Protocol 7 (19 page)

Andrew was the first to turn away. Ryan followed him almost gratefully. Simon stood alone over the body for a moment longer, saying nothing, revealing nothing.

Finally, he turned away and trudged back to the Rover.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

They drove away from the polluted pond. No one spoke for a long time.

* * *

They drove to a working tube station.

“I can’t bloody believe this is happening,” Ryan muttered as Andrew pulled to a stop.

“It isn’t,” Samantha said dully. It was the first thing she had said in more than an hour. “None of it is.”

Andrew popped the door so suddenly it sounded like a gunshot. “I’ll be right back.”

He hopped out of the car, carrying the small silver device in his right hand. Without looking back he crossed four lanes of traffic, dodging expertly between the oncoming cars. When he reached the far curb, he turned on a dime, scanned the vehicles, and raised an arm.

“Taxi!” he said. “Taxi, here!”

One of the semi-automated electrics that scoured the city pulled up almost immediately. The cabby was an older man—semi-retired, Andrew guessed—with chubby cheeks and a bright red drinker’s nose.

The back door opened automatically, and Andrew jumped in.

“Where to?” the cabby said, already abysmally bored. The car would do all the work: plot the course to the destination, avoid traffic problems, and calculate the fare. His presence was more a matter of union politics and public jobs programs than necessity.

“Heathrow Airport!” Andrew crowed with absurd enthusiasm.

The door started to close as the cabby punched the destination into his console…and Andrew stuck his foot half-out of the cab, so it couldn’t close.

“Oh!” he said in the same giddy tone. “Silly me! Forgot my luggage, forgot my wallet, and forgot I’m not leaving ‘til tomorrow. Never mind!”

He hopped back out of the cab and walked briskly away, leaving the old cab driver gaping at him.

“Bloody drunkards,” the driver said and veered back into traffic, returning to the never-ending quest for passengers while carrying the ULF locational tracker with him, wedged between the cushions of the cab’s back seat.

“Take that, you bastards,” Andrew said between clenched teeth. “The Invisible Man strikes again!”

Three minutes later, he was back behind the wheel, guiding the Rover and the rest of the team toward their destination. He almost managed a smile when the familiar black helicopter, still flying far too low to the ground, passed overhead, going in entirely the wrong direction.

* * *

They stopped at a nearly deserted pub, miles from the estate and the pond. As they ate, Andrew took each of them to the restroom—even Samantha—and used his handheld scanner to check for implants. At the same time, Ryan began to make phone calls—half a dozen of them, all very quiet, all very intense. As the rest of them lingered over bad coffee and lukewarm tea, he excused himself from the table, drove off in the Rover, and returned in less than fifteen minutes.

Ryan and Andrew both returned to the table almost at the same moment, from different directions. Andrew broke the silence with a ghostly imitation of his old chirpiness. “Finished!” he reported. “I think we’re clean.”

“Good,” Simon said, feeling a bit better about the entire journey.

Ryan cleared his throat politely, all business. “I have something for you all.” He began to pass out packets to each of them, dealing them across the filthy table as if they were oversized playing cards. “Made the calls, cashed in a few favors, greased a few palms, and hacked a few databases.”

The packets contained old-fashioned paper airline tickets and shiny new passports for each of them: Hayden, Andrew, Simon, and Samantha. He shoved his own into the pocket of his sports coat. “Different airlines, different times—for most of us—and names you won’t recognize and will never see again. These are temporary identities. They’ll last for seventy-two hours or so and then poof, dissolve into thin air.”

Andrew smiled—his first genuine grin since he could remember. “Very nice,” he said, examining the documents closely.

Ryan laughed. “I’m flattered. And I am now officially out of the forgery business.”

He turned to Simon with a very serious expression. “I think you should go with Sam. I set you up as brother and sister, traveling together. I hope that’s okay.”

