The frame broke away.
Shaw and the window went over the side.
Oh, hell, he thought, grabbing a breath just before he hit.
Kicking to the surface again. The shivering was less intense now and he felt a wave of euphoria, hypothermia’s way of telling you that death can be fun.
Scrabbling back onto the foredeck, he dropped into the front portion of the cabin and slid to the bulkhead separating this part from the aft. The vessel was now down by the stern at a forty-five-degree angle. Below him, exhausted Elizabeth Chabelle had left her bunk bed perch in the half-flooded aft section of the cabin. She gripped the frame of the small window in the door. He saw wounds on her hands; she would have shattered the glass and reached through to find the knob.
Which had been removed.
She sobbed, “Why? Who did this?”
“You’ll be fine, Elizabeth.”
Running his hands around the perimeter of the interior door, Shaw felt the sharp points. It had been sealed from the other side with Sheetrock screws, just like at the factory where Sophie had been stashed.
“Do you have any tools?”
“No! I l-looked for f-fucking tools.” Stuttering in the cold.
Where was the hypothermia clock now? Probably ten minutes and counting down.
Another wave crashed into the boat. Chabelle muttered something Shaw couldn’t understand, her shivering was so bad. She repeated it: “Wh-who...?”
“He left things for you. Five things.”
“It’s so f-fucking c-cold.”
“What did he leave you?”
“A kite... th-there was a kite. A power bar. I ate it. A f-flashlight. Matches. They’re all wet. A p-p-pot. F-flowerpot. A f-fucking f-flowerpot.”
“Give it to me.”
“Give—?”
“The pot.”
She bent down, feeling under the surface, and a moment later handed him the brown-clay pot. He shattered it against the wall and, picking the sharpest shard, began digging at the wood around the hinges.
“Get back on the bunk,” Shaw told her. “Out of the water.”
“There’s n-no...”
“As best you can.”
She turned and climbed to the top of the bed. She managed to keep most of her body, from ample belly up, above the surface.
Shaw said, “Tell me about George.”
“Y-you know m-my boyfriend?”
“I saw a picture of you two. You ballroom dance.”
A faint laugh. “He’s t-terrible. But he t-tries. Okay with f-fox-trot. Do you...”
Shaw gave a laugh too. “I don’t dance, no.”
The wood was teak. Hard as stone. Still he kept at it. He said, “You get to Miami much, see your folks?”
“I... I...”
“I’ve got a place in Florida. Farther north. You ever get to the ’Glades?”
“One of those b-boats, with the airplane p-propellers. I’m going to d-die, aren’t I?”
“No you’re not.”
While the glass knife might have cut through plaster to free Sophie, the pottery shard was next to useless. “You like stone crabs?”
“Broke my t-tooth on a... on a shell one time.” She began sobbing. “I d-don’t know who you are. Thank you. Get out. Get out now. S-save yourself... It’s t-too late.”
Shaw looked into the dim portion of the cabin where she clung to the post of the bunk.
“P-please,” she said. “Save yourself.”
The ship settled further.
Level 2:
The Dark Forest
Saturday, June 8, One Day Earlier
25
At 9 a.m. Colter Shaw was in one of the twenty-five million strip malls that dotted Silicon Valley, this one boasting a nail salon, a Hair Cuttery, a FedEx operation and a Salvadoran restaurant — the establishment he was now sitting in. It was a cheerful place, decorated with festive red-and-white paper flowers and rosettes and photos of mountains, presumably of the country back home. The restaurant also offered among the best Latin American coffee he’d ever had: Santa Maria from the “microregion” of Potrero Grande. He wanted to buy a pound or two. It wasn’t for sale by the bag.
He sipped the aromatic beverage and glanced across the street. On his drive to the mall he’d passed imposing mansions just minutes away, but here were tiny bungalows. One was in foreclosure — he thought of Frank Mulliner’s neighbor — and another for sale by owner. Two signs sat in the parking strips of houses. VOTE YES PROPOSITION 457. NO PROPERTY TAX HIKES!!! And a similar message with the addition of a skull and crossbones and the words SILICON VALLEY REAL ESTATE — YOU’RE KILLING US!!
Shaw turned back to the stack of documents he’d removed from the university the other day. Stolen, true, though on reflection he supposed an argument might be made that the burglary was justified.
After all, they had been written or assembled by his father, Ashton Shaw.
Two of whose rules he thought of now:
Never adopt a strategy or approach a task without assigning percentages.
Never assign a percentage until you have as many facts as possible...
That, of course, was the key.
Colter Shaw couldn’t make any assessment of what had happened on October 5, fifteen years ago, until he gathered those facts... What in these pages addressed that? There were three hundred and seventy-four of them. Shaw wondered if the number itself were a message; after all, his father had been given to codes and cryptic references.
Ashton had been an expert in political science, law, government, American history, as well as — an odd hobby — physics. The pages contained snippets of all those topics. Essays started but never completed and essays completed but making no sense whatsoever to Shaw. Odd theories, quotations from people he’d never heard of. Maps of neighborhoods in the Midwest, in Washington, D.C., in Chicago, of small towns in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Population charts from the 1800s. Newspaper clippings. Photographs of old buildings.
Some medical records too, which turned out to be from his mother’s research into psychosis for East Coast drug companies.
Too much information is as useless as too little.
Four pages were turned down at the corner, suggesting that his father, or someone, wished to return to those pages and review them carefully. Shaw made a note of these and examined each briefly. Page 37 was a map of a town in Alabama; page 63, an article about a particle accelerator; page 118 was a photocopy of an article in The New York Times about a new computer system for the New York Stock Exchange; page 255 was a rambling essay by Ashton on the woeful state of the country’s infrastructure.
And Shaw reminded himself that it was possible these documents had no relevance whatsoever. They’d been compiled not long before October 5, yes, yet look by whom they’d been compiled: a man whose relationship with reality had, by that time, grown thread-thin.
As Shaw stretched, looking up from examining a picture of an old New England courthouse, he happened to see a car moving slowly along the street, pausing at his Malibu. It was a Nissan Altima, gray, a few years old, its hide dinged and scraped. He couldn’t see the driver — too much glare — though he did notice that he or she didn’t sit tall in the seat. Just as Shaw was rising, phone ready for a picture of the tag, the vehicle sped up and vanished around the corner. He hadn’t seen the tag number.
The person from last night? The person spying on him from above San Miguel Park? Which begged the all-important question: Was it X?
He sat down once again. Call the Task Force?
And, then, what would he tell Wiley?
His phone hummed. He looked at the screen: Frank Mulliner. They weren’t scheduled to meet for an hour.
“Frank.”
“Colter.” The man’s voice was grim. Shaw wondered if the young woman’s health had taken a bad turn; maybe the fall had been worse than it seemed originally. “There’s something I have to talk to you about. I’m... I’m not supposed to but it’s important.”
Shaw set down the cup of superb coffee. “Go ahead.”
After a pause the man said, “I’d rather meet in person. Can you come over now?”