第17章 The Old Debt

Nessa made herself obvious on the south side of Nine Mile harbor, and the four men came. She walked out onto the ice in the open, in plain sight, with the auger over her shoulder and the throw bag on her hip, and she stopped in the middle of the frozen harbor where the old channel ran under the ice and the current kept the water moving and the ice thin. She stood there and let them see her, and waited. It did not take them long. They came from the west, spread out across the ice, and behind them, from the dock, came a fifth figure, larger than the rest, in a long dark coat, and he walked the way a man walks when he has never once in his life had to hurry. Dorn Varek. He stopped twenty meters from her, out of arm's reach, and the four men stopped behind him, and for a moment the only sound in the whole white world was the wind and the creak of the ice under the current. "You are the pilot," he said. His voice was mild and unhurried and had no accent she could place. "You went into the water for a stranger in a storm and pulled him out, and then you kept him above water for a week, which is longer than most of my men would have managed. I want you to know that I respect it. I do not often get to say that to someone." "Where is he?" "That is the question, and it is a good one." Varek put his hands in his pockets. "I do not know. He went north along the shore about two hours ago, with a case under his arm, and I have two men on the road who are very good at watching a road, and I have a boat that can be anywhere on this shore by nightfall. So the answer is that he is not yet mine, and he will be, and the only thing your standing here has purchased is time, which is worth more than you think and less than you are hoping." "Then you know why I am standing here." "I do." He looked at her, and there was something in his face that was not cruelty exactly; it was the flat interest of a man appraising property. "You want to hear me say it. So I will. You are standing here because you want to believe that this is about a witness and a drive and a set of books. It is not. The books are only paper. What they represent is a company that has spent twelve years moving money for people who pay to have other people made quiet, and the man who wrote the books down is the only person alive who can say so out loud. Everyone else is replaceable. Including me." He shrugged. "Including you." "Who sold the route?" "Marlon Tarn." Varek said the name the way a man says the name of a tool. "Your handler. He sold the convoy and the timing and the two agents, and he sold them for a sum that would embarrass a smaller man, and then he went home and sat in his office and waited to be seen doing his job. He is probably dead by now, of a heart attack, or a fall, or a bad bottle. My people are tidy with the people they use up." "And the safe house list?" A small smile moved across Varek's face and did not reach his eyes. "Twenty years old," he said. "The old woman kept the island on a piece of paper for a decade after she sold it, and could not bring herself to throw it away, and in the end she gave it to you." He looked past Nessa at the ice, at the channel, at the thin skin of it under her feet. "You are standing on a very thin piece of ice, pilot. I have been polite because I respect your work. But I am going to take you off this lake, and I am going to ask you where he went, and I am going to ask you for three days at a house on the mainland where no one will hear you, and by the third day you will tell me, because everyone does." "No," Nessa said. "I will not." "You will." She took a step backward, and then another, and the ice under her boots groaned, and the four men moved forward, and she turned and ran. She did not run for the shore. She ran for the channel. It was the one piece of knowledge she had that they did not: that under the ice in the middle of the harbor the current ran fast and the ice on the channel's edge was not a meter thick but an inch, a skin over black moving water, and that a person who knew exactly where to stop would live and a person who did not would not. She walked the ice in a straight line toward the black seam in the middle of the harbor and she watched the ice ahead of her and she did not look back. Behind her, the boots. Close. Closer. She stopped when she saw the seam begin to darken, three meters ahead, and she turned and dropped to her knees and drove the auger into the ice at her own feet, and the ice split along a line she had been reading the whole way out, and the edge of it gave under the first of the four men and took him into the water without a sound. He came up once, gray and gasping, and grabbed at the edge, and Nessa, whose whole life was pulling men out of that exact water, did not reach for him. She stepped back and let the ice break in front of her and behind her, and the other three stopped hard, and one of them shouted, and the man in the water went under and the current took him, and the throw bag on her hip that had saved a dozen lives sat there unused, and that was the thing she would remember about this day above every other. She got off the ice on the east side, where the current did not reach, and went into the trees, and did not look back. She did not know how long she ran. The forest was a set of small instructions and she followed them one at a time: put your foot where the snow is shallow, keep the water on your right hand, do not stop to look back, because looking back costs a step and a step in this cold is money. The blood on her sleeve had gone from warm to cold to a kind of numbness that had nothing to do with the wound and everything to do with the temperature, and she knew the shape of that numbness from the water and did not trust it. She had a bad cut on her forearm from the auger and a rib that told her, with every breath, that something in her chest was cracked, and she was alone in a frozen forest with the men on the road between her and the only person in the world she trusted, and it was the cold that saved her, because she was very good at being cold, and she followed the shore north into the dark and did not let herself think about the man in the water, not once, not yet. ---