Down the shore, the elephant seals were in panicked motion, humping up the beach to get farther from the water. Even the alpha bulls seemed small, clumsy, and harmless to Camilla, now that the true apex predator had announced itself.
Sickle tail sweeping from side to side in a leisurely motion, the great white shark circled its prey.
L
auren felt her mind growing sluggish. She wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, but she understood that she wasn’t going to make it across now. Sounds faded, getting farther and farther away, until all that was left was a muted whoosh in her ears, like the lingering aftereffect of a loud rock concert.
She had gotten hurt somehow. Very badly hurt—the water around her was red, and she could smell the sharp metallic tang of her own blood.
Somehow, she had also gotten turned around to face the island again. As her eyesight faded, she looked at the group of darkening figures on the walkway. They seemed to be watching her, their outlines blurring.
One of them was a liar, pretending to be someone they weren’t. But which of them was it?
Her last coherent thought broke apart.
T
he shark circled Lauren. Her elbow splashed weakly once, twice, then stopped moving.
Mason gently pulled his wrist from Camilla’s grasp. Her fingers ached, and she realized she had probably hurt him. She looked away, meeting Veronica’s eyes.
Veronica’s expression was hard, her mouth pursed like she had bitten something bitter. She slowly shook her head.
Brent’s face was gray beneath his silver hair. He tucked his hands into his vest pockets and lowered his head, breathing heavily.
Juan released the breath he had been holding, and seemed to deflate. He put his hands on his hips and looked down at his feet.
A large seabird descended to splash at the edge of the expanding red circle around Lauren. A second bird followed, then a third. Hungry beaks snatched at scraps and tugged at loops of something floating in the water.
Camilla covered her mouth and began to weep quietly, staring at the nightmare scene unfolding in front of her.
Then the seabirds scattered, flapping away into the air again with raucous cries.
The great white shark tightened up its slow circle, moving in to feed.
“…
wrongful death, caused by your studio’s willful, unbelievably gross negligence.” Brent stepped forward, rapping the screen of the monitor with a knuckle. “I know you can hear me, Julian. The authorities need to be notified, right now. There are eight witnesses here.” He swept an arm to indicate all the contestants gathered in the central room of the Victorian house: everyone but Travis.
Everyone but Travis
and Lauren
. Camilla snuffled, wiped her running nose, and winced in pain, then looked absently at the blood on her hand. Did Julian even
know
what had just happened here?
“Every minute you delay just makes it worse,” Brent said. “All of us can corroborate the fact that you were repeatedly asked to send help for an earlier medical emergency.
Repeatedly
. This is—God damn you,
somebody
answer me!”
The monitor continued to display the scoreboard, mocking them with its silence.
Veronica shook her head, fear lending added intensity to her electric gaze. “It’s no good. They won’t let us talk to anybody until they figure out how to spin this.”
“They may not even know about Lauren,” Camilla said. “Whoever’s in charge over there probably turned off all the feeds the second Travis attacked me, and sent the camera crew home. They’re probably sitting in a conference room somewhere with Julian, planning damage control for a few injuries—not for getting someone killed.”
JT shoved Brent aside and faced the monitor.
“Listen up, you motherfuckers…” His tone was cold, cold. “Send. Somebody. Right.
Now.
” Veins stood out on his forehead. “Or I’m going to come track you down. I’ll find out who you are. I’ll find you all. You’ll pay for what happened to her—every sorry-assed one of you.”
Leaning against the wall with his arm around Jordan’s shoulders, Juan shook his head at JT in warning. Jordan herself looked upset, though surprisingly dry-eyed, and Camilla was struck by the memory of her tears on the day of the scavenger hunt. Shock over Lauren’s death had deadened Camilla’s emotions. Looking at Jordan no longer hurt. She could finally see her for who she really was: an icy beauty who could cry over her own hunger, but not over another person’s death.
The monitor blinked, going black for a second; then the scoreboard reappeared.
The room went silent.
The score in one cell began to change.
