Pacific Fire (24 page)

Sam repeated the whispers to Em.

“Insertion point viable. Conditions may change if delay persists.”

The operative had expected Daniel a day ago.

The next message read, “Insertion point compromised. Await instructions.”

Things got even more discouraging with the last message: “My presence on island possibly discovered. Will make final attempt to determine new insertion point and relay to you.”

Sam tucked the papers back in the menu and returned the menus as he found them.

“What do we do now? Wait here?”

“For how long?” Em said. “We don't even know if the guy's still alive.”

“He is.”

The hoarse whisper came from the kitchen. A woman aimed a gun at them made of some clear substance, like water suspended in stasis, not quite exactly like ice. She was decked out in camouflage, her face smeared with partially sweated-off black paint. Scratches on her cheeks and forehead made her look a little wild.

“What day is it?” she demanded.

Em responded with the code phrase supplied by Max: “It's the day to get things done.”

The woman didn't lower her weapon. “You're not who I was expecting.”

“He was injured and couldn't make it,” Em said. “We're his replacements.”

“Who injured him?”

“Otis Roth's people,” Sam said.

“You're lying. You caught Blackland and tortured him for the pass phrase.”

“How do we know you didn't?” Em countered.

The woman changed her grip, and the gun seemed to solidify. It'd be hilarious to be killed by a water pistol, Sam thought. But she lowered her weapon.

“You're Sam and Em. The home office told me you might make it.”

“What do we call you?” Sam asked. “Agent H
2
O?”

“You can call me the unlucky bastard who had to wait for you to lollygag your way here.”

Sam shook his head. “She's not a real spy.”

Em tensed. “What makes you say that?”

“She said ‘lollygag.' Real spies don't say ‘lollygag.'”

“Actually,” Em said, lecturing, “I met a spy in Lompoc, and she said ‘lollygag' all the time. And she was a really good spy.”

“Are you two done?” The spy looked ready to shoot them right now.

“Sorry,” Sam said. “About the lollygagging.”

“I found you a new insertion point. Not as easy to get to as the original, but that's what you get for being late.”

“For lollygagging, you mean.”

Sam wasn't sure why he wanted to give her such a hard time. Maybe messing with people who were poised to harm you was a trait he inherited from Daniel.

She described a route to the island's interior, up to the thirteen-hundred-foot summit of Mount Torquemada. Adjacent to an old antiaircraft gun emplacement, they'd find a ventilation shaft leading into the facility.

“Nice of them to leave that there for us,” Sam said.

“Nothing nice about it,” the woman shot back, her eyes bulging a little. Sam was getting the sense that her time on the island hadn't been easy. “Sister Tooth is still using it as a gun emplacement, manned by a team of three. They check in downstairs by radio once an hour. You'll have to figure out how to handle that. Where'd your plane land, anyway?”

“No plane,” Em said. “Crypto-sub. Anchored it in a cove. We're hoping it'll still be there when we're done.”

“Submarine. That's nice.” Her estimation of them seemed to rise a little. “Much cushier than swimming from LA.”

“You swam here?”

She spread her fingers and showed them the webbing in between. “And I've got eight hours until the magic wears off. Which means I should have been gone a long time ago.”

“Will you be able to make it back?” Sam suddenly felt responsible for her, as he did for Sofía Bautista, and Em, and the leech captives, and even, in a way that felt new and burdensome, for Daniel. He shouldn't have made fun of her.

The woman responded with a smile that made Sam think his question didn't have a happy answer.

“Good luck,” she said, departing through the kitchen.

“You, too,” he said, though she was no longer there to hear him.

*   *   *

By now, the sun was rising, so they decided it was better to wait for dark, even though it meant holing up and spending an entire day in the decrepit restaurant. They dined on their ration of cereal bars and water and listened for sounds of approach. Rodents rustled in the ruins and pigeons cooed in the rafters. With little else to keep him occupied, Sam brooded.

