by Sage Walker
“No!” Signy’s voice surprised her. She sounded like a petulant child. “I mean, please, not yet. I want to look around a little.”
“Signy, you won’t find Jared in a broom closet. And you’re about to fall over,” Alan said.
“I am going to bed now.” Anna stood up. “Let me show you to your cabin, Signy.”
“I don’t want to be alone,” Signy said. “I’ll stay with Alan.”
Anna nodded. “I think that would be a good thing for you to do.” She picked up the trays and left.
Signy watched her thread her way through the tables in the quiet room. “I like her,” Signy said.
“Anna? She seems sharp enough,” Alan said.
Pilar’s voice came through Signy’s ear patch. “San-Li Tanaka is on board,” she said.
“Where?” Signy asked.
“Damned if I know,” Pilar said. “No address that we can find.”
“Can you get a picture of her?” Signy asked. “Send it to Alan’s cabin when you do.”
“Looking,” Pilar said. On Signy’s wrist, Pilar’s light went dull. Alan waited for Signy to explain what she’d been muttering to herself about.
“Tanaka’s daughter is here, somewhere,” Signy said.
“Does that mean anything?”
Signy pushed back her chair and stood up. She felt clumsy and very, very slow. “I don’t know.”
* * *
Jared roused from a deep sleep and found himself in the familiar confines of a man-made cave. High above his head, green fabric stretched taut on a pop-up frame. They had pitched the old tent on the banks of the Copper River and gone to bed early; all of them tired after muscling their way past some good stretches of white water. He could hear someone snoring, probably Laughlin, the fat Texan. Laughlin wasn’t a man he could warm up to; but Kihara, quick with his words and wilderness-wise, Kihara he liked.
Jared’s hands were on fire and his face burned. His bladder was achingly full and he was nowhere near the Copper River.
He shoved himself up on his elbows. Three men slept in the tent, dark shapes around a glowing heater. The bandages on Jared’s hands made working a zipper impossible. He shrugged and kicked his way out of the sleeping bag. He crouched on his knees and bit at the bandages on his hands but they wouldn’t come loose. Rucksacks and opened packs lay around the tent, over a rolled-out length of some spongy stuff, an insulating layer. It worked; the tent was steamy. He didn’t see weapons. He didn’t see his battery pack.
Jared could assume that these people had kept him alive for some reason. He could also assume they had trapped him in the water to begin with, or he would be back on the Siranui by now. He had to get outside but he needed a parka for that. Freezing to death wasn’t a good idea.
Jared turned, still kneeling, and found his parka folded at the foot of his rumpled mummy bag. He grabbed the parka between his clumsy fists. It rustled damnably, but the sounds of quiet breathing behind him did not change. Still, he knew before he turned that someone watched him.
One of the sleepers was a woman. She had rolled up on her elbows and she aimed a gun at his middle. The black circle of the barrel looked as large as her head. Jared knew it wasn’t, but damn it, guns pointed directly at a person tended to expand in apparent size.
“Shhh.” The woman mouthed the sound and shook her head in negation.
Jared held up his bandaged hands, patted his crotch, and motioned toward the tent flap. The woman nodded and unzipped the door. No one seemed to wake. Jared got the parka over his shoulders and crawled outside.
He could hear the woman follow him, out onto packed snow, in purple twilight. Jared walked in a straight line away from the tent until he heard her steps slow behind him. If that was as far as she wanted him to go, no problem. Jared felt acutely aware of the woman’s tensions; he tried to read her steps, to know her emotions from her body language in the brief, over the shoulder glimpses he caught while she walked behind him. The limits of the woman’s patience were very important to him.
A glacier hung above the campsite, close, immense. The tent stood on a little island, in a canyon formed by a promontory on one side and the glacier on the other. The flat oval of the beached Zodiac lay on a pebbled beach, dwarfed by the white bones of a whale’s skeleton. Likely a victim of long-gone whalers, the skeleton could have lain there since the 1800s, some part of Jared’s mind told him, since before flensing became an onboard operation and the summer oil factories had gone the way of the dodo.
