Glimpses of the Island

For The Good of the Cause

Sitting in her New York City apartment Luisa Calvaho read the letter again. More than six months of research and investigation, hitting dead ends again and again, but now she was on to something. The letter itself was innocuous, merely a confirmation of her application followed by the travel details. Not like they'd put anything vaguely incriminating in print anyway , she thought. The letter also represented a moment of truth for Luisa. Could she go through with it, knowing the risks? If they found out who she really was, and what she was trying to do, they would simply make her disappear. If they were powerful enough to suppress all evidence of their existence then eliminating a nuisance like her should be trivial.

They weren't quite as thorough as they would like to believe. It had been pure coincidence she had unearthed a journal from the old Victorian era League to Preserve Tradition. It had been an unpublished manuscript donated by the estate of the great-grandson of one of the original members. The university she had been attending had accepted the document as part of a collection of papers. Papers apparently left unread until one Saturday afternoon she had checked it out and leafed through the pages while researching some other references to the donor. The author had been barely literate, one good reason it had never been published. It told of the founding of the colony on an Indian Ocean island, the initial success and the fast transition to disaster when the missionary zeal wore off, to the last days when the colony had been abandoned. Luisa had been intrigued by the story and was curious as to the name of the island and its status now.

To her amazement a check of the atlas showed no such place as Isla Del Sur. Where the colony ship supposedly landed showed only an empty section of the Indian Ocean on modern maps. Drawing ever-widening circles around its charted location she found the nearest possible island was Kerguellen, an uninhabitable volcanic rock described as hell on earth by the French research teams who rarely visited. That couldn't be the spot. It was more than a thousand miles from her starting point, much further south, an arctic climate, and it didn't match the description from the journal.

Equipped with research skills as part of her new journalism degree, she went looking. An initial search online yielded no links on the internet anywhere, not to the Island or the League. She shifted to hardcopy library research, and again came up empty-handed. She even enlisted the help of a Brazilian relative to translate a letter into Portuguese and sent it to the Portuguese National Archives. They had no records of any charts showing a place named Isla Del Sur.

In frustration she began posting requests for any information about the Island or League on internet news groups. After a few weeks those posts started to disappear. The mystery deepened when she did receive enigmatic replies to her requests. Most of them suggested it would be best if she stopped her quest and moved on to other areas of interest. But one day that fateful e-mail had appeared in her inbox. Phony headers and routing through an anonymous re-mailer had left it untraceable. The contents were so amazing she had read it, over and over again, all night long.

Isla Del Sur did exist, the message claimed, but it was kept deliberately concealed by powerful and influential interests with ties across the globe. The reason for it being hidden was the nature of the society there; a place where women were literally enslaved, kept as property by their male owners, stripped of dignity and all human rights. The e-mail went on to make sickening claims of cruelty and depravity, all protected by the isolation of the Island. The descriptions made Afghanistan under Taliban rule sound like a feminist paradise in comparison. Luisa was shocked to her core. If the claims were true someone had to expose this inhuman travesty to the world, someone like herself.

The next evening a second e-mail arrived from the same anonymous source. This one claimed to hold all the details of what the unnamed author knew of the Islands, including possible links to known companies and hints that a recruitment program existed. Luisa began to run down the new clues but as the time added up she realized she needed help. She had to find a sponsor to fund her research.

After graduation from college she had made a living by freelancing, doing research and writing magazine articles. She approached several of her previous employers, but all declined without comment. She met the same resistance when she went to other magazines, until one of the smaller lifestyle magazines indicated interest. Their willingness to help had surprised her given the strong conservative tone of their articles, but she had no other options.

A week later she met with the magazine's editor. His terms were simple; they would fund her investigative work in return for an exclusive. He expressed some doubts about the farfetched claims but was willing to take a risk. The money was disappointing compared to other work she had done but critical to her effort was the expense account and the magazine seemed to be lavish in that respect. With no other prospects she had little choice but to reluctantly accept.

All her trails turned cold, except for the list of international companies from her internet source. Every one had a squeaky clean record, both in business and in how their personnel were treated. None stood out in any way except for one, a civil engineering contractor based in Saudi Arabia. They appeared to thrive on contracts in areas of the world no one else would dare go. Pipelines in western Asia, transmission lines in equatorial Africa, mining in the Andes, even a power plant in the heart of riot-torn Indonesia. Yet never a single story of any of their engineers or managers being kidnapped or killed. Luisa's reporter instinct told her something was missing from the skimpy news articles.

She looked into the company's published records. It was listed as being privately held by a group of Saudi investors, capitalized by oil money. The home office was the address of a building in Riyadh. The company claimed modest profits and reported a pattern of unremarkable but steady growth. Low key and low profile seemed to be its charter. The high-risk projects were ones the established corporations would avoid, leaving this company an economic niche with little in the way of competition.

Out of curiosity, and to satisfy a nagging doubt about the references to a recruitment program from that e-mail, she wrote to the company to ask about a job as a technical writer, using a fictitious name and her post office box. The response arrived in the form of a large envelope addressed in both Arabic and English; Saudi postage stamps and an Arabic postmark confirmed its origins.

