CHAPTER 2

                    “It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.”
                 -Chief Brody
          “Jaws”

Purchased from the CIA in 1972, the Yelina Islands rest just south of the Turks and Caicos islands, and north of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The deal to purchase the string of Islands, three total, was strictly below board and accomplished with garden variety extortion. Uninhabited, save for the seasonal transient Haitian fishermen, the Yelinas were known only to the scientific community for their biodiversity and to the few wishing to strike it rich with their bountiful supply of bat guano.
     The paper on the Yelina Islands was held in the Caymens under the moniker “Bahamian Holding & Marketing Partners,(BMP) LLC”. Aside from that and the lawyers who represent BMP,LLC, the Yelina Islands remained just another Caribbean island until 1973 when the bulldozers arrived.  By the time Trinidad and Tobago became a republic and the USA gave itself a birthday party, five mammoth resort hotels, a shopping complex featuring hi-end retail, and several fusion restaurants had emerged out of the guano.
     The development was limited to just one of the three islands purchased. This one was christened The Isle of St. Agrippina. As a saint, Aggripina was against the following: storms, evil spirits, bacterial diseases, bacterial infections. She was beheaded or scourged, depending on who you talk to, in c.262 in Rome. She came from money and died a martyr. Her tomb was said to be a place of cures and miracles. The island was known informally as “St. Aggies.”
     Rumor has it that the name of the island came from a one hundred and three year-old Catholic priest known only as “Yerbo.” Where the priest came from or why he got to pick the name of the island is subject to a variety of legends. Among them: that he lost his vision to a bacterial infection during Hurricane Alphonso as he battled evil spirits that were pestering a group of nomadic fishermen, whose catch had been dismal. Another has it that he’s actually not a priest, but a leper with connections.
     As for who the actual owners were, that remained behind several lawyer layers. Several fake owners had been dug up in the past, all of them having taken large sums of money to open “Richard Hartburg’s” or “Allen Eisenhower’s” mail from time to time. Pictures were never taken. Appearances, quotes, scandals?
     Zilch.
     BMP,LLC made Bigfoot look like an amateur when it came to anonymity. And really, in the scheme of things, so long as the rooms were clean, the drinks cold, and the tanned bodies in attendance flamed the most unattainable Caribbean desires, who gave a shit who owned it?
     But then, in the summer of 1984, St. Aggies closed it’s bamboo doors. And not just the resorts.  The whole island was locked up tight, including the small port. Nobody came. Nobody left. It was assumed that the island was under quarantine for unnamed tropical disease number one hundred and eighty-seven. But press releases were generated from the St. Aggies’ legal apparatus stating that it was not due to infectious disease. Period.
     And so, The Isle of St. Agrippina drifted into the jade waters and stifling humidity of the Caribbean. Until July of 2002 when Markos Katamalapadatopolis and twenty-five of his closest friends turned up missing.
     Markos and his entourage set sail for this exclusive little abandoned island somewhere north of Haiti to set up a banana republic/eurdisco where sex, drugs, and huge fucking subwoofers were constitutional rights. Being the son of a filthy rich shipping magnate, setting sail meant a trio of yachts big enough to house most of the West Indies proper.
     Six weeks later one of the yachts was discovered during a drug raid off Saint Kitts. No trace of Markos or his entourage. This kicked off what the local fisherman began whispering in Creole amongst each other as a time of “Een man dodt een ander man brod.”
     “One man’s death, another man’s bread.”
     Frequent reports of vessels going missing in and around Antigua and Aruba, stretching all the way up to the Caymans, started rolling in. Port logs were dotted with overdue reports on small sailboats, yachts, an occasional kayaking expedition. The local media picked up on it for a minute, but seeing how there were no bodies, blood or celebrities well, it was no OJ trial.
     The blip on the radar that was St. Aggies faded, save for a blurb in “Outside” magazine on “The most awesome island you’ll never make it to.” It went on to state that what was once the Monaco of the Caribbean had now become a ghost island, with all the natural beauty of a no star resort. Think “Castaway” but with a free room – no showers. The only trouble was getting there. Private charter was the only way to go, and they weren’t going. And those that did? Overdue.
     On October thirty-first, 2004, a select number of travel agencies received a small package; a coconut with the words “The Isle of St. Agrippina Welcomes You” stamped into it with gold foil. Inside the coconut (which had a nice little patina latch keeping it together) were brochures announcing the reopening of the resort and of the charter sea plane service from Florida to the island. The rates were almost suspiciously low, causing salivation in the travel agents and a booking push not witnessed since the Titanic’s maiden voyage.
     Word spread quickly throughout the islands of the reopening of St. Agrippina. The big chains hardly paid attention. As for the smaller independent motels and cottage rentals, a group of owners had banded together to “swift boat” St. Aggies (a tactic that became part of the vernacular as the world watched a decorated Vietnam vet lose the American presidency to an AWOL national guardsman via a constant barrage of vicious lies – well executed).
     However, lacking savvy in public relations, media manipulation, or turning on a laptop, the group of owners managed only to leave scurrilous messages regarding St. Aggies’ safety on “Masakela’s Tavern” chalkboard in St. Barts.

