Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth

by Jay Stringer

  “What are you—?”

  Lauren took a few steps forward, smiling pleasantly. “It’s okay,” she said, in her nicest tone. “We’re not here to torture you. I knew you’d hold out. You picked a side; good for you.”

  Behind Eades, Nash gripped the handle of the cargo door.

  “I was really hoping we could pretend,” Lauren said, smiling at Eades. “Let you think you had a chance to save yourself, before we did this.”

  Nash pulled the lever on the door. The mechanism took a second to engage; then the door started to move. Eades turned to follow the sound, then swung back to glare at Lauren as the sky came into view behind her. Even at this low altitude, promised by the pilot to be safe enough as long as they were careful, Lauren felt the temperature drop, and her ears popped lightly. It was like someone had switched on a vacuum cleaner. She was pulled forward, her full weight straining against the harness and the cord fastening it to the hull.

  “Fuck you,” Eades shouted in the second before she was sucked out.

  Lauren leaned forward, wanting to get a glimpse of what happened next, but it was still dark outside, and all she could make out was a vague impression of the mountains passing close below them.

  Nash pulled against his own harness to reach forward and grab hold of the leather strap attached between the door and the wall. He pulled, aided by the mechanism of the hinge that was designed to take most of the weight in an emergency to help the door open and close. Lauren watched his muscles tense and bulge as he worked. The door sealed with one last hiss.

  They both stood in silence as their ears popped again and then the ringing sound faded. Lauren unbuckled the clasp of her harness, then stepped forward and did the same for Nash. She pressed in close. Her whole body was tingling. Was it the change in cabin pressure? The cold? She knew it was something else. Until a few days ago, she’d been happy to let others do the dirty work. But starting with LaFarge, and now with the thrill running through her at watching Eades go, Lauren could feel the rush of controlling someone’s life and death. This was everything. This was her future. And soon, she’d get paid for it.

  She went up on her tiptoes to kiss Nash.

  “On the sofa, or right here?”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Chase woke up in the hospital. It was a private room, with the usual dull palette of cream and brown. She was slow to come around, with a headache that felt like it would linger.

  “Hey.” Hass’s voice was followed by his face as Chase started to focus in on the world around her.

  Chase grunted. It wasn’t because she couldn’t speak so much as she didn’t know what to say. Asking where they were would bring an obvious answer. She needed an extra few seconds to think.

  Finally, she settled on, “What I miss?” And then, before Hass could answer, something else finally swam into her thoughts. “I fell?”

  “Thirty feet.” Hass smiled. “I caught you.”

  “You…”

  “With the car.” He looked away for a second. “You landed on the roof.”

  Chase tried to sit up, but her body was still trailing behind her mind. “That explains… wait.” She lifted her left arm. Her wrist was in a cast. “What’s…?”

  “Broke your wrist. That’s the only damage, though. I don’t know how you do it. You hang off a car and a helicopter, and then fall thirty feet onto the roof of our car, and you come away with a concussion and a broken wrist. I ever tell you about the time I broke my leg getting out of the bath?”

  “You were hurt… I think? I remember…”

  Hass leaned back and pulled his jacket aside. “Stabbed, right here. They patched me up, pumped some blood into me. I’m fine.”

  Chase settled back into the pillows. There was another thought that hadn’t formed yet. She couldn’t get to it, so she pushed on with something easier. “How’d we get here?”

  “Well, they arrested us. Me. They arrested me. You they bundled into an ambulance. I’m not sure if they ever got around to arresting you. Then your friend turned up and smoothed everything out.”

  “Friend?”

  The door opened, and Mason stepped in. She gave Hass a nod, followed by a lingering smile, and Chase definitely noticed it. Mason approached the bed, put a bag on the floor, and placed her hand on Chase’s arm.

  “You don’t look so good,” Chase said. “Did you fall thirty feet? No, wait, that was me.”

  Mason smiled. Again her eyes flitted to Hass. He returned the gesture. God dammit.

