FORTY-SIX
"Nathaniel," a familiar voice said, dulled as if the speaker were on the other side of a window. "Nathaniel."
Arkin realized he was lying on his back on something soft. Maybe a mattress. The back of his head throbbed with pain, and when he tried to sit up on his elbows and open his reluctant eyelids just a crack, the light seemed viciously bright. It was too much, too fast. Nauseous, Arkin rolled onto his side and squeezed his eyes shut.
"Nathaniel."
Arkin knew the voice. He panted for a moment, still lying on his side and allowing another wave of concussion nausea to pass, before he willed his eyes open once more. At first, the room was washed out in overwhelming white light. But he forced his eyes to stay open. And as they slowly adjusted, things in the room began to take shape. He was in a makeshift cell of some sort, with floors of poured concrete and whitewashed walls of old cut stone. Monastic. Despite his initial impression of exceptionally bright light, the room turned out to be lit by a single incandescent light bulb screwed into a plain fixture just above the frame of the only door. Light also came in via one small window, high up on the wall on the far side of the room. But between where he lay and the wall with the window was a row of thick steel reinforcing bars, set four inches apart in new concrete, dividing the room in half. A narrow, makeshift door of cut steel plate hung on heavy hinges at one end of the rebar barrier. And in an old wooden chair just outside the barrier, smack in the middle of the room, wearing a dark, British-looking three-piece suit, sat Roland Sheffield.
Arkin stared, mute. Sheffield looked older than he had just a few weeks earlier. His hair seemed whiter, his shoulders more slumped. But whatever he'd been through in the past several weeks really showed around his eyes. There seemed to be more wrinkles. The skin of his lids seemed to sag. He looked worried. And sad. He sat there, quiet, his hands resting on his thighs. The long hair, beard, and moustache he had in Eugene were gone.
Still lying on his side, miserable, his head throbbing, his stomach sour, Arkin tried to speak. But his drooling, slack mouth didn't want to form the words. He took a few shallow breaths and tried once more. "Roland."
Sheffield just smiled a sad smile, staring at Arkin with visible concern.
"Roland. Why—"
Sheffield raised his hand. "Nathaniel." Sheffield was the only other person in the world besides Hannah who ever called him Nathaniel instead of just Nate. "Rest, son. You're safe now. There will be time to talk later."
But Arkin couldn't wait. He fought against the disequilibrium of the concussion, panting through waves of nausea, waiting for a lull in which he could summon the strength to speak.
"I'm so sorry about Hannah," Sheffield said.
Arkin closed his eyes as Sheffield's words hit him. For the sake of his emotional stability, he'd been doing his best to not think about Hannah. But in his exhaustion, in his beaten down state, he was vulnerable, and Sheffield's sympathy threatened to crack his hard, outer shell. Emotion began to seep though. He fought to keep himself composed, fought for the strength to speak.
"How . . . ."
"Nathaniel, please, just rest."
"How could you do that to me?"
Sheffield's head leaned to one side, his sad face betraying confusion at Arkin's question. "I'm sorry. They were supposed to be gentle, but you surprised us when—"
"No." Arkin shook his head. "You tried to kill me. You were like a father . . . ." But his struggle to speak triggered another surge of nausea that rose from the depths of his guts. Grappling to hold back the vomit, he blacked out once more.
FORTY-SEVEN
By evening of the next day, Arkin was feeling better. Sheffield's minions, who looked decidedly northern European, had delivered several hot meals of fresh grilled salmon, dense homemade egg bread, and steamed vegetables. They even brought him real coffee—French press, Arkin guessed.
At the forefront of Arkin's mind was one simple, all-consuming question: why hadn't they simply killed him? Did they think he had information they needed? About the extent of his knowledge of their apparatus, perhaps? About the extent to which he'd communicated this knowledge to others? The extent of their exposure?
Ten minutes after listening to a helicopter land nearby, and just as the sun was going down, Arkin was lying on his back on his cot and staring at the ceiling when an unseen guard opened the outer door. Sheffield walked in and sat down in the same wooden chair he'd sat in the day before, outside the rebar wall that kept Arkin contained. Arkin remained on his back, but turned to see Sheffield dressed in an olive green Nomex flight suit, his arms crossed, his eyes studying his captive.
"Nice outfit, Roland. Are you auditioning for Top Gun 2?"
"Your sense of humor endures. That's a good sign."
Arkin slowly turned and rose to a sitting position, holding the back of his still-throbbing head with one hand as he did so. "You know, I'm getting a little tired of you and your goons shooting me, lighting me up with stun guns, and dropping me out of trees. It hurts."
"I'm sorry about that. They had to assume you were armed. Plus, you surprised them again." Sheffield smiled and shook his head. "For the umpteenth time, you surprised them. First, you give our nine-man surveillance team the slip in Colorado. Then you completely bypass Port Hardy, where they were lying in wait for you, instead heading straight to Vancouver. I'm still puzzling over how you figured out to do that. Then, of course, you surprised us by popping up in Oregon. This time, we weren't taking any chances.
