And Maxim, this head of security Roger babbled about. She had no idea who he was, and Roger hadn’t been able to provide much detail—only about the beacon, which could contact Sanctuary’s emergency recovery team. Which also might be a lie or deception.
Who else might be there?
A name floated into her memory. Dr. Müller. He was the one who had dragged her father to Darmstadt. He had seemed to want her father with him. A former colleague of her father’s, she remembered.
Logic.
Her mother and father, both scientists, had instilled in her a belief in logic. These details she’d discovered were like chess pieces. Pawns perhaps, but pawns could still take kings—and pawns could become queens.
Afloat on a frozen ocean, entombed in a blizzard, hidden by darkness—how could she use what she knew to rescue Giovanni and Hector? The prospect of death created a certain freedom, a clarity of purpose, a clear line of desperation. Unthinkable risks became acceptable, any gamble better than simply giving up.
She keyed in seven-four-four-two into the digital shortwave radio, selected the kilohertz band and turned off the sideband frequency switch, then picked up the microphone and handed it to Massarra. “You need to talk.”
The kerosene stove hissed, the light of its flame flickering shadows onto the roof of the tent. The gale howled up and down in pitch.
“Tell me what to say.” She took the microphone.
“Just keep repeating, ‘Al-Jawf, Al-Jawf station, do you read me?’ You want to speak with a man named Ain Salah.”
“And what do I say if he answers?”
“Tell him that he had said he might get an airplane to Jessica Rollins, but that she’s dead. Tell him you have the data.”
Once the snow cleared, an airplane might be able to spot them. Wouldn’t it? They weren’t that far off the coast. Jess knew more-or-less where they were. More or less.
“And who do I say I am?”
“Tell them…you’re my traveling companion. Make up a name.”
Massarra paused, but then thumbed the talk button. “Al-Jawf, Al-Jawf, do you read me…”
“Just kill me, please…” said a weak voice. It was Roger, curled up in the corner of the tent.
Jess took a long look at him, then shuffled over on her knees to loosen the corded knots binding his arms. His face was a mass of bruises and lesions, his eyes ringed by angry pink welts, his cheeks sunken. She touched his slick forehead, and it burned. He was dying, anyway, and wasn’t strong enough to hurt them anymore. Still, Massarra gave her a look as she untied him. Jess returned her gaze. Pity, wasn’t that a virtue, as well as forgiveness?
After untying Roger, who didn’t move from his fetal position, she rolled up her left pant leg and unstrapped the harness of her prosthetic. A putrid stench wafted up, and she gagged. Tenderly, she prodded her raw-red stump. Pus oozed from infected scrapes and scratches. If it climbed into her veins, it would kill her. She had no meds left. They were in the other sled. Gasping, she slid the harness on and pulled her pant leg back down.
“This is Al-Jawf,” said a familiar voice, crackling through the static on the radio.
“Ain Salah?” Massarra said.
“And who is this?”
“I am a friend of Jessica Rollins.”
Silence hissed on the radio. “I am afraid we cannot be of assistance. We are under attack by extremists. I am not sure how long the African Union forces can keep them out. I am very sorry, but we are evacuating.”
Massarra stole a look at Jess. “Where?”
“I cannot answer. I do not know. We will stay on this frequency, wherever we are going.” Ain Salah’s voice paused. “If we survive.”
“May God be with you.”
“And with you.”
The Muslim woman looked again at Jess. She shrugged, anything else?
“It’s your goddamn friends,” Jess spat, hitting the power button to turn off the radio. “Why are they fighting? For what?” She glared at her.
“I cannot answer for God’s plan,” the small woman replied quietly, but didn’t shift her eyes or look away.
Now there was nowhere to go—no southern oasis of safety—even if she could recover Hector and Giovanni.
Or maybe she had it the wrong way around.
