New Year Island (52 page)

Watching a cloud go by, she wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “That woman is an incredible bitch.”

But even Veronica had been happily married for ten years. How would Camilla ever meet the right person if she kept pushing people away, afraid of getting too close, afraid of letting them find out what had happened to her when she was a child? Was she afraid that talking about it would give it power over her again? Or that others would see her differently once they knew? That they would start treating her like a freak?

Juan, Brent, Mason, JT, Jordan, even Veronica and Natalie—they had all heard her story, but none of them seemed to act any differently toward her because of it. She felt strangely close to all of them, like they were a weird dysfunctional family. Maybe that was because they were survivors, too. They understood her. Tomorrow, they would all face Julian together; they were her team.

A noise caught her ear—a faint rustle from beneath. She pushed her rambling thoughts aside and strained her ears, concentrating on the quiet movement she could hear below.

Camilla was ready.

The downhill run had begun.

M
oving silently through the shadows that draped the rooms of the Victorian house, Juan passed through darkness into light and back into darkness again. Motes of dust floated before his eyes, dancing in the fading rays that slanted through the clear plastic tarp over the windows. He paused near the archway that led into the great room, ignoring the bluish glow from the monitor on the wall. The stairwell wound around the corner in front of him. Easing around, he raised his paintball gun.

“Hello, Juan.”

Brent’s deep voice had a strange, hollow timbre.

White cylinders and irregular crumples of shiny foil lay scattered on the lower stairs: syringes and empty pill packets—a half dozen of each. Brent sat on the landing above, his legs stretching down the steps. A beam of light spilled over half his body, leaving the other half in darkness. His wrists hung loosely between his knees, the blue envelope held in one hand. His head was tilted back so that Juan could only see his throat and chin. Brent stared up at the ceiling as if something up there was very interesting.

A starburst of yellow paint exploded across the center of his chest, and Juan lowered the paintball gun.

“Listening to the angels, Brent?”

Brent didn’t move, didn’t lower his head.

“Oh, I think I can hear at least one of them,” he said. “My guardian angel, maybe. Or perhaps the angel of death. I’m not sure which.”

Brent’s chin and Adam’s apple moved as he spoke, but he continued to stare upward. Juan couldn’t see his face.

Quick strides took Juan up the steps. He shoved the muzzle of the gun into the base of Brent’s neck. But it was the Glock, rather than the paintball gun, which he now held.

“Let’s find out which angel it is,” he said. “Two questions, Brent. Answer without hesitating, or I kill you right here. No second chance.”

Brent’s chin tipped forward slowly. His eyes were eerie blue marbles, unmarred by visible pupils, which stared through Juan without really seeing him. Juan’s stomach coiled in disgust.

“What would you like to know?” Brent said.

“How did you know about Lauren’s climbing accident?”

“Yosemite Climbers Die in Tragic Pakistan Fall.” It sounded like a headline, the way Brent said it. “Trango Tower Claims American Lives, 2007.” He tilted his head to peer at Juan with that opaque blue gaze. “Lauren King—that’s an easy name to remember. But I guess you young people don’t read newspapers anymore.”

Juan pointed at the pills and syringes scattered about his feet.

“Why are you taking drugs again?”

“That’s not the right question,” Brent said. “The right question is, did I ever really stop? And the answer is no, I never did. But there’s something you should know.”

He reached into a vest pocket and pulled out a foil pack of pills.

“These I brought in my luggage. It’s modafinil—Provigil—for treatment of narcolepsy and, more recently, Alzheimer’s. Almost no side effects or aftereffects. It keeps you going on minimal sleep, alert and at full mental capacity, without an amphetamine crash later. It also sharpens brain function. A key ingredient of my ‘cocktail,’ as Mason puts it.”

He reached into another pocket and pulled out a similar foil pack.

“This is from the first-aid kit. It’s labeled ‘modafinil,’ too. But that’s not what it is. In fact, I have
no idea
what it is. Something new, probably experimental, certainly not FDA approved yet. A catecholamine booster like modafinil. But much, much stronger.”

