Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  The bay was shallow here. Not more than a hundred feet away, a shoulder of breakwater rocks hummocked through the ice. He squeezed his hands into fists, tensed all the muscles in his body and took three quick breaths. Gulping in a final lungful of air, he stepped forward, planted his foot and dove headfirst into the oval of water.

  He felt like he was hitting a glacial wall, but his body slid through, the sting familiar, that needling pain of ice water against the skin. He’d swum in arctic temperatures before, although only as a stunt. A relief from the heat of a sauna, or a laugh with friends. He’d studied its effects, the tightening of the diaphragm in the chest cutting off air, the suffocating panic and slowing of the muscles.

  He fought it. But he knew he couldn’t fight it for long.

  Down he swam, one stroke, two, before he opened his eyes. A nearly impenetrable gloom. He could barely see his own hands. Three strokes. Four. His outstretched arm touched something. A cloud of debris boiled up around him, a soup of muck and mud. The cord pulled around his waist, and, careful not to tug it too jerkily, he pulled to get more slack.

  His lungs burned.

  The cold seared his skin.

  He pushed sideways off the bottom, his feet skating over the slick rocks, his arms stretched wide, fingers out as whiskers feeling in the darkness. Something. He wrapped his hand around it, pulled himself inches from it. A metal post, sunk in a concrete pylon. He pushed away at ninety degrees, trying to move in a grid.

  Come on. Come on.

  He looked up at the bleary smudge of light and tried to resist the convulsions in his chest, but then kicked off the bottom. A second later he gasped in a lungful of air as his head broke the surface.

  “Do you have her?” Massarra screamed.

  She pulled the cord tight and jammed him into the edge of the ice.

  “Let go!” He slapped the water, sucking in air, trying to control the shivering.

  He dove back under.

  Was there any current? His mind was sluggish. The cold seeped into his skull.

  No.

  The particles of mud churned around him but didn’t seem to float away.

  Already he had trouble moving his arms. He couldn’t feel his fingers. Still he clawed through the water. Not more than ten feet deep. His hand hit the rocky bottom, but he didn’t feel it. Just the sensation of his hand not moving forward, his arm jammed back into his body. This time he kicked off to the right.

  The mud whorled around him, but there was a patch of yellow. He scrambled and scraped his way toward it, pulling on rocks, digging at the water. Jess’s faced loomed from the darkness, her eyes closed. Her skin blue-white. Her mouth open in a frozen scream. Giovanni pulled her close and did his best to wrap his legs around her waist, with one arm around her neck.

  He tugged three times on the nylon cord.

  And waited.

  Shivering hard, he pressed his face against Jess’s cheek. Hard and cold as ice.

  He jerked again on the cord, and this time it ripped away out of his hand. Water rushed past him. His head knocked into something. The ice. He was at the edge of the ice. He reached out—in slow motion, his body a sack of wet cement—and wrapped his arm around the edge and pulled. The thin layer of ice broke and his head popped up.

  “I have her,” he gasped, rolling onto his back.

  With the last of his strength, he pulled Jess’s body up, her head breaking the surface of the water beside him. Her lips were purple-blue, her skin pale-marble.

  “Pull, pull!”

  Eddies of blowing snow skidded past. Massarra had the nylon cord wrapped around her waist, her body forty-five degrees to the ground. She heaved with everything she had. Giovanni felt himself slip up against the ice, and he hauled Jess’s body over himself. The next pull from Massarra popped them both onto the snowy surface. She dug her feet in, yanking and dragging them onto the ice.

  Shivering almost uncontrollably, Giovanni staggered to his knees. “Start the Range Rover,” he stuttered, his teeth chattering. “Get the heat on.”

  Massarra nodded and let go of the rope. She disappeared from view in the thickening snowfall. The orange-red glow of sunset had faded into a deep gloom. Darkness descended, but Jess’s face shone white. He rolled her onto her side and stuck a finger into her mouth to feel for any obstructions. Water poured from her dead lips. He waited and shivered in the dark, then rolled her back.

