by Chris Howard
Drino met Captain Wilraven at the edge of Irabarren, spinning behind them to cover the view and waving several others from his raft to help bring Adam DuFour aboard.
It all was going so smoothly, Wilraven was tense with fear of impending action from Levesgue’s team. Glancing over his shoulder, Wilraven watched the chaos evaporate. Andres’ team had spread out the suits flat on the deck, and Drino’s colorful group paraded back to the Errantes with the forklift and its load of fuel, the children among them dancing around it.
Wilraven had his good arm over Drino’s shoulders and they both turned at the edge of the Irabarren, with their backs to Errantes. Smiling and gesturing at the approaching forklift, he whispered, “Damn, I owe you, Drino. Don’t alert the authorities. Seriously.” He tilted his chin toward Levesgue. “They’re monitoring all radio and sat traffic in the area.”
He could see the questions rising in Drino’s eyes, but they both turned to watch the forklift as Miles Shantz drove the container onto Errantes, set it down smoothly, and backed onto Irabarren amid a series of annoyingly loud reverse tones.
Operation complete.
Wilraven’s voice dropped lower, but the words came out rapidly. “Don’t ask me what we’re doing or who they are. Just slip away without a word. Don’t fuck with them. They will kill you, sink your raft, wipe you off the face of the sea. These guys are connected and they’re bad. They shut down a Coast Guard rescue call and I paid for it.” He indicated his cast. “Just get out of here and get Adam to safety.”
Drino gave him a belligerently stubborn gesture, one hand open, jabbing at him. “And?”
“And we’ll be fine. We’ll do what they want. Get this job over and behind us. I just want Adam in good hands, healing.”
The Errantes captain gave him one more stern glance and a curt nod of his head. “Done. On one condition?” He was dead serious. “You tell me the story next time we meet on the waves.”
Wilraven took that to mean you stay alive long enough to get the words out. “Deal.”
Drino hopped across the opening gap between the Irabarren and Errantes, and then turned to stand at the edge of the raft as it drifted away, arms folded. He called one last demand across the sea. “Stay safe.”
Wilraven said, “I’ll try,” but a gust of wind whipped the words away. The storm was coming in fast and rough, the chop already slapping the Irabarren’s sides and sloshing over the flat deck.
The captain stared at the Inés Errantes, a village on the sea with trees and banners and high-flying kites darting across the sky like eagles. It slid toward the horizon in the currents; engines on one side coughed into life, driving it north and west.
As a way of warning the captain of approaching trouble, Angelo came up behind him and said too loudly, “Drino get what he wanted, Cap?”
Wilraven wheeled, stumbling a bit to catch his balance. He put out his arms, starting to smile at his first. Levesgue was coming up fast, walking determinedly toward him.
“Enough fuel to get him to the coast.”
Levesgue was carrying Wilraven’s makeshift crutch in a way that made it clear he knew something had just happened, he didn’t know what it was, and he was fucking pissed off about it.
Wilraven moved in front of Angelo, forcing himself to grin. “Damn. I’d leave my head behind if it wasn’t attached.” He completely ignored the rage pulsing off Levesgue and held out one hand for the crutch.
The soldier looked like he was a few seconds away from gripping it two-handed and using it to beat the shit out the Marcene’s captain, but the first officer stepped out of Wilraven’s shadow to defuse the situation. He clamped one hand on Wilraven’s shoulder, directing his attention south. “Tail wagging the fucking dog, Cap.”
Levesgue stopped in his tracks, lowering the crutch. The sky was black on the southern horizon and moving their way. Andres’ team was back on the far side of the Irabarren’s deck, dragging their dive suits across to the racks by the shed, bungee-cording them down.
The storm was sweeping in quick, tumbling gray clouds and strong winds. Gusts were humming in the cables. The Irabarren was pulling at her anchors and the dynamic positioning thrusters were working hard to keep the platform in a fixed point on the water, the whole thing shifting back and forth with the Serina’s dead weight below, swinging the giant cranes around like toys.
