Elisa glanced at Victor and Jacqueline in the backseat; they looked as disconcerted as she felt. If Carter were telling the truth, he was the best ally they could possibly have.
"So we're not going to Zurich?" Blanes asked.
"Of course not. I never even considered it."
"Why didn't you tell us?"
Carter pretended not to hear. After maneuvering skillfully between two vehicles and then getting on the freeway, he finally replied.
"If you're going to depend on me from here on out, Professor, you'd better learn one thing: the truth is something you never tell; it's something you do. The only thing you tell are lies."
Elisa wondered if, at that moment, he was telling the truth.
"THEY'RE gone."
That was all he could think, his sole conclusion. His colleague had planned it all very carefully. Maybe he'd never even intended to go to Switzerland. Maybe he had private transport, maybe they'd gone to another airport.
For a moment, he couldn't breathe. He was hyperventilating so intensely that without a word, he had to get up and leave the room where the head of Barajas International Airport was briefing him. He walked out into the hall. His man followed.
"They're gone," Harrison repeated once he got his breath back. "Carter's on their side."
He knew why, now, too. He's trying to save his own skin. He knows this is the most dangerous thing he's ever had to face in his life, and he wants the scientists to help him survive.
He took a deep breath. Suddenly, the prospects weren't looking so good.
Zig Zag might be the enemy. The Enemy, with a capital E, the most fearful thing of all. But now he knew that Carter was another kind of enemy. And even though the two weren't comparable, his old colleague was no trifling adversary.
From that moment on, he'd have to be exceedingly careful of Paul Carter.
PART EIGHT
The Return
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
28
BENEATH the rapidly setting sun, the island looked like a tiny rip in a sheet of wavy blue fabric. The helicopter circled over twice before beginning its descent.
Up until that minute, the idea of a strip of jungle floating in a tropical ocean had seemed more like an ad for a travel agency than a reality to Victor. The kind of place you never go because it's so fake, just bait to lure in more customers. But when he saw New Nelson resting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, surrounded by rings of various shades of green, covered with palm fronds that looked like flowers (from above), white sands and coral reefs like huge necklaces in the sea, he had to admit he'd been wrong. Places like that really did exist.
And if the island were real, he reasoned—petrified—then everything he'd heard up until then took on a new verisimilitude.
"It looks like heaven on earth," he murmured. Elisa, scrunched in beside him by the helicopter window, stared down, riveted. "Well, it's hell," she said.
Victor doubted it. Despite everything he'd heard, he couldn't believe that New Nelson could be worse than the airport in Sanaa, Yemen, where they'd spent the last eighteen hours waiting for Carter to tie up all the loose ends and get them to the island. He hadn't been able to shower or change clothes, his bones ached from having slept on uncomfortable benches at the airport, and he'd had almost nothing to eat or drink besides potato chips, chocolate, and bottled water. And that after the highly distressing flight on the light aircraft they'd taken from Torrejon, Madrid's military air base, made all the more enjoyable by Carter's sarcastic comments.
"You call yourselves scientists, right? You know the expression 'in theory,' I presume. Well, 'in theory' you're going back to the place you left ten years ago, but don't blame me if that doesn't turn out to be the case."
"We never left" was Jacqueline Clissot's taciturn rejoinder. Unlike Elisa, Jacqueline had brought some clothes with her. She'd changed in Sanaa and now wore a baseball cap over her straight hair, a white summer blouse, and a denim miniskirt. At that moment, she looked out the other window, next to Blanes, but she turned her head away when the island came into view.
Victor didn't care what they said. Regardless of whatever might be there waiting for them, at least it was the final stage of that maddening journey. He'd have time to take a shower, maybe even shave. He had his doubts about the possibility of finding any clean clothes there, but just maybe...
The helicopter jerked violently again. After lurching once more—the Arabic pilot assured them that it was the wind, but Victor was inclined to think it was more a case of his piloting skills—they regained balance and descended toward what looked to be a landing pad made of sand. To the right was what appeared to be the ruins of a building and a pile of twisted metal.
