She stopped to consider the options that presented themselves. Taking the fork to Barlovento meant staying on task, completing her mission as quickly as possible. Taking the fork to the observatory meant a short detour, a brief break, before getting back to it. She checked her watch; it was not even one o’clock yet. Thanks to her early start, she still had plenty of time. I could grab a sandwich at the Residencia. I could take a shower—sweet Jesus, I could take a shower! She spun the wheel to the right and began to climb.
Thirty minutes later, she pulled in to the parking lot. The receptionist, Antonio, whom she remembered from her prior visit, did not seem to recognize her. No wonder, she thought, seeing the dirty, bedraggled woman reflected in a mirror behind the counter. I look like a homeless person. “Hola, Antonio,” she said. “Megan O’Malley. From Johns Hopkins University. It’s nice to see you again.”
The man’s brow furrowed as he processed the information and then struggled to reconcile it with the grimy woman standing in front of him. Finally, recognition dawned in his eyes—recognition that appeared mixed, not surprisingly, with puzzlement and concern. “Ah, Doctora O’Malley. Welcome back.” He hesitated, then glanced down. O’Malley heard papers shuffling, saw Antonio’s eyes darting down to make swift scans of the pages. “Forgive me, Doctora. I forgot that you were coming.”
O’Malley smiled and shook her head. “No, no, it’s not your fault, Antonio. It’s a surprise visit. No one knows I’m here.”
The poor man looked more confused than ever. “A surprise?”
“I’m not here to use the telescope,” she explained. “I came back to La Palma as a tourist.”
“Ah, yes?” He took the liberty of staring at her with frank, appraising curiosity. He pointed toward her left ear. “You have been hiking?”
O’Malley reached up and finger-combed her hair, retrieving a twig. She laughed self-consciously. “Yes, I have been hiking.” She leaned forward, elbows on the counter. “I’m wondering if I could ask a big favor. Two favors, actually.”
“Favors? Sure, what favors?”
“First, I’m starving. I’d love to get a sandwich.”
“Of course, Doctora. Mi casa es su casa. You remember where is the café?” He pointed down the hallway behind her.
“Yes, I remember. But even if I didn’t, I could follow my nose. I can smell it from here, and it’s making me even hungrier.” She hesitated. “The other favor might be more complicated.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’m wondering if I could take a shower.”
He blinked. “A shower?”
“Yes.” She gave him a self-deprecating smile and waved one hand at her head, then extended the gesture to encompass all of herself. “I fell down in the woods. As you can see, I’m very dirty. And I pulled a muscle in my back. So I would love to take a hot shower.” It came out sounding pushier than she liked. “But only if you have a room that’s empty, of course.”
“Doctora, it’s no problem—we do have a room. Of course you may take a shower. And you may stay here tonight if you want to. It would be our pleasure to accommodate you.”
“You’re very kind, Antonio, but I can’t stay. A sandwich and a shower would be fabuloso, though.”
He swiveled and took a key from a pigeonhole on the back wall, then laid it on the counter. “Room seventeen. Our finest accommodation. The . . . how do you say it? Penthouse?”
O’Malley laughed. “Will I find roses and champagne waiting for me?”
“Of course, Doctora.”
O’Malley took the key and gave a slight bow. “Thank you, Antonio. I’ll see you on my way out.”
He returned the bow. As she turned to go, Antonio glanced down, reaching for the phone.
O’Malley was eager for the food but downright desperate for the shower. She headed straight upstairs for the “penthouse,” which was like every other room in the Residencia: small and spare, but offering a stunning view of the sea. She spent a nanosecond admiring the panorama, then stepped into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and peeled off her clothes. As soon as she glimpsed steam, she stepped into the spray. “Oh my God,” she moaned. “Oh.”
She spent a while luxuriating under the water, then soaped up her body and shampooed her hair and slowly rinsed. Then she luxuriated awhile longer. Eventually, reluctantly, she turned off the water and toweled off, wishing she had brought a change of clothes. As she was pulling up her muddy pants, she heard a knock on the door. “Oh crap,” she muttered. She grabbed her sweater—no time for the bra—and tugged it over her head as she walked into the bedroom. “Yes?”
