Darkness

by Karen Robards

  “Hold on,” she threw at him over her shoulder. “I’m going to beach it.”

  He didn’t say anything. Instead he gripped the seat hard with both hands, one on either side of her, which she took as an acknowledgment of her words. He was so close behind her now that he was practically breathing down her neck, boxing her in with hard arms and the solid wall of his chest, but there was nothing she could do to get away from him at this point, and, anyway, she couldn’t worry about him at the moment. Bringing the boat in had to be her only concern.

  Steering as best she could given the buffeting the boat was taking from the wind and waves, she sent the boat racing toward the beach. At the last possible minute she shifted into neutral and threw the lever that lifted the motor clear of the water. Clenching her teeth, hands clamped around the wheel, she prepared herself for a hard impact as the force of the huge wave they were riding carried them the rest of the way in.

  Gina let out an involuntary cry as they hit land with a grinding jolt that threw her forward, slamming her painfully into the wheel, driving the binoculars that still hung around her neck into her breastbone. The stranger crashed into her, heavy as a sack of cement, his chest colliding with her back with the approximate force of a giant sledgehammer. Gasping as the air was driven from her lungs, Gina could only lie helplessly against the wheel with him draped on top of her as the boat scraped over the beach, slewed violently sideways, and then finally shuddered to a halt maybe six feet or so beyond the reach of the surf.

  For a moment after they stopped, Gina lay unmoving. The wind had been knocked out of her. Aching, slightly dazed, she gasped for air. After a moment, he levered himself off her. Free of his weight, she finally managed to suck in enough air to fill her lungs.

  The world instantly came back into too-sharp and unpleasant focus.

  Pushing away from the wheel, she coughed, wheezed, and coughed some more.

  “Okay?” he asked. At least he sounded minimally concerned about her well-being, which she took as a good sign. He wouldn’t care if she was hurt if he meant to hurt her himself, would he?

  Not that she intended to wait around to find out. Now that they were safely ashore, she was going to ditch him just as fast as she could. She’d saved his life, repaid a little of her karmic debt as it were, and at this point taking care of number one became the most important item on her agenda. He didn’t know it yet, but as soon as she could get off the boat they were going to go their separate ways.

  “Yes.” Gina was still taking careful breaths and trying not to wince from what felt like the severe bruising of her chest. If it hadn’t been for the cushioning properties of the life vest and her parka, she thought the impact probably would have cracked a rib. There wasn’t time to sit around assessing any possible injuries she might have suffered, however. She needed to move.

  The storm was already barreling into the bay. The breakwater rocks were no longer visible. The waves that had carried the boat in had increased in size until they were now towering walls of water thundering to shore. In the few minutes since the boat had skidded to a stop, the air around them had darkened and taken on a greenish tinge. The surf had risen to the point where frothy fingers slithered under the far side of the boat. The wind howled rather than moaned.

  Slanting lines of snow obscured her vision. What once had been flakes now felt like hundreds of icy needles hitting her skin. The temperature had dropped so that each exhalation frosted the air. She could see individual bolts of lightning as they zapped to earth inside the clouds. The pounding of the waves against the no-longer-visible breakwater boomed like cannon fire.

  What was immediately, abundantly clear was that there wasn’t going to be time to get anywhere that could actually be considered safe. They were lucky they’d made it off the water.

  Pulse racing, Gina swung her legs around on the seat, stood up, and stepped quickly past him. In the process of laboriously getting to his feet, he made no move to stop her. She could feel his gaze on her as she ripped off the binoculars and stuck them in her pocket, then shucked the life jacket and crouched by the stern to free her backpack from its hidey-hole.

  It was a big backpack, weighing in at a little over thirty pounds. A similar one had been issued to each of the scientists when they had arrived on Attu. All the expedition members were expected to take their backpacks with them whenever they left camp as a precaution against Attu’s unpredictable weather (her current situation provided clear proof of the advisability of that). The Eskimos who’d once made Attu their home had called the sudden, fierce storms that blew in without warning williwaws, which in Gina’s opinion was way too poetic a name for the violence of what was happening around them. At first she’d been skeptical of the need for so much stuff. Now she thanked God for the basic survival gear that the backpack was loaded with, including a small pop-up tent and a sleeping bag, in addition to food supplies and extra water. It should be enough to allow her to ride out the storm, provided she was able to find a spot relatively shielded from the wind where she could deploy the tent.

