“Come here.”
“How come?”
“I just noticed another flaw. Something’s wrong with your mouth.”
“My mouth? What’s wrong with my mouth?” They stepped toward each other. “What’s wrong with my mouth?”
“It’s making too much noise.” She stopped six inches in front of him, scrutinizing his lips. “Hey, Chip?” He raised his eyebrows but did not speak. “I know it’s against regs, but would you kiss me, please?”
A long kiss and a short mile down the road, Dawtry stopped again, this time at a switchback where an overlook offered a panoramic view of the ocean to the west and the jagged rim of the caldera to the north. More to the point, the overlook offered the first strong cell signal they’d had since fleeing the airport two hours earlier.
Dawtry scrolled quickly through his texts, voicemails, and emails. “Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news,” he told O’Malley.
“What’s the bad news?”
“Why do you want the bad news first?”
“To get it out of the way quicker,” she said. “Why do you want to use up the good news first?”
“To piss you off,” he joked. “Okay, the bad news is we’re now both considered fugitives from justice. I told you it wouldn’t take ’em long to connect the dots. We’re suspects in the disappearance of Iñigo Rodriguez, a respected Spanish astronomer.”
“A sleazebag, attempted murderer, and terrorist mastermind.”
“My guess is that ‘mastermind’ gives him more credit than he’s due. ‘Minion-mind,’ maybe.”
“Okay, minion-mind,” she acceded. “Is there other bad news?”
“So-so. The island’s ‘rumblings abdominal are clearly phenomenal.’ Actually, not phenomenal but continual.”
“How do you know that?”
“Professor Boyd is sending me updates from your seismometers. Continuing ripple shots and a couple of quakes, but nothing above magnitude three.”
“Hmm. And the good news?”
“The good news is the CIA is now trying to take the case away from the FBI.”
“How is that good news?”
“It means the CIA now considers this an urgent threat to national security.”
“Well, Tippecanoe and whoop-de-do. So the hell what? Where were they when we needed them?”
“We still need them. We need everybody. But the point is, if the CIA wants to take it, the FBI will fight tooth and nail to hang on to it. Or at least to share it. That legitimates it. People believe us now, Megan. People will help us now.”
“About damn time. And how do they propose to do this?”
“Well, first by sending us back into the fray.”
“What? Fuck that shit! Let somebody else get into the fray for a change.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “Reinforcements are on the way. And they’re figuring out how to get us out. In the meantime, though, we’re their only eyes and ears on the ground here, so we need to gather more intelligence before we go.”
“If we had a nanogram of intelligence between us, we’d already be long gone,” she said. It was a cheap, throwaway line—a low-hanging-fruit pun on “intelligence”—and they both knew she didn’t actually mean it. Still, the idea of putting themselves at higher risk was sobering. “So, as good news goes, that was some mighty weak sauce you just served up.”
“Oh, there’s much better news,” he said. “I just haven’t gotten to it yet.”
“Then lay it on me, brother, ’cause I could sure use it. Whatcha got?”
“Well, for one thing, the National Treasury of Nigeria informs me that I’m the lucky beneficiary of a six-million-dollar disbursement.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Congratulations. And there’s more good news?”
“There is, but I can’t tell you what it is.”
“Because it’s top secret?”
“No, because it’s super embarrassing. Let’s just say that the pharmaceutical industry—technically, the dietary supplement industry—is making big strides in men’s health. Huge ones. And wives everywhere are very, very grateful.”
“Wait—you have a wife?”
“Not yet. But if I did, she’d be eternally grateful to the makers of Man of Steel.”
The cell phone’s map had not lied, strictly speaking: the side road Boyd had said to take was indeed there, exactly where Boyd and the map said it would be—a small road branching off from a kink in the highway and angling along the western flank of the island’s backbone. But neither Boyd nor the cell phone map had mentioned that a stout steel gate barred access to the road. The gate wasn’t merely closed; the gate was belligerent, adorned with KEEP OUT and DANGER signs in Spanish, English, and German, along with wordless images of menacing guard dogs.