She half expected to hear someone say, “Housekeeping.”
But this was not a hotel. Instead, she heard the doorknob rattle and saw the door swing open and gaped as a man—a handsome Spaniard—stepped into the room.
“Iñigo—Jesus!” She yanked the sweater down, hoping she hadn’t just flashed her tits at him. “What are you doing here?”
The question she was really asking was, What the hell are you doing in my room? The question he chose to answer was, How did you know I was hoping to see you?
“Antonio told me you were here. A wonderful surprise! You came back to see me?”
“Not exactly. I came back because I’m still trying to figure out the problem I had with the telescope.”
His brow furrowed; then he nodded. “You are very persistent.” He flashed her a disarming smile. “When Antonio told me you had returned, I looked for you in the café, but you were not there. Obviously. Because you were right here.” He stepped toward her. “I am happy to see you, Meh-ghan. Welcome!” He took another step, reached out, and enfolded her in a hug.
O’Malley was angry at being walked in on, half-dressed and dripping wet. Christ, what if she’d still been in the shower—would he have come in anyway? Walked into the bathroom? She was embarrassed that so little fabric separated them. And she was acutely conscious that in spite of her anger and embarrassment, her nipples were hardening against his chest.
She worked a hand between them and pushed away slightly, but still he held her.
“Why did you leave so suddenly last time?”
O’Malley didn’t answer.
“Anyway, I am happy to see you,” he repeated. He pressed against her, and she noticed that her nipples were not the only things growing hard. “I have missed you very much.”
“Oh, please,” she said, realizing too late that her sarcastic words might be open to a different and problematic interpretation.
His hands slid around to her sides. “I cannot stop thinking of you. I wrote you a hundred emails.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did. But I was afraid to send them. Is true, Meh-ghan.”
She felt a stronger throbbing against her belly. Oh God, she thought, then—to her dismay—she heard the words again, whispered aloud this time. “Oh God.”
Reaching up, he cradled her face in his hands and leaned down, his eyes locked on hers. O’Malley felt her breath catch as his mouth met hers, and her knees buckled. With a soft moan she sank against him, and when she did, she felt a more insistent throbbing, now against her, against her thigh. No, not a throbbing, exactly. A pulsing. An oddly incongruous, almost mechanical buzzing: the buzzing of her cell phone vibrating in her hip pocket. She broke off the kiss—difficult to do, for multiple reasons—and pushed back from him again. “My phone,” she gasped.
“Sshh,” he whispered. “It can wait.”
“No, it can’t.” Regretfully she extricated herself from his embrace and pulled her phone from her pocket. “Oh, fuck. I have to go,” she said, as she realized the implications of the message on the display: not an incoming call or text, but a low-battery alert. Maps and signal-seeking were both huge battery sucks, she knew, and if her phone died, she wouldn’t be able to locate a spot with a good signal for the third seismometer.
“Meh-ghan, Meh-ghan,” he pleaded. “Don’t go. Stay here tonight. With me. I beg you.”
/> “I can’t.”
“Why not? What’s so important?”
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “But it is.”
“Don’t go.”
“I have to. Believe me, I’m sorry.”
He turned away and sighed heavily, then leaned on the windowsill and hung his head. “You break my heart.”
“Iñigo, please,” she began, but he held up a hand and waved her off. Dismissed her.
“Just go,” he said, spinning on his heel and striding toward the door. “Goodbye.” Without looking back, he opened the door and walked away, leaving her stunned.
O’Malley was surprised and angry to feel tears on her cheeks. “Damn you,” she muttered—a curse that encompassed Iñigo, herself, her dying cell phone, and the obsessive fool’s errand that had brought her back to La Palma. Stomping into the bathroom, she tugged on her socks and boots and glared at her bra. “Oh, fuck it,” she said, snatching it off the towel bar and stuffing it into a pocket.
