Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
"I'm going to threaten to drop it, and I'm going to mean it so completely that she has no choice but to believe me.
" Elena hauled her end of the crate toward the tailgate, the wet metal slick and cold under her palms, the river roaring forty feet straight down past the rail.
"She respects a forecast. She's a person who reads a situation and bets on the reading.
So I give her a forecast she can't afford to test."
The lead man was twenty meters out along the bridge now, and slowing. He had seen what the two of them were doing at the back of the truck, and he did not have any orders that covered it, and it stopped him where he stood, water running off the brim of his hood.
"Rosa!" Elena called. "Camera on me. On the crate. On the drop — wide, so she can see exactly where this goes if she pushes it one inch further. Logan, get it up onto the rail."
They muscled the crate up onto the low concrete rail of the bridge, Elena on one side of it and Logan on the other, the obsidian a dead and shifting weight inside the wood, the brown water loud and fast below them.
Elena set both hands flat against the top of the crate and looked down the long pale span at the small dry figure standing under the umbrella.
"Ms. Volkov." Her voice carried out over the water better than she had any right to expect.
"You came here for an object you can sell.
So here's the only forecast that matters to either of us.
Your man takes one more step toward this truck, and the most important thing anyone has found in a hundred years goes over this rail and into that river.
And then you go home and explain to the people who pay you how you turned a sure thing into a story about a stone lying at the bottom of a gorge that nobody will ever bring up.
I read this slab. You can't. Without me, you don't even know what it was you lost down there. "
She leaned into the crate, just enough to tilt it against the rail. Just enough that every one of them could see it tilt, and see how little further it had to go.
"Call him back," she said.
For a long moment Volkov said nothing at all. The rain drummed on the taut black skin of the umbrella and ran off it in a bright curtain.
"You won't," she called back, and she said it conversationally, almost gently, as though correcting a student's arithmetic. "You've spent two years of your life protecting that object from people exactly like me. You'll talk to me all afternoon if I let you. But you won't drop it."
"You met me four days ago," Elena said. "You don't know the first thing about what I'll do."
Down the length of the bridge, through the falling rain, Volkov lifted one hand.
The lead man stopped where he was.
It should have ended there.
It did not end there, because one of the men at the western end of the bridge — younger than the others, or hungrier, or simply too far back to have heard the exchange at all — came around the back of the crew-cab, reached the Hilux, and got a hand on Rosa.
She was leaning half out of the cab with the phone held up, and he got a fistful of her jacket and dragged her out through the door before anyone could so much as shout a warning.
Rosa did not go quietly. She drove the phone backward into the man's face with everything she had, jammed one knee hard against the door frame, and braced, screaming Elena's name into the rain.
He hauled at her, and she held, and the river roared under all of it, and for one long second the entire plan hung by the wrong end of the bridge and threatened to come apart there.
Elena did the only thing the geometry left her to do.
"Logan — hold it — hold it on the edge?—"
She let go of the crate and ran. Three steps, four, the deck slick as wet soap under her boots, and she hit the man low and hard — not with any skill, because she had none, she had never in her life thrown herself at another human being, but with the whole of her weight and the slide of the bridge behind it.
She was not trying to hurt him. She was only trying to move him the six inches to the rail.
They went into the rail together, and Rosa came free.
The man's back caught the wet concrete, and his boots slid out from under him on the rain-slick deck, and he grabbed the only thing in reach, which was the rail itself, and he held onto it.
That was what saved him. Elena did not wait to watch.
She dragged her sister back from the edge and shoved her bodily into the cab and put her own body between Rosa and the drop, her back to the roaring gorge.
"Estoy aquí," she said into Rosa's wet hair, both of them shaking against each other. "I'm here. I have you. I have you."
"I'm okay," Rosa said, and she was not okay at all, and her hand had locked around Elena's wrist hard enough to leave marks. "I'm okay. I dropped the phone."
"Leave it. Leave it, it doesn't matter."
"It's still recording. It went over the rail still recording." A laugh tore out of her, half of it a sob. "She's on it, Ellie. All of it. Everything she just did."
At the far end of the bridge, Volkov had not moved. The lead man stood frozen exactly where her raised hand had left him, water sheeting off his shoulders, waiting for an instruction that had not come.
Elena understood that the woman was doing arithmetic.
She could see it even at this distance, in the stillness of her.
The slab balanced on the rail. The camera gone into the river still running.
The cost of pushing forward now, weighed against the cost of standing back and waiting for a better afternoon.
And for the first time since the airport, since Volkov had first put a hand out to her across a crowded arrivals hall as though they were old colleagues, the arithmetic was not coming out in the woman's favor, and both of them knew it.
"Beto." Elena climbed back over the seat, her clothes streaming onto the upholstery.
The crate still sat tilted on the rail with Logan white-knuckled beside it, holding it against the wind.
"When I get the crate back into the bed, you drive straight at the truck blocking the far end.
You do not slow down for anything. They'll move it — because she is not going to let me drop this into the river, and she is not going to let her own roadblock be the reason I do it.
Logan — now, with me, back into the bed, quickly?—"
Together they dragged the crate down off the rail and into the bed, the weight of it fighting them the whole way, and the moment its base touched the pallet again Elena felt something in her own chest come unlocked.
Volkov's voice came once more through the loudhailer.
It was not quite as smooth as it had been.
There was a thread of something new running under it now, something that had not been there at the start.
"Dr. Vargas. This was the generous version.
I want you to understand that clearly. There will not be another one. "
"Then stop offering it," Elena said, to no one on that bridge who could possibly hear her.
"Hold on," she told Rosa, and pushed her sister down flat across the seat and kept a hand on her shoulder. "Logan, brace the crate. Beto—" She slapped the flat of her hand twice against the roof of the cab. "Vamos."
Beto put his foot to the floor.
The truck at the far end moved. Not by much, and not soon, but it moved — a driver making a decision in the last half-second, deciding that his employer would very much rather lose a roadblock than lose a fortune.
The Hilux drove through the gap that opened with a long shriek of metal dragging down the length of the tailgate, and then it was off the bridge and onto solid ground and climbing the eastern road up into the rain.
Behind them the men were running now, dark shapes strung out along the pale span, and they were far too late.
The black umbrella stood alone at the end of the bridge, a small dry point in all the falling gray, growing smaller in the back glass, until the road bent hard around the shoulder of the mountain and took it away entirely.
Nobody spoke for a full kilometer.
Rosa was crying and furious at once, and filming the road behind them out of nothing but reflex, her thumb on a phone that was no longer there before she remembered it was gone and let her empty hands drop into her lap.
Logan had a gash opened along his forearm from the rail or the crate, he could not have said which, and he had not yet noticed it; it stood out bright and startling against the rain-dark skin.
Elena sat with the wet notebook crushed flat against her chest and the slab riding intact in the bed behind her, and her whole body had begun to shake now that it was finally allowed to.
She made herself say it out loud, because if she said it out loud it would be a fact they could all plan around instead of a thing she was carrying alone.
"They tried to take it by force, in the open, in front of a running camera," she said.
"That isn't Hartmann being polite anymore.
That was never Hartmann being polite. That's a company that has looked at where we are and decided the rules don't reach this far out.
" She checked her sister's face, and the raw wet gash along Logan's arm, and the dark solid shape of the crate through the back glass.
"So we get to the cavern. We get there first, before any of them.
And we find out what it is they're willing to kill for, before they do. "