The Sleepless Stars (30 page)

To his surprise, Price gave a nervous shrug. “Best not to risk anything that would get us stopped or draw attention.”

“Right. Worst comes to worst you can buy the Beretta factory or something.”

Devon controlled all of Kingston Enterprises and the family fortune. Ryder removed his pistol and ammunition from the ruck. He found his passport with its virgin pages on his bureau. Since leaving the Army, he hadn’t had a chance to travel anywhere exotic—had been hoping all that would change with Rossi in his life. He looked around his bedroom, the empty feeling pressing down on him like a weight. Everything had already changed because of Rossi.

He hoisted the ruck. “Let’s go.”

They drove directly to the airport. “You don’t have to stop at your mansion, change into a designer travel outfit?” Price said nothing, simply shifted in his seat. “You do have your passport, right?”

“Yes. Got it a few years ago. Saw a Nat Geo special on Belize and thought I’d check out their beaches, hunt for Mayan ruins, but a job came up, and I never got to use it.” Price parked the car outside a hangar in the general aviation section. A sleek Gulfstream awaited them. “I’m not sure how this works, haven’t used the jet myself.”

Ryder was focused on the mission. “The crew will know.”

He grabbed his bag and walked toward the jet. Price popped the trunk on the Town Car and hauled a small valise from it. At least Price traveled light, wouldn’t be slowing Ryder down. A man in his forties popped out from the hangar and strode over to them.

“Mr. Price, welcome. I’m James. I’ll be your steward for your flight. The pilots are doing their preflight checks, and we’ll be ready to leave shortly.” He escorted them up the narrow set of steps into the jet’s cabin. “We’ve a fully stocked bar and kitchen. There’s a stateroom in the rear if you want to lie down, or all of the seats fully recline.”

The man kept droning on, taking their coats and bags, but Ryder tuned him out. All he needed was someplace to sit—one thing the Army had taught him was how to sleep anywhere. Given his subpar physical shape, his head pounding, balance still off, every breath and step lancing pain through his ribs, last thing he wanted was to add exhaustion to the mix.

He took a seat. Price sat opposite, a small table in between that he set up his laptop on. It was strange the way Price kept squirming, twisting in his seat to look around. For the first time, Ryder remembered that Price was a decade younger than he was. Usually, Price was so confident and self-assured that he forgot about the difference in their ages.

Finally, they took off, Price’s grip on his armrests knuckle-white.

“Don’t like flying?” Ryder asked. Given that he was aching head to toe and it was Price who’d gotten them into this mess by sending Rossi off with the Lazarettos, he was not unhappy to see the other man suffering.

“Not sure. This is my first time.” Price gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Where would a kid from the Tower ever need to fly? Philly’s the farthest away I’ve ever made it.” The plane leveled off, but his grip didn’t ease up.

Ryder took pity on the man. “Relax. Greatest risk of a crash comes at takeoff and landing. Get some rest; you’re going to need it.”

With that, he stretched out on the leather seat, folded an arm over his eyes, and went to sleep. Best way to make the time go faster. Plus, the only way he could be with Rossi right now was in his dreams.

<<<>>>

IT TOOK ALL
my acting skills to convince Francesca that I was considering helping her. She went to great lengths to prove to me that I wasn’t a prisoner, that I actually had a choice, giving me free rein of the island and the non-critical areas of the research lab. I took full advantage of her good-will, fake as it was, even persuading her to give Louise their best treatment—not a cure, but a regimen to help decrease fugues and other symptoms.

“I don’t understand,” I asked Francesca on that first day, after we left the lab. “If your brother is threatening your people and your work, why don’t you just leave?”

She seemed puzzled by the idea. “Leave? We can’t do that. This is our home. This is our family. We could never abandon them.”

“But your family wants to steal the prions—there are millions of lives at risk. Why not destroy your research before Marco gets here?”

Another shake of her head as if we were each speaking an alien language. “I cannot destroy the prions. That work will save our family. The family comes first. Always and forever. I may not agree with Marco, and I’ll fight him until the end, but I would never betray the family.”