It scrolled rapidly down from eighteen, spinning through the teens, then through single digits, to stop at zero. The zero blinked slowly inside its square cell.
Lauren’s score.
Then Lauren’s entire cell disappeared from the scoreboard, leaving only nine scores showing.
ELIMINATION ROUND
JT
dropped his tote bag on the cot and unzipped it. He looked up at the corners of the ceiling, at the walls, but it would take too long to find where the cameras were hidden, or even how many of them there were. Fuck it.
He reached into his tote and pulled out the Glock. The thick-framed polymer handgun was chambered in .45 ACP—subsonic and heavy-hitting. Keeping his finger safely outside the trigger guard, he popped the full thirteen-round mag out and eyeballed the visible round. Then he butted the magazine back into the grip’s mag-well and hefted the firearm’s familiar, comforting weight.
Something had scared Lauren, but that wasn’t what made her run. She had run when she realized they were all alone on the island. He, too, understood what that meant.
Holding the Glock in a firing grip, he tapped the bottom of the magazine with the heel of his support hand and then racked the slide, releasing it to slam forward again. A quick press check showed the shiny brass of a chambered round. Then he raised the tail of his Hawaiian-print shirt and tucked the gun into his belt, snugged into the small of his back.
Somebody here was playing a different game than everybody else.
That person was responsible for Lauren’s death.
He or she would pay for it.
JT walked out of the room and down the stairs to join the others outside.
“M
icrophones. Keep your voices low.” Camilla dropped the hidden camera onto the hard dirt at their feet.
The contestants stood outside in a circle, behind the two houses. The dark, moldering eaves and empty windows loomed over them, bearing silent witness. Everyone stared at the black object she had thrown down. A square plastic wafer with a shiny dome of glass in the center, it was connected by short wires to a plastic cube and a tiny metal cylinder. Lens, antenna and battery—the entire assembly would fit inside a matchbox.
Brent stepped forward and crushed the camera under his heel.
Juan dropped three more. “There are hundreds of them. Hidden everywhere.”
“These are too small to transmit far.” Camilla kept her voice to a whisper. “Julian and the crew are in that farmhouse, across the channel.”
Brent scratched the side of his head. “We’ve got to get someone’s attention. Get them to come.” He looked past the houses, toward the mainland. “I mean, Highway 1 is
right there,
on the other side of the headlands. It’s less than a mile away.”
“That’s why I wanted us to come out here,” Juan said. “I have a couple ideas, but I don’t want to give anyone a chance to interfere. I’ll be right back.”
A chance to interfere?
Camilla watched Juan hurdle the seal barricade, heading toward the blockhouse he now shared with Jordan. What did he mean by “interfere”?
In a minute, Juan was back, carrying what looked like a black hard-shell attaché case.
“The EPIRB I found during the scavenger hunt.” He patted the case. “They wanted us isolated, even jammed our cell phones. But Julian made a mistake, giving us this beacon. It’ll broadcast a marine distress satellite signal to the Coast Guard, with our GPS location. We turn it on, and they’ll be on their way in minutes.”
“How do you know it actually works?” Camilla asked.
Juan gave her a grim smile. “I’ve been turning it on four times a day to make sure, checking the signal, running the self-check diagnostics. It was factory sealed. They didn’t tamper with it.”
“What are we waiting for, then?” JT said. He had rejoined the group. “Fire it up.”
Juan nodded. He knelt and set the case down, unsnapped the catches, and raised the lid. Then he froze. He looked up at them, a strange expression on his face.
Camilla’s gut tensed. What now?
Wordlessly, Juan turned the case around for all to see.
Nestled in the form-fitting foam lining was a shattered mass of fractured yellow plastic, pieces of antenna, and clipped, half-stripped wires. Broken shards of green circuit board hung out of the cracks in the beacon’s shell, dangling from loose wires.
“No, that’s not right.” Looking at the wreckage, Camilla felt a lead ball drop in her stomach. “We can’t fix that, can we?”
Juan shook his head.
