The message was "Nothing." He hadn't been able to reach Gary. And he shouldn't have tried. The damn fool was violating Morgan rules.
Daniel shook his head. One of these generations, the Morgans were going to have to go straight. God knows, they didn't need the money. But fraud and theft were the family industries, sort of like any other trade, son following father in an apprenticeship. And it was fun, solving puzzles on a grand scale with the added spice of danger and defiance. Gary had taken to it like the proverbial duck to water. Now Ben was paying the price. If Gary didn't want Ben to find him, the old pirate didn't have a prayer.
He walked down the long stairs, out the back-door tunnel, down the cliff into the half-rotted salt reek of drying rockweed, Daniel stowed his baggage fore and aft, balancing the load so his kayak still rode properly, and sealed the deck hatches. He slid the keel down into the water and pushed off into darkness, bobbing in the slow rise and fall of the swells of yesterday's storm, fitting himself back into the sea. Stars opened out above, vast swaths of stars that city people never saw, and the night sounds of owls and a loon flowed out from the land behind him.
He paddled, breathing the cold damp salt of fog waiting to form in the night chill, sighting on the stars and then the outline of his island against the stars' shimmer on the water, and felt his world settle comfortable around him. This was where he belonged. Masefield, tall ships and stars to steer them by. He'd get this Pratt thing sorted out, cut that tangled web Ben had spun between himself and Gary, and then to hell with Morgans and with stealing.
I'm dead, no reason I can't retire.
He paddled, and paddled, and sighted on a notch in the black spiky mass of trees against the sky and paddled some more until he slid into another trough in the rockweed and stopped and climbed out on slippery footing he knew well. He skidded the kayak up over rumbling stone and under spruces into a hollow that hid it from prying eyes. Swung the backpack across his shoulders, hung a water jug from each hand, followed the faint gleam of a trail under the stars until the old pillbox loomed black ahead of him and he flashed his head-lamp for an instant to shove gear ahead of him into the gun-slit.
Inside, his nose twitched and he sorted odors. Freeze-dried backpacker pilaf, musty concrete, gasoline faint from the stove. Burned motor oil. He sniffed again. Yes, oil. Outboard motor exhaust, faint but recent, new since he'd left for Morgan's Point. He tensed and flashed the caver's lamp again, but all the shadows resolved into his own gear.
He'd had a visitor. Might still have a visitor, somewhere on the island. He dug his starlight goggles out of one pack, an apparent flare gun that was something rather more deadly out of another, loaded it with a flare that wasn't a flare out of a third, and felt adrenaline pumping through his blood.
A slow grin spread across his face. He remembered why he'd scorned retirement before. Morgans didn't need the money, didn't need more trophies over the mantelpiece like Ben's flint. But damn, the chase was fun.
Ben's flint. Daniel flashed his lamp again, checked that particular corner of the bunker a second time. Empty.
The aluminum case was gone. Someone had stolen the flint, a thief stealing from thieves.
Chapter Nineteen
Alice wandered the dreamscape of her ancient house, searching through its rooms and centuries for something. But she couldn't remember what.
Bach followed her along the hall, the Goldberg Variations played on a harpsichord, and the tinkling notes echoed strangely off plaster and old wood as if the stereo moved from room to room cast loose from its moorings to the twenty-first century and electricity. The House liked Bach. It did not like electricity.
Alice turned a corner, turned left instead of right and through what should have been a wall of plaster backed by two feet of solid red-oak logs. She met Kate walking the other way. But the blonde giant wasn't Kate, just looked like her. Family resemblance.
Jackie grinned back at Alice, shattered death's-head grin of the corpse Kate's daughter had become in a blasted instant. The face morphed into Tupash, the Inca brujo Alice had shot through the heart with a sterling silver ball from a percussion dueling pistol.
The sound-track flowed seamlessly into the orchestral drama of Moussorgsky, Night on Bald Mountain, the visuals stolen from Disney's Fantasia. The demon on the mountaintop wore Tupash's face, melting back into Jackie's. Then it leaped down at Alice, flowing like a cat, and it was a cat, a jaguar spotted and fierce, walking upright like a man, muzzle stained with blood. Human blood, she knew, without knowing how she knew. Jade plaque armor hung about Jaguar's body, coils and fanciful animals of gold gleamed around his neck and dangled from his ears and nose. Jade-green eyes glared at her with mad fire and slashed her heart from her chest like razor-edged obsidian knives. Jaguar lifted her heart to the rising sun and drank her blood from it.
Her eyes snapped open, staring up into darkness. A great horned owl hooted in the distance, who-who-whoooo questions echoing around the bay and silent harbor, and the other side of the bed lay cold and empty. No Kate. Alice winced her eyes shut again, squeezing sudden tears.
No help for it. She slid the quilt back and eased out of bed, floorboards icy under her bare feet and forcing her another step toward waking. Autumn in Maine. Too warm to keep the woodstove going through the night, too cold for comfort in the wolf-hours just before the dawn. But the cranky old bitch House wouldn't allow a furnace or electric heat, and the rug had somehow crept away toward
