Salt (24 page)

“That can be done when submerged? Through the torpedo tube?”

“Sure, and you can return inside if the tube is flooded and the breech is open.”

“I don’t understand the need for the subterfuge.”

“I knew too much.” Tom turned to face Jim. “I had discovered the encrypted files. Orders from the government. When I volunteered, I thought I’d get away, but I ended up here…”

Jim instantly knew what he meant by the encrypted files. He thought of Eva and her case, and how it was all tied together. “These files,” Jim said. “The decryption key is held on a USB drive, isn’t it?”

Tom lowered his head. “I’m assuming they’ve been discovered, then?”

“We believe it’s what the killer is after and why Mike was targeted. It was why he volunteered. He came to me, said he wanted to leave as it was too dangerous for him to stay. This is all connected, isn’t it? What’s in those files? And more importantly, who’s killing people in order to recover them?”

When Tom told him and described the person, Jim knew immediately.

“We need to go. Now,” Jim said.

Chapter 41

Eva, Marcus, and Sha
ley entered the corridor leading to the engineering section. Black fabric blinds covered the windows. Eva got that instinctual bad feeling as they approached the door.

“Open it,” she said, ordering Marcus.

He reached for the handle, but it wouldn’t open. “Locked,” he said. “They must have finished up for the night. Or probably doing repairs.”

“Knock,” Eva said.

Marcus dropped his shoulder and sighed. “Fine.” He rapped twice against the window of the door. Waited. Rapped twice more. He turned to face her. “See? No one’s in. We’ll have to come back.”

Shaley pressed his face against the window, trying to see inside.

A sudden eruption made Eva jump. She dropped the knife to the floor, just missing her foot. Marcus spun round. Shaley collapsed against the door, his face catching on broken glass as he slid down, the back of his head blown out.

“Shit,” Marcus said. “Duck.”

It was too late for him. Another gunshot fired through the black fabric and one of the windows, catching him in the shoulder, spinning him round as he collapsed to the floor, grimacing in a silent scream.

Eva’s heart rate doubled as the shock hit her. Fear and indecision temporarily paralysed her. The door swung inwards, dragging Shaley’s dead form with it. Stanic stepped out, holding a pistol with both hands, aiming right for Eva’s head.

“Do as I say and you might just live. Get in here. Now,” he said.

His arms were dead still, his face a picture of calm, but those eyes… they were the eyes of the unhinged. Eva thought about going for her knife, but she’d never be quick enough. Stanic had already proved to be a good shot. She clenched her teeth, furious that she hadn’t seen it sooner.

Stanic! One of the backbones of the flotilla. It didn’t make sense. Why put in all the effort he had on the flotilla only to split it apart?

“Why?” she asked, unable to understand.

“Get inside. I won’t ask you again.”

Stanic stepped out further into the corridor, clearing the way. He waved her into the workshop. She looked at Shaley and Marcus. The latter was breathing but still. She had to step over Shaley’s body. Despite her feelings about him, it wasn’t a good way to go. At least it was quick. “Grab his arms. Drag him inside.”

“Do I look like Wonder Woman? It’s not like I’m in good shape. Remember how you knifed me, tried to leave me for dead?”

“That was admittedly a mistake. Don’t expect me to make another. Drag him in or die where you stand.”

She didn’t fancy testing his patience. Gritting her teeth, Eva pulled Shaley into the room. Her ribs screamed with the effort. As the body slid, Stanic lifted his legs and pushed him all the way inside.

Eva dropped the body once inside and used the opportunity to look for a weapon.

When she turned her head to search the workshop, she saw that the place had been cleaned. There was nothing on the worktables; the tool racks were empty. It seemed as if Stanic had prepared the room.

She heard a muffled noise coming from the back of the room, behind one of the huge generators. She saw Duncan tied to the steel legs of a workbench, a gag in his mouth, his wrists and ankles bound. Blood dripped from a cut above his eye.

“Duncan!” Eva readied to go towards him, but before she could move her feet, Stanic slammed the butt of the gun against her temple, knocking her to the ground. Her vision blurred. A burning pain spread around her head. She tried to crawl away. Stanic grabbed her hair and pulled her head up, stretching her neck, cutting off her scream.

He kicked her in the ribs, making her yelp and curl into a ball. He pressed her face to the ground as he wrapped something around her ankles. A plastic tie came next, binding her wrists behind her back. The gag was next. The piece of fabric cut into the corners of her mouth.

“You had to make it difficult, didn’t you?” Stanic said. “If you’d just kept your nose out of things, none of this would have had to happen. No one else would have needed to be hurt.”

Eva shook with rage. She tried to pull her wrists free but knew it was futile. He’d used the same kind of ties she had once used in the line of duty.

