by Lis Wiehl
She was startled by a knock on the door.
“Hallo?” he called out. “Ist jemand da drin?”
She held her breath.
“Hallo?” he said, knocking firmly on the door. “Bitte—ist jemand da drin?”
“Lass uns in ruhe! Es ist unhöflich uns zu stören!” Henry said.
“Entschuldige. Vergisst mir, bitte.”
She heard the door shut and opened the bathroom door. The stateroom was empty. She returned to the sun deck, closing the sliding glass door behind her.
“What did he say?”
“He asked if anyone was in the bathroom.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him he was rude to interrupt us and that he should leave us alone immediately.”
“I didn’t know you spoke German.”
“I’m fluent in many languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Russian, Czech, Serbian, Norwegian—”
“Yeah, good, I get it,” she said. “You saved me. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Is there anything else you need?”
She took a sip from her iced tea and rearranged herself on the chair, trying to look casual, comfortable, though inside, her heart was pounding.
“A plan would be nice.”
30.
December 23
4:32 p.m. EST
“Just make sure we have enough flashlights,” Reese said.
“Don’t worry about flashlights,” Tommy said. “I’ve got that covered.”
He’d loaded the Helios 9000 onto the Grizzly’s front cargo rack, along with the shotgun and a box of shells. The afternoon drizzle had turned into a steady rain that left the ground saturated and muddy.
“It’ll be dark in half an hour,” he said. “Let’s go before those things won’t let us out.”
But he was upset because of a dispute—or maybe he should call it what it was, a fight—that he’d had with Dani, again, over whether or not Reese should come with him. She understood the urgency of the situation. She knew what the stakes were. There were FBI agents searching for the body—and the killer—of St. Adrian’s headmaster John Adams Wharton, and Casey wouldn’t be able to intervene if they put together enough evidence to arrest Tommy. Tommy knew he might not have another opportunity. They needed the names of the boys who’d been selected. They needed to know where they’d gone, and they needed to stop them. They’d made very little progress so far. The names would be in Ghieri’s computer, and Reese knew the way to reach it without being detected. He knew where the tunnel adit was, and he knew which turns to take. They had one chance.
Dani had argued that Reese was only a boy. She argued that she and Tommy had been called or chosen, but Reese hadn’t. He’d come seeking sanctuary, and they’d promised to give it to him. He was only seventeen, she said. He deserved to live a long and happy life. Tommy knew he’d argued poorly when he replied that no one was going to live a long and happy life if they didn’t get those names, and that Reese was old enough to make up his own mind. But Dani had seen too many child soldiers. She’d seen what fighting did to them, seen them lose their childhood all in an instant, and in many cases she’d been unable to get it back for them.
What troubled Tommy the most was that they’d failed to resolve their issues. Reese had stepped in and said he was going, in a way that indicated he didn’t want to argue about it. Dani had felt unfairly overruled and unheard.
After the FBI agent left, Tommy spent the afternoon alone in his boat on Lake Atticus, getting the water samples that Quinn had asked for. The recent unseasonably warm weather had melted the thin ice, leaving open water that was clear and cold. As Tommy worked, he thought of Dani and what he needed to say to her. There was no time to put the boat back on the trailer, so he left it docked at the Gardener Farm and drove home, hoping they’d have enough time to talk.
But they didn’t. He and Reese needed to leave as soon as it was dark, and darkness was upon them. Dani stayed in the house rather than come out to wish them well.
It worried him, but he told himself there would be time later to straighten things out.
He headed north from the end of his driveway, then turned onto a bridle trail to circle back. There wasn’t a path, trail, or back road that Tommy hadn’t either run or cross-country skied, and he’d played in these woods as a boy. All the same, it took them longer than he’d hoped to locate the entrance to the tunnel that Reese had used to escape the school.
It was on a steep hillside high above a stream, and Tommy had to park the ATV a quarter mile from the entrance and search for it on foot using only his NVGs to find the trail. “I know it’s here somewhere,” Reese kept saying.
The stream carried the overflow from the dam that formed Lake Atticus, but during the Revolutionary War, before the dam was built, the stream would have been a logical escape route for spies or scouts.
At a place where the path led close to the edge of the stream, they came across the carcass of a deer. Tommy didn’t dare turn his flashlight on but covered the lens with his fingers to briefly shine light on the scene before turning it off again.
“Coyotes?” Reese asked.
“Coyotes would have eaten the meat,” Tommy said. “Whatever did this appears to have been amusing itself.”
The footing was treacherous, and Tommy’s boots kept slipping in the mud. The opening was covered by a tangle of vines and would have been impossible to see in the summer when the vines held foliage. Tommy set the spotlight down inside the tunnel entrance and took only a handheld flashlight into the tunnel, the shotgun under his arm, his pockets filled with extra ammunition.
“How did you ever find this place?” he asked as they made their way down the tunnel, occasionally having to duck beneath thick tree roots penetrating from above and sagging wooden beams used to brace the ceiling. The walls and ceiling were lined with brick that was for the most part intact, crumbling occasionally where the mortar had given way.
