第8章 The Cache

They flew home the next morning on a patched float and a prayer, and made it, and put the plane back into the north cove under the spruce, and Nessa allowed herself to believe, for the length of that day, that they might actually last until Tarn found the leak. Then they went to the cache. There were two caches on Larkspur: the fuel drum on the south shore, which Vesta had told them to empty and move, and an emergency box on the north ridge under a slab of rock that the old chart marked with a service number. The box held a tent, a stove, a flare, a shortwave set, and a sealed can of fuel. It was the last-resort cache, the one you opened when everything else was gone, and Nessa had decided that with the plane barely airworthy and the weather closing again, they needed to know whether the box was there. They went up the ridge in the cold, single file, and she noticed the wrongness before she understood it. The slab of rock was still there. The cairn of stones beside it was still there. But the moss around the cairn had been disturbed in a circle, and the stones nearest the slab had been turned, their dark undersides up, and the lichen on them was dead, which meant they had been moved recently. She stopped and put a hand out, and Isaak stopped behind her, and neither of them spoke. She knelt and looked at the ground. A wire. Thin, grey, laid across the gap between two roots, almost the color of the moss, running from the cairn down the slope toward the shore. She followed it with her eyes and found the stake at the far end, a short iron pin driven into the rock, and taped to the pin, wrapped in plastic against the weather, a small dark box with a stub of antenna. She did not touch it at first. She crouched a meter away with her hands on her knees and studied it the way she studied ice before she trusted it: the angle of the antenna, the seal on the plastic, the little scuff of disturbed moss where a boot had turned, the wire that ran away down the slope toward the water and the boat that could anchor there. The device had been placed by someone who knew the island and wanted to know who else did. "It is a recorder," Isaak said, very quietly. "Or a relay. It listens, and it stores, and someone comes back for the tape." He looked at the cairn. "It has been here a while. The plastic is full of condensation. Weeks, not days." Nessa felt the cold come up through her knees from the rock, and it had nothing to do with the weather. "Which means someone put it here before we ever came," she said. "Which means this island was on the list." "Or it was chosen," he said. "If the people who took the convoy knew we would run, they would want a place we might run to. An old safe house. They would want to know whether we used it." She looked out over the ridge, down the long grey slope to the channel, and for the first time she let herself count the ways the island could be watched: the high ground of the next island, a boat anchored in the lee, a listening device left in the rocks. All of them. Every one of them. She had hidden them on the one piece of the map that had been chosen for them by the people hunting them. "We have to take the box apart," she said. "The tape will tell us who comes for it, and when. And we have to know if it has a transmitter, because if it does, they already know." "If it has a transmitter," he said, "then a man is already on his way." She pulled the recorder from the stake and turned it over in her hands. There was a thin seam around the case and a tiny switch set into the plastic, and beside the switch, a filament of wire the width of a hair, which was either an antenna or a fuse, and she could not tell which without opening it, and opening it in the cold with one good hand was a job for a steady place and a steady person. "We take it back to the cellar," she said. "We open it where there are walls." Below the ridge the island was still and white, and they went down through the spruce without speaking, because there was nothing left to say that the little box in her pocket had not already said. Someone had been on this island before them and had left a device in the rocks, and that meant the cabin, the cellar, the fuel cache, and the shore path were all places a stranger could describe from memory. She ran the island through her mind the way she ran a preflight, item by item, and disliked how many of the items had been chosen for her. They went down the ridge fast, keeping to the rock, and did not cross the open shore. And behind them, in the spruce on the northern slope, something they had not seen and could not see watched them go, and the cold little box in Nessa's pocket stayed silent, and no filament of wire warmed, and the question of whether it had ever been a transmitter or only a receiver stayed open until the cellar door shut behind them and the dark closed over the island again. * * * — Isaak — The cellar was cold and smelled of stone and old potatoes, and Isaak Sayer sat on the step with the lamp turned down to a coin of light and watched Nessa Ahlgren open the little box the way a surgeon opens a wound. He had spent two years reading ledgers. He had learned that a man's honesty showed not in what he said but in the small arithmetic of his habits, the receipts he kept, the hours he wrote down, the numbers he did not round. He had watched her now for five days, and her arithmetic was exact and ruthless. She fed the stove to the minimum that kept them alive. She counted the fuel. She flew closer to the danger than anyone should and further from the comfort, and she did it every time, and she did it as if it were nothing. He knew what that was, because he had done it himself for two years. It was a way of living that looked like strength from the outside and felt like a sentence from within. She looked up from the box and caught him watching. "What," she said. "Nothing." He looked away, at the lamp, at the wall. "Open it." She opened it.