Wilraven nodded. “Fuck.” He glanced over at Levesgue. Then to Angelo he said, “Get the cages and winches going.” He waved over Andres. “We need to get Serina back on the cranes with an easy roll out to the floor. We won’t unhitch. Just let out enough slack to keep the Serina from pulling on us.”
Andres understood, barking commands into his handset, calling the dive team for suit-up.
Swinging back to Levesgue, he said, “We’re going to lower the ship—temporarily. Move over to the crane lines again. We won’t unhook her, but we’ll get some slack in the lines. We need to.”
“The fuck you do.”
Wilraven gave it his best out-of-my-hands shrug, wincing against the pain in his shoulder, and said, “Look, the Serina can take us all to the bottom.” With another stab of pain he pointed up at Crane One. “She’s still hanging by the bow off one of the big cranes. We need to lower her or get her on the rollers. Or we’re going under.” Leaning in, dropping his pointing finger to the deck, he added—not caring if Angelo heard him, “Right here, not in Cuban territorial water.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Real Eels
The captain of the Katren kicked Rebekah’s lifeless body aside and waved toward the door. They brought in Martin Allievi, struggling weakly. Martin saw Rebekah on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, and he saw Andreden taped to a chair, beaten and bloody. “You fucking animal!” His mouth opened wide around the words, as if he was trying to roar them. They came out thin and ineffective. It didn’t even sound like him. He got them out anyway, even if his voice broke and he bent into a coughing fit after them.
Captain Reyes waited for Martin to straighten, waited for the coughing to stop. Then he stepped in, swung the butt of the gun across the side of Martin’s face, followed by a left palm heel to the ribs. Allievi went flying, the bones around his eye crushed, the gun peeling away a thin band of blood across his face—vivid red under the halogen light.
Reyes’s helper was a silent blue-coveralled figure just out of Andreden’s view. He picked Martin up and gave him a few prods to the ribs to keep him on his feet.
“Mr. Andreden, what’s my next question?” Reyes brought the gun to the side of Martin’s head.
Andreden stammered, “Lenient Luck. We heard about it from—I don’t know . . . the name. She found him.” The words spilled out of his mouth, fed by broken memories of Laeina showing up at the Knowledgenix labs late at night. “He died, drowned under a bridge, Potomac. The man didn’t find anything. Empty files. He could swim. He should not have drowned.” He had to say something. Anything. He had to keep the words flowing to hold off the next moment, because the next moment meant Martin was dead. “He could swim well for . . . one of us. She told us he knew another place. Some place . . . ” Fuck. He couldn’t remember where. “Boston?” His thoughts felt thick, fighting him. “It started with a B.”
Captain Reyes pulled the trigger, and the room shook with the blast. Paint chips rattled off the walls to the floor. Martin was looking right at Andreden, sorrow in his eyes, and then fury and noise wiped his face away. His legs wobbled drunkenly over Rebekah’s body and he stumbled and hit the floor. The patterns of rust and paint shifted across the walls, and the sound they made was more like weeping.
Weeping, and the soft crinkling sound of folding butterfly’s wings.
Choking sobs, and tears running down his face, Andreden bent forward as far as the duct tape would let him.
Captain Reyes came around and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head back, the tears stinging his eyes. Right in his ear he said, “I think we need to give you another dose, and then we’re
going to dig into that city that starts with a B.” He looked up and shouted across the room, “He’s coming out of it. I need him under to continue.”
Reyes’ fingers dug into Andreden’s throat, and he could feel the metal links of Laeina’s chain there, cutting into his skin. He blinked, trying to reconcile the knowledge they had already taken Laeina’s chain with the sharp line of points stabbing his throat.
It had to be the chain.
He couldn’t breathe; the links pulled tight, twisting and biting. His eyes were closing, and he felt Reyes shove the gun against his cheek, cool, angled metal pressing into his skin.
Andreden couldn’t rein in his own thoughts because they were wandering around his head like predators freed from a zoo, trying to connect the apparent loss of the chain Laeina had given him with the pain of the links cutting into his throat. He was also wondering why the metal of the gun was cold. Shouldn’t it be the temperature of the room? Does this guy store it in a refrigerator?
