New Year Island (64 page)

Her eyes drifted to the center of rainbow territory, where a circular structure was marked, and her heart gave a sudden leap. She stabbed down at the map with her finger.

“There’s our answer.”

• • •

The five of them stood around the broken concrete rim of the cistern dome, looking down into the darkness. At the cistern’s top, the opening let in a shaft of light to illuminate a circle of rocks and broken rubble twenty feet below. The patch of light faded into the black emptiness on each side.

“Not the most pleasant smell,” Mason said.

Camilla took a deep breath, ignoring the foul odor that wafted from below.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” she said. “That’s good.”

Juan nodded. “It extends underneath the edges of the spillway, six or seven meters in each direction. They won’t be able to shoot us from above. They’ll have to come in after us.”

Mason looked at him. “Or smoke us out with tear gas.”

“I don’t think Julian will do that,” Camilla said. Her voice turned bitter. “It wouldn’t look good on camera.”

Near her feet, the edge of the dome had crumbled, creating a rocky slope instead of a sheer drop. Camilla crouched down and slid forward, jumping the last two feet to stand at the wet bottom. The smell was much worse inside—even after getting used to the ever-present miasma of the seals, it almost made her gag.

She looked up at the others, silhouetted around the circle of light above her.

“Come on down, team,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

• • •

“JT’s muscles would be useful right about now.” Mason’s voice echoed in the hollow void of the cistern. He shifted another rock.

“Hold on,” Camilla said, lifting up the lantern. “Another one.” Pulling the tiny camera free of the crack in the cistern’s curved wall, she dropped it to the concrete floor and smashed it with a softball-size rock.

The moving lantern threw wild shadows against the moldy walls. Working nearby, Brent, Juan, and Dmitry cleared wet rocks and chunks of concrete from the slimy corridor circling the inside edge of the cistern. By piling the rubble into sofa-size barriers, Camilla hoped to make a rock maze at the bottom of the pit, like the foxholes in a war movie. Julian’s guns wouldn’t be much use to him in the tight underground space. It would be close-quarters trench warfare.

If only they had JT with them…

“Why is JT hiding from us?” she called.

Juan wedged a large rock into place. “Because he thinks I’m Julian’s spy.”

“Why?”

Juan stood stock-still with another rock in his hands. He slowly turned to look at her with realization dawning across his face. “He had a good reason to. He even told me what it was, but I missed its significance.”

“Blyad!”
Dmitry stumbled away from the rubble where he was digging, and backed into Juan. “
Miertvoh tyelah.
Is dead body under here!”

Down here?
Camilla’s heart sped up. “Is it Heather or Jacob?”

“No, no, not them. Is another man. I don’t know him.”

Juan’s face darkened. “JT, then.” He stepped forward. “Come give me a hand with him, Brent.”

The lantern shook in Camilla’s hand, sending shadows bouncing against the walls of the cistern. Juan and Brent shifted rocks away. The gag-inducing smell of decomposition sharpened. A dense cloud of flies rose from the curled, still shape nestled in the muck and swirled into the air around them.

Half-carrying, half-dragging the slumped, wet form between them, the two men pushed forward. The sickly-sweet stench of putrefaction made Camilla gag.

Juan and Brent let the body slide to the floor in the center of the cistern, where it lay framed in a halo of light from above. Neither said anything. Juan rolled the body onto its back, faceup. Then he stiffened.

Brent took a few steps backward, away from the corpse. He raised a hand to scratch at the side of his head.

Baffled, Camilla stared at the body lying in the circle of light. What she was seeing made no sense at all. The dead man wasn’t JT.

She recognized him, though.

The dead face stared up at the sky, grinning a skull’s mirthless grin, bright white teeth visible through the rotted lips and cheeks. Maggots boiled in the empty eye sockets. More of them squirmed in the matted, damp black hair. His coat twitched and squirmed with loathsome movements. Beneath the mildew, the suit looked as elegant and expensive as the one she had seen him wearing on the monitor yesterday.

Camilla forced a breath through a throat like a pinhole.

