North of Boston (36 page)

I speed-walk along the noisy corridor until I reach the atrium, singing the whole time. No one reacts. Maybe they think I'm a psychiatric patient.

“Where are you now?” Johnny asks.

“The main entrance is right in front of me.”

“Do you see Max?”

I crane my neck. “Not yet.” I go through the revolving door.

“Do you see him now?”

The blue Camry's double-parked by the curb, with Max inside, scanning the entranceway. “Yeah, I see him.”

“Get in the white SUV behind him.”

“What?”

Before I can react, the back door of the SUV opens and a man gets out. Not a local fisherman in dirty jeans. A guy in a grubby suit, his white shirt open at the neck. Short arms, heavyset. He steps behind me in a way that herds me efficiently into the car. I get in and see another man sitting next to the far door. Before I can glimpse his face, his arm reaches up. Something covers my eyes, nose, and mouth. A sharp assault of chemicals. The first man is behind me now. I'm pushed into the seat. My muscles turn to gelatin, and everything stops.

—

A gull's cry pierces the air. Somewhere nearby heavy machinery clanks rhythmically. The air is cold and smells of mud—a salty, oily mud—mixed with the putrid gas of decaying fish. Added to that are several ambient odors: ammonia-washed metal, dry rust, and the persistent smell of human sweat. I don't need to see—which the blindfold prevents me from doing anyway—to know that I'm in the fish processing section of a large commercial ship.

On the
Galaxy
, even though it was huge, you could feel the tremor and strain of the working engine in the metal floors of the lower levels. The floor under my shoes now is tensionless, almost yielding in comparison. This ship isn't moving.

I'm upright in a straight-back chair, my hands cuffed behind me. My shoulders hurt; my head aches acutely. The rise and fall of my lungs is shallow and halting.

I think I'm alone, until a chair scrapes nearby. I feel the air displacement as someone approaches. The blindfold is yanked off. My eyes dully glimpse the edge of a suit jacket, a black leather belt. The man steps away, and I see, five feet in front of me, a pair of feet in dirty Nike trainers, resting on a table. A face comes into focus gradually. At first it's just a cherubic white globe under a reddish glow. Then angles form, and it morphs into the flint-eyed, square-jawed, expressionless visage of John Oster. Feet on the table, upper body tilted back into the chair, hands folded across his chest.

Also on the table are an Apple notebook and a black-and-silver handgun about five inches long.

“Where's Parnell?” I say.

Johnny smiles slightly. “You like him better than me? Think he's smarter?”

“Don't pretend this is personal.”

“I'll tell you, the guy pisses his pants after five minutes of torture. He's in there sobbing like a baby; tried to sell me his mother, but I refused the bitch.”

We're in a cavernous room with two connecting steel tubs and a rubber conveyor belt that leads to a metal housing with plastic strips hanging over its maw. This setup is repeated two more times. Three processing stations. There are enormous metal hinges on the ceiling, holding up some kind of drop from the deck above, like a wide slide through which the fish must pour. Beyond the processing area, there's a big steel door rubberized all around, with a wheel about one foot in diameter to tighten the seal. A walk-in freezer.

When Johnny said
He's in there
, he tipped his head toward this door.

He offhandedly lobs a question at his minion. “How much oxygen in there?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty,” the guy says. He's got a a scraggly black goatee, and a thick guttural accent that I think I recognize. Either he was one of the guys in the SUV, or there are any number of this suited variety wandering around.

“If you talk fast, you can get in there with him while he's still alive,” Johnny says to me, tipping his head with sick gallantry.

“I have nothing to say.”

Goatee Man is staring at me as if he expects me to become very interesting at any moment.

“You're right. You don't. We have his laptop, with his half-finished story and your film. By the way, I looked at your video. It wasn't any good. The images weren't clear at all. Bad time of day to shoot a film, I'd say.” He slides his feet off the table. “Anyway, it will all be at the bottom of the harbor soon. And with you and Romeo disappeared, there'll be no one left who knows what went on up there.”

