Chapter 9 The Answered Beacon

The knife slipped on the third stroke and opened a bright seam across the pad of her thumb. Juna Reyes swore under her breath and set the blade against the ceiling of the truck bay, then reached for the pry bar she had worked off the bay's bumper ninety minutes earlier. Eighteen inches of trapped air at the high corner. The black water had come up a thumb's width while she was on the second set of bolts, and the salt had swollen the hardware into the wall until the bolt head was the only thing her bar could find. She set the iron against the head and put her shoulder into it, one-handed, the other hand flat on the ceiling to keep herself in the pocket. "Hello." She let it carry. "I know you can hear me." "They heard me the first time." The voice came through two inches of steel door, level and unhurried, the voice of a man who has had a great deal of time to decide how he will sound when someone finally answers. "I've been listening to that ladder rung for an hour." "You could have said something when I was on the roof." "I did say something. You were underwater." A short pause. The rung under her palm gave a small ping. "Who is out there?" "Juna Reyes. Tidefall SAR. I came down through the skylight at four." Silence, and then the sound of a man breathing carefully on the other side of the door. Three bolts withdrew in a slow scrape, one after another, and the steel door swung away from its frame on a hinge that shrieked the whole length of its arc. The light came at her face. She turned her head into the shoulder of her wetsuit and let it pass. "It opened on the fourth stroke," said the man. "Salt, not rust." He was fifty-five or sixty, in a harbor department coverall gone dark at the cuffs, holding the flashlight the way a man holds a lamp in a room where he knows where everything is. He looked at her mask, her lead belt, the wet rope at her hip, and something in his face gave up a little. "Ramon Delgado." He put the beam down and stepped aside. "I run the fire hall. Which is to say I run the truck bay and the gutters and the two hundred feet of conduit under this floor. Come in before the pocket closes." The safe house was the length of the room and eight feet wide, built by men who expected to be bored in it. Forty folding bunks stood in two rows, made up with military corners. A galvanized tank the size of a hot-water heater sat under the ridge of the roof. A folding table was bolted to the wall under the single window, and on it sat a radio with a microphone on a coiled cord, a hand-cranked lantern, a thermos, and a folding rule. The floor was eleven inches of water. The room smelled of diesel, wet canvas, and old coffee. "Your light," Juna said. "It's not a locator. Somebody is keying it." "It is a locator. It has been since the day they installed it." Delgado pulled a chair off its hooks and set it in the water. "Flood switches on the first floor, an alarm loop, and a locator tone down the same conduit. Three beats, pause, three beats. You could set your watch by it and never be wrong." "You have been keying it by hand." "I have been *unable to stop it*." He turned the chair and sat. "There's a reed panel four floors up that seals itself when the water touches the contacts. Nothing gets out of this building in either direction once that closes. Microphone, beacon, tone. All of it stuck on. I pulled the tone card with pliers on the second night and the panel spat it back within the hour." He held up his hands. "So I let it sound. It says the building is occupied. That is the only sentence it knows." "It says someone is alive in here." "It says somebody is alive in here who did not go up when the water came. That is a different sentence, and I have had a great deal of time to think about which of the two I preferred." Juna took her mask off and let it hang at her throat. Under the table she could see his boots, planted square in the eleven inches, and beside the table a coil of #12 copper and a stub of pencil with a rubber grip chewed flat. "You did go up," she said. "I went up the stairs to this floor because the stairs were the only way out and the way out was the water. Then I had a bad hour, and after that I came back down here and sat in the room with the tank." He turned the pencil end over end. "I am not going to pretend I was brave. I was tired and I found a dry room." Juna looked at the desk. A leather folder lay open on it, and inside it, in a clerk's careful hand, twenty-two ruled lines with times in the first column. "You've been keeping a log." "Every hour since Tuesday at nine. Air, water, tank, lamp." Delgado pushed the folder toward her with two fingers. "You will notice the column I did not expect to keep. The third one." Juna read it. Every third line said the same four words: beacon tone continues. "You logged the beacon." "I logged every time it stopped too. In the third hour of the second night it stopped for four minutes, and I would have paid for that information with a year of my life." He flipped back three leaves. "It resumed. Same three beats, same interval. That is the only thing in nine days that changed on its own." "It stopped for a reason." "It stopped for a reason, and it started again on the same second it stopped." Delgado's mouth tightened. "You know what that means. Somebody out there is holding a key and following a script, and it is not the building." Juna laid the folder down. Outside the single window the water had climbed past the frame and gone to glass, so the room was lit only by the lantern. She could see the light's reflection on it, flat and wavering, a pale coin the size of a dinner plate. Under the reflection, moving slowly left to right, a long white smear. "The second wave is inside the harbor," she said. Delgado stood up so fast his chair went over. "The channel went an hour ago. I watched the sea leave." He was already at the bunks, pulling a kit bag from under the third one. "How long?" "Seventeen minutes, if it holds the pace it's running. Maybe less." "Then we go up the ladder and we go to the lighthouse point, and if we can't swim a thousand yards in that time, we go up on the roof and we hold the roof." He got one boot on, then stopped, and stood with his hand on the boot. "Say the number again." "Nine hundred forty yards to the point. The band is crossing the harbor mouth right now." "Then the roof first. The roof first, and I will thank you later." He pulled the second boot on. "My name was on the paperwork." "I know what your name was on." "No." Delgado zipped the kit bag to his chest. "Tuesday night, twenty-two ten, the district phone rings in my office. A man from the state's warning center reads me a number off a fax. The offshore instruments have logged a slow slip three hundred miles down and a long slow one behind it, and the runup model wants sixty-one feet at the harbor mouth if both go. He asks me to wake the harbormaster. He asks me to wake the harbormaster and nobody else." Delgado turned the pencil end over end. "I wrote it down. Then I sat in that chair until midnight and decided that a number off a fax at ten at night is a thing that happens to other coasts." He picked up his flashlight. "Nineteen hours in this room telling myself the second one was the big one." The hatch overhead was four bolts and a wheel. Juna took the wheel. It turned a quarter turn and stopped, and she put her weight under it until the frame popped and the sea came in through the gap in a hard black sheet that hit her in the shoulders. The truck bay roof was a foot under. She broke the surface beside the bay's ventilation stack, got an arm around Delgado, and hauled him up after her. He lay on the wet concrete with his hand over his mouth, breathing. It was nothing like a harbor. The whole waterfront lay under three feet of moving brown water, and above the roofs of Front Street a mile inland the water stood in sheets against the uphill grade. The crane boom at the cannery stuck out of it at an angle. The breakwater was gone. Out past the mouth a band of white was walking in from the southwest, and behind the band the sea had begun to lift. Over the ridge to the north, one roof stood clear of everything else. The school. "Bay mouth to that roof," Delgado said, reading her face. "Three miles. Is that where the rest of them went?" "Forty yards above it. They walked there in the dark two nights ago." Juna looked at her watch. Then she looked at the white band, which had cleared the ruined pier and was crossing the flat black water over the town with its top edge a full story above the roofs. Nineteen minutes ago it had been a line you could step over. "We go," she said, and slid off the roof into the water.