  “We need to find shelter,” he said as she straightened with the backpack slung over one shoulder. His voice was a harsh rasp, and he was starting to slur his words. Standing to his full height, he was, indeed, as tall and athletically built as she’d thought, and as attractive. Under other, better, conditions, she might even have been slightly bowled over by him. As she watched, he bent a little to one side, grimacing, a hand pressed to his injury. His clothes clung to him like a second skin, and she was reminded of how wet he still was, and how deathly—and deathly was the word—cold he had to be. The color of the stain had deepened and brightened so that it was now clearly red, clearly blood.

  As she looked at him, a particularly strong gust of wind hit. It caught them both, and he took a stumbling step backward before recovering. At what she calculated was about six-four and two hundred–plus pounds, he was way too big to be blown backward by the wind, especially when the same blast hadn’t moved her. He was also way too buff to be the kind of fat-cat businessman that his clothes seemed to indicate, or that she would have expected to find on a high-end private jet like the one he’d crashed in. Once again she wondered who and what he was, and could come up with nothing that she found even mildly reassuring. Ordinarily she didn’t think any wind short of hurricane force would have been enough to budge him. But his strength was clearly waning: even through the storm-created twilight and blowing snow, she could see that his eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull and his rugged features were pinched and drawn. Every bit of him that she could see that wasn’t pasty white was tinged with blue.

  He was hurt and bleeding. Possibly suffering from other injuries that didn’t show. Probably in the throes of hypothermia. Certainly traumatized by the plane crash and perhaps on the verge of collapsing, of going into shock.

  In desperate need of help.

  Her help. Because she was all the help there was.

  Gina’s lips tightened. The state he was in would have roused her utmost compassion if he hadn’t given her reason to be wary of him. But he had given her reason to be wary of him, and she wasn’t about to simply forget about that because right at this moment he needed her. She had many faults: stupid wasn’t one of them.

  So it was decided. Flinging first one leg and then the other over the side of the boat, she slid the three feet or so down the slippery rubber rolls onto the beach. The coarse sand crunched beneath her boots as she landed. Because it was (semi)dry land, she silently blessed it.

  “Hey,” he said. She didn’t know whether he meant it as a question or a protest. She didn’t care.

  “You need to get off the beach in case of a storm surge.” Turning to face him, she shrugged into her backpack. Because he stood in the center of the boat and she was now some six or seven feet away from it, she found herself yelling again to be heard over the wind whipping in from the bay. “There are abandoned structures all over the island. Finding one of those and taking shelter in
it would be your best bet.”

  Turning, she started walking quickly away, head down, back to the wind, pulling her hood up and securing it in place as she went. She needed to get well away from the beach before she pitched her tent, and there wasn’t much time.

  “Wait,” he called after her. Hunching her shoulders defensively, she lengthened her stride. Her conscience did not smite her. She was not, not, not going to even so much as look back.

  He let out a whoop, the sound high-pitched and startling. It was followed by a heavy thud.

  She looked back and got sandblasted in the face by snow mixed with sleet for her trouble. Swiping a hand across her face to get rid of the snow and then shielding her eyes as she tried to make out what had happened, she saw that he was sprawled flat on his face in the wet, grainy sand. Clearly he’d tried to get out of the boat and fallen.

  Grimacing, she looked beyond him. Black and ominous, already halfway across the bay, the bulk of the storm hurtled toward them. The wind was now strong enough to pick up small rocks and send them flying across the beach. The waves crashing against the shore and sending spray flying skyward were huge. Even as she watched, the boat was caught up by the rising tide and pulled into the surf. A receding wave whirled it away.

  He lay unmoving, inches from the surging foam.

