Earth Thirst (21 page)

She checks on the bleeding and satisfied that it seems to have slowed, she nods toward the pile of personal effects on the counter. “A watcher?” When I nod, she puts down the washcloth and starts rifling through the pile. “Did you…?” She shakes her head. “Where were they?” she asks instead.

“Lobby. Standard stake-out. Waiting for us to come downstairs.”

“So they don't know which room we're in?”

“Or they don't want to corner us here,” I point out. I try to remember if I had seen anyone loitering around when I had gone out for my walk. Were they covering the side exits too? I point at the tracking chip. “If they're keying in on that, we have a slight advantage now. They know where the chip is, but they don't know that it isn't in you anymore. If we leave it here, they'll think we're still in the room.”

“How long will that illusion last, do you think?”

“Long enough for us to get to the airport.”

“And then what? There are two flights out of here per day. One heading for Tahiti, and the other one goes east. To Santiago, Chile. It won't be hard to figure out which way we've gone. If they don't grab us as soon as we walk out of here.” She shakes her head. “It'd be easier if we could just fly out of here ourselves.” Her mouth quirks into a tiny smile. “Too bad we can't turn into sparrows. And fly home.”

Sparrows.

I recall the painting on the wall of the crypt beneath the laboratory. Tiny birds wreathed in flowers.

“Hyacinths,” I say. “That's it.”

“What's it?” she says, but she's talking to my back as I leave the bathroom. “What are you doing?” she asks as she follows me.

“I'm looking for the folder that comes with the room,” I tell her. “The one that has the room service menu and the listing of all the other services the hotel offers.”

“Why?”

I find the leather-bound folio, and start flipping through it. “Because there's always a page filled with market speak about the hotel, and it always contains some reference—”

A buzzing noise interrupts me, the sound of an angry bee caught in the bathroom. “The phone,” Mere says. “I'll get it.”

I nod and stand there, holding the folder, staring at the page. The words are bending out of whack, and I struggle to bring them back into line, just as I'm struggling to bring my memory back.

What I need is in my head. I just can't get it ordered correctly. I can almost see the shape of the puzzle. I almost know where the pieces go.

Mere returns from the bathroom, holding the Secutores agent's cell phone. “Text message,” she says, showing me the display.

It's a message from someone named
Albatross
, and it reads: “Sr loc?”

“Situation report,” I translate. “And asking about her location.”

“Sent a few minutes after nine. Do you think it's routine?”

“Top of the hour check-in?” I shrug. “Probably.”

Mere's fingers fly over the phone's quartet of control buttons, easily navigating the maze of submenus. “Yeah,” she says. “On the hour. One word responses.
Zero. Zero. Zero. Down
. And then nothing before that for something like twelve hours.”

I nod, following the sequence.
Down
was the note that she had arrived on Easter Island. “Text
zero
back. Keep it simple.”

Mere does so, and then starts looking at other screens. “These are cheap phones,” she says. “Ah”—she finds something of interest—“here's her contact list.
Albatross. Bear. Caribou. Dingo. Falcon. Gopher
.” She ponders the list. “No ‘E'?”

“She's ‘E,'” I intuit. “
Albatross
is her commanding officer.”

She giggles slightly. “Do you think it was assigned?”

“What was assigned?”

“That code name.”

I think about it for a second, recalling albatrosses of legend and those that found their way into literature. “Probably not.”

The phone buzzes in Mere's hands and she nearly drops it. “Shit,” she reads the message. “It just says ‘Loc' again.”

“You didn't answer all of the question the first time,” I say.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Tell him something.”

“Like what?”

In the maid closet. Second floor.
I shake my head, putting that suggestion away. “Type ‘pissing,'” I suggest.

Mere smiles. “‘Pissing,'” she says as she works the phone's keypad. “And I'm adding ‘K?'” She hits send.

“Good idea. That'll explain the delay.”

She checks another menu. “That's the only one who has been texting.
Albatross
. God, what a goofy code name. A big white bird, hanging around your neck.” She shakes her head.

