Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  All at once, a colossal explosion rocked the night, a ball of flame lighting the sea as it burst from amidships. The Freiheit split into two separate pieces. Cassandra watched, but only long enough to see an oil slick spreading toward her, the oil on fire, about to engulf her.

  She took a deep breath and dived from the Zodiac before the flames could reach her. The five-gallon gas cans from the raft detonated as she swam below the surface. She stayed under the water and swam as far as she could, and then farther, her lungs aching, until she had to surface … but then she swam still farther before bursting to the surface to gasp for breath.

  The flames were behind her. She turned in time to see the last of the Freiheit disappearing into the depths.

  Silence and darkness returned. Treading water, she looked around but saw nothing to hang on to, no sign of the life preserver that had been almost within her grasp. She swam toward where the ship had been, hoping to find some bit of floating debris big enough to support her. She was, by her best estimate, about a hundred miles from land.

  It also occurred to her, as she stilled her thoughts and breathed deeply beneath the Mediterranean night sky and had time to thoroughly assess the situation, that there was also a great white shark somewhere in the vicinity.

  What would Tommy do? she thought, and immediately knew the answer. He would pray.

  “Lord,” she said out loud, “I hope you don’t mind if I go off the script. Usually I have people writing things for me to say, but just now I’m at a loss for words. But you’ve helped me turn my life around in so many other ways. So if you could just give me a little help here, I’ll figure out how to repay you.”

  She swam, alone in the night, in the middle of the sea. She turned 360 degrees, her eyes getting used to the deep but somehow peaceful darkness.

  Suddenly she saw something floating and swam to it. She would have been grateful for a piece of wood or a garbage bag she could inflate, but God had done her one better.

  It was one of the Jet Skis.

  35.

  December 24

  11:32 a.m. EST / 4:32 p.m. GMT

  Two hundred miles east-northeast of Moscow, outside the town of Ostashkov in the Tver administrative district, two men waited in a white 2004 Lada Laika 210S, a boxy sedan of little distinction, remarkable only for the tinted windows, an after-market addition. Down the street, a large woman wearing a heavy wool coat and a fox-fur hat pushed a collapsible shopping cart full of food, her laden breath forming clouds ahead of her as she made her way home in the cold. The two men were parked where they could keep watch on a modest dacha owned by a minor Communist party member just down the road from the Monastery of the Sign and the Cloister at Zhitnyi. One of the two men carried, in a kit inside his coat pocket, a syringe containing propofol, a powerful, fast-acting sedative that had earned the nickname “milk of amnesia” for its hypnotic properties. The other man had served in Afghanistan as a sniper during the years the Soviet Union had attempted to occupy and subdue that beleaguered country; he carried a rifle loaded with a tranquilizer dart containing the same sedative, at a dosage strong enough to stop a charging grizzly bear. One of the men was in his early twenties, and the other was approaching fifty. Both men were also armed with more conventional weapons.

  In that area of the Tver Oblast, Lakes Sterzh, Vselug, Peno, and Volga all drained into the Upper Volga Reservoir, above a dam built in 1843. The water contained pike, perch, and a bronze-colored species of bream unique to the region, making the town of Ostashkov a popular summer vacation spot. But now it was winter, and the Lada’s heater was not enough to counter the temperature outside the car, a brisk nineteen degrees below zero. On a hill behind them, the two men in the car noted a squat concrete bunker, left over from the Second World War, and beside it a plaque commemorating the men who’d died fighting Adolf Hitler.

  “He’s moving,” the younger man said, lowering his binoculars. The older man put the Lada in gear and followed the target, who was driving a black Volvo onto route P89, headed in the direction of the dam. The surfaces of the lakes and reservoirs in the region were frozen solid, but at the dam there was an overflow sluice where free water poured down the stone-works into the Volga, and from there to the Moscow Sea, a 125-square-mile reservoir supplying potable drinking water to the Russian capital, Moscow.

  Knowing the target’s destination, the driver of the Lada stayed well back while his partner made a phone call to an accomplice waiting up ahead to tell him the target was approaching and to be ready.

  The target, unaware he was being followed, patted the small box on the car seat next to him.

