He was done in here and looked for the exit, finding a ladder welded to the transom that led into the darkness. This would reach the deck, right at the stern rail. He mounted the first rung and began to climb, one handed. He kept the pipe wrench locked under his right armpit. The thing could be flying headfirst down the ladder towards him in the darkness, its mouthful of infected teeth coming at him with the gathering speed of a falling stone. He looked up the rungs and could see nothing. After a while he put thoughts of the thing out of his mind and focused on climbing.
When he got to the hatch, he balanced himself by locking his right elbow around a steel rung while he leaned backwards with his weight on the rusty wheel. When it finally gave way, he spun it counterclockwise and then pushed the hatch up with the back of his neck as he climbed through.
After the darkness and dim artificial light inside the ship, the daylight struck him blind. For a moment, he shrank back into the hatch. He’d expected night. But the sun was either rising or setting, and the sky on the horizon was lit a pinkish gray. If he lived long enough, he’d find out whether this was dusk or dawn. When he adjusted to the idea there would be no cover of darkness, he came entirely out of the hatch and stood on the stern deck. He was in between two canyon-like stacks of cargo containers that rose ten high and five deep between the stern and the superstructure that held the bridge. Then he looked up and saw he’d come to the deck directly beneath the thing he’d been praying the ship would possess: a free-fall lifeboat.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chris methodically worked through the straight and flat streets of the Inner Sunset, and then, while Julissa slept next to him, he started on the curving, steep streets that led up to and around Grand View Park on the southern edge of the neighborhood. In the amber light of the streetlights he could see waves of fog blowing through the stand of cypress trees on the dark hilltop to his left. To his right, down the slope, there was a row of fine houses. The computer was on Julissa’s lap and her head was leaning against the window. Light from the streetlights made a halo from the small circle of vapor where she had breathed against the glass in her sleep.
The alarm went off thirty seconds after he turned onto Fifteenth Avenue. The alarm was just a slowly repeating beep, not very loud. He drove another five seconds before he realized what it was. Then he gently applied the brakes and parked against the curb. It was three o’clock in the morning. The cars parked on the street were covered in a glittering layer of dew. A light rain had been falling, but had stopped for now. He let the windshield wipers go through one more sweep, then turned them off. Some of the houses had lights over the doorsteps or above their garage doors, or low ground lights set amongst the bushes of their steeply sloped and small front yards. But there were no windows lit. He put the transmission into park, set the brake, and dowsed the headlights.
Julissa woke and looked at the computer.
“It’s him,” she said.
Chris nodded and watched as she leaned into the backseat, reached into the box containing her device, and came back holding the main receiving antenna on a long cable. Then she opened a programming window on her laptop and began to dial down the antenna’s sensitivity. Chris watched silently, taking his eyes off her face only to scan the street and the rear-view mirror. Julissa switched off the alarm and the car was hushed except for her fingers tapping on the keyboard and the quiet purr of the engine idling. Julissa covered one side of the circular antenna with a sheet of lead foil and then rotated it slowly. The uncovered side of the antenna was facing backwards when the alarm began to ping again.
“Back up about a hundred feet.”
“Yeah.”
Chris put the car into neutral and released the parking brake. They coasted silently backwards down the hill with the headlights off. When they’d gone past two houses, Chris turned to the curb and parked again.
The third time the alarm began its ping, Julissa’s antenna was facing the house directly to their right. It was a two-story house made of unpainted redwood planks. Its garage came nearly to the edge of the street and there was a deck built on top of the garage accessed from sliding doors giving passage to what may have been the master bedroom. Though curtains were drawn across the glass doors, Chris could see a faint blue-white glow. Otherwise, the house was dark.
“Is this the one, or is it possible there’s a house behind this?”
“I don’t think we could get reception beyond fifty or sixty feet. This is the place.”
They looked at the house, at the cold illumination seeping through the bedroom curtains.
“Now what?” Julissa asked.
“Stay here,” Chris said. “I’m just going to check it out.”
He saw she was scared and he leaned across the seat and put one hand on the back of her neck. Beneath the spill of her red hair, her neck was still warm from sleep and he wished he could simply take her back to the hotel and make love to her and then sleep next to her until well into the morning. He wished he could let go of revenge and just take Julissa to a safe place where they could live quietly and love one another. But even though she was terrified, he knew her heart was locked into this just the same as his. So he pulled her gently to him and kissed her, and felt both longing and ferocity in the way she kissed him back.
“I’ll be right back. I’m not going inside. I just want to see what kind of alarm he’s got.”
“Okay.”
