by Linda Nagata
The steel door was in a sheltered alcove that budded off the footpath. The alcove used to be shaded with a vine-covered pergola. Grand doors had guarded the pirate tunnel and only the most elite among the resort’s guests had been able to buy their way in—to a dark, coldly air-conditioned passage decorated as a secret smugglers’ cave, a haven of pirates. Not inappropriate, given that many of the guests had accumulated their wealth through government and regulatory corruption, and by hostile corporate takeovers.
Near the end of the peninsula, the tunnel descended to below sea level, emerging onto the seafloor. During the day, round windows in the tunnel walls had looked out onto sunlit waters. At night, underwater lights had illuminated the dark sea, drawing in planktonic creatures that in turn lured in feeding manta rays.
At the tunnel’s end, a wide acrylic arch, like an aquarium tunnel, had housed an underwater restaurant, where diners enjoyed luxury meals surrounded by the sight of the living ocean.
The restaurant had been spectacular, but it had lasted less than a year. The seafloor proved unstable. Subsidence kept cracking the seals. Leaking salt water spoiled the kitchen. The restaurant closed, and its acrylic shell was removed, presumably sold off to some other resort. But the tunnel remained, flooded now where it passed below sea level. A heavy steel grate at the underwater end kept out large fish and curious tourists. At the tunnel’s dry end, the grand doors had been replaced by a plain steel maintenance door, tan-colored, marked with a sign that read:
NO ENTRANCE
Authorized Personnel Only
The crazy-mad steel banging noise stopped. Conrad’s back was still turned to Ava as he gazed up the footpath. Kaden must have told him to stay back.
“Ah, shit,” she whispered to Ivan. “He’s going to blow the door.”
She darted from behind the hedge and down the path.
“No, Ava!” Ivan shouted in her ear. “Hold your position.”
“Can’t. He’ll be inside the tunnel before you’re here.”
She followed the path across the strip of beach that bordered the lagoon, and then onto the bridge. The roaring wind and the pounding rain covered any sound she might have made—and Conrad’s back remained turned. Idiot. Kaden had surely told him to guard their rear, but he was failing to do it.
Ava followed Conrad’s gaze, up the footpath. From the midpoint of the bridge, she found she could just see into the alcove. When the banging started up again, this time accompanied by an eerie moan, she saw that it was caused by the steel door, jumping and rattling in its frame—as if trying to throw off the dual charges fixed beside the bolts that held it closed.
She saw Kaden too, a black silhouette in his wetsuit, retreating from the alcove.
She ducked below the bridge railing while bringing her pistol to bear. Slim odds of making the shot, given his distance and the raging wind, but she gripped the pistol in two hands and took aim anyway, forcing herself to see Kaden as just a target. Anonymous. Impersonal. Not the man she’d made love with less than twenty-four hours ago.
Praying for divine intervention, for the goddess of the storm to guide the bullet, she squeezed off a round. Intervention came, but not in the way she’d hoped.
Boom-boom!
Twin explosions, just as she took the shot, the dual concussion covering the sound of her pistol. The steel door slammed open, rebounding against rock, as if an imprisoned demon had shoved it out of the way.
Ava had missed her shot, but Kaden hadn’t heard the pistol; he didn’t know yet she was there.
He yelled at Conrad, “Come on! Follow me.” And disappeared into the dark of the tunnel mouth.
Conrad didn’t follow right away. Shoulders hunched, he turned to look back, revealing a face flushed and angry. Ava guessed he was not enthusiastic about Kaden’s escape route. But she had no time to take satisfaction from that.
Conrad’s gaze met hers. His flush deepened. His brows drew together as he reached for his shoulder holster.
Ava shot before he touched the weapon—and missed by inches. The bullet hit the concrete rock behind him, showering him with fragments. He stumbled, crab-walking toward the alcove, eyes wide, mouth open, fumbling to get his weapon out. She fired again. This time she didn’t miss. The bullet hit him in the gut. He doubled over and disappeared inside the tunnel.