Brent’s jittery eyes turned inward, and Juan had to resist the urge to strike him across the face with the pistol. He had seen that expression of euphoric wonder before. The doctor was cataclysmically high.

“I feel like Superman,” Brent said. “If I wanted to play Julian’s stupid game, I could have taken you all instead of letting myself get eliminated. I could even take that gun away from you right now with ease.”

“I’d like to see that,” Juan said. “Go ahead and try.”

“No, I don’t want to. I’m feeling too good right now. I haven’t slept for three days, but I’m still ready to take on the world. My amygdala is on fire. My brain…”

His strange eyes searched Juan’s face, as if struggling to put his sensations into words.

“…my brain is in overdrive, Juan. I can practically see what you’re thinking, how slowly your thoughts move, by reading the cues on your face. All my senses are amplified. I can hear and feel every little thing going on around us. I can tell you who is moving around outside right now and what they’re doing.”

Juan reholstered the Glock against his thigh. “You’re delusional.”

“No. You need to try this. You need to feel it to understand. You think you’re a survivor? This compound is the chemical essence of what
makes
you a survivor—distilled and amplified. My norepinephrine and epinephrine levels must be off the chart. I wish I could run labs on myself right now, do a full blood workup. I feel decades younger.”

Brent reached out and grabbed his wrist.

“Just imagine what a soldier this stuff could create, Juan. A human machine that could fight for weeks without sleep. Smarter, faster, stronger, more ruthless, more relentless than anything else on the battlefield. Unstoppable.”

Juan’s expression hardened. “I’ve heard cocaine abusers say the same sorts of things right before going into toxic shock. How much of this shit did you put into yourself?”

Brent chuckled. “A lot.”

Juan jerked his arm out of Brent’s grip. “Is this really what you want? To die here?”

“Look.” Brent turned over his wrist to display his forearm. Veins bulged under his skin, throbbing in a rapid cadence. “My resting pulse is over two hundred,” he said. “At my age, it’s amazing my heart doesn’t burst.”

He leaned forward into a beam of light, illuminating an eye that looked solid blue, like a robin’s egg. Inhuman. “They are going to make billions with this drug, Juan. Billions.”

Juan shook his head slowly.
“Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.”

He faded back down the stairs and into the darkness, leaving Brent sitting alone at the top of the steps.

S
quatting in the crawlway beneath the house, JT tracked the whisper of Juan’s departing footsteps. Juan was not his target… yet.

He silently unwrapped an MRE and scarfed it down, thinking about what he had heard. Brent’s words had taken him back to Fallujah, where he had seen firsthand the muj’s drug-fueled zombie suicide runs, their superhuman ability to shrug off devastating injury.

Juan had been quick to dismiss everything Brent said.

JT wondered about that.

But despite all Brent’s talk of enhanced senses, he had seemed completely unaware that JT crouched silently in the darkness fifteen feet below him. Perhaps Juan’s Euripides quote had been right on the mark:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

JT gently touched the skin around his ruined eye. Could a corneal implant repair the damage Veronica had done? Civilian surgery would be expensive, and his dishonorable discharge prevented him from using the VA hospitals.
“Billions of dollars,”
Brent had said. JT didn’t need billions.

He would settle for ten million. Tax free.

He considered the name on his target card again. Threat assessment had been an integral part of the training in his military specialty, and he had watched his opponents here carefully over the past five days. He knew who the most significant threats were, standing between him and the grand prize. Veronica was dangerous in every sense of the word, and she had a substantial point lead over everyone else right now, but he didn’t expect it to last much longer. No, there were two people JT considered far greater threats than the woman who had blinded him.

One of them was Juan.

The other one’s name was written on his target card:

Jordan.

M
ason shuffled through a large cluster of sea lions, moving toward the narrow saddle section near the highest point of the island. The fallen lighthouse tower lay dead ahead, its base a high pile of broken concrete rubble. It would be a good place for someone to hide.

