Devil's Keep (31 page)

“Come in,” Favor said.

Stickney said, “You’re taking on a load here, bucko.”

“That’s the way it worked out.”

“Just one thing I want to be clear about,” Stickney said. “This deal with karmic accounts and paying off the debt—it sounds good on a slow afternoon. But it’s just words. It isn’t real.”

“It’s real,” Favor said. “I know that, and you do too.”

“You are not obligated.”

“I think I am,” Favor replied. “But that’s okay.
This is what I’m supposed to do. I want to do this. You shouldn’t try to take that away from me.”

“You’re a good man,” Stickney said.

“Not yet,” Favor said.

About half an hour after Stickney’s visit to the cabin, Arielle, too, left the deck and slipped down through the narrow hatch.

The cabin was dark. The laptop was put away in the case.

Favor was stretched out on one of the benches, asleep.

Arranged on the opposite bench were the balisong knife and a neatly folded wet suit, with a mask and fins and snorkel resting on it. Something about Favor made her look closer, something in the way he slept. He was stretched out almost full length, legs slightly bent, one arm tucked beneath his head.

She watched him for a few seconds before she realized: he was relaxed.

He was breathing evenly. His body was limp, his face was calm.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him this way.

Ray Favor was at peace.

When Favor woke, he went straight from deep sleep to fully alert. No yawning and stretching, no groping for awareness. His eyes blinked open and he was instantly in the moment.

The time was one a.m.—exactly when he had wanted to awaken, to the minute. The boat was rocking, harder than when he had gone to sleep. Waves were slapping the hull, louder than before.

He stripped naked, stepped into the wet suit, pulled it up to his waist. He laid the balisong along the inside of his left forearm and secured it there using adhesive tape that he tore from a roll in the first-aid kit. Then he pulled the suit up over his arms and shoulders. It was a size too small, but the rubber was thin, and it stretched enough that he could zip it up across his chest. He flexed his arms. The knife felt snug between his skin and the taut shell of the suit. The largest pair of surf shoes was also a size too small, but he jammed his feet inside and fastened the Velcro straps.

They were all awake in the cockpit, waiting for him, when he came up from below with the mask and fins and snorkel in hand.

“Morning, Ray,” said Mendonza.

“Ray,” said Stickney.

“Hello, Ray,” Arielle said.

The greetings were casual. Almost as if this were just another morning. Almost.

Favor looked out and saw whitecaps on black water. The moon was a smear behind clouds.

He said, “I realize we’re still early, but why don’t we move out and take it slow? I’m ready to get out of here.”

Stickney pulled up the anchors, and when he was back in the cockpit, Mendonza moved the throttles forward and swung the long hull to the southeast, toward the island.

The panel showed fifteen knots. At this speed the engines burbled softly, the hull slicing through waves that were now three to four feet. Favor sat quietly with the fins in his lap, the mask and snorkel hanging around his neck. His face was impassive.

The moon’s blur was fading when the navigation screen showed five miles to target. At three miles out, Favor stood and looked at the navigation panel and then outside. The darkness was almost total, just the dimmest of illumination from starlight through the clouds.
Banshee
was running without lights, and in the cockpit there was only the muted glow of the hooded screens.

The wind was picking up now, buffeting the windows of the cockpit. It was from the south. That was good, Favor knew: it would carry the engine sounds away from the island, into the empty water to the north.

He said, “Take it in to one mile, or until you can
see the island. Whatever comes first. If you can see the island, they can see us.”

A mile and a half out, he spat into the mask and rubbed it into the glass—a crude trick to prevent condensation—and stood in the hatch behind the cockpit. He said, “Five knots. Bring it around when you hit the drop point. I’ll know it’s time to bail.”

He stepped out onto the rear deck. At that moment, lightning pulsed silently in the southeastern sky. A squall line. It silhouetted the hulking shape of the island.

Favor said, “Shit, that’ll highlight us for sure. I’m out of here.” He pulled the fins over his surf shoes and fitted the mask over his brow and nose. The boat was swinging around, stopping. Arielle came out into the deck.

