The Sacrifice Game (57 page)

( 88 )

“H
i, it’s Jed,” Jed
₁
said. His voice was heavily processed to eliminate background clues, but Ana’s telephone technicians quickly determined that it was really him. You could hear that he was smiling.

Ana was all over it. “Okay, the second relay’s in.” This was the telephone code locator. “That’s—that’s U.S., so, it’s in, um—”

Antonio said, “Pawleys Island. North Carolina. Jed’s old beach house.”

“You’re sure?”

Ana snapped, “Probably.”

“Okay.”

“It’s about a two-hour drive from there.”

“Got it,” Ana said. “Okay, Antonio, you take the big chopper. We’ll find a car there.”

“Never mind, I’ll put in a bike.”

“Like, a chopper in the chopper?” I said.

“Right.”

“Good deal,” Ana said. “Just, keep an eye out for decoy relays. And bombs and the usual shit.”

“He’s not going to have any booby traps,” I said.

“Not your style, huh?” she said. I stared. “It’s classier to just vaporize the whole place, right?”

“Okay, let’s not bust Jed’s balls,” Marena said. “Jed-Sub-Three’s.”

“What’s left of them,” I said.

“Sorry,” Ana said.

The team also ascertained that Jed
₁
was using a chain of physical relays—pairs of telephones set up in different locations around the country—to make the call difficult to trace, since by the time each location was tracked down, and the next one in the chain was identified, he’d be long gone. Even so, this was a huge step forward for the team, and I—trying to ignore the oddity of talking with myself—took over the call.

I said, “Aren’t you curious about what’s going to happen in the future?”

“There isn’t any future.”

“Don’t you want to meet Kristen Stewart?” I asked. “We just signed her for the sequel.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” Hmm, I thought.

“Look, get your heads together and poke me on HarpoCrazy,” he said. It was an anonymous-messaging site that I, or he, had used before for talking to the posse at La Sierra. Ordinarily it wasn’t anything that the Warren code spooks couldn’t crack, of course, but he’d be covering his digital trail anyway, way before the message ever got to the site. So I guess he just wanted to make sure nobody else would come across the exchange. One thing HarpoCrazy did do well was keep their text off search engines. Supposedly the NSA has a whole division that just keeps on breaking into the site, twenty-four hours a day.

“Uh, okay,” I said. “HarpoCrazy.”

He hung up.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” Marena asked. “You have to
keep him on the phone
!”

“He just screwed up,” I said.

“How?”

“He just told us where he is without realizing it.”

“Sorry?”

“Or because he didn’t think about it. He got that Kristen Stewart post. And he wasn’t looking for it. So he must have played the Game and just found it. I mean, the weekly Grandessa Game.”

“Okay, that’s terrific, so that tells you what?”

“Well, I do that, I mean, you know, he does that right after midnight Mass. That means it’s already Sunday there.”

“Where he is.”

“Right.”

“It’s only Saturday.”

“Right, so, where does that mean he is?”

She thought for about a half-second. “So it’s super-early there? So it’s in the Pacific. Near the international date line.”

“Correct. Right here, we’re, you know, we’re Coordinated Universal Time minus five hours. But wherever he is, it’s UTC plus fourteen.”

“So it’s an island. It’s, it’s some nudibranch thing?”

“Correct. And there was a big new species discovery out there, and it came out in the
JMS,
uh, the
Journal of Malacological Studies,
in December, I mean, it was the December issue, but it got published in October.
Mexichromae zenobia.
That’s a kind of possibly eusocial ’branch, uh, nudibranch—”

“Right, right, so where is he?” Her thumb hovered twitchily over the
CALL
icon on her tablet.

“Guess.”

“Come on, don’t bust my ovaries, where where where where where?”

“Where’s Zenobia from?”

