New Year Island (71 page)

Camilla looked at the streak of blood drying on Brent’s wet suit and pictured Mason’s grin as he wiggled the knife. But she also remembered how he had helped her up, hugged her, and given her water when she was sickened by Travis’s senseless death. Then again, it had been his taunting Travis that almost got her killed. Which was the real Mason?

Hearing a rustle at the doorway, she turned to see him standing there.

Awkward silence hung in the air.

Mason looked at them for a moment. Then he laughed.

“Let me guess.
I’m
the man behind the curtain. A psychopathic financial trader who hired Brent to help me—or blackmailed him into it, perhaps.”

He threw a languid salute toward Brent. “Nicely done. I saw you planting the seeds earlier. But there are just a few problems with your story.”

Brent stared back, impassive.

“For one,” Mason said, “I don’t actually have much money. Oh, sure, for a while I was doing pretty well, but I made a mistake blowing the whistle on my own company. The SEC repaid my good social conscience by cleaning me out, too.”

He paused and leaned against the wall.

“But I’ve been thinking about money, too, and you know what? I don’t think we’re talking millions here.”

Camilla closed her eyes. “A quarter-billion-dollar yacht as a honey trap,” she said. “Once we saw it, we didn’t question the legitimacy. But they can be chartered, can’t they?”

Mason nodded. “For about two hundred thousand dollars a day, usually to impress super-wealthy clients. The cameras, electronics, installation—let’s say another couple hundred thousand.” He grinned at Brent. “Especially if the technicians never left the island or got their final payments. Ten five-thousand-dollar checks with our letters, and another hundred thousand lying around the island in bundles and sprinkled on top of Julian’s fake grand prize. Plus whatever they paid the Pelagic Institute—”

“Three hundred thousand dollar.” Dmitry sat up, wincing, and held his head. “My cousin, he heard this.”

“There you have it, then. Eight hundred fifty thousand for the whole thing. Less than the average house in the Bay Area costs. A good surgeon could put that aside in a few years, couldn’t he, Brent?”

Mason tossed something, and it flapped toward Camilla in a flutter of white, like a startled bird. She caught it, surprised that she hadn’t fumbled it, and looked down at what she now held in her hands. It was the report they wanted.

“But thanks for thinking of me, gang,” Mason said. “Maybe we can do this again sometime. I vote for someplace tropical instead—Parrot Cay, maybe, or Bora Bora.”

Camilla gasped a small laugh, mostly in relief. She felt a flood of warmth toward him. Then she noticed Brent’s gaze fixed on Mason, too. His expression was heavy with malice. A tic jittered one of his eyelids, and his head twitched. Withdrawal symptoms?

C
amilla looked up from the historical report, open on her lap to a page of black and white photographs. Her eyes darted around the rows of machinery to the giant wheel valve where Brent hung in chains. She recognized it from the photograph. Her heart sped up with excitement. After all these years, could her idea actually work?

Only one way to find out.

“Who’s ready to go home?” she called.

Juan was at her side in a heartbeat. She hugged him, but released him quickly when his face contorted with pain.

“Look at this.” She raised her voice. “Everyone.”

Mason, JT, and Dmitry joined them, looking over her shoulder in a tight semicircle.

Kneeling, she tapped the report that lay open before her. “The lighthouse itself wasn’t built until 1890, but the signal station was already operating
twenty years
before that. The building we’re in—all this machinery—it’s been here since 1872.”

She turned to Dmitry and put her finger on a black and white picture.

“Your science station was built inside of
this.
”

The caption beneath the picture read “Fog Signal Building.”

She pointed at the machinery all around them. “The original fog signal was a massive steam-powered whistle. This room was its engine room, generating the steam and sending it up to the whistle through that buried pipe outside.”

She couldn’t get the grin off her face.

“The signal was loud,” she said. “Loud enough to warn ships away in the heavy coastal fog. Loud enough to be heard miles out to sea.”

Juan knelt at her side, reading the captions, his face alongside hers. He tapped another picture. “The whistle itself must be buried in the pile of rubble where the steam pipe ends, at the top of the hill—”

“Next to the broken lighthouse tower.” She turned her head, meeting his eyes, thrilled to see that he shared her excitement.

