Chapter 11 The Fixer

The man who came to Kettlehead was called Dorn Varek, and he arrived the way a bill arrives, quietly, with the certainty that it will be paid. Nessa would not learn his name until later. What she knew, on the morning she and Isaak stood on the ridge of Larkspur with Vesta's field glasses, was only the shape of him: a big man in a dark coat, standing on the deck of a grey workboat that had tied up at the Kettlehead fuel dock, looking out across the harbor with his hands in his pockets as if he owned the water. Beside her, Isaak watched him through the glasses and did not move, and when he finally lowered them his face had gone the color of the sky. "That is him," he said. "That is the man who put my two agents in the road." He said it without heat, the way he said everything, and that was how she knew how much it cost him. A man who has been hunted for two weeks learns to carry his fear somewhere the face does not show, and Isaak Sayer had learned it long before the hunt; she could see the discipline of it in him now, the way he folded the glasses and handed them back with a steady hand while his jaw worked once and stopped. Nessa took the glasses back. The boat was the same workboat that had idled in the channel two days before, and the man beside the wheelhouse was the same man who had swept the island with a glass. She watched him as long as she dared, and then the boat cast off and turned north, and she understood, with the certainty of weather, that it was coming for them. Vesta had told her once that the most dangerous moment in a pursuit was not the chase. It was the lull, the hour when the hunter has arrived and made a show of asking questions and is now doing the quiet work of choosing a place to wait. Varek was doing that work now. He had come to the fuel dock on purpose, to be seen, to let the town know that someone with money was interested in a woman pilot. "He has a chart of the north arm," she said. "And now he has looked at Larkspur from the water and seen nothing, because we were careful, and that will not satisfy him. He will drop men on the island and search it on foot." "Then we are already late," Isaak said. "Almost." She led him back down off the ridge, keeping to the rock. "We have the window this afternoon, before the ice closes the channel entirely. If the wind holds east, I can get the plane off the cove and put it down at the fathom, and he will spend tomorrow searching an empty island." "And if he finds the cabin? The cellar? The fuel?" "Let him. It will tell him we were here and are gone, and it will tell him nothing about where." She stopped at the cabin door and looked at him. "But there is one thing I have to do first, and you will not like it." "What." "I have to warn Vesta." Isaak's jaw tightened. "You do not know that she is clean." "No." Nessa pushed the door open and went to the radio. "But she taught me the approach to this island and the shape of the north arm and the one landmark that never moves, and if she sold us, then she sold the only two things she ever gave me, and I am going to make her say it to my face." She sat down at the set and began to crank. "If she answers, we learn something. If she does not answer, we learn something too." She cranked for ten minutes. The frequency breathed and clicked and gave back nothing, and she was about to give it up when the set coughed and a voice came through that was not Vesta's. "Northreach, Northreach, this is the Kettlehead fuel dock calling the rescue station." A young man's voice, nervous, speaking too fast. "Is anyone there. There is a man here at the dock asking after a woman pilot and a seaplane, and he has a lot of money and he does not like the word no, and old Hob told him to go to the mainland and the man laughed at him, and Hob has gone to the back room and I think he is calling somebody and I do not know who." A pause. "Is anybody there." Nessa's hand hovered over the key. She did not press it. Anything she said on this frequency was a way to be found, and the young man was frightened, and his fear would draw the big man to the radio the way fresh blood draws a lake fish. She turned the set off. "Vesta is not answering," she said, "and the fuel dock is being leaned on, and the man with the money is on the water or about to be." She stood. "We go now. Get the case and the papers. I will warm the engine." There was a version of Nessa that wanted to drive to the fuel dock and find the big man herself and end it on the pier, with her own hands, the way she ended a fouled line. She knew that version. It was the same version that went into the water for a log. She put it away the way she put away a crosswind on a short strip: acknowledged it, and flew the approach she had been trained to fly. They did it in twenty minutes, fast and quiet, and Nessa walked the Merganser through the shallows of the north cove and out into the channel while the ice cracked at the edges of the sheltered water and the wind held, just barely, from the east. The plane lifted off the channel and climbed, and behind them Larkspur Island shrank into the grey and the trees swallowed the cabin and the cellar and the fuel cache and the room where two people had spent six days learning each other, and Nessa turned the nose west and did not look back. "Where is he now?" Isaak asked over the headset. "Varek? On the water, or in a boat going to an empty island." "And us?" She pointed the plane at the far grey line of the western shore, where the water deepened and the colors of the lake went from grey to black, and below them, in the cold channel that the old charts called the fathom, six hundred meters of water waited under a rock the size of a room. "Home," she said. ---