Текст книги "Plague Ship"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“Let me at it.”

They laboriously swapped places, with Linc moving feet first into the tight space. He braced his boots against the rock and his back against Cabrillo’s outstretched legs and brought his strength to bear. In the gym, he was able to leg-press a thousand pounds. The boulder weighed half that, but it was wedged tightly, and Linc was in the beginning stages of dehydration. Cabrillo could feel the intense strain in every fiber and tendon of Linc’s body as he pushed. Linc let out a growl, and the rock slid up and out of its socket of loose stones and packed dirt like a rotten tooth.

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” he whooped.

“Nicely done, big man.”

Linc was able to wriggle forward, and as Juan followed him he realized he was gaining headroom. They had crossed the highest point of the debris pile and were making their way down the back side. Soon, he and Linc could crawl over the remaining stones on their hands and knees and then they could stand upright, so they walked down the last of the rubble and onto the cave floor. When Juan pointed the light back at the pile, the gap near the top seemed impossibly small.

He and Linc rested for a few minutes, with the flashlight off to conserve its batteries.

“Smell that?” Juan asked.

“If you’re talking about a mug of ice-cold beer, you and I are having the same hallucination.”

“No. I smell seawater.” Juan got to his feet and turned on the light again.

They proceeded down the tunnel for another hundred yards, until it opened into a natural sea cave. The grotto was at least fifty feet high and four times as broad. The Japanese had constructed a concrete pier on one side of the subterranean lagoon. There was a set of narrow-gauge iron train tracks embedded in the cement for a mobile crane that had once been on the dock for unloading supplies.

“They brought ships in here?” Linc said incredulously.

“I don’t think so,” Juan replied. “I noticed when the ferry docked that the tide had just crested. That was seven hours ago, which puts us near low tide.” He played the light along the side of the quay where a thick carpet of mussels clinging to the cement indicated that high tide almost swamped the dock. “I think they supplied the base using submarines.”

He killed the light, and, together, they peered into the dark waters for any indication of sunlight penetrating this far into the cavern. There was a spot opposite the pier that glowed so faintly that it looked as if the waters weren’t exactly blue, only less black.

“What do you think?” Juan asked when he turned on the light.

“Sun’s at its zenith. For it to be so dark in here, the tunnel has to be a quarter mile long or more.” He didn’t add that it was too far to swim on a single breath. Both men knew it.

“All right, let’s look around and see if there’s anything left down here we can use.” There was only a single side chamber off the main cavern. Inside, they discovered a trickle of freshwater that seeped from a tiny crevasse high up the wall. The water had eroded a small bowl in the floor before meandering to the ocean.

“It’s not cold beer,” Linc said, cupping his hands in the bowl, “but nothing’s ever looked so refreshing.” Juan, aiming the flashlight around the room, indicated that Linc should drink his fill. Propped against one wall was a row of strange stone tablets. All thoughts of thirst vanished as Juan studied the artifacts. They were roughly four feet tall and two wide, made of baked clay that was less than an inch thick. It wasn’t the stones themselves that held him rapt. It was the writing. An awl or stick had been used to etch the clay before it had been fired, and despite the tablets’ obvious antiquity there was absolutely no sign of weathering. It was as if they had spent their entire existence in a temperature-controlled museum.

Then he spotted the wires. Thin lines arced from the back of one tablet to the next. Juan shone the light in the gap between the tablets and the cave wall. Blocks of plastic explosives had been stuck to the backs of all four ancient texts and rigged to one another. He followed the wire and realized it went out toward the main tunnel. He figured it had been set to blow when they took down the ceiling, but the wire must have been cut before the signal reached this chamber. Judging by the amount of plastique, the Responsivists wanted to leave nothing of the tablets but dust.

“What have you got?” Linc asked. He had washed the grime from his face, and water had cut runnels through the dust on his neck.

“Cuneiform tablets rigged with enough SEMTEX to send them into orbit.” Linc studied the explosives and shrugged. They knew well enough not to touch it. If it had decided not to go off when it was supposed to, they weren’t going to give it any reason to do so now.

“It’s cuniflower?”

“Cuneiform. Perhaps the oldest written language on earth. It was used by the Sumerians, dating back five thousand years.”