  The target was a seventeen-year-old boy.

  During the entire twelve-hour, 300-mile bus ride from Lahore, Pakistan, to Uttarkashi, a town and district of the Garhwal division of the state of Uttarakhand on the border of India and Tibet, the boy in the front seat of the bus across the aisle from the driver only let go of the bag he was carrying once. This was at the border crossing, where he explained to the customs official that the box in his bag contained the ashes of his dead pet, and that he’d made a promise to the animal, a small dog named Yoshi, that he’d bring his ashes to the headwaters of the Ganges. The customs official could not understand why anyone would make such a fuss over a filthy dog, but the boy explained that he’d been living in the United States, where people felt about their dogs the way people in India felt about their cows.

  The last two-thirds of the trip followed dirt roads that made everything in the bus rattle and shake as they climbed up into the foothills of the Himalayas. The boy saw girls carrying bales of clean laundry on the side of the road and old men driving donkeys pulling two-wheeled carts. Occasionally herds of goats or sheep blocked the road, and the driver explained that you could tell the difference because the tails of goats went up but the tails of sheep hung down, and sheep were too stupid to get out of the way of a moving vehicle. The boy might have been interested or amused if he were here as a tourist, but he was traveling to dump the contents of the box in his bag into the Bhagirathi River, which flowed out of the Gangotri Himanada, the glacier considered to be the true source of the sacred river of the Ganges, with 400 million people living in its basin.

  When the bus finally stopped in the middle of the village, in the shadow of the Varun Parvat, beneath the shade of a large sacred fig tree, the boy stepped from the bus onto a surface of frozen mud. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, making the village of sixteen thousand look cleaner than it was. The driver proclaimed loudly to the disembarking passengers that they should visit the Manikarnika Ghat, a set of steps leading down to the river where cleansing cremations were performed, named after the place where the god Shiva lost his earring while dancing.

  The boy scoffed and headed off on foot to his assigned destination, a footbridge across the Bhagirathi made from rope and planks at the western end of village, where a bend in the river carried the water northward toward National Highway 34. At an elevation of 4,436 feet above sea level, the air was thin, and he was soon out of breath. He passed the Mahidanda headquarters, where a battalion of border police was stationed. He felt his spirits rising as he approached the completion of his task.

  The boy did not notice that he was being followed by a man and a woman, both in their early forties. The two of them had boarded the bus with him in Lahore. Their mission, too, was approaching completion.

  The Rio Tietê, or River of Truth, flowed down from the mountains in southern Brazil in the state of Sao Paolo, and reached a place only fourteen miles from the sea before being turned inland again by the Serra do Mar; then it meandered to the northwest until it ran into a reservoir formed by the Souza Dias Dam at a place called Três Lagoas in Mato Grosso do Sul. From there the water flowed nearly four hundred miles to the southeast and the city of Sao Paolo, with a population over twenty million. The artificial lake behind the Souza Dias Dam contained over eight hundred cubic miles of water.

  In the parking area in front of the Ho
tel dos Gaúchos, in the center of Três Lagoas, a young man wearing only athletic shorts, running shoes, and a T-shirt—for here in the Southern Hemisphere it was approaching the dog days of summer—put a small cloth bag containing a wooden box in the basket behind the seat of his motor scooter, a Planet Blue Aprilia Sportcity 250, and headed for a place called Cachoeira de Menina, or Little Girl Falls. He’d been told he would find a small weir above the falls, with a gangway that would lead him to a place where he could pour the contents of his box into the River of Truth. He liked the sound of that, and the irony.

  Behind him, keeping a discrete distance, was a second motorcyclist, a girl with beautiful long black hair, clad as well in shorts and a T-shirt, riding a more powerful Honda CVR 450R. The girl knew exactly how beautiful she was, and also knew exactly how to use her beauty to distract men—or in this case, a boy from St. Adrian’s Academy. On the back of her motorcycle was a picnic basket containing sandwiches and chips and a thermos of ice-cold mango lemonade. Concealed beneath the sandwiches was a Glock 9 automatic pistol and a syringe loaded with propofol, as well as a pair of plastic flex-cuffs. The girl had trained from the age of six in the art of krav maga, a self-defense system taught by the Israeli Special Forces. As the child whose father was Mossad and whose mother worked for Shin Bet, and with six younger brothers, she knew how to take care of herself. She doubted she’d need to use the Glock. She doubted she’d need to use her beauty either, but she was glad she had both available. She’d been told the boy she was following might or might not be on a drug designed to stimulate adrenaline and amplify his hostility. She hoped he was because she looked forward to fighting him.

