Close Reach (20 page)

The log was in Spanish, but she struggled through it anyway. She could pick out the names of ships and yachts, a string of isolated summer-only research stations along the Antarctic Peninsula and scattered in the South Shetland Islands. She spent an hour parsing the journal, stopping only to refill her coffee and get more food from the galley.

Kelly guessed
La Araña
and her crew had been motoring north after wiping out Russia’s tiny Novodvinsk II station a hundred miles south of Adelaide Island when they’d intercepted
Arcturus.
Before that, the log read like a list of calamities: places ransacked, ships looted, men and women captured or killed. There were long tables of goods recovered, bank account numbers beaten from caged victims. They’d make a fortune when they fenced it and zeroed the accounts.
They’d have a mountain of wealth and a pile of bodies to match it.

When she finished scanning the journal, she turned to the maps. David used the same set of hand-corrected British Admiralty charts she and Dean carried aboard
Freefall.
But David’s were marked in pencil and grubby with grease and food stains. A trail of X marks and dates plotted
La Araña
’s last raid from Deception Island, through the South Shetlands, and down the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. A second trail of marks showed
Arcturus
and its route across the Drake Passage. Lena’s website address was penciled at the beginning of that track and underlined.

“David, you piece of shit,” she whispered.

He’d researched her, maybe stealing her identity to get what he needed from the data banks in Scotland. He’d gotten tired of taking people without knowing anything first, testing them only to find out they wouldn’t match. It was too dangerous, and he was probably in a hurry. The Colonel couldn’t wait forever. Not for something like this.

But with Lena, he’d found everything before their paths even crossed. And when he was finally sure, he’d put
La Araña
on a converging course with
Arcturus.
The two vessels finally came together just five miles from
Freefall
’s last anchorage. She and Dean had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Lena was no coincidence.

He’d hunted her down.

She paused and went to the pilot berth to check on Dean. His heart rate had slowed, but his lungs sounded like a bathtub draining. Air and liquid fighting for space in the same small pipes. She kissed him again, thankful to be able to just do that, to have him and hold him, and then went back to the navigation table.

She found the admiralty chart that showed the northeastern tip of the peninsula and the chain of the South Shetlands. Deception Island was circled, and David had handwritten the longitude and latitude coordinates. Next to that was the number 6 in a circle. She’d seen other places marked like this on other charts: coordinates and a number to designate them.

These were important places to David, to
La Araña.
Safe harbors, caches of fuel and gear. He’d probably marked them in a GPS somewhere but hadn’t wanted to take the time to enter a name. So he’d used the numbered waypoints in the sequence the GPS assigned to them and had marked the numbers on the charts.

Each of the numbers 2 through 7 corresponded with safe harbors in Antarctica or the nationless islands scattered off its shores. But she hadn’t seen the first set of coordinates on any chart. Perhaps the first position, the place all this began and the primary waypoint in David’s GPS, was
La Araña
’s home port in the north.

That would be the Colonel.

She flipped through the charts until she came to the one she wanted: British Admiralty
0554—Estrecho de Magallanes. She studied the map carefully until she found it.

David must have had a second thought about what he’d written on this chart, because he’d gone back and erased it. But when she folded the map and brought it up to the light of the oil lamp and looked at it through the hand lens, she could see the faint indentations where he’d pushed the pencil across the thick chart paper. He’d erased the number 1 inside its circle and had rubbed out a set of coordinates: –54°07′34″ –072°05′52″. He hadn’t merely scratched out this entry or haphazardly blotted it with a dirty eraser so that a casual glance would take in the redaction. He’d carefully gone in to remove every bit of lead. She retraced the marks with her pencil and looked at the spot they marked. It was a tiny offshoot of a narrow fjord on the western side of Isla Clarence, deep in the tortured labyrinth of the central Patagonian Archipelago.

She remembered David talking to her the first time. Telling her about his life on the run with his fugitive family.