****

     Most typical boardrooms in corporations are really a variation on a common theme: Christ, we’re powerful. It used to be said that the bigger the conference table, the smaller the penis of the CEO. But the odds of every CEO in the world having a small penis seemed, well, not possible. Though nobody’s stepped up to the plate on that one, so it’s a take it on faith thing.
     The mark of a truly badass conference room table was the monolithic slab. Nevermind that pansy ass sectional table that any mook and his buddy could hoist. It had to weight nine tons, take the removal of at least a corridor wall and, in most cases, be hoisted outside by crane through the floor to ceiling windows (removed – most of the time). It took teams of men with walkie talkies and overalls and thick rope and pulley systems.
     And always one sadistically sexy executive assistant standing by with pinched face and cell phone.
     Soon the size of the conference table took a back seat to what the conference table was made of, where it was made, and what mythology surrounded it. It was mostly bullshit cobbled together by wise antique salesmen and it worked like gangbusters. The salesman even began a yearly banquet honoring the most amazing, purely fictitious story surrounding a conference table in the whole of antiquedom.
     Of course, it was a secret banquet as was the gathering (or cabal, as they like to call it). If word ever got out, they’d be ruined. Then again, proof was hard to come by on both sides. It was a game of mojo.
     Take for instance Coca Cola. In their New York headquarters, they have a 425 square foot single slab of redwood cut from the forest of the Ingskerskyer-Slovan range deep in the Equatorial Siberian Crest. The forest was home to a break off group of the Punic Wars in which the victors would carve out the skulls of their defeated, and use them to eat out of. Also, for one year, the prisoners left with their heads had to blow ring tailed lemurs at the pleasure of the war czar. After one year, common slavery. 
     This year, Johan Elikazer, owner and proprietor of  Medesko Bros. Imports, decided to host the banquet at the newly resurrected Isle of St. Agrippina. His travel agent had suggested it as the perfect locale for a gathering of antiquities experts specializing in the art of the short con. Johan was taken aback.
     “My got!” he exclaimed into the phone. “I forgot! I sold them their conference table tventy years ago! I vunder…vould they still haf it, you tink?”
     It was carved out of limestone, which was taken from the façade of a church in Istanbul that reportedly housed the miracle of St. Ecreosote, in which the saint ascended to heaven, one limb at a time. The center of the slab depicted such ascension in the third stage – no arms and a leg rising above the saint’s head. The saint was also surrounded by small dogs. Nobody knew why.
     Except for Johan Elikazer. He really, really liked dogs.
     The table sat atop four square limestone pillars. The floor of the conference room reinforced with steel panels, gave the room an unusual chill. It was at the head of that behemoth of a table that Jackson Quark sat, head bent down, studying the blueprints for an upgraded HVAC system in the resort. With his right hand, his thick fingers bounced a tiny bleached bone end over end atop his knuckles. The motion was slow and smooth, the bone tumbling silently over his flesh.
     Sitting to his right was the current HVAC systems engineer, Sandy Worth, silently watching the small bone dance on Jackson’s knuckles. It was unnerving, watching that bone hop around. It seemed as if the hand were detached from the rest of  Mr. Quark’s body, which remained perfectly still as he reviewed the blueprints – as if any client has ever understood blueprints.
     “There’s an error in your design,” Jackson said, giving Sandy yet another reason to be slightly freaked.
     “Hmm?’ Sandy said.
     “Your blueprint. It contains a flaw,” Jackson spoke. “See, right here.” Jackson pointed to the blueprint. “You have designed a beautiful air conditioning system here, Mr. Worth. Except. For this.”
     Jackson could do that. Coddle with one hand, choke the shit out of  you with the other. Combined with his vast, open smile, flowing dark blond hair (jawbone length) and rich, sonorous and slow speech – think Jeff Bridges as a Southern gent with a gift for refrigerator systems analysis – Jackson had that way of drawing you in, for better or worse.
     “It looks like your thermal cooling mass load is, well, too low,” Jackson said.
     Sandy rose and stepped over to Jackson’s side, looking at the spot on the blueprint that had a table of specs.
     “Ah, yes, well, see,” Sandy began. “You don’t want your thermal load to outweigh the square footage of the building, see? You don’t want to use a glacier to cool a hen house.”
     Jackson smiled, giving a soft chuckle.
     “I met with a lot of climate control folk, Sandy. All competent, all with big jobs under their belts,” Jackson said. “I chose you for the simple reason that I like how you put things. I appreciate the poetry of science. The iambic pentameter of linear equations and the prose of how a cell divides. But come day’s end, Sandy, I also like to know someone who won’t try to teach my Grandma to suck eggs.”
     Silence.
     “Th-thanks Mr. Quark,” Sandy said. “’preciate it.”
     “So go ahead and double the thermal capacity,” Jackson said. “We like it downright arctic ‘round these parts.”
     Sandy knew better than to push back. He’d heard all the rumors about BMP, LLC and how you never dealt with the same person twice or how creepy the representatives were. A fellow HVAC guy had described them as “lifeless.” Fine with Sandy. His life was about not making waves. About keeping things private.
     Like the bodies buried beneath his ranch house in Burbank, California.