“We get that signal going again,” she said, “and it’ll be heard by every ear up and down the coast, from Davenport to Pescadero.”

S
ilent formations of pelicans lumbered through the sky above as Camilla and Mason shifted rocks, digging through the rubble pile.

In the distance, down near the cistern’s spillway, JT’s muscles flexed as he heaved the heavy high-pressure washer into place on a flat slab of broken concrete. Dmitry, his head still wrapped in a bandage, held the hose. The seals gave them a wide berth, leaving their work area clear.

Juan squatted next to them, looking into the ten-foot segment of steam pipe they had unearthed. From her angle, Camilla could see a ragged circle of light through the thirty-inch-wide pipe, but its edges were uneven—filthy inside after a century of disuse.

The roar of the power washer’s diesel engine filled the air. Juan stood and nodded to Dmitry, who directed a blast of high-pressure water through the pipe. A stream of mud, bird and wasp nests, and other debris washed out the far end. After a few minutes, he turned off the nozzle. The circle of light was round and smooth now.

Juan squatted and looked down the length of the pipe again. Then he gave JT the okay sign.

JT placed his hands on the outside of the pipe section and heaved, rolling it back into its trench.

Juan stood, looking down at it to make sure it was perfectly aligned.
Like a construction foreman,
Camilla thought—
a construction foreman in a black wet suit.
Her eyes followed the path of the steam pipe, tracing the remaining sections that bulged like vertebrae from the spine of the hill, climbing to where they disappeared under the pile of rubble that she and Mason were slowly disassembling. It was so good to see everyone working together, trusting one another again. They would rescue themselves from this nightmare. Together.

They were a team again.

Mason used one hand to balance himself, holding his bad leg away from the pile. He looked awkward but energized.

“Even if we find the whistle, how do you intend to get the pumps and boilers started?” he asked her. “They’re a hundred and forty years old. They must be rusted solid.”

“A girl’s gotta have some secrets,” she said.

“Look at that grin—jeez!” Mason laughed. “And I see how you just can’t keep your hands off our captain.”

She slapped his chest.

He smiled at her. “Can’t say I blame you. He’s not a bad guy for a drug lord.”

“
Former
drug lord.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “He’s too torn up over Jordan.”

“I liked her,” she said. “I know that doesn’t matter now. But I did.”

“So did I,” Mason said. “There was a lot going on under her little-miss-prom-queen act. She was unique.”

Camilla glanced toward the bottom of the hill, where Juan stood with a palm pressed against his side, watching JT and Dmitry dig up the next section of pipe in front of him.

“Juan was probably a first for Jordan,” Mason said. “The first time a guy actually tried to leave
her
.”

“I don’t want to talk about that. What happened is so awful and so sad—for both of them. Let’s talk about Brent instead.” She looked down at the factory building, where they had left Brent chained to the wheel. “Why did he bring us all here?”

“I’m still working on that one myself.” Mason followed her gaze. “He won’t say. He’s just telling random lies now, messing with us. But there are really only three classic motives for murder: love, money, and revenge. I suppose the same motives must apply to
mass
murderers, too.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the particularly loving type. His family wanted a restraining order so they would never have to see him again. Money, though—could there be some truth to what Julian said about the video?”

“Well, Brent definitely was—or still is—recording all this,” he said. “We’ve seen some playback. But profiting from illegal pay-per-view seems farfetched as a motive.”

“And I can’t see revenge, either.” Her throat tightened. “What could he possibly imagine we did to him? We didn’t even
know
him, Mason.
I
certainly didn’t give him cancer or turn him into a drug addict.”

“It doesn’t have to be us personally. Maybe we just represent something to him. A type of person he hates and wants revenge on. Like the way some psychos target attractive women like yourself, for instance.”

“Thanks… I guess.”

She looked back at the factory building. It seemed dark and menacing even in the light of day. “But survivors? That’s crazy. Why would a survivor hate other survivors? Does he hate himself, too?”

“Hey, look.” Mason moved a rock and tugged at the corner of something rusty and metallic that poked from beneath. “Jackpot! I think we just found the whistle. Call the others.”

“W
hat’s wrong with Brent?” Camilla asked.

