Ellie shrugged. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Max. She’d committed to taking him with them, but she still couldn’t wrap her mind around how it could be safer for him to be out on the road with her than here. After all, Buzz could keep him locked up or, even better, protect his computers. Without a PC and a link to the outside world, what harm could he do? No, Buzz had only told her half the story. But a deal was a deal.
She followed Patrick into the room Max shared with Hank. The boy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, studying a square game board made of hexes.
Lewis sat on the other side of the board and Jodi between the two. Hector the dog had positioned himself in one corner and wagged his tail when they came in. Jodi looked up as they entered and immediately flushed. “Look, it got him out of his shell, didn’t it?”
“Catan?” Patrick chuckled. “I never knew you had it in you.”
“Buzz isn’t the only nerd. We used to play it a lot when Dad was in town,” she said, before turning to Max. “Have you got any wheat? I’ll trade ore.”
Max shook his head. “I don’t want to give you my wheat.”
“Fair enough,” Jodi said, “though I don’t think you’ve got the hang of the game yet. Lewis?”
“Yeah. Here you are,” he said, his face lighting up as he arranged the card alongside his others. “Development card, here I come.”
Jodi sighed. “Amateurs.”
Ellie sat on one of the beds while Patrick kneeled on the spare side of the board. “So, Max. You know you’re coming with us?”
“I don’t want to.”
Patrick sighed. “I’m sorry, but…”
“Buzz doesn’t want me around. He’s afraid I’ll discover his secret.”
“He’s worried you’ll be caught hacking and bring trouble here,” Ellie said. Her patience and sympathy were in short supply. They were leaving today whether Max wanted to go or not.
Max grunted.
“Hank’s coming.”
“He doesn’t want to either. Why does Buzz get what he wants when we don’t?”
Patrick said, “Because this is his place. Life’s not fair, but for now you need to come with us.”
“Will I be able to come back?”
“Sure. We’ll be returning with Maria,” Patrick said, glancing up at Ellie. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she responded. Whether Buzz would have mellowed enough by that point to let Max in was another matter and, quite definitely, not her problem.
“Anyway, eat your eggs,” Patrick said. “We’ll make sure to take as many as we can, but you might have to vary your diet a little on the journey.”
They left the kids together and walked down to the infirmary where they found Tom and Jo talking together. They both had a much healthier color to their skin, but Jo, especially, was painfully thin. Ellie felt a flash of jealousy as she watched them. She knew Tom well enough to spot the signs. What would Buzz make of this, she wondered.
“So, you able to watch over Lewis and Jodi?” she asked, breaking into their conversation with some pleasure.
Tom smiled, though he wasn’t able to hide his exhaustion. “I’ll manage. Lewis and I are sharing a room. And Hector. I’m going to train him to be a guard dog.”
“Well, you keep an eye on Buzz. I don’t trust him farther than I could spit him.”
Tom’s face darkened. He glanced over at Jo, who was now lying on her side snoozing, and whispered. “Neither do I. He nearly killed me. He is a little loco, I think.”
Ellie kissed him on the cheek. “Be careful. I’ll be back.”
Patrick shook his hand, nodded and followed Ellie out of the infirmary.
They spent the rest of the morning choosing supplies from Buzz’s storeroom. The scientist shadowed their every step, but he wasn’t miserly. Most surprising, and most welcome, was the supply of root vegetables he had stored in a sand-filled trench cut into the floor.
“There’s only enough here for one season, so now the sickness has passed, I’m going to have to get everyone out into the field. Well, it’s just a patch of ground at the moment, so it’s going to take a lot of work. And we’ll need more. I planned this place for a handful of people, so we’ll have to plant fields up the side of the valley.”
“There’s that area where Dom and Masie were. It looked pretty fertile.”
Buzz nodded. “Yeah. You never know, maybe we’ll spread out to the houses up there once things settle down a little.”
It was an odd thing, but it seemed to Ellie that Buzz’s manic mental state had settled as the fever in the community had abated. She began to see the generous, kind man that Jodi had talked about.
They loaded up the trunk of the car with crates containing a mix of carrots, onions and potatoes, then returned for canned food: hotdogs, beans, stewed beef and Spam. In the end, it took two trips before they’d stowed it all, and Patrick had remained at the boat to keep an eye on it. His parting from Jodi had brought a tear to her eye; his parting from Anna, not so much.
Buzz and Hank fitted a plastic agricultural container into the trunk of the car and filled it with water from the tower that was now replenished by the storm. Then, along with Ellie and Max, they drove to the boat and used its hose to transfer the water.
Finally, as the sun touched the horizon, Buzz got back in the car, ready to return to the farmhouse.
“Thanks for the supplies,” Ellie said. She felt unaccountably sad as Buzz shook her hand and walked back to the car. Was she upset to leave him, or the island, or both? Not long ago, she’d loathed the man, but since then he’d changed. Sure, he was getting his own way, and she sensed that his mood hadn’t only changed because of Jo’s recovery (though that was certainly a large part), but also since she agreed to take Max with her. What was it about the boy, she wondered, that threatened Buzz so much? But he had been pretty generous with the supplies he’d given them and she couldn’t find it within herself to look for a hidden purpose in that.
She patted the small pack that hung from her shoulder, perhaps his most generous gift—a Glock 26 sub-compact with ten 9mm Luger cartridges loaded into the magazine and another ten in a box. Patrick had refused the offer of a sidearm, citing his British nervousness as an excuse, though he did take a hunting dagger. Hank took the shotgun he’d been using to guard the gate.