( 89 )

G
oogle-Earth “Palmyra Atoll” and at first you won’t see anything there, but if you zoom down to the maximum you’ll bring up a linked pair of tiny islands, looking up at you like a white domino mask. If we’d had to stick to commercial travel, it would have taken us eighty-one hours to cover the 6,750 miles. But Marena’d been mending some fences with Lindsay and Boyle and she’d convinced them to lend us one of his Gulfstreams and a crew of three. They took us from Orlando to Twentynine Palms in five hours, and from there we got on one of their decommissioned C-17 Globemasters and flew to Wheeler Base in Wahiawa, in the center of Oahu, in eleven hours, and from there it took five and a half hours to get to Kiribati. We took a cigarette boat to Palmyra and met Ana’s crew, who were on a stealthier boat called the
Gotengo,
just before sunset.

As I’d explained, a bit breathlessly, to Marena, Jed
₁
had to have used the Game to find that hidden post on Kristen Stewart. And he said, “I just got that,” which meant he’d found it during his Game of the Week. Which he does on Sunday night at seven
P.M.
And the only place where it was already seven o’clock was in the Line Islands, which are practically sitting on the international date line. And the most interesting spot in the Line Islands was Palmyra Atoll, because that’s where the newly discovered possibly eusocial nudibranchs were. Although when you spell it all out it seems a lot less magical.

The
Gotengo
rode low in the water, and weirdly slushily, I guess because it was some new kind of stealth thing, all Kevlar and carbon fiber. It was forty-two feet, which would normally seem like a lot to a reef bum like me, but most of that was under the waterline, and the eight of us—Marena, Ana, and five male security contractors, or let’s just be blunt and call them mercenaries, and me—kept bumping each other as we squatted in the ungenerous deck space. Actually,
Gotengo
wasn’t the boat’s real name, or rather it didn’t have a name, just numbers and a two-terabyte spec disk that told you things like how it was built by VT Halmatic and that it was tested for ninety knots, which is huge. But we wouldn’t be doing any racing.

“They’re talking about the storm,” Megalon said. Of course, “Megalon” wasn’t his real name, which I didn’t know. I did know, though, that he was an ex-commodore in the SBS, that is, the Special Boat Service, which is like the UK version of the Navy SEALs. He spoke in that low-key-but-still-working-class way British grunts all have, with a vestige of Australian. He was big and naturally jovial and he’d let his hair grow out a bit now that he was in the private sector, but he still had what they used to call military bearing and a tattoo with a stubby gladius and a banner that said something like B
Y
S
TRENGTH AND
G
UILE
. Good plan, I thought. He was talking about the people on Jed
₁
’s charter, the
Blue Sun,
or rather I should say the
Matango
. You couldn’t see it from here, but the sonar said it was right out there, three thousand and twenty-eight ESE. Oh, and Megalon was telling us because he was talking on his in-ear phone to our audio lady, who was below with the captain and another IT person. Audio Lady—well, let’s use her dumb alias, Mothra—seemed really good. I’d tried listening to the raw audio coming in from the
Matango,
but it just sounded like a hyena in a wind tunnel. You had to be a veteran sound geek to take the stuff off the three differently tuned parabolic microphones, sort it out, denoise it, interpret it, and summarize it for the likes of the rest of us.

“Reptar wants him to come up in a half hour. Ogra says no.” “Reptar” was the skipper of the
Matango
. Ogra was Jed
₁
.

“I used to like to go in a little after sunset,” I said. Most ’branchs don’t roll out of their crooks and nannies until dark. “Except—”