With no tools or sharp surfaces anywhere, she knew she’d be stuck there until someone arrived. How long would it take before Frank realised something was up and brought help? Probably not soon enough. She knew she had to remain calm, wait for an opportunity, and be ready to take it—if it came.

She heard a moan from further back in the workshop. Not Duncan this time—Marcus. Stanic had brought him in. The sound of the “zip” from the plastic tie told her he was facing a similar fate.

***

Stanic had bound her to the leg of the workbench opposite the one where Duncan was tied. With her hands behind her back, she felt around the floor with her fingertips, trying to find anything useful, any piece of metal she could attempt to use to free her from the plastic tie. There was a trick to opening the clasp within the catch. She found nothing beyond the rusted bolts that kept the workbench firmly in place.

Her head rested against the cool steel of the leg. She breathed slowly, keeping her pulse under control. Now was not the time to panic. Although she hadn’t specifically trained to deal with interrogations, she had read up on the subject a great deal in her own time. That was when she thought she’d join the CIA. Felt it to be a good idea to swot up on the job in order to impress any potential employer.

That opportunity never came, though. She had ended up in narcotics instead, which ironically, given that at the time she thought it was the end of her life as she knew it, had actually saved her life. Without being on that ship during the bust, she doubted she would have survived.

Right now, though, bound and gagged, she had to wonder if that was a good thing.

A metal cart trundled down the length of the workshop, its wheels rattling and wobbling against the floor. It stopped a few feet to her right. Her vision was still blurry from Stanic’s attack. Her head felt like an overripe melon, as though her brain was pushing against the inside of her skull.

Stanic stood in front of her and lifted her chin with a piece of cold metal. She jerked away, fearing he would strike her again. He held a large wrench in his right hand. He knelt, the wrench resting across his thighs.

“You’ve left me no real option, Eva,” he said, shaking his head as if he was disapproving the behaviour of an infant. “I liked you. More than most, in fact. I regret that it’s had to come to this, but if only you had left well alone; if you had taken your flesh wound as a warning and dropped the case, we wouldn’t have had to do this.”

The gag prevented her from speaking out, but it didn’t stop her from trying.

“No, no, no. There’s no need now,” Stanic said. “You just be quiet while I tell you a little story. After I’m done, you’ll have the chance to speak. Your response, however, will determine both your fate and Duncan’s.”

Stanic stood up and placed the wrench on the top of the cart. When he pulled his hand back, he held a pair of long-nosed pliers. “One day,” he began, “a submarine captain was ordered to deliver a president to a secure underground facility. On this day, the world was drowning. The president was on a foreign visit and stranded.”

As he spoke, he stepped back and forth like a college lecturer.

“It was this submarine captain’s duty to make sure the president was delivered safely, and in that, the captain did a fine job. Do you know how the captain was rewarded? No? He was rewarded with a death sentence. He was left to drift on the seas with a crippled vessel and a set of final orders. There was no sanctuary for him as promised.”

Stanic’s face contorted. He paced back and forth, gesticulating with the pliers to punctuate his sentences. “There could be no survivors, they said. None. I had learned too much. In exchange for my life, I had to take those of my crew. Now don’t think I found that decision easy. It took me months to come to terms with it, but I eventually realised they were right. No one could know. It was too risky… the infection couldn’t be allowed to get to them. We were sacrificial pawns.”

Spittle flew from his mouth. His face had turned red. He knelt down in front of Eva, the pliers close to her face. “I thought we could start again. I thought we could make a go of things here, but you had to stick your nose in, didn’t you? You and Mike had to bring it out of the shadows when I already had sacrificed so much to keep it hidden. To give us all a chance.”

He stood and turned away, pointing to Duncan and Marcus. “How many more of you know about the files? Think on that very carefully. I’ll offer you the same deal I was offered: you tell me who else is involved and you’ll live. Spare your own by condemning theirs.”

Eva shook her head. She tried to somehow shift the workbench, find a way free, but it wouldn’t budge. Stanic leant over her, the pliers in his right hand. He loosened the gag, dragging it down her chin.

She considered screaming, but she knew she’d pay for it. He held the pliers not far from her ribs. “What’s so important about the files anyway?” she said, trying to keep the tremble under control, showing him she wasn’t scared.

“No. You answer my questions. Who else knows?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Eva said. “You’re insane. To think we trusted you all this time. How could you live a lie for this long, huh? How could you murder your friends, the sub’s crew?”

“Because I fucking care!” Stanic shouted in her face.

She felt his hot breath blast her face.

