Chapter 5 Say Nothing

Arya's POV

Two weeks burned faster than they should have. I read Maddox's file backward, and the target was the least interesting page in it. Horizon International kept its Gulf hub on the mainland shore west of Miami, a private waterfront behind nine feet of poured concrete. Six charges and four hours would have taken the place apart, and that half of the job was finished inside my head before the plane ever landed.

The problem was the signature. Ghost Hounds was in no file that mattered yet, and I meant to keep it there until the world did the paperwork for me. When that concrete came down, every analyst with a badge and a satellite would need a name to look at, and I had already decided whose. That meant I had to be somewhere with witnesses when the sound arrived.

Saint Vincent sat one island up the same break in the sea floor from the one I had emptied that month. After the pulse after the sky lit, both of them went under. No customs hall left to wave anybody through.

Two people on that island happened to be filming a reality show, so I started counting them the way I count everything — posts, camera positions, the gaps between updates — until the count turned into a plan.

"Put a translator on the energy delegation's guest list," I told Maddox.

Maddox was so pleased he added two million as an appearance fee nobody had requested.

"Say nothing," I told him when he finished.

"None of it leaves your house." He promised, and he meant it, and I went over the guest list myself that night anyway.

The party opened at eight above the water, one long table and a bar with a man behind it who knew three drinks. Ten minutes in, a producer with a headset put a hand on my shoulder. "Two steps left. You're in her shot."

I stepped left. A girl in a white dress held a phone up in front of her own face and turned it on me. "Say hi to the chat." I said hi. She told the chat that I was with the delegation and that everybody here was so nice.

An hour in, one of them found me on the balcony with his shirt open and a glass he did not need, and told me I did not look as though I belonged on this trip, in the tone men use when they think they are handing you a truth. He was right, so I let him keep it.

"I'm just here on vacation," I said.

He laughed and leaned on the rail beside me for four minutes, most of it spent on what the wedding had cost, and I listened and made the face that agrees with things.

On my way out I passed the security man in the linen shirt and gave him the smile with the dimples, the one from the mirror at twenty-three, back when I needed people to see a student. He looked at me twice and let me go the second time, which is the same as letting me go.

Two days later that sentence was in every feed in the country, credited to a translator nobody could name. It bought me the only thing on that island I needed.

The flight north took four hours, and I slept through all of it.

Back on the peninsula, I put the warehouse between myself and the water and laid the schematic on the floor, and went through the arithmetic twice. A bad plan kills the man who made it, and I took more care with numbers than with bullets.

The Gulf hub was four hours west of Miami on the mainland side, marsh behind the fence line, flat brown water at the mouth, and nothing Caribbean about any of it. I did not need that building bigger or louder. I needed it that size, with eleven quiet seconds at the front end, because after that the understanding was worth nothing to anybody inside.

The water the next night was ninety degrees and black. I went in off a rental skiff with the engine dead a mile out, and forty minutes later I heard a man before I saw any hull at all, a voice carrying flat across the water at two in the morning. "Ten-ten on the north pier. Ten-ten.”

Then a lamp came on, and I put my face under and stayed there with my hand on the line while a long arm of light went over the top of me, and then the second boat passed, and the man on the bow was looking at his own phone.

Placement took nine minutes of an eleven-minute window. Above me on the catwalk somebody had left a radio on a table with the volume down, and between charges I listened to a ball game run inning by inning while I pressed the last block against the column and taped the line.

On my way out I opened the outer office drawer and pulled three weeks of terminal traffic onto a drive, because for the next two months the only thing I had for sale was what other men had written down.

The fisherman came out of the dark on the way back with a lantern in his bow, an old man with a bucket and no interest in anybody. "You swim out of the pass?"

"Tourist," I said.

He looked at my arms and then at the shore and shrugged. "Tourists don't swim the pass at night."

"This one did."

He went on toward his traps and I went on toward the beach, and neither of us had anything to report.

I was in a parked car six kilometers inland when it went, window down and radio off, and the sound arrived low and wet and unrolled, and then the ground did its small polite shiver under the tires. I turned the radio on. A man on the AM band was already reading it off a wire.

"...private dock facility on the Gulf, and officials are describing the cause as a possible gas explosion. We're told there's no word yet on..." I turned it off.

Maddox called after that, too delighted to breathe. "That was gas! The news says gas. There is no dock left to find."

"The balance cleared," I said.

"Where are you? Are you all right?"

"I'm on vacation."

He laughed a long time, and I let him finish and hung up while he was still going, because a man who talks that much eventually gets recorded.

I crossed the page out in the ops book that evening and felt no lighter for it. Seventy days at the top, nothing crossed out underneath. The easy half of the month was behind me, and everything ahead of it had to be built from nothing.

Then I opened the message again, still sitting there since Tuesday: two coordinates and a comma. I marked the point a second time and priced it the way I priced every unknown. A week to drive up and look, against a week of buying I could not get back. The two did not balance, so I left it where it was and said the word soon to a map, which is not a word I use lightly.

Then I made one call. Nora answered on the first ring with traffic behind her.

"I miss you! It has been a week, an entire week, and I would like it on the record that I am requesting a hug."

"It's noted. Sell the properties. All of them, starting tonight."

Then I gave her the rest in order: northern Michigan near White Pines, big enough for twelve, isolated, land around it, no through traffic, ballistic glass on every window and door, three quotes before she picked a contractor, enough left to live on and the rest wired to me.

"Got it, boss. Starting now." She hung up before I could add anything. Twenty-six houses and change, close to nine figures at that month's prices, and she was going to sell every one of them because I said the word sell and never asked me why.

Then I laid the maps side by side and finished the arithmetic I owed the week. The first year of the blackout was not the hard part. What killed people early was the dark and the cold and having nowhere to put their head down, and that was a problem money and a map could solve.

Northern Michigan, then. Water on two sides, one town with one light, eleven miles of nothing around it, and something up in the trees that was not a tree yet and would eat a county before it was finished. Nobody ever killed it. The awakened, the military, every rifle in the country, and by my tenth year it was still standing. I intended to be there the week it woke up, small enough to be spoken to or burned.

There was a version of me that sat inside the fold with a crate of lobster and let the world do what it wanted. I had met her, and she was half the reason I was here a second time. When this was over I wanted a bar on the water in bad weather with a tab nobody settled.

I stayed on the bed with the book open and kept going down the contacts, and the one I dialed rang four times and then came up live — gunfire, close to the mouthpiece, and nobody saying anything over it.