'I couldn't help but overhear . . . has something happened to that little fellow sent to interview me?'
She was trying to read his eyes. Were they cold and gloating, or were they just like that?
'We're . . . not sure — he seems to have disappeared.' She took a step back, and in so doing managed to free her hand from his grasp. It just slipped out. 'The interview — you did it with him?'
'Oh, yes. He asked all sorts of interesting questions. He was really awfully smart. Nervous, but intelligent, I thought.'
'His cell-phone was found on the top deck, smashed.'
'Really? How odd. He interviewed me in the restaurant on the eleventh. Do you really think something has . . . happened to him?'
'I . . . don't know.'
At that moment Cleaver was distracted by First Officer Jeffers calling on them all to get ready to move out again. There were groans from some of the older passengers as they got to their feet. Claire hurried towards the front of the column. She felt odd — unclean. The hand he had held was moist with her cold sweat and his. She wiped it on her jeans. He had acted pious and innocent, but he knew something, she was sure of it. But again, it was just a feeling — intuition, no cold hard facts.
They were just about to move when one of the passengers cried out: 'Not yet — my wife isn't here.'
Jeffers shook his head impatiently and hurried down the column. 'Well where is she? We haven't time to hang around.'
The passenger, a bald man with a paunchy belly was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and standing in the doorway of an optician's store. 'She was looking for a new pair of sunglasses. She was thirsty, I went to get her another bottle of water . . . I only left her for a minute . . .'
Jeffers studied the store for a moment, before moving past the passenger and into the interior, removing his pistol as he did so. Two crewmen followed him in. Claire peered through the front window at display cabinets full of designer glasses caked with thin layers of dust, before following the passenger inside. She immediately noticed a slight breeze coming from the rear of the store where a door lay open. Jeffers cautiously approached this and looked out into the alley beyond. It was empty. He bent and lifted something from the ground. He held up a pair of glasses, with one cracked lens. The passenger hurried up and examined them.
'These are Mary's! These are her glasses . . .' He looked about him, his eyes full of panic and desperation. 'I don't understand — I was only gone for a minute! Where is she?'
Jeffers moved back into the store, closing the door behind him.
'What're you doing?' the passenger demanded. 'She must be out there — she's—'
'She's gone.' Jeffers' voice was as hard and cold as Claire had ever heard it.
'What do you mean she's . . . ? She must have just popped to the next store — she's . . .'
Jeffers led the way out of the optician's. 'We're leaving, we're leaving now!' he cried. He strode straight up to the head of the column, geeing people up along the way. 'C'mon, let's go!'
Claire stepped into the column about halfway along, beside Ty and a little way behind Cleaver.
The passenger whose wife had disappeared remained in the store doorway. 'We can't just leave her!' he cried.
But that's what was happening. As the column moved out, passengers and crew alike avoided eye contact with him.
'Please!'
They kept going.
'What do you think happened?' Ty whispered, glancing back.
'Don't know,' said Claire.
'Jeffers looks spooked.'
Claire nodded.
'Those damn monkeys,' said Ty.
23
The River
Jimmy had no hopes at all for his stunt with the Morse code. He had only tried it because it was something. He wasn't worried about Ham being suspicious or reporting him for smashing his lighter — he'd left his post while on duty, so he'd only be getting himself into trouble. But he still felt like a prisoner. The Morse code wasn't enough. He wanted to charge at the wire fence. He wanted to dig a tunnel with his bare hands. He wanted to convince his fellow soldiers to stage a revolution. Yet he couldn't understand why nobody else seemed to feel the same way. The rest of his troop all seemed so content — yes, the training was hard, and of course Mohican was a monster, but otherwise they seemed quite happy with their lot. In the darkness of the barracks that night he told them about the plans he had seen on the walls of the war room, of the battle that was being planned. He meant it to scare them. He meant for them to realise that this wasn't a game, that soon some of them might be dead. But they welcomed it. They whooped and hollered and predicted how many bad guys they were going to kill, even though they had no idea who the bad guys were.
Jimmy couldn't sleep. He felt claustrophobic. Quite often on the Titanic he would sleep on the balcony outside his cabin, wrapped up in a blanket with the sea air whistling around him. He tried it here, dragging his sleeping bag out of the barracks and on to the wooden surround outside the hut. He stubbed his toe in the darkness. He cursed to himself. He lay down on the floorboards. He looked up at the stars, but they were obscured by a cloudy sky. The wood smelled of damp and mud. He tossed and turned. One of the search lights crossed above him, and it was only in following its trajectory that he became aware of a single, small red light, just a few metres away. It moved.
He wasn't alone.
Someone sitting in the corner, smoking.
Jimmy groaned inwardly. Ham. 'What, are you stalking me now?' he hissed. Then added, 'You little creep,' for good measure.
The light was extinguished. For ten seconds everything was black.
'Oh, you're scaring me.'
All the same, he tensed, in case the little chimney took a run at him in the dark.
Then there was a click click, a little roar of flame, and Ham bent into the sudden brightness to light his cigarette.
Except it wasn't Ham.
It was Mohican.
Time to backtrack . . . quickly.
'Of course, when I said little creep, I meant most wonderful leader.'
'Relax, Armstrong,' said Mohican. He closed the lighter and they were plunged back into darkness again. 'What's wrong, can't sleep?'
'No. I mean yes. I mean, I can't sleep.' Silence. 'Can you not . . . either?'
The cigarette brightened for a moment as Mohican inhaled. He ignored the question. 'I heard you earlier. Talking about the coming battle.'
'Oh.'
'You're different than they are, Armstrong. I'm sure you've seen some bad things, but you seem to have come through them pretty unscathed. Those guys in there, I know their stories. Terrible stories. Torres — you know what he had to do? He had to shoot his parents. They were in agony from the plague and they begged him. Ramon — with the black glasses? He had little brothers, twins. His parents were gone. He only had enough medicine to give to one of his brothers — he had to choose which one lived. Imagine doing that? And then they both died anyway. Marissa, girl with the long blond hair? Fifteen days without food, turned into a slave by bandits, do I have to say what they did to her? They all got stories like that. So when they find something like this, what we have here, they embrace it. Sure it's tough, but it's not tough compared to what they've been through. They have friends here. They have food and heat and hope. And if they have to go into battle to keep this, then they'll do that, they won't question orders, they'll do exactly what they're told.'
Jimmy could see exactly how attractive Fort Hope, the President and the camaraderie of army life would seem to someone who'd endured and survived the plague.