24
Ava led, stepping into the tunnel and moving quickly to the first turn, peering around it as the wind rushed at her back.
Nothing.
She moved farther in.
The walls cut off the sound of rain and of the storm outside, but the moaning, indrawn breath of wind remained, blended with a distant rumble of moving water, and overhung by Dan Conrad’s booming voice: “I’m hit! I’m bleeding out. I can’t go into the water.” Hard to tell how far away.
Kaden answered, anger, even disgust, evident in his voice. “You want to live, you don’t have a choice.”
Ava advanced to the next turn as the argument continued.
“I’m telling you, Robicheaux. Call it off. Call it off now.”
“What?”
Ava peered around the next bend, but did not see them.
“I’m not going to be able to make it out—”
“Then I leave you here.”
“Damn you! I am Sigrún. This is my operation and you will do what I tell you.”
“I am doing it—at the cost of my career, my love, my future, a hundred thousand lives. There is no going back, Daniel. We both swore to it. Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor—”
“I am ordering you—”
Bang!
Ava jumped as a gunshot echoed up the passage. She bumped against Akasha who had moved up, to stand just a breath behind her.
There was nothing more to hear of that argument.
Ava traded disbelieving looks with Akasha and Ivan. Then she mouthed, Let’s go.
As she sprinted to the next bend, the wind reversed again.
◇
Ava slowed only a little when she saw Conrad. He lay face up, his back arched over the pack that held his air supply. His aloha shirt, sagging with the weight of blood seeping from his belly wound, puckered open between the buttons, exposing the mound of his gut. But it was a head shot that had killed him. Kaden’s bullet had shattered his broad forehead, leaving his wide, astonished eyes staring at the ceiling and his mouth frozen open in shock.
Coward!
In his own mind, Conrad must have cast himself as a hero, a great leader, imagining that this dangerous last-minute escape would become a story he’d tell over and over again, a testament to his manhood, to the testosterone-fueled determination that would reshape the world and place him at the helm of a new American hegemony—and to get there, he’d been okay with the murder of a city and a hundred thousand innocents.
But he hadn’t truly believed in the cause because he’d abandoned it, the moment he’d begun to fear for his own survival.
Kaden’s resolve would not be so easily broken.
There is no going back, Daniel.
She ran on, Akasha and Ivan just behind, with the sea’s breath blowing in a gale against their faces.
The ragged passage began to slope down. The floor took on a wet sheen. And suddenly water a few inches deep surged past, carrying with it lines of foam tinged red from the upwelling illumination of the emergency lights.
A lull in the wind.
A moment of relative quiet admitting only the hiss of disintegrating foam and the splash of booted feet in shallow water.
Then the sea’s breath reversed. An inhale. The gale at Ava’s back as she chased the receding water.
In a low voice between ragged breaths, Ivan warned, “We’re at the end of the peninsula.”
Only seconds left to catch up with Kaden.
A wet sheen could now be seen on the walls, a high-water mark. At first, it reached only inches above the floor. But as the passage continued downward, the sheen rose—knee-high, and then thigh-high. Ava had to run more carefully, bounding over a clutter of debris: broken sticks, plastic floats, clumps of seaweed, even a tangle of fishing net—objects too large to have gotten past the gate at the tunnel’s mouth, if the gate was closed as it should have been.
A tidal reek filled her lungs.
At the next turning, a change in the light. A faint gleam of gray daylight. Ava held up a hand, signaling to Akasha and Ivan that she meant to stop. She crouched at the turning. Peered around. The passage straightened, angling steeply down to a watery glimmer, the light welling up from below the surface, coming in through the tunnel’s underwater windows.
Kaden waited down there, sheltered in a dark nook off the main passage, where the restaurant’s reception podium used to be. He stood immersed to his waist in swirling water, with a respirator hanging over his shoulder—and he held a pistol aimed in her direction.
Ava ducked back behind the rock as Kaden fired. The bullet buzzed past where she had just been. It hit the wall, ricocheted. Akasha cried out, spasmed, then collapsed into silence. Ivan caught her, cushioned her, as Ava reached to find a pulse. “Akasha.” A whispered plea.
There! Her chest rose, fell, rose again. Just visible past her black, bloodied hair, a fragment of the spent bullet lay embedded in her scalp, looking like a bit of red bone in the glow of the emergency lights.
“Ava?” Kaden shouted, his confusion echoing up the tunnel. He had not expected her to be there. Who then had he been expecting?
Kaden answered her unspoken question: “It’s on you, then, Domanski!”
“No, Kaden!” she shouted, peering out again. “Matt’s not here. It’s just me.”