Checking the paper map the car rental agency had provided, O’Malley noticed a shortcut she could take to Barlovento. The shortcut meant she wouldn’t have to backtrack all the way down to the fork in the road—the fateful, ill-chosen fork that had brought her up to the rim of the caldera. Up to the brink of torrid sex with Iñigo.
Spilled milk, she told herself, stopping to inspect a narrow side road branching—“twigging” might have been a more accurate word—from the highway. High above to the right, perched on the rim of the volcano, she saw several of the observatory’s gleaming white telescope domes. To her left was a ribbon of pavement, one lane wide and badly cracked. It angled across a stretch of rocky, treeless terrain—the one flat spot on the entire island, in O’Malley’s limited experience—and then dropped over an edge and down into a sea of clouds, which had apparently coalesced during her stop at the Residencia.
O’Malley eyed the road doubtfully. Was this really her road? Was this really a road at all? A small, weathered sign, labeled with an arrow and the word “Gallegos,” seemed to confirm that it was. She didn’t like the look of it, but at this point, she doubted that she had enough daylight and battery power to backtrack to the bigger, better route that she had impulsively rejected for the sake of a hot shower and a steamy kiss. “Okay, here goes nothing,” she muttered, activating the four-wheel drive and then easing out the clutch with considerable unease.
As she neared the edge of the relatively flat stretch, the cracks in the asphalt grew bigger and more numerous, and soon the road was more crack than pavement. As the road dropped over the edge, all pretense of paving vanished: the single lane became a pair of ruts, rocky and twisting, snaking down a grade steeper than any O’Malley had ever driven on. “Holy shit,” she muttered, hitting the brakes.
Nothing happened.
Actually, something happened, but it was the opposite of what O’Malley had intended. The pedal turned mushy under her foot and sank to the floor. She pumped the pedal, but still it refused to hold pressure. Her brakes had failed completely. “What the . . . ?” she muttered. They’d been working fine before her stop at the observatory. Had something broken since? No, she realized with terrible clarity, they’ve been sabotaged.
The road was worsening and the vehicle was gathering speed, bucking like a furious rodeo bull. She gripped the wheel tightly, not just to steer—an increasingly difficult proposition—but also to keep from being flung around like a rag doll. In desperation she floored the clutch and shoved the gearshift from second gear toward first. The transmission fought back, the gears gnashing—O’Malley imagined the metal teeth snapping off in rapid sequence like machine-gun fire—but she had no choice, so she slammed it again, harder. This time the transmission snarled all the way into first, and she popped the clutch and lurched hard, slowing with whiplash-inducing force.
In first, the engine whined like a jet turbine, the tachometer edging up toward its red line, but at least she was still in control, sort of, and still on the road, such as it was.
O’Malley was getting lightheaded, and she realized she was hyperventilating—her brain, like the engine, close to redlining—and she fought to slow her breathing. She forced herself to breathe in through her nose, which made her feel as if she was suffocating, then blew out slowly through pursed lips. Again, she commanded herself. And again.
It worked, until she looked ahead and saw the road vanish. Fifty yards ahead the mountainside ended abruptly; beyond and below was an unbroken sea of clouds. “No no no,” she moaned. She flashed back to her first day on La Palma, a seeming lifetime ago, and to the little Toyota tumbling down into the clouds. The crucial difference, the lethal difference, was that this time she was inside the doomed vehicle. Should she bail out? Could she bail out? She had to try.
She fumbled for the seat belt release, but her fingers encountered an obstacle before they found the seat belt button—a shape that felt familiar and somehow helpful. Still staring ahead at the fast-approaching edge of the abyss, O’Malley analyzed the tactile data, and when she grasped the meaning, she grasped the thing itself—it was the parking-brake lever—and yanked with all her strength. The SUV bucked and lurched, the engine stalled, and O’Malley slithered to a stop in a cloud of dust and a miniature avalanche of loose stones, twenty feet before a sharp turn that surfed the very edge of the precipice.