“What the heck are they doing down here?” Linc asked.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Cabrillo replied, reaching for his camera phone so he could take pictures of the tablets. “I know later cuneiform script had a more abstract look to it, like a bunch of triangles and spikes. This looks more like pictographs.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning these date to the very earliest uses of the language.” He checked the images captured by his camera and reshot a few of them so they were clearer. “These could very well go back fifty-five hundred years or more, and they’re in pristine condition. Most examples of cuneiform have to be pieced together from fragments as small as stamps.”

“Listen, man, this is all well and good, but it isn’t exactly helping our situation. Get some water, and I’ll finish looking around.”

Cabrillo had drunk from thousand-dollar bottles of wine, but nothing could compare to that first sip of water from the spring. He drank palmful after palmful, and could almost feel fluid coursing through his body, recharging his muscles and clearing the fog of exhaustion that had been clouding his mind. His stomach was sloshing by the time Linc finished his reconnoiter.

“Looks like we stumbled into the Responsivists’ love shack,” Linc said. He held up a box of condoms with only two remaining, a wool blanket, and a trash bag with a half-dozen empty wine bottles.”

“I was hoping you’d find a scuba tank and a couple of dive masks.”

“No such luck. I think we’re just going to have to swim for it and hope like hell one of us makes it.”

“Let’s head back into the main chamber. I don’t do my best thinking around explosive charges.” Cabrillo considered inflating the trash bag with air and towing it behind them so they could each take a breath halfway down the tunnel, but its buoyancy would make it scrape along the roof of the submerged tunnel. The plastic would tear before they’d gone two feet. If they counterweighted it so it maintained neutral buoyancy, the drag would make their progress impossibly slow. There had to be a better way.

Linc handed him a protein bar, and for the next few minutes the men chewed silently, racking their brains to come up with a solution. Juan had shut off the light again. The faint glow coming from the far end of the cavern beckoned with both freedom and frustration. They were tantalizingly close, but the last obstacle seemed insurmountable. And then an idea hit him out of the blue that was so outlandishly simple, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it first.

“Any chance you recall the German words for sodium chlorate? It’s a toxic salt used as a pesticide.”

“ Natrium Chlor. I remember seeing a jar or two of it back in the dispensary.”

“And you still have that second detonator pencil?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to make an oxygen candle. While I’m gone, I want you to scrape up iron filings from the railroad track. When you mix the two and ignite them, the reaction produces iron oxide, sodium chloride, and pure oxygen. I’ll swim halfway down the tunnel and find someplace to fire it off. The oxygen will displace the seawater, and we’ll have a bubble where we can breathe.”

“More voodoo chemistry from your high school teacher?”

“Actually, I got this from Max. We have oxygen generators aboard the Oregonfor when we rig the ship for fire or chemical exposure. He explained how the system works.” Juan was going to need the flashlight, so he left Linc at the railroad track to scrape the shavings they would need with his knife. It took Cabrillo forty minutes to navigate his way back through the partially collapsed section of the tunnel, reach the dispensary, and return to the sea cave. In that time, Linc had managed to produce more than enough iron filings from the old rail.

Working under the beam of the now-dying light, Cabrillo mixed the chemicals in one of the empty wine bottles and wound the rest of the electrician’s tape around the glass while Linc took apart the detonator to reduce its explosive charge. When they were finished, Juan inserted the detonator into the top of the bottle and wrapped the makeshift oxygen generator in the plastic bag.

“Rube Goldberg would be proud,” Linc joked.

Juan kicked off his boots and pants at the edge of the quay and tossed his bush shirt aside. “Back in five,” he said, and lowered himself in the bath-warm water. The sea around him clouded with the dust that washed off his skin. Using an easy sidestroke, holding the bag and flashlight, he swam across the grotto to where he and Linc thought there was an exit.

Juan left the bag floating on the surface as he dove down, pressing hard with his legs and arms, the waterproof light turning the water turquoise. The salty water made his eyes sting, but it was a pain he had grown accustomed to over the years so he set it aside. At first, all he saw was jagged stone covered in kelp and mussels, but when he reached a depth of fifteen feet a yawning tunnel opened up in front of him.

It was easily fifty feet around, more than enough to accommodate a World War II-era submarine. When he turned off the torch, he could see the faint glow of sunlight at the very extreme periphery of his vision.