A blast of wind roared up the passage.
“Run, then!” Kaden shouted, backing deeper into the nook, bracing himself against its smooth walls. “The water’s coming in. Get out now!
A flood surged from the submerged passage. It swept past him, toward her. She turned. Ivan already had Akasha’s limp body over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He started up the passage—too late. The incoming jet of water hit the wall where the passage turned, and then the flood rebounded, shooting up the tunnel, knocking them both off their feet.
Water churned past Ava’s chin as the flood dragged her, scraping her thigh against the concrete, and slamming her shoulder into a wall. A slopping backwash slapped her in the face and she choked. Salt water burned in her nasal passages and in the back of her throat. But she kept her head up, kept her gaze on Akasha as Ivan lost his grip on her and the unconscious young officer went under, the current carrying both her and Ivan away up the tunnel.
Oh God, no. Not Akasha too.
Her recurring nightmare, brought to life. Another friend stolen away by a violent flood. Nolo, all over again.
No. Let me find her. Please. Please.
Instead, the current again slammed Ava against the tunnel wall. Her fingers clawed at the rough stone, defying her desire to follow Akasha, to find her, and bring her back above the surface before it was too late—because didn’t she have to get to Kaden? He was the priority. A hundred thousand lives.
Right?
Ava clung to the bumps and knobs sculpted into the imitation lava rock, bracing with her legs, cursing silently at the weight of the armored vest she still wore. A quick last breath as the water rose to fill the passage and she was submerged.
The current slowed. Stilled. Eyes closed against the salt, Ava released her grip on the rock just long enough to pull off the vest so it couldn’t drag her under. Then she grabbed the rock again.
Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . lungs burning.
Then—at last!—the current reversed. The water drained away as swiftly as it had come in. Ava got her head above the flood. She gasped and let go of the tunnel wall, riding the current back down the passage and around the bend.
Where was Kaden?
There. Still braced in the nook, his face wet, mouth twisted in anger and disbelief. He reached out a hand as the current swept her past him. She grabbed his wrist. His hand locked around her arm and he pulled her in against him as the water drained away.
Ava realized she’d lost her pistol in the flood, but she still had her duty belt and one free hand. She pulled her shockgun from its holster.
Kaden saw it and slapped it away into the receding current, his grip on her wrist so tight her hand had already gone numb. “He recruited you, didn’t he? Matt Domanski. Do you know who he is?”
“Someone who’s trying to stop you,” she said in a low salt-roughened voice.
Kaden leaned in, eye to eye. “Domanski was Sigrún, too, Ava. He proposed this operation. I argued against it, but I was voted down—and then I was handed the duty to do it.”
“And you accepted that duty!”
“I did. And in the end, Domanski lost his nerve. You should have let him drown.”
“Don’t do it, Kaden,” she pleaded as her free hand groped for her folding knife, finding its handle still sticky with threads of webbing. “Don’t. You know it’s wrong.” And in an echo of Daniel Conrad, “Call it off. Please.”
“You want to think that’s still possible.”
Concealing the knife under the water, she struggled to get it open, but she couldn’t do it with just one hand.
Kaden noticed her effort. He grabbed that wrist too and twisted her arm, forcing her to drop the knife, still folded.
“You can’t stop it, Ava. It’ll happen whether I’m there or not.”
No. She did not want to believe that. It couldn’t be true. The launch protocol required him to be there.
But as she gazed into his eyes, she saw it was true.
HADAFA should have foreseen Kaden’s potential for subversion. It should have detected Sigrún’s operation even before it was underway—but HADAFA had been subverted first, made into a false prophet. It had been corrupted by secret-keeping and the ability of those with deep access to modify, sequester, limit, or delete the information on which the system based its assessments.
HADAFA, designed to expose reality, had been used instead to cloak it.
The air grew still. The water swirled, pulling back farther than it had gone before. In that moment of suspended time before the next flood rushed in, Ava saw only truth in Kaden’s eyes. Lyric and Matt had both been wrong. Sigrún, operating under a veil constructed by HADAFA, had cracked and compromised national security, rewriting the launch protocol so that it did not need to rely on the presence of any one man.
The revelation hit hard. Even if she stopped Kaden here and now, it wouldn’t stop the nuke.
Hope stole away. She sagged in his arms, drained by fatigue and dragged down by the bitter inevitability of defeat.
Another gale of moist, salt-laden wind blasted past, pushed by the next incoming flood—and Gideon spoke to her, his flinty, cynical voice half-heard in the wind’s white noise: Angel Dust . . . drop it into the enclosed atmosphere of that submarine and no one will last long.
