The Columbus Affair: A Novel by Steve Berry Read Free Book Online Page B

folded documents. “I need your signature. These will allow lawyers to petition a judge for an order of exhumation on your behalf. I am told it will not be a problem, provided the closest living relative consents. Your daughter has already signed, as the estate’s representative. Of course, she had little choice.”
    Sagan refused to accept either the papers or the pen he offered.
    “There are but a few minutes remaining for me to call and stop those men.”
    He watched as his ultimatum sank in.
    Finally, Sagan snatched the pen and papers and signed.
    He retrieved them and started to leave. “I will need you at the cemetery, in the morning, at 10:00 A.M . An heir must be present. I will have a representative there on my behalf. Do as instructed. Once the exhumation of your father is complete, your daughter will be released.”
    “How do I know that will happen?”
    He stopped, turned, and apprised Sagan with a curious glare. “Because I give you my word.”
    “I feel better already.”
    He pointed at Sagan. “See, there still is some wit left in you.”
    “I need my gun.”
    He held the weapon up. “You can have it back in the morning.”
    “I would have pulled the trigger. I’d be dead right now, if you hadn’t come along.”
    He wondered whom Sagan was trying to convince. “Please, do not fret. You will have another opportunity,
after
tomorrow morning.”

CHAPTER TEN
    B ÉNE WAITED AS ONE OF HIS MEN DUG OUT THE GRAVE . H IS DOGS had returned and now lay placid beneath the trees, basking in the broken sunlight, satisfied from the hunt. His animals were thorough, a talent bred into them long ago. His mother had told him about the
chasseurs
from Cuba. Small, swarthy men who’d worn open checked shirts, wide trousers, and light straw hats with shallow crowns and broad rims. But it was their shoes that set them apart. They would skin the thighs and hocks of wild hogs then thrust their feet into the raw hide. The pliant became a kind of short boot, which fit close, and lasted for weeks. They wore crucifixes around their tanned necks and were armed only with a
machet
, sharpened on one side, the other used to beat the dogs. They first came in 1796, forty of them with their hounds, imported to hunt down the Trelawny Town Maroons.
    Which they did.
    With no mercy.
    Hundreds were slaughtered, and the fear of the dogs was born.
    Which he intended to resurrect.
    While gangs sought favor with the poorest in Jamaica’s cities, he’d always cast his lot here, in the windward mountains and, to the west, in the leeward Cockpit country, places where Maroons had existed for four hundred years. And though each ran their community through colonels and elected councils, he liked to think of himself as their collective savior, protecting the Maroon way of life. In return, his compatriots provided men and women to staff his many ventures. True, prostitution, gambling, and pornography were covert interests, and theymade him millions. But coffee was his passion. All around him, on the slopes for many kilometers, grew shrubs of modest height with glossy, dark green leaves. Every year, sweet-scented, white blossoms sprouted and eventually matured into bright red berries. Once ground and boiled they produced what many said was the finest drink in the world.
    Blue Mountain Coffee.
    His ancestors had worked the plantations as slaves. He now owned one of the largest and paid their descendants as employees. He also controlled the main distribution network for all of the remaining growers. His father wisely conceived that opportunity, after a devastating hurricane in the 1950s wiped out nearly every grower. A national board was established, with membership limited and criteria for quality, cultivation, and processing decreed. If not grown within sixteen kilometers of the central peak it was Jamaican Prime, not Blue Mountain Coffee. His father had been right—scarcity bred mystique. And through regulation of the product, Blue Mountain Coffee