The Tenth Circle (13 page)

Roanoke Island

Wareagle emerged from the woods, big hunting knife newly wedged into his belt and holding a teenage boy by the scruff of the neck. An Indian boy with wavy black hair that dangled well past his shoulders, wearing boots, jeans, and a beat-up leather jacket. Indignant scowl plastered across his anomalously soft features that didn’t mix well with a patchwork of bruises across his cheeks at various stages of healing. The middle of his nose looked a little like Sal Belamo’s, although broken on only a single occasion as opposed to several.

“I could’ve killed you, you know,” he spat, drawing closer to McCracken and Captain Seven, “all of you.”

McCracken watched Wareagle open a worn leather pouch he’d confiscated from the boy and remove a pair of oblong, homemade grenades complete with fusing strung from thin holes in their centers.

Blaine could smell the black powder through the cold air. “Why the firepower, kid?”

“Never know when you’re gonna run into a few assholes.

“Homemade grenades? Really?”

“Hey, I didn’t know if you were friendly or not. I still don’t.”

“So, if we weren’t, you planned on blowing us up?”

“Maybe just scare you off.”

McCracken watched Johnny return the homemade grenades to the pouch. “You don’t use a weapon like this to scare somebody. Or that knife my friend here took off you.”

“Okay, so maybe I had other plans. Just in case.”

“Just in case?” McCracken gave the bruises a longer gaze, let the kid see him doing it. “Somebody else you tried to scare off do that to you?”

“None of your fucking business,” the boy said, trying to sound tough, but his eyes had lost their resolve and harshness. He looked young and frightened, his gaze turning furtive and restive at the same time.

“Why were you watching us?”

“I’m not answering any of your questions,” the boy said stridently, blowing some of the stray hair from his face. “I’ll answer his,” he added, cocking his gaze back at Johnny Wareagle. “What tribe are you?”

“Oglala Sioux.”

“I’m a Croatan. Native to this place for maybe a million years. But we’re called Lumbee now. All that’s left of the Croatan tribe, and I still call myself a Croatan.”

“An offshoot of the Carolina Algonquian tribe, related to the great Algonquian tribes of the north,” Wareagle noted.

The boy looked closer at Johnny. “Wish I had some Sioux in me. That warrior tradition might help out now and then.”

“Right,” McCracken said, again eyeing the boy’s bruises, a few of which were still yellow with healing, “I see your point. What’s your name?”

The kid smirked, looked back toward Wareagle again.

“Answer him,” Johnny ordered.

“You’ll laugh if I tell you,” the boy said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the same as the kid from the
Twilight
movies.”

“
Twilight
movies?”

“You know,” said the boy, “the werewolf.”

“Sorry, kid, I
don’t
know.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “Jacob, all right? My name is Jacob. There, you can laugh now.”

None of them did.

“Okay, Twilight,” McCracken picked up, “why were you watching us?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What?”

“Twilight. It’s lame. I told you my name.”

“Why were you watching us, Jacob?” McCracken relented.

The boy looked back at Wareagle again instead of responding. “I’ve heard Sioux warriors are plenty badass. You a badass?”

“Ask him how old he is, Indian.”

“Fifteen,” Jacob told Wareagle before he had the chance. “And I’m sorry I was sneaking around, watching you like that. I wasn’t sure, that’s all.”

“Sure about what?”

“Whose side you were on. If you were one of them.”

McCracken and Wareagle exchanged a wary glance.

“One of who?” from Wareagle.

“Been a long time since anybody figured this for the real site of the lost colony, as opposed to the place they pack the tourists into. Then, all of a sudden, people start showing up, at night mostly. This is still Croatan land—well, kind of anyway. That makes it trespassing.”

“You saw them?” McCracken posed.

“Another kid did first. He came back to watch them another night and nobody’s seen him since. Everybody thought he was a bad kid, figured he’d run away. But he wasn’t a bad kid and he’d never run away. He was my friend.”

“And you thought we were the same guys he was watching.”

“Maybe. I wasn’t sure. I think they killed him and buried him somewhere nearby. I see him in my dreams sometimes and know he’s not alive anymore.” Jacob looked back at Wareagle again. “You see stuff in your dreams too?”

“All the time,” Wareagle told him.

The boy looked about the lifeless clearing. “You ever see what really happened here, what it is about this place that makes it cursed?”

“No.”

“Because I know we’re different tribes, but I just figured there might be a connection somewhere.”

