Exodus 2022 (20 page)

He made it to the bathroom, dragging his hand along the wall for stability, like he was drunk, like he was back in college, paying the price for a big night on the town.

He left the door open and the lights off—the nightlight cast enough of a glow—and stood at the toilet peeing, staring at the framed picture on the wall. An antique map of Scotland. A souvenir from a semester abroad.

Joe’s heart thumped harder when he realized he was seeing two maps on the wall. Two distinct and separate maps of Scotland in the dim light.

The frames floated lazily in front of his eyes, hovering, refusing to merge and become whole again.

I’m seeing double.

His stomach churned and bucked in his belly and his mouth felt now dry as desert sand.

He reached for the light switch, eager to check his pupils in the mirror and see if the double vision persisted in normal light.

Then he lowered his hand and left the lights off.

Go back to bed. Nothing you can do now. Turn on the light and you’ll just get more worked up. More freaked out. Go back to bed. Things might be different in the morning.

He staggered back to the bed—room still spinning—and eased himself into the sheets. Felt Ella’s warmth. He put his arm around her waist, closed his eyes, and fell back into an uneasy sleep.

BECK, COLLINS, AND ORONDO RING
huddled in the cool glow of Ring’s workstation, watching the video of the events at the bridge.

“So there was no meeting,” said a bleary-eyed, unshaven Beck. “Stanton went to the Manette Bridge to kill himself.”

“So it would seem,” murmured Ring, as he replayed the grainy green footage for the umpteenth time.

It was 3 a.m. and the War Room was quiet. Just the three men at Ring’s workstation, and two technicians hovering about the Palantir, which shimmered like a reflecting pool.

They stared at Ring’s big monitor—Collins and Beck looking haggard, Ring, sharp and alert as ever—and listened to the field agents’ play-by-play from the time Joe and Ella stepped onto the bridge until they returned to Joe’s house.

“This morning,” said Beck, “after Stanton’s epiphany, I actually believed that he might meet someone on the bridge. That we might discover the source of the hallucinations.” He sighed. “This is a dead end.”

“It’s weird,” said Collins. “I know Stanton’s messed up—same as our divers and Whittaker—but I didn’t peg him as suicidal.”

Beck and Collins turned to Ring. Waited for him to say something. But Ring just sat there, watching the silent, grainy footage of the incident on the bridge, over and over again.

Ring restarted the video. Again. Beck and Collins watched with him. Again. The same fuzzy, low-light telephoto shot of Joe and Ella walking to the center of the bridge. The same thirty-some seconds of Joe climbing over the railing, hesitating, and then leaping off, slicing the darkness like an arrow.

Ring played the loop again.

Beck stood. His headache had returned.
Time to go.
“Ring—”

Ring turned suddenly. Faced them. Eyes sparkling. “He wasn’t trying to kill himself,” he said matter-of-factly. 

“Huh?” Beck pointed at the screen. “Then how do you explain the jump? The stuff he said to his girl, in the car? He flat-out admitted it.”

“He lied.”

Beck sat back down.

“I analyzed his voice,” said Ring. “Ran it through our software.”

“Why would he lie to his girlfriend?” asked Collins.

Ring shook his head. “He wasn’t lying to his girlfriend. He was lying to us. Or to the microphone, anyway. He knows he’s under surveillance.”

Beck slumped in his seat, irritated that Ring was apparently on to something he hadn’t grasped, and wishing he had coffee. “What? Wait. So, even if he’s lying, I mean, how do you explain the jump? Jumping off a high bridge into fifty-degree water in the middle of the night? What is that if not a suicide attempt?”

Ring rolled his high-backed leather chair away from his workstation. “Stanton,” he said, “
did
meet someone tonight.”

“When?” asked Beck. “Our guys had him under surveillance the entire time. We have video, for Christ’s sake. There was no one else on the bridge.”

“Take a look,” said Ring. He swiveled and tapped commands on his keyboard.

Stanton’s grainy suicide leap rolled again and Ring magnified the image. Slowed it down. 

“Watch carefully,” he said.

They saw Stanton’s rigid body knife feetfirst into the channel.

“There. Did you see that?”

“See what? For fuck’s sake, what are you talking about?”

Ring ran the video again—the same final frames of Joe Stanton’s plunge. This time, he froze the image at the moment of impact—the point at which Stanton’s feet and legs hit the water.

