Typhoon Island Page 10

  * * *

  Jose Ruiz stepped from the shadows. In his hand he held a revolver pointed at the brothers. “My boss will be very pleased that you have eliminated the troublemaker Escobar,” he said. Jose grinned, showing his missing tooth. “I hope you will not mind if the boss does not thank you in person; he is a very busy man.”

  “Is the rental business slow, Jose?” Frank asked. He slowly went to pick up the gun and handed it over as instructed.

  Jose shrugged as he carefully reached for the weapon. “It is good enough for my brother, perhaps—but not good enough for me.”

  “So you sabotaged the plane we rented from you,” Joe said. “Why? To hurt your brother, or to harm the tourist business on San Esteban?”

  Jose’s dark eyes narrowed. “You are far too smart for your own good, Americano,” he said. “Now that I have had a moment to consider, I think I will hurt you.”

  Angela Martinez screamed. The cavern magnified the sound, making it almost deafening. The earsplitting noise caused Jose to flinch as he pulled the trigger.

  Joe flung himself across the floor in a barrel roll, and Frank ducked to one side. The shot went between the brothers, and before Jose could fire again, they were on top of him. Joe knocked Jose’s legs out from under him, while Frank clouted the man on the jaw. Jose went down like a sack of flour. Joe hit him one final time, just to make sure he didn’t get up.

  “Good work!” Frank said to Angela.

  “I-I was just frightened,” she said, her voice shaking.

  “Good work anyway,” Joe said, smiling.

  It took the brothers only a minute to tie Jose with his own coat. As they trussed up their prisoner Jamie Escobar groaned.

  “He’s coming to, I think,” Angela said.

  Escobar’s eyes flickered open, but he still looked dazed. Angela ungagged him. “What happened?” he asked.

  “We thought you were shooting at us,” Joe replied warily.

  “I . . . was not shooting at you,” Escobar said. “I was shooting at the man who was shooting at you with the blowgun.”

  “Was that Jose?” Frank asked.

  Escobar shook his head wearily. “No,” he said. “It was . . .” His eyes rolled back and he lapsed into unconsciousness once more.

  “If Jose is here,” Angela said, “then his brother, Pablo, must be the man behind the trouble.”

  “I don’t think so,” Frank said. “Remember what Jose said about the rental business being enough for his brother, but not him?”

  Joe nodded. “Besides, how would a rental business profit from hurting the tourist trade on San Esteban?”

  “How would anyone?” Angela asked.

  “I’m betting that whoever is at the other end of this wire can answer that question,” Frank said, looking at the line they’d disconnected from the TNT charges.

  “And I think we have a pretty good idea who that person is,” Joe added.

  “Take care of Agent Escobar,” Frank said to Angela. “And Joe and I will take care of whoever’s on the other end of this line.”

  Angela nodded, and the brothers went off into the tunnel, following the detonator wire.

  The passages twisted and turned as they snaked under the city. The brothers saw many more packages of TNT on their way, but they knew they didn’t have time to stop and disconnect them all—not if they hoped to stop the villain behind the plot.

  They ran as quickly as they could, knowing that at any moment the mastermind of this awful scheme could set off the dynamite. “Let’s hope,” Frank said as they sprinted down the passages, “that he’s waiting for Jose to return before pushing that plunger.”

  Tracing the wire, they soon came to a ladder leading up to a trapdoor. They heard voices through the open hatchway above. “What is taking Jose so long down there, do you think?” one asked.

  “Some trouble with the connections, perhaps,” replied another voice.

  “You don’t think,” said the first voice, “that he ran into those meddlesome teenagers or that spy in the tunnels, do you? They were near the tour entrance when I lost them.”

  There was a pause before the other, more resonant voice replied, “I doubt it. No one knows those passages but us. Just in case, though, we’ll detonate the TNT in five minutes—whether Jose returns or not.”

  The two voices laughed.

  The Hardys approached the bottom of the ladder and listened carefully. They heard possibly two or three people moving around upstairs. The brothers waited until the sounds moved away from the trapdoor before climbing up the ladder.

