Katherine reacted to the shadows of restrained grief that drifted behind his eyes, and immediately moved to his side. ‘What is it?’
Joaquin whispered so that Jacob and Merriel would not hear.
‘There’s been an accident and I need to deal with it personally,’ he said. ‘Why not take the children back to the airport? I’ll meet you in Miami after we’ve surveyed the island.’
‘You sure?’ she asked, concerned but not alarmed.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Joaquin assured her, and gestured to Dennis Aubrey, who was chatting amiably to the children. ‘You sure he’s able to lip-read?’
Katherine chuckled. ‘Of course, his brother is deaf so he learned sign-language and lip-reading as a child. I still don’t understand why you need a scientist working for you who can lip-read?’
‘Communications,’ Joaquin replied. ‘Sometimes we have issues with equipment on the conservation projects and we only have visual and not audio.’ He waved for Aubrey to join them. ‘Dennis, something’s come up. You okay to accompany me before we head back to Miami?’
‘Not a problem,’ Aubrey agreed, clearly eager to please.
Katherine kissed his cheek. ‘Talk to me,’ she said quickly. ‘Whatever this is about, don’t keep trying to save the world on your own, okay?’
She turned and led their children away from the shattered remains of the school and down to the white jeep waiting for them. Joaquin watched as they were driven away down a hill littered with debris that wound its way to a distant, broad bay.
‘This way, Dennis,’ he said to Aubrey.
Joaquin turned and walked further up the hill with the physicist to where the helicopter waited. Standing alongside it with his arms folded was a tall, powerfully built man in an expensive suit that did little to conceal the ranks of muscles bulging through the fabric. Olaf Jorgenson, Joaquin’s personal bodyguard, watched them approach and then turned and rapped on the cockpit window. The pilot inside immediately started the helicopter’s engines.
‘What’s happened?’ Aubrey asked Joaquin as they walked. ‘Something urgent?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ Joaquin replied. ‘You’ve just been promoted to head scientist at the IRIS Deep Blue facility on the Miami Terrace reef.’
Dennis Aubrey’s round face broke into a bright smile as his pasty skin glowed with a brief flourish of color.
‘That’s fantastic news.’ His expression sagged slightly. ‘You don’t seem very happy about it.’
‘I’m afraid that your promotion is due to a tragedy, Dennis. There was an airplane crash yesterday afternoon. I lost my entire Deep Blue staff.’
Aubrey’s skin dulled again to its familiar wan tones.
‘My God, I’m sorry. Do we know what happened?’
Joaquin shook his head.
‘I’m sorry that this promotion hasn’t occurred under better circumstances, Dennis,’ he said. ‘But I need your help. It will take some time to find replacement staff, and between now and then I need somebody reliable to man the Deep Blue facility. It might entail you being on the site for a few days, until I can get everything sorted.’
Aubrey grabbed the helicopter’s door handle and opened it for Joaquin.
‘Consider it done,’ he promised. ‘When do we leave for the facility?’
‘We’re headed for Miami right now,’ Joaquin said. ‘You’ll join me at the facility as soon as I’ve tied up some loose ends in the city.’
Olaf Jorgenson joined them inside the helicopter, as did Sandra, her red hair flying in the downwash from the spinning blades, until Olaf’s giant arm slammed the fuselage door shut. The four of them donned headphones, and Aubrey’s voice cut through the static.
‘What about Katherine and the children? Will they be joining us?’
‘Katherine is due to lead the defense for IRIS at the opening of a court case in Miami this morning,’ Joaquin explained, ‘and won’t be able to join us until later. We’ll have to make do until then. The children will be in school for the week.’
The helicopter lifted off, the downwash from the blades shuddering through the palm trees below as it flew low over the battered shanty towns. Joaquin looked out across the crippled island as it swept past beneath the helicopter, a barren and mud-strewn wasteland of misery and despair. Tiny figures stared up at him, their bare legs ankle-deep in cold mud, their clothes smeared with filth and their eyes wide with shock and disbelief, haunted by the loss of their families and homes.
