Neil tried the Enter key a few times and agreed: “Yup. This thing’s dead. I wonder why they bothered. Did you scan all the photos?” She shrugged and nodded which he took for a yes. He scrambled beneath her desk where the tower sat. “Okay. Maybe we can remove the hard drive and put it in a different computer…did you see the mess down here? Oh, they wrecked it all.” He came up holding little bits of computer innards. “I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. Jillybean has the only other working computer on the island and hers is always locked.”
“So, this is a dead end?” Deanna asked. They both nodded. She stood and paced, eyeing the single filing cabinet. “And all the files involved with this case are gone? But they left the rest. Hmmm.”
Deberha sighed. “It was the only case I ever really worked.” She pointed at the open cabinet to a single half-filled drawer. “Most of those weren’t even real cases. Remember when Travis shot his Mr. Chu? He admitted the whole thing. I took his statement and some pictures of the scene just so people would think I was doing something productive, you know?”
“It’s not all bad news,” Deanna said. “I must be getting close. Something in the files and something at Gina’s house gave away the killer.”
“I’ve been over those files a hundred times,” Deberha replied. “There’s nothing in them…but maybe the killer thinks there is. You ever think about that? The fingerprint!” Deberha was up in a flash and rushing down the hall to the evidence room, pulling keys as she went, only to stop short as her foot kicked a doorknob and sent it bouncing away. It had been smashed off by a sledgehammer.
The three stared in at the room; it had been torn apart. Shelves had been thrown down and the floor was littered with a bizarre mishmash of items. “I give up,” Deberha said and turned away.
Deanna tried to stop her. “You can’t give…” A distant bell began tolling. Her heart skipped a beat at the sound. It was one of the bells on the wall and it could only mean that the Corsairs were coming. Before she knew it, Deanna was out in the morning light and racing for the wall, yelling, “Where are they? Where?”
At sunrise the island had seemed almost completely empty; now there was an unbelievable surge of people rushing at the wall along with Deanna. Many were wild-eyed teens, or huffing, nervous older adults, but mixed in with them were a flood of little kids.
“Get these children off the wall!” she barked. The order was somewhat generalized and Neil took it upon himself to follow it, nearly causing a panic in the process.
“Zombie!” one child screeched at the top of her lungs, pointing at Neil’s grey face. Screams erupted all around him as children fled in every direction.
“It’s still me,” Neil said, holding his deformed hands out and attempting to smile. “I’m only a little bit of a zombie.” Someone threw a rock at him. “That’s not very nice. I know that was you, Sammy!”
Deanna grabbed him and pulled him along as she mounted the wall. “Forget them. Someone get me a pair of binoculars.” They almost weren’t needed. Black ships were flooding into the Sound from five directions. The thirty that had already been lurking in the many canals and inlets came out to greet the larger fleet. Altogether there were eighty-six ships and they were positively crammed with men.
The two hundred people on the wall stood in awed silence, each counting or doing simple multiplication. Most of them came up with a number that didn’t seem so terrible: seventeen hundred men.
“I thought it would be more,” Andrea Cleary said, sounding relieved.
“You’re assuming that more haven’t been marching over land,” Deberha said. “Remember what that Guardian said about the mountain bandits? They were chased all the way from Hoquiam. Maybe…maybe we should leave the island. You know, before they have a chance to attack. We can use the…”
Deanna slapped her hand down on the top of the wall. “No! We will not give up the island. But I will not stop anyone who wants to be a slave from going out there and giving up. You can start swimming right now, Deberha.” When she didn’t answer, Deanna walked down the length of the wall, watching the ships and holding herself against the chill of the wind.
The Corsairs took their time. Each filed past the big two-master that led the fleet. It flew an immense black flag that was so large that only the heavier gusts of wind could lift it. The ships dawdled, or so it seemed to the people on the wall, many of whom left to find someplace warm. After the first frightening thrill, there was little to see. As they went south, the fleet kept far out toward the Seattle side of the Sound and, as they did, the small crowd on the wall shuffled along, keeping pace.