“See? There. A little to the right of Stanton, and behind.”

Collins shrugged. “Mist or something. So what?”

“Watch it again,” said Ring, “and focus on that spot.” He tapped a small area of the screen.

He ran the video at one-eighth normal speed. Collins and Beck stared. And this time they saw it clearly: a plume of spray shooting up, out of the water behind and to the right of Joe Stanton. 

“Spray?” said Beck.

“Breath,” said Ring. “Exhale.” His eyes shone brighter than ever and the excitement and confidence in his voice grabbed Beck.

“What, like from a dolphin or something? Our guys said they heard dolphins in the Narrows when Stanton was on the bridge.” Beck nodded at the screen. “You think that plume came from a dolphin?”

“Precisely,” said Ring.

“Which means?” said Collins, more flummoxed than ever. “So there’s dolphins in the channel. Swimming past when Stanton tried to off himself. So what?”

“Not swimming past,” said Ring. “Swimming
to
him. Coming to meet Joe Stanton.”

Collins and Beck stared blankly at Ring, as if waiting for the punch line. Whatever it was, Beck wasn’t going to laugh. It was the middle of the night, and Ring’s bizarre ramblings were beginning to piss him off.

“Don’t you see?” said Ring. “The voice—the source of the hallucinations—in all four men, belongs to a dolphin. An orca whale, if I’m right. Which technically is a dolphin. Did you know that orcas are the largest members of the dolphin family? Everyone thinks orcas are whales. But they’re not.”

Beck stared at him. “You think Stanton went to the Manette Bridge at one in the morning—to meet a whale?”

“Yes.”

Beck slumped in his chair and Collins lowered his head, stifling a laugh.

“Are you smoking crack?” asked Beck.

Collins lost the battle to suppress his laughter and snorted long and exuberantly. 

“Laugh all you like, Mr. Collins,” said Ring. “I don’t hear you advancing any theories. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you offer a single cogent idea. On anything.”

Collins lifted his head, red-faced, smile gone.

“Easy,” said Beck. “Let’s just take it easy, okay? Seriously, Doc. You gotta admit…this is…Talking to whales? Come on.”

“It’s the only explanation that makes sense,” said Ring. He got to his feet, stepped to the Palantir, and called up a map of the North Pacific. Beck and Collins moved in beside him. 

“Consider,” he said, tapping a glowing image of Nunivak Island, “Galbreth and Stahl—the divers we lost in the Bering Sea—were in the water immediately before their hallucinations started. Crew reported heavy concentrations of orca around the platforms the entire day.”

“I don’t remember hearing anything about whales,” said Collins.

“Perhaps because it seemed irrelevant,” said Ring. “There are lots of whales in the Bering Sea. Who cares? Nevertheless, our crew reported seeing whales around the platforms. I just reread the files.”

Ring manipulated the giant touch screen until Yakutat and South Central Alaska dominated the frame. “Whittaker—the gillnetter—fell out of his skiff in the middle of a pod of orca whales. His brother saw them. Talked about it.”

Ring slid the glowing map to the San Juans.

“Eight days after Whittaker, Joe Stanton goes kayaking and encounters an entire pod of orca, here.” He tapped on the map. “Off San Juan Island. Stanton’s girlfriend said he touched a whale with his bare hand—that the whale rose up under his kayak and lingered there for several seconds.”

Ring slid the map to Bremerton, deep within the Puget Sound.

“A few hours ago,” he said, “Stanton responded to a summons and went to the Manette Bridge. What did he find there?” 

Ring looked at Beck and Collins. “Whales…or, one specific whale, to be precise. A member of the species
Orcinus orca
, which is Latin for ‘whale from the underworld of the dead.’

“The voice is real, gentlemen. The source of the madness and hallucinations. The voice is real. And it belongs to a leviathan. A creature of the deep.”

JOE AND ELLA STOOD
in Joe’s tiny kitchen, the radio blasting Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.” Joe pulled Ella close, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, relying on the music to conceal his words from Beck’s microphones. “Beck’s not gonna let us leave. We have to ditch them.”

Ella looked at him. Wide-eyed. Frightened. She squeezed his hand and nodded but didn’t speak.

It was 10:00 a.m., July 4. Independence Day. The first day of Seafair. They’d slept six hours, waking to the roar and rumble of military jets. The morning paper lay open on the kitchen table, the front page all about the day’s festivities. A picture of Bremerton hometown hero and Seafair master of ceremonies Rear Admiral Wesley E. Houghton, dominated the layout.

