Chapter 9 Dead Reckoning

The recorder held no tape. It held a small spool of wire and a stamped serial number and a transmitter no bigger than a thumb, and when Nessa finally got the case open on the cellar table she sat back and looked at it for a long moment and understood that they were already found. "It transmits," she said. "On a timer, or on a trigger?" Isaak leaned in. His breath moved the lamp flame. "If it is on a timer it has been sending since before we came, and there is nothing we can do about the past. If it is on a trigger it may have sent the moment I touched the stake, or the moment you picked it up, or not yet." "Can you tell?" He studied the wire, the switch, the tiny board, and shook his head. "Not without instruments. It is a simple device, and simple devices are hard to lie about and hard to read." He straightened. "Assume it has sent. What does that change?" "That we have less time than we thought." They went up to the radio at nine and got nothing. Ten minutes, twenty, an hour of the hand-crank turning and the cold frequency sighing in the headset, and no Vesta, and no voice at all. Nessa set the headset down and looked at the wall of the cabin and did the arithmetic she had been avoiding since the workboat first idled offshore. The Bureau had missed its window. Vesta had missed her window. The island held a listening device placed before they arrived. The only two people who knew where Isaak Sayer was hiding were a chief who had stopped answering and a handler in a distant city who might be the leak, and one of those two had almost certainly sold them. "We cannot stay," she said. "We cannot fly either." He nodded at the window. "That float is patched with hope and the storm is coming back tonight. If you put that plane in the air now and the ice forms again, you will put it in the water, and this time there will be no beach under the cliff." "Then we wait for the ice to pass and we go the moment it does." "Go where?" She did not answer at once, because the answer was a place she had never told anyone about, and telling it now felt like handing him the last thing she owned. "There is another island," she said. "West of the Bellamys. It is not on the service list. It has never been a safe house and it is not on any chart the Bureau ever filed, because the only person who ever used it was my brother, and the only other person who knows is me." She looked at him. "It sits over a deep channel that the old charts call the cold fathom. Six hundred meters of water under a rock the size of this room. There is no beach, no dock, and no place to land unless the wind is from the east. If we can get there, no one will follow." Isaak was quiet. "That is where he is," he said. "Your brother." "His boat is down there. The lake took the boat and never gave the boat back and never gave him back. I have gone out to the fathom in the summer to float over it and I have never once told a living soul." She met his eyes. "Now you know. So you understand what I am offering when I say we run to the one place in this lake that means something to me." He looked at her for a long moment, and the lamp put light on one side of his face and left the other dark, and he did not say thank you, which she was grateful for. "Then we both need to be honest about something first," he said. "About what." "About why you are still here." He folded his arms. "I have been telling myself you are here because a chief you trust asked you to be, and because you are the kind of person who pays debts. That was easy. It gave me a reason to keep my distance." He paused. "It stopped being true two days ago on the shingle, when you sat by that fire and let me hold your wrist, and I knew it was not duty that let you. So before we go to the place where your brother is, I need to know what I am to you, because I will not run to that place as your assignment." The stove ticked. The wind pressed a hand against the roof. "You are the man I went into the water for," she said finally. "Not the first one this month. The second one. The one I did not have to save and did anyway, and who has been pulling me out of it ever since." She stood up and looked down at him. "I do not know what that makes you. I know I am not letting you walk off this island by yourself to draw them away, which is what you have been planning since the recorder came out of the ground." He did not deny it. "You could not have known." "I know it the way I know weather," Nessa said. "It is the shape of the pressure. You have been calculating which way to run ever since we opened that box." "Because it protects you," he said, and for the first time his voice rose. "Every hour you keep me here, the people with the charts get closer to you. They are not looking for a pilot. They are looking for me. If I am not with you, you are no one." "And if you are not with me, you are a man in a stolen coat on a lake in a storm with nowhere to be, and they will find you in a day and put you in the road like your agent, and the names go back to being nothing." She said it evenly, and it landed like a stone. "So no. You do not get to spend yourself to keep me poor and safe. We go to the fathom together or we do not go." He looked at her for a long time. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Together," he said. "Together." There was one more thing to decide, and they decided it without much talk, the way two people decide a thing when both of them already know the answer. She would fly them out at first light if the ice allowed, and if it did not, they would go on foot across the frozen channel to the nearest island with a shore, and from there down the coast to the road. Either way the case went with them and stayed within arm's reach, because the case was the whole reason two men had died on a coast road and a chief had spent twenty years not sleeping and a woman had gone into the water twice. They spent the rest of the night packing the dive bag and the papers and the little that mattered, and neither of them slept, and somewhere past two in the morning she caught him watching her coil the shore line and looked away first. ---