Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  Tommy considered their options. It wasn’t a difficult decision.

  “We jump,” he said, grabbing Reese by the hand.

  “Into the wolf sanctuary? Are you crazy or stupid?”

  “I thought we already settled that.”

  It was fifteen feet down from the top of the rock to the other side, but where they landed was soft, padded with fallen leaves and sloping away from the rock. They rolled a few times and got to their feet.

  A half dozen cave weasels leapt down from the rock after them.

  The wolves set upon the beasts immediately, encircling them and tearing at them, while other wolves howled, and more wolves came bounding through the woods at top speed to join the battle. This was their home territory, and it had been invaded by an alien species. The cave weasels were larger and stronger, but the wolves were smarter and worked together, quickly surrounding the mesonychids and nipping at them from all directions.

  The wolves paid the humans no attention whatsoever, and Reese and Tommy backed away, turned, and ran. Five minutes later they were scaling the gates at the far end of the wolf sanctuary and dropping down into the parking lot at the sanctuary’s education center, while in the distance a chorus of triumphant howls pierced the rain.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Reese as he picked up the pace, heading for home.

  “I’m all right,” the boy said. “You?”

  “Let’s get back,” Tommy said. “If Dani asks, let’s just say everything came off without a hitch.” He gave the boy a reassuring squeeze on the back of his neck. “You know I’m kidding, right? Tell the truth.”

  “I know,” Reese said. “How’d I do?”

  “You did great,” Tommy said.

  31.

  December 23

  4:35 p.m. EST / 10:35 p.m. CET

  Cassandra had the odd feeling that she’d left something important behind, and then she realized what it was—a script. She had to improvise—something she’d done back in acting school. The key to improvisation, her teacher had said, was listening. Being present in the scene. She was still finding her way into this part, though. And she couldn’t afford the slightest misstep. The stakes were a lot higher than she was used to.

  She took another sip of her iced tea and smiled.

  “If you want to know me,” she said, “the way I know you want to know me, then I have to know you first.”

  Bauer smiled back, looking like the cat that was about to eat the canary. “And what would you like to know about me, Cassie?”

  She shuddered inwardly at the sound of the nickname, even though she’d suggested its use. “My friends call me Cassie,” she’d told him, but that was a lie. In fact she hated the name Cassie, but she hated this man who was sitting across the table from her even more, and she wanted to feel repulsed every time he spoke to her. He was crass, arrogant, entitled, and devious. Worse than that, he was evil—and connected to a greater evil still.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  Their candlelight dinner on the sun deck was over, the stars above them twinkling brightly. Bauer had offered her a cognac. She’d declined, explaining that on nights like this, a girl needed a clear head to make the proper decisions. She’d delivered lines from scripts in movie after movie where the push and pull of seduction played out in a similar fashion, the man single-minded but the woman in control. Bauer’s condescending ego was precisely his weakness, his self-glorification the thing Cassandra knew would compel him to take whatever bait she dangled in front of him.

  “I am what you see,” he replied.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not that I don’t like what I see, but you’ll have to do better than that. What is your worst quality?”

  “My worst quality?” he said. “I suppose it’s that I won’t suffer fools. I have no patience for them, no sympathy for their handicaps. And they are everywhere. Particularly in politics. But it would only matter if I cared what they thought. Or if they cared what I think.”

  She smiled. “What do you want?” she asked. “Besides the obvious.”

  “Right now, the … obvious is all I can think of,” he said.

  She leaned back in her chair, turning sideways and folding her arms across her chest. “I know what else you want.”

  “What else do I want?”

  “An empire.”

  “What’s wrong with wanting an empire?”

  “Nothing, as long as it’s realistic,” she said. “I’m not interested in a man with delusions of empire. I’ve known several.”

  He took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and lit it from one of the candles, the smoke rising into the warm Mediterranean night.

  “Oh, it’s quite realistic, Cassie,” he told her, sipping his cognac. “One might even say it’s nearly within my grasp.”

  He was bragging. Bragging, Cassandra knew, was a sign of insecurity. Tommy, for all his physical gifts and accomplishments, had never bragged, not once, in all the time she’d known him.

  “How so?”

  Bauer smiled, but didn’t reply. Cassandra knew he was going to, though. She knew exactly what he was thinking: that this foolish American actress was no match for him—he could tell her anything, tell her what she wanted to hear, and there would be no consequence.

  “Have you heard of my grandfather?” he asked.

  “The Nazi?” she said. “The one who experimented on concentration camp prisoners?”

  “The one who gave their deaths meaning,” Bauer said. “They were going to die. That he could not stop. No one could. Not at the end, anyway. Maybe at the beginning. But what he could do was give their lives, at the end, purpose. He could make their deaths mean something.”

  “And did he?”

  “Oh yes. The medications and treatments that resulted from the data he was able to collect have since saved many lives—many more lives, in fact, than were lost in the camps. This was my grandfather’s way. He looked at the facts, with a cold eye, yes. An ice-cold eye. But with an eye that saw the truth. And from that he derived a greater good.”

  Cassandra had felt repulsed by Bauer before; now she was nauseated. Still, she feigned interest.