She said, “Watch your ass, tough guy.”

He met her eyes through the glass, nodded, then stepped to the edge of the boat and held his palm against the mask so that the fall wouldn’t dislodge it.

He front-rolled over the side and into the dark water.

Lightning throbbed again as he plunged.

He curled, rolled head up, and kicked for the surface. Thunder was rumbling when he broke into the open air. He swam several strokes, turned, and looked back. Arielle was watching, saw that he was clear, and gave Mendonza a rev-it-up signal. The engine’s rumble seemed loud to Favor as he bobbed at the surface, but within a few seconds the boat was out of sight, and seconds more after that the rumble
was swallowed by the wind.

He was alone.

Again the lightning. It was directly behind the island. Favor counted and got to five before the thunder arrived, a low rumble.

He put his head down in the water, breathed through the snorkel, and he began to swim.

Ilya Andropov was timing it too. When the first flash came, he was standing at a window in the operations room in the main building of the complex. He began to count, and was just about to hit four when the thunder clattered in. Four miles, maybe a little less.

He said, “What’s the speed of storms in these parts?”

From his desk, the radio operator said, “Most of them are fast. Real fast.”

He cupped a hand at his earpiece, listened, and spoke to Andropov:

“Chopper’s twenty minutes out. It’ll be close.”

Andropov walked out, across the corridor, into the scrub room where the surgical team sat waiting. Two surgeons, including Karel Lazovic, an anesthesiologist. two surgical nurses, two orderlies.

“Thirty minutes,” Andropov said from the door, then turned and walked away.

“Thirty minutes” was not just timekeeping: it was a command, and the two orderlies understood it. One of them picked up a hypodermic kit, and the two of
them left the room.

Boris Godina and Sasha Batkin were their names. Godina was a hulking man-mountain: tall and massive. Batkin was small, slight, wiry. They were often assigned to the same details, and the sight of the odd pair provoked grins around the island. But only from a distance. Both were Spetsnaz-trained in hand-to-hand combat. Godina was especially feared, as much for his dark temper as his physical size and power. He was mean and massive and viciously schooled. Nobody screwed with Boris Godina.

Now Batkin and Godina walked along the corridor and out of the building, down to the high-walled concrete block structure that everyone on the island knew as the Guest House. Batkin had a key ring with three keys, one for the pharmaceutical locker and one for each of the doors to the cells. These were among the few locked doors on the island. He flipped a wall switch that turned on the lights in the first of the two cells, picked out the correct key, and swung the door open.

Both Batkin and Godina had combat experience. They knew exactly what was going to happen soon to the boy in the cell, but they were unfazed. One way or another, they had brought dozens across the threshold between life and darkness, either dealing violent death by their own hands or tending mortally wounded comrades as they slipped away. This was just more of the same.

The boy lay on his cot, head lolling. He was out. At least he was supposed to be out. They had kept
him sedated since the trouble the previous morning. But there was fight in him yet. He began to struggle as they lifted him off the cot, one at each arm. He writhed and pulled.

They couldn’t bring him in this way. Godina pinned his arms behind his back, and Batkin fixed the hypodermic and injected him with more sedative, a double dose. All this time his sister was making a fuss in the other room, shouting and wailing, enough to wear on their nerves. So they hauled him outside and held him up while they waited for the drugs to kick in.

In a few minutes his legs buckled. Then they carried him in, one at his shoulders and the other at his feet, his body sagging between them.

They didn’t bring him through the main corridor to the operating room. Instead, they carried him around to the south side of the building, through a door to a prep room with a bare steel table on rollers. Lazovic was waiting there. He stood to one side while the orderlies strapped the boy onto the table and cut away his shirt, exposing his chest. When they were done, they moved aside and Lazovic stepped up to the table. He was holding a marking pen with a thick black tip. He touched the tip to the boy’s bare skin and inscribed a single line, about a foot long, down the middle of the chest.

