Mirage

for.

“BP?” she asked.

“Barely registering,” replied the orderly monitoring the cuff.

“Same with the heartbeat.” Julia looked up to see the Ringer’s were flowing wide-open and knew she could do no more here. “Okay, people, let’s get him to medical.” Her voice had the crisp command of a person who was in complete charge.

She exchanged a glance with Cabrillo, her somber dark eyes telling him everything he needed to know.

“Nyet,” Borodin wheezed. Somehow he levered open his eyes.

“Sorry, no nyet yet,” Hux said, laying a hand on Yuri’s arm. “Let’s move it!”

“Nyet,” Borodin managed to rasp again. “Ivan?” He called to Juan, using his Russian name.

Juan leapt forward so he stood over Yuri’s supine body. “Easy, my friend. You’re going to be okay.”

Borodin smiled a bloody smile, his teeth stained crimson like a shark’s after a meal. “Nyet,” Yuri said a third time. “Kenin.”

“I know all about Pytor Kenin,” Juan assured him.

“Chairman,” Hux said edgily.

“One second.” Juan didn’t want to look at the rebuke on her face. He knew as well as she did that every second counted. He also knew that Yuri Borodin understood this fact even better than them.

Borodin coughed, and the effort seemed to tear something deep within his body. He winced, his eyes screwed tight as he rode a wave of pain. “Aral.”

The word dribbled from his lips.

“The Aral Sea?” Juan asked. “What about it?”

“Eerie boat.”

“I don’t understand.” Juan could see — all of them could see — that Borodin had seconds left.

“What about the Aral Sea and an eerie boat?”

“Find Karl Petrov — Pe-trov—” The syllables came further and further apart. Juan bent down so his ear was barely an inch from his friend’s bloody mouth. “Petrovski.”

The effort to get the name out was the last gasp of a dying man. His skin, if possible, looked even paler, more translucent, like the waxy rind of one of Madame Tussauds dummies.

“Yuri?” Juan called with a desperation he knew would go unanswered. “Yuri?”

Borodin’s Adam’s apple gave one final thrust, one more attempt to speak. With his lung so full of blood, there was hardly enough air to form his dying word. It whispered past his unmoving lips already laced with the icy touch of death. “Tesla.”

Julia pushed Juan out of the way, rolled Borodin onto his back, and leapt atop the gurney so she was astride her patient like a jockey on a horse. She was a curvy though petite woman, but when she started chest compressions she did it with strength and vigor. The orderlies took up positions to guide the rolling stretcher to the Level 1 trauma center within the labyrinthine corridors of the Oregon’s secret passages.

Cabrillo watched them disappear through a watertight door, blew out a long breath, and then moved to an intercom box mounted on a wall. He barely noticed the crewmen securing the boat garage from battle stations.

“Op center,” came the voice of Max Hanley. Not knowing the situation, Max wisely kept his usual repertoire of bad humor and sarcastic remarks to himself.

“Max, get us out of here,” Juan said, as if leaving the scene of the act could somehow bury the fact. “This mission was a bust.”

“Aye, Chairman,” Max replied gently. “Aye.”

CHAPTER FOUR

He sat slouched against the corner of his desk for the next fifteen minutes, his cabin lights dim, his eyes pointed at the floor but seeing nothing. The space had been his home for years. Its current inspiration was the set of Rick’s Cafe from the movie Casablanca and had been pulled off with some of Kevin Nixon’s Hollywood set-designing friends. Usually it was a place of solace for Cabrillo. Until the phone rang, it was merely a void.

The replica Bakelite phone trilled, and he snatched up the handset before the first ring ended. He said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Juan.” It was Julia Huxley. “I just called it. He’s gone.”

“Thanks, Hux,” Cabrillo said in a monotone. “I know you did all you could.”

He settled the heavy handset back onto its cradle.

From the brief exchange of looks he’d shared with the ship’s physician back in the boat garage, he’d known the inevitability of Yuri’s death but couldn’t motivate himself to do anything until he’d received verification. He’d failed. It didn’t matter that he’d busted Yuri out of the prison and got him to within a mile of the Oregon. Juan blew out another long breath.

Cabrillo stripped off the remains of his snowsuit and stuffed it and his prison garb and the bloody boots into a plastic bag for incineration. He strode into a green-marble bathroom and hit the brass taps of a multiheaded, glass-enclosed shower that was big enough to hold six. As steam began pouring over the top of the enclosure, he unstrapped his artificial leg, gave the toughened skin of his stump a quick massage, and then stepped into the hot spray.

There were usually just two items in his shower, a bar of plain soap and generic shampoo. Though Juan was a bit of a clotheshorse, like most men his personal grooming was minimalist.

Today there was a third item and from it he poured some yellowish gel into his palm and felt its chemical burn over the heat of the water. He smeared his hand across his bald head and began working it into his skin. Kevin Nixon had explained the chemical process that would dissolve the ersatz tattoos he’d painted across half the Chairman’s body, but formulae and reactivity coefficients were meaningless when the solution felt like it was not only melting off the ink but his skin as well.

The water sluicing off his head turned gray as the ink began to run.

It took fifteen minutes of searing agony to remove the tattoos to the point they looked like faint, week-old contusions that would fade away completely in a couple of days. He could have spared himself the pain and let them wane on their own, but having them on his body somehow reminded him of the mark of Cain.

He toweled off and swiped clear a spot in the mirror over the vanity, deciding at first glance that for a while, at least, a hat was in order. The baldness was shocking enough — he usually sported thick blond hair trimmed neatly by the ship’s barber — but the faint blue cast left by residual ink made him look like a reject from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

He looked past the faded ink and decided that if his hairline ever did go into retreat, as it had with two uncles on his mother’s side — an ill omen — he would shave it all off. With his broad swimmer’s shoulders and height, he thought he could pull it off. He thought he looked more Yul Brynner than Telly Savalas.

He hopped through his cabin to the closet. The leg he’d worn on the mission would go down to the Magic Shop for cleaning and maintenance. Lined up like boots at a shoe store, the back of his walk-in had a selection of artificial limbs for any number of occasions. Some were designed to mimic his real leg right down to the coarseness of his hair, while others were metallic monstrosities out of science fiction. He chose a flesh-colored plastic limb and snugged the top sock over his stump, making sure there were no wrinkles that would later chafe his skin.

It had been more than five years since a shell fired from a Chinese gunboat had severed the limb below the knee, and not a day went by that the missing portion of his leg didn’t hurt. Phantom pain, doctors called it. To those who suffered through it there was nothing phantom about it.

He dressed in a pair of jeans, an Oregon State sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. He’d gone to UCLA for his undergraduate degree. The Oregon shirt was a hat tip to the ship. He slipped on an original L.A. Raiders baseball