Maybe they Giovanni would save her. If they were still alive, he had to be thinking the same thing she was. Maybe they would both run aground. Maybe all she had to do was wait. They still had fuel, still had the snowmobile, assuming its engine wasn’t flooded with water.
But where would they go? South. Still south.
Massarra took Jess’s hand. “What about the boats?”
“There are no boats. There never were any.” Another one of Roger’s lies, she’d found out. One that had trapped them.
“Not those boats. The jolly boat.”
Jess’s mouth fell open. The Jolly Roger. Last they talked to Ballie Booker, he was rounding Gibraltar. By now he had to be deep into the Mediterranean. But those meteor strikes, they were west. Exactly where Ballie and the Jolly Roger should be. But that boat had survived Nomad.
She turned the radio back on, keyed two-one-eight-two and pushed the “U” sideband frequency. She handed the microphone back to Massarra.
“Ballie Booker, he’s captain of the Jolly Roger. Try to raise him.”
Massarra clicked the talk button. “Jolly Roger, Jolly Roger, do you read.”
“Who is this?” a voice answered immediately, loud, clear, no static.
Tears stung Jess’s eyes. “Giovanni?” she blurted out.
NOVEMBER 13th
Twenty Days A.N.
27
“ARE YOU THERE?” Massarra whispered into the microphone.
Silence.
“Yes,” came the reply, Giovanni’s voice, but almost unrecognizable. The radio hissed static, the signal was getting weaker, but that was only half the problem.
He was getter weaker, too.
“It is still snowing,” his voice continued, “and very cold. Fifteen below, at least.”
Jess rocked back and forth, fidgeting her hands together. She leaned forward to open the flap of the tent. No snow. Just a slate-gray sky.
Two days of floating on this Godforsaken sea.
“Ask about the boys,” she whispered.
“And Hector?” Massarra said into the microphone.
“He is fine—” Giovanni started to say, but was interrupted by a tiny voice: “Jessica ci sei?”
Muffled voices on the other end of the radio, the older man softly, “No, no, Hector non possiamo parlare con Jessica,” and then the child, “Ma io ho fame.”
Jess understood: I’m hungry. She held back tears. She was desperate to speak with Hector, tell him she was fine, that everything was going to be okay. But she couldn’t risk her voice over the radio. Not yet. And she couldn’t lie to the boy.
After a pause: “Lo so, vai a giocare con Raffa.” Scratching and ruffling. “We are cold and hungry, but not bad. More of problem is water. I’m melting snow in cups, but…and Lucca has a very bad stomach last night.”
“Bad stomach?”
“Diarrhea.” Another pause. “But we are okay.”
He said the words, but Jess heard the strain. In the cold, calories were a problem. The human body needed much more energy to sustain itself in the cold. Arctic explorers consumed thousands more calories a day, Giovanni had explained to her once. Her boys had no food. And no water.
Dehydration was even more of an enemy.
They were covered in snow, but eating it lowered the body temperature and induced cramps. The snow wasn’t just snow, but filled with tiny particles of ash, which could be toxic. Even if it was only an irritant, diarrhea would dehydrate them quickly.
The motion of the waves rocked the tent fabric.
Jess clenched her fists and looked at the compass in her lap. She wasn’t sure if north was north anymore, but all compasses at least registered the same thing. Their slab of ice seeme
d to be floating southeast, according to hers, where Giovanni’s was headed more to the west, according to his compass. They’d been caught in a current, or a wind, or something. Last time he’d gone outside, his ice sheet was surrounded by open, dark water.
In the night, they’d tried Al-Jawf again, but with no response.
The extremists must have overrun the camp, or something else, but there was no contact. They had sporadic contact with some other survivor camps, but nothing close by. Jess kept the communication frequency with Giovanni the same frequency as they talked with the Jolly Roger, but so far they hadn’t heard anything from the boat, either.
No help coming.
“Massarra, we will talk later, yes? In three hours.”
“Radio off,” Massarra confirmed.
Batteries were another problem.