Mason leaned forward to look into the case. “Travis smashed my RF scanner right before the scavenger hunt. Just saying…”
“When’s the last time you checked it?” Camilla asked Juan.
“This morning.” He stood and shoved the case with his boot, sliding it into the center of the circle, where it sat like a mute accusation.
Camilla stared down at the wreckage of the beacon, understanding what it meant. Lauren had figured it out before the rest of them had. And now she was dead.
Juan looked from face to face, his expression hard. “One of you knows something about this. I’d like to hear it right now.”
Camilla pushed the case away with her toe. She looked at the circle of faces. “It’s obvious when you think about it,” she said. “The scanners, the flags, the gifts, and then the empty buildings…”
“Just say it.” Veronica’s eyes bored into hers. Her face was drawn with fear.
“One of us never got a letter,” Camilla said softly. “One of us isn’t really a player. One of us has been working with Julian all along.”
“W
ell, we know it wasn’t Lauren.”
“Oh god, shut up, Mason. You’re not helping.” Camilla looked from person to person—strangers really, all of them, despite their five days together. She could see her own fear and confusion reflected in each of their faces, but how could she tell what was really going on in their heads? The ball in the pit of her stomach shifted.
Mason waved a hand toward the house behind them. “But the fact that someone like Travis—”
“I doubt it’s Travis,” Brent said. His mouth was still swollen from Travis’s elbow. “He called too much attention to himself.”
“But he’s an
ex-con,
” Camilla said, liking the idea of the spy being Travis. She could handle that. She wouldn’t have to be afraid, the way she was now. Afraid to look too closely at the faces in front of her, scared of what she might see there. Her voice sped up.
“Julian could have used Travis’s past to blackmail him—”
“And then let us all know about it?” JT shook his head. “No.” His eyes drifted from face to face. “Makes no sense.”
“Someone doesn’t want the rest of us to leave,” Juan said. He shoved the case back into the center of the circle with his boot, and the broken beacon seemed to accuse them all over again. “Someone did this.”
“How do we know you didn’t do it yourself?” JT asked. Muscles bunched in his thick shoulders.
Jordan slid a hand around Juan’s upper arm: a warning.
JT raised his eyebrows at that. “Hell, maybe you
both
did it. Maybe that secret-alliance shit was just a smokescreen—”
“Wait a minute, guys.” Jordan turned to look at Veronica. “You were up near the blockhouse this morning, after the fight. What were you doing there?”
The back of Camilla’s neck tightened. “Stop it, all of you.” she said. “Accusing each other isn’t solving anything—”
“No, little lady, you’re wrong.” Veronica’s sharp voice silenced her. “It’s exactly how we get to the bottom of this.” Her ice-hard silver eyes swept the circle. “Because we’re looking for a person who has done something like it before—someone with a history of doing things like this.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” JT’s voice was different now, his tone cautious.
“Wait here,” Veronica said. “I’ve got something to show you all.” She turned and strode into the Greek Revival house.
A minute later she was back, holding a tabbed manila folder. Camilla’s eyes widened when she saw the red-and-white “Classified Information” label.
Veronica flipped it open and read aloud.
“Summarized Record of Trial of Corporal James Tyrone Washington, by Special Court Martial. Convened by Commanding Officer, First Reconnaissance Battallion. Tried at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, on November sixth, 2007—”
“Where the hell did you get that?” JT grabbed for the folder, but Veronica backed away. Brent laid a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.
“Those transcripts were sealed,” JT said. “That operation was
classified
. You’re breaking national security laws even by having those in your possession. Give me that…”
Veronica waved the folder out of his reach.
“Your chopper was shot down in Afghanistan,” she said. “Three others from your squad survived the crash also, but they were hurt worse than you. They couldn’t move. You were supposed to stay with them until an evac team arrived, weren’t you?
Semper fidelis
, JT—”
“Shut the hell up, woman—”
“—it means ‘Always Faithful’—”
“—you don’t know. You don’t have
any
idea—”
Veronica’s voice rose, harsh and strident, overriding his. “—
doesn’t it?
”