CHAPTER 27
Mara
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The wind at the Notch was at forty knots and rising, and Mara could feel it inside her collar.
She stood on the wind-scoured granite three miles above the compound, at seven-thousand-nine-hundred-foot elevation, with the handheld recorder cold in her right hand and Nathan’s Seiko ticking on her left wrist above the sleeve that hid the six stitches in her forearm.
The RAID sat under her jacket on the chest strap, heavy in the way titanium was always heavy — four-point-four kilograms of proof pressed against her sternum.
She had checked the record light three times in the last minute. It was on.
She was to let Cross come to her on the visible route. She was to let him talk. She was to keep the recorder up.
The plan had a shape, and the shape was a triangle.
Cross on the visible route, Elias on the ridge, Reyn and Havlin on the cut back-route.
She was the fourth point, the one on the flat of the overlook where the wind was worst and the audio was best. She had built the audio geometry herself, at the kitchen table in the vault three nights running, with Havlin sketching arcs of coverage on a napkin while a five-point-one warmed inside a fault segment thirty miles east and did not go off yet.
The Whitcomb had waited. The Whitcomb was not sentient. The Whitcomb was patient.
She counted, because she was afraid. She counted the wind — a beat every three seconds on the north face of the rock.
She counted her own breathing until it stopped being a useful number.
Then she stopped counting her body and did what the harder part of her did in weather like this.
She reached for magnitudes. The wrist sensor said the low band was warm.
The Whitcomb had been climbing all week.
She had told Cross that. She had told the ground.
The wire in her ear had been quiet for six minutes when Havlin came on.
“Cross’s convoy is at the fire road, boss, three vehicles,” Havlin said in her ear.
“Copy. Two escorts, one principal,” Elias said from the ridge over comms.
“Wind is holding steady from the northwest, boss,” Havlin said.
“Reyn, drop the left agent first if the geometry gives it to you,” Elias said.
“Copy. Left agent goes first, boss,” Reyn came back.
Mara did not answer the wire. Answering the wire was the fourth point’s job to refuse. She kept the recorder up and her eyes on the visible route.
He came up the visible route at four minutes past four in the afternoon.
He was in the bespoke charcoal suit. In this weather, on this rock, it was the wrong garment and he had chosen it anyway.
Two agents in dark shells came up behind him, five paces back, hands at their sides where hands went before they went somewhere else.
Cross carried a handheld recorder of his own, matte black, held low.
He climbed the last of the rock without looking at his feet, which meant he had climbed it before.
“Doctor Valdés,” Cross said. “Thank you for coming.”
“You don’t get to thank me,” Mara said.
His mouth moved — the smallest revision. He set his own recorder on the flat of the granite between them and pressed a button. The wind took a corner of his silver-blond hair and put it back down.
“Your recorder against mine, then. That is fair,” he said.
“Let the tape decide who is telling the truth,” Mara said.
“This is not the meeting I had hoped for, Doctor,” he said. “You could have worked with me on this data set.”
“I am not working with you on anything,” she said.
Behind her on the ridge, Elias breathed in. She heard it in the wind, or she told herself she did. Her eyes stayed on Cross.
“I moved a hospital,” Cross said. “Fourteen months ago I moved a hospital off the Whitcomb Fault. There is a children’s ward standing on ground that will not shake, because I bought time nobody else was buying.
The fault will slip. It was always going to slip.
I did not invent the geology. I bought a survival window for a building full of children, and I did it with the only currency I had, which was silence. ”
He was careful and warm and educated and precise.
His voice did not rise. He was not a man who raised his voice; he was a man who moved money.
His pale green eyes were level on hers. There was even a small tiredness in them, the tiredness of a man who slept enough hours a night to be certain of his own conscience.
Mara let the silence hold. She could feel her own tongue counting inside her mouth, the way a metronome counts when it has nothing to time. She stopped it.
“My brother worked three months for you,” she said.
“He was a junior engineer. He resigned in protest because he read the same signals I read. His resignation put him on a construction site in Independence eleven months ago, on a Tuesday morning, at eight forty-one. The ground moved. The scaffolding fell. His name was Nathan Valdés. He was thirty. He was buying a survival window too. He bought it for me.”