After that, I gave up on trying to find any rational common ground and focused on finding the cure.

We spent the next two days together, poring over Tommaso’s research. Francesca was truly brilliant. And truly insane. I was tempted to stay long enough to create a cure, hoping I could somehow steal it and destroy the prions before Francesca went through with her plan and released them, but once I realized that, like Tommaso’s, her research was also a dead end, I knew I had to escape.

Knowing there was no cure made my decision to leave easier, although I wished there was a way I could destroy the prion research before I left. Although the lab was equipped with a fail-safe system that would unleash caustic lye and eradicate the prions, I couldn’t break through the security to trigger it. If Francesca couldn’t move forward with her plan to create a cure and release the prions without my stem cells, then better to leave now before she could harvest them. And before her brother came to steal them and unleash them on the world.

During my few days here, I’d noticed that the island had its own rhythm, especially during the predawn hours when even the worst of the insomniacs were quiet. There was a predictable traffic pattern of boats coming and going: fresh food came, trash left; clean linens shipped in, dirty laundry shipped out; wine and liquor arrived, recyclables departed.

Each morning, I’d watched the boats dock at the landing outside the gates, saw their clever use of small cranes to transfer prepackaged bundles to and from the dock, noted when and where the boats were left unattended, if even for a few seconds.

The boat operators weren’t especially security conscious, not like the guards who never left the gates to the dock unsupervised. But if I could make it to a boat from the water, the view from the dock would be blocked by the cargo and the boat’s hull.

All I had to do was find a way past the walls and bars and into the water.

It was Daniel who gave me my answer. During my exploration of the island, I’d happened upon an alcove on the first floor of the ancient monastery building with a display of very old glass bottles and vials. There were droppers, calibrated measuring tools, sealed jars of all shapes and sizes, even distillation vessels. Apothecary tools. Hand blown, some exquisitely delicate.

A memory from Daniel filtered through my vision: Francesca showing him this same display, explaining how for centuries the family had their own glass factory, creating the special equipment they needed to distill their venoms, creating both poisons and cures. She’d led him down a set of worn, stone steps, deep into a subterranean grotto carved out of the heart of the island. It was cool and damp, a constant stream of water circling in and out via a pristine tidal pond filled with crystal-clear water. Beside it were the ancient stone ovens used to forge the molten glass before it was blown, manipulated, and cooled in the water.

At the time, thirty-some years ago, the abandoned glass forge was their secret rendezvous site. Now, it was the start of my escape.

I waited until even with the irregular sleep-wake cycle of my fellow fatal insomniacs, the monastery had gone silent. It was just past four in the morning on the thirty-first. As I’d done on previous nights, I tossed and turned and finally left my bed to go into the bathroom and use the isolation tank—the one place where I’d be free of the EEG monitor and the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. I turned the lights off in the room, climbed into the tank for a few minutes, then with the lights off in the tank, climbed back out and redressed in the dark.

Knowing that I’d be going for a swim, I sealed a set of pajamas—the only clothing Francesca had allowed me—into a plastic bag stolen from the packaging of one of the EEG caps and slipped out of my room. The lights in the corridor were dimmed, and no one was around.

I hugged the wall and followed a path of what I hoped were blind spots from the cameras. It seemed they’d been designed and positioned more for patient safety—to make sure no one wandered into danger while disoriented from a fugue—than for security. Made sense. As Francesca had said, no one visited the island except family members suffering from fatal insomnia. Other than the lab, there was no need for any security. And it was pretty obvious that they’d never kept anyone prisoner here before. The only guards I’d seen during my time here were the men stationed at the main gate and the entrance to the lab.

I liked the idea of using their hubris against them and especially enjoyed the fact that Francesca’s youthful indiscretions with Daniel Kingston were the path to my salvation. I followed the ancient stone steps down to the grotto where the glass-blowing furnaces sat empty, my footsteps disguised by the lapping of water in the tidal pool. It was the end of December, making hypothermia a definite risk, but I didn’t have to swim very far. If I’d timed it right, I wouldn’t be in the water for long.

