0533 hours.
Finn was in trouble.
At first he’d tried to ease his way back into those random patches of childhood memory. Slow. Cautious. Carlos Hathcock, the legendary Vietnam-era Marine sniper, once took three full days to slither a thousand yards through heavily defended territory before sending a bullet ripping through a general’s heart. Finn didn’t have three days, but he did his best to slip into the bear’s cave as undetected as Hathcock.
Didn’t work.
Every time he got close the bear lashed out—and he would find himself sitting up, gasping for air, gripped with nausea.
Now it was worse. The dizziness was back. In the dirty red haze of the safety lights the walls of his cell seemed to be slanting inward, crashing into one another at impossible angles. It hurt to keep his eyes open, hurt worse to close them.
The buzzing in his head came and went, a distant police siren having a psychotic episode.
He sat up and leaned against the wall, panting with effort. Consulted the clock in his head. After 0530.
Which left him barely half an hour.
Focus.
The danger was coming at him from three directions. Danger at the beach, when they landed. That could wait. Danger here on the ship. Imminent. Danger from inside his head—worsening by the hour. But he wasn’t making any progress on that last, so that would have to wait, too.
Leave the old memories for now. Deal with the imminent danger.
Which meant a different kind of reconnaissance. He needed more than an unaccounted-for cup of coffee.
He needed to ID the guy.
Assuming it wasn’t himself.
Finn lay back on his prison cell rack, hands clasped behind his head, and closed his eyes. The nausea swept over him like a poisonous wind, rushing up from his legs to his head. He let it run. Breathe in, let it hold, four, five, six, seven, let it empty out, then roll in again…a slow surf of breath, a tidal heartbeat.
He’d already run through footage in his head of the days Schofield and Biker went missing. Ditto Luca Santiago. Ditto the night the two boys from recycling were killed, the night he and the CMC ran into each other patrolling, the night of the full moon. Nothing but gaping holes.
He started unpacking the files of memories of that Beer Day talent show scene, the day of the killer’s big reveal.
Breathe in, four, five, six, seven…
Sitting by the portside edge of the flight deck, watching the crowd. West Texas, the helo pilot, walks over and sits down. Starts talking to him, asking something about her CO. Finn watches the stage. Master of ceremonies pointing to the rolled-up canvas. A few laughs in the crowd, people guessing at the joke to come. The canvas unfurling. The first scream.
At the time Finn was dimly aware of the poster depicting the two kids being burned alive, but unlike most of the crowd he was not shocked by it. Not even surprised. In fact he hadn’t paid much attention to the poster itself. He was focused on everyone’s response. He began replaying those observations now, subject by subject—the screaming, crying, shouting, vomiting. He didn’t care about any of that. It wasn’t the reactions that interested him.
It was the reactions to the reactions.
Finn flipped rapidly through the mental files, pausing only to examine images of the scattered few who responded proactively—those who, rather than recoiling or freaking out, acted instantly to protect or support the person next to them. The sheepdogs of the group. These were not conscious, thought-out responses. There wasn’t time for that. They were reflexive. Instinctive. And all virtually identical.
Except one.
He rewound the footage in his head, watched it again.
Something was different here. What, exactly? Different how?
He rewound and scanned it again.
And a third time—
There.
One man, an officer, putting out a hand to support the screaming woman standing next to him. Much like a few others.
Except that this one started putting out his hand a split second before the poster unfurled.
He knew what was about to happen.
He knew before it happened.
He was the guy.