He pulled the smartphone from his front pocket. As the screen lit up, he saw that it was smeared with his blood. Not daring to uncover the bullet wound in the filth of the garbage truck, he used the light of the screen to eyeball the exterior of the bandage. There was significant bleeding, but it wasn't too heavy. With any luck, it would stop without need for re-stitching. He pressed one hand against it while using the other to pull the received faxes and fax reports from his pocket. The paper had held up amazingly well for having been soaked with saltwater, kerosene, and blood. It appeared that someone—presumably the police—had opened it for examination, refolded it, and put it back in his pocket. It was still damp. But it was readable. Arkin used the smartphone browser to search for the number he'd written down after listening to the redialed tones on the handset back in the secret room at the gallery. It did not lead to a name. However, he was able to ascertain, from a handful of searches of phone numbers with the same first seven digits following the 011 international dialing code, that it was for a listing in the old colonial port city of Valparaiso, Chile. He turned to the fax report. There were only two numbers in it, repeatedly appearing for both inbound and outbound faxes. Again, the first didn't lead directly to a name, but Arkin could see that the area code was for the island of Montserrat, a small British Overseas Territory in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean Sea. However, the other fax number turned out to have an Oregon area code, and he was quickly able to link it to a business in the city of Eugene called Bluefields Data Dynamics.
As if Arkin needed any further confirmation that the fax numbers were relevant, the report revealed that faxes came in from Eugene and Montserrat several days before the killings of Egan and Pratt, and went out to each location a few days after. Otherwise, there was almost no fax activity at all. That couldn't be a coincidence. It looked like someone in Eugene, Montserrat, or Valparaiso was dispatching a Balkan-Canadian homicidal lunatic artist on assassination missions in the United States.
Then, he did a search for the hand-scribbled Alberta address included on one of the faxes. It linked it to a man named Ted Wright. A follow-up search revealed that he was a fiery First Nations activist who was hell bent on stirring up his local tribal population to violently oppose the construction of a luxury resort on lands they claimed as ancestral. Arkin was able to find several photographs of Wright, including one, from a Calgary newspaper, showing him exiting a corner grocery, hand-in-hand with a little girl who must have been his daughter, each of them holding ice cream cones. Arkin had little doubt Wright was the assassin's next target.
Finally, he began a search of State of Oregon business entity records for Bluefields Data Dynamics. But before the Secretary of State website was fully downloaded, the phone ran out of battery power. Arkin dropped it into the garbage.
Though the painkillers, his blood loss, and his overall fatigue had him feeling lightheaded and dull, he did his best to think about what he'd learned. The last known link he had to the group was the water-stained pages of numbers, only one of which appeared tied to a U.S.-based location. Eugene, Oregon, was the most logical next stop. He considered going to Calgary to shadow Ted Wright, with the idea that he might be able to catch a member of the group as they circled for the kill. But he knew his chances would probably be better if he could catch them somewhere where they weren't already going to be on an operational footing—hyper-aware, hyper-observant. He just hoped the group really had some sort of physical presence in Eugene. That it wasn't a red herring, like another mere voicemail location. As he considered his next move, his condition gradually caught up with him and he nodded off.
*****
A loud, echoing crack and roll of thunder deafened Arkin. A flash of light from an approaching electrical storm illuminated the high sandstone walls to either side of him and the dry sand upon which he stood. He looked up in the next lightning flash to see that he was at the bottom of a narrow slot canyon, no more than 10 feet wide, its path twisting and turning away into the darkness ahead of him. A sandstone walled chasm cut, over millions of years of erosion, a hundred feet deep into the high Colorado Plateau. The air smelled of damp stone. He was wearing a full suit of dark wool, but he couldn't tell the color.
Between flashes of lightning, he stood in a complete and total darkness that added to his sense of confusion. Where was he, exactly? And how had he come to be here?