  “Good to see you, too,” Mason said. “How you feeling?”

  “That a trick question?” The difficult thought finally bubbled to the surface, and Chase groaned. “Eades?”

  Mason and Hass shared a more serious look. Mason shook her head once. “We don’t know. No sign of her. August Nash has vanished off the security grid, and Lauren Stanford was never here.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  Mason shrugged. “Someone has her back. She was able to enter the UK without leaving a record, so I don’t know if she’s left or is still here. And Eades is off the grid, completely lost.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Around the same time you did. They were pulling you out of the ambulance when I arrived. I’ve cleared the mess up as best I can. There’s no police record of the car chase or the helicopter at Glasgow Green. They don’t know about the dead body in the house.”

  “Is he…?”

  “I sorted it.”

  “How?”

  “I’m a spook.”

  Mason left it there. She bent down to pull a file from her bag and set it next to Chase on the bed.

  “Lauren Stanford,” she said. “You already know the headlines, but these are the details, if you need them. I pulled in a favor from a friend in the CIA. They’ve been watching her for a while, her whole family. Something about a terror attack on New Jersey a hundred years ago.”

  Chase took the file that Mason passed to her, started flicking through it. “If the CIA knows all that, why haven’t they done anything?”

  “Politics. They’re not supposed to work internally, and neither them nor the FBI are allowed to do much of anything at the moment. Nazis don’t seem to be anyone’s priority. I mean, they tried to bring down my government, and we’re all acting like they didn’t. I’m leaving myself overexposed helping you.”

  “So we’re not going to get any official help from your side?”

  Mason kept a straight face. “I’m not here, that file doesn’t exist. You are not receiving any MI6 help.”

  Chase closed the file and put it on her bedside table. If it didn’t exist, she wasn’t stealing it.

  Chase said, “Ashley…,” but her words trailed off. What was there to say? She’d come halfway across the world to make sure Eades was safe, then helped to lead the enemy right to her door and failed to save her. Finding Eades once had been a Hail Mary pass, Chase just happening to know the right person in New York and having an MI6 spy as an ex-girlfriend.

  Mason squeezed Chase’s arm. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think you need to assume she’s gone. If they have her, they’ll be able to get the information they need, and…”

  “Yeah. They’ll have the map. They’ve won.”

  Mason cocked her head. “Map?”

  Hass nodded. “For the Garden of Eden.”

  “Wait, I thought they were after the Fountain of Youth.”

  Chase rolled her eyes like the star of a nineties teen comedy. “That’s so yesterday.”

  Hass held back a smile. “I still don’t see what they want with it. Whether it’s the Fountain of Youth or the Garden of Eden, what’s in it for them?”

  Chase propped herself up on her elbows. Whether it was the concussion or medication, thinking was still coming to her slowly, in fits and starts. “After Adam and Eve were kicked out, the entrance to the garden was guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. I mean, I could believe they thought the sword was worth finding, but I do
n’t think Lauren even knows about the Eden connection. It’s still the Fountain she wants. The water.”

  “The next big thing,” Mason said, echoing her thoughts from their previous conversation. “Owning water, owning minerals, everyone wants in. But could there be something to the legend? Water that makes you young?” She left a beat, time for them to all think the same thing. “We already know some legends turn out to be true.”

  Chase’s nostrils filled with the smell of burning. Her mouth went dry, tasting the ash and debris of the London attack. A city almost destroyed by a legend. A government almost overthrown.

  Hass turned to Mason. “While you’re not helping, could you not help us get to Tanzania?”

  Chase cocked her head, her brain kicking into gear. “Tanzania?”

  Hass paused, milking his big moment for all it was worth. He stooped down beside the bed, and Chase heard him messing around in a bag, the sound of papers being moved. He came back up with large computer printouts, satellite images from Google Earth.