He reached into the glove compartment and took out a black shaving kit full of things he’d picked up in Chinatown. Then he stepped from the car and pulled the hood of his black sweatshirt against the light rain. He crossed the street and walked into the narrow side yard between the hacker’s house and the one next door. No motion light came on and no dog barked. He opened the shaving kit, found the pair of black spandex gloves, and slipped them on. Then he took out one of the throwing knives and a penlight. He unsheathed the knife and held it in his right hand, keeping the penlight in his left hand. He did not turn on the light yet, but walked quietly between the low juniper bushes, the legs of his jeans soaking through from the rain in the branches. He came to the kitchen window, which was about three feet square. Its outer sill was above the level of his head, but there was a plastic trash can against the house just under the window. Now he turned on his light and saw several things at once. There was a pair of wet boot prints on the lid of the trash can, and there was a six-inch diameter circle of glass on the ground in the bushes. He shone the light carefully up the window. Someone had used a diamond-bladed glass cutter to cut a circle from the pane’s upper edge. The window was closed. He turned off the light and held it in his teeth while he climbed up onto the trash can. When he stood, the circular hole in the glass was right at his face. Without even using the light he could see it would be possible to reach through the hole and unlatch the window. As for an alarm, the window was wired with a sensor. When the sliding pane of glass was opened, a magnet on the moving pane would lose contact with the stationary sensor on the casement, triggering the house alarm. But when he flicked on the penlight, he saw this sensor had been overcome in the same way he would have done it. A small piece of black magnetic tape was stuck over the sensor, so that no matter what position the window was in, the alarm system would believe it was closed because the sensor would never lose contact with a magnetic pull. There were no vibration sensors on the window, probably because the hilltop was too windy.
He heard a rustle of clothing against branches behind him and he dropped to a crouch on the lid of the trash can, bringing up the knife. Julissa was standing five feet away, hidden in the shadows except for her face.
He lowered the knife and slipped down from the trash can.
She stepped up to him and leaned to whisper in his ear.
“What’d you find?”
“Someone’s broken into this house,” he whispered back. “Probably tonight.”
He used the flashlight to illuminate the boot prints on the trash can and the circle of glass on t
he ground.
“The prints haven’t washed off yet, and it’s been raining on and off for an hour.”
“Who’d have gotten here before us?” Julissa whispered.
“I believe in coincidences, but not this time.”
“You think it sent someone.”
Chris nodded. He led them farther into the shadow between the two houses. There was a low redwood fence partitioning the backyard from the narrow side yard. At least in the darkness he didn’t feel so exposed, though he realized if people expected them to come, he and Julissa may have been watched from the moment they rolled up. He needed to think fast. If they made a run for the car, they might get shot crossing the driveway. A man with a rifle could be standing behind the curtains in the bedroom, or hiding in the shadows on the hill where they’d never stand a chance of seeing him. But if there were gunmen in either place, why didn’t they get shot the second they stepped out of the car? The killer and his hired men obviously knew what they looked like.
They came to a second window that lit the living room. Chris risked raising his head to the level of the sill so he could look inside. The room was in perfect order. A few small spotlights over the bookshelves showed the space. There were leather couches facing a gigantic flat-screen television, dark wood-and-glass display cases housing vases and jade carvings. The walls were adorned with framed paintings showing scenes from Guilin—steeply peaked mountains rising above the mist, rivers flowing between stands of bamboo. A potted orchid sat alone on the coffee table. Nothing was tipped over, there were no books strewn on the floor, there were no bullet holes in the furniture or blood splatters on the walls.
“What now?” Julissa said. She was whispering so quietly he heard her words more by the brush of her breath against his ear than by the sound of her voice.
Maybe the only safe thing was to hop the fence into the backyard of the house next door, move into the yard of the house past that, and then run on foot in the shadows until they could catch a cab or hop a bus. If the killer sent his men to break into his own hacker’s house, then it was likely the hacker was dead and whatever evidence he’d possessed had been destroyed. Perhaps the hacker knew too much, or his usefulness had ended and his only remaining purpose was to hang as bait. If that were the case, then the best thing they could hope to get from this situation was to stay alive. Chris thought about it a second longer, and saw by the look on Julissa’s face that she was reaching the same conclusions.
“Is there anything in the car that could trace us to the hotel?” Chris whispered.
“Not on my computer. Did you rent the car under the same name that you used to check into the hotel?”
“Shit.”
If the killer’s men got the car and traced it, they would find the name he was traveling under, which was also the name connected to his source of nearly endless funds. It had been unbelievably stupid to park out front and walk up to the house. Part of his mind wanted to ask how he could have known. But the facts were simple: he’d been stupid and may have killed them both. He and Julissa just looked at each other, crouching in the shadows with their hands on each other’s shoulders so that they could whisper into each other’s ears.
“Then let’s go in,” Julissa said. “I mean, if we’re fucked either way, we might as well do the one thing that has a chance of getting us somewhere.”