Ava had not seen a way to do that—not then—but she’d taken the vacuum bottle with its ampules of Angel Dust and secured it to her duty belt.
The ocean surged in, curling around them. She wrenched her left hand free of Kaden’s, but clung with her right as the current tried to carry her away.
The water rose to her shoulders, her neck. He held on to her, gripping the wall with one hand and bracing with his legs as he strove to keep them both within the shelter of the nook.
She groped for the vacuum bottle with her free hand, found it.
“You can survive this,” he told her as she unscrewed the lid. “After I’m gone, just hold on to the wall. Wait for the water to go out and then run. Get to shelter. Everyone will be sheltering because of the storm. The death toll will be minimal. And afterward, it will be a new world. I promise . . .”
The lid came off. Her fingers fished in the canister. She clutched a floating ampule, a single ampule.
“Hold onto the wall,” Kaden repeated.
Instead, she brought her free hand up, out of the water, holding the ampule hidden in curled fingers, her gaze fixed on his. “I loved you,” she told him. And as if she meant to caress him, she brought her trembling hand closer to his face.
The current rested. The passage was flooded now almost to the ceiling.
Now or never.
She sucked in a sharp breath, filled her lungs. Then she used her thumb to pop the top off the ampule, snapping the powdery contents out into his face as she ducked under the water. Using her legs for leverage, she wrenched her wrist free of his grip and pushed away.
The current reversed, sucking her with unholy force down through the lower half of the passage.
◇
An instantaneous mental calculation warned Ava not to resist. If she fought the current in the hope of riding the next inflow back to the upper passage, she would exhaust the oxygen in her system within seconds; she would be dead before the current reversed. So she arrowed her body instead.
Arms extended beyond her head, one hand atop the other, feet together. She kicked hard in mermaid fashion, shooting down the straight passage with her eyes open, salt-stung, her vision a watery blur but good enough to perceive the round windows on either side. Dull gray daylight gleamed behind them, guiding her. A gray glow of open water at the passage’s end became her sacred goal. Reach it, and live.
With every kick, a mental chant:
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic.
And don’t think about the burning explosion building in your chest. You’re going to make it out. You can do this. And the gate will be open. It has to be open. All the debris in the upper passage guarantees that. So kick, and—
Don’t panic.
She saw the gate ahead of her. It was arched like the passage and it was open. Open! Standing open at an angle so that its dense steel mesh looked ominously solid in the blur of her vision. Sand swirled around it as the outflowing current eased.
Oh God, no.
Within seconds, the current would reverse. She had to be clear of the passage before then, or she would drown.
She kicked harder, pulled at the water with her hands. Darkness loomed on the periphery of her vision. She ignored it, all her intent, her effort fixed on the necessity of reaching open water.
Don’t panic.
She shot past the gate, into a cloud of sand grains stirred up from the shallow sea floor by an incoming wave. Within that veil, just feet away, two dark aquatic shapes—six feet? seven feet? eight feet long? One darted toward her. She recoiled, tumbling back as the force of the wave took her, shoulder crunching against the sandy bottom.
Deep instinct controlled her now. Survival mattered most. She kicked off the sea floor, rocketing toward a foam-laced gray daylight even as her brain noted the presence of a third dark shape appearing out of nowhere to join the other two.
◇
Ava burst past the surface into a driving rain. She had emerged in the long trough between two massive breaking waves.
She filled her lungs with a wrenching gasp, forcing air past a salt-swollen throat, and then she blew it all out again. Breathed in, breathed out. In and out, forcing oxygen into her blood stream. Then she ducked under the water again, diving for the bottom ahead of the oncoming wave, so that the brutal chaos of its foaming break passed above her.
Even so, the rolling force of the wave dragged the bottom, tumbling her. She didn’t fight it. She relaxed in its grip, shaping herself to its flow, riding it, kicking at the water and pulling when she could, surfacing only when the boiling white water had safely passed.
Cold rain sluiced over her upturned face as she breathed, deliberately hyperventilating. The weight of her duty belt forced her to kick hard and paddle at the water just to stay at the surface. She could have popped the buckle, but she didn’t, because the belt’s weight would make it so much easier to return to the relative safety of the bottom.
She dove again as the next breaking wave bore down. She rode its vortex, swimming when she could. And when it left her behind, she surfaced. Breathed. Looked for the next oncoming wave—still several seconds away—and then turned to gauge the distance to the shore.