  “I did some work while you were out. We’ve been coming at it wrong. James Gilmore turned up in Ethiopia, so we looked there, and all the mentions of Punt made me think we would be heading to Somalia. But we need to throw out our modern ideas of nations and borders and focus on the landmarks on his map. I don’t know how he found his way to Ethiopia, but I’d guess he was lost and knew to follow the river, like everyone else, and took a wrong turn.”

  “He should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

  Hass paused. He hadn’t gotten the reference. Chase thought about explaining it but waved for him to continue.

  “Gilmore didn’t have Google or satnav. His map isn’t going to be exact, and on foot he would have taken some long routes—it’s all just an impression. And he threw me off at first, because ‘Gateway to Hell’ is a nickname for Erta Ale, in Ethiopia. But if we remember he was an old confused guy and cast the net wider…”

  He held up one map, showing a geographical feature, a winding brown line across a green landscape. “This is in Kenya. It’s the dried-out tributary to a prehistoric lake. The lake is a large plane now. It’s where they set The Lion King.” Hass shared another look with Mason, who smiled at his mention of the film. “When it was still a lake, the water flowed in through this crack in the mountains. It’s called Hell’s Gate.” He held up another sheet, where the image was zoomed out to show a larger area. He traced left, across the map from Hell’s Gate to a body of water. “This is Lake Victoria, on the border between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The Brits named it after the Queen. I don’t know why Gilmore called it a garden, but it’s easy to see it as the Queen’s Lake.” He traced his finger downward and drifted to the right as he went, to a large brown area about an equal distance from both Hell’s Gate and Lake Victoria. “This was mentioned in Henry Morton Stanley’s book, but I didn’t see the connection at the time. The local Chaga people called it the Impossible Mountain, but we know it better now as Kilimanjaro.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  You can’t go to Kilimanjaro.”

  Freema Nkya’s voice had risen to a shout. She paused and looked around the room, seeing that a handful of people had noticed her volume. She and Hass were sitting in the Royale bar, back in Addis Ababa.

  Mason had arranged transportation for them out of Scotland, with fake passports to help keep a low profile, but couldn’t get them into Tanzania. Nothing official had been announced, but flights were being canceled and private charter pilots were being refused permission to fly. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda all seemed to have closed their doors. Chase and Hass had connections in Rwanda and Burundi but didn’t want to take that route. Mason could have used MI6 connections to get them in, but that would have drawn even more attention to her private games.

  Instead, Chase and Hass had gone back to where it all started, a country that was still open for business despite the earthquakes: Ethiopia. Hass had a good connection there, or so he’d thought. Freema’s family were Chaga; they were from the slopes of Kilimanjaro. If anyone could tell them the best way in and fill in blanks in their knowledge, it would be her.

  Hass put a hand up, asking her to quiet down. “I know, we’ve noticed, the door is closed. But we need to get there.”

  Freema sat back in the chair, folded her arms. “We?”

  “Me and Marah Chase.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Knew it.”

  Freema and Chase had both heard a lot about each other over the years. Freema, for her part, didn’t like any of it. She blamed Chase for every bad decision, every injury, every arrest warrant, that Hass had suffered.

  Hass tried again. “It’s important, Free.”

  “What I’m saying is important. You can’t go there. Not now. Wait, please. Go later.”

  Hass leaned forward. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Freema didn’t answer right away. The hesitation was written across her face. She was always so expressive. Hass could tell she was under orders not to reveal the details she was about to give him. “We were wrong,” she said. “The big one I told you about? We were looking at the wrong thing, in the wrong place. All the activity here, the tremors, Erta Ale, they’re all reactions, symptoms of something that’s happening at the other end of the rift.” She paused, staring into his eyes, as if willing him to get the message. “Right under Kilimanjaro.”

  Okay. That was bad. Hass had only shown just enough of an interest in geology and seismology over the years to humor Freema and keep getting laid, but he knew Kilimanjaro was an ancient, and huge, volcano.

  “Eruption?”