Joaquin felt a burden of responsibility weigh down on him, strong enough that it seemed it could send the helicopter in which he sat plunging back down to earth. One man, one company, one chance to make a difference. Most people lived under a comfortable illusion that the whole world was now connected, that all people had some idea of what technology was, had access to medicine, had a chance in life. The truth was that only one fifth of the world’s population lived in the developed world. Half of all the people on earth had never made or received a telephone call. The vast majority of mankind had little or no access to clean water. Several hundred million children died every decade from easily preventable diseases or starvation. And all the while politicians in designer suits, chauffeured in cars that cost more than many people would earn in several lifetimes, attended huge conferences and told the world how much better it all would soon be. How much they were doing to help. How much brighter the future was.
Joaquin looked down at the devastation and considered once again how nothing changed. Not ever. Governments would never be able to save their own people, not unless there was a chance of generating a profit at the same time, anyway. Too much corporate interference now. As one government gave millions to dig wells in one impoverished country, another would sell arms to its rival. The whole charade continued, decade after decade, century after century, propping up the wealthy and keeping the poor incarcerated in poverty for all time. A line from Homer’s Iliad drifted through his mind: We men are wretched things.
Sandra’s voice cut through his glum reverie.
‘There’s no word from the Miami-Dade police about Charles Purcell,’ she said, looking at an e-mail on her tablet. ‘He’s not been reported as missing and there’s nothing from South Bimini about him either. He must have missed the flight, but I can’t locate him.’
Joaquin nodded and glanced at Jorgenson. The huge man’s angular, expressionless face and pale-blue eyes returned his gaze as though he were hewn from solid granite, but his square head gave a barely perceptible nod.
‘What will I be doing at the reef?’ Dennis Aubrey asked Joaquin, his features vibrant with enthusiasm.
‘Manning our sub-aquatic research station,’ Joaquin replied, turning away from Olaf’s gaze. ‘It’s on the edge of an underwater terrace shelf about twenty miles offshore of Miami beach. You’ll be responsible for some of the technological assets we have built there.’
Aubrey frowned in confusion.
‘I thought that it was some kind of wildlife preserve? What have we got down there that would need a physicist?’
Joaquin grinned conspiratorially and patted Aubrey on the shoulder.
‘The future, Dennis, or at least that’s what I hope – something that will benefit mankind for all time to come. You’ll see soon enough. Right now, we have to get back to the city. I have some very important guests to meet for breakfast, and I need you to be there with me to get to know them. I’m sure that you’d like to meet the Florida governor?’
‘The governor?’ Aubrey almost choked. ‘Is he involved in the conservation effort?’
Joaquin chuckled.
‘Not yet, Dennis, but it’s time to make government work for the people and bring some balance back into their lives. By the time I’m done with him, he’ll be up to his neck in it.’
Olaf’s broad jaw fractured like a glacier into a broad grin.
12
HALLANDALE, MIAMI
June 28, 9:34
Ethan stared at the mirror on the wall of the motel r
oom, captivated by the reflection.
‘What are you talking about?’ Lopez asked. ‘You see something?’
Ethan nodded, tilting his head to one side and looking at the strange symbols written on the wall above the window, and then looking again at the reflection in the mirror.
‘It’s not an equation,’ he said finally. ‘I need a piece of paper.’
Sears reached into his pocket and provided Ethan with a small notepad and a pen. Ethan leaned on a table and copied down what he saw in the mirror before showing it to Lopez.
N2764C
She scanned the figures and frowned.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just junk.’
Ethan grinned and reached out to tap her head with his knuckles.
‘Don’t tell me you can’t see it. What do we know about Charles Purcell’s father?’
Kyle Sears stared at the symbols.
‘Looks familiar somehow,’ he said.