We had a pretty good idea you were in the neighborhood after that woman, presumably on your instruction, pretended to be trying to deliver a package to the office in Valparaiso. Needless to say, that phone number relays calls to here. And as I'm sure you figured out, nobody ever delivers anything to that office. So, your accomplice's call caught our attention. And then, of course, you killed a member of our extraction team."
"Extraction team? The son of a bitch opened fire the moment he saw me."
"They were instructed to take you alive."
"Perhaps that detail was lost in translation."
Sheffield looked troubled at hearing this but regained his composure. "At any rate, in the days since your encounter with the extraction team, we've been staking out every bus station from Puerto Cisnes to Chaitén to Quellón. We had guys driving up and down the Carretera Austral, watching for hitchers, studying the occupants of each car that passed. But to come via the open sea? In a kayak?" He shook his head again. "Nobody expected that. Clever, Nathaniel." Sheffield smiled a sad smile of approval at his former pupil's cunning. "I should have expected nothing less. You were the finest agent who ever worked for me."
"Don't try to butter me up, Roland. My ribs still hurt from where you put three bullets in my vest."
"You had me cornered. You'd become an existential threat to the group. It wasn't personal."
"Oh, well then."
"You were the best agent I ever had. You were my greatest hope. Still are."
"Please," Arkin said in a disgusted tone of voice. But against his will, Sheffield's comment made Arkin pause and think. "Greatest hope for what?"
"Oh, don't be obtuse. To join me, of course. Now that you're here, now that you know the truth, we can dispense with the façades and present our philosophy to you in a more direct and compelling form. I'm confident we'll be able to show you the light."
"The light, huh? And how will you ever know that you've converted me? That I'm not faking it and waiting for you to take the cuffs off so I can make a run for it?"
"Where else could you go?"
"Somewhere with no extradition treaty with the U.S. Maybe Venezuela. Antarctica."
"Don't be silly."
"Really, though. How will you know I've bought in?"
"We'll send you out with teams for the first few missions. The team will be there to watch you. You'll be there to pull the trigger on the target. After a few of those, we'll probably be more confident that you're a true believer."
&nbs
p; "I suppose I see the logic of that. Where are we, by the way?"
"You are on La Isla de los Alemanes in the Chonos Archipelago. And it's Pearl Harbor Day, December the 7th, in case you're interested."
Arkin nodded, reflecting on how far he'd come. It felt as though he'd been gone from Durango for years, though it had only been a few weeks.
"So, you had watchers at bus stations and on the highways for miles in every direction, huh? How many people do you have down here?"
"Enough," Sheffield said, perfectly aware of Arkin's probe for information.
"What is this place?"
"It was a sheepherding station. The remains of an attempt by German and Basque ex-pats to set up an agrarian utopia back in the early 1900s."
"So, the plan is to convert me? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just shoot me?"
"You're worth too much. You have too much skill. Too much potential. Plus, I know you're teachable. Receptive to our ideas. I know the way you think. I know your philosophy."
"My philosophy?"
"Of our battle against the forces of darkness. You know what's necessary, even if you're still reluctant to cross the line. You're going to see the light and join us." Sheffield smiled. "Either that, or we'll dump you, bound and gagged, where some dust-eating U.S. Border Patrol agent will boost his thankless career by finding you, a red-hot fugitive, out in the mountains east of San Diego." He laughed. Arkin just stared at him. "But that's not going to happen." He rose. "So, rest for now. We'll have plenty of time to talk later, once you've recovered."
"I feel fine."
"You don't look fine. And anyway, I'll be rather busy for the next couple of days. Our pursuit of you required the dedication of considerable resources. Movement of personnel and so forth. So, I busy myself orchestrating our redeployments."
"Sorry to have inconvenienced you."
"I'm sure you are. In the meantime, you'll be well-fed, and the guards will take you out for a daily walk, weather permitting, to give you some exercise. Any requests?"
"I have a craving for matzo ball soup."
"I don't know that we have cracker meal. How about chicken noodle?"
"Good enough."
FORTY-EIGHT
The next day, as promised, three guards took Arkin on a long walk around the island. To his continuing surprise, there wasn't a Chilean among them. They looked German. Tall and blond. But they didn't speak German. They didn't speak much at all, probably under orders from Sheffield. But when they did, Arkin tried to figure out the language. Was it Czech? Hungarian? Lithuanian? He couldn't tell. But they were European, surely. They all smoked wretched, filterless European cigarettes. He wondered where and how Sheffield recruited them.
For the next several days, he was allowed to leave his cell unfettered, though always with his three-man escort, and only after they locked an electronic tracking bracelet to his ankle. He doubted he could have overcome or escaped all three of his escorts anyway. They were much bigger than he was. Plus, they were professionals. Arkin could tell just by the way they carried themselves. Where they stood in relation to him as they walked, how they spaced their feet, how they maintained a thinly veiled readiness posture. On top of that, one of them—the one who invariably trailed the rest of them at a perfect tactical distance—carried a stun gun on one hip, and a .40 caliber Sig Sauer semiautomatic on the other.