“Not true. The Canadian authorities were notified. The story's going to break soon, if it hasn't already. Bob Jaeger, Dustin Hall, and Ocean Catch will be all over the news. My guess is, one of your sailors will crack, and everything will come to light. You might even find yourself answering questions down the line.”

He smiles with sad condescension. “That's a nice story you're telling yourself. But you're forgetting something. Money. There isn't a government official alive or dead who can't be bribed, and Jaeger and his friends can spread a lot of cash around. A real lot. I figure they'll end up with a slap on the wrist for bad behavior, if that.”

“But—”

“And down here in the States? Come on, think about it, Pirio. Who really cares about some dead fish in the arctic? If you had the film, then sure, maybe you'd have something. Everybody wants to see spear-throwers, bloody carcasses. If you put it on YouTube, it'd be a hit. But a couple of paragraphs buried in the back of a newspaper isn't going to make any difference. Especially if Lady Gaga's in town.”

“It doesn't matter,” I say, heart sinking. “The locals know.”

He laughs outright. “The Inuit? You think they don't need money?”

I try to pull my wrists apart, predictably without luck. “So what are you waiting for? Why not get it over with?” In a corner of my mind, I try telling myself that if I'm gone, Johnny will have no reason to go after Noah. A silver lining that doesn't sit so well.

“You know what I don't like about you liberals?” he says, eyeing me with coy laziness.

“Do tell.” I get the feeling he's been waiting for this moment—the moment when he can tell me how wrong about everything I am and have always been. The moment when he attempts to heal his own more-jilted-than-I-realized, class-conscious heart through elaborate self-justification presented in the form of a patronizing lecture.

“You overreact to the wrong things. A couple of guys out having fun on their yacht, and you start screaming like it's the end of the world. Save the whales, blah, blah. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. But the whales aren't going anywhere. There are fucking thousands up there. Hiding out, honing their survival skills. Meanwhile, you don't see what's going on every day right before your eyes.”

I look around obligingly. “Guess not.”

He leans forward, lowers his head like a bull about to charge. “Where do you think you are?”

“In a big commercial fishing boat.”

“How big?”

“I don't know.”

“Big as a freighter?”

“Sure. If you say so.”

“How many pounds of fish you think this holds?”

“I don't know, Johnny. You tell me.”

“I don't know either. That's the point. Nobody knows, and nobody cares.” He smirks. “There are forty-five thousand of these babies on the seas right now. One percent of the world's fishing fleet, employing two percent of the world's fishermen, landing fifty percent of the world's fish. The government made all these regulations for fishing in territorial waters—had to protect those precious groundfish, which were doing fine. So what did us fishermen do? We moved offshore, where there are no laws and plenty of fish. We got nets so big on this thing, you wouldn't believe it; steel cables dragging massive metal plates. We're making so much money, we can't count it fast enough. It's not even fishing anymore; it's more like mining.”

“You sound kind of liberal yourself, Johnny. Crisis of conscience?”

“I'm just saying, you can't stop any of it. Not you, not your journalist. Nobody. Man was meant to hunt; man was meant to fish; man was meant to get rich if he possibly can. All you need is one tiny loophole in the government regs for the whole thing to unravel. Put an end to one practice, and somebody somewhere's gonna find a way to make an even bigger pile of money doing something else.
Where there's a will, there's a way
—truer words were never spoken.” He leans back, folds his hands behind his head, well satisfied with mankind's eternal ingenuity.

“So what?” I say, figuring indifference is the only way I can piss him off. I strain my wrists against the cuffs. How much time does Parnell have left?

“You thought you were onto something, right? Thought you were going to break something big. You and your journalist who can't even hold a fucking pen in his hand. Well, what did you end up with, Pirio? Couple of minutes of video, some tusks in the sand—cripes, you were so far off base, it's pathetic. Now, on top of that, you're getting yourself killed.”

“Fair enough. Let's get on with it.”

He glances over his shoulder at Goatee Man. “How much more time we got?”

“Ten minutes?” The guy seems annoyed with the question.

Johnny turns to me. “You want to see him now, or when he's gasping his last breath, or when it's over?”

“First option, definitely. I hate waiting around.”