I waded through the pool, shivering. The water was maybe fifty degrees at most. At the grotto’s entrance, the water became deep enough for me to swim. I tied the plastic bag to my waist with a spare bathrobe belt, dived in, sputtered against the cold, and swam.

The dark water closed over my head, and I realized the one thing I’d forgotten to factor into my plan: the current.

AT FIRST I
panicked, allowing the greedy sea to smother me with its freezing embrace. The currents tugged at me, pulling me out to sea, no matter how hard I thrashed. Ryder’s pendant bobbed up, but noticing it brought me the calm I needed to focus. That and a memory of my father teaching me and my baby sister to swim, coaxing us through our fear of the water.

I forced myself to relax, kicking only enough to keep my head above water. As I floated, I realized the current was doing the work for me—it flowed naturally around the island and was taking me toward the side where the dock was. Soon, I was treading water out of sight of the guards inside the gates, waiting for the first boat to arrive.

It was the laundry man. Perfect. As his crane clattered and squeaked, hoisting bales of fresh linen onto the dock, I swam to the side and pulled myself up over the gunwale. I lay on a bale of uniforms that stank of dead fish, hauling in my breath, shuddering with the cold. Finally, I pushed two bales apart, leaving just enough room for me to hide between them, and rolled down into the space, the laundry on either side hiding me from everyone except the occasional seagull flying directly overhead.

The boat pulled away without any sign of an alert from the island. We chugged out onto the rollicking open water. I was surrounded by dirty linen, which hopefully meant no reason for anyone to come near my part of the boat. It was a tight fit for changing into my dry clothing, but I managed it before the boat docked at its next stop.

I waited past the island stops until the laundry boat docked at one of the hotels on the Grand Canal in Venice proper. Once we came to a stop, I raised my head up far enough to watch the boatman.

He must have been friends with the staff here at the Europa, because instead of immediately unloading his baskets of fresh linens, he waved a hearty greeting to someone out of sight on the dock and hopped off, disappearing through the staff entrance. I edged past the bales of laundry until I reached the side of the boat. Grabbing on to a cleat on the dock, I hoisted myself up and over, then duck-walked through the puddles covering the dock to the guest side of the terrace where only a knee-high ledge with planters of flowers separated the working dock from a dining area.

Two steps later and I was on the guest side of the wall and heading through the vacant dining room, out a set of double doors, through an empty ballroom, and into a large marble-floored hallway leading past the concierge desk into the main hotel lobby. A phone. I needed a phone and a place to hide—I was much too obvious in my silk pajamas and bare feet.

I found both behind the chest-high concierge desk. The clock on the phone said twenty after six—the Lazarettos would know I was gone by now and would be tracing the laundry boat’s route. I hoped I hadn’t gotten the boatman into too much trouble.

Behind the desk was a cloakroom and in the corner of that what appeared to be a lost and found. I stretched the phone cord as far into the cloakroom as possible and dialed Ryder. Had to hang up and do it twice until I got the country code correct. Not just one. Zero-zero-one.

By now I was shaking with fatigue and fear. I wrapped an abandoned pink and yellow flowered raincoat around me. It was two sizes too large, but I didn’t mind—it was warm. I added a wool scarf to complete my disguise and hide my shaven head. No one had left any shoes behind, unfortunately.

Finally, Ryder answered. “It’s me. Is it safe to talk?” I asked, not sure if his phone might be monitored. After what I’d seen of the Lazarettos’ operations, I wouldn’t put it past them.

“Rossi.” His voice flooded with relief, as did my entire body. I sagged against the doorjamb, sliding to sit on the ground when my legs gave out. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

“I’m okay, but they’re looking for me. I’m at a hotel called the Europa on the Grand Canal. That’s Venice. Italy.” How the hell was he going to get anyone here in time to help me? I was wasting precious time calling him—but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to hear his voice. And warn him not to trust any deal they made with Francesca.

“We’re not far,” he replied.

“What? How?”