‘Purcell’s father was a physicist too, but he died in a plane crash in the Bermuda Triangle, right?’ Lopez said. ‘Still doesn’t add up to much.’
‘Yes it does,’ Sears replied as he suddenly recognized the configuration. ‘Tail code? I drive past O’Hare airport virtually every day and I’m sure I’ve seen codes like that on small aircraft.’
‘November two-seven-six-four-charlie,’ Ethan con firmed. ‘It’s a standard tail code for a civilian-operated aircraft in the United States. My sister got her pilot’s license a few years ago, and she flies a light aircraft with a similar number.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ Kyle Sears said.
‘So will I,’ Lopez murmured as she looked at Ethan. ‘You never told me you have a sister.’
Ethan didn’t respond to her and turned instead to Captain Sears.
‘Whatever the reason, it seems that Charles Purcell wants us to follow the clues he’s leaving. You think you could check out that aircraft and find out where it is? My guess is that it belonged to his father.’
‘I’ll get right on it.’
Sears left the room as Ethan stared up at the code on the wall.
‘Okay,’ Lopez said, ‘you’ve done good, but let’s not dwell on it. What’s your sister’s name?’
‘Natalie,’ he replied, still staring vacantly at the symbols on the wall.
‘How come you never mentioned her before?’
Ethan stared up at the wall and the code, but for a moment his thoughts switched to his family. His folks were both retired, his father from the Marine Corps and his mother from banking, living out their lives in peaceful seclusion in the Chicago suburbs. Truth was, he saw them rarely and had only recently begun speaking to his father again, long after he’d resigned his commission in the marines and ended his father’s dreams of a high-ranking son. Natalie was studying politics at college in New York City, shooting for a job at the White House last he’d heard. There wasn’t much he could tell Lopez about any of them.
‘It never came up,’ he replied, dodging her question as deftly as he could.
‘That’s crap,’ Lopez scolded him. ‘You don’t talk about them, but I know that you’d have bugged out of the Windy City a long time ago if they weren’t important to you.’
Ethan blinked. What did keep him in Illinois? He shrugged it off as he looked up at the odd symbols and rubbed them with his finger.
‘Will you cut it out?’ Lopez laughed. ‘Your work here is done, Einstein.’
‘Why’d you think Purcell would do this?’ Ethan asked her. ‘Leave messages like these for us to find?’
Lopez shrugged. ‘He’s a scientist – they get their rocks off on stuff like this.’
Ethan shook his head.
‘He’s just lost his wife and child in a brutal murder that he says he did not commit. I don’t reckon he’d be interested in playing mind games if he’s trying to prove his innocence. Surely he’d just write the tail code in big letters like he did the other message, or he’d just call the police again and tell them to search for the aircraft in question, not conceal them in a tiny scribble up here.’
Lopez fell silent for a few moments as she considered this.
‘Unless maybe there’s somebody else looking for him too,’ she suggested. ‘Somebody who he knows might not search as thoroughly as the police have. But then why leave the blatant message for you on the other wall? Why not hide everything?’
Ethan spoke without breaking his gaze.
‘Maybe the real message is the coded one, the rest just enough to satisfy whoever he thinks is pursuing him. So he hides the coded message here behind the curtain, maybe figuring that the police will search more thoroughly and have more resources to figure out what he’s trying to tell them, before whoever else he’s hiding from finds him.’
Lopez looked across the room at the scrawled message.
‘He’d still have to know in advance that we’d definitely be here.’
Ethan turned on his heel and looked at her. ‘And how might he know that? Sure, he called Sears and told him to contact me, but how could he be absolutely sure that I’d turn up?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lopez admitted, ‘but why else would he have written your name up here and then left a code for you to find?’
Ethan was about to respond when another voice answered for him.
‘Because Nicola is right, and he knew that you would be here.’
Ethan turned and saw Jarvis standing in the doorway of the room. The military transport he’d travelled down on was not even half as fast as the F-15s, but Ethan knew they’d have been given priority status as they raced south. The old man sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the walls where the scrawled messages taunted them.