Wareagle shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“When did your friend disappear?” McCracken asked.

“Eight months ago, maybe nine now.”

“And you’ve been watching this place ever since?”

“Croatans have been watching this place for over four hundred years, just in case it comes back.”

“In case
what
comes back?”

“Whatever killed the original colonists. It’s kind of a legend in these parts. Some believe it, some don’t.”

“Do you?”

“I didn’t,” Jacob said, blowing more hair from his face. “I do now. Ever since they killed my friend.”

McCracken thought of Andrew Ericson, holding out hope the boy was still alive in frigid waters seventy-five feet deep. “You can’t know he’s dead.”

The boy reached up to touch Wareagle’s shoulder. “Tell him.”

“He can know, Blainey.”

“Blainey?” The kid chuckled. “What kind of name is that?”

“One you won’t find in any movie, Twilight.”

Jacob looked from McCracken to Wareagle and back to McCracken again. “You’re looking for the same thing they were, aren’t you?”

“We’re not exactly sure what we’re looking for.”

“Good, because it’s gone. And it’s been gone for, like, one hundred fifty years now.”

“What’s been gone for one hundred fifty years?”

Jacob rolled his eyes. “Don’t you guys know anything?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Well, my, like, great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was chief of the Croatan tribe back in 1590. He led the party that found the colonists’ bodies after he heard their screams in a dream.” Then, with his gaze fixed on Johnny Wareagle, he said, “Guess he had the gift too. Anyway, he and the rest of the party buried the bodies as best they could, hoping that would be the end of it, but knowing it wasn’t. Ever since, the story’s been passed down through the generations, with the firstborn of each chief in the lineage responsible to stand vigil in case the dying starts again.”

“You?”

“Me,” the boy said meekly as he blew the stray hair from his face again.

“You knew we’d be here,” noted Wareagle.

“I knew somebody would. That’s why my family’s been running the tribe for so long, ’cause we got this gift. Just lucky I guess,” Jacob said.

The wind picked up, whipping larger snowflakes through the air, the fall becoming steady as the storm intensified off the water.

“You’d best be off this island before it starts blowing big and bad,” Jacob warned.

“Was there a storm the day the colonists were killed?”

“Yes, but it was rain, a real soaker that turned the land to mud. The Croatans had to wait until it passed before setting out to the colony where they ended up burying the bodies. Wasn’t the first time it happened either, just the first time with people. Before it was always just animals. Explains why the woods around here are so quiet, since they never came back. Maybe they’re smarter than we are, smart enough to know to avoid it.”

“Avoid what?”

“The White Death.”

Dearborn, Michigan

“How did you know?” Zarrin asked him.

Al-Asi glanced down and laid a hand over Zarrin’s. “You’ve been filling prescriptions for Sinemet. Different pharmacies, scripts written by different doctors, even filled in different names.” Al-Asi’s gaze relaxed, the color of his eyes seeming to change from gray to blue. His touch felt cool, but tender and reassuring at the same time. “Sinemet is composed of levodopa and another drug called carbidopa. Levodopa enters the brain and is converted to dopamine while cardidopa increases its effectiveness while lessening the side effects.”

Zarrin’s gaze drifted out a nearby window toward a lone man seated at a picnic table, trying to appear not to be looking inside. He’d been there when she’d first pulled into the parking lot, doing the very same thing.

“You’ve done a great job of hiding your secret from the world, but not from me,” al-Asi continued after a pause that exaggerated the sounds of children cackling, laughing, and blowing noisemakers. “Did you really expect I wouldn’t find out?”

“Keeping tabs on all your former agents, Colonel?”

“Just you, Zarrin.”

“What about the operatives who accompanied you here, settled in Dearborn just like you? American citizens too, aren’t they? Your personal security force trained by Mossad and Israeli Special Forces.”

Al-Asi couldn’t help but smile, in that moment very much his old self. “Who is keeping tabs on whom?” His smile vanished, as he glanced down at Zarrin’s hands. “You’ve sought out all the medical opinions, I’m sure.”

“And then some. The treatment retards and controls the disease to a degree, but the future is inevitable.”

Al-Asi stopped just short of a laugh, the gesture seeming to relax him. “The future is always inevitable.”

“Not to people like you, who managed to control it.”

“Something else you must have learned from me.”

“Colonel?”