“We were wrong…
so
wrong.”

She raised her eyes to look at the others.

“Julian’s not coming. He’s been down
here
all along.”

J
uan climbed out of the cistern and stood at the rim, staring down at Julian’s corpse—a grinning scarecrow in a four-thousand-dollar suit. Camilla, Mason, Brent, and Dmitry climbed up after him and spread out around the edge, making a circle. They stared down at Julian, too, their faces frozen in expressions of shock and disbelief that no doubt mirrored Juan’s own.

“We had this backward,” he said.

“Prerecorded.” Mason’s face showed no expression. “Every word and pixel of it.”

One of Brent’s lower eyelids started to spasm. “There’s only one possible reason I can come up with for that,” he said.

Juan nodded. Brent may be high, but he was lucid enough to understand just how bad this was.

Looking at the others around the circle, Juan read their faces and saw that Camilla, Mason, and Dmitry also understood what this meant.

“This is what Jordan was trying to tell us,” Camilla said.

He glanced sharply at her, but her eyes were still riveted to the corpse. Her face was as white as Julian’s.

“There’s nobody else,” she said. “
Nobody
is watching us right now. This whole time, we thought it was Julian’s
spy
we were trying to uncover…”

Juan nodded. “…when who we were really looking for is Julian’s
boss
.”

With one last look at the grinning corpse below, he turned away. It was time at last, he knew. He had waited as long as he could, but he no longer had any choice. The objective hazards here had now become too overwhelming.

It had been the same ten years ago, with
el jefe
—Juan’s father, Roberto—lying dead in the street and none of them knowing who had ordered the killing: Montoya’s men, the Ramírez brothers, Guillermo el Loco, or even one of
el jefe
’s own trusted lieutenants. Juan had looked into all their faces during the emergency meeting in Cartagena and understood the same thing he understood now.

To stay was to die.

With his back to the others, he walked down the slope and away from the cistern.

“No!” Camilla shouted after him. “Can’t you see? This is just what he wants!”

Without turning, Juan raised a hand in farewell—and kept walking.

“He?” Mason’s voice sounded high and squeaky. “We have no idea if the person we’re looking for is a
he
.”

That was what Mason sounded like when he was afraid, Juan thought. Really, truly, finally afraid at last. He continued up the hill, past the blockhouse.

“It could be a
she,
Camilla,” Mason said as Juan left them farther behind. “It could even be
you
.”

Juan headed down the small slope toward the shale beach, and the crest of the hill hid the others from sight. Mason was right: it could be any of them… including Mason himself.

The answers that Juan had come for no longer mattered. He no longer cared how Vita Brevis had found him, how they had uncovered his true identity, or who else they had told. It didn’t matter anymore; the profile they had done of him had rendered those questions moot. He would have to disappear again. He’d go somewhere obscure this time—the Maldives, maybe—and start over. Change his name again. Change his face again. Last time, he had been too young—too vain to realize that when you were trying to disappear, giving yourself an unforgettable face was a fool’s choice. This time, he wouldn’t make that mistake.

He looked over his shoulder, to confirm that he was out of sight of the others. Then he dropped to one knee and lifted a half sheet of broken plywood by one edge. Holding it upright one-handed, he swept at the dirt beneath with his free hand until he unearthed a crescent-shaped edge: the soil-packed mouth of a buried pipe. Still holding the plywood vertical with his other hand, he scooped rocks away from the opening until he had exposed a six-inch gap. Leaning in shoulder deep, he reached inside until his fingers touched a rubbery hose. Grabbing it, he slid the cylindrical scuba tank and regulator out of the hole.

He checked the mouthpiece to be sure it hadn’t been fouled.

Sharks or no sharks, it was time to leave.

Dragging the tank with him, Juan scooted back and let the plywood fall to the ground, revealing the silent figure that now stood behind it where, a moment before, there had been only seals.

He backpedaled, landing on his butt and dropping the tank in surprise.

Balancing on one leg like a flamingo, Jordan aimed the speargun at him. He was shocked by the hate distorting her face.

