The Englishman laughed. “Oh, no, my peasant friend. Our arrangement does not earn you that.”
In the night, they’d returned to the area next to Vivas, on a plateau overlooking it. But they hadn’t entered, despite the Englishman contacting his colleagues. The passages underground had been re-opened. Just a scratch, that’s all the attack had been, the Englishman said, with some civilian casualties on the surface. His men had erected a camp on the ice, and made their meeting space a ten-by-ten makeshift structure.
“I am not here to earn your table scraps,” Salman spat back. “But the extremists that attacked Vivas, are they not in the hills?”
The Englishman laughed again. He turned the knife around and slammed its point into the wooden table between them. “You can’t believe everything you hear on the radio, can you?”
He flipped his blond hair back with one hand.
“I think our broadcast, the one saying we had Jessica Rollins, was what got us in trouble. I believe there are warring factions within Sanctuary. Someone wants her dead. And wants this.” He used the knife to poke the collection of CDs and tapes spread out on the table, next to the laptop they’d stolen from Jessica.
“The girl is dead.”
“I know she’s dead!” The Englishman got halfway up out of his seat, spit erupting as he yelled, his face mottling red. He pointed the knife at Salman. “You got her to give you…what? A bag of medical supplies? And then drowned her?”
“She fell in. An accident.” Rita, standing guard behind him, tensed and took a step forward.
The Englishman held up his hands, easing her back. “My man says you shot the ice.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“If someone in Sanctuary wanted her dead, then equally, ergo, there is someone in there who wants her alive. I am an equal opportunist, if nothing else. We still do not know to which faction we need to ingratiate ourselves.”
“Why do you care?” Salman grunted. “You have Vivas. Why not hide there, leave this to me?”
“You think I do not want to get back inside Vivas? Have a hot bath? I want to get inside Sanctuary. If they are warring, something must be wrong.”
“These Jovians?” The Englishman had explained how his experts predicted the swarms of asteroids, how the Earth wasn’t finished getting its ass kicked yet.
He put his blade down. “I’ve heard that the Sanctuaries will open their doors after one year, to begin the process of rebuilding civilization. But I fear this may not be the case.”
“How long can Vivas survive?”
“A year, perhaps two…”
“So you need them.”
“Perhaps I should leave you out here. We’ve run simulations of the Collapse, you know.” His smile was thin. “It is already starting, somewhere, out there. Ravenous humans, eating the only source of protein left—other humans. Did you know that human biomass exceeds that of any other living organism on the planet, pre-Nomad, even arctic krill? We were eating the planet, and now we consume ourselves, instead. A certain poetic justice, no?”
He wasn’t really waiting for an answer from Salman, and the Italian didn’t share his sense of humor.
“Now we gamble,” the Englishman continued. “Activate the beacon. Tell them that we have Dr. Rollins’s data. Lie, and say we have the girl, and that we need access to Sanctuary.”
“What if they refuse?”
“They know I have the resources to copy and distribute the data. But we cannot broadcast. We need to speak to whomever Roger was supposed to talk to on the other end of that device. Make sure it is not in broadcast mode, you understand?”
Salman held his hand out. Rita deposited a slab of black plastic, emblazoned with a white yin yang symbol. Roger’s emergency beacon.
“How quaint,” said the Englishman, “to use the yin yang as a secret symbol. Do you not see it?”
The Italian’s face remained blank.
“The two small dots, they represent the two black holes of Nomad, circling each other in tight orbits, the lines radiating away outside of this are the gravitational waves. It’s not a yin yang symbol. It’s a graphical image of Nomad itself. Didn’t make that connection, did you, my little peasant?”
Salman’s face creased, the veins in his neck flaring out. “If you insult me one more—”
“You are in no position to make demands.”
“Only I know the code to turn it on.”
“A gift from your man, the one that you abandoned. Anyway, yes, yes,”—he flicked his fingers—“get on with it. Begin the gamble.”
The red faded from Salman’s face, but the angry creases remained.
Hunching his body away from the Englishman, he hid the beacon as best he could, and flipped up the cover. He keyed in the number sequence, as Roger had shown him, back at the castle when he’d activated it briefly, and spoken to someone on the other end. But the beacon’s light didn’t activate, the glowing blue that signaled it was on. He tried again, but it didn’t work. Nothing happened.
Salman held it in the air. “It’s not working.”
The Englishman leaned over the table. He took the beacon and turned it over, inspecting it. “Why in God’s name didn’t you retrieve your man?”
“Because he was not needed.”
“Do you see this?” The Englishman pointed at the beacon’s main button. “That is a biometric device. I am quite sure it samples DNA and takes a fingerprint. We need Roger to activate this goddamn thing.”
Salman gritted his teeth. “If he’s still alive.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Why would he be?”
Roger’s face puckered crimson red. “Let me go!” he screamed.
“Why are they coming back?” Jess asked again.
“Let me go, and I’ll tell you,” he whimpered.
Still hog-tied to the strut of the Cessna, his arms and feet were bound behind his back. More than twenty-four hours now. It had to be excruciating. The cut in his left shoulder had opened up again, as had the knife wound through his hand. His face was covered in scabby lesions. He was a mess.