“You think I don’t know where a great deal of your fortune has gone? All the schools you’ve funded, all the medical supplies that exist in the camps only because of your efforts. The teachers, the doctors, too many to count, drawing compensation from foundations set up by you.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be so easy to discern.”

“It wasn’t,” al-Asi said slyly. His eyes flashed their former spry gleam, playful and dangerous at the same time. “I remember the first time I saw you in the refugee camp, the way others looked at you. You walked through the camp without fear, even as a child. First time I had seen anybody do that. It’s what attracted me to you immediately, how I knew I’d found what I came for.”

“I watched my parents die, Colonel. Nothing could ever scare me after that until now. I’m scared for our people. These attacks on innocent Americans are a setup. How many more are we to be blamed for before innocent Muslims, both here and at home, pay a terrible price?”

“This is my home,” al-Asi reminded her.

“All the more reason for you to help me uncover who’s really responsible for the wave of attacks.” Zarrin regarded the children charging about around her, tomato sauce from the just-served pizza dribbling down their chins and staining their cheeks like paint smears. “Otherwise, days like this may be few and far between, even for you.”

Al-Asi rose with a sigh, not speaking until Zarrin joined him on her feet. “I can’t help you, Zarrin. I’m not that man anymore. It’s time for others to fight this war.” He waited for a response, surprised at the one that came. “Why are you smiling?”

“I was thinking of my father, how much you remind me of him. He taught me the piano as a young girl, but I did my best learning inside that camp. From an old man on a legless piano salvaged from a trash dump.”

“Kazim,” al-Asi nodded.

“You knew?”

“I sent him to you,” al-Asi told her softly. “As a test, to see how well you could learn what you loved.”

Zarrin’s gaze turned out the window toward the man she’d been watching, who was now straddling the concrete and grass strip that rimmed the parking lot. A phone at his ear.

“With maybe another test about to come,” she muttered.

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing, Colonel,” Zarrin said, still eyeing the man. “Not yet, anyway.”

Roanoke Island

“White Death,” McCracken repeated.

Jacob nodded. “The Indian word is
pakenappeh
. Came from the old days when there was this ice fog in the winter. But my ancestors had a whole other reason for calling what killed the colonists and haunted the land that.”

“Which was?”

“Nobody ever saw it.”

“Hold on,” said Captain Seven with eyes squeezed closed and fingers pressed hard against his temples, “I’m having a moment here, a genuine quickening.” His eyes opened, the lids fluttering. “Yup, I think I know what wiped out the Roanoke Colony. Nailed it dead solid perfect.”

“Please continue, Captain.”

Captain Seven moved to the center of the former encampment, standing atop one of the natural berms. “It was right about here, mentioned in White’s original journal. I should know better than to doubt myself. See what happens when you pull me away from my daily allotment of ganja, MacNuts?”

“What’d you miss from White’s journal, Captain?”

“The original well the colonists dug had run dry, something White discovered when he returned here to find them all missing. He also found the recently dug replacement well about right here on this natural berm, if I’ve got my bearings straight.”

“The replacement well,” McCracken repeated.

“That’s where whatever killed the Roanoke colonists came from. Starts with the fact that water wasn’t the only thing they found when they dug that new well right where you see this depression.”

McCracken exchanged a wary glance with Wareagle. “You’ve got our attention.”

“Then try this: Know what you’re standing on?”

“Ground?”

“Try a volcanic plain. Sure, the nearest known volcanos are Virginia’s Mole Hill and Trimble Knob, and, sure, their last eruptions were forty-seven million and thirty-five million years ago, respectively. But this island formed essentially over waters that were crater lakes that burned hot with occasional lava flow back when T. rexes and velociraptors ruled the land. And I don’t have to tell you how stubborn that kind of shit can be.”

“Yes, you do, Captain.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Not much for the science books, are you?”

“Why bother when I’ve got you?”

“Good point.”

“And what’s the one you’re getting at with lava and volcano plains?”

“About four hundred fifty years ago, around the time the Roanoke colonists dug their fateful well, the tectonic plates on the seafloor beneath this island weren’t where they are now. And what was there must have included a pocket of magma—that’s a mixture of molten and semi-molten rock mostly. Now magma leaks good ol’ carbon dioxide, lots and lots of it, into the waters it settles in, turning that ordinary H2O into something called carbonic acid. You with me so far?”

“Enough to know anything with the word
acid
in it can’t be good,” McCracken told him.

