The Red Pearl Effect (Sam Quick Adventure Book 1)

by Scott Corlett

  Reyes pressed down the phone’s cradle several times and dialed a number. “Sí, I know, but forget the plane crash. In twenty minutes, pick me up at my home.” Recalling Dr. Quick’s admonition to bring heavy weaponry, he added, “Grab two flashlights. And no sirens, understand!”

  In the Tazacorte police station, the officer hung up the phone and then immediately dialed another number. His brow wrinkled; the computerized voice repeated its chant: “The party you are trying to reach is unable to accept calls at this time. Please try again later.”

  The officer sighed and replaced the receiver. As he went to retrieve the flashlights ordered by Reyes, his hand massaged his service revolver’s grip.

  ∞

  Soot covered her face. Her clothes were torn. And every muscle and joint ached. But Sam Quick could not care less. The engine of the red Jeep roared, as she slammed the transmission into first gear and cranked the wheel. A sheet of gulls rose in panicked flight from the parking lot, shrilling their displeasure as the 4x4 pounded by.

  With one hand on the steering wheel, Quick fished out the phone, with its disarmament instructions, from a pocket. Its interface was cracked like a shattered windshield, and one edge was deeply dented. Quick tossed it on the passenger seat. Then she reached behind her back and pulled out the Walther P99 that she had grabbed from the old man’s pocket in the Prado’s subbasement. The gun joined the phone.

  Both hands now clamped on the steering wheel, Quick glanced at the pavement falling away in the rearview mirror. She pictured Kalia Slater during the drive to the mine exactly one week ago: the young Hawaiian laughing and chatting with Eric Hunt, as the interns sat in the back, taking in the island’s sights … Manuelo Alcanzar, both as he sat beside her during the drive to the mine and, later that day, as he lay shot, facedown at the entrance to La Garganta del Diablo … the decapitated corpse in the Prague morgue … Zach Davies lying in his hospital bed, his arm bandaged … Hunt crumpled on the runway outside the burning aircraft … then the Zanin sisters popped into view.

  Quick glanced at the heavier of her two front-seat passengers. Her execution of the plan would be as cold and methodical as her scientific training demanded. But the fire driving her forward was as raw and primal as the very forces that had created this volcanic isle and that now threatened to tear it asunder.

  The Jeep careened onto the road bisecting the island into its northern and southern halves. The blacktop steadily climbed, and the Jeep’s speed grew in direct proportion to the distance between the colorful houses alongside the road. On the straight stretches, the speedometer’s needle flicked the triple-digit mark and then plunged as the Jeep approached the next hairpin curve. Alongside the road, the banana groves climbed in stepwise fashion up the volcanic spine.

  Quick inhaled deeply, pulling in the mixed smells of the sea, soil, and volcano. The Jeep hooked into a switchback, as the first direct rays of sunlight shot from the eastern horizon and, bouncing from the vehicle’s mirrors, dappled her face, while Sam Quick stared at the road ahead.

  – 64 –

  Monday, 16 July

  Island of La Palma

  The engine died. The red Jeep rolled to a stop in the middle of the two-track, about three hundred yards below the mine, at a spot hemmed in by brush and rocks. The early morning on the mountainside was hushed, peaceful: Streaks of blue now infused the sky. The morning birds were softly chirping. The wet air, exhaled overnight by the vegetation and hills, hung close to the ground.

  Sam Quick quietly grabbed the Walther P99 and Hunt’s phone, and squeezed out of the Jeep, carefully closing the door after herself. She shoved the gun under her waistband, at the small of her back, and slipped between the vehicle and a formation of jagged rock. Once past the rocks, she pressed a button on the phone. Despite the cracked interface, the screen immediately came alive, and Quick ordered 34:45 on the timer—the exact number of minutes and seconds until detonation. Then she shoved it in her pocket and started running along one of the two-track’s weed-strewn paths.

  She sprinted but then slowed as the road turned sharply. Sixty feet before her, the awakening sky outlined the mine’s dying outbuildings and rusting machinery. The structures were dark, and she saw no vehicles other than the abandoned mining equipment. But a steady hum set Quick’s jaw.

