“Thank you,” he said, looking down where the engine must have been. If it started and ran like that, it couldn’t have been hit by a bullet.
He put the transmission into forward and revved the engine to four thousand RPM. Right then he was more interested in putting distance between himself and the ship than in worrying about the engine’s health. It probably wouldn’t blow a gasket or overheat right away. The helmsman’s seat was in a raised turret at the back of the enclosed lifeboat. By turning around he could see to his stern, through reinforced windows. Looking aft, he saw two satisfying things. The ship was steaming away without any sign of turning, probably going twenty knots. And there was a body in the water a hundred feet from the lifeboat, floating facedown.
The Englishman must have been knocked unconscious by the impact and the shock of losing half his forearm. If he hadn’t already drowned, he was in the process of doing so. Westfield watched the ship for five minutes and it never tried to turn. Either he’d knocked out the steering so completely that it could do nothing but plow across the ocean in a straight line, or its crew hadn’t noticed the lifeboat was gone. Either option was fine with Westfield. He wondered if the creature were still aboard. If it had come aboard the ship by helicopter, it may well have left the same way once it was finished with the girl.
The pain flared in his chest and his thoughts turned from the creature to the infection it gave him. The creature had provided Westfield at least a rudimentary cleaning. Apparently it wanted him alive long enough to answer the Englishman’s questions, whatever they had been. Now Westfield decided to try to finish the job. The lifeboat had no autopilot, but the steering wheel had a lock, and he engaged it to set the rudder amidships. Then he climbed down the ladder to find the lifeboat’s medical supplies. The boat was made to hold eighteen men; it was well stocked, and its first-aid kit was in good order. Westfield took what he needed and then climbed back into the helm seat, working on his chest with antibiotic ointment, then using finger splints and white medical tape to bandage his mangled right hand. Finally he used his left hand and his teeth to rip open a vacuum-sealed Z-pak of azithromycin. He swallowed two of the tablets with a long pull from one of the liter-sized bottles of water he’d found stored in plastic crates under the seats. The instructions on the back of the package told him to take one of the remaining tablets a day for the next four days.
“If you live that long,” he told himself.
That thought brought his eyes to the stern again. The ship was so far towards the horizon, he could only make out its superstructure as a faint white blur. In another five minutes it would be gone entirely, and he would be alone on the ocean. Then it would be time to throttle back and conserve fuel while he tried to figure out where he was. As he looked around, he realized he didn’t even know what ocean this was.
Chapter Forty
They were looking at a man who should have been dead.
Julissa had followed Chris up the stairs, keeping her hand on the small of his back so she wouldn’t lose him in the shadows. When they reached the landing, he switched on his small flashlight. He’d turned the throwing knife in his hand, holding the blade in his palm. Maybe he knew how to throw it. Then she let her eyes follow the circle of light as Chris worked it across the floor and along the walls of a richly decorated study. She saw the oiled wood paneling and the carefully placed paintings, the desk in front of the bay window with its leather-padded writing surface and a laptop computer open at the center; she saw these things, but without any immediacy, because what she was truly seeing was the blood splashed on every surface touched by Chris’s light. It was dripping from the desk onto the floor and there were splashes and spots of it on the walls and across the fronts of the paintings, and there was a wide trail of it from the desk to the bathroom door, and that was where the man who should have been dead had finally tumbled to the floor to finish doing the only thing left for him to do.
Chris did not go to him right away, but instead played the light along the walls into all the corners of the room and then crouched to shine it beneath the desk. There was plenty of blood, but there was no living man to be seen. Chris went across the room, shining the light at their feet so they could step clear of blood. He stepped over the man and shined his light into the bathroom, then turned again and crouched close to the man. Julissa stood with her back near the wall, watching Chris with one eye and the staircase with the other.
“His throat’s been slit,” Chris said to her.
She looked down and saw the two rough slashes across the center of the man’s throat. Chris briefly let the light roam around the room again. As she watched it go from the leather chair, to the walls and then to the trail of blood that led to the body, she understood the chronology here. The man’s attacker cut his throat while he was sitting in the chair; in his struggle the chair had spun, jetting blood from his jugular all over the room. The attacker must have left him for dead, but he wasn’t. The thump they’d heard was him falling out of the chair and dragging himself across the floor to the bathroom. When Chris knelt next to him and put the light in his face, the man’s eyes rolled back and tried to stare past the beam. They were unfocused and registered no expression.
“Can you hear me?”
Bubbles of blood came from the man’s slit throat, but there was no sound of his voice.
“He can’t talk,” Julissa said.
“Were you the one hacking into the FBI?”
The man closed his eyes for a few seconds, and then opened them again. He was so thoroughly covered in blood it was impossible to tell anything about him. He had black hair and brown eyes, but even the shape of his eyes was obscured by the clotting blood on his face.
“Is that a yes?” Chris asked.
The man blinked.
“Do you know how to find him?”
The man blinked again.
Julissa saw that the man’s fingers were scrabbling against the floor weakly. She and Chris must have had the same realization because as she was turning towards the desk, Chris said in a low whisper, “A pen. Get him a pen!”