She sprinted in pursuit, off the bridge, up the footpath, then across the alcove to the tunnel mouth, gambling Conrad was not waiting just inside to ambush her.
No shots came out of the dark.
She pressed her back against the wet stone beside the open doorway. Her breath came hard and fast. Even so, she sensed a faint vibration in the stone, generated by the pounding of storm waves. And to her astonishment, a moaning wind was blasting out of the tunnel, tasting of salt. That wind had knocked the door open when Kaden blew the locks. But why was there wind in a tunnel closed by water?
She hesitated a second, pondering this, and in that interval, motion drew her gaze across the lagoon. Two motorcycles sped down the path from the promenade: Ivan and company.
Ava leaned over, looking cautiously into the tunnel, eyes narrowed against the outflowing wind. Little emergency lighting panels, set two feet apart on the tunnel floor, threw a red glow against walls made to look like rough lava rock. She did not see Conrad, but then the tunnel turned just twenty feet in. It was possible he was right around the bend—and surely he had gotten his pistol out of its holster by now.
The wind’s hoarse voice worked together with a low rumbling roar of moving water reverberating from deeper in the tunnel, to cover any sound of footsteps, or strained breathing. But then the wind out of the tunnel hesitated, slowed, a held breath. Seconds ticked past—and the wind reversed, drawing atmosphere back into the tunnel with the sound of massive lungs.
Wave action. It had to be. With each massive swell, a surge of water shot up through the tunnel, displacing the air ahead of it, generating the wind—and when the sea pulled back, the wind reversed.
Ivan rode into the alcove, bringing his motorcycle to a skidding halt. “Dispatch reported you wounded the big one.”
“Gut shot,” she agreed. “I don’t know if it’s serious.”
The second officer came in behind him. Akasha. When Ava realized it, she wanted to curse. What was Ivan thinking? Akasha had been out and on the move all night. She had to be exhausted—and Ava had so wanted to believe the young officer had gotten safely into shelter.
But all she said was, “Where’s Gideon?”
Akasha answered, “Keeping himself busy at HQ.”
“All right. We’ve got two perps, both armed, possibly with additional explosives. And we cannot let them reach the water. Let’s go.”
chapter
24
Ava led, stepping into the tunnel and moving quickly to the first turn, peering around it as the wind rushed at her back.
Nothing.
She moved farther in.
The walls cut off the sound of rain and of the storm outside, but the moaning, indrawn breath of wind remained, blended with a distant rumble of moving water, and overhung by Dan Conrad’s booming voice: “I’m hit! I’m bleeding out. I can’t go into the water.” Hard to tell how far away.
Kaden answered, anger, even disgust, evident in his voice. “You want to live, you don’t have a choice.”
Ava advanced to the next turn as the argument continued.
“I’m telling you, Robicheaux. Call it off. Call it off now.”
“What?”
Ava peered around the next bend, but did not see them.
“I’m not going to be able to make it out—”
“Then I leave you here.”
“Damn you! I am Sigrún. This is my operation and you will do what I tell you.”
“I am doing it—at the cost of my career, my love, my future, a hundred thousand lives. There is no going back, Daniel. We both swore to it. Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor—”
“I am ordering you—”
Bang!
Ava jumped as a gunshot echoed up the passage. She bumped against Akasha who had moved up, to stand just a breath behind her.
There was nothing more to hear of that argument.
Ava traded disbelieving looks with Akasha and Ivan. Then she mouthed, Let’s go.
As she sprinted to the next bend, the wind reversed again.
◇
Ava slowed only a little when she saw Conrad. He lay face up, his back arched over the pack that held his air supply. His aloha shirt, sagging with the weight of blood seeping from his belly wound, puckered open between the buttons, exposing the mound of his gut. But it was a head shot that had killed him. Kaden’s bullet had shattered his broad forehead, leaving his wide, astonished eyes staring at the ceiling and his mouth frozen open in shock.
Coward!