  She moved forward, crouched low, crossing the work yard, and flattened herself against the generator shed.

  She rose and peered through a window. The light dripping from holes pocking the rusted ceiling barely illuminated a second, larger dynamo droning beside her expedition’s generator. Quick figured she could switch them both off to slow whatever task occupied the Zanin sisters. Except doing so might endanger Kalia. Instead, she moved inside and grabbed one of the flashlights lying stacked beside the generators and then started tracking the electrical cables snaking toward the mine.

  Outside, the sky was now a pale blue. Half running, half crouching, she crossed the mine yard, until she stopped beside the timber-framed entrance to La Garganta del Diablo. She leaned forward and surveyed the tunnel. The mine’s stale breath hit her in the face. But the shaft was empty save for the cabling, lighting, and rails. She took a last gulp of fresh air and pulled out the Walther. Then muddy gravel crunched beneath her shoes, as the mine swallowed her.

  Approaching the first junction, her pace slowed. Here, the cables split into two branches. Her eyes followed the lights hung by her expedition, which led to the right, toward the site where she and Hunt had collected soil samples.

  “But the other is just as fair,” Sam Quick whispered, as she and the Walther hooked hard left, shadowing the lamps newly hung since her last visit.

  ∞

  Inspector Reyes’s head still ached, but now with good reason. His junior officer drove as if he were charging atop a mainland freeway rather than laboring along an island two-track. Weeds scraped the car’s sides, and stones banged against the undercarriage. And every time the compact slammed into a pothole, Reyes’s bald crown smashed against the vinyl headliner.

  The car rounded a tight curve. Reyes threw up his arms and shouted, “Stop!”

  The locked tires slid on the loose gravel. Reyes glared at the rear bumper of Quick’s Jeep, which now lay only inches before the police car. He sighed, grabbed the flashlights, and handed one to his subordinate. “Nice driving.”

  In front of the Jeep and the rock formation, Reyes and the officer each silently claimed one of the worn tracks. When they reached the work yard, a now clear-blue sky backlit the old buildings. Reyes swore again. He saw no signs of new activity; everything was as he and his men had left it after collecting the physical evidence of Manuelo Alcanzar’s shooting.

  “I have a good mind to leave her on the mountain and go attend to the plane crash,” Reyes said, as his ears tuned into the electric hum. Of course, he thought, Dr. Quick has fired up her generator and entered the mine.

  “Well, in that case,” he said aloud, “I’ll do exactly what draws my grandchildren from the fields after sunset—I’ll flick off and on the veranda lights.”

  The younger officer shrugged and followed Reyes toward the generator shed.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do, I’ll turn off and on the lights in the mine three times—” Reyes stopped in the doorway. “What do we have here?” he asked, briefly forgetting his headache as he stared at the new generator sitting beside Quick’s.

  The ring of metal digging beneath his scapula had no answer.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Inspector Reyes barked, whirling around.

  His officer answered by cracking the gun against the pink walrus skin gathered just behind the inspector’s right ear.

  ∞

  The echoing footfalls lashed the women. Kalia Slater tried resolving the jumbled sounds into an image—of the number and the intent—of their originators. But she could only determine with any certainty that the feet approached from the direction of the chamber where she and Amanda had been held captive. And
that given the women’s orientation on the tracks—bound heads together, in front of the suitcase—the encroaching person or persons would reach Amanda first.

  The echoes grew louder, and the crunch of stone and the squish of wet mud joined in accompaniment. Slater twisted her head and found Amanda’s two large eyes locked on her. Now the metal rails, to which their wrists and ankles were bound, reverberated with each new footfall, eliciting whimpers from Amanda.

  Slater’s eyes widened as a face appeared directly above hers. It was the first female visage that she had seen since her abduction at the hotel other than Amanda’s. Beautiful, shiny black hair framed the face. And Slater watched its carefully painted lips part, revealing bright teeth, white like those of the sharks at home in Hawaii.