He returned to the surface and corralled the bag. He began taking deep breaths, filling his lungs to the maximum, purging as much carbon dioxide out of his system as he possibly could. When he began to feel light-headed, he thrust himself out of the water to clear his chest so he could take an even-deeper breath, filled his lungs, and dropped back into the gloom. He followed his flashlight beam downward and entered the tunnel. The tidal action that had created the cavern system kept the sides free of marine life. He counted the seconds in his head as he swam. He hit the one-minute mark and noted the sunlight was markedly brighter. He kept going, keeping his mind clear and his body relaxed as he went deeper into the tunnel. At a minute thirty seconds, he turned the flashlight to the ceiling. Ten feet farther, there was a concave space in the rock, a natural dimple, easily five feet across and a foot deep.

The bag had just enough air in it to keep it pressed to the ceiling. Juan felt through the plastic for the timing pencil and activated the detonator. He turned and started swimming away, keeping the same measured pace he’d used to enter the tunnel. He’d been under three minutes when he cleared the tunnel’s mouth and angled for the surface. He broached like a dolphin, coming halfway out of the water, expelling the air from his lungs in an explosive whoosh.

“You okay?” Linc called out from the darkness.

“I might have to give up my occasional cigar, but, yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m coming over.”

An instant after Linc said it, Juan heard him dive into the water. He was at Cabrillo’s side moments later, with their boots laced across his shoulders and their clothes tied around his waist. “I double wrapped your cell with the condoms,” Linc said. “It’s in your pant pocket.”

“Thanks. I forgot all about it.”

“That’s why you’re giving me a raise when we get back aboard ship.” Linc’s bantering tone then vanished. “Just so we’re clear, if your little Frankenstein experiment doesn’t work and there’s no pocket of oxygen we just keep going?”

The distance was too great for even the best swimmer, so when Juan replied he knew it was their death sentence. “That’s the plan.”

The detonator was too distant and small to feel through the water, so Juan let ten minutes tick by on his watch before asking Linc if he was ready. They began to hyperventilate, each knowing their bodies enough to keep from becoming euphoric from too much oxygen.

Together, they dove for the tunnel. For some reason, it looked ominous to Cabrillo. Like a massive mouth, and with the slight ebb tide sucking at him, it seemed the rock wanted to swallow him whole. The flashlight was fading fast, so he shut it off as he and Linc swam for the distant glow coming from beyond the cave. After a minute and a half, he turned the light back on and began searching for the oxygen pocket. The tunnel’s ceiling was featureless rock. The underside of the bubble should flash silver, like a pool of suspended mercury, but the light revealed nothing but blank stone. Juan had slowed as he searched and had just a second to decide if they should accelerate in a desperate, but hopeless, dash for the exit or keep searching for the dimple.

He panned the light around and realized they had drifted to the right. He cut left, followed by Linc, and still couldn’t see the bubble.

The taste of defeat was as bitter as the salt water pressing his lips. His oxygen generator hadn’t worked, and he and Linc were going to die. He started stroking hard toward the distant tunnel exit when he felt Linc’s hand on his ankle. Linc was pointing a bit more to their left, and when Juan hit the spot with the light he saw a flash like a mirror. They swam to it, expelling the air in their lungs before surfacing carefully so as not to hit their heads.

Neither cared that the oxygen was still warm from the exothermic chemical reaction and had a foul smell.

Juan was inexorably pleased with himself and was grinning like an idiot.

“Nice piece of work, Chairman.”

There was only enough oxygen for a three-minute break. The men filled their lungs greedily before they committed themselves to the final leg of their journey.

“Last one to the entrance buys the beer when we get back,” Juan said, taking one last breath before dropping into the tunnel.

A second later, he could feel the water churning as Linc swam in his wake. A minute into the dive, it looked as though the outlet had grown no closer. Even with the tide working in their favor, their progress was much too slow. When he was in his twenties, Juan could free-dive for almost four minutes, but there had been a lot of hard living in the years since. Three minutes fifteen seconds was the best he could manage now, and he knew Linc’s big body burned oxygen even faster.

They continued onward anyway, stroking through the crystal water as efficiently as they could. At two minutes thirty seconds, the mouth of the cave had finally brightened but remained impossibly out of reach.

Juan felt the first flutter at the base of his throat telling him he needed to breathe. Fifteen seconds later, his lungs spasmed without warning, and a little air escaped his lips. There were twenty yards to go, sixty tantalizing feet. By force of will, he clamped his throat to fight his body’s urge to inhale.

His thoughts started to drift as his brain burned up the last of his air. He was growing desperate, his motions uncoordinated. It was as if he no longer remembered how to swim, or even how to control his limbs. He’d been close to drowning before, and he recognized the symptoms, but there was nothing he could do about it. The broad ocean beckoned. He just couldn’t reach it.