She stopped when she saw what the man was doing. He bent his elbow and dipped his finger into his own slit throat and then reached out to the wall in front of his face and drew a diagonal slash. He made a second diagonal slash in the other direction and then a small horizontal dash in between. He’d written an upper-case “A”. Chris and Julissa stared at him as he reached his finger back into his neck to re-wet it with his blood. He reached back to the wall and made an upper-case “I” next to his first letter. As he was dipping his finger into his wound a third time, a spasm overtook his body, starting at his feet and moving upwards until it had all of him. He tried to steady himself and get his finger to the wall to paint another letter, and he died just as his finger reached the wall. It was as simple as that: he stopped shaking and lay still on the floor in the spreading pool of his blood, his finger outstretched and pointing at the two letters he’d written. The wet blood, heaviest at the corner of the letter A, ran slowly over the baseboard towards the floor.
“Let’s get out of here,” Chris said.
“I’ll grab his laptop.”
Julissa was still trembling when they got into the car, but she stopped by the time Chris drove them down from the hilltop and made a right turn onto Lincoln Way. There were cars parked along both sides of the street, but there was no other traffic. Chris drove at twenty-five miles an hour. He hadn’t said anything since they’d left the house. She had so many questions she couldn’t even think of where to begin. She looked at the computer and tapped at its keyboard for three blocks, then shut the screen and tossed it into the backseat. Chris looked at her. They were stopped at a red traffic light; its glow lit the left side of his face.
“The hard disk was scrubbed less than half an hour ago,” she said.
“We walked in right after his killer walked out.”
“Except we don’t know if he ever walked out. We never searched the whole hous
e,” Julissa said. “If they came here to kill him so we couldn’t get anything out of him, don’t you think they’d stick around and kill us too? Isn’t that what you’d do?”
Chris nodded. The light turned green and they started rolling.
“They left the laptop on even after they scrubbed it, probably to draw us in. They know what I do for a living. They knew I’d find him.”
“Maybe they didn’t think you’d get here so fast.”
Chris glanced into the rear-view mirror and then turned his head to look at a car that was overtaking them in the left lane. She followed his gaze and saw they were being passed by a black sedan, driving without its headlights. As it pulled alongside, Chris slammed the brakes at the same time the passenger in the overtaking car let loose a burst of gunfire. Julissa screamed as she hit her seat belt. The car skidded sideways, knocking her head against the window glass. Chris jerked the wheel all the way to the left and accelerated into a high-speed U-turn, over the low curb separating the four lanes of Lincoln Way. They bumped into the westbound lane, laying rubber on the road as they sped towards the ocean. Julissa swiveled in her seat and looked out the back window. The rental car’s front bumper lay on the curb along with a part of its muffler. The black car was sideways on the empty road, pushing over the curb into the westbound lanes. Its headlights were still off. As she looked at it, she saw a muzzle flash from the driver’s window. She ducked and heard the shot hit the side of their car with a bang.
“Jesus, Chris! Get us out of here!”
“I’m trying,” he said, his voice low and calm.
The black car was farther in the distance now because Chris had gotten a head start in the new direction. The rental car’s engine was roaring louder now without the muffler. She could feel the acceleration pressing her against the seat. They shot through a red light without slowing.
“I’ll try to lose them in the park.”
She turned to see out the front, gripping the inner handle of the door. They were pushing past ninety; the parked cars on the side of the road came up and shot by in a blur. There were loud bangs underneath the car. Either something was breaking loose down there, or the car was getting hit by shots they couldn’t hear.
“Try to stay down.”
She ducked low in the seat and watched. They were coming to another red light, skidding as Chris hit the brakes in preparation for the turn. There was a Shell station on the other side of the intersection, the area around its pumps lit in bright fluorescent light. A police cruiser was there, the cop just stepping into the car after coming out of the mini-mart. Chris laid his hand on the horn and made a right turn, taking them into the park at fifty miles an hour. At that speed the car could barely hold the turn. They careened into the left lanes of the road they’d turned onto and mounted the curb before Chris corrected by cranking the steering wheel to the right. The car jumped off the curb and slammed back onto the road. Chris followed the curves and brought them onto a smaller road that led into the park. Now there were no streetlights. He revved the engine, and again Julissa felt the press of acceleration as they picked up speed. She couldn’t believe they made the turn without flipping.
She was trying to get back up to look out the rear window when she heard the siren.
“The cop?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Chris raced through the park, working mostly west through the stands of dark eucalyptus and past the old polo field. The police car was catching up and she realized it was because Chris was slowing down. They came down a hill and rounded a long curve through a meadow where she could see the road behind them for a quarter of a mile.
“They back there?” Chris asked.
“I don’t see them. Just the cop.”
The police car was nearly on their back bumper now. They heard the officer shouting through the bullhorn mounted to the squad car’s siren, telling them to pull over.
“They must’ve hung back on Lincoln when they saw the cop come after us.”
“What do we do?” Julissa asked.
Before he could answer, another piece of the exhaust system broke loose from the car’s undercarriage. Still leaning to look backwards, Julissa saw the trail of sparks shooting back. They were dragging something made of metal, and as she braced herself, it broke off. She felt the hard jolt as it went under one of the back tires. Behind them, the cop swerved to miss the broken and sparking piece of metal that came scuttling out from behind their car. The cop never slowed, but their own car started to lose speed in a big way, fishtailing all over the road.