  “Hello,” the apparition said in English, its smile widening. “No, no, please don’t bother to get up. I see you are comfortable where you are. In any case, I have no time to chat. But I promise I’ll be out of your hair just as soon as I attend to this lovely luggage.”

  Slater watched the woman turn and kneel between her and the suitcase. She heard the click of nails on plastic and metal, interspliced with a series of electronic beeps. She saw the woman pause, check her watch, and then press a final sequence of keys. Then a long beep sounded. The woman rose from the suitcase and turned toward her and Amanda.

  “See, no time at all!” The woman smiled. “Now, my dears, I must go meet my sister. We have a seaplane to catch.” She barked something at the men in their language and then pressed herself against the tunnel wall beside the suitcase.

  In response, grinning broadly, the men jumped forward and knelt with one at each bound woman’s head. Slater’s stomach churned as the woman laughed. “Not to worry, I assure you they won’t bother you long.”

  Knives sprang and moved for the plastic straps binding the women’s wrists.

  Slater felt Amanda’s face burrow into her neck. She watched the men nudge each other and laugh at the woman’s fear. But Kalia Slater was much more interested in the woman, who was smiling down on the scene from the behind the men, like a doting teacher.

  Slater barely flinched as the bullet shattered the skull of the first man, slamming him down atop Amanda. She watched the Bobcat redirect its attack; another shot rang out; the second man crashed down on her like a load of cement, blocking out all light.

  The grad student felt Amanda’s adjacent thrashing and heard her muffled screams. For several seconds, Slater struggled against the wet body pressing down on her face. Then she did what a life lived on Pacific waters had taught her: As if she had been sucked beneath the ocean’s surface by an inexorable undercurrent, she relaxed her body to conserve whatever oxygen remained within her cells and began silently counting the seconds. As Kalia Slater knew from her many close calls while surfing in Hawaii, the tally would reach no higher than two hundred before darkness fell.

  – 65 –

  Monday, 16 July

  North Atlantic Ocean

  Alphanumeric characters popped on the dark screen like tiny, pixelated explosions of fireworks spelling a celebratory message across a night sky. Except instead of wishing a Happy July 4 or congratulations to a local sports team, the message consisted of four lines of garbled, meaningless text.

  The ensign seated at the console immediately began typing the day’s 32-digit authentication code. After a final entry, the four code lines instantly transmuted to a readable message.

  Lt. Commander Elijah Robsen read the dispatch over the ensign’s shoulder. Then he turned and calmly walked to a manned console on the room’s opposite side. A message originating from a different command center, received via a different comm network, and deciphered with a different authentication code filled this screen. But down to the last character, the text was identical to the message burning on the first monitor.

  Robsen read it one more time. Sweet mother, he thought. This mental exclamation surprised him, defying all his discipline. But the question of why never entered his mind; the countless drills, role-plays, and hours of psychological training had successfully suppressed that curiosity at least.

  Robsen moved with a slow and deliberate step for a third console. Here, he pressed his thumb against a scanner and stared directly into an iris reader. A green light flashed. His voice, toneless and clear, rendered the command, “Launch depth. Prepare twenty-four. One target coordinate: 55.7500° N, 37.6167° E. Hold launch for my command.”

  Throughout the 560-feet length of the U.S.S. Maryland, amber lights silently exploded. Only those submariners performing critical tasks continued as they were; all others immediately moved for their assigned stations, each sailor instantly amped by the adrenaline flood triggered by this highest call of battle.

  The Maryland, along with the thirteen other Ohio-class submarines, formed one leg of America’s three-prong air-sea-land strategic nuclear deterrence, with each sub carrying up to twenty-four Trident II missiles, and a potential total strike force of nearly three thousand Hiroshima events.

  At any one time, the United States deployed a varying, classified number of the submarines from both its Pacific base in Bangor, Washington and its Atlantic base in Kings Bay, Georgia. These deterrence missions silently delivered American missiles to within fast-strike distance of enemy coastlines on a constant, rotating basis. Any seaside nation considering an attack on the United States faced the possibility that nearly fifty thousand kilotons of American nuclear firepower waited at its doorstep—the ultimate “try me if you dare.”