  Poking their heads out cautiously, they saw the dark interior of a deteriorating factory. Rain dripped through the ceiling, and they could hear the typhoon winds howling outside. Standing near the ladder, with his back to the boys, was a man dressed in overalls. He was rummaging in an old tool chest. A well-dressed man fiddled with what looked like a detonator box on the opposite side of the room. “Give me some pliers, would you, Luis?” he asked.

  Luis turned to answer, and when he did, he spotted the Hardys. Before he could say anything, the brothers jumped through the trapdoor and rushed toward the criminals. Joe took the handyman, while Frank ran over to the deep-voiced stranger.

  The handyman pulled a dart out of his coveralls and popped it into his blowgun. Before he could shoot, though, Joe tackled him to the ground. Luis struggled, but he was no match for the athletic teenager. Joe shouldered the handyman’s pudgy gut, then finished him off with a solid uppercut.

  The well-dressed man turned as the elder Hardy closed in on him.

  “Jorge Tejeda,” Frank said. “I thought so.”

  “Pretty smart, turista,” the politician replied.

  Frank aimed a chop at Tejeda’s collarbone. The older man ducked out of the way, dropped to the floor, and swept Frank’s legs out from under him with a spin kick.

  Tejeda laughed and bounced to his feet. “Before I was a politician,” he said, “I was the islands capoeira champion.”

  Before Frank could recover, Tejeda dropped him with a vicious kick to the jaw. The evil politician reached for the detonator box. As he did he shot Joe a glance that said, Too late. Joe grabbed the blowgun, put it to his lips, and fired.

  His aim wasn’t perfect, but the shot scratched across the back of Tejeda’s hand. The politician drew back in surprise, giving Frank just enough time to recover. Ignoring the spots dancing before his eyes, Frank spun across the floor, imitating the kick Tejeda had used to bring him to the ground.

  His blow caught the politician behind the knees, and Tejeda toppled like a stout tree. Joe sprinted in, and working together, the Hardys quickly subdued their foe.

  “Did he say he was a master of Copacabana?” Joe asked as they tied Tejeda and Luis up.

  “Capoeira,” Frank said as he pulled the knot tight around the politician’s wrists. “It’s a Brazilian martial art.”

  “Oh, good,” Joe replied. “For a moment I thought he was going to try to sing us to death.”

  • • •

  The worst of the storm was over by the time the Hardys set out their flares to attract the police. The city authorities were shocked to discover their most prominent politician had been behind such a dastardly plot. Fortunately Jamie Escobar—who easily recovered from his earlier tussle with the brothers—arrived in time to back up the Hardys’ story.

  All of them spent the night in the Nuevo Esteban police station, and the brothers rejoined their girlfriends the following morning. By that time Hurricane Hilary had moved back out to sea.

  In gratitude for their services the island tourism bureau gave the teens rooms at the Hotel San Esteban for the final days of their vacation.

  “What a nightmare!” Iola said after they’d recovered their things from the stranded Jeep and moved into their new rooms.

  The four of them and Angela Martinez sat in the living room of the girls’ suite, looking out over the bay. The waters of the harbor were still gray and gloomy, but sunshine had begun
to peek through the receding storm clouds.

  “I’ll say,” Callie agreed. “I’m glad this hotel has an indoor pool. The beach is a wreck!”

  “And probably will be for months,” Angela added.

  “I hope that Ms. Aranya has enough insurance to rebuild her hotel and bungalows,” Callie said.

  “She should be okay,” Frank replied.

  “What she doesn’t get from her insurance, she should be able to recover from Tejeda’s holding companies,” Joe added. “The value of his business and real estate properties should cover the damage he and his sidekicks did.”

  “And he won’t be needing money where he’s going,” Iola said with a satisfied smile.

  Callie sighed. “So our vacation was ruined by a greedy politician.”

  “And a typhoon,” Iola added.

  Joe smiled. “Not even Tejeda could arrange that—though he and his cohorts did try to use the storm to further their scheme.”

  “Exactly which one of them tried to shoot us?” Callie asked.

  “Luis, the handyman,” Joe replied.

  “The first time Luis used the blowgun,” Frank said, “he just wanted to scare tourists off the island.”

  “That’s the same reason they set the fires, both to our bungalows and to Casa Bonita, and slashed the tires of our Jeep,” Joe continued. “The previous muggings, the theft of Beth Becker’s rental boat, the creatures in the rooms, and the release of El Diablo were all part of the same plan.”