‘That’s crazy,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘You saying this guy really can see into the future?’
‘We’re not sure,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘But he’s leaving you clues and he must have a reason for doing so. I was just listening to what you said, and there’s no point in Charles Purcell concealing selected information in codes unless he’s hiding something from one person whilst trying to inform another.’
‘Sure,’ Lopez agreed, ‘but who’s to say that it’s us Purcell wants to figure all this out? Maybe this is all a double bluff to throw us off the scent, and he really did murder his family.’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘Given what we know about him I’d say it’s unlikely. He has no history of mental instability and was by all accounts extremely happy in his work at NASA.’
‘But he works for somebody else now, right?’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Maybe something happened?’
Sears re-appeared in the apartment.
‘I’ll say,’ he said, as he waved a piece of paper at them. ‘I had that aircraft checked out for you.’
‘Did you find it?’ Ethan asked.
‘Kind of.’
Lopez looked at the captain with an uncomfortable expression. ‘The hell does that mean?’
Sears looked somewhat pale as he replied.
‘It didn’t belong to Charles Purcell’s father. November two-seven-six-four-charlie was a Grumman Mallard that went down yesterday afternoon off the coast of South Bimini island in the Bahamas. There were no survivors.’
Ethan stared at Sears for a moment and then looked at the code that Charles Purcell had scrawled across the wall.
‘When was Purcell booked into this apartment?’ he asked.
‘Checked in yesterday at five thirty in the evening, and according to the hotelier he left in his car two hours later and did not return . . .’ Sears broke off as he realized what Ethan was getting at.
‘When did the aircraft go down?’ Jarvis prompted the captain.
‘Radio contact was lost just before seven thirty in the evening,’ Sears replied. ‘The aircraft was reported missing at just after eight, after it failed to land at Miami International at the allotted time.’
Ethan looked at Jarvis. ‘Purcell wrote that coded message before t
he aircraft had gone down.’
‘He knew it was going to crash,’ Lopez said. ‘You think he somehow saw the crash in advance, like the scene at his home yesterday evening?’
Kyle Sears shook his head. ‘It’s more likely that Purcell had something to do with the plane going down than that he’s able to see the future. We could be dealing with a mass murderer.’
‘Has any wreckage been found?’ Ethan asked.
‘That’s part of the problem,’ Sears replied. ‘The aircraft vanished without trace. The Miami Coastguard conducted a search at the aircraft’s last known position but nothing was found. The airplane was travelling through the Bermuda Triangle when it disappeared from radar screens.’
‘The Bermuda Triangle,’ Ethan echoed.
‘This is getting weirder by the minute,’ Lopez said.
Ethan turned to Jarvis.
‘Purcell used to work at NASA. We need to go and talk to some of his colleagues and find out what he was doing there.’
Jarvis nodded as he slipped a cellphone out of his pocket.
‘I’ll get us a ride. We’ll be in Cape Canaveral within the hour.’
Ethan stared at the wall and its cryptic message.
‘What’s up?’ Lopez asked him.
Ethan sighed.
‘I want to know,’ he replied, ‘what happens at 20:48 on June 28. I’ve got a feeling that, whatever it is, it’s not going to be good.’
13
MANDARIN ORIENTAL HOTEL, MIAMI, FLORIDA
June 28, 10:02
Joaquin Abell stood at the ceiling-to-floor windows of his penthouse suite and looked across the water to the Miami skyline, where the British Consulate dominated the scenery. The channel between the hotel and Bricknell Key, a wedge-shaped island just off the shore, glittered in the morning sunshine as it flowed south in deep eddies before trailing away to be lost into the endless ocean, like time irretrievably passing him by. Lost, but still there.
And at what price? The late, great Isaac Abell watched him from history and gave a deep and disapproving shake of his head. Joaquin swallowed thickly.
‘This is worth it, Father.’
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