In his own mind, Conrad must have cast himself as a hero, a great leader, imagining that this dangerous last-minute escape would become a story he’d tell over and over again, a testament to his manhood, to the testosterone-fueled determination that would reshape the world and place him at the helm of a new American hegemony—and to get there, he’d been okay with the murder of a city and a hundred thousand innocents.
But he hadn’t truly believed in the cause because he’d abandoned it, the moment he’d begun to fear for his own survival.
Kaden’s resolve would not be so easily broken.
There is no going back, Daniel.
She ran on, Akasha and Ivan just behind, with the sea’s breath blowing in a gale against their faces.
The ragged passage began to slope down. The floor took on a wet sheen. And suddenly water a few inches deep surged past, carrying with it lines of foam tinged red from the upwelling illumination of the emergency lights.
A lull in the wind.
A moment of relative quiet admitting only the hiss of disintegrating foam and the splash of booted feet in shallow water.
Then the sea’s breath reversed. An inhale. The gale at Ava’s back as she chased the receding water.
In a low voice between ragged breaths, Ivan warned, “We’re at the end of the peninsula.”
Only seconds left to catch up with Kaden.
A wet sheen could now be seen on the walls, a high-water mark. At first, it reached only inches above the floor. But as the passage continued downward, the sheen rose—knee-high, and then thigh-high. Ava had to run more carefully, bounding over a clutter of debris: broken sticks, plastic floats, clumps of seaweed, even a tangle of fishing net—objects too large to have gotten past the gate at the tunnel’s mouth, if the gate was closed as it should have been.
A tidal reek filled her lungs.
At the next turning, a change in the light. A faint gleam of gray daylight. Ava held up a hand, signaling to Akasha and Ivan that she meant to stop. She crouched at the turning. Peered around. The passage straightened, angling steeply down to a watery glimmer, the light welling up from below the surface, coming in through the tunnel’s underwater windows.
Kaden waited down there, sheltered in a dark nook off the main passage, where the restaurant’s reception podium used to be. He stood immersed to his waist in swirling water, with a respirator hanging over his shoulder—and he held a pistol aimed in her direction.
Ava ducked back behind the rock as Kaden fired. The bullet buzzed past where she had just been. It hit the wall, ricocheted. Akasha cried out, spasmed, then collapsed into silence. Ivan caught her, cushioned her, as Ava reached to find a pulse. “Akasha.” A whispered plea.
There! Her chest rose, fell, rose again. Just visible past her black, bloodied hair, a fragment of the spent bullet lay embedded in her scalp, looking like a bit of red bone in the glow of the emergency lights.
“Ava?” Kaden shouted, his confusion echoing up the tunnel. He had not expected her to be there. Who then had he been expecting?
Kaden answered her unspoken question: “It’s on you, then, Domanski!”
“No, Kaden!” she shouted, peering out again. “Matt’s not here. It’s just me.”
A blast of wind roared up the passage.
“Run, then!” Kaden shouted, backing deeper into the nook, bracing himself against its smooth walls. “The water’s coming in. Get out now!
A flood surged from the submerged passage. It swept past him, toward her. She turned. Ivan already had Akasha’s limp body over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He started up the passage—too late. The incoming jet of water hit the wall where the passage turned, and then the flood rebounded, shooting up the tunnel, knocking them both off their feet.
Water churned past Ava’s chin as the flood dragged her, scraping her thigh against the concrete, and slamming her shoulder into a wall. A slopping backwash slapped her in the face and she choked. Salt water burned in her nasal passages and in the back of her throat. But she kept her head up, kept her gaze on Akasha as Ivan lost his grip on her and the unconscious young officer went under, the current carrying both her and Ivan away up the tunnel.
Oh God, no. Not Akasha too.
Her recurring nightmare, brought to life. Another friend stolen away by a violent flood. Nolo, all over again.
No. Let me find her. Please. Please.
Instead, the current again slammed Ava against the tunnel wall. Her fingers clawed at the rough stone, defying her desire to follow Akasha, to find her, and bring her back above the surface before it was too late—because didn’t she have to get to Kaden? He was the priority. A hundred thousand lives.
Right?
