Impact (37 page)

85

Burr stood in the pilothouse, swiveling the spotlight around, peering into the storm. The beam stabbed into the raging murk, showing nothing but boiling water and rocks. Where were they? Had they drifted out of the lee? He fiddled with the dials of the radar, trying to tune in a coherent image beyond the limited range of the light, but all he could get was static.

A bolt of lightning flashed, illuminating the towering rocks on his right. The roar of surf was almost deafening and the water around him was webbed with spindrift, the sea heaving.

“Son of a bitch!” Burr pulled down the VHF mike and pressed transmit. “Where are you?”

No answer.

“Respond or he’s dead!”

Still no answer. Was it a trap? He hollered into the VHF, “I got the gun at his head and the next one’s for him!”

With a sudden roar the boat surged forward, throwing Burr off balance. He seized the passenger seat and arrested his fall, trying to pull himself up as the boat accelerated. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried, struggling to brace himself and get the gun back over on the fisherman. He stared through the pilothouse windows: the son of a bitch was accelerating the boat straight for the reef, a wall of rock rising from a hell of boiling surf, rain streaming from its ramparts.

“No!” He lunged for the wheel with his left hand while bringing the gun up with his right and firing it almost point-blank at Straw. But the fisherman anticipated the move and jerked the wheel, causing the boat to careen sideways, throwing him off balance. The shot went wide and Burr fell hard, crashing through the flimsy wheel house door to end up sprawled in the rear cockpit.

“Motherfucker!” He struggled to rise, grasping the gunwale railing and pulling himself up into the teeth of the storm. The boat had swung ninety degrees and was still tilting to one side, coming broadside to the sea. Straw jerked the wheel back again, trying to keep Burr off balance. But he seized the rail and hauled himself to his feet despite the tilting deck, bucking and heaving, and braced himself while bringing the gun up and aiming it into the pilothouse at Straw. He was about to fire when he heard a new sound—a full-throated roar of an engine—and turned to see a terrifying sight. A boat suddenly materialized out of the storm, bulling straight at him at full speed, gleaming steel keel splitting the black sea, throwing water to either side. And standing in the forepeak, gripping the rails, like a figurehead from hell, was the girl. He scrambled backward, trying desperately to get out of the way, but at that very moment Straw threw the
Halcyon
into reverse, guaranteeing a collision and throwing him sideways again. Off-balance, one arm wrapped around the rail, Burr could do nothing but point the weapon and unload it, pulling the trigger one, two, three, four times—

With a deafening crash of pulverized fiberglass, the bow slammed into the gunwale, bursting through it and riding up on the deck; Burr made one final effort to throw himself out of the way but he still didn’t have his footing on the bucking deck. The bow struck him square in the chest with a massive bone-crunching blow. It felt like his rib cage had been shoved into his spinal cord and he hurtled through the air, plummeted into the raging waters, sinking helplessly down into the black, cold, crushing depths.

86

With a sickening smack, Abbey saw the body fly head over heels into the sea and disappear. The force of the collision threw her forward into the curved rail and she almost went over. With a roar Jackie reversed the
Marea II
’s engines, the water boiling around the stern, and Abbey clung for dear life while the
Marea II
ground to a halt, heeling to one side and almost capsizing; after a moment of terror the boat backed off and righted itself. Abbey hadn’t had a chance to board. Her boat’s momentum pushed the other into the breaking seas, where a large incoming comber caught it and carried it onto the rocks with a shuddering crash. Abbey, horrified, could see her father in the pilothouse, struggling to free himself from the handcuffs on the wheel.

Without waiting for orders, Jackie slammed the
Marea II
into forward and brought it up to the crippled stern of the other boat.

“Dad!” Bolt cutters in hand, Abbey took a flying leap off the bow, landing in the sinking stern. An incoming wave heaved the boat up against the rocks a second time with an enormous crunching sound, throwing her down. Gripping the bolt cutters, she grabbed a broken rail and struggled to her feet, trying to maintain her balance on the buckling, splitting deck. A bolt of lightning blasted the scene with spectral light, followed by a thunder crack. She staggered toward the pilothouse. Her father was inside, still shackled to the wheel.

