Seven hundred miles north of Deception Island it was warmer now. Maybe in the mid-forties. She took off her hat and went to stand at the bow with the binoculars, the hard katabatic winds draining from the folds of Isla Furia’s mountains like rivers of snowmelt, whipping her hair until it tangled on the forestay. Birds were swooping and diving in a tight pile atop a patch of troubled water where baitfish schooled. She saw no boats, no houses. There were no fingers of smoke rising from the hills. In the pilothouse, she turned on the VHF radio and listened to silence on every channel.
The chart plotter showed only twenty-six miles left to go. She throttled back to 1,000 rpm and rolled in the genoa to slow the boat. She wanted to time it correctly. La Araña would be there already, but the Colonel’s men wouldn’t be able to start right away. The doctors would want Lena to have a few hours of sedated rest. They’d want her fed so she’d be able to hang on as long as they needed her. They wouldn’t want to put stress on her, on her heart. There’d be enough of that later.
* * *
She saw the mouth of the fjord just before midnight and shut off the engine. There was still wind, but the water was calm. Islands rose around her in every direction and reduced the fetch to nothing. She went to the mast and lowered the mainsail, furling it and tying it to the boom. She brought the dark blue sail cover from below and put it on so that the lowered sail wouldn’t flap in the wind and make noise. She made the turn into the fjord and then rolled in the genoa to bring Freefall the last mile on her staysail alone. She’d already turned off all the lights in the cabin. The masthead tricolor was dark, and the navigation lights were off. She switched off the chart plotter and toggled the radar screen to its night mode, throwing a chart book atop the screen so that its glow would show only if she bent to look at it.
Now it was quiet and dark.
She could only hear the water slipping past the hull, the trickle of the wake settling into the calmer sea. She took the binoculars and went to sit on the side deck while the autopilot steered Freefall up the fjord. From studying the charts, she knew the branch was coming up. She was on the far side of the mile-wide fjord, where her yacht’s silhouette would blend with the gray cliffs. She put the binoculars to her eyes and adjusted the lenses to watch the other shore.
This could all be for nothing.
If David had lied to her, if the charts were wrong, she’d have no recourse. She saw the narrow branch of the fjord where it broke away from the main channel and split up to meet a mountain valley. It was less than a quarter mile wide and only twice as long. Down at the far end, moored close to the cliffs, was La Araña. By its shadow alone, she’d recognize it on any ocean for the rest of her life. Next to the old crab boat was a propeller-driven float plane. Neither of them was lit, but when she searched up the slope, she saw the glow of lantern light in the windows of a small cabin. And as she breathed in, she could smell the wood smoke that was drifting down the fjord on the cold mountain breeze.
Please God, she thought, let me make a stand here. Please, that I am not too late.
Rather than turn down the branch toward La Araña, she let the autopilot continue to steer up the fjord. She went up to the bow and quietly prepped the anchor, shackling the chain to the anchor’s shank. When she was done, she went back to the helm and switched off the autopilot. The Colonel’s branch of the fjord was out of sight now. She steered to cross the main body of the channel, knowing from the charts there was a cirque in the cliffs up ahead, a quiet roundabout in which to anchor Freefall, beyond the cabin’s line of sight.
She furled the staysail and let the boat drift into the wind for the last three hundred feet of its journey. When it came to a stop, she was already at the bow, lowering the anchor into the water, paying out the chain by hand so that it did not bang against the deck or make a splash in the water. She felt the anchor bite the bottom and dig in. By the feel of it when she pulled on the chain, the bottom was loose gravel and scree from the cliffs. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone from Freefall. It could be ten minutes. It could be forever. She hoped the anchor would hold as long as she needed it. She shackled the chain and then went below.
When she’d changed into a pair of black jeans and a black fleece jacket, she knelt next to Dean and uncovered his face.