  He put both hands together and pressed them into her chest. Once, twice, three times. He leaned down to breathe air into her mouth. He repeated this a half dozen times, until he heard the growl of the Range Rover’s engine starting up. Faint beams of its headlights pierced the darkness. Giovanni pumped Jess’s chest one last time before forcing himself to his feet.

  He grabbed Jess by the hood of her parka and dragged her stiff body across the snow.

  20

  “IS SHE DEAD?”

  “You’ll know if she’s dead.”

  “How the hell would I know?” Roger grimaced and tried to shift position. He was hog-tied against the strut of the Cessna.

  “Because I’ll slice the liver from your body and feed it to that boy’s dog while you watch.”

  Giovanni didn’t turn to look at Roger as he said it, didn’t bother to try and menace him further. A dog doesn’t bark before it bites, and he wasn’t barking anymore. Just looking at Roger made his stomach turn. He was afraid that he’d kill him, but he knew they still needed this pathetic excuse for a human being, at least until they got the truth from him.

  “I was trying to protect her, I told you—”

  “Enough! Shut him up, fallo stare zitto!”

  Raffa got up from the bench next to the fire in the middle of the hangar. Blade in hand, he stalked toward Roger, who flinched away. Raffa knelt to grab an oily rag from the floor and stuffed it into the traitor’s mouth. Lucca sat at the hangar’s front door, open a crack, on guard but seeing only the darkness outside.

  Leone groaned. Hector worried over him as he lay wrapped in blood-soaked blankets next to the fire. Off to one side of the concrete floor were two bodies. One was Elsa; the other, an old man Massarra had dragged up from near the seawall, already dead. She hadn’t said anything yet, hadn’t explained, but she hadn’t tried to run away, either.

  Right now, Giovanni’s singular mission was Jessica. Everything and everyone else was secondary.

  He lowered his cheek to her mouth, and rested one hand on her neck. A weak pulse. She was breathing, but barely. They’d constructed an improvised stretcher from plywood, softened it with a rolled foam sleeping pad, but he only covered her with a thin blanket.

  “Should we not move her closer to fire?” Massarra asked.

  The old man she’d dragged up here, Giovanni didn’t recognize. She seemed unable, or unwilling, to leave him, hovering close to his bullet-riddled body. The anguish on her face was real, if about the only real thing he knew about her now.

  “Rewarming too quickly can be fatal.” He knew the core temperature of victims of hypothermia continued to drop, even after they were brought into warm environments.

  Cold blood from the surface tissues were rich in lactic acids, and bringing that into the core of the body too quickly added more stress to an already over-stressed situation. He’d heard of fisherman plucked from arctic waters who had thanked their rescuers, were wrapped up in blankets and urged inside for a cup of tea, only to drop dead, one by one, from reheating too quickly.

  When he got Jess into the Range Rover, he’d done his best to warm her gently, pressing her chest, pumping her heart to get blood into her brain, breathing new, warm air into her lungs. But the extreme hypothermia brought with it the risk of afterdrop, the difference in temperature between the core and extremities shocking the heart back into fibrillation. She had a weak pulse, but at least, thank God, her heart had started again.

  She was young. She was strong. And now, gently, gently, was how he needed to bring her back to life. But how long had she been dead?


  Maybe her body was limping back toward living, but was there brain damage? She might never awaken. Her skin was still cold to touch, her lips purplish-blue, but some color had returned to her waxen face.

  “Bring me another blanket.”

  Raffa pocketed his knife and fetched a pile from next to the truck. He’d said nothing since Rita disappeared, but Giovanni noticed him glance over at Leone every so often, and flinch each time he did.

  They moved Jess another two feet closer to the fire, swinging her around to warm her other side. Roger had already managed to spit out the rag stuffed in his mouth.

  “Who were those men in the Volkswagen?” Giovanni asked him again, grunting as he put the head of Jess’s stretcher down. It was still painful for him to lift anything, and he wasn’t getting stronger as he healed from his own injuries. If anything, in this cold, with the constant dehydration and strain, the lack of food and sleep, he was getting weaker.