A sudden, howling gust of cold wind at his back got him to turn around and face the upstream direction. He knew that such gusts sometimes preceded deadly flash floods in slot canyons like this one. He squinted, wishing he could see through the darkness, when another lightning flash revealed a tall, dark figure standing near. At least 10 feet in height, the mysterious figure wore dark robes decorated with broad vertical and zigzagging white stripes. Its large and faceless black head bore a crown-like adornment with two pair of radiating spokes that projected outward as if representing antennae or beams of a magical light. But when Arkin saw the eyes—the empty, menacing, red glowing eyes—he knew exactly who he was looking at. It was the priest from the Anasazi pictograph he'd found in shadow below the canyon rim alongside the Animas River.
The priest stood staring at Arkin. A silent, ominous sentinel. Who are you? Arkin wanted to ask. But he couldn't draw breath to speak.
In the darkness between lightning flashes, the priest vanished. Arkin looked all around, but saw no sign of him.
"Who are you?" he finally managed to yell to the surrounding darkness. "Who are you?"
But the priest was gone. Rain began to fall, cold drops landing on the top of Arkin's head. Then he heard it. A low, distant rumble. Like a train. Coming closer. Coming from the upstream direction of the slot canyon. The rumble getting louder. In moments, it grew to a deafening roar, and in the next burst of light, Arkin saw a high wall of churning flash-flood water rounding the corner of the canyon and bearing down on him. He screamed as the cold water hit him.
*****
A filthy, overweight, jumpsuit-clad garbage man was staring down at him, holding an upturned beverage cup over his head.
"Come on, guy. Wake up. Free ride's over. Let's go."
Arkin stared up at him, dazed. He was still in the back of the garbage truck. His head and shoulders were soaked with cold lemon-lime soda.
"Come on, now. Out of my truck."
Arkin sat up. The garbage man saw the blood.
"Oh. Hey, man. You're messed up pretty bad."
Arkin didn't bother to respond. He rolled out of the truck and limped, dazed and aimless, down a potholed street between what appeared to be small warehouses or industrial buildings. He didn't stop until he'd put a couple of blocks between himself and the garbage truck. When he did, he looked around to find that he was only a few hundred yards from a body of water. A channel, it appeared. Probably some branch of the Fraser River. Without giving it any real thought, he hobbled down to the water and made his way along its bank, passing several warehouses and a large vacant lot fronting a collapsed pier lined with seagulls, before finding a small marina full of sailboats.
A plan took shape in his mind. Stowing away in a motor vehicle was out of the question. From where he was in Vancouver, it would be far too difficult to make an accurate guess as to what vehicles might be headed across the border. Even if he lucked out and found himself a southbound ride, there was an unacceptable risk of being discovered by U.S. Customs. Customs always inspected trains as they crossed the border too, so travel by rail wasn't an option. And he was in no condition to sneak through the woods to make the crossing on foot. But a sailboat offered a relatively low-risk, low-strain, and immediate option to get him moving south.
Doing his best to look sure of himself, to look as though he belonged, he gritted his teeth against the stabbing pain in his side, stood up straight, and entered the marina. Walking the docks, he found an old sloop-rigged Cal sailboat, maybe 29 or 30 feet long. It looked seaworthy, well-maintained, but also had enough salt film and dust on its decks to tell Arkin that i
t hadn't been used in a while, and probably wouldn't be immediately discovered as missing by its owner. There were only two other people in the marina, both on a boat a few slips over, fiddling with its halyards. They paid Arkin no mind. He went aboard, snapped an old padlocked hinge from the cabin door with little effort, and made a quick inspection of his ship. There was a good mainsail, a good Genoa foresail, and an ancient jib. No autopilot, but it did have a Washington State registration sticker, which would draw less attention once he was back across the border.