He turned and, pushing his cracked glasses higher on his nose, looked back along the path he had traversed. Nothing moved except for the wriggling, writhing mass of seals, sea lions, and birds.

A large black cormorant flapped into startled flight from the ground near his feet.

Looking after the departing bird, Mason held an index finger to his lips and whispered, “Ssshhh!” Then he giggled.

He continued toward the base of the tower, twenty feet ahead. Something blue on the ground near his feet caught his eye. An envelope.

Bait.

Movement rippled in his peripheral vision. Mason spun, and his mouth opened in surprise.

One of the seals he had passed on the trail contracted unnaturally and rose from the ground in a single graceful movement to stand upright. Black paint splattered across Mason’s chest.

He laughed. “I thought I was seeing fifty million years of evolution happen in fast-forward.”

Jordan threw back the crude hood of her sealskin cape and lowered the paintball gun. Her eyes were cold.

“I can smell your new couture from here.” Mason reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and withdrew his own blue envelope. “Your new target.” Squatting, he placed it carefully atop the other envelope, covering it. Then he continued along the path.

As he came parallel with the broken base of the tower he grinned.

“But wait,” he called, turning back to look at her. “Why are there two envelopes instead of one?”

Jordan was leaning forward at the waist, one arm outstretched to pick up Mason’s envelope, when he turned. Her green eyes flicked up toward him, going wide with sudden alarm.

Mason moved aside, still grinning.

Next to him, Veronica stepped out from behind the base of the tower.

V
eronica pivoted on her feet, swinging her paintball pistol up two-handed to aim it at Jordan’s face. She pulled the trigger.

But instead of the hard snick of gas expanding behind a high-velocity paintball, the gun made a muted
phhht
. A few drops of red paint sprayed from the gun barrel to sprinkle the ground, falling well short of Jordan. The look of triumph on Veronica’s face twisted into surprised anger.

Jordan didn’t hesitate. She scooped up Mason’s envelope and the second envelope beneath it. With the other hand, she swept her gun around to fire at Veronica.

Jordan’s gun
also
malfunctioned with the same
phhht
sound.

Veronica’s left hand slapped upward beneath the pistol grip and then whipped over the top to grab the frame of the gun. She yanked back hard, holding the gun steady with her right. The movement was lightning fast, a reflex, but her left hand slipped off the plastic.

Tap-rack.
Muscle memory. Jordan knew Veronica’s years of firearms training had just betrayed her. The Tippman TPX wasn’t a real gun. It didn’t have a working slide. Jordan’s own finger was already on her magazine release, dropping the faulty ammunition cartridge toward the ground at her feet. But when it hit the dirt her feet weren’t there anymore.

Pulling her arms in close to her body, Jordan spun away, letting go of the envelopes. She pirouetted like a dancer, grabbing her spare ammunition cartridge and shoving it into her gun as she whirled.

Six feet from where she had stood a second ago, she raised the gun.

Veronica was in the middle of a combat reload, striding sideways, slamming a new cartridge into the grip of her gun. The jammed ammunition cartridge floated near her knees, dropping in slow motion through the air, as Jordan pulled the trigger twice.

Two black flowers of paint bloomed on Veronica’s chest. Her jammed ammunition cartridge bounced off the dirt, spattering her shins with red droplets.

Jordan raised the gun a few inches.

Fuck you and your useless training.

Veronica’s head snapped back as black paint exploded across her forehead.

Jordan dipped to scoop up both the envelopes she had dropped.

Veronica threw her paintball marker aside, sending it skittering across the rocks. Black paint streaked her face and frosted the spikes of her short hair. Raising both hands in front of her, she stared at them in stunned incomprehension. Then her fingers hooked into claws.

She shook her head violently, like a wet dog, sending streamers of paint flying in all directions. Then she screamed—a wordless, full-throated, guttural cry of fury that made the tendons stand out on her neck. Her chest heaved, rising and falling. Bulging from their sockets, her luminous eyes locked on Jordan’s own.

Then her lips curled up at the corners in a terrifying, openmouthed smile.

Jordan’s own anger melted away.