“I have an idea,” Joe whispered, “to give us cover. Get us out of here. Be ready. We’ll leave through the backyard.” Ella nodded and began stuffing items into a daypack.

Allen Dodd sat slumped in the driver’s seat of a beige Crown Vic. He’d spent the night—after the bizarre events at the Manette Bridge—sleeping in the car in front of a boarded-up adult video store on West Thornton Way, earbud in one ear in case the mics hidden around Joe’s house picked up any suspicious conversation or sounds of departure. An iPad propped on the dash displayed alternating views of Joe’s residence: Entry. Kitchen. Backyard.

Another Beck operative, Chad Kehler, waited in a Mustang on East Archer, one block south of Joe’s house.

Beck wanted Stanton and his girlfriend brought to
Marauder
, alive and unharmed. Dodd and Kehler were confident they could do the job alone, but Beck had ordered them to wait for reinforcements.

Dodd looked at his watch. In twelve minutes, if all went according to plan, a FedEx van would enter Joe’s street, back into his driveway, and park in front of his garage door. The man driving the van would knock on the front door, just as others jumped Joe’s back fence and stormed the house from the rear. Joe and Ella would be taken captive, blindfolded, gagged, and herded into the van via the garage. The van would then deliver them to the Bremerton Airport and Beck’s waiting helicopter. Clean. Simple. Quick. No drama. No freaked-out neighbors.

Dodd watched the video feed, fascinated, as Stanton rolled a charcoal grill onto the middle of his tiny back deck.

Ten minutes to extraction.

Dodd caught a glimpse of Ella stepping onto the deck and actually drooled, a thin stream of saliva trickling from the corner of his mouth.

Dodd wished Beck would haul Stanton away and leave him in charge of the girl. Even on the little screen she looked hotter than hell. Beautiful face. Long legs. Perfect breasts. Perfect ass. Great handfuls of red hair. Dressed now in shorts and a T-shirt and hiking boots.

Dodd ogled and daydreamed, oblivious to the fact that Joe Stanton was pouring gasoline from a jerry can onto his grill and intentionally sloshing it all over the deck. 

JOE STEPPED OFF HIS DECK
and called 911 from his iPhone. “I’d like to report a fire,” he told the dispatcher. “Burning out of control in my backyard. Please hurry.”

He took a book of matches from his pocket.

“You sure about this?” Ella asked. The gas fumes were making her dizzy.

“Beck’s guys are watching us,” Joe replied with flat certainty. “They’re not gonna let us leave. Or if they do, they’ll track us.”

He looked at Ella. “And Mia needs my help.
Our
help.”

Ella nodded and Joe tore a match from the pack.

Seven minutes to extraction.

Dodd stared at Joe and Ella on the video feed and thought the girl looked scared. He’d seen the couple talking. Had seen Joe on the phone, but hadn’t heard any of the call. There were no mics on the deck.

And then he heard sirens. Lots of sirens, coming fast, from multiple directions.

Dodd sat bolt upright in the driver’s seat of the Crown Vic and called Kehler. “Dude, something’s going down.”

On the iPad he saw Joe Stanton light a match and toss it at his barbecue. The grill exploded in flame. Front and back. Top and bottom. Fire flowed down the legs of the cooker, a bright ribbon unspooling, and roared onto the deck, leaping and dancing like a thing alive.

The video feed skipped automatically to images from the other hidden cameras: Entry. Kitchen. When it flicked back to the deck, Joe and Ella were gone.

“Shit!” yelled Dodd. “Chad—they’re in the alley! They’re running.”

Kehler threw the Mustang into gear and lurched from his parking spot, then jumped on the brakes as a cherry-red Bremerton Fire Department ladder truck swung through the intersection of Archer and 9
th
, fifty feet away, horns blaring, sirens screaming.

Kehler waited for the truck to pass, then blasted out of his space just in front of a second fire truck, this one a pumper, its air horns bellowing in complaint.

Kehler gunned the Mustang across oncoming traffic and into the narrow dirt alleyway behind Joe’s house. He spotted Joe and Ella immediately: far end of the alley, three hundred feet away, running in the opposite direction.

“Got ’em!” Kehler yelled into the phone. “They’re in the alley running east. I’m right behind.”