She kissed him, and then she whispered in his ear. She told him all the things she wished she’d said every day of their last year, the things she should have been saying whenever she woke next to him or fell asleep at his side. That she needed him. That he had showed her the way and she would always follow it now. Whether he was here or not, he could count on it.
She kissed him once more and covered his face with the blankets.
Then she went to the galley and took David’s gun from the drawer. She’d discovered if she cocked it so that a bullet was in the firing chamber, she could pull the magazine and load another round to carry eleven shots. Still, she took a handful of the bullets and put them in one of her jacket pockets, and then she put the cocked pistol in the other.
She went up to the pilothouse and untied the flensing knife.
It was fifteen minutes till 1 a.m., and the sun was already painting the northern sky a glowing shade of purple. She looked at her yacht one last time, this home Dean had built, and then went to the stern and hit the button to lower the transom. It swung down like the tailgate of a pickup truck on hydraulic struts. When it was down, the transom became a swim platform, inches above the water’s surface. She stepped to it and crouched, turning to see into the dinghy garage. Their little Zodiac was sitting on rollers, waiting to slide out. The outboard was attached and ready to go, but she wouldn’t use it going ashore.
There were oars. Rowing would be quietest.
Kelly knelt in a copse of southern beech trees and looked at the cabin. She was a hundred feet from it and off to the side. There were no windows in the back or along the sides, and from her hiding place she could not see through the windows facing the small front porch. But there was a glow of light from the windows, and by it she could see the man sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette.
It was the man who’d strung Dean from the rafters: Scarface.
He was sitting on the thick boards of the porch, his feet in the tufted grass that grew in patches around the cabin. A dozen yards from him, on level ground, were three gasoline-driven generators. Big portable generators, five or six kilowatts apiece. They were all running in a loud din of smoke and half-muffled combustion. Thick yellow cords uncoiled from each generator, up the porch steps and into the cabin. Tanks of gasoline were stacked in rows nearby.
They’d brought the generators to run the machines they’d need for Lena and the Colonel. There was no other electricity here. But the generators would serve Kelly, too: they were so loud, Scarface would never hear her coming.
She checked that her jacket pockets were zipped so that the bullets and gun wouldn’t fly out. The flensing knife was in both of her hands, its curved blade rising past her right shoulder. In the last hours of her sail, she’d taken Dean’s whetstone and used it to hone the knife’s century-old blade. Now the carbon steel shone like a dirty mirror along the cutting edge where she’d ground and tapered it with the stone. This was a crude instrument, good for only the most basic operations. It would be fine for what she had in mind.
There was no pretense, no hiding. She simply stepped out of the trees and walked up to the man from his right side, the flensing knife cocked in her arms like a scythe. He’d brought the cigarette to his lips and was drawing on it, his eyes watching the glowing ember as it brightened and burned closer to his fingers. When he looked up, she was standing in front of him. She waited only for his eyes to widen in recognition, because she wanted him to have her face in his mind at the last.
But she gave him no time to stand or cry out.
She swung the flensing knife over her right shoulder and down. The man tried to fend off the blow with his left hand, raising it palm out in shock. The blade sliced easily thro
ugh all five of his fingers and then went diagonally into his flesh where his neck met his shoulder. It went deep, nicking past his clavicle and catching in his spine somewhere just north of his heart.
She leaned back on the handle, rocking the knife in his flesh the way a woodsman rocks an ax to draw the blade free of green wood. The first cut would have been enough to end this man. But Kelly wanted more than that. She wanted satisfaction. The first cut had been out of necessity; the second was for Dean. She brought the blade back and swung it horizontally from her hip, catching the man below his left earlobe even as he was falling back. She followed through, like swinging at an easy softball pitch, and she got all of it. The full force of the swing ended with the flensing knife resting over her left shoulder, while the man’s head rolled down the porch. The head came to a rest on its scarred cheek, open eyes facing Kelly.
She hoped he could see her.