“How about a trade?”
His glassy eyes circled around, unfocused, his head bobbed unsteadily. “Let me go. They want you, Jess. I was trying to protect you. I still can.” A muted hysterical laugh burbled up from his chest. “It’s our only chance. I saw the post-collapse simulations. Do you know what’s coming?”
She ignored him. “Morphine.”
“What?” His fish-flopping head straightened up, his bloodshot eyes meeting hers. His pupils focused.
“Jessica. No. Absolutely no.” Giovanni’s voice echoed from across the hangar.
He’d emptied the Range Rover, and opened the boxes, to spread their remaining supplies and tools out on the concrete floor. Hector helped him. Massarra had already retrieved one of the Vivas snowmobiles to drag up the body of Abdullah-shah, so Raffa was outside inspecting its mechanics. Lucca went down to the waterfront, by himself, to get the other one. Jess had complained that it was dangerous for him to go alone, but Giovanni insisted, said they needed to get out of here as quickly as possible.
She didn’t argue.
Jess hobbled across the hangar floor. Her prosthetic leg was coming apart. Her stump bled into the harness when she moved around too much. It was excruciating, and, she feared, infected. But there was no time for that. She gritted her teeth and retrieved the medical pack Giovanni was putting together, from what they had left.
But it wasn’t for her.
“Just kill him.” Giovanni reached to take the medical pack out of her hands. His face had broken out in angry red sores as well.
She wrenched the med pack free and pulled out a vial of morphine.
The Italian relented, seeing it was no use arguing.
“You tell me something, I give you something,” she said in a singsong voice, turning to face Roger. She dangled the vial between her fingers, and did her best to saunter back across the concrete, forci
ng a facade of confidence to cover the lancing pain in her leg.
Roger’s eyes hungrily following the vial in Jess’s hand.
“They need my fingerprints and my DNA to activate the beacon. The code alone won’t work.”
“So you gave them the code?” She popped the cap off the syringe she’d taken, and inserted the needle into the vial of morphine.
“Give me some.”
“Tell me about the code.”
He shook his head in shivering gasps. “You first.”
She gripped his arm. “Hold still.” She didn’t need to cut off circulation to get his veins to surface. He was already straining. She slid the hypodermic in, and squeezed the plunger a quarter inch.
Roger groaned in pleasure.
“Tell me about the code.”
“Six, six, four, two, eight, one…”
“Like a dial pad?”
He nodded. “More.”
“And you activated it before? Back at the castle?”
He nodded again, this time more emphatically. “But I didn’t talk to anyone. I turned it off. I just needed to show them.”
“And who does it call?”
“More!”
Jess squeezed another quarter inch of the plunger. “Who does it call?”
“Set to channel one, that’s all I know. Maxim. The head of security.”
“What about the other channels?”
He shrugged limply, his eyes drooping shut. He perked up. “The last channel is broadcast. All frequencies, wide spectrum, unencrypted.”
“Anything else? I’ve got a full dose for you, but I need to know everything.”
“My ring.” He held up his hand, showing her the signet with the yin yang symbol. “It’s a locater. In case we lose the beacon.”
“How does it work?” Jess whispered, putting her cheek next to his.
“A mechanism in it taps against my finger. The stronger the tap, the closer the beacon. Works up to ten miles away. Top of my finger, means in front. Bottom, behind. Then left and right. Simple. Give me more.”
“Is the ring tapping, right now?”
“No. More.”
“It’s not tapping?”
“No.”
She squeezed the last of it into his vein. He shuddered in pleasure.
“How does the beacon work? Can Sanctuary find them? How do they locate them?”
“Hard…hard to…” The junkie moaned, but he didn’t finish his sentence.
“Roger! Wake up.” She shook him, but his eyes didn’t even flutter.
An engine whined outside. A snowmobile. Jess tensed, but realized it had to be Lucca. Her heart hammering in her chest, she grabbed Roger’s hand and pulled the signet ring off. She put it onto her own finger.
“Nothing,” she said to Giovanni, who’d stopped to listen.
No tapping.
The beacon wasn’t anywhere close, but that didn’t mean that their enemies weren’t on their way.
“You could just fill up another of those syringes and finish it,” Giovanni suggested.
Jess didn’t reply. She watched Massarra, sitting cross-legged on the floor near Hector. Her implacable calm was in stark contrast to the whimpering mess that Roger had become. Maybe it was because he was painfully tied up, but Jess doubted it. She imagined Massarra would bear almost any pain with dignity. She’d even offered to take Roger’s life herself, sensing Jess couldn’t bring herself to do it. Jess didn’t need to be a mind reader to know it was something Massarra had wanted to do for a long time.
And Massarra knew her life endangered Jess’s.
She understood that letting her live created risk for Jess. But she didn’t leave. She said she put her life in Jess’s hands, that if she wanted to kill her, then this was God’s will. More than anything else, she wanted to enact revenge, get into Sanctuary and hunt down whoever started them on this path.
Jess just wanted to run.
“We’ll have to cut off his fingers,” Giovanni said, pulling Jess out of her daydream. “Or burn the body, that might be easier. We can’t leave his DNA around.”