"That's what's left of the garrison and the warehouse," Elisa said.
Victor saw her shiver and put his arm around her.
From the air, the station looked a little like a bent fork. The tines were formed by three gray barracks with sloping roofs that were all connected at the northern end, and the handle was stumpy and round. He imagined that was where SUSAN, the electron accelerator, was stored. There were long, circular antennae on the roof above it, stretching their metallic skeletons up into the sky. The whole thing was enclosed by a huge, square, barbed-wire fence.
Victor was one of the last ones out of the chopper. He followed Elisa to the steps—both of them bent double to avoid banging their heads on the roof (he was practically kissing her behind)—and jumped to the ground, feeling off-kilter from the flight, the sound of the chopper blades, and the sand. He stepped away from the helicopter coughing, and, when he took a breath, his lungs filled with several centimeters of island air. It wasn't as humid as he thought.
"There's a storm south of here, in the Chagos," Carter shouted from the helicopter. He had no trouble making himself heard over the noise of the rotors.
"Is that bad?" Victor called, raising his voice.
Carter stared back at him as if he were a larva.
"It's good. It's dry weather that worries me, and that's what you normally get this time of year. As long as there are storms, no one will come close. Here, take this."
He held out a box with one hand. Victor needed two to even lift it, and still he had a hard time not dropping the thing. He felt like a soldier transporting supplies. In fact, it was provisions that Carter had gotten in Sanaa: canned goods and pasta, several sizes of batteries for the flashlights and radios, munitions, and bottled water. The water was vitally important since the warehouse tank had been destroyed and Carter didn't know if they'd installed another one. Elisa, Blanes, and Jacqueline wandered over and got the rest of their baggage.
Victor was lurching and staggering like a drunkard. The box was extraordinarily heavy. He saw Elisa and Jacqueline pass him, Elisa carrying two boxes (no doubt significantly lighter than his, but still, two). He felt pathetic and useless, and it made him remember how much he'd hated PE at school, and how humiliated he always felt when girls were stronger than him. Somehow the idea that a woman—especially one as attractive as Elisa or Jacqueline—had to be weaker than him was something still ingrained in the recesses of his mind. It was silly, he knew, but he couldn't get it out of his head.
As he struggled to make it to the barracks with his burden, he heard Carter behind him, shouting good-bye to the pilot. As head of security on New Nelson, he'd had no problem getting the coast guards to look the other way. And as he'd explained, there was very little chance of Eagle getting wind of their presence on the island, since the guardsmen were trustworthy. But he'd warned them that the helicopter would take off immediately. He didn't want to risk the chance of a military plane spotting them on a routine flyover. They had to be all alone. And as if to emphasize that fact, he heard the chopper's rotors begin to turn faster and looked up just in time to see it whir up into the air, sending flashes of the fading sunlight shooting out from the revolving blades before it faded into
the distance. All alone in paradise, he thought.
Maybe that thought flustered him, because suddenly the box slipped from his hands. He managed to save it before it crashed to the ground, but one corner of it banged down on his foot. The searing pain smashed any more thoughts of paradise.
Luckily, no one had seen. They were all clustered together outside the door to the third barracks, probably waiting for Carter to let them in.
"Need some help?" Carter asked, passing him.
"No thanks, I'm fine..."
Red as a beet and totally out of breath, Victor limped off across the sand once more, his legs spread wide. Carter had already caught up to the others and brandished a bolt cutter as big as his arms. The noise of it cutting through the chain on the door was like a shot being fired.
"The house was empty, and no one came to sweep," he said, as if it were a song lyric, stopping to kick aside some debris with his boot.
It was 6:50 in the evening, island time, on Friday, March 13, 2015.
Friday the thirteenth. Victor wondered if that would bring bad luck.