Favor was a strong swimmer, a high school distance champion in the pool. He often swam two or three miles in Lake Tahoe in the early mornings before
the casual boaters and water-skiers put their craft in the water. Now the distance to Devil’s Keep was just under a mile and a half. The fins added power to his kick, and the buoyancy from the salt water and the foam rubber of the wet suit seemed to make him weightless in the water.

This should have been nothing. But the waves were high and growing higher. Rolling in off his right shoulder, they were pushing him back and trying to sweep him past the island and into the open sea. To counter the current, he altered his course to the southeast, making for a point off the southern tip of the island.

The lightning was brighter and more frequent now, and when he looked up during one extended string of bursts, he found that he was still being pushed north. He turned again to the south. Now he was plowing directly into the waves, digging up the steep faces with his arms and then kicking hard down the back sides. More lightning, more thunderclaps, loud and furious, coming within a one-count of the flashes, the squall line passing over the island.

The cliff was closer. He knew that he was making distance now, and he pushed harder, fighting up through the waves, almost bodysurfing as he kicked down into each trough, immediately digging up the next face. He was barely conscious of the storm as it moved overhead. His face was down in the water as he breathed through the snorkel. Each flash threw a pale glow deep into the water, and he was distantly aware of the booming thunderclaps: they sent a
shiver through the water that he felt against the exposed skin of his face.

The current grew stronger as Favor closed on the island. The waves were higher; they broke over him, driving him down into the turbulence and filling the snorkel. He cleared it a few times with sharp exhalations that blew out the seawater, but it continued to fill after nearly every breath. So he gave up the snorkel and spat out the mouthpiece as he kept stroking against the current. A low churning sound now filled the space between thunderclaps. It was the sound of waves crashing against rock. He looked up and saw the cliff face looming overhead. The surging water had him now, pushing and tossing him. His strongest kicks and strokes barely kept his head above the surface. He felt himself lifted and dropped, shoved and lifted and dropped again, then thrown one more time.

He was being tossed toward a pile of rubble at the foot of the cliff, sharp-edged chunks of stone the size of dressing tables and refrigerators. He tried to kick away, but an onrushing wave flung him into a rock that jutted out of the water.

Favor managed to turn aside and take the wave head-on. The move saved him. When he smashed against the rock, he took the blow to his back instead of his face. It knocked the breath from him and stunned him. The backwash pulled him down and tumbled him over a slope of submerged stones; he got his arms up over his face in time to absorb the jolts.

He fought the instinct to ascend. He knew that
the next wave would take him again, and he might not survive a second crash at full force against the rocks. So he stayed down and wrapped his arms around a submerged boulder, and waited until he felt the wave surge over him. Then he shot up and forward, finding a few seconds’ lull in the fury. He kicked and stroked and came in just behind the breaking wave. It was a barely controlled crash. He covered up and let his arms absorb the force, then kept moving, scrambling upward.

The following wave smashed in around his legs, but he felt its force drain away as it receded. He hauled himself up onto a tilted slab, and when he was sure that he was beyond the reach of the crashing surf, he stretched out on the flat stone surface, facing up toward the sky.

He gasped and heaved and sucked in air by increments until he could finally breathe again.

Rain was falling. He hadn’t noticed. But he could see it now, gleaming streaks in the lightning flashes, and he could feel it pattering against his cheeks and taste it as it washed the salt water from his lips. He reached up and pulled away the mask to let the rain wash over his face.

His right arm seemed to work okay. Elbow and wrist and fingers. Yeah. He began a cautious inventory of the rest. His left arm hurt, but it was the bruise-and-contusion kind of hurt, not the stabbing pain of a fracture. He noted that the knife was still in place. Left leg, right leg … all good. He breathed easily.

He told himself that he was lucky. Real lucky. He
could have broken his back.

The rain continued to pelt him. He knew that he should be moving up the cliff, but he was tired. Not just tired, he thought. Drained. Completely exhausted.

He told himself that he needed to rest for a while before he continued. He lay on the slab. He would have napped, except for the noise. There was the pounding of the waves, and the thunder’s intermittent roar, and the spattering of raindrops against the flat rock near his ears.