Chapter 2 The Divert

The call came at four in the morning, which was the hour Nessa distrusted most, the hour when the lake gave back whatever it had taken. She was in the station loft with a mug of coffee that had gone cold in her hands, watching the weather crawl across the wall monitor. The storm had stalled over the north end of the lake and was feeding on itself, a slow wheel of rain and wind that would not clear for two days. Every forecast she pulled said the same thing: no one flies anywhere until it moves. Her phone buzzed with a number she did not know. She answered because Vesta had asked her to. "Miss Ahlgren." A man's voice, careful, flat, the voice of someone who had learned to give nothing away. "My name is Marlon Tarn. I work for the Bureau of Protected Testimony. Chief Skale said you would speak to me." "I am speaking to you." "Good." A pause, the sound of a hand over a receiver, then, "I need a pilot. I need a diver. I understand from Chief Skale that you are both." "Say what you need." "I had a witness in transit tonight. A convoy southbound on the coast road, three vehicles, two agents. Somewhere north of Kettlehead they were taken off the road. I have one agent confirmed dead, one missing, and a witness who is currently running through a storm in country he does not know, because I told him to. That was my instruction. If he is caught, he will be killed, and it will not be quick." Another pause, longer. "The people who took the convoy knew the route and the timing. That means the leak is on my side of the wall, which means I cannot send another convoy. I need a place that is not on any map I have filed, and I need a way to put him in it." The monitor showed the storm turning slowly, indifferent. Nessa watched it and said nothing, because the first thing she felt was not sympathy. It was the old tightening in the chest, the refusal, the knowledge that the last time she had gone out of her way for someone, the someone had been her brother, and her brother was at the bottom of the lake. "What you are describing," she said, "is a manhunt in the worst weather of the year, in a place with one road and one runway and a harbor everyone can see from the water. I cannot hide a man here. There is nowhere here to hide a man." "There is Larkspur." She set the cold coffee down. Larkspur Island was the southernmost of the Bellamy group and the smallest, a knuckle of rock and spruce with a single cabin the service had kept as a fuel cache for thirty years. It sat in a lee that made it invisible from the water on two sides and landable only by a pilot who knew the approach. She knew the approach. She had been flown there as a girl, by Vesta, on a training run. "How do you know that name?" she asked. "Because Chief Skale chose it when she worked for me," Tarn said. "Twelve years ago. Before she came here to retire. She is the only person alive who has ever used that island as a safe house, and she taught the one pilot she trusted to fly into it." A pause. "You." The weather wheel turned. Rain ticked against the window like a fingernail. "Why did she leave you?" Nessa asked. "I would rather she told you that herself. I will tell you what I can. The witness is named Isaak Sayer. He is a forensic accountant. He spent two years reconstructing a set of books that a shipping company kept for people who hurt other people for money, and when he was done he did not sell the reconstruction, he did not hide it, he walked into a federal office and handed it over. He has been in custody ever since, waiting to testify. The people who want him gone are the people whose names are on the books." The voice flattened further. "He is not a hero. He is a man who could not stop looking. That is a different thing, and it is the reason he is still alive." "And the drive?" "There is a drive. There is also a backup, which he says is somewhere he can reach, and which he will not describe to me over an unsecured line. Find the drive, you find the backup, you find the case." A breath. "I am not asking you to fight anyone, Miss Ahlgren. I am asking you to fly a frightened man to an empty island and keep him above water until I can find out who sold me out. Two days. Three at the outside." "Three days in a storm on an island with no power and no neighbor." "That is correct." Nessa should have said no. She could feel the shape of the no in her mouth, clean and round, ready. It was the answer she had given every time the department had asked her to train a replacement after Sten died, every time some well-meaning person had told her she needed to let people in. She had built a whole life on the shape of that no. Then she thought of the second man in the net, the hand drifting in the dark, and how she had gone down for him without thinking, and how that was the only part of herself she trusted. "I will need the rendezvous point," she said. "And I will need you to understand one thing. If the weather closes, I cannot promise you three days. The lake does not care what I promise." "Understood," Tarn said. "The point is an old logging dock on the north arm, coordinates to follow. He will be there before dawn. He is armed with nothing but what he is carrying, and he has been walking since midnight." "Then he will be cold." "Yes," Tarn said, and for the first time something moved in his flat voice, something that might have been a man and not only an office. "He will be very cold." She hung up and went to find Vesta, and found her already in the shed, pulling a tarp back from the Merganser with the rain running off her shoulders. "You told him yes," Vesta said, not looking up. "I have not said anything to him yet." "You are standing in the shed at four in the morning with your flight jacket in your hand." Vesta dropped the tarp and faced her. "I told him you would. I also told him you would hate me for it, and he should let you." "Do you want to tell me why you left the Bureau?" "No," Vesta said. "Not tonight. Tonight I want you to fly to the north arm, pick up a man you have never met, and bring him back to a place only the two of us know, and I want you to trust me enough not to ask why until you have to." Nessa walked the length of the shed and laid a hand on the Merganser's cowling, cold as a stone. She had flown this aircraft for nine years and had never once taken it up for a reason that was not written on a dispatch slip. There was a version of her life in which she said no to Vesta and went home and slept and woke to a report about a witness found dead on a coast road, and she knew that version, and she did not want to live in it. Careful had not brought her brother back. Careful had not made the water any warmer. She did not know what she was walking into. She knew only that the shape of the no had stopped fitting her mouth, and that a man she had never met was standing on a broken dock somewhere in the dark, waiting to be seen by someone. She held Nessa's gaze, and her old eyes were steady as the lake was not. "Can you do that?" Nessa put on the jacket. It was answer enough. ---