Jared saw these things while he wondered what he could do with his zipper. He pawed at it, helpless. The woman stepped in front of him and bent her head to inspect his fly. She had olive skin and a hawk nose and long black eyelashes. She was thirtyish and not pretty, Jared noticed, while she got the zipper undone with her cold hands and held him while he pissed. It was a hell of an introduction.
Both her hands were busy, Jared reflected, while between the two of them they got him repacked into his layers of clothing. Both her hands were free; therefore, the gun was inside the tent. Or she had stashed it in her clothes somewhere. That would be stupid, but Jared had learned, over the years, never to underestimate the power of stupidity. The woman started to step away from him. Jared hooked an elbow behind her neck and clamped his other hand over her nose and mouth. His knee slammed into the bend of her knee and they went down together.
She twisted like a cat, but he got his weight stretched out on top of her in a strange parody of a missionary position. Jared kept the woman’s mouth covered with one bandaged hand while he pawed and patted at her, but he could find nothing that felt like a gun. He sat up astride her and pushed the gauzy bandaged wad of his hand up against her nose to extend her neck, forcing the back of her head into the packed snow. He put the heel of his other hand directly on her trachea, and pushed, gently. The woman grabbed at his forearms.
“Don’t scream,” Jared whispered. He pushed at her throat just a little more, for emphasis. “Don’t scream. Reach up, slow now, and undo the bandages on this hand.” He rocked the cartilage of her windpipe back and forth with his left hand, to help her understand. “This hand, okay?”
She blinked rapidly and tried to nod.
The bandages were fastened with clear tape. Jared kept an eye on the silent tent while the woman unwrapped lengths of stretch gauze. Glacier, beach, the sea; they were camped on a small island, somewhere near the continent in the empty, frozen south. The diffuse light gave no directional clues. He saw no seals or penguins. Did that mean anything?
The air struck Jared’s hand, and he examined it. The damage was nasty, an observation that he made with clinical detachment. The skin over the distal phalanx on his left fifth finger had turned dead white. Blisters had formed on the finger pads, but the thumb had been spared.
Jared flexed his hand and watched the woman until she inhaled. He switched hands, and felt the blister on his index finger break as his bare hand clamped across her face.
“Now the other one,” he said.
The sensory functions of his index finger had survived. The texture of her cheek under his exposed raw finger pad felt like acid sandpaper. She got the second bandage off. His right hand appeared to be no more damaged than his left, and the fifth finger wasn’t blistered.
The woman stared up at him, her pupils dilated wide in her brown eyes, and the indelibly imprinted physician inside Jared noted those wide pupils, an effect of catecholamines on the woman’s central nervous system. He could feel a small branch of her facial artery throb at the edge of her jaw. Her pulse rate was nicely elevated.
He might have to kill this woman and he couldn’t quite see himself doing it. Then he remembered a hand on his collar and how he had tried to relax in the water, and how this woman, this woman, had forced him under again. Bitch.
Jared reached up and put the heel of his free hand on the woman’s forehead, so that his fingers rested over her eyes. Just beneath the ridge of her eyebrows, his tender fingers sought the notches where t
iny nerve bundles curved upward to send sensory branches across the forehead. Jared put pressure there. The woman tried to push the back of her head deeper into the snow. Fine.
Jared stretched out on top of her, carefully, pushing his legs between hers and letting his weight settle against her chest. Her arms pounded at his sides and her heels kicked at his thighs. These motions were a minor annoyance. Jared let go of her throat and covered her mouth with his. His damaged lip cracked when he opened his mouth and clamped it on hers. It hurt.
Jared grabbed the wad of soiled gauze and shook loose a free end. When the gag was in place, he checked the knots with a certain degree of satisfaction and gently wiped a smear of his blood away from the woman’s temple.