  “Either Jose, Luis, or Tejeda was always nearby when the ’accidents’ happened,” Frank said. “Because they were working together, it was nearly impossible to figure out who was doing all of these things, and why. Luis’s job also came in handy, as it diverted suspicion of their sabotage of the town hall—and probably other incidents as well.”

  “The perfect man for the cover-up,” Callie remarked.

  “We weren’t the only tourists targeted, though sometimes it seemed that way,” Joe said. “Most of the problems went unreported. Tourism and hotel officials didn’t want island business to be hurt, so they covered some incidents up.”

  Frank nodded. “The second time Luis used the blowgun, he was trying to scare us away from the deserted factory where he, Jose, and Tejeda were setting up the detonator. We never would have found that if Angela hadn’t taken us on a shortcut back to the storm shelter.”

  “I’ll never take that shortcut again!” Angela said.

  “Agent Escobar was watching the factory and fired at Luis to try to protect us,” Joe explained. “The government suspected Tejeda was up to something, but they didn’t know what. When Luis came after us, Escobar chased and shot at him—which explains all the gunshots. Luis returned after Escobar followed Angela, Frank, and me into the old bootlegger tunnels. Escobar was the one Frank and I chased that day in the rain. At that point, because of the El Diablo incident, he thought we might be in on Tejeda’s scheme.”

  “Luis’s shooting at you convinced him otherwise,” Angela added.

  Callie rubbed her head. “This was a pretty complex scheme to wreck the islands tourism.”

  “Tejeda wasn’t really aiming to ruin tourism,” Frank replied. “His true goal was to drive down real estate prices, while solidifying his political position as ’friend of the poor.’”

  “It was a good plan,” Joe said. “They cause crime in Nuevo Esteban and then take credit for cleaning it up. By the time tourism rebounded, Tejeda would have owned the best properties on this side of the island—and he would have bought them for a song.”

  “Just like he bought the underground tour business and those other properties over the years,” Angela said.

  “Owning the bootlegger tour business gave him access to the tunnels he and his gang needed to pull off their crimes,” Frank said. “They could move between the city and the coast with no one seeing them. It also gave them a place to stash money and stolen goods, like the speedboat. When the storm blew in, Tejeda saw an opportunity to put their ’urban renewal’ plan into high gear. They could dynamite the tunnels under key areas and then blame the storm for the collapse of the old tunnels and the damage to the city.”

  “Then they could swoop in and pick up the pieces,” Iola said.

  “The disaster would have killed the real estate market in a way that would have taken months, or maybe years, to accomplish otherwise,” Joe said. “Then Tejeda could step in—both financially and politically—and be the town’s savior.”

  “Having Luis in the town repair office, and Jose in the tourist rental business, made the sabotage that much easier,” Frank said.

  “Then, it was Jose and the handyman who hijacked Beth Becker’s speedboat,” Callie said.

  Frank and Joe nodded. “And Jose who sabotaged our plane,” Frank added.

  “Working against his own brother!” Angela said, shocked.

  “Pablo Ruiz wasn’t involved at all,” Joe said. “He was just a patsy.”

  “Okay, I get all that,” Iola said. “And I understand why Escobar was constantly showing up—he was an agent working the case. But what about Lucas McGill?”

  “We think The Gringo was probably trying to find out who was behind the scheme—either to stop the trouble or, more likely, to get a cut,” Joe said. “That’s why he kept popping up like a bad penny. But who knows for sure.”

  “That’s The Gringo’s luck,” Angela said. “Other people get caught, and he gets away scot-free.” She threw up her hands in exasperation.

  “Oh, I’m sure that he’ll slip up one day,” Joe said.

  “Someone will catch him,” Frank replied.

  “Well, I hope it’s not you two who put him behind bars,” Iola said, winking playfully at Joe.

  Callie looked at Frank. “Or if it is,” she added, “I hope it’s not during our next vacation!”

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition August 2003

  Copyright © 2003 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  The text of this book was set in New Caledonia.

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  Library of Congress Control Number 2002115457

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-85884-0

  ISBN-10: 0-689-85884-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4424-7234-1 (ebook)