  Indecision rooted her to the spot.

  If she left him where he was, he would die. If he didn’t get pulled into the surf like the boat and drown, the storm surge would get him. If nothing else, he’d certainly die of exposure.

  Damn it to hell.

  Muttering every curse word she knew, Gina ran back toward the stranger’s prone form.

  Chapter Seven

  Somewhere he’d read that freezing to death didn’t hurt, Cal reflected groggily. Whoever had written that was wrong. He was freezing to death as he lay facedown in the grit on that bitterly cold, storm-swept beach, and the process hurt like a mother. His skin burned as the icy blast of the wind froze his sea-soaked clothes to his body. His bones and muscles ached as if a dozen thugs armed with baseball bats had just worked him over. His head pounded unmercifully. His throat was parched and dry.

  He didn’t think he could get up. No, he was pretty sure he couldn’t get up. It didn’t help that he didn’t see much point in it. He’d gotten a good look at the desolate terrain before the boat had pitched up on it and there was no shelter from the elements in sight.

  If he did manage to get to his feet, he could stagger a few yards, even a few hundred yards, and then collapse and die.

  Seemed like a lot of effort for the same result.

  Upon discovering that his purported savior in the boat was a young woman, his first reaction had been a feeling of immense relief. He’d let go of the suspicion that she was a cog in the plan to murder Rudy and everybody who might be party to the information he had possessed, and accepted at face value his good luck at having an innocent civilian in a boat available exactly when and where he’d needed one.

  Lying there in the bottom of her boat, he’d been so exhausted, so wet and cold and nearly drowned, in so much pain and, he saw now, so close to going into shock, that it had taken him a little while to remember that his luck had never been that good.

  To remember that the world was a violent and unpredictable place where trusting anybody was a good way to wind up dead.

  The last harrowing minutes aboard the plane had underlined that for him. He’d been in the back with Rudy, in the small, private, windowless, lockable room that the plane had been outfitted with for the precise purpose of transporting individuals like Rudy who were untrustworthy and needed to be contained. Some people might have called it a cell, but no one who had ever been in a real cell would have done so: this one had four big leather chairs that reclined into beds, with basically all the comforts of a very luxurious home readily available. He and Rudy were alone. Rudy was chatty, proud of his exploits and eager to talk about them. One of the reasons Cal personally had been tapped for this job was because of his background in avionic military weapons systems, something he’d studied at the Air Force Academy. He’d been tasked with evaluating Rudy’s claims as to what had happened to Flight 155. His opinion as to the plausibility of Rudy’s story would be included in the oral briefing he would give his employer upon handing Rudy over. He’d been prepared to coax/scare/bully the details out of Rudy, but as it turned out he hadn’t had to do anything but sit there and listen. Among a whole lot of nonessential information, Rudy told him exactly what he was claiming had happened to the plane.

  “That Jorgensen guy was the target,” Rudy said. After a hearty meal (the equivalent of a TV dinner zapped in an onboard microwave) and a nap, he kicked back in a chair munching Peanut M&M’s like they guaranteed long life and happiness. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt with chinos, his dark brown hair hanging in an uneven bang across his forehead, he looked as comfortable as if he were sitting in his own living room. During the briefing he’d received before taking off for Kazakhstan, Cal had been given the NTSB report (which basically said that the plane had flown into a mountain for unknown reasons), along with a host of technical information and a dossier on the passengers and crew. On the flight to pick up Rudy, Cal had reviewed that material, and had watched a number of security videos, including one of the passengers passing through security and another of them boarding the plane. He’d done all that as part of his preparation for grilling Rudy later, because in his opinion what Rudy was suggesting had happened to that plane was all but impossible.

  Of course, whether to believe Rudy wasn’t his call to make. His job was to get the guy out of Kazakhstan and bring him back to American soil, and add his opinion to all the other opinions and the rest of the material that was being gathered.