Where they started with hundreds of them, to power their LED headlamps and more, they’d been scattered and lost. They had only a handful left, and they weren’t the right size to power the radios. Giovanni had jury-rigged some to power the old analog radio he was talking on, but how long that might last was anyone’s guess.
The rocking motion of the ice changed. They’d hit something. It had happened before. A lot of other icebergs were floating in the water. Massarra got up and pulled on her boots to investigate. In the corner, Roger groaned. He was extremely ill. They were all sick. At least they were warm, with the kerosene stove, and could melt snow with it.
“Do you want some water?” Jess filled her tin cup and offered it to Roger.
“I want to go home,” Roger whimpered. He wept in tiny sobs. He’d been delirious most of the night.
“Jessica! Come outside.”
“What is it?” Her heart rate kicked up and she reached for the rifle.
“Land.”
She reached for her boots instead, and a second later jumped up through the tent flap.
Glistening white cliffs shimmered below an ashen sky. The water’s edge was just visible as a crumple of snow and ice, not more than a few hundred yards from where their ice floe had log-jammed with other flat slabs into a patchwork of white. Outside the tent, it was bitterly cold, and Jess shivered. “Do you think we make it?”
“The ice will crust. Maybe a few hours.”
In the night, Jess had heard the seagull crying. She’d had a feeling they weren’t far from land. Now a terrible decision she’d been hoping she wouldn’t have to make. She almost wished they hadn’t run aground.
All night, on the radio, Giovanni had asked Massarra to make sure they continued south, continued on their mission. Asked her to promise him. She hadn’t, and neither had Jess. She’d been on the verge of revealing her identity on the radio, rambling about her father and Sanctuary, on the wild assumption that someone had to be listening. Maybe that someone would come and get them. A long shot, but better than no shot.
But now she could get to land.
Now she had to decide.
“There is something I want to say.” Massarra stood with her back to Jess.
“I can’t leave them.”
“I know you blame me for terrible things, and I cannot answer your accusations. But the fight we are fighting now, we are on the same side. We fight the people that hid the existence of Nomad, from you and your family, and from the world. If we let them win, they will enslave what’s left of this world. We need to find a way to strike at them. To stop them.”
Jess let seconds slip by as she absorbed the words. Finally she said: “I just want to get Giovanni and Hector and the boys. Your fight is not mine.”
Massarra remained silent.
Jess grabbed the tent flap and pulled herself back inside. “Roger, hey, wake up.”
“Huh…”
“Think we can still fly that airplane?”
“What airplane?”
“The one back at the hangar.”
A weeping giggle burbled from his nest. “You’ll never find them. Even in good weather, with working instruments, doing a grid sweep over the ocean almost never finds anyone. This whole time, there’s never been a cloud ceiling of more than a thousand feet. No visibility more than a few miles. There’s thousands of kilometers of open ocean—”
“Just show me how to take off, you don’t need to come with me.”
“Landing is more of the problem.”
“Let me worry about that.”
Massarra pushed her way through the tent flap and pulled off her gloves. She squatted by the kerosene stove and warmed her hands.
Jess glanced at her, then back at Roger. “Show me how to take off, and I’ll make you a trade.”
Crews of workers pulled wreckage of sheet metal and plastic into piles on the snow-laden fields. The Vivas beacon was lit again, bright streaks of light stabbing into the fog from the villa atop the hill above it. The workers were shoddy, there were no earth moving trucks. Salman stood and watched the work in silence. No matter what this Englishman said, Salman sensed the damage to Vivas was much worse than he admitted.
This Englishman didn’t just want to get into Sanctuary.
He needed to.
They’d barely escaped from the coast with their lives two nights before, when the meteors hit. They’d camped near the beached cruise liner. The sea had risen up and swamped the town. The Englishman lost half his remaining men, a toll to add to the three in the poorly executed attack two days before, and those who perished when Jessica Rollins had escaped.
This Englishman wasn’t so smart. He didn’t know everything.
