When he found the station, he carefully stood on the helm seat, head and shoulders poking through the hatch. Then he’d turned the radio in his hands so the antenna was parallel to the sea, the little silver ball on its tip pointing at the blue horizon. The signal came in just as strong as before. He slowly rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, moving his feet cautiously on the helm seat so he wouldn’t fall down the hatch, holding the antenna out like the dowsing rod it had just become. When the antenna was pointing east northeast, the signal abruptly faded out. A hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction, west southwest, the signal faded out again. He listened to the wind blowing past, and the sound of the engine vibrating below him, and the gurgle of waves sliding past the fiberglass hull. He listened to the silence of the radio and looked at the horizon where the antenna was aimed. There was nothing there, but that wasn’t important. He noted the position of the sun in the sky, and the angle of the waves lined up on the face of the sea, and ducked into the boat again with his hand shading his eyes so he could read the correct bearing on the bulkhead compass.
What he knew was that AM radio stations fade out when a radio’s antenna was aligned horizontally with the earth and pointed directly at the transmission source. What he didn’t know was whether the transmitter was in front of him or behind him. The only way to figure that out would be to motor along in one direction or the other and see if the signal strengthened or faded. Because he was already going basically east, and because the wind and waves were carrying him that direction anyway, he chose east.
Near sunset, he knew he’d chosen correctly. The music was clearer. For a stretch of ten seconds, he heard an acoustic guitar backed by drums, but when the singer’s voice came in, static cut it off. The signal still faded in and out, but it was getting stronger. He turned the radio off to save the battery and steered by compass, wondering how much fuel the engine burned and how long the little boat could carry him. There were tarps on board and a pair of wooden oars, so he supposed if it came to it, he could rig a sail and work downwind. But he hoped it didn’t come to that. With the engine running at 1500 RPM and the gentle, steady push of the wind and waves, he was making good speed on the course he wanted. He locked the wheel and climbed down the ladder to find something to eat in the boat’s supplies.
At full dark, he stood on the helm seat again and looked at the stars. All he was sure of was that he was in the northern hemisphere. He saw the Big Dipper and followed the pointer stars in its outer edge to the North Star, which hung a little less than halfway between the horizon and the zenith above his little boat. By this he guessed he was at about forty degrees north latitude. He took his time making this estimation, adding up the degrees in a swath of sky by measuring up from the horizon by the width of his thumb. But even if he had his latitude fixed within a hundred miles, he still had no idea whether he was in the Pacific and heading east towards California, or in the Atlantic and heading east towards Spain. For that matter, he could be in the Mediterranean, motoring to Greece or Albania, or in the Yellow Sea, plugging towards North Korea.
That last thought, at least, made him smile.
He settled into the helm seat and watched the night. After an hour or two, he slept in a fashion, waking every few moments to check the compass and the engine gauges, and then to scan the horizon, looking first for signs of the ship he’d escaped, and then ahead for signs of land. Just before dawn, he woke cold and stiff. He hobbled down the ladder and forced himself to stretch in the little aisle between the seats. Then he redressed his wounds, took another dose of the antibiotic and urinated into one of the empty water bottles.
As he was standing, he saw the sleeve of the Englishman’s jacket poking through the aft hatch. No wonder small splashes of water came inside the boat in the following seas: the sleeve kept the hatch from sealing properly. He looked through the window to be sure no wave was on the verge of overtaking the boat, spun the wheel, opened the hatch, and pulled the jacket inside. Then he slammed the door and sealed it. Because the jacket was soaking wet, he could see a rectangular shape of something stuffed into its inner-liner pocket. He flipped the jacket’s lapel back, unzipped the pocket and pulled out the little leather case of syringes the man had used. He opened it and saw four intact syringes, held in place by nylon loops.
He still had no memory of what had happened after the man had stuck one of these into his neck. But he had no doubt these could be useful. He took the case and put it inside the first-aid kit.
When he climbed back into the helm seat, the cloud on the eastern horizon had dissolved. The silhouette of an island lay directly ahead. Another smaller island lay a few miles to the north. He stared at the islands and waited for them to turn into clouds and float away, but they didn’t, and he wasn’t too surprised. He supposed he’d been expecting them. The closer and larger island looked to be ten miles wide and about equal that distance from the boat. If he kicked up the engine speed and had good luck with the currents, the trip would take under two hours.