  “Edward Thomas Jorgensen,” Cal said. He knew precisely whom Rudy was talking about. He’d read the guy’s bio, seen his picture, watched on video as he’d passed through security and boarded the plane. His first impression had been: Special Forces. Then he’d checked and been struck by the paucity of information on the man—no family listed, no employment, no military or criminal record—as well as by something indefinable in the way he carried himself. A constant alertness. An air of expecting trouble.

  Cal realized that he recognized it because he moved through the world like that himself: it took one to know one. For those reasons, Cal had flagged him as a person of interest before Rudy ever mentioned him. Not that he meant to share that, or anything else, with Rudy.

  His and Rudy’s conversation was strictly one-way.

  Cal’s internal radar pinged in response to Rudy’s assertion that Jorgensen had been the target.

  “Yeah?” Cal settled more comfortably in his chair and raised a skeptical eyebrow. He’d already learned that skepticism drove Rudy into paroxysms of revelations.

  “Jorgensen’s not his real name.” Rudy tossed a couple more Peanut M&M’s into his mouth and crunched. “Steven Carbone. Former DIA, Navy SEAL. Left the military and the US under a cloud. Something about passing secrets. Anyway, after that he did some freelance work for some bad actors. Part of the team that took out Victor Volkov—you know, that Russian billionaire who challenged Putin for the presidency a couple of years ago but got killed in a car accident before the election? Let’s just say that wasn’t no accident. There’s a top-secret investigation going on into that and other murders of Putin opponents in DC right now, and Carbone was on his way to talk to them. Hand them the smoking gun, you might say, in return for a full pardon for anything he might have done in the past. He got whacked before he could.”

  “So a whole airplane full of people was taken out to get rid of one guy.” Cal kept the note of skepticism going, although he was starting to get extremely interested in what Rudy was telling him. It meshed with certain rumors he’d heard. That Jorgensen/Carbone was formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency and a SEAL tracked, too.

  “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t know that Carbone was the target,” Rudy poi
nted out as he tossed back more M&M’s. “No one would. It’s easy to hide a murder in the middle of a terrible accident with two-hundred-some-odd victims.”

  True enough.

  Cal got down to the nitty-gritty. “Who did it, and how did they do it?”

  Rudy shrugged. “People loyal to Putin. What, I’m supposed to know their names? What I got is how. And I already told your bosses that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “They hacked the flight controls. Gained access through the plane’s entertainment system, went through a couple of firewalls, and voilà! They got control of the plane. Probably for a few minutes only, but when you’re flying over the Rocky Mountains, losing altitude for a few minutes is all it takes. Boom-pow.” The bag in his hand apparently empty, Rudy turned it upside down, shook it disconsolately, and asked, “Got any more M&M’s?”

  Cal didn’t change expression, but he was thinking furiously. What Rudy described—it sounded more doable than he’d originally thought. A modern jetliner at cruising altitude is on autopilot, which means that it practically flies itself. If there was a program that could interfere with the autopilot . . . He felt his shoulders tighten with concern. “When you tell me what I want to know. And what I want to know are specifics. Everything. How the program works, who designed it, what kind of system it needs to run on. Who’s using it. Who has access to it.”

  “It’s on the market as we speak. Anybody with the money to buy it can get access to it, what do you think? Course, that’s a short list, because a program like this is worth tens of millions to the right group. The FSB has it for sure, that’s how I found it. Also, at a guess, some factions of the Bratva.” Having clearly assumed that Cal knew that the FSB was the latter-day KGB and the Bratva was the Russian Mafia, Rudy screwed up his face in the pained expression of an expert conversing with the uninitiated as he moved on to describing the technical side. “As to how it works, it’s like a virus. All it takes is for one passenger to turn on his individual entertainment unit and it’s in the system. Then—” He broke off, frowning. “Look, it’s all on the flash drive I gave you. Steps A through Z, so simple a kid—no, that’s not right—a grandpa could follow it. It’s fucking amazing, let me tell you. I only wish I’d come up with it.” Cal got a glimpse of what looked like professional jealousy shining out of Rudy’s eyes before the other man continued, “Give it back to me, and get me a laptop, and I’ll walk you through it.”