O’Malley frowned at the gate. “You’re sure this is the only way in?”
“Only way besides bushwhacking.” He handed her the phone. “Here’s the image Boyd sent. It’s the only road that follows the mountain’s flank, except for the coast highway, which is miles below this. This road heads straight to the blasting zone, according to your seismometers.”
She studied the map, zooming in and out and scrolling around on the cell phone’s screen. “Crap. I wish you were wrong.” She brightened. “But, hey, praise me.”
“Just in general, or for something specific?”
“When I told David, my ex, that the telescope was basically a giant dragon bowl? He made fun of me. But look—the seismometers show the blasting zone directly south of the observatory. Exactly in the direction the telescope pointed.”
“I praise you. I praise the dragon bowl telescope. So MacGyver-ish of you. I love it. Wanna know what I hate?”
“What do you hate?”
“I hate it that the blasting’s happening right at the center of the fault line. I hate it that these people seem to know what they’re doing, and that they’re totally getting away with it.”
“Have been getting away with it,” she said. “But all that’s about to change.”
“I like a woman with confidence.” Dawtry edged the car closer to the gate, and they got out for a closer look. His first move was to check for a surveillance camera. Seeing none, he began a detailed inspection of the gate. It appeared to be of recent vintage: gleaming and free of rust, with a motorized mechanism that could be activated by either a magnetic card or a keypad. “So,” he said, “I guess we won’t be crashing through.” Welded together from thick steel plate and square, solid bars, it looked ready, willing, and able to repel a frontal attack by a bulldozer or army tank, let alone a rusted-out, stolen Volkswagen.
“Can you hot-wire it? The way you did with the car?”
“Alas, they didn’t teach us that at the Academy.” He walked to the keypad and bent down to study the keys.
“You’re thinking maybe somebody wrote the combination in Sharpie? Let’s hope so, because it would take us forever to try every possible combination.”
“I’m looking to see which keys get pushed a lot.”
“Ah. Good idea,” she said. “I was just about to suggest that.”
“Hmm.”
“‘Hmm’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that all the keys look untouched except for three of ’em.”
“Which three?”
“The one, the nine, and the zero.”
“Hmm,” she agreed. “Interesting. Most keypads use at least a four-key combination. I’ve seen some with five or six. Seems odd to use only three different digits.”
“I hear you’re good with numbers, Dr. O. How many different combinations are there using only one, nine, and zero?”
She calculated for a moment. “Well, it’s been a while since I had stats, but I seem to remember that the number of permutations is the factorial of n plus r minus one.”
“Right,” he said. “I was just about to remind you of that. Which gives us . . . ?”
“For a four-digit combination,” she mused, “t
hat would be . . . cool—only ten different possibilities!”
He was already punching numbers. “And for a five-digit combo?”
She took a bit longer this time. “Still not bad—only twenty-one possibilities. So cumulatively, that’s a total of thirty-one possibilities. But a six-digit combo adds . . . let me think . . . another—”
She was interrupted by the whir of a motor and the clatter of latches releasing.
She gasped and clapped her hands together. “Holy crap, Chip, what was that, your second try?”
“I cannot tell a lie—I promised you I wouldn’t. My third. Three is the number, and the number is three. Please don’t think badly of me.”
“That’s amazing! How’d you do that?”
“Think like a terrorist, Megan,” he said. “If you want to deal a devastating blow to America, what prior event—what prior attack—would inspire you most?”
“World Trade Center. No question.” Her eyes widened. “Nine eleven!”
“See? Elementary, my dear Watson. My first try was nine, one-one, zero-one—the month, the day, the last two digits of the year. My second try was zero-nine, one-one, zero-one. Still no dice. Then I remembered—everybody but Americans writes the day first, not the month. So—one-one, zero-nine, zero-one. Bingo.”
“So now what? We just drive right up? Act like we’re invited?”