That made him smile. It felt weird with his swollen lips, the cuts, the bruising. And he felt shame at smiling—a rush of warmth in his face and up his back at finding anything to smile about with the dead bodies of Martin and Rebekah a few feet away.
He should not find anything to smile about in the world ever again. For as long as they let him live.
There was a metallic crunch, his head snapped back hard, and Reyes stepped away, waving the gun irritably, staring down into the clawed fingers of his other hand. They were curled up around something he now found fascinating, and even though Andreden had trouble focusing, he could just make out a thin line of dark red running the length of Reyes’ forearm. Blood dammed up at his elbow and then dripped to the floor.
Reyes lifted his gaze to the far end of the Katren’s hold, walls streaked with rust and faded gray paint. “What the fuck?” A shadowy figure moved in the light from the open door, talking in a voice so muffled and indistinct it was only noise with pauses between gibberish.
Andreden started breathing, a sudden reflexive pull of air into his lungs, and he didn’t feel the links of chain around his throat. Reyes must have broken it.
Laeina’s going to be angry. It was a gift. His wandering thoughts picked that up and started playing with it. If it broke, did it call Laeina? Did she say it was some kind of protection? Why wasn’t she here? She was still recovering from the gunshot wound. Maybe she’s dead like everyone else on this journey.
Captain Reyes threw the chain with the teardrop-shaped ampule to the floor, crushing it under one boot. The slushy mix of broken glass and water, the scrape of metal links against the deck. But hadn’t the ampule broken when Reyes had upset the table? The sounds were real, but they seemed so far away to Andreden. The gun, the killing, the rusty metal walls of the torture box were a sharper layer over some dull and muted level of reality they didn’t want him to experience.
Even Reyes seemed to move away from him, where his voice still roared and echoed in the empty metal space, but sounded somewhere else at the same time. “Who the fuck are you?”
Laeina was there, her voice not as strong as he remembered, but it was definitely her. “I will ask the questions. You will answer them.”
The world flipped upside down. Andreden blinked, and Reyes and the shadowy torturer’s assistant were floating the wrong way in the air—their feet hitting the metal beams across the ceiling, mouths gaping but silent, eyes wide.
Laeina grabbed Andreden by the shoulders, pain lancing down his arms as she lifted him out of the chair. He didn’t even remember the duct tape being cut away, or the abrupt adhesive tear across his skin. She turned him toward the brightly lit open door to the ship’s hold and torture chamber.
“What do you have on your eyes? Lenses?”
His fingers—no longer broken and useless—reached up mechanically, slowly, rubbing them, and he felt the slight ridges against the insides of the lids. The effort to think, to lift his hands, to do anything seemed too much. “Martin and Rebekah.” The names gusted out of him.
Laeina batted his hands away and gripped his face in her hands, tilting his eyes to hers. “I have not found them. I do not think they are aboard.”
He tried to shake his head, but she held him still. “Dead. Reyes shot them both. Right in front of me. Here.”
She looked around. “I think you dreamed that. You have wires and needles stuck all over you, in your skin, going to those machines.” She indicated something behind him while she continued examining him, bending his head one way, then the other, her fingers holding his jaw to turn his face to each side. “Something also in your ears. They were doing something with your senses. Something artificial to deceive you.”
Laeina made a slashing motion with one hand, and the pain in his fingers, up his legs, the bruising around his face, drifted away. The cables running from sensors and inducer pads, dozens of them all over his body, went slack. She had cut them, and reality started stamping around at the edges of his awareness.
He blinked a few times, the world a bit clearer, his muscles stronger. “I saw. I heard Martin’s voice.” His fingers went to the strips of medical tape holding leads to tiny audio drops in his ears. He peeled them away, and the muffled noises of the world sharpened. He heard the ocean through the open door, the soft slip of wind through the cranes and containers on Katren’s deck.