Cross’s mouth did the small revision again. This time his hand moved, an inch, and stopped.
“I did not know his name,” Cross said.
“You said his name on the phone to my station on the eleventh of September,” Mara said. “You knew his name. You just didn’t know he was a person.”
His mouth held a beat before it opened. His silver-blond hair was flat against his skull with the wet in it. His pale green eyes went from her face down to the recorder on the rock and back up.
“The Whitcomb Fault slips on its own calendar, not mine,” he said.
She did not let herself look at the ridge behind her. She looked at his hands, which were still.
Then the ground hummed under her boots.
She knew it before the wrist sensor said it.
She knew it in the little bones of her ankle where an old sprain had healed.
The granite made a noise she had heard exactly twice in her life; a sound that was not sound, a shift of air pressure the size of a mountain rearranging itself half a kilometer down.
“The precursor is four point two, in twenty seconds,” she said, more to the recorder than to him.
Cross flinched.
It was small. He would not have registered it on his own recording.
On hers it would be visible in the audio — the tiny catch of breath, the shift of his weight from one polished shoe to the other.
Mara did not flinch. She counted, and she counted for the ridge behind her, not for the ground.
She counted Elias’s breathing on the wind at her back.
Three seconds, four. Four, five. He was steady.
The wrist sensor climbed. The four-point-two hit the north face of the rock like a hand slapped flat against a table, and the rock said yes, and the ropes of snow along the edge of the overlook fell straight down.
Cross was still on his feet. His two agents had gone into a half-crouch behind him. Mara stayed upright because staying upright was the thing she had that he did not, on this ground, in this weather.
“You are a very serious young woman, Doctor Valdés,” Cross said. His voice was still level; his hand was not.
The wire in Mara’s ear clicked.
“Contact,” Reyn said over comms, low.
“Three, four, on the visible route,” Havlin logged in her ear.
Cross had heard nothing. He was speaking again, about geology, about time, about a ward full of children who were still alive because of him. He was going to keep speaking. He believed in the sentence he was inside of.
Then his agents moved.
Mara heard it before she saw it — the dry rustle of a shell coat, the shift from a hand-at-side to a hand-at-holster. The wind took the sound and gave it to her a beat late.
“Down,” Elias said, moving.
She went down. She went down with the recorder in her right hand and the RAID against her sternum and her left forearm burning under the sleeve, and she went down flat on the granite where Elias had told her to go before any of this had started, on the wind side of the rock where the overhang cut a foot of shelter from the north face.
The first shot cracked over her head and went nowhere.
Reyn’s answering shot, from the cut back-route, was quieter — the suppressor eating the report the way Reyn liked it eaten.
One of Cross’s agents folded at the knees.
The second turned, tracking, and Reyn’s second shot took him at the base of the throat.
“Two down clean. The third is in flight,” Reyn radioed.
“The four point two shifted their footing, boss,” Reyn added.
“Cross is on the rocks below the visible route.”
The third was Cross. Cross was running for the visible route with the wind stripping the tail of his suit jacket sideways off his back.
Behind her, on the ridge, Elias moved for her.
She did not see him take the graze. She heard it — a small hot sound, wrong against the wind, the sound of a bullet meeting a jacket that had a man’s shoulder inside it.
Elias did not go down. Elias came down the ridge with his left arm held tight against his side and the HK416 riding easy in his right hand and blood already dark on the shell of his sleeve.
“I am on you in ten seconds, Mara,” he said in her ear.
“Halberd chartered helicopter inbound from the north, boss,” Havlin called.
“Range one mile and dropping fast, on you.”
Mara kept the recorder up. She kept it up while Cross broke down the visible route and while Reyn moved on the cut back-route to cut him off and while a distant beat began under the wind — a rotor, thin and cold, coming out of the north over the twenty-mile smear of the valley.
Elias reached her at nine seconds by her count.
“Stay on the wind side,” Elias said, when he reached her, left arm heavy. “Recorder up.”