“We will get up now,” Jared said. “We will walk close together, like lovers.” He kept his voice low, but it shook with rage. He took a deep breath. Rage would not serve him well, just now. He spoke with his mouth close to her ear. “We will go down to the beach. We will take the Zodiac. Yes, you can try to make noise when we are working with the boat, because I plan to let you loose then. I will stay close to you. You can hope that your friends can wake, get out of the tent, and kill me before I kill you, if you hit something or drop anything. You can hope that, but you will be wrong. You see, I will kill you if you make noise. I will kill you if you run. I will kill you if you do anything that alarms me in any way. I would very much like for one of these things to happen. Do you understand me?”
The woman kept her dilated eyes on him and nodded.
Jared rolled off of her and they struggled to their feet. He twisted her arms up behind her and held them there. He kept the pace slow, because they were clumsy, walking together like this. Even if he didn’t kill her, he planned to let her feel that icy water, at least once. He hoped the Zodiac’s motor held gas. He hoped it was equipped with emergency flares, or a radio, or some such.
They walked down toward the beach, circling away from the tent, their steps bringing up soft whispers from the summer snow.
TWENTY-ONE
There were two bunks in Alan’s cabin, stacked atop each other, their fittings made of a reddish wood glazed with many coats of varnish. Lying down would feel so good. But the console pulled at Signy’s attention. She sat down in front of it.
Alan sighed and stretched out on the lower bunk.
Pilar had sent no pictures of the Tanaka heiress.
Signy called Seattle, called Pilar. Pilar answered slowly, distracted by some conversation she was having with Jimmy.
“You’re too spaced to do much good there,” Alan said.
Signy heard the bunk creak behind her. She ignored Alan and spoke to the console. “Where’s San-Li’s picture?” Signy asked.
“Girl, there aren’t any to be found,” Pilar said. “Jimmy hacked some medical records from somewhere while you were stuffing your face. Prescription records. San-Li’s on chronic doses of human growth hormone. Maybe she’s a dwarf or something; I dunno.”
“That’s rare as hen’s feathers,” Signy grumbled. She found herself yawning. “I mean teeth.”
“Will you get the hell off-line? You’re too tired to make sense,” Pilar said.
“I want to talk to Paul.”
Paul appeared on the little flatscreen, a haggard Paul with a frown. “No, you don’t,” Paul said. “Goodnight, Signy.”
Paul’s face vanished.
“Wait!”
The console refused to give her pictures of anything. Voice only, Paul said, “We’re watching. We’re guarding both of you, in our limited fashion. Someone’s going to baby-sit your terminal all night, okay? We’ll hear you if you so much as fart, darling. But enough’s enough. Get some rest.”
Alan reached down over her shoulders and lifted Signy’s hands away from the keyboard. “I’ll keep her in reach,” he told Paul.
“Don’t!” Signy jerked her hands away from Alan’s grip. Alan had been on the boat with Jared. Alan might have arranged the accident; he could have called the kidnappers to the Kasumi. Signy was afraid of him. Go to Anna? She didn’t know Anna. Anna had left Jared on the Kasumi. Maybe Anna was involved.
“Don’t what?” Alan let her push his hands away.
“I—”
“You’re afraid of me.”
“Yes.”
“You need to trust somebody. You don’t know if I’m the right person to trust. We have a business agreement, remember? If you knew me better, you’d know that means something. And what I haven’t told you is that I need to come back with business for Gulf Coast. Gulf Coast is having just a few problems these days. I’m old. I bring some bacon home, or I take an early retirement.”
“And you don’t want to do that.”
“No way,” Alan said.
That made sense. Nothing else much did, as tired as she was.
Alan turned away from her and pulled a terry robe out of a cabinet. “Now that we’ve got that straight, you get first dibs on the shower. Then we’re going to bed. Paul, is that all right with you?” Alan asked the blank screen.
“Oh, yes,” Paul said.
“Okay,” Signy said. “Okay, okay. I’m going.”
She emerged from the steamy shower to find Alan sitting on the bunk, his hands held together between his knees.
“It was a good night, back in Houston,” he said. “Signy, I haven’t forgotten it.”
“Neither have I.”
He got up and headed for the shower. “I’ll take the top bunk.”
“Nope. I need something warm to hang on to. If you don’t mind being crowded.”