Laeina helped with the lenses, holding up her cupped hands with sparkling clear seawater. He dabbed a few drops across his eyes.
“Stop.” She sounded impatient. “Move your hands away from your eyes.”
As soon as he did, something shoved his face into the water in her hands, a strong swirl of the sea running into his eyes, under the lids, cleaning away the lenses Reyes and his torture team had attached to him. Andreden staggered back, mouth open for air, shaking the water off his face, out of his hair.
He rubbed his eyes and opened them.
The world snapped into clear focus. The walls of the hold weren’t rusty at all. They were clean, painted a slightly lighter shade of blue than the hull of the Katren.
That suddenly made complete sense. Why would the hold be in such poor shape? Except in some sort of pretend torture scenario, an augmented experiential session that made the victim feel in every way as if the place was real—pain that felt real, with virtual characters moving on stage and off, characters who could be killed brutally in order to make the victim talk. And drugs. It wouldn’t work without some heavy narcotics and hallucinogens—lowering inhibitions, increasing tactile input—along with vision and audio manipulation to cover over the seams in the virtual space.
He looked down at his body. He was naked, but there wasn’t a new mark on him. Just the handful of old scars.
Laeina tossed him the shorty wetsuit. “Get dressed. We’re going to get some answers, and then I think we’re going to take this ship for the next hop of the trip.”
She frowned as she watched him struggle to get into the suit, his balance still off from the drugs. He used the chair for support, and she only had to grab him once to keep him on his feet.
Then they turned their attention to the floaters.
Captain Reyes and his coveralled buddy were still bobbing around the ceiling with their work boots in the air, silently screaming at Laeina, mouths wide, all molars and snarling teeth. And while Andreden moved normally through the room, they moved in slow motion, as if they were underwater.
They went still, both of them suddenly and intensely focused on what Laeina had brought with her. Laeina’s hands were cupped around something that rolled and punched against the confinement of her fingers, struggling to break free.
Curious, Andreden leaned down to get a better look. “What are you going to do with Reyes and this guy?”
“I will show you.” She let the fingers of one hand peel up and flipped a furiously squirming bundle of long, slender gold eels at the pair. They tumbled in the air for a few seconds—as if they were in water-- and then slowly untangled themselves, sp
litting into two groups. Two groups of perhaps twenty eels wriggled over the space between Laeina and the torturers. Tiny dark eyes glinted and paler flesh showed from the open slices of their mouths. The first group spread out evenly along Reyes’ body and then burrowed through his jeans, boots, white collared shirt . . . into his skin. The eels wriggled up his forearms, worming under the skin of his hands. Lumpy shapes moved up his throat into his head.
“Eels.” Staring, drained from the interrogation, Andreden repeated the word, turning it into a question, “Eels?” He found the chair again for support, and waved at Reyes and the torturer in the blue coveralls suspended in the air. He took a few more deep breaths in order to ask a follow-up: “What are they doing, eating them from the inside out?”
Laeina made a disgusted face. “What? No, that would be revolting.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Practice Run
Levesgue threw Wilraven’s crutch to the deck, then threw his hands in the air, snapping them closed into fists, knuckles whitening. “You can explain it to Corkran when he calls.” His voice was low and controlled, but he looked as if he wanted to pull out the gun and shoot something repeatedly as he stormed off in a circle around Irabarren’s deck.
Angelo and Andres both glanced at the captain with expressions that clearly showed they were puzzled by Levesgue’s behavior. The captain shrugged again. Gone crazy? Some sort of cooling-off thing maybe?
Either way, the Irabarren just wasn’t that big, and Levesgue would be back, perhaps with a changed mind. They had to move quickly.
Andres let the words drift out under his breath. “Captain, you have a plan?”
Wilraven huddled them together. “First, you know the quick-disconnect bolts Adam was working on? We need two sets of them.”
Angelo cranked up an eyebrow. “Sure.”
He glanced at Andres. “Replace the D-shackles with Adam’s releasables on the cables coming off the cranes to the lift beams. Rigged to blow when we need to from the Marcene.”