The cover letter informed her that indeed the company did have openings for technical writers to help provide customer documentation for ongoing projects. A pamphlet in the envelope showed company locations around the world, though there were none in North America, Australia or Europe. Buried in the text around the glossy pictures was a note that the company operated facilities in the Maldive Islands, and that the employee-training center was located on a private island.

That caught her eye. Luisa had a vague idea that the Maldives were not in the Pacific Ocean. A quick check of the map showed they were in the Indian Ocean spread along the equator, with the closest countries being India and Sri Lanka. Her suspicions rose; it was too much of a coincidence. The Maldives even had a link back to Portuguese exploration five hundred years ago, followed by a British presence from the 1800s. The location didn't fit too well with the League manuscript, but that could be explained by the poor education of the original author. Everything else did fit. Luisa was convinced her elusive Isla Del Sur had to be one of the numerous islands in the Maldives chain.

She gathered up all her information, wrote a summary, a proposal for further investigation, and then took it to her editor. She knew she had to sell him before she could take the next step. Over lunch he went through her summary point by point, bringing up other interpretations to her facts, but to Luisa's surprise he agreed it looked like a good story. Since he seemed interested she pitched her proposal next.

"You sure about this?" he asked. "Do you realize how dangerous it could be? A foreign country, you could be cut off from any kind of help. Don't kid yourself about the glamour of undercover reporting. You may see the success stories in the big magazines and on TV, but sometimes it goes terribly wrong. You don't know what kind of people you might be dealing with." For nearly half an hour he lectured her on everything that could possibly go awry.

Luisa wasn't swayed from her purpose. "I think I'll be safe. If it looks like they are getting suspicious then I'll hop on the next plane out of the country. I checked; the Maldives are a major Asian tourist area with regular schedules. Just be ready to help me escape if I need it, that's all I ask.

"Look, it's all set up. I can't pass up a chance like this. Who knows how many women are off on some island suffering under conditions we can't even imagine. I spent four years in college reading about places like this. Women and minorities brutally exploited and repressed. I can't sit back and knowingly let it continue. We have to stop it!"

Her editor held up his hands in mock surrender. "Okay, okay, you win. Maybe this will be Pulitzer material, but even if it isn't it'll grab the public's attention. Now about this false identity, I think the magazine can provide some assistance there. A few years back we did a feature on fake passports and birth certificates. Some of our sources were shut down, but I know of one that can help. That part doesn't go into your story, by the way. And my cousin runs a website company; she can provide you with work references. I may be able to get you set up with some school records too. Fortunately you are young enough not to need a long work history. This won't hold up under close scrutiny but it should pass for a simple background check.

"One thing though. A whole lotta years ago I worked for a big city newspaper. We had a wannabe investigative reporter decide he'd go undercover and break up a ring of exotic animal smugglers. He did everything right, fake ID, good solid references to back up his story, but he did something incredibly stupid. He told his girlfriend what he was doing. She talked about it over lunch with a friend of hers. That friend told her sister. Someone overheard her. The reporter was badly beaten and nearly dead when they dumped him in the street right in front of our offices. He quit and went to work selling car parts.

"Whatever you do, don't give anyone even a hint as to what's happening. If you want you can leave addressed letters with a delivery date in our office safe, but for your own sake don't leave a word about it anywhere else. I wouldn't want you on my conscience."

Luisa hadn't even thought about it. She had been so focused on finding the Island, and now the investigative work, that she hadn't given any real consideration to her own safety. The letters sounded like a good idea, she could leave one for her aunt. They weren't close but she was the only relative who kept in touch. There were no real friends so explanations for her coming disappearance weren't required. "Alright, I'd like to leave one envelope with you, though I'm not worried. Get the identity set up. I'll send in the application."

That had been four weeks ago. Today the employment offer had come for one Lois Vallardo, unemployed web site designer in New York City, complete with salary offer and travel plans if she chose to accept. The salary amount seemed absurdly low at first, but the letter pointed out that room and board would be provided at company expense, as well as any travel. Plus under reciprocal tax treaties there would be no income tax taken out of her pay. Factoring in the low cost of living it looked very competitive. Luisa had a fleeting thought that if this didn't work out she could just keep the job. In terms of what she would keep it paid better than the magazine.

She sent back a letter accepting the offer along with an open start date. A week later a courier delivered plane tickets with an envelope. Inside the envelope was a letter with her schedule and an advance for miscellaneous expenses. The tickets proved to be a surprise; New York to Madrid, then to Istanbul, Victoria in the Seychelle Islands, and finally the city of Male in the Maldive Islands. The letter warned her to expect a tropical climate.

The letter also made a point that the Maldives were an Islamic country, though a liberal one tolerant of tourists from the West. She was advised to not bring alcohol or non-prescription drugs into the country, to dress conservatively, and that it would be considered polite to wear a scarf on her head. The first hints of oppression , Luisa thought, already telling me how to look and act . Still, it was a foreign country; she told herself she shouldn't try to judge them by her own values.

She made a copy of the letter and the tickets and mailed it to the magazine. From now on there would be no direct contact. For all intents she had become a different person, someone eager to start her job at a new company in a far off exotic land. She looked at the name on her passport, Lois Vallardo. That's the only name she answered to now. There would be no more Luisa Calvaho until she returned. Her editor would be her lifeline, the only one in the whole world who knew her secret. And when she did come back, she would destroy the Island of the South, Isla Del Sur.