She was alive. Saved by the parking brake, she was alive. And she was sobbing, her head on the steering wheel.
But not for long. O’Malley reached again for the seat belt release, almost as frantically as before. This time she found it and punched it. When the belt retracted, she flung open the door, staggered out, and vomited, though there was nothing much in her stomach to lose. Well, she consoled herself once the heaves had ceased, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t have that sandwich.
As she contemplated her options, she realized that they weren’t good. She was on a narrow, knife-edge ridge, with no room to turn around. In reverse, her driving was marginal even at best—even on pavement in her Prius, which was equipped with a backup camera. Here, it would be suicidal to backtrack. Yet going forward, around the bend, and along the ledge seemed the height of lunacy.
But going forward was the only way to place the third sensor. She had to find a way forward. Could she abandon the SUV and walk to the third location, carrying the sensor and the battery? Realistically, she doubted it; the location was a good ten miles away—no, a bad ten miles—maybe more. And the sun would be setting within an hour or so.
Think, O’Malley, think, she ordered herself. She had stopped the runaway SUV once, she reminded herself. Could she stop it again, or slow it enough, to make the sharp turn up ahead? She walked down and studied the terrain up close. Up close, it wasn’t quite as tight a turn, or as narrow a ledge, as it appeared from above. And the ledge itself wasn’t that long—less than fifty yards. If she could manage to stop just before the turn, then restart slowly, she might make it.
Suddenly she laughed. “Well, duh,” she said out loud. Of course she could manage to stop before the turn: all she had to do was switch off the ignition with the transmission in first, and she’d jerk to a halt immediately. Or, she realized, if I put it in second or third but leave the ignition off, the engine’s compression will work like a brake, and I’ll crawl like a snail. Piece of cake!
It was not a piece of cake; it was a harrowing, hair-raising, white-knuckle thrill ride. But she hung on, working the transmission and the hand brake in tense tandem to slow her through the turn. She crept along the ledge, hugging the rock wall to her left as closely as possible—so closely, in fact, she knocked off the driver’s side mirror, but she judged the loss minor, considering the alternatives. And then she had made it—across the ledge! Gradually the track widened and smoothed, and in less than a mile she was back on pavement, honest-to-god pavement, and approaching her final destination outside the town of Barlovento.
After a couple of false starts, which took her down dead-end alleys and driveways, she f
ound the dirt road she had spotted on Google Earth the night she and Boyd had selected the seismometer locations. The road zigzagged and switchbacked its way toward the high cliff on the island’s northeast coast. O’Malley’s phone was nearly dead—“3%,” read the blinking battery-charge indicator—and she jolted along the road as fast as she dared, alternating between taps on the gas pedal, yanks on the brake lever, and strategic switchings-off of the ignition. By now the makeshift combination of workarounds was nearly second nature. With a bit more practice, she might even be able to manage the maze of city streets back in Santa Cruz.
The cell signal was better here than at the prior location, bouncing back and forth between one steady bar and two flickering bars. She came to a place where the road crossed a small, wooded ravine that cut through a tight switchback. She risked another obsessive glance at her phone. Two steady bars. Jackpot!
At the top of the ravine, she eased the vehicle onto the narrow shoulder and parked, being careful to angle the wheels up the slope and give the parking brake a hard yank. As she opened the door, it was caught and nearly yanked from her grasp by the wind whipping off the ocean and up the face of the nearby cliffs. O’Malley forced it shut, then popped the rear hatch and leaned into the cargo space. “Third time’s the charm,” she muttered again, hoisting the last of the three seismometers and its battery.
From behind her, against the wind, she heard a voice. “I think it would work better on the edge of the cliff.”
O’Malley whirled. Twenty feet away she saw a man—Iñigo!—standing beside a jeep whose arrival she had not heard.
“Dammit, Iñigo, you scared me! What the hell are you doing here?”
He shrugged. “I followed you.”
Wave of Terror Page 13