Some of these places
, David had said,
don’t even have electricity.

This would be one of them. A hiding place at the bottom of the continent for an old colonel, a man plotting his return. She wouldn’t let him have it, and she wouldn’t let him have any part of Lena.

She checked on Dean one more time, and then she put on her coat and went out.

* * *

She ran the Zodiac hard until she closed with the shore, then tilted the outboard shaft up and let the boat slide onto the rocky beach. She hopped over the bow onto dry ground and walked around the side of David’s building. He’d have heard the Zodiac, so she didn’t bother to tiptoe. Besides, she wanted him to hear her moving gear. She yanked a blue tarp from a pile of equipment stacked along the wall of the building. There were a dozen jerry cans of diesel there. Barrels of fresh water. She opened one of the jerry cans and sniffed it, then sorted through the rest of the junk until she found the old cook pot they’d used with Dean.

She carried the fuel and the pot to the door and stood where the light would make a silhouette of her so that while she stared at David in his cage, he couldn’t see her face. He was hunched in the corner of the trap with the blanket drawn about him like a hooded beggar. Kelly came into the room and crouched on the ground in front of him.

“They teach history at Deerfield?”

He looked at her without speaking. His mouth and chin were bloody from sucking on his wounded hand.

“Did they teach you history? Yes or no? It’s the easiest question you’ll get.”

He sat up a bit.

“Yes.”

“Then you know about the Spanish Inquisition. Those guys, they knew torture. Better than your grandfather and your uncles. You know about them?”

He nodded.

“Yes or no, David. You speak when you’re spoken to.”

“Yes.”

“They had a process. I read about it. The first step; it’s got a name. Show the instruments. It’s not about threats. Fanatics don’t fuck around with threats. They’re more into vows. So you show the instruments because
you will use them.
You show the instruments because
it’s a promise.
You get that?”

He pulled the blanket to hide his wounded arm and looked away from her.

“Yes or no, David. You understand I’m making a promise?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.”

She stood and took the cap from the jerry can and poured diesel into the pot. She did it from high up so that he could see the pink stream, so that it splashed out of the pot and onto the rocks. Then she capped the jerry can and set it aside.

She pointed at the pot of diesel with her open palm.

“The instruments,” she said.

She turned and walked out of the building and didn’t look at him again.

Once she was outside, she took the pistol from the left pocket of her coat. She walked over to the building where the men had been sleeping and took a rock from the ground. The clapboard walls were unpainted and old, but when she dug in with the sharp edge of the rock, she was able to gouge a rough circle onto the wall. She backed up twenty paces and then looked at the gun.

She’d never held one, had never even thought of shooting one. They were supposed to have safeties so that you couldn’t accidentally pull the trigger. So that a child couldn’t pick one up and do something terrible. She thought you were supposed to cock them somehow, to engage a spring before they’d fire. There was a lever on the handle, and this ejected the magazine when she thumbed it down.

She pulled the clip out and looked at it. There was a bullet at the top, its lead sheathed in copper. It was fat and blunt-tipped. She took the bullet out, and another one slid into its place. Stamped into the brass around the rim of the shell casing were the words .45
AUTO
. She took all the bullets out, counted ten of them, and then put them back. With the magazine out, she looked for the safety and found a switch near the gun’s rear. She toggled it down until the white line on
the button lined up with a red F.

F for fire,
she thought. She aimed the gun at the wall and pulled the trigger.

The hammer on the back of the gun drew back and fell, but nothing else happened.

She slid the magazine back in, clicking it into place by slapping it with her palm. Again she aimed at the wall and pulled the trigger. Still nothing. She reengaged the safety, then felt along the top of the pistol, seeking out the edges between the metal parts. The top half could slide back. She pulled it until she heard a series of clicks, then released it, knowing she’d drawn the top bullet up and into the firing chamber.