Big white bird…

“That's it,” I whisper as the pieces start falling into place.

“What? An albatross?”

I tap the page I've got open in the hotel folder, and she leans over to see what I'm trying to show her. “‘The Hanga Roa Royal Resort is part of Hyacinth Worldwide, a network of family-owned hotels and resorts,'” she reads. “Okay, and…”

“On the plane flight out here, you were telling me about your research. One of the companies you mentioned was…”

“Hyacinth Holdings,” she finishes.

“On the wall of the temple, there is an old mural. Most of it is gone, but the trim along the top is still there. An ornamental row of white-winged birds and hyacinths.”

The pieces start clicking into place.

Hyacinths on the wall.

The Bird Man ceremony.

Hyacinth
owns the hotel.

Big white bird, falling into the ocean.

Hyacinth
is in the agriculture industry.

The albatross. The harbinger of ill luck.

“I remember,” I tell Mere. “I remember why I came here before. Arcadia sent me. We were abandoning the island.”

Mother sent me because I do what she asks. I follow orders.

I had been sent to kill the steward.

BOOK FOUR

HYACINTH

TWENTY-FOUR

W
e put together a plan to get off the island. We've got an hour or two before a sitrep of
zero
becomes odd, and we make the best of it. Mere calls the front desk to check into the next flight going east. We're booked on the midday flight to Santiago, Chile, in four days, but if we show up at the counter at the airport and make enough noise and wave enough cash around, we can probably get our flight changed.

Especially if we play up the disgruntled newlywed angle. No one likes to see relationships go sour that quickly.

Mere leaves first, heading out the front door since
E
was probably the only one watching from the lobby. I linger, mainly to get the body out of the maid's closet and up to our room. I slip the tracking chip into the pocket of E's pants, along with everything else I had taken from her.

I keep the phone. I send one more progress report on the way to the airport and then I shove the phone down behind the seat in the back of the cab.

Mere is waiting for me next to the security check-point. She's wearing a large hat and dark sunglasses, and she's got a handful of wadded tissue. Her glasses are big enough to hide the fact that she's been crying, pretty heavily.

“What happened?”

“I had to put on a real show,” she says, offering me a boarding pass. The flight leaves in forty-five minutes.

* * *

Once the doors of the plane shut, I stop staring up the aisle; once the plane is in the air, I start to relax. I've been anticipating the arrival of any number of people: airport security, Secutores, the captain of the plane. None of those people show. It's just a tiny trickle of tourists, and then it is time to go.

The six-hour flight is uneventful. Mere sleeps for most of it. When we land in Chile, we slip into the flow of passengers leaving the airport. Twenty minutes later, we're outside the main building, standing on Chilean soil, and no one appears to be the wiser. The flight wound back a number of time-zones, and I had been worried that during our actual flight time, our ruse would have been discovered and someone would have called ahead.

For the moment, though, we appear to be ahead of Secutores, and now that we are on a larger landmass, it'll be easier to disappear.

The airport is in Pudahuel, a short subway ride outside of the city. I change some of my dwindling cash into local currency while Mere examines a subway map, trying to figure out which line will take us into Santiago proper.

She's been full of questions since we landed, and I've managed to put her off to this point, but once we get on the subway, she starts up again. This time, I get the sense that she's not going to stop until I give her some answers.

“Let's just find a hotel,” I try. “There will be time enough for all of this.”

“Do we have enough cash? I need some things. What about our passports? Are they still good?”

“I can get more money, and we don't need to worry about the passports.”

“What are we going to do for ID? Should I go to the US Consulate then?”

“Why?”

“I'm an American citizen. I've been kidnapped by an international security company. I was aboard the
Liberty
when—”

We're sitting next to each other in a pair of narrow seats, our thighs touching. I reach over and silence her with a touch on her leg. “Let's not worry about all that quite yet.”

“I'm going to worry about something.”

“I know.”

“It's what I do.”

“I know.”