In five minutes, he'd fired up the engine, backed out of the slip, and was headed downriver. Putting along as he made his way toward the open water of the Strait of Georgia, he thought out his next moves. He could sail down past Seattle and head to the southernmost extremes of Puget Sound, down near Olympia, and then hitchhike from there. But hitching always invited scrutiny and suspicion from passersby and law enforcement officers alike—especially if he couldn't get all the blood washed out of his shirt. The safer play, at least with respect to the risk of getting picked up by a cop, would be to sail down the Pacific Coast until he was as far south as Eugene, and then hitchhike the short remaining distance inland. But the journey would probably eat up the better part of 300 sea miles. So even if he could maintain decent speed, with minimal tacking or beating to windward, and despite moderate assistance from the south-flowing California current, a nonstop journey would take more than two full days. Too slow. No, he'd use the sailboat to cross the border, hopefully avoiding customs, then put in at a marina near the main north-south rail line—which ran straight from Vancouver, through Seattle and Portland, down to Eugene—and catch a waiting southbound train. Again from his travels with Hannah, he remembered that the line ran along the water much of the way, and that trains had to stop at various points along the line to wait their turns to cross bridges, transition single track stretches of the line, and sometimes drop or link up with train cars in the bigger towns. Going by train, he could probably get to Eugene in less than a day.
As he emerged from the Fraser River and entered open water, he tied off the steering and went below to see what he could find. There was a well-insulated, foul weather sailing jacket in the cabin that he would put on as soon as he went back on deck. There was also a small first aid kit in a wall-mounted holder just inside the door. In it, he found various bandages, an iodine swab, and antibiotic ointment. Reluctantly, he peeled back the blood-soaked dressing to examine the bullet holes in his side. One entry and one exit wound, from the same bullet. They were relatively clean. But he had torn half the sutures out of the exit wound, still oozing with a pink, semi-transparent liquid. At least the major bleeding had stopped. As delicately as he could, he cleaned off the wound with the iodine swab, squeezed a large blob of antibiotic ointment onto a barely large enough square of new bandage, slipped the new bandage under the old hospital dressing, and then stuck the old hospital dressing back on. They had no doubt pumped him full of antibiotics back at the hospital too. Still, at some point in the very near future, he would need more.
He was pleased to find NOAA and CHS nautical charts covering the entirety of his likely route folded up in a holder next to the console. The nearest U.S. town in which the north-south train line ran, and that had a marina where he could tie up, was Bellingham. But if he was going to sneak onto a waiting train, he preferred doing so under cover of darkness. So he'd sail south during the daylight hours, and then put in and jump a train after sundown. Promising ports included Edmonds and Everett. But Everett was much bigger and more industrialized, so there was a better chance it might have side tracks with trains waiting their turn to head south.
Having plotted a rough course, he raised the sails, catching the 15-knot wind. The boat healed to starboard as he chose a southwesterly tack, close hauled, toward clearing skies. He trimmed the sails to a perfect 45 degrees off the wind, and the ship began to slice through the water with impressive speed and grace. It struck him, as he filled his lungs with the fresh sea air, that the best thing he ever learned at Annapolis was how to sail.
*****
The sun rose higher in the clearing sky, and both the San Juan and Gulf Islands grew on the horizon off his bow. By lunchtime, he was crossing the U.S.-Canada border somewhere between Saturna and Patos islands, shooting for President Channel, and he celebrated his uneventful transition to U.S. waters by drinking a bottle of lukewarm spring water he'd found in the cabin. His course would take him close to Friday Harbor, immensely popular with boaters of every imaginable sort, where he could lose himself among innumerable craft—ferries, barges, sailboats, motor yachts, fishing boats, kayaks. In the unlikely event that his movements were being casually observed by border agents, Coast Guard patrols, or vessel traffic radar operators, and even if someone were pursuing him in earnest, they'd have a hell of a time remotely tracking him through the crowded channels and radar shadows of the San Juan Islands. By the time he came out the other end of the archipelago, he'd be just another unidentified boat of unknown origin and unknown destination, looking as common as anything.