One of the back tires had blown.
“Hang on!” Chris shouted.
The car swerved to the edge of the road and hit the curb. This time, instead of mounting the curb and continuing, the left front tire blew. And that was it. Julissa was conscious of the roar of the engine and the red and blue lights reflecting off the mirrors as her side of the car flew up and slammed upside down into the ground; she saw in that moment the shadows cast by the blades of grass, and then they were rolling again.
The car landed with a bang of steel on what was left of its four wheels and rolled through the muddy grass at thirty miles an hour until it slammed into the mulch-covered embankment of a terraced flower garden. Julissa was never aware that the airbags had come out. She only saw, when they had come to a complete stop, that the white silk bags were draped around them, already deflated.
“You okay?” Chris said.
She nodded, just to see if her neck was broken. Shattered electronic equipment and broken glass lay everywhere. She ran her hands along her chest and up her arms but found no cuts.
“Yeah. You?”
Chris nodded. “Okay.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and started to open his door, and that was when Julissa saw the cop. He was standing outside the shattered driver’s side window, his right hand on his still-holstered Beretta.
“Sir, are you—”
That was all the cop ever had time to say to Chris and Julissa before his chest exploded in a geyser of blood. Julissa looked past the slumping cop and saw the black car, its headlights still dark, idling on the street behind the parked police cruiser. In a single motion she would replay for the rest of her life, Chris reached through the broken window and grabbed the Beretta from the cop’s falling body, kicked open his door and dropped out of the driver’s seat to the ground with one knee on the grass and both hands on the pistol, and fired five shots through the passenger window of the black car. Then he was up and running the hundred feet to the car with the Beretta in front of him. When he reached it, he leaned inside through the passenger window and fired three more shots. Then he turned to look at her.
“Are you hit?” he called.
She shoved her door open and stepped out.
“I’m okay.”
There was nothing still intact in the wrecked rental car for her to bring along. She walked stiffly across the tire-marked grass to the black car. Chris opened the passenger door and pulled a dead man out of the seat and dropped him onto the grass. His face and head were so mutilated by gunfire she couldn’t tell which of the men it had been. From his close-cropped dark hair, it could have been the Italian, Giovanni Greco, but she couldn’t be sure. She recognized the dead driver, though, from the dossier she’d read on the plane. As Chris hauled him out, dragged him around the front of the car, and dumped him on the grass next to his dead companion, she got a look at his face and recognized Jonah Chapman, the British fugitive and alleged smuggler. She was still standing in the grass staring at his body, vaguely aware Chris was walking back to the body of the dead policeman and kneeling down to put the Beretta in his hand. Then he was back at the black car, holding the passenger door open for her.
“Let’s go.”
She got into the seat and Chris shut the door. The car smelled of powder smoke and cigarettes. There was an Uzi in the footwell underneath one of her sneakers. She looked at it and moved her foot. The inside of the windshield was misted with b
lood.
Chris pulled around the police car and drove away from the scene. When they were back into the anonymous, sleepy avenues of the Sunset District, they heard the sirens begin to converge on Golden Gate Park. She noticed Chris was still wearing the gloves he’d worn into the hacker’s house.
“What now?” Julissa asked.
“I need a payphone.”
“A payphone?”
“I need to call Avis. My rental car’s gone missing.”
An hour past sunrise, they were doing seventy miles an hour on Interstate 5, heading south towards Los Angeles. The sub-machinegun was locked in the trunk along with their few possessions from the hotel. Julissa had fallen asleep, her hand on top of Chris’s, her red hair blowing in the strong wind coming through the shot-out driver’s side window. In her mind as she slept, she fit the bleeding letters A and I into the beginning of every word she could, and in this dream, as in her last few hours of wakefulness, she came up empty.
Chapter Forty-One
The ocean was limitless blue from horizon to horizon: blue waves and blue sky overhead, broken only by the occasional patch of white foam where current lines brought opposing waves together in wet claps of spray. Where he was, the waves were widely spaced and running to the east northeast, the direction he was going, and there was no spray at all. He’d opened the overhead hatch for fresh air and had been running with the waves and wind at six or seven knots for the last eight hours.
He still didn’t know where he was, but he had a good idea of where he needed to go. This was thanks to the battery operated AM/FM radio he’d found in one of the supply kits while he was taking stock of the boat. It was a cheap little radio receiver with a built-in speaker and a flimsy telescoping antenna. He’d been hoping to find a handheld GPS, but instead he’d found this. As an old-school naval officer, who had navigated ships around the world decades before anyone even dreamt of GPS, he knew exactly what to do with a tool like this. While sitting in the helm seat with the overhead hatch open, he switched the radio to receive on the AM band, extended its antenna through the open hatch, turned the volume all the way up, and scrolled through the AM channels listening for any kind of signal. He found one at 850 kHz—a signal so faint he could only discern music behind all the static, but he couldn’t tell what kind of music it was. But it was real, which was all that mattered.
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