"IT looks so tiny now," Elisa said.
She stood in the doorway, sweeping the flashlight beam across what had been her bedroom on the island.
He started to think it might be hell after all.
He'd never seen a more depressing place in his life. The sheet-metal walls and floor were hot as an oven that had just baked several loaves of bread. Everything looked utterly dismal, there was no ventilation, and it stank to high heaven. Oh, and, of course, the barracks were significantly smaller than Elisa had made them out to be: a pathetic dining room, a pathetic kitchen, and totally barren rooms. The bedroom was nothing but naked walls, the bathroom barely had even the most basic features, and, of course, it was all covered in a thick layer of dust. Nothing resembling the dreamy facilities that Cheryl Ross had welcomed Elisa to ten years earlier. Elisa's eyes brimmed with tears and she smiled, surprised. She'd been sure she would feel no nostalgia whatsoever. Maybe she was just exhausted from the trip.
Victor was slightly more impressed with the screening room, though it, too, was puny and stiflingly hot. Nevertheless, staring at the black screen, he couldn't help but tremble. Could they really have seen Jerusalem during Christ's lifetime on that monitor?
The control room, however, was the place that left him dumbfounded.
A cement-walled chamber almost a hundred feet wide and 120 feet long, it was the biggest, coolest room at the station. There were still no lights (Carter had gone to check out the generators), but Victor could make out, through the dusky light coming through the windows, the shiny backside of SUSAN, and he was spellbound. He was a physicist, and nothing he'd seen or heard in his entire life could possibly compare with that piece of equipment. He felt like a hunter who, having heard stories of amazing kills, was finally seeing the gun that had fired the shots and could no longer doubt the rest.
Then, startled, he jumped. The fluorescent lights flickered on above him and everyone blinked. Victor looked at the others as if for the first time, and suddenly realized he was going to live with these people. But he didn't mind, especially not about Elisa and Jacqueline. Blanes wasn't bad company, either. It was only Carter, who just then appeared through a small door to the right of the accelerator, who had no place in his world.
"Well, you'll have power so you can play with your computers and heat up food." He'd taken off his jacket and some random gray chest hairs peeked out over the top of his shirt. His biceps bulged, too large for his sleeves. "The problem is that there's no water. And we can't use the air-conditioning if we want anything else to work. I don't trust the backup generator, and the other one is still busted. And that means it's going to be hot," he added, smiling. There was not a drop of sweat on him, though, and Victor realized that the rest of them were drenched from head to toe. Listening to him talk, he never knew if Carter was mocking them or if he actually wanted to help them. Maybe both, he decided.
"There's another reason to save electricity, too," Blanes said. "Up until now we've always done the opposite: avoid the darkness at all costs. But it's obvious that Zig Zag consumes all the energy he can find. Lights, appliances, computers that are on ... that's all food to him."
"And you want him to starve," said Carter.
"I don't know how much it'll help. He uses varying amounts of electricity. In Silberg's plane, for example, all he had to do was burn out the cabin lights. But I think it's best not to give him too much to choose from."
"That can be arranged. We'll disconnect the overall power supply and use only computers and the microwave to heat up food. We've got more than enough flashlights."
"Well, let's get going." Blanes turned to the others. "I'd like us all to work together. We can use this room as our base. There are enough tables and it's plenty big. We'll split up the tasks. Elisa, Victor: we need to find the speed at which the attacks occur. Why does Zig Zag act over several continuous days and then 'rest' for a few years? Is it related to the amount of energy consumed? Is there a concrete pattern? Carter will give you detailed reports on the murders. I'll work with Reinhard's conclusions and Marini's files. Jacqueline, you can help me sort through the files..."
While they were all nodding, something happened.
They were tired, or maybe it happened too fast for anyone to react. One second, Carter was on Blanes's right, rubbing his hands together, and the next he'd jumped to the computer chair and was stamping the ground beneath the table. Then he puffed out his chest and looked at them all like a ticket taker interrupting the first-class passengers' conversation.