“I don’t mind,” Alan said.
* * *
Wavelets lapped at the shore. Brash ice and small bergs slid down the little channel, riding a current toward a looming wall of ice and vanishing around it toward territory unknown. Twilight dulled the shadows of the glacier, of the shore, of the bergs slipping their way through black water. The camp sheltered between giant walls of ice that seemed designed to produce echoes. Clouds rolled past the narrow wedge of sky between the glacier wall and the ice cliff that jutted into the sea. The clouds rode high and fast. There seemed to be little chance of the Antarctic fogs that were said to rise at a moment’s notice. The islet seemed to be in a strait, or perhaps in the twisting recesses of a canyon that might dead-end at some unexpected cul-de-sac.
The tent’s small dome looked tiny, scaled next to the amazing wall of glacier, but Jared found it difficult to tear his eyes away from it. The zippered closure of the tent remained motionless, but he imagined someone inside, rousing now with the sleepy awareness that the woman and her prisoner had been gone too long.
Salt-soaked pebbles crunched under their feet as they left the snow. Jared pressed his lips together at the noise. The Zodiac was beached well above the high-tide mark, and it contained tarp-wrapped bundles that looked heavy. Three oars lay loose in it, short stubby ones that were never meant to get the craft any great distance. The apparent weight of the bundles convinced him that two people wouldn’t be able to lift the boat off the noisy rocks and carry it into the water. Jared pushed the woman toward one side of the Zodiac and grabbed the other. He heaved, and the friction of the thing, sliding across the scruff of the little beach, made a racket that scared the hell out of him. So he pushed harder, and as the Zodiac began to lift into the silent water, he realized that the noise of the pebbles was scarcely louder than that of his own breathing. Jared motioned the woman into the boat and clambered inside as it came free of the shore.
He stood facing the shore and poled the boat with one of the oars until the shore fell away and he couldn’t reach bottom. He motioned toward the two remaining oars. The woman, her eyes dark wounds in the half-light, fastened the oars to the oarlocks and began to back away from shore with strong, sure strokes. The boat turned broadside into an incoming wavelet and Jared ruddered the damned thing around to follow the berg’s path in the unseen current. He stepped toward the stern and pushed the woman away from the seat, grabbing the o
ars from her so he could row and keep an eye on the tent. She crouched near his feet and stared up at him. Her nostrils flared as she fought for breath against the gag. The veins on her throat bulged with her exertions, but she wasn’t retching. He would have to get her gag off if she did, or she could aspirate, strangle on her own stomach juices. Aware that he needed her alive, not dead, Jared accepted that he had never wanted to kill her in the first place.
The tent, even at this slight distance, seemed much smaller than before. Jared’s shoulders and back delighted in the pull against the oars, the solid feel of them against his burning hands. The smears of blood his hands left on the shafts seemed to help his grip, and he didn’t take time to fish in his jacket for his gloves.
The woman shifted her knees and got them beneath her. Her hand began to move toward the gag on her face. Jared kicked at her without breaking his stroke at the oars, and she let her hands fall into her lap. She twisted her head so she could see the tent.
Again, and again, Jared drove the oars against the inertia of the heavy water, aiming for a smallish floe about a hundred meters offshore, wanting to get it between their silhouette and the tent. Brash ice brushed against the Zodiac and parted before it. In this sea, they would not die of thirst, not with this much fresh water floating in chunks beside them. Not of thirst. Hypothermia and starvation would be sufficient to do them in. Jared glanced behind him at the floe, which seemed to be farther away than he’d thought at first.
When he looked back, the mouth of the tent was open. Puffs of fog swirled from the black opening, the tent breathing its trapped heat into the cold air.
He pulled again, watching the two parkaed men crawl from the tent, watching them look about to where the Zodiac no longer lay.
He pulled again. The taller man scuttled back into the tent and the shorter one squatted beside the opening.
He pulled again. A hand clutching a rifle emerged from the tent mouth. Damn, not a hand gun. The rifle carried a bulky telescopic sight. Infrared? Probably.