Simon glanced briefly at Sam. “It’s fine,” he said quietly. “A good idea.” He was frankly unsure if she could have made it out of the country on her own—not in her current state. She didn’t look back at him. She didn’t even bother to push the hair out of her eyes.

“Okay, then,” Simon told them all, “I think we’re set. Andrew, why don’t you drive us all to the nearest hotel. We can catch individual cabs or busses or shuttle from there—split up and fade away. You can just leave the car in extended parking. It’ll be weeks before they notice something odd.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Andrew said.

Simon looked up at the rest of them. He knew that they would all meet again in Corsica. He had to go. He had to find out more about his father’s travels. Oliver’s private hideaway nestled in the remote mountains of Corsica would give them the perfect place to be undetected while he searched for more clues.

“And so it begins,” Hayden said grimly and looked at the door.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Andrew added.

Simon’s eyes moved from face to face, as if he was memorizing each of them. As if this was the last time they would be together.

“Thank you again,” he said. “I’ll see you in Corsica.”

Sabrina stood on the porch and waited for the rain to stop. She stared at her car, glistening in the downpour.

She wanted Ryan to come back. She wanted to confront him one last time. She wanted to know, to understand, why he was doing this—why he was disappearing with his friends without so much as a word of explanation.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t like Ryan at all.

And she knew deep down, there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop him.

But it was too late now. He was gone, disappeared into the night and the storm. He wasn’t even answering his mobile. He wasn’t—

—a hand snaked around from behind her and slapped something on the side of her neck.

Sabrina tried to scream, but the hand darted forward and clamped over her mouth, blocking her voice completely. She tried to struggle, but her attacker’s other arm slipped around her waist and lifted her off the ground before she could jump or kick.

She felt her body break as she was slammed against the side of the building. For one instant, she saw the face of her attacker quite clearly. She was beautiful. Very tall, very thin, wearing a camelhair coat, and absolutely without expression. So perfect she didn’t seem human at all…

“Why?” Sabrina whispered, choking on her own blood.

Her attacker did not answer.

The light was starting to drain away. The lamps were liquefying, the windows growing dim. Even the sound of the rain was moving farther away…and farther still.

The sound of the rain was the last thing Sabrina ever heard.

The frigid dusk breeze was sharp enough to sting as Simon drove a little too fast down the dark and secluded road to his father’s old hideaway. Three days had passed since the team had separated in London; since then, he and Samantha had made their slow and circuitous way across Europe, acting exactly like brother and sister on an extended holiday, even though they felt the weight of the world on their shoulders.

The farther they got from Oxford and its madness, the more Samantha acted like her old, tough, smart self. She had avoided talking about the future entirely; there were moments along the way, Simon thought, when she actually seemed to forget why they were traveling and where they were going.

But now they had arrived, and the darkness had returned. She had been very quiet ever since their small charter plane had landed on one of Corsica’s World War II-vintage airstrips.

Simon made a sharp turn as the road took another twist to the south, then an almost immediate twist to the north, winding between yet another set of steep, rocky peaks. The island seemed to be made of nothing but small mountains with the occasional pocket valley just large enough for a single cottage and a pasture.

Simon almost smiled as the SUV pushed on and the mountains unfolded around them. He vaguely remembered this approach to his father’s property. He knew they would be reaching the nearly hidden gate any moment now. Assuming I don’t miss it entirely, he told himself.

Simon hadn’t spoken to any of the team since Oxford. He didn’t dare—and didn’t need to. They each had their own route, their own set of tasks, and they all had the same destination on the same date: the cottage on Corsica, no later than sunset on May 22. It wasn’t written down anywhere; it didn’t need to be. They each knew it by heart.

Still, Simon couldn’t help but wonder if they were all still alive.

He gazed idly at the winding road, the ragged hillsides, the tiny, tidy cottages. Nothing’s changed, he thought as they sailed along the roughly paved road. He hadn’t driven to this cottage in twelve years, but the roads were etched in his mind as if he had driven through them yesterday.