Despite the constant presence of the guards, Arkin took every opportunity to study the area, looking for the means of his eventual escape. His cell was in a small, old stone house, probably built for food storage before the invention of refrigerators. But the house was merely one of a rectangular compound of a six small houses and other structures, all of them made of stone, all of them whitewashed. The whole compound was surrounded by a high, newer looking cinderblock wall that very much reminded Arkin of the wall surrounding the late Reverend Sam Egan's house back in Cortez, Colorado. One of the larger houses had a satellite dish and several large antennae protruding from its roof, as well as what looked like a wheelchair ramp leading up to its door. The settlement and small marina he'd seen from the plane were down a rutted gravel road roughly half a mile east of the compound. There were several modern industrial buildings there, with walls and roofs of corrugated tin. Along the shore in front of them was a recently built service pier with a tender vessel of some sort tied up at one end of it. Probably the boat that worked the salmon farming pens that floated just offshore. The marina was filled with power boats of various sizes and functions—some trawlers, an out-of-place looking cabin cruiser, and one very small freighter.
One day, his escorts took him hiking on the faint vestige of a sheep trail that ran along the very periphery of the island. A half mile or so from the compound, the rolling ground briefly flattened out into a sort of low plain. Halfway across it, Arkin saw, to his alarm, fresh graves. Seven of them. Each piled with raised and upturned earth that hadn't yet settled back down flush with the surrounding pastureland. None of them more than a year old. His imagination ran wild with the implications.
He saw very few people out and about. But given the number of buildings with lights on or with smoke rising from their chimneys, and given the number of boats in the marina, he guessed there were several dozen people on the island. When he did see people, they tended to stop and stare at him, their facial expressions betraying a sort of wonder, as if they were thinking that's the guy. Among them, he saw a mix of ethnicities. Mainly European. One East Asian. One sub-continent Indian. Another who might have been Ashkenazi. Not one of them spoke when he was within earshot.
He tried to figure out the security arrangement. Listening carefully each morning, it seemed to him that two of his escorts arrived from elsewhere, meeting the third—probably the one with the weapons—who sat just outside the door of the house they had him in. There were two thick timber doors through the high outer wall of the compound. But, while they were barred from within as a matter of routine, they did not appear to be actively guarded. Of course, it was possible he wasn't seeing the full extent of their security apparatus. Knowing Sheffield, the compound was bound to have significant hidden defenses. All the same, the outer wall struck Arkin as perplexing overkill. What on Earth could they be worried about in this remote corner of the world that would warrant the installation of 10-foot walls? Holdout bands of Mapuche cannibals? Dinosaurs?
In the time he was confined to his cell, Arkin began to work out an approach to dealing with Sheffield's group. For starters, he knew he had to keep his rage contained. Blowing up at this point would do far more harm than good. If they truly intended to convert him to their cause, he would pretend to play ball. Only not too easily, as that would make them suspicious. No, he'd play the long game. He'd play hard to get. The skeptic with potential. It might take a long, long time. But one day, when they at last believed he was all theirs and dropped their guard, he would take them down.
FORTY-NINE
After five days, Sheffield reappeared, once again wearing his dark three-piece suit, which struck Arkin as a ridiculous and entirely impractical choice of attire given their location. One of the guards followed him in with a folding card table and chess set which he set up inside the cell before locking both Arkin and Sheffield in and departing. It was an old tradition that Arkin and Sheffield shared, going back to their days in D.C., to play chess once a week over lunch. Sheffield was the better player. But Arkin had his share of wins.
Five rounds into the game, Arkin lost patience with Sheffield's chummy, business-as-usual facade. "Alright, Roland, out with it."
"I beg your pardon?"
Arkin stared at him for a moment. "Roland."
"What is it? What?"
"Who are you?"
Sheffield sat back in his chair. "The same man you knew."
"Right. And how did you come to be here?"
Sheffield smiled. "You flushed me out. Remember?"
"Don't be coy. I'm talking about the bigger picture. How did you come to be here, at the end of t
he road, at the bottom of the planet, playing Mistah Kurtz."
"Does that make you Marlow?"
"Marlow and I may have something in common, at the very least."
"And what is that?"
"Disappointment with the objects of our respective quests."
"Don't be cross."
"Don't be cross?" Sheffield's comment was too absurd, his tone too innocently paternal for Arkin to stomach. He scowled at Sheffield with utter venom.
"Sorry," Sheffield said at last. Then he sighed. "Alright. What do you want to know?"
"Oh, well, let's see. What, when, why?"
"Why? You already know why. We've discussed this before. You already know exactly what I would say."
"Indulge me."
Sheffield stared through the chessboard. "What is the greatest threat to the human race?"
"High fructose corn syrup."
"Are we being fatuous?"
"Nuclear weapons."
"Wrong. Nuclear weapons are nothing more than ugly inanimate objects unless a person is willing and able to use them."
"'Guns don't kill people—people kill people,' right? Okay, how about emerging viruses? Bird flu. Ebola. Drug resistant bacteria."
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