“Especially in this case, because what happened here around 1590 was unprecedented on this continent. Would have been goddamn exciting if it wasn’t so goddamn scary.”

“If
what
wasn’t?”

“The water became a bomb, MacNuts. It goddamn exploded,” said Captain Seven.

“I don’t mean literally,” he said after a pause that felt longer than it really was. “More a figure of speech that comes from the notion of exploding lakes, which are actually limnic eruptions. Natural disasters of true epic proportions that don’t get more attention because, thankfully, they don’t happen all that often. Now ‘limnic eruption’ is just a fancy term for what happens when dissolved carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid, stages an escape from the waters in which it’s contained, normally under intense pressure.”

“So when the colonists dug this new well …”

“They pierced a thermal layer and gave all that carbonic acid its escape route. Chances are, and this is just me talking here, that the barometric pressure was really low, a storm coming or already there, because that would create the perfect atmospheric conditions for what happened next.”

“Lake Nyos,” Johnny Wareagle said, before Captain Seven had a chance to continue.

The captain’s eyes bulged as he grinned at Wareagle approvingly. “Maybe you should spend more time around the big fella here, MacNuts, so his smarts might finally rub off on you.”

“I’ve heard of Lake Nyos too, Captain.”

“Really? Then you know it’s a deep lake high on the flank of an inactive volcano in the Oku region of Cameroon in Africa, complete with that pocket of magma leaking carbon dioxide into the water. You getting the picture here?”

But McCracken had turned his attention to Jacob, who’d grown suddenly antsy, sweeping his gaze from left to right and back again. “What is it, kid?”

“I don’t know. I get these feelings sometimes. Like …”

“What?”

The boy turned away from the woods beyond. “Nothing.”

“Anybody mind if we get back to business?” said Captain Seven. “I’m losing my train of thought here and it’s been way too long since I last smoked up.”

“Proceed, Captain.”

“Smoking?”

“Explaining.”

Captain Seven hummed a few bars of
The Twilight Zone
theme song. “In August of 1986, what happened in this very spot, to a smaller degree, happened in Lake Nyos, to a much larger one.”

“Don’t tell me; the lake exploded.”

“So to speak. A large cloud of carbon dioxide in the form of carbonic acid burst out of the water and suffocated around seventeen hundred people in nearby towns and villages. Spread for miles. No one in range was spared. How’s that for White Death?”

“Did you say
suffocated
?”

“As in asphyxiated, MacNuts. Guess I need to draw you a simpler picture that includes the four thousand or so heads of livestock that got killed that day too.”

“You’re saying that’s what killed the Roanoke colonists,” said McCracken, not yet struck by the fact that Captain Seven had just solved one of history’s greatest mysteries.

“Quickly and horribly, or horribly and quickly. Take your pick. Based on what Twilight here is saying, my guess is the magma pool that spawned the carbonic acid rose just short of ground level. Means the contents of the entire well were contaminated, meaning weaponized.”

“But the colonists lived here for years without incident.”

“Until they dug that replacement well, effectively allowing this White Death to mix with the air, oxygen. Then—
boom!
—you’ve got Lake Nyos on a smaller scale.”

“What happened to the well?” McCracken asked him.

The captain shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. Twilight’s ancestors probably covered it up when they buried the bodies, hid all trace anyone had ever been here. Which brings me to this …”

Captain Seven whipped out a thick pen-like object and pulled on a slot carved into its top. The insides of the object spiraled outward, narrowing at the tip when it reached a yard or so in length. The metal was finished in an absorbent, felt-like material. The captain dropped to his knees and sunk the object into the ground depression where he’d identified the position of the replacement well to be. Then he eased it back out and ran a hand down its length and then up again.

“Just like I thought.”

“What’d you think?”

“Feel for yourself.” Captain Seven resumed, as Blaine did just that. “Barely moist and crusted with dirt. That tells me the ground still holds remnants of the White Death, but the supply that killed the colonists must have been drained.”

“Maybe by those guys lurking about the premises a few months back,” McCracken thought out loud, “the ones who killed Twilight’s friend.”

“It wasn’t them,” Jacob interjected, continuing when they all turned toward him. “It was somebody else. A long time ago, back when my great-grandfather was—”

The boy stopped, noticing Wareagle’s gaze lock on something no one else could see in the woods beyond them. He seemed to be sniffing the air.

“The boy was right, Blainey. We’re not alone,” he said, in the last instant before the gunshots sounded.