Alcatraz

by Michael P. Spradlin

  It was dark and shadowy back here. Across the bay, she could see lights from Sausalito and the marina where they’d sat on the boat that afternoon. It seemed like forever ago.

  As he paced, Speed muttered unintelligible words and phrases. He had just gotten off the phone with Boone. She hadn’t been able to hear all of the conversation. But enough to determine that he was working out a way to trade her in exchange for access to the Holy Grail.

  She thought about her mom. What would she do in this situation? Easy. She had given up her life and family in order to root out and destroy the most evil terrorist network the world had ever seen. No way would she let Speed get what he wanted. Not even if it meant her own life.

  Q had told her about getting free of a pair of flex-cuffs. Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t escape-proof. He’d said the trick was not to move or twist your wrists. You used your shoulder and elbow to manipulate your hand. Otherwise, your wrists would swell up, and you’d never get free. She tried it. It was hard. Your instinct was to try and yank your hand out of the cuffs. After a few minutes she gave up. She was not a magician like Q.

  She wondered if she could take Speed out with a tae kwan do kick or something. Maybe if she could get him close enough to her she could sweep his legs. Then give him a good hard stomp on the head. Try blinking away when you’re unconscious, you skinny little worm, she thought.

  “You know Boone isn’t going to give you what you want,” she said. Maybe she could get him talking. Stir him up and get him to make a mistake.

  “Shut up.” He didn’t even interrupt his pacing.

  “Boone is too smart for you. He’s got resources you can’t even—”

  Speed stormed over to where she sat on the log.

  “I said shu—”

  It was the moment she was waiting for. Angela launched herself from the log, aiming the crown of her head toward the point of his chin. See how you like a nice head butt, weasel face. But she never connected. Speed was suddenly gone. Angela lost her balance and sprawled face first on the ground. Someone grabbed her roughly by the arms and jerked her to her feet.

  “Nice try,” Speed said. “But you might say I’m a lot ‘speedier’ than you. Sit down and behave.” He pushed her back onto the log.

  She was seething with frustration, but tried not to show it. Just you wait.

  Speed resumed his pacing. Angela turned her attention to the case holding the Grail. It sat on the ground a few feet away. There was no doubt in her mind that Boone and Q were on the way. But she needed to try and do something to even up the odds.

  “This is epic,” he said. “Perfect place to have a showdown with that fool Boone. Did you know that Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone were prisoners here? They were the baddest of the bad. Until me.”

  “Really? The baddest of the bad? You? I don’t think so. Unless you’re talking about how you dress. Then you might have a case,” Angela said.

  Speed ignored her and looked at his watch again. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and the screen lit up, illuminating his face. He still wore full Speed regalia. His hair was braided with feathers. His ears were pierced about a dozen times with a variety of earrings and posts. On his feet were fancy cowboy boots made, no doubt, from some exotic animal skin. Angela had been around musicians most of her life, so she was used to unusual dress. But she still thought Speed looked ridiculous.

  She watched his face closely as he studied the screen. His eyes narrowed and he tapped the phone a couple of times, giving it a small shake, as if something wasn’t working. He put it in his pocket and glanced out at the bay.

  “Listen,” he said to her. “I’m going to go do some looking around. You had better be here when I get back. This is an island, remember. There’s nowhere for you to go.”

  “Duh,” Angela said. “You brought me here in a boat, remember? Must be a bummer you never learned how to blink with someone who can’t.”

  “Blink? What are you talking about?”

  “Boone has learned how to blink with someone who can’t. All he has to do is hold them by the arm or something, and they go along with him. But since you brought me here on a boat, I guess you never figured it out.”

  “First of all I don’t blink, I speed. And he can’t do that. You can’t speed with someone who doesn’t have the ability. I should know, I tried,” Speed said. But he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  “Don’t you get it? You think you’re the one who’s a step ahead. Boone’s been on to you since we arrived in Philadelphia at the start of the tour. Why do you think everything you’ve tried has blown up in your face? My bet is he’s already here. He’s probably got a couple of his guys with him staring at you through the sights of a sniper rifle right now. You’re six kinds of toast.”

  Speed glanced around, looking over his shoulder, his eyes darting back and forth.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Yeah, but according to Boone you were only exposed to the Grail power for a short time. Boone used it numerous times. You should see some of the stuff he can do. It’s pretty amazing. If I were you, I’d just surrender now and save yourself the embarrassment.” Q always said she was an exceptional liar. All she could hope was that Speed would buy it.

  “Shut up!” Speed stalked back and forth in the clearing. He looked out at the bay. There were boats moving across it, but none of their running lights indicated they were heading in the direction of the island. Of course, they could be running dark.

  “Where is that old geezer?” Speed muttered. Then he blinked away.

  She was surprised he left the metal case behind. Angela assumed the wooden container Boone had described to them was inside it. She stood up and hustled over to it. Turning around, she squatted down, grabbing the handle with both hands. She stood and lurched away. It was hard to walk and carry the case like this, with her arms bound behind her. But she had to try. Maybe she could hide it, or if she could get to the water—

  She yelped as Speed appeared right in front of her.