  Until Robsen’s command, the Maryland had been running at a depth of 330 feet, approximately two hundred miles south of the Icelandic coast, en route to a deployment in the Barents Sea on Russia’s northern flank. But now the sub was rising fast and its forward motion, virtually halted.

  Robsen calculated a rough launch-to-strike time. From this position, he figured the missiles would reach Moscow less than twelve minutes after leaving their silos. And it wouldn’t be much longer before Russia’s retaliatory strike hit home.

  – 66 –

  Monday, 16 July

  Island of La Palma

  The sounds of gunfire arrived from two directions: two sharp shots directly ahead in the tunnel, and two distant pops behind her. Quick stopped. The Zanins must have split up: one sister ahead, and one behind, both shooting their Bobcats twice in apparently coordinated attacks.

  The phone’s cracked face flashed 28:02. No time to wait for more information. Instead, Quick shoved the Walther into the lead and continued running forward.

  The shaft bent to the right in a large-diameter arc, putting Quick on the inside curve. From ahead, she heard the murmur of a familiar female voice. Her thumb quietly cocked the P99. She thought about simply killing the speaker. But then I lose the element of surprise with the other one. No, I must try for a quiet take.

  The voice grew louder as Quick crept further into the curve, and the murmurs resolved into comprehensible words: “You didn’t think I would allow you to suffocate, did you, my dear?”

  Quick paused at the final point where she would remain invisible to the speaker. Craning forward, she watched the woman drag a man’s body from the tracks twenty feet ahead: Solta Zanin.

  The corpse slid free of the rails, revealing Kalia Slater lying centered and bound on the tracks, with blood smearing her face and heaving chest.

  Seeing Slater, Quick reconsidered putting the bullet in Solta’s head. But I can’t risk everything by alerting Nin, even for Kalia.

  Solta dropped the man’s feet and turned back to Slater, continuing, “Perhaps my sister would permit such a slow death, but I’m not that sadistic. No, you’ll enjoy the ultimate end: a painless death during which every atom in your pert little body is instantly consumed”—she gestured at the suitcase with her hands held palms-up like a TV game-show hostess presenting a prize—“in a thermonuclear furnace.”

  Then Solta bent and began hauling a second body from atop what Quick soon realized was another woman bound wi
th Slater. “A rather easy death I’d say—”

  Now was as good a time as any. “Step back. Now!” Quick shouted, advancing rapidly with the Walther locked on Solta.

  Solta looked up, her teeth glinting. “A cat has many lives, indeed.” She released the body, slowly straightened up, and stepped away from the tracks.

  Quick moved in. Her gun maintained its aim. And Solta reached for her red skirt as if to smooth it after standing.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Quick said. “Shooting you doesn’t suit me just now. But my first bullet will rip into your heart, and a second one will be speeding toward your brain, before your hand slips under that pretty fabric, not to mention onto the inscribed whalebone grip of your Beretta Bobcat.”

  Solta shrugged and tossed up her hands. “Since you put it so graciously, Dr. Quick.”

  Keeping the gun on Solta, Quick grabbed some of the leftover plastic ties lying beside Amanda’s feet. Then she closed in and pressed the muzzle into the exposed hollow marking Solta’s breastbone. Staring into the other woman’s eyes, Quick slipped her free hand under the red skirt and liberated the Bobcat, which she tossed aside.

  “Turn around and cross your wrists behind your back.”

  Solta sighed but rotated the 180 degrees. The plastic strap bound her overlapping wrists. Quick stepped back. Then her shoe slammed the red skirt. Solta fell face-first into the arms of the corpse that she had hauled from atop Kalia Slater.

  “You have a real way with the men,” Quick said, as Solta glared back at her.

  Then Quick turned to Slater, who was staring up at her from the tracks, her mouth still plugged by the red handkerchief. “I’ve never been so glad to find an intern lying down on the job.”