A lighthouse blinked from the island’s northern end, but the land there rose in cliffs directly from the sea. The waves looked small and gentle here in the middle of the ocean, but would be a different story altogether when they were slamming into cliff faces. Towards the middle of the island, short river valleys dropped from the central plateau; if he landed at one of the riverheads, he might find a sandy beach and a way up without having to climb a cliff. He steered for the island’s center, watching the horizon for boats and escorted on this last stretch of his journey by a pod of dolphins that came from behind and then slowed to swim alongside the lifeboat, keeping Westfield within their ranks until he was so close to the island he could hear the surf breaking on the beaches just ahead. The dolphins left him and went back out to sea, and Westfield turned the boat to motor six hundred feet off the shore, going south along the island. There were no houses, but towards the crest of the plateau, he saw a cut in the pine forest that might be a road. He went below and got an inflatable lifejacket, a bottle of water, and the first-aid kit, which was in a watertight yellow box. He clipped the bottle and the kit to the lifejacket harness, turned the wheel to point the lifeboat away from shore, and locked the helm. Then he climbed out the hatch, stood on the curved orange deck, inflated the lifejacket, and stepped over the side.
Chapter Forty-Two
When Chris figured it out, it came all at once, whole and unbroken. If he and Julissa had to spend the next ten hours proving it was right, and making additional discoveries that went along with it, it didn’t change the basic completeness of what he’d just realized. He was sitting in a stuffed armchair in a room at the Sheraton, four blocks from Los Angeles International Airport, looking out the window at the fading light, and there it was. He sat frozen for two minutes, watching a plane materialize out of the gathering dusk, watching it grow from a light in the sky to a jumbo jet about to land, and then he stood and crossed the room, entered Julissa’s adjoined suite, crossed to her bathroom, and opened the door without knocking.
She was in the bath and looked up at him, startled.
“What is it?”
“A.I.S.,” he said.
“What?”
“A.I.S. What you switched off on Sailfish when we sailed across to Molokai. The automatic ship identification system. You turned it off so no one could track us.”
Julissa stood, gathered her wet hair into a ponytail, and took the towel he was handing to her.
“I don’t know if that’s what he was trying to write on the wall, but if it was, I’ll bet anything we can find him that way,” Chris said. He leaned against the sink. “Look. We know he’s coming and going by water, and we know he kills close to ports. He’s hired smugglers who’re spending time in ports. He’s moving around on ships and every commercial vessel in the world has had an AIS for a decade. There are websites that track ships live, all over the world, any time they’re within thirty or forty miles of a port. You can see exactly where the ship is and wher
e it’s going. You can get its name and IMO number.”
“IMO number?”
“It’s like the VIN number on a car, but for commercial ships. They never change, even if the ship changes hands or the company that owns it changes its name.”
Now Julissa was getting it, the whole idea, complete and intact and ready to go. Chris saw the look on her face and realized if he’d kept the AIS system running while they escaped across to Molokai, so Julissa could watch its screen, she’d have thought of this days ago.
“We can correlate them,” she said. “Find out what ships were in the harbors on the days the murders happened.”
“And then use their IMO numbers to figure out who owns them, and if that doesn’t give us any clue, we can use the Lloyd’s of London registers to figure out who’s been chartering and sub-chartering them.”
Julissa wrapped the towel around her torso and tucked the corner between her breasts to hold it in place.
“Show me these websites.”
They left the bathroom and went back to Chris’s suite. Then they sat on the floor at the coffee table, Julissa looking over Chris’s shoulder as he logged into one of the ship tracking sites.
“There’s one problem,” Chris said. “Most of these sites only have data going back a couple days. If there’s no way to get the data they had ten years ago, this won’t work.”
Julissa nodded and they looked at the screen. Chris zoomed in on a map of Galveston. Colored icons indicated ships coming and going from the port, or tied up alongside the wharves. There were dozens of them—tankers, bulk carriers, tugs, container ships.
“I can get the old data,” Julissa said.
Chris looked at her, and she went on.
“In grad school, at M.I.T., I knew a guy who was studying the way the web grows. He’s been at it since ’99. His lab takes a virtual snapshot of the entire web, every day, then maps the changes. He’s got hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of terabytes stored up.”
“Can you get in touch with him?”
“He’s still at M.I.T. We dated for about two years, but that was a long time ago. I ended it on friendly terms.”
“What do you need to start?”
“My laptop. The list of all the murders and when and where they happened. A list of every other website you can find that has this kind of data. Dinner. Coffee.”
“You got it.” He started to get up, but she stopped him by putting her hands on his shoulders and pulling him to her.
“And you,” she said. “I need you.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Westfield staggered up the black-rock beach, slipping once on the wet stones and landing on his bad knee, but rising and moving on before another wave could hit him. He followed the edge of a fast-moving stream a hundred yards inland from the sea and then sat against the stone abutment of a washed-out bridge. He took off his mechanic’s jumpsuit and sat naked and shivering on the stones, wringing seawater from the suit. The sea had been cold but the air was warm enough. When the wind finished drying him, he stopped shivering. Swimming ashore had made a wreck of his bandages, but the first-aid kit held dry replacements and new ointment. The Russian syringes were still there, dry and intact. He cleaned his wounds and looked at the bites before covering them over with new bandages. The infection was waning; the antibiotics were working.