Juan stopped swimming and felt water sear his lungs.

And as soon as he did, he started accelerating. Linc had recognized the trouble Cabrillo was in and had grabbed the back of his T-shirt. The ex-SEAL had to be as desperate to breathe as the Chairman, but his legs kicked like pistons, and each great arc of his right arm propelled them closer and closer. Juan had never seen a more determined display. Linc was simply ignoring the fact he was drowning and kept swimming anyway.

The water suddenly grew lighter, as they emerged from the cavern. On guts alone, Linc dragged them to the surface. Gasping, Juan spewed a mouthful of water and coughed up what felt like lungfuls more. They clung to rocks like victims of a shipwreck, as the sea surged gently around them. Neither man could speak for several minutes, and, when they could, there was nothing to say.

It would take an hour of hard climbing and another two and a half to circle far around the former Japanese installation before they reached their hidden jeep. Cabrillo had put the ordeal behind them even before they reached the top of the cliff. His mind was focused solely on the images stored on his cell phone. He didn’t know how or why, but he was certain it was the evidence he needed to blow the case wide open.

CHAPTER 25

HALI KASIM FOUND EDDIE SENG IN THE OREGON’S gym. Seng was wearing the baggy pants of a martial arts gibut no shirt. Sweat coursed down his lean flanks as he went through a series of karate moves, grunting with each punch and chop. Eddie noticed the look on Hali’s face and ended the routine with a roundhouse kick that would have taken off the head of an NBA center.

He grabbed a white towel from a bin next to a Universal weight machine and wiped his neck and torso.

“I screwed up,” Hali said without preamble. “After Kevin interviewed Donna Sky, I went to that damned tape again, programming new parameters into the computer. Gil Martell didn’t say ‘Donna Sky.’ He said

‘Dawn’ and ‘Sky.’ I checked, and the Golden Dawnhas a sister ship named Golden Sky. Eric and Murph did some digging. The Responsivists are holding one of their Sea Retreats aboard her as we speak.”

“Where is she now?” Eddie asked.

“Eastern Mediterranean. She’s scheduled to dock in Istanbul this afternoon. Afterward, she heads to Crete.” Hali then added, before Eddie could ask, “I’ve already tried to call Juan. He doesn’t answer.” With the Chairman incommunicado and Max still in the hands of Zelimir Kovac, Eddie was in command of the ship, and any decision would fall on his shoulders.

“Have there been any reports of illness on the ship?”

“Nothing in the news and nothing on the cruise line’s internal communications logs.” Hali recognized the hesitation in Eddie’s dark eyes. “If it helps, Linda, Eric, and Mark have all volunteered. They’re already packing.”

“If the ship is hit with a chemical or biological attack, they’ll be at risk as much as anyone else,” Eddie reminded.

“This is too much of an opportunity to pass up. If we can get our hands on some of their people, the intelligence will be invaluable.” Hali had put into words the other half of a dangerous equation.

Balancing risk versus reward was the most difficult of all military decisions because lives invariably hung in the balance.

“They can get to shore on the Rigid Inflatable Boat. The jet’s waiting at Nice. Tiny can file an emergency flight plan, and our people can be in Turkey as the Golden Skyarrives. It isn’t likely the Responsivists will attack while they’re in port, so we can at least sneak aboard and have a look-see.”

“Okay,” Eddie agreed, and then stopped Hali as Hali turned to go. “But under no circumstances are they to remain on that ship when she sets sail.”

“I’ll make sure they understand. Who do you want to send?”

“Linda and Mark. Eric is a first-rate navigator and researcher, but Mark’s weapons background will give him an edge finding a chemical– or biological-dispersal system.”

“You got it.”

“By the way,” Eddie said, to stop Hali from rushing off a second time, “what’s the status on our little eavesdropping gig?”

An hour before sunset, the Matryoshka, Ivan Kerikov’s luxury yacht, had eased out of Monte Carlo’s harbor with Ibn al-Asim and his entourage on board. Al-Asim was an up-and-coming Saudi financier who had begun funneling money into radical Islamic schools and some fringe terror groups, with an eye toward linking up with al-Qaeda. The CIA was particularly interested in him and his meeting with the Russian arms dealer because there was a chance he could be turned, and thus give access to the upper echelons of the terrorist world.

