New Year Island (70 page)

“You’re not giving me much incentive to be cooperative.”

“We’ll see.” Mason struggled to his feet. He squatted next to JT for a moment, fumbling at a pocket of his fatigue pants. Then he limped over to the wheel where Brent was chained.

Alarm raced through Camilla’s limbs. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just asking for a little cooperation.” Mason turned toward Brent and did something that she couldn’t see. Then he stepped back.

She gasped.

The handle of JT’s tactical knife jutted from the hollow of Brent’s collarbone, standing upright between his neck and shoulder. Mason had driven it deep into his body.

Brent studied the knife handle quivering close to his chin. He raised his eyebrows.

“If you were aiming for a painful nerve cluster,” he said, “I think you missed the brachial plexus. It’s a little closer to the shoulder.”

Mason stepped forward and pulled the knife out. He stabbed it into Brent again, closer to his shoulder this time.

Camilla tried to speak, but her throat locked.

Brent and Mason both looked at the knife handle, their heads close together, examining it with dubious expressions.

“Wiggle it, maybe?” Brent said.

Mason obliged. Blood ran down the outside of Brent’s wet suit.

She gagged.

“Sorry.” Brent shook his head in apology, as if embarrassed by his lack of a reaction. She pushed to her feet, finding her voice at last. “Oh god, stop! Stop it right now! What is wrong with you?”

“He can’t feel pain.” Mason chuckled. “That explains the bear spray, too. He didn’t even feel it.”

“No, Mason.” She stared at him, shaking her head in disbelief. “Not
him
. What is wrong with
you
?”

“Sorry, my bad.” Mason grinned sheepishly and pulled the knife out of Brent’s shoulder. “But this isn’t working too well. He won’t tell us anything he doesn’t want to.”

Brent smiled at him, eyes filled with good-humored amusement. But when he spoke he directed his words at her.

“Last year, psychology researchers did a study comparing financial traders for egocentrism, cooperativeness, and risk-seeking behaviors. For a control group, they used incarcerated psychopaths. Care to guess what the research found, Camilla? On tests such as ‘the prisoner’s dilemma,’ the traders were more egocentric, less cooperative, and more prone to senseless risk taking than the psychopaths.”

Brent nodded toward Mason.

“The researchers found other disturbing similarities between financial traders and psychopaths. Both groups had above-average intelligence, were superficially charming, and had strong verbal skills. Both showed marked tendencies toward insincerity and untruthfulness, both lacked a fear of consequences, and neither group showed any remorse or shame for their actions. Sound like anyone we know?”

“Ignore him,” Mason said. “He’s just grouchy because he got caught. By the way, where were you going, Brent?”

Brent lapsed into a stony silence, but his jittery blue eyes stayed on them.

Monday: December 31, 2012

T
he first rays of dawn glowed bright through the small holes that dotted the roof and walls, filling the interior of the factory building with a gray light. Juan leaned against some machinery with his back toward Brent, reading through the yellowed papers they had found in the loft above. Old, handwritten documents listing dates, ship names, locations, weather conditions, and cargo manifests.

Shipwrecks. All reported within a few miles of Año Nuevo.

Something Juan had read bothered him—an oddity, a discrepancy he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Yet.

He had woken some hours ago and convinced Camilla to get some rest. JT and Dmitry were still unconscious or sleeping. A makeshift bandage from a strip of torn blanket circled Dmitry’s head. His brow was furrowed, and he seemed to be in pain. He had woken long enough to throw up earlier. Dmitry had a concussion at least, and possibly a skull fracture.

Juan coughed, and a streamer of thick blood drooled from the corner of his mouth and dangled toward the floor. The blood looked dark, almost black. He brushed it away, and wiped his hand on the thigh of his wet suit.

He wasn’t in especially great shape, either.