“Soap bubbles,” Reese said. “An older boy told us about the heating tunnels, but Edmond wanted to know where the air went. So we brought some soap bubbles down and followed them where they drifted.”
“That’s good thinking,” Tommy said.
“My brother is very clever,” Reese said. “I’m a bit more bookish.”
By the light of the flashlight, Tommy noted the concern on Reese’s face. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get him back. If Dani says she can do it, she can do it.”
They came to a place where the tunnel split into a Y.
“This way,” Reese said, pointing to an arrow on the wall written in chalk. “I marked the way back, in case I got lost.”
“That’s good thinking too,” Tommy said. “For someone who’s bookish.”
They passed a section of the tunnel where several names were scratched into the brick—one said Solomon Brooke, 1779—before arriving at what seemed to be a dead end, the way forward obstructed by a wall of wooden crates and cardboard boxes. Reese showed Tommy where he and his brother had moved the boxes to make a narrow passage that required them to turn sideways.
On the other side of the constriction, the walls were made of a more modern concrete, with water and sewage pipes and ventilation ducts lining the ceiling, and electrical conduits and junction boxes on the walls. Reese told Tommy to turn left. Now they came to intersections and side tunnels leading to various buildings.
“Turn right,” Reese said at a crossroads. “Do you see why I had to come with you? You would have gotten lost.”
At the next three-way intersection, Reese showed Tommy the tunnel leading to the art building, a second leading to Honors House, and a third to the administration building. Tommy paused, briefly wishing he had some sort of explosives with him to at least blow up the art museum and that hideous painting, if not Honors House too. He let Reese guide him to the administration building, where the boy paused again. Down one hall that dead-ended abruptly at s
olid stone, he saw a pair of wrought-iron candle sconces bracketing a windowless wooden door.
“What’s down there?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t know,” Reese said.
“Did Edmond ever come down here by himself?”
“It’s just an impression,” Reese said. “I think maybe he was here once.”
A door opened into a custodian’s supply room. Tommy used his infrared scanner. As far as he could tell, they were alone.
A hallway and a set of stairs later, they emerged on the first floor where the library wing met the main building. Tommy scanned again. Nothing. He knew the way to Ghieri’s office because it was where Dani and Detective Casey had met with Amos Kasden. The place had made his skin crawl, a sensation of ants on the back of his neck.
“No one seems to be expecting us,” Reese said, following close behind Tommy.
“That’s what I was telling Dani,” Tommy said. “They’re not worried because they know you’d have to be crazy to do what we’re doing. Crazy or just really stupid.”
“Which one are we?”
“Does it matter?”
“Guess not.”
The door to the waiting room was unlocked. The door to Ghieri’s inner office was ajar, and the lights were on, as was the computer, Tommy saw. He held up a hand to stop Reese, on the chance that Ghieri was in his office. He listened.
Not a sound.
The office was empty.
“We should hurry,” Tommy said, seating himself in front of the computer. “What was the name of the file you found before?”
“I don’t remember,” Reese said.
“What were the other names you came up with? You saw four faces you recognized.”
Reese told him the names. Tommy searched for any files containing all five names, including Edmond’s. There was only one, labeled Holiday Travelers.
He opened it.
“Bingo,” he said. He read twenty-one names. Next to the name Edmond Stratton-Mallins, he saw an address on Lowndes Street.
“Do you know that address?” he asked Reese. “Is that where Edmond is staying?”
“I know where it is. It’s in Belgravia. Part of London. But I’ve never seen that address,” Reese said.
“Nobody named Marko,” Tommy said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“If we don’t know where he is, that’s bad,” Reese said. “Everybody I knew was afraid of him. Guys I was afraid of were afraid of him.”
Tommy plugged a thumb drive into a USB port and copied the file to it, removed the drive, and put it in his pocket. He paused.
“What?”
“Maybe I should just crash the hard drive,” he said. “While we have the chance.”
“They’ll know we were here,” Reese said. “They might change the date of the attack. Which could mean moving it up. And we might not be able to get out with that list.”
“You’re three for three,” Tommy said, restoring the computer to its previous screen. “Let’s go.”
He left everything exactly the way it was, and then the two moved back down the hall, past the library, and down the stairs to the custodian’s room, then down another flight of stairs to the service tunnels. Tommy stopped again.
“What is it?” Reese asked, but Tommy was already headed down the side tunnel to the door he’d seen earlier, the one with wrought-iron candle sconces on either side.
“I just want to see what’s in here,” he said. “When are we going to get another chance?”
The heavy door opened inward. He turned on his flashlight. He saw, on the walls, a large mural of scenes taken from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. In the center of the room he saw an altar, carved from a large piece of black marble in the shape of a bull.
“They must have brought it with them,” he said. “Pergamon’s Altar. Revelation chapter 2, if I’m not mistaken. They brought it with them when they fled England.”
He circled the altar but didn’t touch it. There appeared to be drains in the floor at the base of it.
“What are those for?” Reese asked.
“Blood?” Tommy said. “Just a guess. I’m not exactly up on my human sacrifice rituals.”
