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We were able to find a map of Tonga and the surrounding area quite easily. Not that there was much beyond Tonga but a WHOLE lot of water. The Fijian islands were about 400 miles west, the Samoan islands about 350 miles north, the Cook Islands about 1500 miles east and New Zealand about 1000 miles southwest. Tonga itself consisted of several hundred islands. The capitol was on the nearest island, Nuku'alofa, about 100 miles north of us, which also had the only international airport in Tonga. One plane left Avua'tutu for Nuku'alofa every afternoon. By motorboat or ship it would take about half a day to get there.
All of this meant that if Stroeker wanted to get out of Tonga, he either had to steal a boat and take it to Nuku'alofa, or sneak onboard/hijack the plane going from Avua'tutu to Nuku'alofa. Once on Nuku'alofa, he might be able to sneak on a flight off the island, if the authorities there hadn't been contacted by the authorities on Avua'tutu, or he could hijack a plane there. Or he could steal a boat capable of covering much greater distances and just head out to sea. Or he could have confederates who might help him. Who were those crates for, anyway, and how was he planning to get them off the island? If he remained loose, would he go back to the islet for them? If so, how and when? Could he do it in this storm? I privately doubted it. The winds were blowing hard enough to be considered near hurricane force. Stroeker was lucky and all, but in this case, my money was on Mother Nature.
Whatever Stroeker decided to do, it looked like he was going to have to wait out the storm first. Most of our options required waiting for the storm to end as well, but there was one place we could investigate now: Stroeker's hotel room. Given that the Tongans were now looking for him, I doubted he'd be there, and he probably hadn't had a chance to clean the place up. Which meant there could be information there that might help me determine who he had been planning on shipping those nasty statues to. The problem was that the Tongans might be keeping an eye on the room, in case Stroeker was stupid enough to go back to it, which would make it rather difficult for us to sneak in unnoticed.
The plan I settled on was to go up to the floor Stroeker's room was on, check it out to determine if anyone appeared to be watching the room, and if no one was, listen for any sounds of activity from the room itself. If the room didn't seem to be occupied, then we'd break in and check it out. Given that I couldn't be certain Stroeker wasn't holed up in his room, and how dangerous he was, I insisted that Laughlin keep behind me until I had cleared the room. Not for the first time, I wished I had found a way to bring my service pistol with me. I felt incredibly vulnerable without it.
Stroeker's room was on the fourth floor of the hotel. When the elevator opened, the only person I saw in the corridor was a Tongan room service attendant, pushing a cart bearing empty trays of food. He smiled and nodded as he stepped aside to let us pass, then got into the elevator himself, leaving us alone in the corridor.
I heard nothing when I listened at the door to Stroeker's room, so I pulled out my lockpicks, and had the door open in twenty seconds. Inside, the room was a mess. The window was open to the storm and rain blew heavily into the room. The place had been ransacked. The mattress was torn open, shredded even, and the drawers and cabinets were all open.
I shut and locked the door behind us, frowning at the devastation, although I wasn't really surprised. "I wondered if the Tongans might have beat us to it."
Laughlin nodded and followed behind me as I put on my gloves and began a search of the room. I quickly found a few things of interest. The first was that whatever had ripped up the mattress wasn't human. It was done with claws, torn apart. The second was that nothing appeared to be missing. Stroeker had three different passports, two American and one French, several hundred dollars in American and French money, and a business card referencing LeGoullon Shipping in New Orleans. There were also deep scratch marks on the empty table, along with what looked like black candle wax drippings.
I pocketed the business card, intending to find out more about the company later, and took a closer look at the passports. They were issued in three separate names, "Dennis Carridan", "Henry Reneau" and "Jean-Louis Chaillard." Each showed Stroeker with a slightly different hairdo. Chaillard wore spectacles and had traveled frequently from New Orleans to Guadeloupe. Carridan was apparently the passport he had used to travel from Honolulu to Tonga. The Reneau passport had never been stamped with a visa. I decided to pocket the passports as well, in hopes that this might make it a little harder for Stroeker to flee the island, or failing that, to re-enter the United States.
I turned my attention to the open window next, and found that it had been shattered inward. If not for the ransacked room, it might appear to have been merely the work of the storm. Obviously, this was the way at least one person had gained access to the room. Given what floor we were on, it had to have been before the storm broke. No one could climb four stories in the kind of gale that was blowing outside now.