In particular, he didn’t like the way his injury
tickled
—a maddening crinkly itch that accompanied every inhalation. The extra oxygenating capacity of his free-dive-trained lungs would let him remain active even if the injured one collapsed completely and left him running on just one. Still, it was something he hoped to avoid.

Setting the papers aside, he stepped into a beam of light from a hole in the roof and let it illuminate his chest. He reached behind him and pulled the lanyard to unzip his wet suit, careful not to let the excruciating pain show on his face. Then he peeled the wet suit down to his waist.

He couldn’t see the exit hole in his back, but the edges of the entry wound were starting to blacken. A six-inch patch of skin around the hole had turned an angry red. He probed at the wound. It didn’t appear to be healing.

Juan inhaled deeply.

An ugly wheeze sounded from the hole in his chest.

He exhaled, tightening his abdominal muscles.

Tiny bubbles of dark, clotted blood foamed out of the hole between his ribs and ran down his side in a thin, lumpy stream.

That
couldn’t be good.

“Pneumothorax.”

Juan looked up at the deep, rumbling voice. Brent stared at him with an eerie passivity from where he hung chained to the metal wheel.

“You’re going to die, Juan.”

Juan shrugged. “We all die sometime.”

“Would you like me to take a look at that for you?”

Juan ignored the doctor. He walked over to the wall where Camilla was sleeping, next to the small pile of supplies they had salvaged. He bent slowly to retrieve a roll of duct tape, and blood dribbled from the hole in his chest, onto the floor. He straightened and scuffed the sole of his bootie across the spatters nearest Camilla, smearing them away.

She was curled on her side, her cheek pillowed on her hands. Juan stood still for a minute, looking down at her face. Her sleeping features held the sweet, guileless innocence of a child.

She looked like an angel.

He thought of the first time he had seen her, jumping out of a taxicab and running to save the little boy in the street. It had been no big deal for Juan to snatch the kid out of harm’s way. He had gauged the truck’s speed and distance first and seen that there was very little danger for him. But Camilla—she
would
risk her own life to save someone she didn’t know. It was simply her nature.

He had no idea what she imagined she saw in him. She was a far better person than he could ever be.

Jordan’s face hung before Juan’s eyes. Dead because of his selfishness. His cowardice. He had been so cruel to her.

The wrenching, twisting blackness inside him tried once again to shake loose from the chains he had buried it in. He could feel it rising now, filling him, threatening to burst from his mouth in a howl of anguish. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and strangled it, knowing it would annihilate him if he let himself give it voice even once. Trembling, he got himself under control again.

His injury? His physical pain? Those were nothing.

He rubbed as much of the blood as he could from the edges of the hole in his side. Then he reached behind him and, by feel, did the same for the exit wound.

He pulled a long strip of duct tape from the roll.

Camilla’s eyes moved beneath their lids, darting back and forth. A frown creased her brow, and her mouth trembled. She was dreaming now.

Her dreams would not be pleasant ones, he knew. Like him, she had lost her entire family. In many ways the two of them were similar. But unlike him, she was not to blame for what had happened to her.

He would
not
let her die here.

Wrapping the duct tape around his torso, he pressed it against his skin. The patch of tape would seal the pneumothorax—a type of injury he had seen other divers sustain—and, with luck, would hopefully allow his lung to reinflate.

He welcomed the explosion of physical pain, which was a distraction from his bleak thoughts. It really didn’t matter if they never found out why Brent had gathered them to the slaughter—he couldn’t let any more of these people die.
Especially
her.

He shrugged back into the shoulders of his wet suit and zipped it up. Staring down at Camilla’s sleeping face, he felt the full weight of his grim responsibility settle on him. What if he failed again, and she died because of it?

“
El escorpiόn.
” Brent said.

Juan ignored him.

“That’s what they used to call you, isn’t it?” A rumbling chuckle. “That sweet girl you’re staring at—she thinks you’re some kind of misbehaved frat boy she can reform. But you and I know better, Juan. You ran your father’s intelligence networks for two years. There’s another word for your kind of intelligence gathering, isn’t there?”