  “I am the benefactor of all the work he and my father have done,” Bauer said. “I too am able to look at the world with an eye that is both cold and accurate.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “I see misery,” Bauer said. “And pain. And want and hunger and fear. So I’ve created a way to fix that.”

  “How so?” she asked.

  “Why, Cassie,” he said. “Can’t you guess? With a drug. That’s what I do. A perfect drug.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I think somebody’s been reading their own press releases,” she said.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I do not,” she said, shifting in her chair and sipping the last of her iced tea. “If something seems too good to be true, it usually is. It always is, in my experience.” When she set her glass down, a waiter who had been hovering out of sight instantly refilled it. Bauer waited for him to leave before he spoke.

  “You’re too young to be so jaded. You’ve heard of Provivilan?” Bauer asked.

  “How could I not?” she said. “The ads are everywhere. The new wonder drug that’s going to change the world.”

  “Sarcasm is unbecoming on you.”

  “Change the world?” she said. “Really, Udo? How?”

  He hesitated. She could see his mind working, wondering how much he should tell her. The man needed a bit more persuading. Cassandra leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, looking up at him as if he were the most interesting man in the world.

  “I want to know,” she said, and smiled. She waited.

  Bauer caved, as she knew he would. “Because this drug is unlike any other.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s quite simple,” he said. “Unlike every other drug you can take, this one does not wear off. And the change is for the
better. No more anger. No more depression. No more sadness or grief. And the benefits of the drug last forever. As long as you keep taking your daily maintenance dosage.”

  “In other words, it’s addicting?” Cassandra said.

  “It becomes a requirement.” Bauer nodded. “Like food or water. No more or less.”

  “And since Linz Pharmazeutika is the only manufacturer,” Cassandra said, “you become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.”

  “I am already wealthy beyond my wildest dreams,” Bauer said. “But yes. You’ll probably think I’m exaggerating, but when I was quite young, I set a goal for myself. I said that one day I would be the richest man in the world—and not just that, but the richest man who ever lived. Richer than Rockefeller or Rothschild or Mansa Musa. It just didn’t make any sense to me to have anything less as a goal. And with Provivilan, I will accomplish it.”

  “What if someone steals the formula?” she said, leaning back in her chair.

  “There is only one written copy,” he told her. “In the safe in my stateroom. And one in my head. And a sample in a very safe place in a laboratory in Connecticut.”

  She pretended to be making up her mind, then reached across the table and took his hand. “I want to be alone with you,” she told him, leaning forward and putting her lips close to his.

  “Excellent,” he said, his face growing flushed. “I’ll dismiss the staff for the night—”

  “No.” She smiled. “I mean alone on this ship. Tell your crew to get on that little boat you’re towing behind us and go for a cruise until morning.”

  Bauer frowned slightly. “I don’t—”

  “And then, when we have this big old boat all to ourselves, I want you to go to your stateroom and wait. And in half an hour, after I’ve had a chance to change into something I brought, I will knock on your door. You will open the door. I will turn out the lights, and then …”

  “And then?”

  She tapped him on the nose with her forefinger and stood up. She didn’t need to wait for his answer, because she knew Bauer would comply. Men always did. All of them, all the time.

  Except Tommy.

  She walked toward the gangway leading down to her stateroom while Bauer spoke to the steward. When she was out of sight, she ducked into an unused stateroom and waited, leaving the door opened a crack, enough to see when Bauer walked past, heading down to the lower decks to dismiss the crew. She looked at her phone for the time. It was 10:51. She had nine minutes.

  She took her shoes off and carried them in her free hand, making her way quickly back to the sun deck and Bauer’s. At the wall safe, she plugged her earbuds into her ears so that no one else could hear.

  “Henry—we’re at the wall safe. The one you mentioned earlier. What do we do?”

  “Press your phone, microphone side first, against the vault door approximately four inches to the left of the tumblers.”

  “Got it.”

  “Now turn the lower wheel three full rotations clockwise.”

  “Done.”

  “Now, continuing to turn the wheel clockwise, move the scale as slowly as possible until I say stop. Keep going. Keep—stop.”

  “Now what?”

  “Repeat the procedure for the lower wheel. Keep going. Keep going. Stop.”

  “This is nerve-wracking. What next?”

  “Turn the lower wheel counterclockwise one full rotation, and when you reach the mark again, turn the wheel as slowly as possible until I say stop. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Stop.”

  After arriving at five numbers for each of the two tumbler dials, Henry told her she could throw the spoked handwheel in a clockwise direction to open the safe.

  She was reaching up to remove the earbuds from her ears when someone standing behind her grabbed her by the wrists, pulled her hard away from the safe, and threw her down to the floor. When she looked up, Vito was standing over her, and Udo Bauer was next to him.

  32.

  December 23

  6:55 p.m. EST

  “You’re on foot,” Dani said.

  “Funny story,” Tommy said.