  “We think so.”

  “But Kili is dormant?”

  “Was. We’ve known for a long time that there was still lava flowing under the surface. I’m not a volcanologist, I don’t understand half the things they say. It’s like being a student again.” A brief smile cracked through her seriousness. “But our best guess right now, based on the data we have, is that Kilimanjaro is waking up. The lava movement is causing the tremors along the fault line.”

  “Why? Why is it waking up?”

  “Honestly, we don’t know. But it’s not alone. Other volcanoes around the world are getting more active. Fault lines are moving. The Amazon has been on fire for a year. It’s like the whole world is angry…” She paused, catching herself before she started ranting. “So we don’t know yet. We need to move our team, our equipment, and get a better look.”

  “You’re going in?”

  “As soon as we can. But it’s not simple. This team was assembled as a joint operation of the United Nations and the Ethiopian government. There’s red tape, funding to be approved. We’re working with four different governments on this right now, negotiating the next move.”

  “That’s why everything is locked down?”

  Freema leaned in closer again, her voice dropping. “Yes. They’re preparing. Tanzania and Kenya are both ready to issue evacuation orders. But they’re waiting for us to tell them where would be safe to evacuate to. We don’t know how big it might be, if it goes.”

  Hass breathed out, tried for his most relaxed smile. “It’s still an if?”

  “It’s always an if. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. We’re getting very good at educated guesses, but they are guesses. It could be that Kili is just turning over in its sleep, putting us on watch for the future. Or it could blow a little, let off some magma and gas, then subside again. It did that two hundred thousand years ago. One of the peaks blew and collapsed, but life went on. Or…”

  She looked down at the table, tapping the side of her coffee nervously, not wanting to say what was next.

  Hass nudged her along. “That bad?”

  Behind Freema, Hass watched Chase enter the bar. She’d left him to start the ball rolling with his on-off girlfriend while she met with Conte. Now she was ordering a drink, nodding in his direction.

  “Small eruptions are happening all the time, all over the planet. There’s an index. It’s like the Richter sc
ale but for volcanoes, tracked by how large the explosion is. It goes from one to eight, and they tell me the small ones, a one or a two, are happening regularly. We think of Mount St. Helens as a big eruption, but it was only a four. Vesuvius was either a five or a six.”

  “If the scale goes to eight, that means there have been some eights?”

  “Hey.” Chase set down a glass of amber liquid on the table and pulled up a chair. “What’re we talking about? I’m Marah, by the way.”

  She offered her hand for a shake. Freema took it with a smile, not a single sign that she hated Chase’s guts.

  Chase smiled at Hass. “Your girlfriend is a babe. Totally above you.” Then to Freema, lowering her voice as if Hass couldn’t hear, “Want to trade up, make some fun mistakes?”

  Freema smiled again and laughed, totally caught off guard by Chase’s approach. “What did you do to your arm?”

  Chase held up her wrist. She’d cut off the cast they’d set at the hospital, replacing it with sports tape. It wasn’t ideal, and she’d switch back to a real dressing once they were done. But a cast would be visible and memorable; it could be a problem if they needed to sneak past anyone. She also didn’t want to give the enemy too much sign of her injury.

  “I hung off the back of a car,” she said.

  “And a helicopter,” Hass added, before getting back on topic. “Free was explaining volcanic eruptions to me.”

  “Oh, cool.” Chase crossed her arms on the table, leaned forward. “I grew up near Mount Rainier. I love this shit.”

  “Free was telling me that Mount St. Helens was small.”

  Chase shrugged. “Halfway, if I remember?” She looked to Freema for approval, getting a nod. “Like a four on a scale that goes up to eight.”

  Freema’s eyes flashed like she’d finally found a kindred spirit. “Yes, and Vesuvius could have been a five or a six.”

  Chase, who had sipped her drink while Freema was speaking, set down the glass gently. “And the Minoan Eruption, I think I read, was a seven.”