Nothing of any great importance had been discussed while the yacht was in port. Most of the men’s afternoon had been taken up by the women Kerikov had provided. But when the Matryoshkaslipped out of the harbor and headed into the waters of the Mediterranean, everyone on the Oregonknew the real negotiations were going to take place far from prying eyes.

With her running lights doused, the Oregonhad followed the Matryoshka, staying low over the horizon so that just the tip of her tallest mast peeked above the earth’s curvature. The Russians went out twenty miles before idling the megayacht’s engines. Feeling comfortable that they had the seas to themselves, Kerikov and al-Asim had started talking in earnest over an al fresco dinner on the boat’s back deck.

Using the Global Positioning System and the ship’s thrusters, Eric had programmed the computer to keep the Oregondead even in relation to the drifting Matryoshka, while, high atop the tramp freighter’s mast, sophisticated electronics monitored the yacht. Utilizing state-of-the-art parabolic receivers, high-resolution cameras to read lips, and a focused-beam laser that could sense the faint vibration of a conversation taking place on the other side of a window, they were able to eavesdrop on everything.

“Last I heard, al-Asim and the Russian were talking about SA-7 Grail missiles.”

“The Grail’s a piece of junk,” Eddie said. “They’d never be able to hit any of our jets with those. Ah, but a civilian aircraft would be vulnerable.”

“Kerikov made it clear early on he didn’t want to know what al-Asim planned to do with the arms, but the Saudi alluded to hitting airliners.”

Born in New York’s Chinatown, Eddie was especially enraged by the idea of terrorists targeting commercial aviation. Although he didn’t know anyone killed on 9/11 personally, he knew dozens of people who did.

“Anything else?” Seng asked.

“Al-Asim has already asked about nuclear weapons. Kerikov said he didn’t have access but would sell them if he could.”

“Lovely,” Eddie spat with a grimace.

“The Russian went on to say he would be willing to deliver something he called Stalin’s Fist, but said there were too many technical challenges to make it practical. When al-Asim tried to pursue it, Kerikov told him to forget he’d mentioned it. That’s when they started talking about the Grails.”

“Ever heard of anything called Stalin’s Fist?”

“No. Neither has Mark.”

“Langston Overholt might know something about it. I’ll ask when we turn over the raw-data intercepts.

That’s his problem anyway. Let me know the minute you hear from Juan, or if Thom Severance ever calls us back.”

“Do you think Max is okay?” Hali asked.

“For Severance’s sake, he had better hope so.”

ZELIMIR KOVAC WATCHED the chopper emerge from the leaden sky. It was a bright yellow dot amid the pewter clouds. He showed no outward sign of his anger. He had been unable to find the escaped American, and that failure rankled. He was not a man prone to make excuses, but that was exactly what he was rehearsing in his head as the helicopter flared over the pad, whipping up storm water that had pooled nearby.

Apart from the pilot, another man was with Thomas Severance. Kovac paid him no heed, focusing his entire attention on his superior, a term he meant quite literally. Thom Severance was superior in every way Kovac thought important, and Kovac’s loyalty to him and his cause knew no bounds. From that devotion sprang Kovac’s self-recrimination, and he hated himself for letting Severance down.

Severance threw open the chopper’s door, his windbreaker and hair whipping in the maelstrom. He somehow managed to make his movements elegant as he ducked from under the whirling blades. Kovac could not manage to reply to Severance’s dazzling smile, a smile he didn’t deserve. He glanced away, recognizing the second passenger.

Confusion replaced his anger.

“Great to see you, Zelimir,” Thom bellowed over the whine of the helicopter’s turbine. He recognized the startled look on his security chief’s face and chuckled. “I bet he’s the last person in the world you ever expected to see with me, eh?”

Kovac found his voice without moving his eyes away from Dr. Adam Jenner. “Yes, sir.” Severance dropped his voice an octave, making his next words a gesture of intimacy and trust. “It’s time you understand everything. Past time.”

Jenner approached and touched a gloved hand to the bandage where Kovac had pistol-whipped him back in the Rome hotel. “No hard feelings, Mr. Kovac.” Ten minutes later, they were in the underground base’s most luxurious suite. It was here that Thom and his wife would wait out the coming chaos. In total, there were facilities here for two hundred of the top members of the Responsivist organization.

The last time Severance had been here, the four rooms had been nothing but bare concrete walls. He admired the work that had gone into the suite, and, apart from the fact the windows were actually flat-panel televisions, could find no evidence he was fifty feet belowground.