Midway through the islands, the wind began to die. To maintain his speed, he fired up the engine. But ten minutes later, a temperature warning light came on. He checked the gauge and was chagrinned to see that the needle was well into the red. He shut down, giving the engine time to cool, fired it up, and tried again. The temperature again climbed into the red in only a few minutes. He loosed the main and jib sheets, spilling his wind so that he could go below to take a look at the engine compartment. Opening the hatch, he found, in the immaculate and bone dry compartment, what he thought might be a bypass hose. He put a small clamp on it, hoping it would force more water through the engine block. It didn't make any difference. For the next half hour, he went through another three cycles of running the engine for a few minutes, letting it cool, and then running it again. But on the fourth attempt, it refused to start. He was sure he hadn't run in the red long enough for the engine to have seized. Perhaps he'd somehow flooded it. Whatever the case, it wouldn't start, so he limped along under full sail, with an anemic breeze pushing him along at a disappointing two knots. As he passed between islands, his empty stomach groaned for mercy as his nose caught the inviting smell of deep-fried something—maybe crispy fries, maybe cornmeal coated fish fillets, maybe both—drifting across the water from some undoubtedly quaint and welcoming island pub.
As he eventually passed the southern end of San Juan Island itself, heading out into the wide Strait of Juan de Fuca, he eyed the grassy pasturelands behind him and to starboard where, in 1859, the United States and British Empire almost went back to war over a land dispute brought to a head by something as trivial as an American potato farmer's shooting of a trespassing Hudson's Bay Company pig.
Halfway across the strait, the breeze died completely and the boat bobbed along on glassy water at the mercy of a rising tide that seemed to be pushing him backward. The conditions remained unchanged for an hour. Then another. Arkin grew restless, his lack of progress eating at him. Worse, whatever painkillers they must have pumped into him in the hospital were wearing off. The pain was strong enough to make him grit his teeth. Regardless, he took the opportunity to strip and wash the blood out of his clothes with saltwater. It took some scrubbing, but they came passably clean.
Remembering one of the instructors in his first Navy survival course telling him that in such situations one had to keep his mind occupied such that it didn't stray to troubling and demoralizing thoughts, he forced himself to recall, in every material detail, his most recent chess matches with Gregori Zhukov. Move-for-move, he replayed the matches in his head, pinpointing exactly where he'd made mistakes, and exactly how Zhukov had exploited them. Then he imagined alternate endings, in which he caught and corrected himself before making each key mistake, visualized making different moves than the ones he had actually made, and then contemplated how Zhukov might have responded to them. In his mind's eye, he played entire matches, move by move, until he began to play
Zhukov to a draw. Until he eventually began to win. He began to state his moves aloud, just to break the horrendous quiet. "Bishop takes pawn. Knight to king six, checkmate."
In time, the well of imaginary chess matches ran dry. As it did, and between the pain, hunger, and utter exhaustion, Arkin's control over his conscious mind began to waver. His fears began to intrude, no matter how hard he tried to focus on other things. He was desperate for sleep. But fearful that the breeze might pick up and slam him onto the lee shore of Whidbey Island, to his east, if he were to heave-to and go below for a nap, he decided to try to sleep on deck, upright, in the captain's chair. He squirmed and squirmed, trying to make himself comfortable. But it was a short chair, and there was no support for his head. He tried lying against the stainless steel wheel, but that was no better. Chin resting on his chest, he might have nodded off for a moment. But then his head rolled to one side and he woke with a start, jerking his head back to the vertical.
In his frustration, he made the mistake of looking back over his terrible month. Three weeks earlier, he might have been sharing a quiet meal with his wife, gardening, making a pot of coffee, maybe fly fishing with his friends. Now one of those friends had been gunned down, his wife was in the hospital, and he was a hunted man. A fugitive in his own country. Stealing to get by. Dead in the water on a stolen boat more than a thousand miles from home. And for all the miles he'd run, all the ethical lines he'd crossed, all the pain, fear, exhaustion, and hunger endured, all he had to show for it was an abdominal gunshot wound and a pitifully short list of phone and fax numbers that might or might not somehow be connected to a conspiratorial priest who might or might not even really exist. It was absurd.
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