Juan walked back to where he had left the shipwreck reports. Brent’s voice followed him.

“Torture.”

Turning his back, Juan returned his attention to the old papers in his hands. He remembered what Julian had said, ten days ago, about the construction of the lighthouse. He flipped back through the papers, reading the earliest shipwreck dates again.

Juan stopped at the report on the wreck of the
Seaver
. That was the one that bothered him. He coughed, then reread the signature line on the report.

William N. Steele

Station Keeper

Año Nuevo Signal Station

A scuffling noise made him look up.

Mason limped toward him, grinning, dragging another cardboard box of old papers along the floor. He had been in and out all morning, salvaging gear and, now, documents.

They had also raided Brent’s first-aid kit. Juan had dosed himself with antibiotics and painkillers. He looked at the swollen bulge of Mason’s knee; Mason’s mobility was undoubtedly due to the wide array of painkillers they had found.

“Ten days ago,” Juan said. “The first morning we were here, Julian told us about the lighthouse. Do you remember what year he said it was built?”

Mason nodded. “Eighteen ninety.”

Juan looked down at the report on the wreck of the
Seaver.
He read the signature line again.

Signal Station.

Then he rechecked the date on the report.

1887.

Somewhere in that three-year discrepancy, Juan was sure, lay the answer to their escape.

C
amilla knelt beside Juan, looking at the dozens of papers he had spread out on the floor.

“Shipwrecks?” she asked.

“Treacherous stretch of coastline.” He indicated the closest document. “In 1883 it even killed two of the island’s signal station keepers as they were attempting the crossing from the mainland. Their rowboat overturned while their families watched from here, helpless.”

Her heart sped up. “Did you say that happened in
1883
?”

Juan smiled—it was wintry and grim, but a smile nonetheless—and something came unstuck in her chest. He tapped the 1887 report on the wreck of the
Seaver.

“You see it, too,” he said. “The dates.”

She nodded. “What kind of signal station
was
this, seven years before the lighthouse was even built? There was a report on the history of this place I was reading, but it was in the other room, so it’s probably confetti now. I wish we still had it.”

“I borrowed it yesterday,” he said. “It’s in the blockhouse.”

He shoved himself to his feet and swayed, almost stumbling. Her breath caught.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“I’ll go,” Mason said. “I need the exercise, anyway, to keep this knee from stiffening up completely.”

“On the table next to the map,” Juan said.

Mason limped away. At the doorway, he passed JT, who carried the MRE crate in both arms. Setting it down, JT stared after his departing back.

“Where the hell is he going
this
time?”

“We need something from the blockhouse,” she said.

JT frowned. “Man keeps finding excuses to leave.” He tossed MREs to Juan and Camilla.

She unwrapped hers—Thai chicken with peanut sauce again—even though she didn’t have much appetite.

The minutes dragged.

“I’ve been thinking,” JT said. “Where would a doctor get this kind of money?”

She had wondered the same thing herself. She shot a glance at Juan, but he shook his head.

But JT walked over to the wheel where Brent hung, arms extended to the sides, and looked up at him. “Got anything to say, Doc?”

Juan’s voice held quiet authority. “Don’t waste your time talking to him.”

“Maybe there are lots of people like Mason,” Brent said. “But most don’t have the money to bring their strange fantasies to life. I think this little adventure is the only reason he bought that monstrous yacht.”

“I don’t believe you,” Camilla said, but her heart sped up.

“I got myself into deep trouble with the gambling. Ended up owing a lot of money to the wrong people. My life was in danger, so I went to my wealthiest patients for help. Mason wrote one check, and my problems disappeared. But it seems I made a deal with the devil.”

Juan sounded bored. “He’s lying. Nothing he says is worth listening to.”

JT looked at the doorway Mason had exited through. “Man
has
been gone an awful long time.”