The Ocean Dark

61

Overnight, the weather turned. Alena had slept fitfully, rousing several times to hear the patter of rain against her windows and the way the old windows rattled in their frames with every gust of wind. As a young woman she had traveled the world and rarely suffered from jet lag or insomnia or, God forbid, homesickness. She loved the adventure, even now. But no matter how fit her travels and the gym might have kept her body, her spirit sometimes grew tired. The time shift from Croatia to Washington, DC, had unsettled her, so she had not slept well and had risen just after four a.m. to find herself entirely awake.

In the kitchen, she fixed herself a cup of strong coffee and then sat at the small table by the window that looked out on M Street and watched the dawn arrive. The sky lightened, though the sun hadn’t a hope of even peeking out from behind the heavy clouds, and rain dappled the lilies in the flower box just outside the window. General Wagner would expect her in the office today, writing reports and taking meetings, but Alena decided that she could write reports here at home and take any meetings by phone. It was a day for staying in, for swaddling herself in a blanket on the sofa, drinking coffee and listening to all the handsome twentysomething singer-songwriters that David teased her so much about.

The phone startled her into spilling her coffee.

“Damn it!” she muttered, then she shot an accusing glare at the offending instrument. It jangled in its cradle on the countertop, face lit up with the number of the incoming call, but she couldn’t make out the digits from across the room.

As she rose, it occurred to her to check the clock on the microwave: 5:47 a.m. That was when she knew her day would not be spent on the sofa. Hank Wagner had worked with civilians long enough to know that even a general didn’t call at 0600 hours and expect a warm reception.

Hoping that the phone would not wake David, she snatched it up and thumbed the button to talk. “This had better be good, General.”

“Hello, Alena,” Wagner replied. “And you know it isn’t. For something ‘good,’ I’d let you sleep. I only wake you up when it’s something ugly.”

David woke to a banging on his bedroom door. His eyes snapped open and he stumbled out of bed with the sheet wrapped modestly around him, barely awake but filled with panic. As he oriented himself, he wondered what had happened. Fire? An intruder?

“Up and at ’em, David!” his grandmother called from the hallway. “Come on. Get your ass out of bed.”

The bedroom door stood half-open and as he stumbled toward it he saw Alena hurry by, then abruptly reverse course as though she’d forgotten something.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

She paused in the hall to look in at him, and it struck him that she had been up for quite some time. His grandmother had showered and dressed in black trousers and a white tailored blouse. She’d done her makeup and hair. But the shoes were a dead giveaway, flat and practical, perfect for traveling.

“Pack a bag,” she said, then wrinkled her nose. “And take a shower. Your room reeks of man-smell. But hurry.”

Before he could argue — or ask what else men should smell like — she set off again, vanishing beyond the narrow view his half-open door provided. David knew Alena did not exaggerate, that if she wanted him to hurry there must be a reason, but he’d just been roughly woken from too-brief slumber and he wanted to know what the hell was going on.

He pulled the door open and went into the hall, dragging the sheet around and behind him like the train of a wedding dress. When he didn’t see Alena in the hall he blinked, then realized that she had gone into his office. The door hung open and she had turned on a light to brighten up the gloomy morning.

He started to ask what she was up to, but the moment he saw her bent over the table, peering at his ocean charts, he knew. His first instinct brought a rush of triumph, but then his stomach gave a sick twist and he shivered as nightmare images sprang up in the back of his head — memories that had haunted him both awake and asleep for years.

“Someone found another island,” he said, approaching his grandmother from behind. “Who found it? And where?”

She did not turn to face him. “Gun smugglers, believe it or not. Followed quickly by FBI and Coast Guard. And in the Caribbean.”

“Jesus.” David came up beside her and stared down at the chart, at the tiny red X she had made. Over the past few months, comparing reports of missing pleasure craft, fishing boats, and other ships, he had been creating an incident map on the chart, trying to pinpoint a probability triangle, an area where those events indicated such a habitat would likely be found. Alena’s X fell within his probability triangle.

“I was on the right track,” he said, but the realization did not feel like a victory. He wondered how many people had already died.

Alena turned to him, rose on her toes, and kissed his temple. “You were. Now get in the shower. There’s a plane waiting, and the car will be here to fetch us in twenty minutes.”

She left the room, and a moment later he heard her soft tread as she descended the stairs. David glanced over at the wall where he had posted dozens of newspaper articles about missing ships, as well as case notes about the two previously discovered habitats. A strange feeling spread through him, and he hefted the chunk of glassy black stone in his hand as he tried to identify the unfamiliar tremor inside him. Staring at the smiling faces of a fiftyish couple who had vanished on their sailboat, David blinked in surprise.

He wasn’t used to fear.