Another guy walks in. This one's tall, with a confident snap in his step and a slightly better suit. He starts murmuring something to the first guy. My ears catch the familiar accent again. Russian.

I glance at Johnny in his dirty jeans and oil-smeared down vest. I think about his tired wife, his screaming brats, and his crappy house. His worn-down sneakers and completely baseless need to lecture me on the true ugliness of the unleashed profit motive.

Then I remember how Hall's minion, Dennis, automatically reacted when I cursed in Russian.
She could be with Petrenko
. As if Yevgeny Petrenko were the boss to fear. Something clicks. I smile at John Oster. “You're not in charge here. They are. You work for them, and they work for Petrenko. They throw you a few dollars now and then, just enough to keep you hooked. They promised you a big payoff, but they're not going to deliver it, and in your heart you know you're a loser, no better than Troy was, just a bit higher up.”

His face stiffens. The edge of his right eye is quivering. He softly hisses, “What do you know?” To the Russians, he yells, “She's ready to go.”

The two Russians walk over.

“Zdravstvuyte,
” I say.

They exchange a glance. One of them replies,
“Zdravstvuyte.”

“Don't fall for it; she's American,” Johnny says.

Snapping the cuffs, I say authoritatively, “Take these off and get Yevgeny Petrenko on the phone. You've got the wrong woman, and he's going to be very angry when he finds out. Hurry up.
Toropit'sya
.” My spotty college Russian might be enough to give me credibility.

Goatee Man snaps into action, takes a small key out of his jacket pocket, and moves behind me obediently.

“Don't listen to her! She made the film,” Johnny yells.

I smile into the man's dull eyes, and say in Russian, “
He
made the film. He wants to bribe Petrenko.”

The guy undoes the cuffs, tosses them on the table with a certain smugness. As far as he's concerned, Johnny's an American ass, while I'm practically a relative. All across the world, people are loyal to their tribe.

“What are you doing?” Johnny yells hysterically, leaping from his seat.

The dapper Russian has been watching all this silently. He puts his hand on the smaller guy's arm.
“Zhdat',”
he says, looking at me. “We have heard nothing of you. How do we know you're with Yevgeny?”

I assemble a calm expression, try not to blink. “He quotes Solzhenitsyn. He's got a fat blond woman whose elbow he likes to rub.” Hardly proof, but my brain's a fear-soaked sponge, and that's what it gives me to say.

Goatee Man bobs his head like he just heard a good joke, but the tall one's not impressed.

“That doesn't mean anything! She saw Petrenko on the
Galaxy
!” Johnny reaches across the table and pulls the laptop toward him. “Here. Check this out.” He clicks a few times and turns the screen to face the Russians and me.

It's my footage. The narwhals surge through the mouth of the inlet. They're dark, and so is the churning water. But you can still see them. And hear them. Their strange, unearthly noises come through the speakers. Then, quite clearly, you can hear my voice, Martin's, and Parnell's.

The tall guy gives me a backhanded slap across the face.

Johnny comes around the table and hauls me out of the chair. Clutching my upper arm, he drags me toward the freezer. There's no point in resisting. One part of my brain is telling me I'm about to die. The other part refuses to believe it.

We stand behind Goatee Man, who slowly turns the wheel on the door. He steps aside as it swings open. The inside is totally dark.

“There's supposed to be a light,” Johnny mutters. He's momentarily confused, peering into blackness.

The freezer also appears to be empty.

He roughly pushes me forward. “He's in there somewhere. Go find him.”

Almost before the words are out, a roar comes from the depths. Parnell lurches out, holding aloft what looks like a jousting spear. His left hand grips its front half; the other end is tucked under his armpit, pressed to the side of his body by his upper arm. He barrels forward, plunges the rod at Johnny's chest. It doesn't penetrate, breaks in half, but the force of the blow is enough to get Johnny off balance and loosen his grip on my arm. I twist out of his hold, and shove him in the direction that Parnell's strike has him moving. He lands heavily on the floor; I hear the fall rather than see it, as I am running across the room. I lunge across the table and grab the Colt. In quick succession, I cock the hammer with my thumb, slide the barrel back, and whirl to see that the smaller Russian is about to tackle me. I fire.