“Sure,” he said. “Blend in.” He waited a beat. “Actually, it’d be better to go on foot, but the blasting site is three, four miles down the road, according to Boyd’s map. Long way to hoof it, there and back. I’m hoping there’ll be someplace closer where we can hide the car. A side road, a shed we can tuck behind.”
“What if somebody comes along in another vehicle and spots us? Only one way in, one way out, right? We’re sort of trapped.”
“Only if they come in the gate behind us. If they’re coming from the blasting zone, we outrun ’em.”
“In this? Zero to sixty in a day and a half? Fred Flintstone’s footmobile has more get-up-and-go than this.”
“Sorry. Next time I’ll be sure to swipe us a Ferrari.”
“Not criticizing, just nervous.”
Dawtry pointed at the deep, wide tire tracks leading to and from the gate. “The good news is whatever’s leaving those huge tracks doesn’t have a lot of speed.”
She hoisted an eyebrow at him. “The bad news?”
“It can crush us like a bug.”
“Have I mentioned that your sunny optimism is what I love most about you?”
He hoisted both eyebrows at her. “So there are multiple things you love about me? Do tell, Professor. Count the ways!”
“Can’t,” she said. “I’m no good at numbers.”
They’d gone barely a mile when Dawtry slammed on the brakes and slithered to a halt. “What the hell is that?” He pointed to a metal tower of red and white rising above the road a few hundred yards ahead, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle.
“It’s the Eiffel Tower,” said O’Malley. “Or the leaning scaffold of Pisa.”
“It looks like a drilling rig,” he said. “I thought we were looking for blasting, not drilling.”
“Maybe it uses small explosives?”
Dawtry shook his head. “I don’t think so. Just a damn big drill bit. Besides, we’re still a long way from where the explosions are happening, right?”
“That’s true.” She shrugged, as baffled as he was.
“Let’s check it out.” He eased the car forward another hundred yards, then, finding a notch in the embankment where a pile of extra gravel had been bulldozed, he backed the car off the road. “You stay here,” he told O’Malley.
She snorted. “Like hell.” She was out of the car before he was.
He sighed and followed. “All right, but remember—we’re hunting wabbits, so be vewwy, vewwy quiet.”
In fact, they could have shouted or set off a car alarm without being heard over the racket of machinery: the bass thrum of a gargantuan diesel engine, the soprano wail of spinning gears and zinging cables, the clatter and clang of steel colliding with steel.
Dawtry pointed to the woods, and they headed up the slope a ways before turning parallel to the road. The going was easy, with the pines widely spaced and almost no underbrush.
As they drew near, the din grew deafening. Occasionally, the roar was punctuated by guttural, indistinct shouts. Soon O’Malley and Dawtry reached the edge of a clearing: an arc roughly the size of a baseball infield, the arc cutting deeply into the mountainside. As they watched from behind the last of the trees, a long section of pipe tilted upward from a horizontal stack of pipes, almost like a flagpole being hoisted toward vertical. Then it angled further, settling into some sort of slide or groove in the latticework. “If they’re drilling,” he said, “they’re drilling at an angle. Any guesses why?”
Her eyes widened. “They must be drilling down toward the base of the fault line,” she said. “Maybe they’re making a hole for more explosives? So they can start blasting here, too? Attack the fault at multiple points?”
He shrugged, then took out his phone and began snapping pictures.
O’Malley tapped his arm and pointed slightly downhill from the rig. “Get pictures of that thing, too. What is it?”
He zoomed in as tight as the lens allowed. “Looks like a giant motor. Or maybe a pump? There’s a big pipe on the downhill side. Whatever it is, I don’t like the cut of its jib.”
The wind, which had been blowing from the west, shifted direction slightly, blowing now from the north of the island, parallel to the ridge. With the wind at their backs, the noise from the drilling rig lessened slightly, and the stench of diesel fumes dissipated.
“So now what?” she asked. “We’re still miles from the blasting zone, but I don’t think we can just drive past this without being noticed, do you?”