  “Going somewhere?” He reached around her and yanked the case out of her hands. He jerked her back into the clearing, shoving her back onto her seat on the log.

  “Nice try. You’re a brave kid, Ashley. But there’s nobody here. Boone isn’t here. We’re alone. Now stay put.”

  “The name is Angela, you moron. And sure. I’ll stay put. That way I’ll have the best seat in the house to watch Boone take you down.”

  Speed smirked and stalked off to the edge of the clearing, looking out over the bay. Angela felt a little deflated. Nothing she tried was working.

  As her head drooped in dejection, she looked down to find that the angel necklace her mother had given her years ago had fallen outside her shirt during their tussle. The sharp edges of the wings gave her an idea. Bending at the neck, she swung her head back and forth until the chain flew up. She grabbed it in her teeth. Turning to the side, she bit down as hard as she could until she felt the chain snap in two. Slowly she let one end of the chain out of her mouth, and the angel pendant dropped onto the log next to her. She then twisted the other way. With her hands still bound behind her, she felt around until she found the charm with her left hand. Picking it up, she gripped it tight and turned it over in her hand until the wings were facing out.

  She smiled as Speed stood with his back to her. With the charm tight against the flex-cuffs, she started using the angel’s wing as a saw. It was slow going, and she couldn’t see, but after a moment she got a rhythm going and could feel the pendant cutting into the plastic.

  Speed was in for a big surprise.

  Over the Bounding Seas

  In our haste to get off the boat when the limo arrived, I had forgotten to return the sailboat keys to the marina office. They were still in my pocket. This is what you call lucky, because the marina office was locked up tight, and we sure didn’t have time to look for another boat.

  My mom was a really good sailor. She’d taught me a lot, but not everything. Mainly
we just lived on the boat and didn’t take it out all that often. Sailing is a lot of work. But it was actually cheaper living on the boat than having a house or apartment in San Francisco. And infinitely cooler.

  I started up the engines and backed out of the slip, then steered toward the breakwater. Once we passed it, we’d be in the bay and could set a course for Alcatraz. There was only one problem. The “I wasn’t much of a sailor” thing. Like I said, my mom had taught me a lot. But not everything. From looking at the gauge, I wasn’t even sure if we had enough fuel to make it all the way to the island using only the engines. We’d have to raise the sails, and that’s where I’d run into problems.

  Boone had activated X-Ray’s gadget that would scramble all the audio and video signals coming from the boat. I knew Speed couldn’t track us electronically. But sailing is not easy. In fact, it is hard and takes a lot of knowledge. I could operate the boat with the engines running. But hoisting the sails and navigating was a whole different story.

  We were almost to the breakwater when I realized I was going to need some help.

  “Um, Boone,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been alive for a long time, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever learned to sail in all that time, have you?”

  “A little.”

  “How little?”

  Boone pointed to the mast. “That’s the mast. That rolled-up canvas attached to it is the sail,” he said.

  “Seriously? All that time on your hands and you never learned to sail?”

  “I never learned to do a lot of things.”

  I groaned. “I hope we have enough fuel to get there.”

  “If we don’t, we’ll figure it out,” Boone said.

  Off in the distance I could see the lights on Alcatraz.

  “So why didn’t you ever learn to sail?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ve been alive for over nine hundred years, Q. Give me some credit for learning how to do a lot of other stuff.”

  “Really? How many languages do you speak?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “How did you end up in the music business?”

  “Don’t really know. I always liked music. And after the Second World War, British and American music became enormously popular all over the world. One thing I haven’t picked up in my long life is musical ability. So I couldn’t be a musician. But working with musicians and bands got me into and out of a lot of countries without questions. American music was welcome in a lot of places Americans weren’t.”

  “How many presidents have you known?”

  “A few. Not all. Every few years I had to take a break. I’d ‘retire’ and move off someplace for twenty or thirty years, until people forgot about me. Then I’d come back with a new name and identity and work my way up the chain. It usually didn’t take long. Blinking made it easy for me to get good intelligence, and that gets you noticed by the higher-ups. But it’s been a challenge the last thirty or forty years. There are too many cameras and computers. Everything is recorded and stored. Even really old photographs have been scanned and put online now. As you discovered with your pal P.K.”

  “And you’ve been looking for the Grail this whole time?” I asked.

  “Yep. It was my duty to keep it safe. I lost it,” Boone said.

  “But you were injured; it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Duty is duty. Sure, I suppose I could give up and stop looking. But in truth, I couldn’t risk letting something that powerful fall into the hands of someone who might misuse it. And I couldn’t take a chance that someday, with all of this technology that keeps getting invented, someone wouldn’t figure out a way to open Quintas’s container and get access to it.”

  “Did you ever want to give up?”

  Boone laughed. “Plenty of times, Q. There have been hundreds of moments when I thought that maybe whoever took it lost it themselves. Or hid it and died, and it would never be found. At first, all I knew was that it let me blink and healed wounds. I had no idea it would also make me live such a long time. But then . . .”