  Dani buzzed them in at the gate, and a few minutes later they were debriefing her in front of the fire and warming themselves. Reese went out of his way to make sure Dani understood that he was okay and never in danger. She sent the names and addresses from Tommy’s thumb drive to Ed Stanley and to the members of the Curatoriat with instructions to locate the individuals listed but, for now, simply to maintain surveillance from a distance.

  When they were alone, Tommy told Dani they needed to talk.

  “I am so sorry,” he said to her. “I don’t ever want that to happen again. I couldn’t stand thinking that if something happened to me, and I didn’t see you again, our last moment together would have been one where we hadn’t resolved anything. We should have talked it through. You felt like I wasn’t listening to you, or that I wasn’t respecting your opinion, and you had every reason to think that, even though nothing could be further from the truth.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Dani said, taking a deep breath. “I was being pretty inflexible. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I can be stubborn as a mule.”

  “I’m the one who’s been an ass,” Tommy said. “But seriously. We got lucky. You were right. That could have gone wrong in a thousand ways.”

  “You were right too,” Dani said. “I feel the same way—I never want to leave things unsaid like that.”

  “It scared me,” Tommy said. “Maybe more than anything else going on around here.”

  “I get it,” Dani said. “But you know, conflict is a given. My dad had a saying: ‘If two people agree all the time, one of them is unnecessary.’”

  “I like that,” Tommy said. “My dad thought so too. Of course, that one didn’t turn out so good.”

  He’d discovered that his mother was having an affair—it was the formative event that made him want to someday, after his sports career was over, become a private detective, in the belief or hope that he’d never be fooled again.

  “I’ll forgive you if you forgive me,” Dani said. Tommy took her in his arms and was about to kiss her. He had his hand in his pants pocket, his fingers closing around the engagement ring, which he’d sensibly removed from the crumbled blueberry muffin and restored to its original luster inside the jewelry box, when he heard what he thought was thunder. Then the thunder grew louder. He looked up in the sky and saw lights and then the vague outline of a black helicopter landing on his lawn.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said, releasing the jewelry box.

  The helicopter was one of the larger models, the kind used as Marine 1, the helicopter the president flew in. A side door opened, and Ed Stanley stepped out onto the wet ground, ducking and holding his hat with one hand to keep it from blowing away as the rotors on the massive aircraft continued to turn. As Ed walked quickly to the house, Tommy’s motion detectors turned on the floodlights. He held the mudroom door open for the older man, who stepped lightly over the threshold and took his hat off to shake the rain from it.

  “I hope you don’t mind a surprise visit,” Ed said, smiling warmly. “I would have called, but I’m not sure how secure your phones are.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Tommy said as Otto gave the man a once-over with his nose, wagging his tail in approval. Arlo ignored the visitor, which Tommy had come to understand was Arlo’s way of showing approval.

  “No, no thanks,” Stanley said.

  “You’re sure?” Dani said.

  “Yes, yes. So listen, I got the names you sent me,” he said to Dani. “Great work. We’re running them now.”

  “That was fast,” Dani said. “I didn’t expect such quick results.”

  “I was already in the area,” Stanley said. “We’re up and running on the other list you gave me too. Actually, I thought you might be interested in joining me.” He gestured over his shoulder toward the helicopter.

  “For a ride?” Tomm
y asked.

  “Just a little one. I’ve set up a meeting.” Stanley looked at his watch. “I can get you back here in an hour. Do you mind? It’s important.” He held out his arm, extended toward the back door.

  Tommy looked at Dani, who nodded.

  “I’ll get your coat,” he said.

  In the helicopter, Stanley brought them up to date. His people had continued surveillance on St. Adrian’s from the air, and they’d intercepted a handful of unsecured texts and voice messages. His technicians had been unable to breach the firewalls protecting the school’s computer network so far, but according to the intelligence they had been able to gather and analyze, something was indeed planned for Christmas Eve.

  “We’ve also learned that the gathering at St. Adrian’s is a reunion of sorts,” Stanley said. “A fund-raiser, basically. Just like every other prep school has, only this one is a celebration of the ‘New Millennium.’”

  “What do you think that means?” Tommy asked. He and Dani had discussed the discovery Helen Trumble had made, that the Vademecum had been consecrated within a thousand-year design that apparently applied to both sides of the question. He was following Dani’s lead, letting her disclose what she thought Ed Stanley needed to know.

  “We’re not sure,” Stanley said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “It’s not that complicated,” Dani said. “It’s been a thousand years since the Druids first sailed from England. We can’t be as precise as we’d like to be, but we know the first millennium is coming to a close.”

  As the helicopter descended, Tommy saw the terminal for Westchester County Airport, and then a building marked Duncan Aviation and another home to Panorama Flight Services. They flew low over a row of private jets and touched down at the southwest corner of the airfield, where a large motor home with darkly tinted windows was parked. They exited the helicopter and crossed to the RV. The rain was falling again, dappling the broad shallow puddles on the tarmac.

  In the RV, Dani and Tommy were introduced to four men, a diminutive Russian named Konstantin, a young smiling Chinese man named Guangli, a frail-looking Frenchman named Lucien, and an overweight Egyptian named Abd-al-Rashid. Last names were not offered. Tommy thought it unlikely that even the first names were genuine.