Just before noon, the ships swung west and headed for the little city of Manchester, Washington, which sat a mile or so across from the island, just out of reach of their rifles. Two at a time, the ships unloaded their soldiers until there was a great mass of men milling about. A few fires were lit and it was thought that this was where they were going to make camp, but then they formed up into companies and set off, disappearing as they headed due west—toward Gorst.
“The spy!” Deanna hissed as she ran for the stairs, afraid that her little army would find themselves trapped. The spy was leading the Corsairs right to Gorst. She sped for the southwest edge of the island, a place called Point White where she had the best chance to reach Emily by the handheld radio she carried.
After a mile sprint, she was sucking wind as she climbed the steps of a lighthouse that erupted from the highest hill on that part of the island. By the time she got to the top, she was so exhausted that for a minute she couldn’t find the breath to speak. Finally, just as Deberha, Neil and most of the council caught up, she gasped into the radio, “They…they’re…coming! Emily? Hello? Emily?”
“Who is this?” Emily’s voice came crackling over the airways. “Mom, is that you? I can barely hear you.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Deanna yelled into the radio. “The Corsairs are heading for Gorst! Do you copy that? They’re going to Gorst right now.”
There was a loud, harsh crackle that made Deanna lean away from the radio, then Emily came back on. She was laughing, making the static rise and fall. “Gunner knew it. We’re not in Gorst. We’re hiding in the hills right above this highway. It’s sixteen, I think. It goes to Gorst and we’re planning an ambush. What was that? Hey, Gunner says I have to get off the radio. He says it’s for emergency only. Bye Mom. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Emily? Emily?” She glanced at Neil. “Do you think she heard me?”
“Oh sure. And I wouldn’t worry too much about this Gorst business. I’m sure Gunner will think of something.”
Deanna patted his arm. “He already did. He’s setting up a trap. Does anyone know how far it is to Gorst by land?” Rosanna Landeros thought it was ten miles while Karen Hentz and Andrea thought it was closer to six. “Okay, they could be there in a couple of hours if they hurry, but will the Black Captain hurry?”
No one knew and the six of them tromped off to the Governor’s mansion to stare at a map of Puget Sound. Gorst was so small that it wasn’t even listed.
“I’d swing around here if I were the Corsairs,” Jonathan Dunnam said, tracing a route around the very hills Gunner had his men hidden in.
“Not if you’re not expecting an ambush,” Karen put in. “Otherwise you’d go the straight route.” This set off an argument by a bunch of armchair generals. Deanna and Neil kept out of it. She worried over her daughter while he took his fears out on a plate of sandwiches.
Eventually, after an hour had been wasted, Deanna called an end to the little session and sent everyone but Neil away. “I don’t know how you can eat; my stomach is in knots. As long as that spy is out there we don’t stand a chance. I say we go back to the police station and look again.”
Neil was all for the idea, especially after Deanna said he could take his sandwiches with him. They crossed the island and twice they passed a tree that had “the” letter still attached to it. Deanna pulled them down and reread the accusations ag
ainst her printed on them.
“That took some guts to put these up,” she said. “We’re right out in the open. What if someone saw, you know?” Neil mumbled something around the sandwich. “Yeah, I guess it was dark. And she is one of us. She’s someone no one would expect, which is every one. No one’s a suspect.” No matter how hard she tried, Deanna couldn’t picture a single person who could do all the horrible things that the spy had done. She still couldn’t believe Joslyn, Gina and Eddie had been a party to murder or to any of it.
The station was empty and Deanna took Deberha’s seat and placed the two pieces of paper in front of her—it was all the evidence left to them. She pored over the letter. She read it backward and forward. She took apart sentences and studied individual words. She held them up to the light, and even studied the font, and all the while knew that if Jillybean was there, she would have undoubtedly figured out who the spy was ages ago.
Neil held out for nearly an hour of this before he fell asleep in the chair against the wall. Deanna didn’t blame him. The day had been long, stressful and completely dull.