“This is almost as nice as our new house in Beverly Hills,” he remarked, brushing his fingers against a silk damask wall. “Heidi’s going to love it.”

He asked a waiting attendant, who was beaming just to be in the presence of their group’s leader, for coffee service and sat in one of the wingback chairs in his office. The flat-panel monitor behind him showed the sea crashing against a rocky coast. The live feed was from a camera mounted not too far from the base’s entrance.

Jenner lowered himself onto a plush sofa, while Kovac stood at almost rigid attention in front of Severance.

“Zelimir, sit, please.”

The Serb took a chair but in no way relaxed.

“You know the old expression ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’?” Severance asked once the valet had poured coffee. He didn’t wait for Kovac to answer. “Our greatest enemies aren’t only those who ridicule our beliefs without fully understanding them. They are those that once believed but have lost their faith. They do us the greatest harm because they are privy to secrets we would never share with outsiders. Lydell Cooper and I talked about this at great length.” At the mention of the Responsivist founder, Kovac nodded and shot a glance at Jenner, as if to say Jenner didn’t deserve to be in the same room when that name was uttered. The psychiatrist looked back at him with a fond, almost paternal smile.

“We decided to create an expert on Responsivism, a man who families would turn to if they felt they had lost control of their loved ones. He could also approach those who left on their own, in order to determine their intentions. He could then report back to us so, ah, appropriate actions could be taken.” There was a trace of respect on Kovac’s face when he looked at Dr. Jenner. “I had no idea.”

“You don’t know the best part,” Severance went on. “There was really only one person we believed could do a credible job.”

“Who?” Kovac asked.

“Why, me, my dear boy,” Jenner said. “Only, with the plastic surgery to my face, the contact lenses, and the passage of almost twenty years, you don’t recognize me.” Kovac stared hard at Jenner, as if the intensity of his gaze could see through the disguise. “I don’t . . .” His voice trailed off.

“I am Lydell Cooper, Mr. Kovac.”

“But you’re dead,” Kovac blurted without thinking.

“Surely a man of your background knows that no one is truly dead until their body is found. I have sailed for most of my life. The storm that supposedly killed me was nothing compared to some of the weather I’ve been through.”

“I don’t understand.”

Severance spoke up, “Lydell had laid the foundation of Responsivism with his writings, giving us our basic tenets, the core of what we all believe.”

“But I am no organizer,” Cooper said. “That is where Thom and my daughter, Heidi, outshone me. I detest public speaking, holding meetings, or any of the mundane day-to-day details. So as they grew the movement, I took on a different role, that of protector. By acting like our biggest detractor, I was able to keep watch over everyone trying to harm us.”

Kovac finally found his voice. “All those people you turned against us, you reprogrammed?”

“Would have left anyway,” Dr. Cooper replied airily. “What I did was minimize their criticism of us. They had left the fold, so to speak, but for the most part none of them revealed much about us.”

“What about what happened in Rome?”

“That was a close thing,” Cooper admitted. “We had no idea Kyle Hanley’s father had the resources to hire a rescue team. I called Thom as soon as I knew they were taking him for the initial deprogramming in Rome, so you could be in position, and then later called in with the name of the hotel and number of the room so you could snatch him back. We weren’t sure how much the boy knew or what he told his father.”

“By the way, how are you coming on that front?” Thom Severance asked.

Kovac dropped his eyes. As bad as it was to admit his failure to Severance, he couldn’t speak of it in front of the great Dr. Lydell Cooper, the man whose philosophy gave purpose to his life.

“Zelimir?”

“He escaped, Mr. Severance. I don’t know how, but he got out of his cell and made his way to the surface. He killed one mechanic and injured two others.”

“Is he still on the island?”

“He stole an ATV last night. The storm was severe, and visibility was only a couple of meters. He must not have seen the cliff. A search party found the machine when the tide went out this morning. There was no sign of the body.”

“No one is dead until you see their remains,” Lydell Cooper intoned.

“Sir, you have my greatest respect and admiration,” Kovac said, “but it’s much more likely that this man Hanley had an accident during a storm. He was in very poor condition when he escaped, and I seriously doubt that he could have survived a night out in the elements.” He said nothing about the bioelectric implant he’d found and the implications behind it, because he didn’t want to sow seeds of doubt. The search teams were still combing the Responsivists’ private Aegean island, and if they found the fugitive they knew to report it directly to him. Kovac would get the information they needed and dispose of Hanley before any more damage could be done to his reputation.