Chapter 14 The Informant

She flew the beacon east at dusk and dropped the dive bag on the north shore of an island with a good cove and a stand of spruce, and she was back on the fathom in under two hours, and in the morning the helicopter came back and swept the wrong island, and she and Isaak watched it through Vesta's field glasses and said nothing and did not celebrate, because a helicopter that sweeps one island today can sweep another tomorrow. The question that remained was the one with a name on it. She got the answer that afternoon, when the storm broke for an hour and she cranked the radio and used a code she and Vesta had once made up for the busy season, a set of numbers that meant nothing to anyone listening and everything to the two of them. She sent the numbers. She sent the beacon's frequency. She sent the word for betrayed, which in their code was the number of the old dive locker they had never replaced. Vesta came back on the frequency in four minutes, which was fast, and her voice was thin and hoarse, as if she had not slept since Larkspur. "Confirmed," Vesta said. "Ot Tar is your leak." Nessa sat very still with the headset on and the crank in her hand and did not say anything for a moment, because the name had gone into her chest like a thrown knife and she wanted to be sure she could speak before she tried. "Ottar Lund," she said. "I have the proof. Hob found it. A transfer into his account, three weeks ago, and a second one last week, and a name on the sending account that matches a shell company I have seen before." A pause. "His wife's medical bills, Nessa. The boy does not gamble and does not drink. He has a wife who is sick and a daughter at the school in Kettlehead and a job that pays him nine thousand a year. They came to him with money and a story about how no one would get hurt, and he believed it, the same way a man believes a weather forecast." "That does not make it less true." "No." Vesta's voice was steady and hard. "It does not. He is not to be trusted with anything, and when this is over he will answer for it to someone whose job is to make him answer. But I am telling you the whole of it because you are going to want to hate him, and hate is a bad pilot. It flies you into the ground." She thought about Ottar Lund, who was fifty-one and had a laugh like a dropped toolbox and a wife named Thora whom Nessa had driven to the mainland for treatments twice that year, and a daughter at the school whom Nessa had once taught to tie a bowline, and she found that the anger she wanted was not there, only a heavy, cold grief that sat where the anger should have been. He had been in her cockpit. He had flown the second plane on the night Sten went into the water, and he had held the search grid while she went in. And he had taken money to point the men in the road at her. "I want to hate him." "I know. I want that too." A long pause. "Now listen to me, because I have only a minute and there is a thing I have to say that I have been not saying for twenty years. That list of safe houses they used to have. The one that was sold. I did not find out about it after. I knew about it. I was there when it was sold, and I did not stop it, and I told myself for twenty years that it did not matter because no one would ever use those places again." Her breath came uneven over the radio. "And then I sent you to one of them. So when this is done, if you never speak to me again, you will be right, and I will not argue." Nessa closed her eyes in the cold cave with the case beside her and the storm working outside, and she thought about the summer before last, and Vesta pointing at the spruce that never moved, and what the old woman had really been teaching her. "Vesta," she said. "Why did you leave the Bureau." "Because I sold something and I could not look at what it bought." The radio clicked. "The Bureau will not save you, Nessa. Tarn is three days silent. I think Tarn is dead, or worse. You and the plane and the drive are all that is left of the case, and they know it, and they will come with everything to the one place they have not looked." A pause. "The fathom. They know about Sten. They will know about the fathom. It is the only place left in this lake that means anything to you." The radio went to static. Nessa sat with the headset in her lap and looked at Isaak across the cave, and he had heard enough of the shape of it to know it was bad. "Ottar," she said. "The man who flies the second plane. The man who helped me recover Sten's boat. He sold me to them because his wife is sick." She said it without any edge at all, and that was how he knew how deep it went. "And Vesta knew the list was sold, and sent us to Larkspur anyway, and if we are lucky she did not know what she was doing, and if we are unlucky she did." She thought, too, about how much easier it would be to be angry at a stranger, and how the whole machinery of this business seemed built to make sure that the people who did the worst things were never the people you could comfortably hate. Ottar was not a monster. Ottar was a man with a sick wife and a bad winter and a bank account that had been too small for too long. That was the design, the one Isaak had spent two years writing down. The money always went to buy the small man, and the small man was always someone you knew. "Which do you believe?" "I believe people do terrible things by small steps," she said, and looked at him. "You taught me that. So I do not know what to believe about her. What I believe about you is the only thing I am sure of, and I am not going to spend it on someone who has already left the room." She stood and reached for her jacket. "They know about the fathom. We cannot stay. We fly at first light, and we fly the drive to the mainland, and we give it to someone who cannot be bought, and we do it before Varek gets here." "And the weather?" "It will be terrible," she said. "We go anyway." ---