  “But then what?”

  “It sounds weird when I say it.”

  “Really, Boone? It sounds weird? In case you haven’t been keeping up on current events, we passed weird about three counties back.”

  Boone chuckled. “You’ve got me there. For a while now, I’ve had this hunch it was keeping me alive until I found it. I know how strange that sounds. And it makes no logical sense. But there’s always been this feeling I’ve had. Like it’s out there waiting for me to recover it. Almost like I made a promise the Grail is waiting for me to keep.”

  I was quiet a few minutes.

  “Boone?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ever since we found out about Speed, and about him being Number One . . . I can’t stop thinking about what happened to me in Chicago. When I blinked.”

  “Mm-hmm. I know what you’re thinking, Q. You don’t have to worry about it.”

  “How do you know what I’m thinking?”

  “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you learn how to read people. You’re worried that, since your dad can blink and he’s a bad guy, you’ll end up using it to do bad things like he does. Am I right?”

  He was right. That was exactly what I was worrying about.

  “Well . . . yeah. I mean, haven’t you ever been tempted to do something . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Evil? Listen, Q, temptation is part of being human. Once I was playing poker with Doc Holliday, the famous gunfighter. I blinked behind him to look at his hand. Then I blinked back into my seat before anyone noticed. He was bluffing, and I won. I cheated in a poker game. He was a mean little snake, so I didn’t feel too bad about teaching him a lesson. And that’s just one example. But you don’t have to worry.”

  “Why? What if I do something I’m not supposed to?”

  “You won’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because you have a conscience, Q. You have morals. Your dad doesn’t, but you do. Just because you’re the son of a bad guy doesn’t automatically make you bad. And we don’t even know if you have the same level of ability that Speed and I do. But even if you do, you won’t use it except to help people.”

  “You sound pretty confident.”

  “I am.”

  Boone seemed so sure of himself. He looked at his watch.

  “We’ve got about twenty minutes,” he said, closing his eyes and appearing to concentrate. “We’re close to the island. But I still don’t have enough gas in my tank to blink there. Croc?”

  I was conflicted. I knew we had to rescue Angela and time was critical. But I was secretly glad Boone wasn’t leaving. If he did, I’d have to pilot the boat and would probably run it up on the rocks and die horribly.

  Croc sat up on his haunches and huffed.

  “Can you do it, buddy? Can you get there? Find Speed?”

  Croc was gone in the blink of an eye.

  Croc

  Croc materialized in the water about one hundred yards off shore. He shook his head and paddled hard. Long way to the island, Croc thought. He had been with Boone so long he almost always immediately understood what Boone wanted him to do.

  “Find Speed,” Boone had said. Croc blinked and now he would do what Boone asked. He only wished he hadn’t landed in the water.

  Unlike Boone, he did regenerate fairly fast. But even he did not have enough power yet to make it all the way to the island. Croc didn’t like water. Not because he couldn’t swim; he began paddling toward shore immediately. Croc didn’t like getting wet because it ruined his smell. After a dip in the ocean, it would take him days to get back to smelling the way he liked. He huffed and paddled harder.

  He was aware that humans found his odor offensive. And he didn’t care. They had no idea what it was like to be a dog. Humans relied on eyesight and hearing, but to a canine the sense of smell was ki
ng. Dogs had better hearing than humans too. Could hear things in higher and lower frequencies than the human ear. But their ability to sniff out different scents and odors, compared to humans’ abilities, was like comparing an elephant to an ant.

  Croc had been with Boone since he was a pup. They had traveled together all over the world. And he could remember every single thing his nose had smelled in all that time. That was why, when the other human, the one Boone called Speed, was on the coach, Croc had gone so crazy. It was him. The one. He had taken what Boone was searching for all these years.

  But despite his special abilities, Croc could not always communicate. Boone hadn’t understood. The human had changed, aged. He had been a boy when he took away the glowing thing Boone carried. But his scent had stayed the same. And Croc remembered it. He remembered tracking him in the desert when the boy had taken the glowing thing, until he lost the scent. In the warehouse, when he found the feather, the odor of the one was everywhere. Q had understood.

  And now, with the wind coming off the island and over the water, he could again smell the human Boone sought. He was there somewhere. Croc kicked his legs and strained and pushed and finally reached the shore. He was tired and shook his body, water spraying everywhere. He put his nose in the air. The breeze carried thousands of odors. He sorted through them until he found the two he wanted: the human who had taken what Boone wanted, and the girl. Boone called her Angela. Croc liked Angela. Her smell was close by the man Boone wanted. Her scent also told him she was scared. He would help Boone find the man and save Angela.

  He shook the water from his coat one more time and crept away into the darkness.

  Showdown

  “Here they come,” Speed said.

  Angela looked up. She could see, a few hundred yards off shore, the sailboat approaching the dock. Boone and Q were coming. She was relieved but still nervous.

  “Well, I guess this is it for you, then,” she said.

  “You know, you got a mouth on you. Somebody ought to do something about that,” Speed said.