Kelly leaned the flensing knife against the rail and unzipped her pocket. She stepped past the rest of the dead man and went across the porch to the door. She stood quietly and listened but couldn’t hear anything over the steady roar of the generators. Finally she took the rusty doorknob in her hand and turned it, stepping into the cabin behind the pointing barrel of David’s gun.
She’d known what was happening, known what Lena was to these men and why they’d kept her heart beating when they’d killed everyone else they met. But she was unprepared for what she saw when she stepped into the cabin. She’d been so sure that she wasn’t too late, that the storm had taken Dean but had delivered her to Chile in time for Lena, that God had dealt her a hard trade but not an outright loss.
She hadn’t been ready to fail.
The cabin had been cleared entirely of furniture to make room for the operating theater. The men had hung plastic sheeting in a rectangle from the ceiling, sealing the seams with duct tape to make a clean room in the center of the cabin. The sheets were translucent. Through them, Kelly could see the shadowed forms of three people working above a gurney. The plastic nearest her was speckled with blood on the inside. A fine, undulating red mist of it. Sometimes an oscillating sternotomy saw would throw out blood like that if its blade was still running when it was lifted from a patient.
None of the figures inside the plastic room looked up at her.
They were murmuring softly in English. There were low, steady beeps. EKGs and ventilators, she thought. Kelly circled the perimeter of the plastic box, looking for the way in. The plastic sheets bulged out, tight with internal air pressure. She could see the outlines of the compressed air tanks they were using inside to maintain a pressure differential for sterility. There was an antechamber of draped plastic built off the theater’s side, a Velcro strip running down the middle of its entry point. It was their makeshift air lock.
She opened the Velcro with the gun’s barrel and stepped into the lock, closing it behind her. Then she opened the second sheet in front of her and entered the operating room. The yellow cords ran across the floor to power strips. Machines were plugged into them. Old equipment, the kind you could get on the cheap from medical clearing houses. Two heart-lung machines, a roller pump. A pair of FLOW-i anesthesia machines. There was another thing near the surgeons she didn’t recognize, but she guessed it was an antique cardiopulmonary bypass machine. Its cannulation tubes were coiled in waiting on a rolling Mayo table nearby.
Big halogen lights hung overhead and lit the space with a hot, white glare. The air smelled sharply of antiseptic and bleach.
The three men, dressed in blue scrubs and wearing masks and goggles, never looked up. Two of them were huddled over the gurney, looking down. The anesthesiologist was behind a drape of blue cloth at his machine, watching the LCD monitors. The surgeon and his assistant had lights clipped to their eyewear, magnifying loupes hanging from their plastic visors. There was a wheeled tray with instruments, a tissue table with its bloody bowls and used blades. She saw the electric sternotomy saw, its blade red with clotted blood. Scalpels, retractors.
Another piece of plastic divided the room down the middle, and she leaned to look into that half of the operating theater.
It was empty except for a gurney with an old man on it, surrounded by blinking equipment. The Colonel was naked and covered with a blue sheet from the waist down. They’d already drawn the incision marks on his chest with a purple marker. He was hooked to a saline drip and was on a ventilator. His eyes were closed.
She turned back to the men, who were still bent at their work.
“Get the fuck away from her,” Kelly said.
The surgeon looked up first.
“Who the hell are—”
“I said get the fuck away from her!” Kelly shouted. She pointed the gun at them, and they all seemed to notice it for the first time.
The surgeon held up his hands. His blue latex gloves were stained red at the fingertips. He was holding a tiny-bladed scalpel and a disposable plastic hemostat.
“We’re right in the middle—”
“I don’t give a shit what you used to be doing. Step away from her. Now.”
She gestured with the gun as she stepped deeper into the operating theater. The surgeon and his assistant came out first. The anesthesiologist followed. They stood with their backs to the plastic and their hands in the air. Kelly kept the gun aimed at the surgeon but stole a quick look at Lena.