And he was desperate.
Salman knew desperation, could smell it on a man’s skin, spot it in his eyes. The more he became immersed in this, the more he sensed fear. He realized he was a pawn in someone else’s game. When his nephew, Nico, had called him and talked of a government conspiracy, he hadn’t paid much attention. He’d only listened to the part about the Baron Ruspoli’s gold. The more he thought about it now, the more it became clear that others had lured his nephew Nico into this.
That woman, Jessica Rollins's mother, the Tosetti, hadn’t been related to his family, hadn’t been connected to the old blood feud. Someone had played upon his nephew’s obsession, spoon-fed him lies, and lured the Rollins family into Italy to coincide with Nomad. Whoever that was, they were still pulling strings from faraway, while everyone here danced as puppets in a drama written by someone else.
The time had come to get off the stage.
Salman wet his cleft lip and turned to re-enter the tent. He almost gagged from the stench. Spread out on a table in the middle of the space were two decomposing, fire-blackened bodies.
“Within the hour we should be able to determine if one of these is your man Roger,” the Englishman said, seeing Salman. “We might even be able to activate that beacon, if we can scrape a fingerprint from one of your samples.”
Salman did his best to look impressed.
“But I think it would be best if we kept the beacon, and Dr. Rollins’s laptop and data underground, do you not?”
Without the beacon, without the data, Salman knew his life wouldn’t be worth spit to this Englishman. How could the man smile at him with that stupid grin and make threats as if he was doing him a favor?
“Of course, yes, of course,” Salman replied, effecting his most ingratiating of smiles.
“But I think this is not your man.” The Englishman smoothed back his blond hair. “It makes no sense. If they wanted us to know that your man was dead, and not chase them, why burn the bodies?”
“A delay tactic?” That was obvious to Salman the moment they found the blackened corpses, but the Englishman hadn’t wanted to press on. A decision that might have saved their lives. If Roger had gone over the water, if he wasn’t dead before, he most certainly was now.
“Sir, sir.” A boy, not more than sixteen, with shaggy brown hair, came into the tent holding what looked like a radio and handed it to the Englishman. A note was attached.
The Englishman scanned the note. He
turned to Salman. “Please excuse me for a moment?”
Salman nodded. “Of course.” He exited the tent the same way he came in, but stayed close enough to listen. He might be old, but he had excellent hearing.
Inside the tent, the radio hissed.
“I am here,” the Englishman said, his voice muffled.
“This is Roger Hargate, I want to speak with a Vivas representative,” crackled a voice over the radio.
Salman’s stomach turned.
“I am such a representative,” the Englishman answered.
“Prove it.”
“I am standing in front of what we thought was your burnt corpse.”
A pause. “Is Salman with you?”
Another pause. “He is not.”
The brown-haired boy appeared through the tent opening. “Mr. Salman, please, could you move away?”
The Englishman waited for his boy to return. He nodded. Salman was out of earshot.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Hargate?”
“Do you have the laptop and data, and my beacon?”
A smile crept across the Englishman’s face. “I do indeed.”
“I have specific information that isn’t in what you have. I copied it, deleted things. I’m coming in, and I need to speak to my handler at Sanctuary.”
“I am very happy to hear that.”
“No tricks, you understand? I’ve hidden the data. If anything happens to me, it will get out. I promise that.”
“You have nothing to fear from me.”
“And I have a terrorist, one of the extremists that was responsible for the Vatican bombing.”
“Excuse me?”
“And the attacks on Vivas. We think someone from Sanctuary is involved. I’m bringing her in.”
“Where can we find you?”
“Just give me your location.”
NOVEMBER 14th
Twenty-One Days A.N.
28
SMOOTH HILLS OF ice drifted into view in the distance, each ridge slowly coming into focus through the frost-mist. Each one seemed a million miles away, felt like a distance that she could never hope to cover, but Jess held on and gritted her teeth.
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 20
