Mark got to his feet, pushed against Smith and fell against the wall, hard. It shook the office. The look on Howard’s face was slow in coming—horror. His eyes were wide and his mouth dropped open, and Mark Howard made a long sound like a foghorn calling to the drowning passengers of a sinking ship.
Sarah Slate burst into the hospital room and found herself halted. Smith had her by the arms. She would have never thought the gray old man was so powerful.
Mark was shirtless on the platform, surrounded by doctors in the triage center that served as Folcroft’s emergency room when necessary. An IV was in his arm and a mask was on his face. A nurse pushed a needle into his arm and injected something.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“We’re not sure.” Dr. Smith added in a quiet voice, “He fell asleep at his desk and experienced something traumatic.”
“But he’s unconscious.”
Smith looked at her helplessly.
“He may have hit his head when he fell against the wall,” reported one of the doctors. “We’ll check him out. Probably just a mild concussion. Don’t worry.”
“But what about his leg?” Sarah demanded.
“His leg wasn’t affected,” the doctor said, and stopped when he noticed the stream of red soaking Mark’s pant leg. Everyone saw it then, and there was a second of surprised silence. It was at that moment that the blood began spattering noisily on the floor tiles.
Sarah was finally kicked out and sent back to her suite to stew while the doctors performed tests on Mark Howard. She expected Smith to call with news, so when he knocked on her door personally her mind leaped to horrible conclusions.
“He’s in no danger,” Dr. Smith said. “He’s sleeping.”
“Don’t screw with me. Is he comatose?”
“I don’t believe so,” Smith said. “There was no trauma to the head. I never thought there was, actually. This is similar to his past episodes …” Smith became uncomfortable.
“They are this bad?” Sarah asked.
“Almost never.”
“What about his leg?”
“He tore open a section of the scar himself. The damage was minor. Five stitches.”
Sarah shook her head lightly. “I don’t know if I should be relieved or not.”
Smith was startled when the hyacinth macaw crossed the room in a flurry of purple wings and touched down on her lap, then comforted her by rubbing its head against her collarbone. She stroked it.
Smith wasn’t at ease with this girl. Woman, he reminded himself, even if she did look too young to vote.
Sarah Slate had come to Folcroft unexpectedly, to tend to Mark when his first grievous leg wound was inflicted while trying to save her life. They now shared a suite in Folcroft’s private wing.
She was in her young twenties, a wealthy heiress from Providence, Rhode Island. Sarah was well-educated, quite intelligent and extraordinarily intuitive—and she knew about CURE. But how much did she know about Mark Howard?
Each time the bird rubbed its head on her chest, it lifted the dangling gold charm and dropped it against her skin. The charm was the symbol of the House of Sinanju and a gift from the Master Emeritus.
“Dr. Smith, what does this mean?” she asked.
“How can I know without knowing—what he experienced?”
“You said almost never. When these experiences affect him to this level, it means something is reaching for Mark specifically, right?” she demanded.
“Maybe that this place is being targeted,” Smith replied. “Mark’s is the most receptive mind to receive the communiqué.”
“Attack, you mean?”
“We can’t assume that.”
She glared at him. “Sure we can.”
Chapter 22
Henry Lagrasse was alive. That was his first clue that something was very, very wrong.
He should be in Davy Jones’s locker. Him, the rest of the crew, the whole damn ship.
The ship! Was he still aboard the Reliant? That mystery prodded him into opening his eyes again, however painful it was. The light was as diffuse as late twilight, but he still blinked for a minute. His head pounded. When he was knocked out, he had landed on his left arm and now it was numb.
Yes, he was on the deck of the Reliant, which was sickeningly motionless. It must have washed ashore.
Impossible. They had been caught in a whirlpool, the cone maybe ten kilometers in diameter. The Reliant was rushing into the vortex faster than she had ever moved in her entire existence. The current was drawing them in, and they were powerless to stop it.
Then he remembered the island—yes, sitting right in the eye of the vortex. The vortex shot the Reliant into the stony shore of the island. The Coast Guard cutter bottomed out, her hull flattening, and her enormous inertia kept her moving. The hull screeched and threw up plumes of sparks, and somehow Lagrasse kept to his feet while his Coast Guard brothers and sisters spun off the deck like toys.
Then came the other ship, a burning pleasure yacht that had arrived on this strange shore but minutes before. The Reliant plowed into it and twisted to one side—and Lagrasse remembered seeing the deck come at him. Then nothing.
The ship must have ground to a halt finally. But what was this place?
He got to his feet and rode out the waves of nausea. The stillness of the cutter was sickening. The Reliant was never supposed to be perfectly still. She should always be in motion, moving with the water.
He stumbled to a nearby corpse. Katrina. First mate. Lagrasse tried to position her head in a more natural position, but it kept rolling to the side.
He crept into the superstructure. The bridge was a mess, full of broken equipment and broken people. The entrances belowdecks were all blocked. The hull was pancaked underneath the deck. Anybody belowdecks was flattened.
But was there anybody belowdecks? They had all been on deck when the crash came, right? The commanders had said they might—just might—have a helicopter rescue en route. Considering the circumstances, everyone had stayed abovedecks in the vain hope of making a quick exit.
So where were the others?
Lagrasse’s eyes focused better now. He crawled over the rail, dangled and dropped. He landed on someone.
One of his shipmates, but he would never know who. He turned away from the mess and circled the Reliant.
His mind didn’t like what his eyes were seeing and attempted to shut it out, but Lagrasse shook his head clear.
What he had seen during the crash was all true, all still there. The crushed Reliant was on an island of black, hard stone, and the hard current rushed at the shore—then flowed, under the lip of stone, disappearing somewhere underneath.
How could that be? Was there a gigantic sinkhole down there, draining the ocean?
They had been pulled in from kilometers away.
The speed of the water movement, the water depth, the diameter of the vortex—Lagrasse tried to compute how much water was being sucked down every minute and his head pounded.
The island—what was it? It looked man-made. Even the shore looked as if it were chiseled, long ago. How did the island cause the vortex? Was the vortex man-made?
Lagrasse felt his mind become light and his limbs. stopped working. His eyes rolled into his skull involuntarily, and he collapsed on his face. He knew his face hit hard, but he didn’t feel it.
When he opened his eyes again, the place looked just the same. The twilight gray was no darker or lighter than before, but the crusted blood in his hair told him he had been out long enough for his split face to bleed, clot and dry up. A few hours at least.