  “You idiot. I was protecting you from them, and from those bitches, Elsa and Rita. They would have killed you in your sleep.”

  Old Leone had never stopped watching them, Giovanni thought. Invisible beneath his pile of sodden blankets next to the fire, the old man hacked up a phlegmy cough. He and Jess formed a vee around the crackling embers. The old man never trusted anyone except Jessica, Giovanni realized, and he should have trusted his instincts.

  Raffa sat cross-legged next to Leone, anguish creasing his face. He whispered soft questions, asking if he wanted water, something to eat. No, no, was always the answer.

  “You want answers, ask Massarra,” Roger continued. “Tie her up, stick knives in her. Those men didn't capture her. She wasn’t with us. She’s lying. Ask her what she’s doing here.” He spat blood-speckled sputum onto the concrete.

  Giovanni held a hand to Jess’s cheek. She felt warm now, warmed by the fire, her breathing more regular. He wanted to get some fluids into her. “Is that true, Massarra?”

  She hung back at the edge of the hangar, beside the dead man she’d dragged in. She still had her rifle in hand. “Mr. Roger was not captured by those men, that much I can tell you.”

  “I was!” Bloody spittle sprayed from Roger’s mouth.

  “Not what I saw, not back at the castle. And I watch for a long time.”

  “She admits it! She was spying on us!” Roger strained against his ropes. The tendons in his necked flared, his face mottled red.

  “But I, Mr. Roger, am not the spy,” she replied in a cool voice. She sat on her haunches, balanced on the balls of her feet, balanced by holding her rifle upright against the floor in front of her. Giovanni hadn’t tried to take it from her, and she hadn’t offered it up.

  “How did they know about the bag, Roger?” Giovanni stroked Jess’s hair, then felt the pulse on her neck again.

  “I told them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I needed some reason that they shouldn’t kill me. When I went outside with Jess’s father, I was thrown down the mountain in an explosion. That man, Salman, found me. Nico had called him, asked him for help. Told him how much gold you had.”

  “Then why didn’t they come for the gold?”

  “They wanted to kill all of you. I told them there was something much more important.”

  “And why, exactly, would that be more important than gold?”

  “That data…” Roger’s voice faded.

  “You’re telling me some goomba thinks a bag of CDs is worth more than gold?”

  “He can sell it, that’s what I told him.”

  “To who exactly—”

  “Tie her up,” said a small, weak voice.

  Giovanni turned from glaring at Roger. His eyes and mouth opened. “Jessica! My God.” He dropped to his knees and held her head gently in his hands. “Do you know who I am?”

  She took a moment and breathed as deep as she could. Her chest rattled and she coughed. “Baron Giovanni Ruspoli.”

  “Where are you? Do you know?”

  “In hell, as far as I can tell,” she wheezed.

  Giovanni half-giggled, half-sobbed. “How do you feel?”

  “That’s a stupid question. Get me water.” She raised a shaking hand and pointed at Massarra. “And tie her up.”

  Massarra stood and shouldered her rifle, but she didn’t budge and didn’t move away. In fact, a smile flitted across her lips, seeing Jess awake.

  “She saved us, both of us.”

  “Do you have it?”

  He held Jess’s gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot; angry veins swollen red around her blue irises. He shook his head.

  She didn’t reply, but her chest hitched, a spasm that ended in coughing fit.

  “Jess, Roger gave it to them. He was with them, the men that chased you.”

  “I told you,” Roger gurgled. “I was trying to save—”

  “You were not helping anyone but yourself!”

  “Please, tie me up.” Massarra stood over Giovanni and Jess. She’d put her rifle on the floor. “If that is what Jessica wishes.”

  Giovanni shook his head. “You keep watch, help Lucca.”

  “She’s not who—” Jess coughed.

  “We need her right now.”

  Massarra offered a tiny bow and retrieved her rifle. She walked to the front of the hangar.