  Standing on the balcony of the Spice Beach Hotel in the town of Bukoba, Tanzania, Qwesi was glad he’d brought his purple-and-red St. Adrian’s sweatshirt with him because even though he was within a single degree of the equator, Bokuba’s elevation above sea level meant the temperature at night had been dropping into the fifties. Down the street, a Pentecostal church was celebrating Christmas; the sound of familiar carols, played on African instruments and accompanied by African drums, drifted toward him through the darkening sky. A dozen small short-haired dogs with curling tails scavenged in the street below.

  He stared across the array of thatched-palm beach umbrellas to the shape of Musira Island, the outline losing form as darkness descended on Lake Victoria. Below him, a boy who’d been fishing all afternoon for tilapia on the guano-covered rocks was finally calling it a day.

  Qwesi sat on the edge of his bed and laced up a pair of hiking boots, then headed for his rented black Land Rover, parked in the shadows behind the hotel. There were no streetlamps or floodlights, and only a few dim bulbs burned in the nearby windows, making it so dark that it was difficult to find the keyhole to insert his key. He started the vehicle and followed signs in English to route B9, passing a group of boys using sticks to drive their cows down from the grassy slopes of Mt. Kashura for the night. The high beams of the Rover illuminated groups of women with broad aluminum pans balanced on their heads and men in flannel shirts walking home, weary after a long day of work, for even the day of Christmas Eve was a workday for Christians and non-Christians alike. At a roundabout at the edge of town, three boys, none older than ten, stepped in front of the Rover and tried to sell him small plastic bags of potable drinking water. If they only knew. He’d been born in the same country as they, but when Qwesi was ten his parents, who had money and power, had already sent him abroad to study at St. Adrian’s Academy for Boys.

  It would be another thirty miles on the red dirt of the B9 to the town of Kyaka, where the Kyaka Bridge spanned the Kagera River. Qwesi had been told to look for the ruins of a church that had been destroyed by troops belonging to Idi Amin, the brutal former dictator of nearby Uganda. Qwesi’s father, one of Amin’s generals and a close advisor, had led the raid that destroyed the church. The Kagera flowed back into Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile River, which flowed north for 4,130 miles before reaching Cairo and the Mediterranean.

  The driving was rough, with potholes and ruts to maneuver around. Qwesi was careful as he drove to check in his rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t being followed. When he was five miles from Bukoba, he relaxed, knowing that in the absolute blackness of the African night he would have seen the headlights of anyone trying to follow him.

  Just to be certain, he stopped the Rover, got out, and trained a pair of night-vision goggles on the road behind him. He saw nothing moving.

  He got back in and drove, unaware of the man atop his car, dressed in black from head to toe, holding on to the roof rack, his black rubber-soled shoes wedged beneath the cross-piece to keep him from bouncing.

  Similar covert pursuits transpired in cities and towns around the world, in Shanghai and Mexico City, Sydney and Caracas, Paris and Oslo. Operatives on the ground, controlled by Ed Stanley, coordinated their efforts with aerial intelligence assets providing falcon views of their targets. At the same time there were others close at hand, representatives of the Curatoriat, who had been fighting pagans for a thousand years and were no strangers to covert activities themselves. They’d had a head start, had the same targets but different objectives, and an imperative to reach those targets first.

  In East Salem, New York, Reese Stratton-Mallins had asked Dani if he could try one more time to reach his brother by using the sensory deprivation tank in Tommy’s media room. It was the day of Christmas Eve, and he found himself unable to quiet his thoughts any other way.