“Hah!” Megalon went. “Okay, there they go.” He said that Ogra had gone in with two other divers, possibly bodyguards, and they were swimming south, without tow sleds, toward the extreme tip of the reef. “Eighteen minutes.” We wanted to spend as little time in the water as possible, and I’d said how my average dive was about seventy minutes. So if we could get there in forty-two minutes, and we wanted to catch them toward the end, when they were tired. I shifted on the little drop-down seat. Eeekch. My tow-harness’s crotch strap was chafing the tenderest segment of my perineal raphe, but I didn’t want to unzip and grub around in there in front of Marena and Ana. A trio of brown pelicans shuffled over us, boogying west. Way off in the east, a low scroll of clouds was turning to what Joseph Conrad had called “that sinister olive.” I checked the little screen on my left wrist. It was six minutes to sundown on Friday, December 2, that is, sixty-three hours after we’d ID’d the boat. Weatherwise it was sixty-four degrees, with seventy percent relative humidity, wind southeast at eighteen miles per hour, and cloudy with a chance of annihilation. Tide was high water minus one hour and waves were two to three feet SW, and choppy. The clouds in the east were part of a late tropical storm building up over Antigua, forty miles away, and according to the Meg man they could be a problem—or “issue,” which I guess was worse than a problem—but it wasn’t yet.

“So why’s he got guards unless he’s expecting us?” Marena asked.

“Maybe it’s just for safety,” Megalon said. “With the current. Or maybe they’re just friends.”

“Friends?” I asked.

“Do you not have any friends?” he asked back.

“No, it’s—I mean, haven’t we been monitoring all my friends? Like, all one of them?”

“Yeah, we have,” Ana said. “Then they’d have to be new friends,” Megalon said. He pulled on a full face mask—yellow fiberglass face complete night-vision goggles and bolts at the temple. It had an exposed wire breathing apparatus that curved around from his neck and made him look like the Vincent Price Fly wearing a supersized Essix retainer.

“That doesn’t sound likely,” I said. Must readjust groin area, I thought. Megalon’s voice sounded beefy and determined even over the com link. “Even if they’re females, we’re going to treat these friends as armed frogmen,” it said. “Grab, contain, and retrieve.”

Sir, righto sir, I thought. Someone handed me a BandMask
^®
, Bandkeepers
^®
, and a SuperFlow
^®
regulator. I started strapping the gear on, expertly, until Ana just took it from me and strapped it sadistically tight. ITCH! OUCH! IOUTCH! MUST! ADJUST! NOW! A glint of yellow flashed on the underside of the green cloud front just as my full face mask was closing down on me. Not a good sign. Marena was looking at it too so I half-stood up and sneaked my hand into the old crotch area behind my harness. Ahh. A little more. Damn, she was looking at me. What the hell. I sat back down, bobble-heading heavily under the mask.

“Let’s hook on,” Megalon said. I found the ’bener on my harness—the one gouging my crotch—and clipped it onto a nylon line that went over the side and down and aft, leading to my designated tow sled, or Diver Propulsion Vehicle, henceforth referred to as a DPV. There were seven of them trailing behind us in a long line. They were big—or, it seemed to me, gigantic—but supposedly any other models were way too noisy and the Matango’s hydrophones, if any, would pick them up in a second.

Ow. The adjustment hadn’t been entirely successful. All the stuff down there had just better smooth out in the water or—

“Let’s go,” Megalon said. He tipped backward and slid discreetly into the sea.

I flipped up my seat and sat on the gunwale. Ana went next, making a little more noise, but nothing to be embarrassed about. I started hyperventilating. The other combat swimmers dropped in, three, four, five, six. Okay. Breathe. In. Out. In. Now. I leaned backward, fell, and heard the beginning of an amateurish splash. Then even with the Jack Browne drysuit, there was that zap of almost-insupportable cold that, like always, was over almost before it registered, and then the gradual melting into equal buoyancy and that moment where—no matter how big a sack of bad is going down—every diver in the world ever, in the wooshiest, most clichéd possible way, feels, for a few seconds, at one with the all-embracing wine-dark brine-mother. This time it reminded me of how Koh had told me she remembered breathing saliva in her mother’s womb, listening to the hairdressers’ muffled singing in the red twilight. Okay, focus. I sucked in two lungsful of ntitrox. Ahh. There was an extra eight percent of O
₂
in the mix, enough to give you a little extra moxie but not enough to make you silly. Okay. Step two. Claim your DPV. I got hold of the tether line and followed it aft, pulling myself along upside down, until my head hit the vehicle. I got in position, dropped the tether, and clipped my harness to the cleat on the back. You could ride the thing hands-free if necessary. In fact, if, say, you got knocked unconscious, the crew on the boat could remote-drive it back to the boat, trailing you along. I got into position behind the thing—you could feel the motor purr through the handlebars, but you couldn’t hear it—and let myself hang with my head down, soaking up the growing warmth and listening to that different underwater-world five-thousand-feet-per-second sound, with critters clicking like fairyland stone marimbas. I thought. Okay. I switched on the DPV’s headlight. Damn. The visibility was lower than the thingy’d said it was, barely five yards, I guessed. Way too much phytoplankton. Maybe it was because of the storm. As always, I twisted around for a useless look over my shoulder. Nothing. Brrrrr. No matter how many night dives you’ve done, there’s always a shudder-and-chill when first you feel that immensity of dark below and especially behind you, which your amygdala helpfully populates with peckish hammerheads, cardiolethal box jellies, the last surviving
Carcharodon megalodon,
snaggle-fanged Xibalbans, and a couple Spawnlets of Cthulu.