Now she spread her feet on the ground and held the pistol with both hands, aiming at the circle. She clicked off the safety and pulled the trigger. The bang was incredible. Like a car accident. There was a flash and much more smoke than she’d expected. She saw the shell casing fly out to the right and bounce across the rocks. The shot echoed around the island, and the storm petrels went wild in their roosts.

She looked at the side of the building.

The bullet hole was three feet from her target. She aimed again, telling herself the gun was just an instrument. A tool no different from a scalpel or an endoscope. Or a flensing knife. This time, when she pulled the trigger, she didn’t flinch.

She hit her circle dead on, punching a hole in the wall and the one beyond it so that she could see daylight clear through the building. She put the safety back on and put the pistol in her pocket, knowing the gun was loaded and cocked.

She was trembling as she walked back to the Zodiac, the pistol heavier in her pocket now than it had been before. Shooting it felt wrong and dangerous. Now it was something she could use and not just show. Its weight tugged at her jacket and told her what she’d known all along, what she’d told David: once you showed the instruments, there was a vow to use them. A solemn pact between two people. She knew it was there, and she didn’t like it at all.

She pushed the Zodiac into the water, jumped aboard, and started the engine. Let David stew a while, she thought. She wasn’t ready to question him yet. It would have to be soon but not yet.
La Araña
was still within radar range, so there was time before she could leave.

* * *

Dean was still sleeping.

She scrubbed herself clean and changed his empty glucose bag for one of sterile saline. If she got him hydrated again, she’d have to worry about keeping him clean. She gave him a urinary catheter and hung the collection bag just above the cabin sole, taping the tubes so they
wouldn’t catch on anything once she was under way. She listened to his chest again and tried to think what she would do if the antibiotics didn’t work.

Then she went up into the cockpit and sat on the edge of the boat, taking out David’s satellite phone. He’d already ripped all the communications equipment from
Freefall
, and even if the delicate gear hadn’t broken when he dropped it on the rocks, she wouldn’t know where to begin rewiring it. But there was his phone. She turned it on and looked at the screen.

BATTERY TOO LOW TO TRANSMIT

             
POWERING OFF

The green-lit screen went dark.

“Goddamit!”

She wanted to throw the phone off the boat but stopped herself. She turned it around and pulled off the plastic panel covering the back. It had some kind of custom lithium rechargeable battery. Nothing she had aboard
Freefall.
A rubberized plug protected the recharging port, and she yanked it out. To charge this thing, she’d need whatever cable had come with the phone. She wondered why everything had to be so fucking complicated. Why there couldn’t be just one kind of battery, one kind of cord.

“Fuck you, David,” she said.

She climbed back into the Zodiac and started the engine. This time, instead of going ashore, she motored over to
Arcturus.
If Lena had been maintaining a website while at sea, Jim must have had good communications gear aboard. She didn’t see any antenna domes on the mast or the stern arch. Maybe they had something smaller, such as a handheld phone that hooked up to a laptop. She tied off alongside and jumped aboard.

* * *

They’d had more time with
Arcturus
and had stripped her nearly to a bare hull. Everything worth anything was gone, down to the cutlery in the galley. All the electronics and instruments were missing. A series of holes in the panel above the navigation table hinted at what might have been taken. Now there were just frayed cables hanging in the empty space.

She went up to the master cabin to check the drawers. There was a queen-size berth straddling the yacht’s centerline. The down blankets were wadded and had fallen to the floor. The fitted sheet was still on the mattress.

It was smeared with blood across the middle.

They’d been like the high school boys in New Haven—they’d started right away, before they even got her off the boat.

“Lena, honey,” Kelly whispered.

She sat on the end of the mattress and put her face in her hands.
Arcturus
was cold and offered nothing. She didn’t stay long.

* * *

Palida
was worse.

David’s men had taken the research ship by force, with guns. Some of the communications gear was still in place, but it was shot up and blood-spattered. She tried it all, but it was dead.