“I wish Jillybean was here. She would glance at the paper, give me that look of hers, as if she’s embarrassed for me and…” A very distant rattle of gunfire broke in on her thoughts. “Neil, wake up.”
“I was awake. Hey, what’s that sound? That’s gunfire.” She was already through the door and was quickly outside standing in the grass with her head cocked to one side, listening to an uncountable number of guns. It was a fully fledged battle that had sprung out of nowhere.
Neil began heading for the lighthouse, but Deanna stopped him. “Gunner will be too busy. We have to let it play out.” While the island erupted in useless energy and activity, she displayed a tremendous amount of self-control as she calmly went back inside, collected the two pieces of paper and strolled to the lighthouse. There was a crowd in the building and more people were along the wall, standing on tiptoe in the hope of seeing anything at all.
Deanna let Neil part the crowd, which he did simply by saying, “Excuse me.” People shrank away from his diseased flesh and quickly left the building. At the top was the same small glass-walled room; now it was crammed with thirty people. It emptied in seconds and the two were left alone to wait for the battle to end. From Deanna’s perspective, it was a long battle, made even longer since they could see nothing of it, so their focus remained fixed on the little plastic radio that sat mutely against the glass. The gunfire roared for an hour.
Three times someone came up the stairs to ask for an update, receiving only a shrug from Neil in answer. By the sound of the gunfire alone it was impossible to tell who was winning.
Eventually, the fire petered out a bit, picked up in a brief ten-minute flare before it died away.
“I’m going to try the radio,” she said. For her, it had grown into something of a religious talisman. She approached it slowly, touched it reverentially and spoke into it softly. “Emily, come in, Emily. This is…” She suddenly remembered the proper radio procedure. “Grey, this is Black, come in.” The radio cared nothing for procedure, and only emitted angry static.
Neil and Deanna stared at it for a few seconds. “Try again,” he urged. “Maybe they had it off or changed to a different station.”
“Yeah,” Deanna said, doing her best to hold back the tears that kept filling her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she tried again, and again and again for the next hour as the sun went down. Finally, the batteries died and the life went out of the radio. “I should say something to the people.”
There wasn’t really much she could say. She gave a quick rah-rah speech, using words like determined, vigilant and brave a number of times. To her they felt completely disingenuous since she thought she was on the verge of falling to pieces right in front of them. Somehow, she held it together long enough to make sure that the watches were set for the night and that everyone would be on full alert.
Then she and Neil walked away, alone.
“You know what happened, don’t you?” Neil asked.
She knew. The spy had warned the Corsairs of the ambush. “So, who is it? Roseanne, Karen, Andrea or Deberha?” They had been the only women in the lighthouse when Emily had told them about the ambush.
“Hold on. It could be someone with the army,” Neil replied. “That’s almost a thousand women.”
Deanna shook her head. “It’s not one of them. I’m seeing it now. The killer disguised her voice when she spoke to me. That means it’s someone I deal with frequently. And being on the council is the perfect…I don’t know the right word. Disguise? She could come and go all over the island and no one would think twice about it.”
Neil thought it over. “That makes sense, I guess. So, how do we catch her? Do we just try to arrest all four? Oh, wait. We can feed different disinformation to each one. You know, we can tell Roseanne that the army is going to Belair and we can tell Andrea they’re coming back here. Then we’ll know who it is by which way the Corsairs go.”
“That could work,” she said, lowering her voice in case the spy was lurking out in the night. “I need a map.” The pair hurried to the council chambers in the New Peking Panda and stared at the map—the once useless map that had been ignored for a decade. Right away, Deanna discovered a flaw in her plan: she didn’t know anything about what constituted a smart military maneuver. Or even an average one.
“If we say they’re going somewhere where no one would go, the Corsairs might smell a rat. Should we also come up with a reason for a move?”