I stretched my arms and let myself settle into the soothing pressure, about a foot under the surface. Ahhhhh, that’s better. Enough of that gravity bullshit. I balled myself into a fist, counted to four, straightened out, and shook my legs. Damn. Mobility problems. Too much crap. Which, naturally, the SBS guys called “systems.” Of course, gear doesn’t weigh anything once you’re in the water, but there’s still a limit to how many protuberances you want on your eighteen square feet of body surface. The closed circuit rebreather—which didn’t make any tattletale bubbles—was lighter than a normal tank, but it was big, and they’d loaded me up with all this other gear, including a full-face mask by Ocean Reef—I think we can call it a helmet—with unslashable woven steel hoses and securing straps around your forehead so enemies couldn’t yank it off. There was also a night-vision system with protruding flylike eyes that swiveled in and out of my field of view. It seemed jerry-rigged and jury-built, and my whole left forearm was covered with what looked like a black-jade scaled wrist cuff, with the OLED screen and big keys with excitingly geometrically styled raised icons. The trickiest deal on it was the synthetic aperture LIMIS, that is, Limpet Mine Imaging Sonar. The speakers were on the
Gotengo,
of course, but each of us could see the picture on our heads-up screen, shifted so that it corresponded to our own point of view. Supposedly the pings were disguised, and too low for most countersonar systems to hear anyway. Still, the resolution was great. You could see, or rather hear, a beer can on the ocean floor a quarter-mile away. Then there was the adaptive-beamformer communications system, and the beacon system that ID’d and located me, which also included five ’trodes taped to my chest that monitored my heart rate and blood pressure and, for all I knew, my sperm count. And they’d mandated those new tiny thin superspringy fins that kill your knees, and then the worst thing was that the supposedly ballistic wetsuit was way too stiff. Don’t worry about it. Breathe. Ahh. Okay. Depth fourteen feet, temp sixty-four degrees, and pressure 1.3 ATM. Check, check, and check. Location, 17.22° North, 63.1° West. Current, east by northeast at five miles per hour. Littoral floor depth, thirty-one feet. Estimated travel time to the reef was creeping up on fifty minutes. I squinted at the heads-up display. It showed a hundred-foot area in three dimensions, on an xyz axis with me at zero. There were four views, like on 3-D AutoCAD software. And right now it showed way too many blips. Lots of snapper around. I switched it to standard mode, which was supposed to edit out anything under shark size, and everything disappeared except the six blue dots for the other divers and the big green one for the
Gotengo
.

Djoong djoong dhoong djoong
, Megalon went. Get in formation, he meant.
Djoong djoong djoong djoong.
I finned myself to the right and forward. Three blips came up even with me, as though I were the leader, although I wasn’t. Ana was the nearest on my left and Megalon was nearest on the right.
Breeeeep,
Ana’s wrist thing went in my ear. It meant, “Jiga here, all okay.” I hit two keys meaning “Jed
₃
here, all okay.” The others sounded off.