When he had wrung all the water he could from the jumpsuit, he put it back on. He kept the first-aid kit and water bottle, but deflated the life jacket and left it under a flat stone. Then he climbed the abutment and found the track of an abandoned dirt road that led into the higher country of the island. He stood a moment before setting off, watching as the lifeboat motored away. He hoped it would be a speck in the distance before anyone came along and found him.
The road wound up switchbacks along cliffs ledged with pine trees. After a mile, he came to a paved road. If he’d had a coin, he might have flipped it, but he had nothing in the pockets of his jumpsuit. So he went right, because he was already facing that direction, and besides, it looked to be downhill. He walked past terraced fields planted with some kind of yellow flowering bush and divided by neatly built, low rock walls. When the sun rose high enough that he was no longer in the shadow cast by the high country, he felt the jumpsuit finally start to dry. He walked for half an hour and then sat down to rest on one of the rock walls, looking down the escarpment and into a protected bay he had not been able to see from the water. At the head of the bay there was a village of whitewashed houses with red tile roofs, all neatly lined along stone streets that led to an old wharf. Fishing boats and wooden sailboats bobbed on their mooring balls behind a breakwater. Fifteen minutes later, he came to a road sign that pointed down a narrower asphalt road that led directly to the village. The sign read Fajã Grande — 1 km. A smaller sign beneath it bore the symbol of a cross and said Igreja Matriz de Fajã Grande. Westfield looked at the words and decided they must be Portuguese, and that was when he realized he’d landed in the Azores.
He walked through the narrow stone streets of Fajã Grande. An old man wearing a tweed cap and sitting on a wrought iron balcony put down his newspaper and watched Westfield pass. He had been feeling good in the morning air and the sunshine, and had forgotten his jumpsuit was stained with blood. He was barefooted and limping, and hadn’t shaved in days. He nodded at the man and continued through the village until he found the small central plaza where the church, Igreja Matriz, was built. The parsonage was behind it, and like the church and everything else in the village, it was a low whitewashed house, built flush to the edge of the street, with flowers in iron planters that hung from the brightly painted window sills. He stepped up to the parsonage door and knocked. Across the street, a bakery was turning out the smell of fresh malasadas and coffee. His stomach woke, and he wished he had some money. Then the door opened, and the parish priest dressed in black clerics stood looking at him over the gold rims of his spectacles.
“Good morning,” Westfield said. “You speak English?”
The priest smiled. “Yes. Can I help you?”
“I’m an American—a sailor. I ran my boat onto the rocks just before sunrise and lost her because I fell asleep on watch. I don’t have any papers or any money. I walked to this village from the beach where I swam ashore. Is there a computer I can use? With an Internet connection?”
The priest looked at him. “You need a doctor.”
“No. I got scraped up in the wreck and again coming to shore. But it’s nothing serious.”
“I can take you to a computer. And I can give you some shoes and clothes.”
“Thank you.”
The priest opened the door the rest of the way and motioned Westfield inside.
Half an hour later, Westfield followed the priest, whose name was Father Leonardo Silva, through the rest of the village and along the waterfront. Westfield wore an old gray jogging suit and a pair of Nike running shoes that Father Silva had given him. Though he seemed to want to walk faster, Father Silva kept pace with Westfield. He carried a set of keys on a large brass ring.
“Where had you sailed from, and where were you going?”
“I set out from Halifax and my first landfall was supposed to be Gibraltar.” He was pretty sure the Azores lay on the great circle line between those two points.
“What kind of boat?”
“A thirty-four-foot sloop,” he said, thinking of the last boat he’d seen beam reaching across Puget Sound when he could still go to his house. Except now that he thought about it, he didn’t miss his house at all. He had escaped with his life and, for the first time, he had a solid clue: he knew the name of the ship.
“She’s totally lost, your boat?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. What was her name?”
“Tara,” he said, and without any hesitation. “Right now I’m just glad to be alive.”
“I wouldn’t have set out alone across the Atlantic before November,” the priest said. “You must be br
ave.”
“You’re a sailor?”
“Yes.”
They walked in silence for another few minutes and then Father Silva pointed at the two-story whitewashed building in front of them. It clung to the seawall on one side and its well-tended lawn faced the street. The stone lintel over the door was carved with a Latin cross.
“The parish school,” Father Silva said. “Of course the children are not here now. Summertime.”
They went across the lawn to the door, where Father Silva used the keys from his ring to open the locks. Then he led Westfield inside and up the stairs. The classroom facing the ocean was also the computer lab. There were two desktop PCs on a table by the window. They looked four or five years old, but they would work fine, if there was really Internet.
“Do you know how to use them?” Father Silva said.
“Yes.”
“I have to go back to the church. Confession begins soon. When you’re finished here, will you lock the door?”
Westfield nodded. “I can meet you back at the church?”
“Yes. I’ll be in the booth.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Be sure to lock the door.” He handed Westfield the key ring and left.
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