I moved on to checking under the bed, dressers, etc., just in case anything was concealed there. I was in luck. I found a 9-mm semi-automatic pistol and two full clips duct-taped to the underside of the bed where it would be reachable by a person lying there. Pulling the gun out, I recognized it as a German-made Sig-Sauer, the best. It was in a leather shoulder holster, which I could use to conceal the gun under my jacket, although a jacket would be out of place in Tonga except during the storm. And possession of an unlicensed firearm was a felony in Tonga. Still, as long as Stroeker remained at large, that was a risk I was willing to take. If nothing else, it prevented Stroeker from coming back at some point and getting it. I'd worry about how to conceal the pistol after the storm, if I lived that long.
"How much do you know about Stroeker?" Laughlin asked, standing over by the table. "There's more going on here than trade in cult artifacts."
I frowned as I put the shoulder holster on underneath my jacket and stowed the clips in the pockets. "Not as much as I'd like," I admitted. "We like him for several murders, and he's proved to be a rather slippery customer. We suspected he was smuggling something, but until I came here, we never determined what. What makes you say there's more to this than smuggling?"
"Look at this print," he said, pointing to a muddy footprint near the table. It was strangely shaped, with three clawed toes forward and one shorter claw backwards, like some large reptile, only more elongated. "That's not human," he added, unnecessarily. "I don't know what it is, but Stroeker, or somebody, was performing black magic rituals here. Some sort of bayou voodoo mixed with Egyptian or Sudanese elements. Add to that those weird cult objects on the island and there is something very strange going on here."
Black magic? Voodoo? That was an awful lot to read into one unusual footprint. I was about to suggest that maybe Laughlin had been spending too much time listening to the conference lecturers, when he snapped his fingers. "I just thought of something else. The day I got here I was accosted by a middle-easterner. He had a north African accent. I forgot about it when they mixed up my luggage."
I didn't see the connection. "Do you have some reason to think he might be connected with this, other than his accent? What did he say to you?"
"That he knew me. I don't think the luggage mix-up was an accident. How many nutcase professors own Misako hand-tooled leather luggage? It would have cost him a month's salary, at least. Just too many odd little details to be coincidence. The middle-easterner...Sudanese, I think - I never did get his name...has returned to Africa now."
"Hmmm, maybe we should go over the luggage incident a little more carefully. But in better surroundings." I indicated the trashed room. "Did you need to examine anything else here? And did you touch any surfaces with your fingers?"
"Damn," he said. "Yeah, I touched the powder on the table."
Just then, I heard voices in the hotel hallway, speaking in Tongan. Since the door was closed and locked, our presence wouldn't be obvious to anyone just walking by. Still, they might be coming here. And worse, they might have a key....
I glanced quickly around the room, looking for a means of escape, or a place of concealment, if it should come to that. It didn't look good. The only other exit from the room was the window, and as I recalled, there was no ledge we could climb out on to, and nothing we could use to climb down the wall.
Laughlin abruptly grabbed my arm and tugged me towards the bathroom, it being the only other place we could hide. I made sure to swipe my hand through the powder Laughlin had touched as I went by, doing my best to disturb the print he had left, since it was an obvious sign that we had been there. As we hurried into the bathroom and shut the door behind us, Laughlin turned to me, placed a finger on his lips, and then traced a design on my forehead. He repeated this on his own as there was the sound of a key, and then the door to the room opened.
Two male Tongan voices whispered, then muttered angrily as they moved about the room. I barely had time to draw my pistol before the door to the bathroom suddenly flew open. But even though I stood right in front of him, with my pistol aimed at his chest, the Tongan man in a room service uniform did not appear to see me. My eyes looked past him to the mirror, and I barely stopped myself from gasping aloud. I couldn't see myself there, or Laughlin, even though he was standing right next to me, waiting tensely.
I held perfectly still, waiting for the men to leave, my eyes going from the Tongan in front of me, to the mirror, and then back again. At a call from the other man, the man in the bathroom left, and shortly the two of them went out the door, closing it behind them.
Laughlin breathed a sigh of relief and reached up to run a thumb across both our brows. My image returned to the mirror as if a curtain had been pulled back. "Okay," Laughlin said with an impish grin, "so we were both keeping secrets. Let's get out of here before they come back with help."
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. What the hell had just happened? How had he made us disappear like that? It was utterly impossible...except that I'd just seen it happen....
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Last modified on July 8, 2002 by Kris Fazzari.