  In the tank, he applied the breathing technique Tommy had taught him, a process Tommy said he used to go through before every game when he needed to focus his mind and become singular of purpose. Soon—or perhaps not soon, for there was no way to accurately gauge the passage of time—Reese found himself swimming in a sea of memories, remembering Christmases with his brother when their parents were still alive, eating delicious bread pudding and mince pie and roast goose stuffed with chestnuts, and going to church, and singing, and opening presents. He remembered attending school with Edmond, both of them smiling when the teacher said something funny, jokes nobody but the two of them got.

  Slowly he realized that what he was seeing was no longer a memory. It was happening now.

  In London, Edmond Stratton-Mallins left his flat and headed for the Underground. There he boarded a Piccadilly Line train for Heathrow Airport. At the Oxford Circus Station he saw carolers dressed in elaborate Dickensian costumes singing to raise money for charity, their music sheets illuminated by handheld candles. He saw families traveling with children to spend Christmas Eve with relatives, and people carrying large shopping bags with purchases from Harrods and Debenhams and Fenwick and Harvey Nichols. In one station, as the doors to the train opened to let on passengers, he even saw a man dressed as Santa Claus arguing loudly about devolution and the monarchy to no one in particular in a thick Scottish brogue, a drunken slur to his speech.

  At the airport he hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him to the village of Runnymede—the very place, he’d learned in elementary school, where the Magna Carta had been signed. Between Heathrow and Windsor Castle, two miles farther west, a series of reservoirs had been excavated shortly before the Second World War, including the Queen Mother, Wraysbury, Queen Mary, King George VI, and Staines Reservoirs, from which the metropolis of Greater London drew its drinking water via the Staines aqueduct. Edmond’s destination was the canal where the Thames Water and Power Company took river water to fill the reservoirs at Hythe End, above the Bell Weir Lock.

  As the A308 led along the shore of the Staines Reservoir, he saw flocks of pochard and gooseander, and recalled how his father had loved bird watching. He had tried to teach Edmond and Reese how to identify birds just by hearing their calls. Seeing the ducks only made Edmond feel sadder, but not because he missed his father—he did, but there was nothing he could do about that. No, who he missed was Reese, more intensely than he ever had missed anyone in his entire life. The two had never spent thi
s much time apart; they’d never been so far from one another, an entire ocean away. And the more Edmond thought about Reese, the less he wanted to carry out his task.

  Dr. Ghieri had talked about unity and loyalty and solidarity, and how St. Adrian’s was the world’s best hope for the future, but there was no solidarity, no loyalty, no unity greater than the bond between identical twins.

  Stepping up from the Underground at Heathrow, it occurred to Edmond that he could, if he had a mind to, use a credit card, buy a ticket to New York, and be with his brother by Christmas morning, assuming he could find him. Before, he’d known that if he disobeyed Dr. Ghieri, somebody would hurt Reese. The threat was implied, never explicit, but it was clear.

  But now he knew Reese was safe. The image of his brother inside the giant egg had become a recurring waking dream, a guarantee, almost, that Reese was beyond harm’s reach. He had the image again. Edmond had spent a lot of time in the past few days considering the things he knew Reese was feeling. Edmond thought Dr. Ghieri was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, but Reese thought the school psychologist was evil, and now Edmond wasn’t so sure. What kind of man, Reese wanted to know, would threaten to harm those who refused to obey him? What kind of man led by fear and bullying, promising to give you everything if you agreed with him, but to take away everything if you didn’t? What kind of seeker of truth refused to entertain any truths other than the ones he already knew?

  Edmond knew Reese, if he were there, he would disapprove. Turn around, he could hear him saying. Go back. You don’t know what you’re doing.

  Edmond decided to compromise. When he reached the weir at Hythe End, he’d dump the ashes into the canal, then head straight for Heathrow and catch the first flight to Kennedy, and from there he’d take a cab back to East Salem and find his brother. Somehow he’d find him, and they’d be together for Christmas morning. That was the only thing he wanted, a fact he knew with greater and greater certainty as the taxi drove past houses filled with festively decorated trees and families settling down to spend the holiday together, past churches where couples and families and single people were all entering to worship. Edmond had never understood how important it was to be with his brother. And he would be with him, soon enough.