Ava clung to the bumps and knobs sculpted into the imitation lava rock, bracing with her legs, cursing silently at the weight of the armored vest she still wore. A quick last breath as the water rose to fill the passage and she was submerged.
The current slowed. Stilled. Eyes closed against the salt, Ava released her grip on the rock just long enough to pull off the vest so it couldn’t drag her under. Then she grabbed the rock again.
Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . lungs burning.
Then—at last!—the current reversed. The water drained away as swiftly as it had come in. Ava got her head above the flood. She gasped and let go of the tunnel wall, riding the current back down the passage and around the bend.
Where was Kaden?
There. Still braced in the nook, his face wet, mouth twisted in anger and disbelief. He reached out a hand as the current swept her past him. She grabbed his wrist. His hand locked around her arm and he pulled her in against him as the water drained away.
Ava realized she’d lost her pistol in the flood, but she still had her duty belt and one free hand. She pulled her shockgun from its holster.
Kaden saw it and slapped it away into the receding current, his grip on her wrist so tight her hand had already gone numb. “He recruited you, didn’t he? Matt Domanski. Do you know who he is?”
“Someone who’s trying to stop you,” she said in a low salt-roughened voice.
Kaden leaned in, eye to eye. “Domanski was Sigrún, too, Ava. He proposed this operation. I argued against it, but I was voted down—and then I was handed the duty to do it.”
“And you accepted that duty!”
“I did. And in the end, Domanski lost his nerve. You should have let him drown.”
“Don’t do it, Kaden,” she pleaded as her free hand groped for her folding knife, finding its handle still sticky with threads of webbing. “Don’t. You know it’s wrong.” And in an echo of Daniel Conrad, “Call it off. Please.”
“You want to think that’s still possible.”
Concealing the knife under the water, she struggled to get it open, but she couldn’t do it with just one hand.
Kaden noticed her effort. He grabbed that wrist too and twisted her arm, forcing her to drop the knife, still folded.
“You can’t stop it, Ava. It’ll happen whether I’m there or not.”
No. She did not want to believe that. It couldn’t be true. The launch protocol required him to be there.
HADAFA should have foreseen Kaden’s potential for subversion. It should have detected Sigrún’s operation even before it was underway—but HADAFA had been subverted first, made into a false prophet. It had been corrupted by secret-keeping and the ability of those with deep access to modify, sequester, limit, or delete the information on which the system based its assessments.
HADAFA, designed to expose reality, had been used instead to cloak it.
The air grew still. The water swirled, pulling back farther than it had gone before. In that moment of suspended time before the next flood rushed in, Ava saw only truth in Kaden’s eyes. Lyric and Matt had both been wrong. Sigrún, operating under a veil constructed by HADAFA, had cracked and compromised national security, rewriting the launch protocol so that it did not need to rely on the presence of any one man.
The revelation hit hard. Even if she stopped Kaden here and now, it wouldn’t stop the nuke.
Hope stole away. She sagged in his arms, drained by fatigue and dragged down by the bitter inevitability of defeat.
Another gale of moist, salt-laden wind blasted past, pushed by the next incoming flood—and Gideon spoke to her, his flinty, cynical voice half-heard in the wind’s white noise: Angel Dust . . . drop it into the enclosed atmosphere of that submarine and no one will last long.
Ava had not seen a way to do that—not then—but she’d taken the vacuum bottle with its ampules of Angel Dust and secured it to her duty belt.
The ocean surged in, curling around them. She wrenched her left hand free of Kaden’s, but clung with her right as the current tried to carry her away.
The water rose to her shoulders, her neck. He held on to her, gripping the wall with one hand and bracing with his legs as he strove to keep them both within the shelter of the nook.
She groped for the vacuum bottle with her free hand, found it.
“You can survive this,” he told her as she unscrewed the lid. “After I’m gone, just hold on to the wall. Wait for the water to go out and then run. Get to shelter. Everyone will be sheltering because of the storm. The death toll will be minimal. And afterward, it will be a new world. I promise . . .”