“Not without a cloaking device.” He thought for a moment. “We could just abandon the car,” he said. “Walk to the blasting zone, then bushwhack downhill to the nearest village.”
“Then what?”
“We look for a Lamborghini to steal.”
“Ha ha.”
“Seriously, maybe it makes sense to switch cars. Leave the VW as bait, as a distraction, while we make good our escape in some old Peugeot or Ford Fiesta.”
She snorted. “Did you actually just say ‘make good our escape’?”
“What? You’d rather make lousy our escape?”
“Amaze me you do,” she said. “Okay, whatever you think. You’re the secret agent.”
“Special agent,” he corrected. “No secret there.” He pointed upslope. “I guess we gotta skirt it on the uphill side, so we don’t have to cross the road in plain sight.” He turned and began leading the way.
“Wait. Stop.”
He looked back at her. “What? You don’t like the plan after all?”
“I don’t like that. Look!” She pointed toward the drilling rig. Two immense dogs—Rottweilers, by the look of the massive square heads and stocky black-and-tan bodies—had emerged from somewhere among the sheds and vehicles. They sniffed the breeze—the damnable north breeze—and then, barking ferociously, charged directly toward O’Malley and Dawtry.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” O’Malley said. “We’re screwed!”
“Run,” he ordered. “Run for the car. Hard as you can. Wait—take this!” He thrust his phone at her. “If I’m not there in five minutes, go without me.”
“No way—I’m not going without you.”
“We don’t have time to argue, Megan. If I don’t make it, you gotta go without me. If they catch us both, there’s nobody to stop this.” She glared but took the phone. “Hit ‘Redial,’ it’ll call my boss. Tell him what happened, and send the pictures.”
“I don’t even know how to start the car!”
“Touch the end of the red wire to the end of the green wire. Once the car starts, pull ’em apart. It’s easy—even a PhD can do it.”
&nbs
p; “Don’t you fucking dare get caught.”
“Shut up and run. Fast as you can.”
They took off—hurtling headlong through the woods, stumbling and lurching over rocks and roots as fast as her sprained ankle and his bruised foot would allow—a desperate dash by the halt and the lame. O’Malley caught a toe and went sprawling, catching herself an inch before her head hit a rock. Dawtry grabbed her arm, yanked her up, and gave her a push on the back to propel her forward again. Then he turned. The dogs were closing fast, their howls coming loud and frenzied.
“Chip!”
“Run, Megan! Now! And don’t look back!”
She staggered out of the woods and slumped against the car, her breath coming in ragged gasps that quickly turned to sobs and, soon after, to retching. O’Malley had done more retching in the past three days than she’d done in the entire preceding decade. Behind her, out of sight, she heard snarling and roaring and cries of pain that might have been either human or animal, or both. “Oh God,” she whispered. “Please, God. Please.”
Hands shaking, she opened the driver’s door and leaned in, inspecting the wires Chip had tugged free of the steering column in the airport parking garage. Two of the wires were already twisted together, but two others hung free, a half inch of bare copper exposed, so she took hold of them both, one in each hand, and brought the ends together. A spark popped and the car lurched forward a foot, nearly knocking O’Malley to the ground. “Son of a bitch,” she swore. She reached over and yanked the emergency-brake lever up, then popped the gearshift into neutral. “Once more with feeling,” she muttered, then brought the wires together again.
The car fired up again, this time without the dangerous lurch, and O’Malley stared at it, mildly astonished that it had started as easily as Chip had said it would. Chip. She turned back toward the woods, which had fallen silent—ominously, terrifyingly silent. “Come on,” she said, crying. “Dammit, Chip, come on.”
But he did not come.
She checked the phone. Four minutes passed, then five. “If I’m not there in five minutes, go without me,” he’d said.
She got into the driver’s seat and closed the door, then pressed the clutch and put—slammed—the shifter into first gear. She rolled down the window, looking and listening. Nothing. Six minutes. “Damn you, Chip Dawtry,” she said, her voice strangling in her throat. “Damn you.”
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