“You got a while?” Mason laughed. “Where do I even start?”

“No, seriously—look at him.” She pointed.

The five of them had gathered once again in the machinery room of the fog signal building. Fifty feet away down one of the rows of machinery, Juan, JT, and Dmitry had taken a panel apart. They poked at the valves and gears inside, talking, unaware of Brent’s plight. His head hung on his chest, jerking every few seconds. His entire body shuddered with violent trembling.

“Ah, the old Münchausen is faking it,” Mason said. “Travis could have told you. It’s the oldest prison trick in the book.”

“No, I think he’s going into convulsions,” she said. “Everybody, get over here!”

JT looked at Brent with a disgusted grimace. “Who cares? Let him die.”

“We don’t want to be like him,” she said. “Besides, he shouldn’t escape punishment for what he did here.”

Juan wandered over, followed by the others. He searched the pockets of Brent’s wet suit.

“Phone.” He held up a large touch-screen mobile phone in a Ziploc bag, then crouched and slid it across the floor to Mason. “Check it out.”

To Camilla’s relief, a few seconds later Juan unsnapped a small medical kit he had found in Brent’s chest pocket. Taking out a needle, he uncapped it and poked it into an ampoule. “Fentanyl,” he said. “How much do we give him?”

“He told us something like nine thousand milligrams,” she said. “Remember? But he could have been lying.”

“If he lied, then he just killed himself.” Juan drew the liquid into the syringe.

With a jolt, she realized her error. “No, wait! That was the other stuff. The pills. The modafinil. I have no idea on the fentanyl.”

Juan looked at JT and raised an eyebrow.

“Give him twenty milligrams,” JT said.

Camilla’s eyebrows rose. “How do you know?”

“Our squad medic used to carry fentanyl in the field. We cross-trained.”

Juan stuck the needle into a vein on Brent’s wrist, which was held steady by the chains. He depressed the plunger.

“Something else we missed.” Mason looked up from Brent’s phone. “Battery levels. After ten days, he’s got a full battery. He’s been recharging somewhere.”

“No cellular reception, though…” Mason manipulated the phone for a few moments, then tensed with excitement. “He’s got a Wi-Fi signal here. There’s a hidden wireless network.”

A moment later, he lowered the phone, looking disappointed. “The screen’s locked,” he said. “We need an eight-character code to get in. Any ideas?”

Juan shrugged. “Año Nuevo.”

“Survivor,” Camilla said.

JT grunted. “Shit-head.”

Mason punched keys without apparent success. “I’ll try a few now.”

Brent’s condition didn’t improve over the next several minutes. The muscles and tendons in his neck and arms jumped like downed power lines.

Juan stuck the syringe into the ampoule again. “He did say he has a very high tolerance.”

“Give him another twenty,” JT said.

“Let’s give him two hundred and see what happens.”

The larger dose of fentanyl seemed to help. After a few minutes, Brent’s tremors lessened considerably. He stirred, rolled an eye toward Juan, and grunted. “Modafinil.”

Juan fed him some pills from the medical kit. Brent chewed them and mumbled for more. He couldn’t raise his head. Fragments of pills littered the front of his wet suit and fell to the floor, the white crumbs sprinkling the patches of dried blood where Mason had stabbed his shoulder.

Eventually, he had recovered enough to raise his head. He looked steadily at Juan. “I suppose I should thank you.”

Juan shrugged. “Thank Camilla. She insisted.” He walked away to lean with his back against the wall. “The rest of us were okay with letting you die.”

Brent turned his head toward her. His pupils were pinpoints again, surrounded by a jittering expanse of blue. “Dear, dear Camilla.”

She was horrified to see genuine affection in Brent’s eyes.

“You were such an adorable kid,” he said. “You know, I probably saved your leg.”

She felt the blood drain from her face.

“What she’d been through,” Brent said, “it broke your heart. Everyone on the hospital staff wanted to adopt her.”

Camilla closed her eyes. “Stop…” She could manage only a whisper.

“But then the rumors started. The EMTs, the fire crew—a kid named Garcia told me what they
really
found when they went in. Nobody wanted to believe such a thing about a little girl who looked like an angel, but it wasn’t a story you could ignore.”