In the floor on the far side of the altar he found a trapdoor, a wooden square three feet across with a large iron ring in the middle.
“What do you suppose is down there?” he asked.
“Do we need to know?”
“I need to know,” Tommy said.
He opened the door and shone his flashlight into what appeared to be a deep black hole. At the bottom of the hole, he saw a pair of glowing red eyes. Then another. And then a dozen more.
“No I don’t!” he said. “Run!”
They bolted from the room just as one of the things leapt from the hole in the floor. In the hallway, Tommy pulled down a storage rack behind him as they fled. He was faster than Reese, but Reese led because he knew the way and Tommy didn’t. Tommy turned and fired the shotgun behind him twice, striking the closest beast in the head at point-blank range and splattering the wall with a reddish-gray goo.
More kept coming. Tommy fired again, unable to count how many of the things were chasing them as he followed Reese down the tunnel.
When they reached the stack of boxes concealing the old escape route, Tommy fired again as he squeezed between the boxes and the wall, pulling boxes down behind him to block the way, Reese helping. Tommy paused to reload.
“Go!” he shouted. “It’s not going to hold them for long.”
Tommy shone his flashlight behind him and backed down the tunnel as fast as he could. At the end of the tunnel, he grabbed the Helios 9000 and hit the standby button, waiting for the spotlight to power up.
“Come on, come on!” he shouted as he fired another shell and the rain poured down. Finally the standby indicator turned from red to green.
He turned the spotlight on, a storm of white light that stopped the Beasts of Gevaudan in their tracks as they shielded their eyes and howled with pain.
“Keep it on ’em,” he told Reese, handing him the heavy spotlight. Reese shouldered it and aimed it at the creatures as he backed carefully down the slope to the path at the bottom. Tommy moved upstream, toward the ATV. As long as Reese held the powerful light, the beasts stayed back. He kept one hand on Reese’s shoulder as they backed up the path and fired four more times, knocking three of the things down and wounding a fourth. He reloaded.
“The battery is running out!” Reese shouted.
“Keep moving. Just keep it on them as long as you can,” Tommy said, firing two more times, running, then firing twice more. The light seemed half as bright as it had been before, and as it dimmed, the beasts grew bolder.
“Get on!” Tommy shouted when they reached the ATV. He took the light from the boy and fired again at a beast trying to slink along the ground to his right.
Reese straddled the driver’s seat.
“Do you know how to drive one of these?”
“Not at all,” Reese said.
Tommy turned the ignition key, then pushed the starter. The engine came alive. “Those are the brakes and that’s the throttle. It’s like riding a bike.”
“I’ve never ridden a bike,” Reese said.
Tommy sat on the rear cargo rack, facing backward. “Don’t overthink it—just drive! Go!”
Reese pulled away just as one of the beasts leapt through the air. Tommy fired his last shell at it from perhaps two feet away. This time it was Tommy who got splattered with the reddish-gray goo.
The Helios 9000 was down to less than a quarter power. He picked the heavy spotlight up with one hand and flung it behind him, knocking one of the beasts over with it. He reloaded and fired the gun again as the beasts gave chase.
“Where am I going?” Reese shouted.
“Just go—you’re doing fine,” Tommy said. Soon they’d put some distance between them and their pursuers, but it wasn’t enough. Tommy looked around. They seemed to be on a br
idle path, the rain turning the path to mud and muck.
When Reese hit a rock, Tommy became momentarily airborne but grabbed the cargo rack he was sitting on to avoid falling off. He fired two more times, missing once, then hitting one of the beasts with his next shot. He reached into his right pocket for more shells. Empty. He reached into his left pocket and found six. He pushed four of them into the weapon and pumped it again.
The ATV suddenly slowed down.
“What’s the matter?” he called over his shoulder.
“Look,” Reese said.
They’d come to a dead end, the trail stopping at the base of a thirty-foot rock escarpment with swampy wetlands to the left and thick woods to the right. They couldn’t go right, left, or forward, and they certainly couldn’t go back the way they’d come.
“Get to the high ground!” Tommy said, following behind Reese and pushing him up the rock. He heard a beast approaching and turned in time to fire directly into its face, knocking it backward in a shower of gore.
At the top of the rock he pushed a shell into the breach, giving him five more shots, then flipped down his NVGs to survey the area. The woods below swarmed with shadows. A long, high fence led in both directions from the rock where they stood.
“Where are we?” Reese said. “What is this place?”
Tommy flipped up the goggles and shone his light on the fence. He knew what it was. Deer fences were about the same height, but not as sturdy. He had been to this rock before, one night in high school during a full moon, just to sit and observe.
“We dead-ended at the wolf sanctuary,” he said. “Look.”
When he shone his flashlight into the woods beyond the fence, they saw shapes moving furtively and eyes reflecting green. A pair of large wolves stepped into the light, snarling and pacing sideways. The alpha pair. On the opposite side of the rock, the Beasts of Gevaudan were slowly climbing toward them.
“I’m sorry,” Reese said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tommy said. “I’ve been in worse situations.”
“Such as?”
“I can’t think of any off the top of my head.”
“What do we do?”