She was strapped to the gurney with thick tie-downs. Her face beneath the clear latex respirator mask was the color of trampled snow. They’d opened her chest with a saw and had used stainless steel retractors to spread her split sternum into a bloody opening five inches wide. She’d been a vessel for them, carrying in her chest the thing the Colonel needed most. And they’d cracked her open to take it.
“Goddamn you,” Kelly whispered.
She was looking the surgeon in the eye. He didn’t understand what was about to happen. He had Lena’s blood dripping off his fingers, untraceable millions in some Swiss account to pay for what he’d done. Some of it was probably Kelly’s money, taken by David after he’d tortured Dean aboard La Araña. But he still didn’t see this coming. Kelly stepped forward two paces and shot him twice in the face. She shot the assistant in the chest before the surgeon even hit the ground, and then she had the anesthesiologist in her sights. The pistol barrel wasn’t shaking at all.
The anesthesiologist was frozen, his hands in the air.
He looked from the dead men on the floor back up to Kelly. His lips were trembling and he was trying to say something, but his terror kept him mute.
“You’re part of this, too. You didn’t cut on her, but you put her under. You made it happen. And you can burn in fucking hell.”
She shot him in the throat, and he tore through the plastic sheeting and landed on the floor of the cabin. He turned on his stomach and crawled three feet toward the woodstove in the corner and then fell still. Kelly looked at the other two men on the floor. The surgeon’s face was a caved-in wreck, but he was still breathing. His fingers twitched against the floor planks. One of the bullets had split his chin so that his lower jaw hung in two toothless halves. The other bullet had turned his nose inside out and left it spattered on the plastic sheeting.
Either he’d bleed to death or he’d drown in his blood, but he wasn’t getting up again. She wasn’t going to give him a third bullet.
Kelly dropped the pistol and then fell to her knees.
She closed her eyes and listened to the ringing from the gun blasts. When that bled away, she could dimly hear the fire spit and crackle in the corner. The only other sounds were the slow, steady beep of the EKG and the hiss of sterile air from the tanks. The generators were a distant hum. She was dizzy, her head turning like a spindle, each chime of the EKG like the tone of an elevator car marking the floors as it shuttled her down a long shaft to a place of utter darkness.
But she snapped her eyes open and looked up when she realized something. The old man, the Colonel, was prepped for the transplant, but his chest was
completely bare. There were no EKG leads on him yet. The beeping was coming from the machine hooked to Lena. The quiet, small tone was a register of her heart.
It was still beating.
There was a scrubbing station in the corner of the surgical room. Hot water in Igloo coolers, soap in plastic bottles. Three sets of spare scrubs hung from a stand. The men would have cleaned and changed into fresh surgical clothes after the bloody work of harvesting Lena’s heart. She’d taken a visor and eyewear from the floor, and she found latex gloves and a face mask. There was nothing she could do about the breach in the plastic sheeting. She’d just shot three men within a few paces of an open patient, and there was nothing she could do about that, either.
When she was clean and ready, she stepped to the side of Lena’s gurney and assessed the entry. They had split her sternum down the middle with the sternotomy saw, pulled her chest open with self-retaining surgical retractors, and exposed her heart. They’d been examining it when she came in. Now she leaned close and looked, lightly pulling back Lena’s ribs with her gloved finger to expose everything.
They hadn’t cut through the pericardial sac yet, hadn’t cut her heart from her body or poured ice into her chest cavity to keep their prize cold. They hadn’t performed a cannulation either, so Lena’s heart was still pumping her blood. It was beating once a second, each contraction a double pulse of atrial and ventricular systoles. Her heart was strong and red and healthy. Of course the Colonel had wanted it.
But there’d been no plan to put Lena back together after this theft. The tools for that repair had been on the other side of the operating theater, next to the Colonel. She’d wheeled that tray to Lena’s side before scrubbing in, knowing she would need everything they had prepped for the Colonel. The absorbing sutures, the surgical stapler, the thin titanium plates and six-millimeter screws for bolting Lena’s sternum back together.
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