“Dad!”

“Abbey!”

A vertiginous comber materialized out of the dimness, rising like a mountain above the boat. Abbey braced herself, wrapping her arms around the rail as the wave came crashing down, throwing the boat full against the wall of rock and crushing the pilothouse like a Styrofoam cup. Buried in roiling water, Abbey clung on for dear life, trying to keep from being ripped from the boat by the withdrawing surge. After what seemed like an eternity, her lungs almost bursting, the swirl of water subsided and she surfaced, gasping for breath. The boat was a sudden wreck, lying on its side, the hull split, the ribs sprung, the pilothouse in pieces—and the helm underwater. Her father, gone.

With a superhuman effort she grabbed the railing, hauling herself to the shattered pilothouse. The boat was sinking fast and everything was underwater.

“Dad!” she screamed. “Dad!”

Another wave slammed the boat, throwing her so violently into the smashed wall of the pilothouse that it tore the bolt cutters from her hands, and they vanished into the black water.

She held her breath and dove down, her eyes open underwater in the dim turbulence. She saw a thrashing leg, an arm—her father. Handcuffed to the wheel. Underwater.

The bolt cutters.

With a scissor kick she propelled herself to the bottom of the overturned pilothouse, frantically feeling around for the cutters. The dim light from the
Marea II
’s spotlight filtered down and gave her enough light to see. Jagged underwater rocks were cutting and sawing through the lower part of the pilothouse where it had caught on the reef, but below that was yawning black space—the cutters had sunk into the abyss. The current was swirling and the water was full of debris and oil streaming up from the shattered engine, making it almost impossible to see. That was it; with the cutters gone, her father didn’t stand a chance. She couldn’t hold her breath any longer and surfaced, gulped air, then dove again, with the crazy hope she could dive to the bottom and find them.

Suddenly there they were: the bolt cutters had hung up on a broken window frame, dangling over the ocean depths. She snatched them and swam up to the wheel. Her father was no longer thrashing, floating silently. She grabbed the wheel to steady herself, fixed the cutters around the handcuff chain, and slammed the handles shut. The chain parted and she dropped the cutters and grabbed her father’s hair, dragging him up. They broke the surface inside the pilothouse, just as another wave slammed the boat again, rolling it upside down. They were suddenly underwater, Abbey still grasping her father’s hair, and a moment later she pulled him back up. This time they surfaced underneath the cabin hull, in an air pocket.

“Dad, Dad!” she screamed, shaking him, trying to keep his head above water, her voice ringing hollow in the small air space under the hull. “Dad!”

He coughed, gasped.

Abbey shook him. “Dad!”

“Abbey . . . Oh my God . . . What?”

“We’re trapped under the hull—!”

A tremendous crash jarred the space and the hull shuddered, rolling sideways; a moment later a second booming crash ripped open the hull and it parted with a tearing screech, water surging in as air rushed out.

“Abbey!
Out!
”

In the confusion of water she felt herself given a great shove and they were in the raging surf just outside the rocks, being drawn toward the killing surf by an undertow.

“Abbeeeey!” She saw the
Marea II
, thirty feet off, Jackie standing at the rail with a life ring. She flung it in their direction, but the rope wasn’t quite long enough and it fell short. A moment later her father surfaced. Grabbing a fistful of his hair, scissor-kicking and stroking one-handed as hard as she could, she dragged him to the ring. Jackie reversed the boat and pulled them out of the sucking breakers and then hauled them in, hoisting them over the side, one after the other, where they fell sprawling on the deck.

87

Chaudry stared at Ford with a pair of cold eyes. “I was protecting that crucial piece of classified information that you so carelessly left in your jacket pocket.”

The others were looking on, startled.

“Really?” Ford said quietly. “Then why not say something to me directly? Why wait until everyone was out of the room and then steal it? Sorry, Dr. Chaudry: that paper was bait and you’re the fish that took it.”

“Come now,” said Chaudry, abruptly relaxing. “This is absurd. You can’t possibly believe what you’re saying. We’re all under a strain. What in the world would I want with that password? I’m mission director—I have access to all the classified data.”