The smooth back of the last wave loomed like a blue mountain. Beyond it, she saw the peaks of crumbling dunes, and then hotel towers. Off to her left, at least a hundred feet away, maybe more, waves crashed and fountained against the artificial stone of Komohana Point.
Astonishment coursed through her. The usual longshore current ran east to west, from Diamond Head toward Ewa. If she’d been caught in that, she would have been swept west past the point, toward the Ala Moana seawall—and away from any chance of ever making it alive to shore. But in that raging sea, the usual current had reversed, running west to east, carrying her with it as it paralleled Waikīkī Beach.
She drew another breath, and dove, stroking hard under water, then tumbling in the surge of the passing wave.
Usually, the largest waves came in sets with a relative lull between them. Ava would have waited for that lull before trying for the shore, but in that wild sea she could not judge the wave height. Her only strategy was to keep going. Dive, then swim hard underwater as the seafloor grew shallower—and then it became so shallow there was nowhere left to dive.
Pummeling white water swept her up, rolled her, slammed her against the bottom, lifted her again. Sand got into her mouth, her ears, her eyes. Then the worst of it passed. All along her body she sensed the force, the direction, the velocity of the foaming water. Flattening her hands, she used them like fins to stabilize her body in a wild ride as the wave carried her up the beach. When she felt her momentum slow, she struggled to get her feet beneath her, finally standing up into wind-driven rain.
The wave reversed. Its powerful backwash streamed past, threatening to drag her back into the sea. She leaned in to counterbalance, her shoes sinking into water-logged sand, helping to anchor her. As the water subsided, she pulled her feet free and staggered up a beach strewn with bits of vegetation and plastic, small fish, crushed jellies, and even the long, pale blue corpse of a sea serpent. Seaweed trailed from her duty belt.
She looked for a path inland.
Wave action had undermined the dunes, collapsing their seaward slopes, leaving towering cliffs of sand that she didn’t dare try to climb. With that much sand, if it gave way, she would die beneath it. Instead, she ran down the beach searching for a low point, where a paved path had been.
Another wave washed up, fountained past her ankles—a small wave, compared to those marching in behind. The roar of the sea filled her mind and she felt the power of those waves as a vibration in her chest.
There!
A low point in the sand cliff, only a little higher than her head. Ava bolted for it as a massive wave roared onto the beach, flooding it with white water. She clawed at the vertical face, using hands and feet. The sand gave way as she scrambled over what proved to be a narrow ridge, formed by the collapse of the dunes on either side. She splashed down onto a sand-covered path where rainwater pooled. Momentum carried her on for a few more steps before she dropped to her knees, bent over in exhaustion.
After a minute, after her breathing calmed, she remembered the canister on her belt and reached for it, fingers groping inside. Empty. All the ampules gone.
She hoped the sea would open them and kill the spores of Angel Dust.
Her tactile mic was gone too, of course.
And Kaden was gone.
She’d seen him, hadn’t she? That dark shape that had seemed to come out of nowhere. He’d emerged from the tunnel just seconds behind her. Two divers had been there waiting to meet him.
So he would live, for a time.
And what of Akasha and Ivan? Had they made it out of the tunnel?
And where was Matt?
Kaden’s bitter voice echoed in her memory: Domanski was Sigrún, too, Ava. He proposed this operation.
But Matt worked for Lyric. The call for Sigrún to carry out a false-flag operation must have begun with her.
Ava straightened up as best she could in the fierce wind. She looked up at the hotel towers, with their windows of hurricane glass. There, only a little farther east, the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower.
She got to her feet and stumbled through the dunes to the line of lagoons, wet sand pelting her legs. Palm fronds, ripped from the whiplashing coconut trees, cluttered the path. She started across the bridge, her head down against the wind until someone yelled her name.
“Ava!”
Looking up, she saw Ivan running toward her—and dread slammed in. “Where’s Akasha?”
“Upstairs, with a massive headache. She’ll be okay.”
They met in the middle of the bridge. Ivan gripped her shoulders, gazing into her eyes as if he could read some truth there, his own eyes narrowed against the rain. “When you didn’t come out of that tunnel I thought we’d lost you.” His grip tightened. “You went after him?”
She nodded.
“Damn it, Ava. Do you know how crazy that was?’
“No choice in it. Had to try.”
A hollow note in his voice: “You couldn’t stop him . . . could you?”
“In the end I didn’t want to. I hope he made it out. I hope he’s taking out his regulator and coughing out Angel Dust into the cold air of Denali’s lock.”
If Kaden had breathed in the spores and if the spores were viable—then how long would it be before the deadly fungus spread throughout his skeleton crew?