She watched as Buzz reversed the car up the slope, swung it around and headed off. Patrick had spent the intervening couple of hours tidying up the saloon and preparing the ship as best he could for launch. Ellie ambled into the galley to find the cans all neatly lined up, with the fresh vegetables stacked in racks underneath.
The engine was running and the lights on. They would settle in overnight and set off at dawn. In the meantime, she went to find Max, who was occupying Tom’s cabin. It was a twin-bed, so Hank was going in with him.
The boy sat forlornly on the bed, blankly staring at a book balanced on his knees. Hank, who was unpacking their change of clothes—taken from the Colonial house where they’d found Dom and his family—turned to look up at her and smiled. “He’ll be okay once we’re on our way.”
Max shook his head without looking up, so Ellie left them to it. She wasn’t a patient person at the best of times, and she certainly had no time for a self-indulgent teenager.
Patrick was still fussing around in the saloon when she returned. “I wish Tom was coming,” he said. “Even if only to see us safe across the water.”
“It’s lucky I’m not short of self-confidence,” Ellie said, with a smile. “We’ll be fine. We’ve got plenty of fuel, so we won’t need the sails.”
“What are you going to do with the boat when we get there?”
She’d thought about that. Truth was, she would also have been happier if Tom had come with them. Then he could have sailed Kujira back. “I’m hoping to find somewhere offshore to tie up and use the dinghy. That way, we’ve only got to find somewhere to hide the inflatable.”
Ellie had looked out at
the dark shore of the island as she spoke, but turned as she heard the clinking of glass.
“Here,” Patrick said. “I persuaded Buzz to add a couple of bottles to our list of supplies. It’s a Chardonnay. Californian, I’m afraid, but we can’t have everything.”
“Snob.”
“Aye, love. That’d be me. Right stuck-up ponce, I am,” he said in a broad Yorkshire accent.
She turned to him. “This is nice. The calm before the storm. I just wish…”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Well, obviously I wish Maria was here and we didn’t have to go look for her. And Buzz bugs me.”
“He is an enigma, that’s for sure. Like his brother while, at the same time, completely different.”
She sipped her wine. “I can’t make up my mind about him. One minute he’s full-on mad scientist, the next he’s being generous. And what did he know about the flood? It’s all tied up together, I reckon. You know, I’m glad we’re going tomorrow, but I can’t help thinking we’re helping him avoid being accountable by taking Max with us. I don’t like the idea he’s beaten us, even if we’re going to be eating his food for the next ten days.”
Patrick emptied his glass, refilled it, topped hers up and chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Answer this, first. What did you think of Jodi when you first met her?”
Ellie shrugged. “Spoiled celebrity brat.”
“And what do you think now?”
“I was wrong about her. She’s smart—she drew that map without the help from a computer that Max had. She helped get the boat back from the pirates. Yeah, I admit it, I was wrong.”
He smiled, fished in his pocket, and held up a small metal object the size of his thumbnail.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the USB drive Max was using on the computer Buzz lent him. If we’re lucky, it’ll have everything he downloaded from that academic server.”
Ellie’s jaw dropped. “Oh my God! Have we got a laptop?”
“Jodi’s is under her bed.”
“Have you told Max?”
Patrick shook his head. “No, but I’ve got one suggestion.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s move the boat offshore a little. If Buzz finds out it’s missing, he’ll be back and he won’t be feeling so generous.”
So, they raised the anchor, nudged Kujira until it was a hundred yards out, and tied up again. And, the next day, they set sail for the drowned Oklahoma City.
Chapter 25
Found
Edward Pope—“Ted” to his friends and superiors—looked up as Lexa slipped into the little room he was using as his private office.
“What’s the latest from our mole?”
Lexa folded herself into a plastic chair next to the desk and leaned forward. “They do not have coordinates, but they have narrowed the location to a small group of islands. There was an attempt to hack into the server of the University of Detroit, and they managed to trace the IP address.”
Ted looked into the ice-blue eyes of his deputy and the single person in the world he’d trust with his life. “Have they gone looking?”
“Not yet. They do not have the resources for an extensive search and they fear that if he gets wind of them, he will go to ground or activate his security.”
“How do they know he even has security? He’s a scientist, not Dr. Evil.”
She curled her lips like a robot imitating a human smile. “Dr. Evil was a scientist, wasn’t he? But, anyway, they wish to proceed together.”
“You didn’t reveal that we have the precise location?”
She shook her head. “We know the island he’s on, but we must still proceed with caution. It is inhabited, after all.”
Ted leaned back and rubbed his chin. This was a tricky situation. Helmut had proven to be an invaluable spy in Professor Lundberg’s team, but he was only being cooperative because they were spoon-feeding him information. But Ted couldn’t afford for Helmut to get hold of Ed Baxter before he did, or he feared he wouldn’t get to speak to Baxter at all. His thirty years in the Secret Service had equipped him with a pretty effective instinct and he knew Lundberg was hiding something. And Baxter was the key to it. Maybe the key to re-establishing federal control and rebuilding the country. No, they couldn’t risk it.
“Talk to Major Brightman. Tell him to prepare to make the trip. I’ll go talk to Kessler, and the president.”
DELUGE Book 6
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