Chris nodded and they went back to the kitchen window. He climbed onto the trash can, checked that the magnetic tape was still in place over the sensor, and then slid the window open. To climb inside he’d have to step into the kitchen sink and then down to the floor. Before he did, he handed Julissa a second pair of gloves from the shaving kit in his sweatshirt pocket. As she put them on, he ducked through the window and into the kitchen. He still had the throwing knife in his right hand. When Julissa stepped into the sink, he held her left hand to help her silently down to the floor. The kitchen had a recently cleaned citrus smell. Chris went to a small throw rug in front of the stove and wiped the soles of his shoes so they wouldn’t squeak on the hardwood floors. Julissa did the same.
As they reached the living room, they heard a thud directly above them. This sound was followed by the scratch and drag of a man clawing his way across a hardwood floor. Then the house was still. Julissa had taken a big Chinese-style cleaver from the magnetic rack in the kitchen. She was looking across the living room to the staircase that rose up into darkness. She nodded at it with her chin, and Chris raised his own knife and led the way.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
For the first time since he got out of the body bag, Westfield really believed he was going to make it. He’d climbed the steel ladder to the aft-end of the freefall lifeboat. The lifeboat was set on sled-like davits that tilted it steeply over the stern of the ship. He had never used a lifeboat like this, but was counting on the idea that emergency equipment should be easy to figure out. The hatch at the back opened easily enough, and when he looked inside, he immediately recognized the wheel and lever that released the clasps on the transom so that gravity could take over.
There was a 220-volt power cord that connected the lifeboat to the ship. He bent to look at it. It would be easy to unplug, but after that, everything would have to happen very quickly. If he knew anything about ships, it was that everything had an alarm wired to the bridge. Disconnecting the free-fall lifeboat from the ship’s power source was going to be one of those things. He grabbed on to the cord with his good left hand and yanked it out. Then he stood and climbed through the orange hatch into the lifeboat. The interior lights were on—unplugging it must have activated the internal systems. Now he could see the ladder he would have to climb to reach the raised helmsman’s seat. He turned to shut the hatch and as he did so, he slipped on the tilted deck and tumbled backwards. He somersaulted down the steeply sloped aisle, all the way to the bow. The bulkhead that stopped him was well padded. He got to his knees and then pulled himself up by holding on to the headrest of one of the backwards-facing seats.
The Englishman was there. Westfield reached the hatch just as the man jammed a pistol at Westfield’s chest. Westfield ducked to the side and slammed the hatch. The man fired three shots, none of which hit Westfield. They were eye to eye with the hatch’s reinforced glass window in between them. Westfield had his right arm locked through the wheel and was pulling the door closed. Because of the boat’s tilt on the davits, he had gravity on his side: he could put all his body weight on the door just by leaning back. The man’s hand was still trapped inside the lifeboat, but he had dropped the gun. The man was shouting, probably asking for help, but Westfield wasn’t listening. He was too busy using his left hand to turn the wheel on the aft bulkhead that unlocked the release lever. Then he found the lever. His eyes never lost contact with the man’s. The Englishman must have realized what was about to happen, because he started to beat on the window glass with his free hand.
“Hey!”
Westfield nodded at him.
“That’s right,” he said.
He released the lever.
The motion was immediate. The lifeboat hurtled forward on the sled and then was airborne off the high stern of the ship. All the seats faced backwards to give the crew the best chance of surviving the impact unscathed. Westfield rode down standing at the back of the enclosed boat in its aisle, his arm locked through the steel wheel on the hatch. He braced his arm and held on to the wheel with his left hand. As the boat cleared the davits and started its freefall to the ocean, its bow tilted nearly straight down.
Westfield felt himself flying, his body parallel to the deck and his feet pointing at the bow. Then there was the jolt of impact as the bow hit the waves and the entire boat submerged.
He held on as best as he could, feeling his right elbow stretch and pop, and finding what purchase he could with his feet on the backs of the first row of seats. The light went blue green as the stern drove under the water from the force of the drop. Westfield slammed into the floor as the boat righted and popped bac
k up to the surface. He got to his knees and turned the wheel hard to the right with his left hand, sealing the aft hatch. Five or six gallons of water had splashed in when the boat submerged, but no more than that. The blood all over the hatch explained that. The man’s hand must have been severed on impact, and then Westfield’s weight pulling on the hatch kept it closed while the boat was underwater. His eyes followed blood trail to the bow: the Englishman’s arm, sliced unevenly midway up the forearm, lay next to the pistol. Two sharp bone ends poked out through the skin and muscle. He remembered the pistol shots, supposing he’d know in a moment whether they hit anything important.
The short ladder to the helmsman’s seat was a challenge. He felt as if he’d spent the last week on a medieval torture rack being pulled apart. The relief was that the control panel was straightforward. There were meters showing battery charge, a main breaker, a fuel meter, an oil pressure gauge, a tachometer, and an engine temperature gauge. He found the throttle and pressed the rubber starter button. Down below, the engine turned over once and then purred like a sewing machine.
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