“I thought survivors were supposed to be unpredictable,” she said, “but you’re so fucking easy to predict, it’s pathetic. That’s why he left the dive gear in the blockhouse where you’d find it. He knew. As long as you thought you had a hidden escape plan, he
knew
you’d stick around.”

Seeing her now, Juan felt something come unstuck inside his chest. What was he doing? He hadn’t been thinking straight. He didn’t want to leave Jordan. Not ever. He couldn’t imagine being without her. They
belonged
together. But he’d made a terrible mess of things. He needed to make everything all right between them again.

It was his fault her face looked this way right now. He had done that to her. It was his fault her lip was trembling. He wanted to kiss her, to crush her to his chest, to wrap his arms around her and tell her he would never let her go again. He would apologize—make it all up to her. He held out his arms.

“Jordan, please—”

“Don’t.” She jabbed the speargun at him, and her face crumpled. “Just don’t.”

How could he make her understand how he felt about her? He himself hadn’t realized how much he needed her. Until now.

Jordan closed her eyes, trembling. There were words he needed say to her right now. Words that
she
needed to hear him say. But he was afraid his actions had already spoken louder than any words could atone for. The words died in his throat.

When she opened her eyes again and he saw what was in them, Juan knew that his actions had damned him.

“What a sorry freak show he’s gathered on this island,” she said. “I know what
my
limitations are, Juan. Other people have never meant much to me. I can’t help that; it’s just the way I am. But you’re
not
that way. Can’t you see? You only
want
to be. You only
try
to be. And that makes you the worst one of us all.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “So very sorry I hurt you—”

“No.” Tears burst from Jordan’s beautiful green eyes. “No, you’re not.”

“I’ll make things all right again.”

“How?” She pointed at the scuba tank. “Like
that
? I guess people don’t change, do they? I see that running away is still your answer to life.”

Her face broke apart. “But
me,
Juan? You’re trying to run away from
me
?”

She pulled the trigger.

The steel spear struck Juan’s chest dead center. It hit like a hammer blow, knocking his breath away. Searing pain exploded through his sternum.

He looked down at himself.

The end of the spear protruded from his chest, wiggling as he sucked in a shocked breath that stung like flame.

He gasped, and the spear wiggled again. It stuck out of his chest at a sideways angle rather than straight.

He had been shot before. This wasn’t that bad. He could survive this, too.

He looked up.

Jordan was reloading the speargun. In a rapid but graceful motion, she slid another shaft into the barrel and planted the tip in the ground. She stretched the elastic cable, letting it snap into place.

Then, raising the speargun with terrifying purpose, she aimed it at Juan’s face.

The loud explosion hurt his ears, making him flinch.

Jordan’s head snapped to the side.

She fell.

The speargun clattered to the rocks beside him as the echoes of the gunshot rolled across the island.

Fifteen feet behind Jordan, Natalie fumbled the Glock in an unskilled grip. Dropped it.

She looked at him with a horrified expression on her face. Sat down hard on the rocks.

Juan turned his head toward Jordan. From where he lay, he couldn’t see where she was wounded. Her foot twitched once.

Maybe she was all right. Maybe the bullet had glanced off her skull, as it had when his brother Álvaro shot him in the head, years ago. Maybe one day he and Jordan would compare scars, sitting side by side on the snow white sand of Grace Beach, in front of a bungalow the two of them shared.

He pulled himself toward her. The spear through his chest snagged on the ground. He barely felt it.

Maybe they would live in Palau, sail the islands in a catamaran yacht together, his arm around her and her head on his shoulder, with calypso music playing through the speakers and their scuba tanks and gear drying in the wind.

He reached out and dragged her toward him.

Maybe she would never want to see him again. He could even live with that. He could live with anything, just as long as Jordan was all right.

Juan lifted his head and saw what was left of her face. A spreading fan of crimson soaked the dirt beneath her head.

He let go. Rolled onto his back. Stared up at the indifferent sky.

He and Jordan lay next to each other, head to toe. Without looking, he reached down and found her hand. Took it.