“These are the things I'm going to wonder about.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“You need to give me something else to gnaw on.”

“Like…”

“Hyacinth.”

“Later,” I tell her. “When I'm sure.”

She sighs heavily, and flops her hand down on top of mine. As the subway pulls into an underground station, she looks out the window. “I typically project three to six months for research before I even start laying out my story. I tell no one what I'm working on. Maybe one or two people at the network,” she says quietly, forcing me to lean toward her to hear the story. “But after Hachette Farms”—she swallows heavily, and her fingers tighten on mine—“after the incident with Kirkov, things changed. It all broke too big, and everyone knew my face. I couldn't do anything without someone—somewhere—trying to figure what my angle was. They didn't know the details, but they could guess as to the general shape of the piece. I wasn't a friend to Big Ag—they knew that—and research got harder. Sources were less inclined to go on the record. I had to dig deeper. I had to take more risks. I filed a couple of stories where my facts weren't quite solid, but I was close enough that public opinion did the rest for me. I couldn't stop them, but I could make them change how they did business. I could make them be more cautious about breaking the law.”

She turns her head and looks at me. It would be easy to get lost in her gaze, but there's tension in her face that keeps me at bay. “I was never more than an annoyance. A line item on a budget: damage control, media spin, that sort of thing. And I had a network of people I could rely on; people who I knew would ask pointed questions if I disappeared. It was a game we played. I wrote a story, and they did a cost analysis internally. Was it cheaper to let me have my day and go do business some other way, or was it time to shut me down? You see? It's not personal. It's barely political. It's all about money. That's all they care about.”

I recall Callis's command to follow the money. “Is that what is going on here?”

She shakes her head. “I don't know. Personal vendettas don't make any sense in the corporate world. Resolving a grudge isn't boardroom thinking, and if we're talking about an enormous corporate entity, we have to assume there's a lot of boardroom thinking that is driving decisions. Unless you pissed off an entire corporate board.”

“Isn't that what you do with your stories?”

“Yes, but not like this. They don't come to my apartment and do awful things to my cat.”

“You don't have a cat,” I point out.

“Well, yeah—” She gives me a look that says such details are somewhat beside the point.

“Look, it all boils down to controlling the market. Whatever I do with my stories or whatever direction they're heading is all about locking down market share. Destroying the competition or beating up on your personal enemies is meaningless if you don't control the market.”

“So where does the video fit into this?”

“They want us to react. They want us to be horrified and outraged. They want us to get all wound up and go off on a tear in one direction, while they do something sneaky in the other direction. It's a distraction. They're trying to keep us from thinking about the big picture.”

“Hell of a distraction,” I point out.

She nods absently, returning her attention to the window. We're still underground and the tunnel walls are a blur rushing by. “And expensive,” she says pensively. “Which means what's at stake is worth significantly more.” I can see her reflection in the window and I can tell she's looking at me.

What's at stake is Arcadia, and she knows it too.

* * *

We get off the subway at the Baquedando stop, near the Bellavista district. The wooded slope of San Cristobal rises to the north of us, and I'm immediately set at ease to be close to trees again. We wander the streets awhile, getting our bearings, and stumble upon a two-level, open-air mall. Mere drags me into a restaurant that isn't subtle in its mood lighting—orange and red lamps pointed at the walls and ceiling give off the impression of dining in a cavernous lava dome. The dark booths rise like stones out of a lake of shadows that covers the floor.

“I thought you might like the ambience,” Mere says after the host seats us. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the music, and as soon as she finishes speaking, she shakes her head and slides out of her side of the booth and comes over to mine, bumping me with her hip to make room. “Not very ambient,” she says when she's settled next to me.

“It's a privacy screen,” I say, trying to adjust myself in the seat so that I have a little more space between us.

“Yes,” she nods. “That's a good word.
Privacy
. This is hardly the soundtrack to an intimate dinner.” The music was banal, heavy with electronic beats, and I vaguely recognize it as something that had been popular in the US a few years ago.