He wanted to ask Em about growing up with her sisters, about what it was like to have a family, to share a common purpose. He wanted to ask what it was like to be away from them. He wanted to tell her how, in this damp and foul place, he felt as if he were where he was supposed to be. Part of it was because he had sort of fallen in love with her. Just as he had fallen in love with Valerie at the Salton Sea. As he had fallen for any number of girls with whom he'd had momentary contact, because his heart was the vacuum which nature abhorred. And, possibly disconnected from these ridiculous feelings, he loved her because she was the first real friend he'd ever had.

Once or twice, he caught her looking at him, and he wondered if there were things she wanted to say but couldn't, because she didn't want to risk being heard by a patrol party, or because she feared how stupid she'd sound if she spoke her words aloud. And so they sat in silence, and Sam hoped that when this was all done they'd both be alive and maybe they could sit at a table with good food in a house with furniture and have a conversation without worrying about leeches and guns.

They left the restaurant after sundown and made their way to the trail Argent's operative told them about. Fog thickened around the island like a slow flood as they hiked into the interior toward Mount Torquemada. Limbs of mahogany twisted like arthritic fingers from cracks in the schist, reminding Sam of the San Andreas creature's grasping claws.

The trail dipped into a hollow where thicker fog gathered. Sam couldn't hear Em's footsteps, yet the breaking surf at the bottom of the hills seemed mere yards away. The brush rustled with creatures. The air did weird things to sound. It was too easy to imagine every fox or shrew darting across the scrub was actually something worse.

As they headed up the next rise, Sam heard something worse.

A breath. A snort. Something large. Wads of mist swirled ahead.

Another snort, and a whisper-soft bulk emerged from the gloom. At first Sam thought it was a bison—there were still bison on Catalina, descended from a herd brought over in the 1920s for a silent Western—but as the creature came closer, Sam made out curving tusks, crossing at their tips, and a trunk swinging low to the ground.

Sam's breath caught in his throat. The animal wasn't huge. The top of its head didn't even come up to Sam's chin. But it was nonetheless magnificent.

Em clutched his shoulder, and he felt she was the only thing holding him to the ground.

“That's not an elephant,” Em said in a gruff whisper.

“No. It's a mammoth.”

Its breath smoked, and as it approached, scents of grass and dung and magic rolled over Sam in waves.

Judging from the length of its tusks, it was an adult, but its modest size meant it must be a pygmy Colombian mammoth. Their remains were known on some of the other Channel Islands, but they'd gone extinct eleven thousand years ago.

Sam's cells contained inherited mammoth osteomancy, which the Hierarch had gained by eating mammoth bones, but his sense of this creature's magic was so much stronger. It was potent, and beautiful, and wrong. And it was proof of concept that osteomancers could take bones and vat-grown organs and cultured flesh and combine them into a patchwork animal. Imagining a living Pacific firedrake, Sam was struck with dread and delight.

The mammoth came to a rest on the trail before them. It raised its trunk and snorted, drawing in air.

It's smelling me,
thought Sam.

He pulled away from Em's grasp and extended his hand out into the few feet of space between him and the mammoth. The mammoth reached out, curling the fingerlike extensions on the end of its trunk around Sam's hand. Sam was touching living magic.

Over the last few days, he'd wondered how he was different from the Hierarch. Now he knew. The Hierarch would see the mammoth as a resource. He would consume it. But Sam never would. Sam considered the mammoth his kin.

Releasing his hand, the mammoth lowered its trunk. Sam and Em stepped aside to let it pass and watched as it retreated into the fog, becoming a ghost in the gray world.

*   *   *

At the peak of Mount Torquemada, a woman and two men huddled around a long piece of plumbing mounted on four knobby tires. Sam and Em watched them from the cover of an ironwood tree.

“Antiaircraft gun, twenty millimeter,” Em whispered. “Looks like war surplus.”

They would have met the gun had they arrived by air as originally planned. But Sam couldn't feel good about avoiding that fate. Not with Sofía Bautista's body lying under a pile of rocks in the desert.

In addition to the big gun, the crew was equipped with thermos bottles, black rifles, and a radio set. The radio was the biggest problem.

On Em's go signal, they set off across the distance to the gunners.

