case for finger-pointing: The looming disasters throughout much of Oceania could be laid at the feet of the smokestacked, tailpiped West.
As Birk took the last three steps to the main floor, he spotted Senator Gayle Higgens and her entourage bustling through the main entrance. Argh, the sight of her spurred a memory painful as a lesion, a real standout in his fat catalog of sexual misadventures.
She’d been a freshman Texas legislator when they’d met, as foulmouthed and shameless in private as she was sanctimonious and born-again in public. He’d been young, too, sent to the Oil Patch to cover some long-forgotten hurricane, whose force, even then, couldn’t have stood up to Gayle Higgens. She’d rounded Birk up like one of her stray steers and herded him right into her bed. She’d tied him down as if she were a real buckaroo, then laughed bitterly when he couldn’t perform.
He’d sworn never to go near Higgens again, and there she was. Christ almighty, aging was pitiless: Look at her pastry-crust skin; bloated, mashed-potato body; and swollen ankles, shapeless as bread dough.
She pointed the sharp tip of her pink umbrella at him and bellowed, “Get your rascal self over here, Birk.”
He looked around, finding no reprieve.
“What are you doing here?” the senator demanded.
“Scoping out the restless natives,” he responded as suavely as he could, wondering why in God’s name he was even bothering. But he couldn’t help himself: She’d humiliated him almost fifty fucking years ago, yet the moment he saw her he was filled with an unruly desire to reclaim his dignity.
“But you must come for the launch of our pilot project. Surely you know about it, you old crow.”
Old crow? That’s some cheap goddamn booze.
Yeah, surely he did know about her pet project, but the seeding of the ocean with iron oxide held no more interest for him than all the bizarrely shaped sea critters whose names escaped him and whose culinary appeal lay chiefly in their most crushed, pounded, and fully processed, deep-fried forms.
“I’m on the hard news beat, Senator.”
She looked at him, openly askance. “Hard news?” she laughed. “You?” With those few words, and with that sharp inflection, she brought back the single biggest humiliation of his sex life. “We’re here to change the world. If you’re smart, Ricky, you’ll come along.”
“I’ll be busy.”
“Sorry to hear that you’ll be tied up. I’m at the Four Seasons. Come by for a backgrounder, if you’d like a good one.”
Why was everything a double entendre with her? And was that a wink? Had that old sack of nickels actually winked at him?
She turned away in the next instant. “Ten o’clock. Down at the port,” she said in parting.
He harrumphed. At ten he’d be at the port, all right, but it would be to catch a water taxi to the island of Dhiggaru. He’d found out the name of weather girl’s old flame—Rafan Yoosuf—and now knew exactly where he could be found. Wasn’t hard. Malé was a small city, and memories were long for beautiful blond girls who scandalized the locals by stealing the heart of one of their sons.