"Well, Professor, looks like even bad students have their uses. At least they can clean the erasers after class." With dramatic flourish, he bent down and picked up a squashed snake. "I'm guessing his family is close by. It might not look like it, but we are in the jungle and little creatures often come inside in search of food."
"It's not poisonous," said Jacqueline, unflustered, taking it from him. "Looks like a simple green swamp snake."
"Still disgusting, though, isn't it?" Carter snatched it back, walked over to a metal trash can and dropped the coiled snake in, its guts spilling out. "Evidently, we need more than brains here. We need a little brawn, too. And that reminds me, I need some help, too. Someone to deal with our provisions, cooking, organizing, taking turns on guard duty, maybe cleaning a little... You know, all of life's unpleasant details."
"I'll do it," said Victor immediately, glancing at Elisa. "You can take care of the calculations yourself." She saw Carter smile, as though he found Victor's offer amusing.
"Good," said Blanes. "Let's get moving. How much time do you think we have, Carter?"
"You mean before Eagle sends in the cavalry? Two, three days, tops, and that's presuming they buy the story I told in Yemen."
"That's not long."
"Well, that's the optimistic view, Professor," Carter replied. "Harrison's smart as a fox, and I seriously doubt he'll buy it."
THE good thing about people who are sad all the time is that when things take a turn for the worse, they seem to brighten a little. As though realizing they had nothing to complain about to begin with. And that's exactly what happened to Victor. He couldn't say he was happy, exactly, but he did feel sort of exalted, like he had a renewed zest for life. His days of aeroponic plants and reading philosophy were long gone. This was a savage world he was living in, one that made new demands on him by the minute. And he liked feeling useful. He'd always felt that no skill is worth much if it doesn't help others, and now was the time to put that belief into practice. All afternoon he opened boxes, swept, and cleaned, following Carter's orders. He was exhausted, true, but he'd discovered that fatigue could be addictive, like a drug.
At one point, Carter asked him if he could cook using a microwave.
"I can make stew," he replied.
Carter stared.
"So make it."
It was clear that the ex-soldier was taking advantage of him, but he
obeyed without grumbling. After all, how satisfying was staying home alone working all the time? Now he could actually help other people just by carrying out simple tasks.
He opened several cans, a bottle of oil, and some vinegar, and did what he could, taking advantage of the scarce natural light coming in through the window to create, if not a masterpiece, at least something that might qualify as a decent home-cooked meal. He'd taken off his sweater and shirt and worked bare chested. The air was so dense and heavy with sweat that he thought he might gag, but that just made his mission all the more real. He was a miner making dinner for his exhausted companions, a cabin boy sweeping down the deck.
Amazing circumstances were cropping up all over the place. At one point, Elisa actually walked into the kitchen with her jeans in her hands. All she was wearing was a spaghetti-strap top and a tiny pair of panties, and she was sweating profusely. She'd put her thick black hair up into a ponytail.
"Victor, do we have anything I could use to cut these? Some shears or something? I'm sweating like a pig."
"I think I've got just the thing."
Carter had brought a huge box of tools that lay open in the next room. Victor selected the steel cutters. It was a marvelous, spontaneous moment between them. He could never have dreamed of a situation like that occurring to him, especially with Elisa. She even smiled; they joked.
"Higher, no, higher, cut them here," she pointed.
"Wow, these are going to be real minipants. Even as short shorts, they'll be short..."
"I don't care. Jacqueline doesn't have anything to lend me, and I'm boiling."
He thought of his previous life, when he used to feel lucky if he got to have coffee with her in Alighieri's clinical surroundings. And now here they were practically naked (him from the waist up, and her in panties), deciding how short to cut her shorts. He was still scared (and she clearly was, too), but there was something in their fear that made him feel he could handle anything, pleasant or unpleasant. Fear was liberating.