And then there it was: the Gate, an overgrown alcove of trees at the side of the road that blocked the main entrance to the property. Anyone who was unfamiliar with the entrance would easily miss it in the deep blue shadows of the thick foliage; the fact that it was dusk made it even harder to decipher.

The cottage had always been a mystery to Simon. Ever since his childhood, conversations about the hideaway were discouraged. Oliver never liked to discuss it, and Simon himself had only been there twice—once as a child, and once when he was in college. The college trip had been terribly important, but for some reason his childhood memories were far more vivid. Like a dream, he thought. One of the few really good ones I had as a boy.

He looked into the rear-view mirror and saw that Samantha was sleeping soundly. Good, he thought. She needs it. He saw her stir and mumble something he couldn’t quite hear. He hoped it was a good dream. He could use a few of those himself, he thought.

As he drove up the rough dirt road, he realized that he needed to focus on why he had come. He reviewed the next stage of the plan one more time. It wasn’t going to be easy; the cottage’s remote location made it safe and secure, but it made the communication links that were crucial to the plan very difficult—almost impossible.

One night, he thought. If they were right about the location of the S.S. Munro and its precious cargo, they would have a single window of less than one hour, on this very night and no other, to make contact. Ryan had told them that he could scramble the satellites in their specific location for one hour before it raised suspicion. If they succeeded, they would all leave together—and stay together from now on, until the end. There was a chartered yacht moored in a small lagoon near town. It would wait until one hour past high tide for them to board and no longer. Or at least that was what Ryan was supposed to have arranged, he told himself.

“Timing,” he said aloud, but very softly. “It’s all about timing.”

As he passed through the final copse of trees, so dense it was black as coal, the rich smell of the pine in the cold mountain air brought a sacred memory back to him: three days with Oliver, here on Corsica, when he was no more than seven years old. He remembered everything they had done together that long summer weekend—making breakfast, fixing the porch steps, hunting for foxes with a shared compound bow in this same slice of wood he was passing right now. They were together every moment until the late evening of every day, when his father had disappeared into his upstairs study and closed the door behind him, locking it and leaving Simon alone.

The study, he thought. I need to get inside the study. There were secrets in there, he knew, enormous secrets his father had kept locked away for a generation.

He pictured the door to the study as if he had seen it yesterday. He was convinced—almost certain—that the key to Oliver’s predicament waited for him inside.

Ask Leon, the coded message had said. He knows. It was more than a decade since Simon had seen the groundskeeper. The dour old Corsican native had terrified him when he was a boy and made him bloody uncomfortable when he’d visited as a young man. Now, somehow, he was at the center of this mystery.

And Simon needed his help.

He remembered how scared he was when he’d first met Leon as a child. He was an unusual person to Simon—he would have been to any child—and Simon had been terrified by his stark, cold demeanor.

The groundskeeper never talked much. He was a tall, slender fellow with hair as black as obsidian and hands the size of shovels. He had dedicated his entire life to caring for the estate—and it really was an estate, Simon admitted to himself, not just some modest cottage in the Corsican hills. He and Leon had never been friends; they wouldn’t be friends now, he knew. But he needed to talk to the man, and he needed his help, if only for the next few hours.

Simon had sent him a message from Oxford and had received a one-word response: COME. They hadn’t exchanged another word since.

He maneuvered around the trees, then tapped his brakes, and slowed the car as they approached the massive iron gates that had been hidden from sight. They blocked the entrance to a winding road that led even further up the mountain. As the vehicle crawled forward, the gates started to open slowly. So he did get the message, Simon thought. Otherwise, he knew, that huge threshold would have remained silent and immobile. He’s expecting us.

The road beyond was narrow and covered deeply in gravel that was so coarse it was almost like cobblestone. The popping crunch of the tires pushing down onto the small stones unnerved him all the more; it was an all-too-familiar sound he hadn’t heard in years. Outside, the mountain was strangely quiet, almost expectant, as they slowly drove up toward the cottage.