Darkness and fog assisted their suits' osteomantic stealth properties, but as they approached the three from behind, Sam felt as though he were tap-dancing in broad daylight while playing bagpipes. One of the men yawned. Another arched his back to stretch. Em leaped ahead. She struck one gunner behind his ear and hit the woman at the base of her skull. Both went down.

Before the third could raise his gun, Em dropped low, thrust a leg out and swept it in a circle, taking him down at the ankles. By the time he hit the ground, Em was back on her feet with his gun aimed at his face.

The two gunners she'd sapped were still conscious, and they were Sam's responsibility. He took a lump of gray caked powder from his kit—processed gorgon bone—and crunched it between his molars. His tongue grew cold and numb. He forced it down, past his dry, brittle throat. Within seconds, an icy sludge crawled through his veins. He blinked, and his eyelids felt like they might flake away. He blinked again, and they felt normal.

He blew a cloud of particulates into the air. They crystallized in the cold and precipitated onto the two gunners. The gunners stopped writhing. Their moans fell silent. Their faces grew gray as concrete, and they froze in rictus horror.

With the sound of cracking walnuts, Sam stretched his neck and flexed his fingers.

“It's time for you to check in,” Em said to the third gunner. “If you don't, your friends downstairs will know something's wrong, and they'll send someone up to check. Right?”

“That's how it works,” he said. He had pimples and was working on a mustache.

Em cupped the radio mic in one hand and put it in front of the gunner's mouth. She keyed the mic and whispered, “Talk.”

The gunner cleared his throat. “Base, Mount Torquemada Station, all clear. Over.”

“Thanks,” Em said. “Except for the part where you used your distress code. You were supposed to call this ‘High Vent Station.' Fortunately, I changed the frequency, so that went out to Guam.”

“Well, that's the best you're going to get out of me,” the gunner said, with a gleam of defiance. “You can go ahead and shoot me now.”

“We're not going to shoot you.” From his kit, Sam removed a tiny vial, filled with a golden, pearly fluid.

“Cat piss?” the gunner asked.

“Lamassu,” Sam said, leaning over him. “Ever heard of it?”

The gunner swallowed. Clearly he had.

“With enough of this stuff, I could convince you to shoot your own mother dead and eat her for dinner.” Sam felt like a heel, making threats. The guy probably wasn't ideologically invested in Otis's operation, and he might not even know anything about the firedrake. But fear was a better weapon than fisticuffs. “I'll try not to use that much. Just enough so you'll make the radio call and then take a nap. But if you're going to struggle, I might get sloppy. Hold still, okay?”

Em put him in a headlock and turned his head so Sam could reach his ear. He let three drops of the lamassu fall in. The gunner did not fight him. He even bit his own arm to muffle his scream.

*   *   *

Sam and Em opened the hatch to a freight elevator shaft that plunged into the mountain's interior. “Hopefully, the car won't come up and smear us into paste,” Em said, starting the way down iron ladder rungs stapled into the bare stone.

The ladder reached bottom in the back of a high-ceilinged vaulted chamber lined with chain-link pens. Sam and Em hunkered behind a stone pillar and surveyed the room. Housed inside the pens were a few dozen men, women, and children. The occasional cough or moan broke through the din of air handlers.

With only some banks of fluorescent fixtures dropping weak light, Sam couldn't get a good look at the occupants, but from his time on the leeches' glue-factory boat, he could guess what kind of prison this was.

A lone watchman paced up and down the cages, none too watchful. His attention was buried in a paperback book, held in one hand. The other lazily swung a cleaver-club by its strap. Sam could make out the walnut grip of the holstered gun and the dried blood on the blunt edge of his cleaver. Whoever the prisoners were, they must not be considered much of a security threat.

Sam wanted the guard to keep coming toward him. He wanted to see a brief look of surprise register on his face. He wanted to see his hand fumble at his snapped-shut holster, and maybe even an instant of pain as Em broke his neck. To Sam's mind, the difference between the gunners upstairs and this guard with blood on his cleaver-club was vast.