“I always cared, that’s why I had to do what I did. You’ll never understand the pressure. If I couldn’t go back, then no one could. The time was over, you understand? We were cast off, exiled, left for dead. This is all we have. This is our entire world right here. I couldn’t stand by and watch it split apart. I couldn’t watch these people return to them, only to be refused and eliminated.”

The veins in his temple throbbed as he continued to work himself into a frenzy. He stepped away, faced Duncan, then Marcus, and shook his head before returning back to Eva.

“They were my friends. Even Ade, Mike and Jean. But like all of us, they were just pawns. I had to do it. Mike had let the genie out of the bottle, and there was only one way of stopping it. Stopping everyone from learning about… them.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“You don’t get the answers. You don’t have the luxury of asking questions here. The files, Eva, tell me who else knows. Your life or theirs? I’ll find out eventually. I already know Frank and Catherine know. I saw you all poring over the files, trying to understand the words. But you’ll never decrypt them, not without the USB drive.”

Eva thought of Danny. He was with them. She couldn’t let him get embroiled in this.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why all of this for some files, orders, or whoever ‘they’ are? There must have been another way.”

Stanic thrust the pliers into her ribs, driving the hard metal tips into the wound, splitting the stitches apart, making her gasp for air. The pain gripped her, and she clenched her jaw so hard she thought her teeth would break. Tears streamed from her eyes. Her back arched in an attempt to lean away, relieve the pain, but he kept up the pressure, kept driving and twisting until she cried out for him to stop.

“Don’t make me do this,” Stanic said, withdrawing the pliers. “Tell me everything.”

Eva sobbed with the agony and thrashed her legs against the floor, bucking back and forth, knocking her head against the workbench leg, but it stood firm.

Stanic waited in silence for a minute, the pliers in his right hand. The tips dripped with blood. She felt the warm, wet sensation of blood oozing from the wound. When she looked up at him, she saw the beginnings of a smile on his face and knew then, without any shadow of a doubt, he was completely crazy. It went beyond whatever conspiracy he was embroiled in; he enjoyed this at some unnatural level.

But as he bent down in front of her again, she saw a shadow move behind him, something by the door. She refocused on his face, not wanting to give away what she had seen. He just stared at her. The pain in her ribs subsided enough for her to catch her breath and get herself under control.

“Okay,” she said, stalling for time. “I’ll answer your questions. I’ll tell you everything, but you have to meet me halfway. Before you kill the others, and me, I want to know more. I want to know what’s in the files. Who was it that made you do these terrible things? I can see how hard it must have been for you—”

Her right cheek erupted with a sharp pain. Her head was thrust to the side by the force of a blow that made her skin burn. She closed her eyes and waited for the bloom of agony to pass.

“No,” he said, quietly and simply. “We’ve covered this already.” While Stanic looked over at Duncan, she caught a glimpse over his shoulder of someone approaching the door. Someone poked their head through the blown-out window. Jim! Her heart leapt, and it was all she could do not to shout out to him.

Her eyes grew wide as she made eye contact. How could he be here? Jim must have seen Duncan because his face twisted and twitched. Then he saw Stanic and placed his finger over his lips to indicate for her to be quiet. Like she was going to give him away.

“I’m sorry,” Eva said, getting Stanic’s attention. “You’re right. I just wanted to try to understand. You’ve been with us so long. You’ve been such a solid foundation of this community. I can’t imagine why these people, whoever they are, would want you to do these things.”

Another slap rocked her head violently to the side. She tasted blood in her mouth and spat it out on the floor. She turned her face back to him. Stanic’s nostrils flared, and his lips curled at the edges. He grabbed her chin with his left hand and squeezed, forcing her mouth open. With his other hand, he gripped her tongue between the pliers, applying enough pressure to make her choke and thrash. His hands were too strong; he continued to pull on her tongue, squeezing the pliers shut.

Eva clenched her eyes shut in response to the pain, fully expecting Stanic to pull her tongue right out of her body. She could feel it stretching all the way down, tensing against the ligaments and muscle fibres that held it in place.

She heard a loud crash and then Jim screaming, bellowing like a wounded beast.

The pliers were no longer crunching down on her tongue.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Jim beating Stanic’s head into the floor with the large wrench.

The cart had collapsed, spilling out tools and the fragments of the USB drive.

Holding the wrench with both hands, Jim raised it above his head and brought it back down with a sickening thud, cracking Stanic’s skull.

A dozen more times, Jim struck down. Eva had to look away from the mess. Blood spattered over her with each blow.

“Stop,” she managed to eventually say, finding it difficult to speak with a swollen tongue. Everything hurt, and she turned away, not wanting to see the mess that Jim had made of his former friend. She had seen many terrible things, but that was as brutal as anything. “Stop,” she whispered again. She leaned over and closed her eyes, breathing through her nose, and waited for Jim to release her.