“But not to the location, which is on that drive. That’s what your clients have been after all along—the location.” Ford glanced at the group, which hadn’t yet reacted. He could read skepticism in their eyes. “It all started with Freeman. He was murdered by a professional assassin specifically for that hard drive.”

“Absurd,” said Chaudry. “The killing was thoroughly investigated. It was a homeless man.”

“Who was in charge of the investigation? The FBI—with the heavy involvement of NPF security and you, personally.”

“This is a blood libel on my reputation!” said Chaudry angrily.

“One can speculate how this worked,” said Ford. “You didn’t do this for money. This was too big for money. You realized long ago that Freeman had discovered an alien machine on Mars, although Freeman himself hadn’t quite gotten that far with his conclusions. So you fired him to keep the knowledge to yourself. And then you learned he’d stolen a classified hard drive. Somehow decrypted it, copied it, gotten it out. Something even you couldn’t do. What an opportunity for your clients to get all the crucial information. And then you learned that Corso continued the work. Not only that, he built on it.
He discovered the location of the machine.
And it was on that hard drive. So you told your handlers, and they went to get it, killed Corso and his mother. But they didn’t get the drive—because I found it first.”

Chaudry faced the stupefied group. “This man has no proof, no evidence, just a crazy conspiracy story. We have work to do.”

Ford glanced around at the group, and saw skepticism, even hostility, in their eyes.

“Freeman was killed by a piano-wire garrote,” said Ford. “No homeless drug addict would kill that way. No: the killer wanted
information
—the hard disk. That’s what the garrote was for. You wrap that around someone’s neck, they’re gonna talk. Except Freeman.”

“What a fairy tale,” said Chaudry with an easy laugh. “Why are you listening to him?”

Suddenly Marjory Leung spoke up. “I believe it. I
believe
Dr. Chaudry is guilty.”

“Marjory, have you lost your mind?”

She turned to him. “I’ll never forget what you said about Pakistan, India, and China. That evening?” She flushed. “That evening we spent together? You said that Pakistan’s destiny was to become a world technological power. That the U.S. was finished, that it was spoiled by wealth and materialism and easy living, that we’d lost our work ethic, that our educational system was collapsing. And I’ll never forget when you said that China and India were too corrupt and would eventually lose out to Pakistan.”

“Pakistan?” Lockwood said. “But I thought Dr. Chaudry was from India.”

Leung turned. “He’s
Kashmiri
. Big difference.”

Chaudry remained grimly silent.

“I know how it works,” said Leung. “I’ve experienced it myself. A few of my Chinese colleagues, they drop a hint here, a hint there. They think that because I’m ethnic Chinese that I should naturally pass on information to help their space program. It burns me up. Because I’m an American. I’d never do that. But
you
—I know what you said that night. I know how you think. That’s what this is all about: you were passing information to Pakistan.”

“It wasn’t about money,” said Ford. “But something a lot deeper. Patriotism, perhaps, or religion. This is the greatest discovery of all time. Very, very tempting to get your hands on it, to own it. Who knows what technological advances could be gleaned from an alien machine—a weapon no less. And then when a hard drive with all the information on it miraculously escaped from NPF, there was the opportunity.”

“What rubbish,” said Chaudry.

“I knew the mole was probably in this room. So I set up a little sting operation. With the password. And look who we caught.”

“You finished?” said Chaudry coolly.

Ford glanced around, meeting a mass of skeptical faces.

“Well, well, that’s quite a story,” said Chaudry. “There’s only one problem with it: it’s all supposition. It’s true I had a little thing with Marjory, like so many others at NPF. Bad judgment. But I’m no spy.”

“Oh yeah?” said Leung. “Then why did Freeman tell me, right before he was fired, that you wanted his entire analysis of the gamma ray data? Only to get it and tell him the next day you’d fire him if he kept working on it? Why did you go to such great lengths to discourage anyone at NPF from looking too closely at the gamma ray data? You got Derkweiler here to fire Corso—because
he
got interested in gamma rays.”

Comprehension blossomed on Derkweiler’s face. “That’s right. And then you asked me for all of Corso’s gamma ray analysis. I wondered why you were suddenly so interested.”