Jess started to shake her head, but then nodded. “We burn the bodies.”
Raffa strained to pull the corpse, wrapped in bloodied blankets, across the concrete floor. This hangar was empty. Jess was ready to burn down the one with the Cessna in it, but Giovanni said to use the one a hundred yards away. No sense in burning down a perfectly good aircraft, he reasoned, when all they needed to do was torch the bodies. With a grunt, Raffa hauled the body next to the other bloodied corpse in the middle of the concrete. Sweat poured from his face, spotted pink from the effort.
“Good work.” Jess patted him on the back. “Now go back, help load the sleds.”
The teenager, his face already gaunt, smiled and turned to jog out of the hangar.
Leaving Jess alone.
She opened the canister of fuel and soaked the rags and blankets covering the dead bodies. Half of it splashed back onto her. She cursed her clumsiness and did her best to empty the remainder, soaking a rolled-up newspaper with the last of it. Stepping back, she pulled a lighter from her pocket. She clicked it on.
“Ah, God…” Should she say a few words? There was nobody else here. “Please take these souls at your mercy,” she whispered, lighting the gas-sodden newspaper. Flames licked to life around it.
And it felt like something needled her.
She looked at the burning newspaper. Was it prickling her somehow?
No. It was her finger.
The ring.
Roger’s ring.
Tap…tap…tap.
Blood drained from her face, a tight fist of fear knotting her stomach. “Shit.”
She threw the burning paper onto the rag-covered corpses and a blue-yellow flamed whooshed across the floor, sucking the air from her lungs.
“They’re coming,” she said aloud, more to herself than anyone who was nearby. She hopped to the door as the flames burst into the air, rushing against the roof fabric of the hangar.
Pain exploded in her stump.
She reached the doorway and waved her arms over her head.
“They’re coming!” she screeched, this time with every ounce of air in her lungs.
25
AIR HORN BLASTS from the tugboats bayed in the distance. Through a cascade of hanging vines and blooming begonias, the boats were visible on the bloated gray waters of the Mississippi, busy bees pushing towering ocean-going container ships into port. Ufuk Erdogmus adjusted himself on the wrought-iron chair and checked his watch, then looked at the Café du Monde menu.
“An espresso, please,” he said to the waiter.
“Of course.” The young man, clear eyed with blond hair and slight of figure, took back the menu and smiled curtly.
Ufuk watched him weave his way through the crowd of patrons and past the line of customers waiting to get in. Even heaven must need good waiters, he mused, but this help staff knew their lives depended on the good graces of the powers that be.
In this world, heaven existed below ground, whereas hell was up above. Checking his watch again, he returned to staring at the ships in the distance. A projection—an illusion—but a convincing one, if you suspended disbelief. A breeze carried in the scent of salt water. Also manufactured, although the sweet fragrance of the begonias was real.
The illusion of space was critical to maintaining the sanity of the thousands of inhabitants crowded together. Escape was neither permitted nor possible. They were in prison for the full term of their sentence. The official line was a year. Then they’d open surface contact, so said the manual, and begin the process of rebuilding civilization.
Ufuk doubted it would only be a year. Not with the devastation he’d seen.
Everything down below was shiny, the air clear, but an almost-closed system like this…how long could that last? A bigger question—what version of civilization would they be rebuilding?
And the biggest question of all—who would be in cha
rge?
The solar system had been thrown into chaos, the Earth bombarded daily as it plowed through the cloud of debris thrown up by the passage of Nomad. Most deadly for now were the Jovian clusters, but in eighteen months, the Earth would brush past Saturn.
How close remained a matter of debate.
Few of their satellites had survived Nomad, and they struggled to stabilize their orbits. All were heavily degraded in one way or another, and provided no better than a patchwork solution that enabled only intermittent communications and information about the outside world.
General Marshall dropped himself heavily into the seat across the table. “I’m a very busy man, Mr. Erdogmus.” He still wore the blue uniform of the European Union central command, but the military here was more of a mercenary nature, although the General hadn’t admitted as much to himself yet.
“I found the remains of Dr. Ben Rollins.”
The General’s gray mustache twitched, the scowl on his face retreating for an instant before returning in force. “We have allowed you special—”
“Only drones and robotics. No people. I did a DNA sample. It’s definitely Dr. Rollins.”
“Good riddance.”
The waiter returned with Ufuk’s espresso, and the General waved him off before he could ask him if he wanted anything.
“He was buried at a castle in Italy, not far from here,” Ufuk continued. “I suspect that his daughter remains alive.”
General Marshall’s face puckered up as if he’d bit into a lemon. “Mr. Erdogmus, I am not sure a public café is the right place for this sort of discussion.”
Ufuk picked up his espresso. “Surely, there are no secrets here, are there?”
“And I am not sure this is a proper use of our resources—”
“My resources.”
“You are breaching protocol, Mr. Erdogmus.”
“With all due respect, I know you have Special Forces teams operating outside of these walls. And who gave authorization for an emergency beacon to be given to Roger Hargate? He was low level, and my sources say he had a serious drug addiction—”
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 18
