He went outside to stand on the private deck belonging to the Lorenzo cabin and instantly regretted it as he was ambushed by tropical humidity. “Sonofabitch.” The ocean was a deep gray-blue nearly twelve meters below, with vivacious whitecaps cresting the larger waves. Alik was dressed for New York winter in a nice real wool suit. The Bureau still hadn’t let go of J. Edgar’s dress code, and he stuck with it because of the peripherals that could be discreetly incorporated into the suit fabric. But a cooling circuit wasn’t one of them. Every centimeter of his skin was immediately layered in sweat. “Where the hell are we?” he asked Shango.
“Approaching Cape Town from the east,” it said. “The coast will be visible tonight, local time.”
Salovitz was fanning his face with his hand, looking at the swell with disapproval. Neither of them could feel any motion; the
“If you were going to dump a body, this is the room I’d use, not the Antarctic,” Salovitz said.
“Good point. What’s left?”
The tropical island. Alik rolled his eyes as another gust of heat and humidity sluiced over him. He took his suit jacket off as soon as they went through the portal door. It was against Bureau protocol; as well as peripherals, the fabric was lined with a decent armor weave. It made him a sitting duck to a sniper, but he decided to risk it.
The island was where the Maldives used to be—a beautiful coral archipelago in the Indian Ocean whose only industry was tourism. They were beautiful because they were so low-lying, a few meters at best, giving them broad, pristine beaches and secluded lagoons. That didn’t go well for the indigenous population in the late twenty-first century when the ocean level started rising. The rest of the world built sea defenses and tidal barriers to protect their crumbling shorelines and inundated coastal cities. The Maldives didn’t have that kind of money, not even with the microfacture revolution brought about by home fabricators and printers, which liberated so many from absolute poverty.
The archipelago claimed the crown of Atlantis and slowly sank beneath the waves. A true tragedy for a UN World Heritage Site.
Then along came astute developers in massive airships with portals fixed underneath. Torrents of desert sand poured down out of the sky, mixed with genetically modified coral seeds. New islands rose up and stabilized.
It was a bitch of a lawsuit. The ex-Maldives population claimed the artificial islands were squatting on their ancestral seabed and should be given to them. But the World Court declared against them—a decision helped by the Chinese, who had long experience with enforcing ownership claims over artificial island territories.
The contemporary islands weren’t as big as the old originals. The new owners divided them up like the slices of an exceptionally rich cake, with wooden shacks on stilts at the back of the beaches.
Stylish mock-antique patio doors slid open in front of Alik, letting him out onto a raised veranda where steps sank into the oven-hot sands. Thirty meters farther on, the clear wavelets of the Indian Ocean lapped against the exquisite coral reefs that were still expanding out into the deeper waters.
“Beats the Hamptons,” he muttered in reluctant approval as he walked across the nautical-themed designer-minimalist lounge. A forensic tech was working on the patio door.
“It was forced,” the tech told Salovitz. “Alarms disabled, and the lock physically cut out.”
“From the outside?” Alik guessed.
“Yes, sir.”
“Any blood in here?” Salovitz asked.
“The preliminary scan didn’t show any.”
“One team comes in via crazy gymnastics seventeen stories up in a nighttime snowfall, the other saunters across a beach,” Alik said. “No prizes here for which team has the brains.”
He and Salovitz walked down the steps to the beach, where he reluctantly put his jacket back on, which earned several curious looks. But he figured that if this was a route in, the team might have a hot backup waiting to provide cover. So if they’d been waiting with growing anxiety for their buddies to return, and the first out of the boutique shack is a bunch of cops heading toward them…
Three of New York’s finest were making their way back across the beach. They’d all taken their winter jackets off, and sweat was soaking their thick shirts.
“Found the way the intruder team got onto the island,” the sergeant told Salovitz. “The shack two down. Its patio door was open. We went in. There’s a body in the hubhall.”
“Where is the hubhall?” Alik asked.
The sergeant pushed his cap back and gave him a rueful look. “My altme said Berlin.”
“Aw, crap,” Salovitz groaned, raising his eyes to the bright, cloudless sky. “This just keeps getting better. I fucking hate portalhomes.”
“I’ll put an official call through the Bureau to the Berlin police,” Alik reassured him. “I know a guy in the city. They can run forensics at their end, and I’ll send you the results.”