第19章 Under the Ice

The Shrike was exactly where Vesta had left her in the shed at the head of the bay, cold and dry and ready, and they pushed her down the ramp and through the broken ice at the mouth and into the black water, and the old boat took the lake like a horse that had been waiting in a stall too long. They went south under the shore, keeping to the lee, Vesta at the wheel and Nessa on the bow with the searchlight hooded and the throw bag and the dive bag between her boots. The lake was like glass for the first kilometer and then it roughened, and the wind came up out of the southwest, and by the time they rounded the south cape the swell was running and the stars had gone behind a new front of cloud, and the barge stood out of the water ahead of them, a low black island with a light on its mast. There was a boat tied alongside it. Two men on the deck. One man in the wheelhouse. And nowhere, so far as Nessa could see from the bow, one man who mattered. "He is below," Vesta said over the engine. "There is a hold in the barge and they keep the water in the bottom of it. That is where they will have put him, because it is cold and quiet and they can leave him there while they decide what to do." "Then I go under." "Nessa." "The barge is anchored, so it does not move much, and the water is deep, so the hold is below the waterline, and the only way in that they will not see me coming is through the hull." She was already pulling on the drysuit that Vesta had brought, and this time there was no hole in the ice and no short line and no shore party; there was only a barge and a dark hold and a man in it. She checked the seal at her throat and the knife at her calf and the lamp on her wrist. "You keep the Shrike in the lee and you keep the searchlight off and you listen for me on the radio. When I say go, you come to the stern ladder and you do not stop for anything you hear." "He is a frightened man in a hole in the dark," Vesta said. "When you find him, be quiet, and be slow, and tell him your name first." "I know." Nessa went into the water. The cold took her the way it always took her, total and immediate, and then the work took over, and she swam down along the anchor chain into the deep black under the barge, where the hull curved and the barnacles cut her glove and the only sound was her own breathing and the creak of the anchor line and, faintly, from somewhere above and inside the steel, a human voice. She came up under the overhang of the stern and found the hold by the light that came up through the water from a hatch on the deck, and she surfaced in it, quietly, in the black water at the bottom of the barge, and there he was. Isaak Sayer sat against the far wall of the hold with his hands tied in front of him and his head down, and he had been badly used; she could see it in the way he held his shoulder, and the blood at his hairline, and the way he did not lift his head when the water moved. She said his name first, the way Vesta had told her. "Isaak. It is Nessa. I am here." His head came up. For a moment he did not believe it. She saw him decide not to believe it, and then decide to believe it anyway, because there was nothing left to lose by believing it, and something in his ruined face came alive. "You are in the water," he said. His voice was a rasp. "Of course you are in the water." "That is my whole profession." She cut his hands free and put her wrist lamp out and took his arm. "Can you swim?" "I can float. Swimming is for people who are not tied up." He got his feet under him. "The case?" "With Vesta. On the boat. Waiting." She took his weight and moved him to the water. "We go out the stern, under the hull, forty meters to the boat, and then you do not look back, and you do not stop, no matter what you hear." He looked at her in the dark of the hold. "What will I hear?" "Probably nothing. Possibly everything." She pulled him into the water. "Go." They went out of the hold into the black lake, and above them on the deck a man shouted, and boots hammered on steel, and the barge's engine started with a roar, and Nessa swam with one hand on the anchor chain and the other on Isaak Sayer, counting the strokes in her head the way she counted everything, and Vesta came out of the dark in the Shrike with the searchlight up and the throttle down, and they surfaced in her wash and were hauled over the rail, and then there was the whole rest of it: the barge turning, the boats coming, the flare going up from the deck, and Vesta Skale driving the Shrike at the mouth of the harbor with the searchlight on and a plan that depended on the provincial police being on the water and not the road, and on the fog that had come down over the south cape, and on a channel marker that only she knew. The police boat came out of the fog with its light bar up and took the barge's escort boat at the mouth of the harbor, and the barge itself ran aground on the shelf by the south cape trying to turn, and its crew went into the water and got out again into the hands of the police, and Varek was not with them. By then the whole south cape was full of light, and the fog had lifted just enough for her to see the shore, and running along the shore road, red and blue and slow in the snow, the vehicle Vesta had promised her, the provincial police arriving the way help always arrived in the north, at the very end of the window, when a person had already decided she was alone. Varek was on the barge. Nessa saw him when they came alongside to help take the prisoners: a big man in a dark coat standing at the rail of a stranded barge with his hands in his pockets, looking at her across the water, not running, not shouting, only looking, the way a man looks at a bill he intends to pay later. And then the police boat came between them, and he was gone. ---