Chapter 13 Sabotage

The helicopter came in low along the western shore and passed directly over the island, and Nessa and Isaak lay flat under the overhang of the cliff and did not breathe. Through the snow she could just make out the shape of it, a small dark machine with a company mark on the door and a man in the front seat leaning out with a glass, sweeping the rock and the water and the cave mouth where two people lay still as stones. It went by, turned, came back once, and then the wind took it and it went away north, and the sound of it faded into the general noise of the storm. They lay where they were for a long time after that. "He is not searching the lake at random," Isaak said at last. "He knows roughly where we are." "He knows the north. He does not know this island. It is not on any service chart and it is not on any list." Nessa pushed herself up and brushed the snow off her front. "Which means the helicopter is a sweep, not a fix. He is working outward from Larkspur, and we are west of that, and the weather is on our side for now." "For now." She stood and looked back at the plane, staked down under the cliff, half drifted over with snow. And because she was a pilot, and because a pilot never stops reading an aircraft, her eye caught something on it that did not belong. She walked over and knelt at the cowling and ran her hand along the seam, and her fingers found a wire. It was thin and black and had been spliced into the bundle under the cowling with a neatness that told her it had been done by someone who knew aircraft, and it ran back along the underside of the fuselage to a small dark lump the size of a matchbox, taped out of sight behind the rear strut. She stared at it for a long moment while the cold went through her gloves. "Nessa." Isaak had come to stand beside her. "What is it." "A beacon." Her voice came out flat and strange. "A tracking beacon. It sends a pulse on a frequency, and the pulse tells a receiver how close it is and which way to come." She touched the little box and did not pull it off. "Somebody wired this into my plane. Somebody with access to the shed and four minutes alone with the cowling." He understood before she finished. "Someone at the station." "Someone at Northreach." She stood up and looked at him and her face was hard with a thing she did not want to feel. "One of the three people I eat breakfast with. One of the people who help me drag men out of freezing water. Somebody there put this on my aircraft and let the men in the road follow me to the dock in the north arm." He did not offer comfort. She was glad of that. He stood with her in the wind and let her be angry, and after a while the anger found its way to the surface and she turned and drove her gloved fist into the fuselage once, hard, and the plane shuddered, and she leaned her forehead against the cold metal and closed her eyes. "Sten used to say that in this work you trust the crew because the crew is all you have," she said. "I believed him. I have spent a year trusting the crew because the crew is all I have." She did not cry, because she had not cried in a year, and she was not going to start in a snowstorm on the wrong end of the lake. She turned the rage over in her hands the way she turned a knot of line, looking for the end of it. Somebody at Northreach had taken money to put a pulse on her aircraft and send men to the dock in the north arm, and whoever it was had known the schedule, the fuel, and the fact that she would fly to a stranger in a storm, which meant it was not a stranger at all. It was a person she had trusted. She could think of three names and none of them fit, and that was the worst part, worse than the beacon, worse than the men on the road. "Whoever it is," Isaak said quietly, "is a person who was afraid, or owed money, or was told that the price of refusing was their family. Men who do this are rarely monsters at the start. They become monsters by small steps." He paused. "I know, because I have read the receipts of men who took those steps." "Then read theirs for me." She straightened. "I need to know who to stop trusting, and I need to know it before we make a move." They took the beacon off the plane. It was the work of a few minutes with the tool roll, and she held the small box in her palm and found that it weighed less than she had expected, such a small thing to have carried so much. "We could crush it," Isaak said. "No." She closed her hand around it. "A beacon that goes silent tells him we found it and cut it. A beacon that keeps moving tells him where we are. But a beacon that moves away from us tells him where we are not, and that is worth more." She looked at the frozen island around them, at the cliff and the rock and the storm. "How far can a boat go in this weather?" "Not far. A few kilometers a day, in the lee of the islands." "Then we give him a few kilometers." She tucked the beacon into the dive bag and pulled the zipper shut. "Tonight I fly the bag east, along the inside of the Bellamys, and I drop it on an island that looks like a good hiding place. He follows it, spends his day on the wrong rock, and while he does, we move." "And I?" "You stay here, in the cave, with the case, and you keep the fire smoke curling in the lee, and if I am not back in two hours you take the case into the water at the north end and you do not wait." She met his eyes. "I am not asking. I am telling you the order of things." He looked at her for a long beat. "Two hours," he said. "Two hours." ---