elevator to the Secret Service offices. In the kitchen area stood a double-door refrigerator from which the shelves had been removed. Crammed inside the chilled space was an oversized burlap bag, knotted at the top. Ryskamp helped Angie pull the unwieldy load to the floor.
“I’ll take it from here,” she said.
Three other male agents wandered in, dressed in standard street-fed fashion. They joined Ryskamp in a semicircle around Angie and the hefty parcel.
The knot was too tight. Angie took out a small knife.
“May I?” she asked Ryskamp.
“God, by all means.”
Angie sawed off the knot and opened the neck of the bag.
“Holy shit,” she said. “I know this snake.”
She unfurled the mammoth Burmese and arranged its reeking limpness along the tile floor. The other agents, their faces now as gray as their suits, exited the area.
“Something’s missing,” Angie remarked.
Ryskamp said, “Uh, yeah? The head.”
“No, sir, I’ve got the head. Something else is gone.”
“How can you tell it’s the same snake?”
Angie showed the agent a cell phone photo from the Lipid House incident. “The skin is identical,” she explained. “Each python’s color pattern is unique.”
“This one doesn’t have a big lump in its belly like the one in your picture.”
“Exactly. That’s our mystery—what happened to the phantom lump? A.K.A. supper.”
Ryskamp smiled. “Let’s go down the street and grab a drink. You can tell me the whole story.”
“First we’ll need a large box,” Angie said, “and a shit-ton of ice.”
* * *
—
The same night as the White Ibis Ball, eighty miles on the other side of the Gulf Stream, a thirty-two-foot boat departed the Bahamian island of South Bimini on a beeline for the coast of Florida. The vessel was overloaded with twenty migrants plus the captain, but the chop was light, the ride smooth. Powered by twin 350s, the boat moved very fast. Nobody got seasick.
At half-past two, the darkened craft nosed onto a beach across the road from the Palm Beach Country Club. The silent, anxious passengers descended one by one from the bow and began to run. They carried gym bags or backpacks, and not much else. There were six Haitians, five Hondurans, three Chinese and six Cubans, each of whom had paid $8,000 cash to the smuggler.
For all but one of the travelers, the sprint across the sand would be their first footsteps inside the United States. However, a twenty-five-year-old man named Diego Beltrán was returning to a familiar place. He’d earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of Miami before going home to Tegucigalpa after his student visa expired.
After seeing his two favorite uncles shot dead by police at a political rally, Diego decided to return to Florida as soon as possible. Knowing the asylum-application process would be slow and complicated, he drove past the U.S. Embassy and straight to the airport. From there he flew to Nassau via Havana, hopped the mail boat to Bimini, and the following afternoon was sitting at a waterfront bar buying bottles of LandShark for a no-name smuggler with a speedboat.
Diego was the last to debark when they landed on the crystal shore of Palm Beach. He knew by the pattern of the skyline where they were, and how difficult it would be for the others to blend in. When he reached A1A, he turned and saw that the smuggler’s boat was already gone. Diego listened to the fading growl of its engines as he pressed his back against the trunk of a tree on the golf course.
Before dawn, he undressed and rinsed off in the fairway sprinklers. He waited to drip-dry before donning a Bon Jovi tee that matched his black jeans and black high-tops. Diego was only five-eight, but his upper arms and shoulders were ripped. Clean-cut was the impression he aimed for; before leaving the Bahamas, he’d shaved his beard and neatly trimmed his black hair.
As the sun rose above the ocean, he walked along the road with an unhurried yet deliberate gait. He didn’t want to look like someone who’d just crossed the Gulf Stream on an outlaw’s midnight run; he wanted to look like an average guy carrying an average backpack on his way to an average job. Maybe he drove a delivery truck for the florist. Maybe he stocked the aisles at the boutique grocery. Or maybe he even worked the cabana shift at the Bath Club, serving chilled mimosas to crepe-faced old millionaires reeking of designer sun block.
All that mattered to Diego was that nobody paid him any attention.