  “Are you kidding me? You have me tied up, and you’re giving her a gun?” Roger squirmed against his ropes. The wing above him had a gaping hole in it from one of Rita’s shotgun blasts. “Jess, how long have I known you? You know me.”

  “No, no, no!” Raffa’s voice rose in a crescendo. He held Leone’s head in his arms.

  “What is it?” But Giovanni knew from the way Raffa’s eyes grew wide in sad fear.

  “He is not breathing,” Raffa sobbed.

  The teenager buried his face in Leone’s chest, holding Hector together with him. Lucca skidded across the smooth concrete on his knees, already having sprinted from the hangar door. He wrapped his arms around his brother and the body of the old man. Their bodies rocked back and forth, punctuated by sobs. From the hangar door, Massarra watched them, her face pinched. She returned to staring into the darkness outside.

  Giovanni shifted on his knees toward the mass of bloody blankets. He put a hand to Leone’s neck. No pulse. There wasn’t anything he could do. The old man had lost too much blood.

  With a groan, Jess propped herself up on one elbow and looked at Roger. “Any reasons these people have for keeping you alive are dwindling fast. And I don’t know you. Now tell us everything.”

  The trapped man’s eyes darted back and forth, from Massarra, to the heaving, sobbing mass of the boys and Leone, to the snarl of Giovanni. “They knew about Nomad.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. They just called it The Organization.”

  “The organiza…what do you mean, they knew about Nomad?”

  “I mean for years.”

  “Years?”

  “Decades. They knew it was coming.”

  Giovanni stood, his hands balled. “Who? The American government? They knew about Nomad but didn’t tell anyone?”

  A wet laugh percolated up from Roger’s chest, small hiccups that turned to sobs while he smiled and leered. “All those conspiracy nuts telling you about government cover ups? That the end of the world was coming? They were right. The Organization stamped out the louder ones, but the wingnuts they let sing. They had a lot of time to prepare.”

  “And you worked for them?” Jess held onto Giovanni’s leg and propped herself up higher.

  The traitor scoffed. “Stupid question. We don’t have much time. They’ll be coming back. You need to untie me.”

  “How long did you work for them?”

  “Maybe three years. They recruited me at the university. My dad was naval intel, remember?”

  “You said you hated your father.”

  “I did. I do.”

  “So us, you and me, that was all…” Jess’s voice grew thin.


  “That was real, Jess. I didn’t mean to—”

  “You’re disgusting,” Jess spat. Her body trembled. “So you were spying on my father? Why?”

  His chin fell into his chest, the laughs subsiding into sobs. “I’m no professional. They just told me to watch him, to get close to him.”

  “And you knew all along about Nomad? And didn’t tell us?”

  “I didn’t know. Not back then. It was all need to know, and they didn’t think I needed to. I thought I was doing my patriotic duty. I thought they were CIA. I found out different at Darmstadt. It was a shock to me, too.” He fixed Jessica with the intensity of his gaze. “Those men, they’ll be back soon. We need to get out of here.”

  “Who did you speak to in Darmstadt? Who was your contact?”

  “I had a handler. Head of security called Maxim. That’s all I know.”

  “And why did you leave Darmstadt?”

  “Your father had come to find you.”

  “And you wanted to go with him? If they knew about Nomad, they must have had somewhere safe to go.”

  The beaten man nodded. He broke off his stare. “Please, Jess, untie me.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Where did they go?” Jess’s voice intensified. Then she bellowed. Roared. Her father was dead. He had discovered Nomad, but they hid the secret from him.

  Why? To blame it on him, while they hid like cowards, even as he sacrificed his life to try and save what was left of humanity.

  “They gave me a beacon,” Roger said, his voice barely a whisper. “When I left Darmstadt, my handler gave me a beacon that I could activate to get rescued. They told me to watch your father, to find out what data he had. They told me to find you.”

  Giovanni looked at him incredulously. “Rescued to where, exactly?”

  The beaten man hesitated but relented. “There are three or more of them, and they’re big, ten thousand people each. One in central Europe, one in America, one in China, and others I don’t know where. Together, they’re called Sanctuary.”