Neil had only been pretending to study the map. He was too embarrassed to admit that his worm-eaten mind couldn’t make heads or tails of the colors and the squiggly lines. “Yes, that sounds right. I just don’t know…”
Deanna elbowed him and he looked up to see Deberha standing half-in the door. At first, he didn’t know why Deanna was so stiff. Then it came to him and he almost spat out an accusation. Instead, he narrowed his yellowed eyes and said, “Yes?”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you guys but we can’t find Karen. She’s supposed to be the officer in charge of the east wall tonight, but she didn’t show and she’s not at home, or at church or anywhere. I have a couple of teams looking for her. Everyone’s saying that maybe the spy got her.”
“Or she is the spy,” Neil suggested. “So far she hasn’t been shy about hiding bodies. Why start with Karen? We all know what kind of panic would occur if someone found her body.”
Deanna agreed. “She must have known her time as a spy couldn’t last. We’ll keep the searchers going just in case, but I think we should go inspect her house.” She grabbed her coat, and had to take a moment as relief flooded through her. They wouldn’t find a body; Karen was a creature of habit. Unless council business took her from her house, she was always either working her little plot of land or at church.
A rueful laugh escaped her. “Was going to church a cover? If so, it was brilliant. I’m just surprised that she didn’t come after me before she took off.” She slid her coat on just as a bell began to ring—clang, clang, clang—someone was beating it urgently. More bells began to ring, making the air vibrate in fear.
“I’ll go check it out,” Neil said and dashed out of the room.
“Maybe it’s our guys coming back,” Deberha suggested.
Ours guys? It was a ludicrous thought. “Our guys” would have sent a runner ahead with the white and red flag letting the defenders on the walls know they were coming so the bells wouldn’t be rung. Deanna stared at Deberha and was struck by a sudden blinding flash of insight. Her mouth fell open. “The spy did come for me, didn’t she?”
Deberha nodded gravely. “I’m afraid she did.” In her hand was a black gun. “What gave me away?”
Deanna felt her stomach squirreling in circles in the exact spot the gun was pointed at. She felt the greatest desire to take a large step to her right. “I want to say that I just knew but that would be wrong. A lot of little things have been piling up. I think what was
nagging at me was the picture of Eddie’s little boy that you used to blackmail him into kidnapping Emily. There wasn’t anything on it that gave you away. It was what the picture was on. It was on the same sort of paper as the evidence photos. You see? It’s the little things, like how you acted like you knew next to nothing about computers and yet you and Jillybean were the only people who ever really used them. And the letter you had printed…damn I should have seen that.”
“Yeah, having the only printer on the island was pretty obvious,” Deberha said. “I thought you would have figured things out from that. Not that it would have done you any good, I was ready with an alibi just in case. Either way, it’s too bad for you that your epiphany came a little too late.”
She started to raise the gun when Neil came rushing in. “It’s the Corsairs. They must have turned the tables on Grey. And now they’re setting something up…” He jerked a little, just realizing that something was going on. He turned and gazed placidly on the gun without a trace of fear. “Am I missing something?”
“Yes,” Deanna told him. “An assassination.”
Deberha locked eyes with Deanna over the gun. “I hope you know there’s no hard feelings, Dee,” she said and fired twice.
Chapter 25
The Marin Headlands, San Francisco
The back side of the hill was a mere thirty yards away. It was thirty yards of barren rock covered by loose sand, some patchy weeds and two dozen bodies.
Down the front side of the hill were a thousand Corsairs, half were shrouded in smoke, which left five hundred, each with a weapon trained on the little built-up berm of dirt where Mike Gunter and four others huddled. The call to “Take as many as you can with you!” had been met with contorted looks of outright terror.
“Come on!” Mike cried, his voice almost lost under the thunder of gunfire. He jumped up, pulling his trigger as fast as he could. There was no time to aim and in the brief couple of seconds he was exposed, two dozen bullets ripped all around him. Although he wasn’t hit, his M4 was smacked twice. The first round skipped off the forward sight with a high whining noise that reminded Mike of a tuning fork. The second bullet struck the upper receiver an inch from his cheek, making an awful tin clank sound and sent a sharp vibration through the weapon and up into his face.
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 29
