Sammie didn’t realize Jamie was standing, but she kept her word: The boat indeed headed for Austin Springs. Jamie saw the town’s twinkling lights and the vague outlines of stores along the lakefront. They were still more than a mile away. A mile from …
Something didn’t make sense. The lumbering stiffness vanished; he felt refreshed. The extreme exhaustion that grounded him before reaching the dock disappeared. Hours should have passed to feel this invigorated.
“I don’t get it,” Jamie said, looking at his wristwatch.
6:06 a.m.
“Just ten minutes. Can’t be.”
The full reality of his predicament strike him. Jamie realized the lights of Austin Springs were broadside to the boat, which was veering away toward the western shore. His grip on the pistol tightened as he realized Sammie was betraying him yet again. Was she such a cold-blooded Chancellor she would allow Michael to die?
Jamie didn’t wait to find out. He rushed forward and jammed the gun against her head.
“What are you doing, Sammie?” He yelled over the outboard. “What are you doing?”
She pulled back on the throttle and pointed to the boat’s port side.
“Look. Over town. It’s a helicopter, Jamie. It’s coming this way.”
Jamie kept a steady aim while shifting his eyes toward Austin Springs. Then he saw the lights. They didn’t match the steady twinkles from the storefronts. Green and red flashers. Through the hazy dawn light, Jamie saw an ovoid shape emerge. The familiar echo of a chopper’s rotor was faint but distinct. They were still almost a mile from town but sitting dead in the center of the lake, the refuge of the eastern and western shores each a good half-mile away.
“Throttle up, Sammie. We’re not changing course.”
“Jamie, that doesn’t make sense. We’ll head right into them.”
He cocked the hammer for emphasis. “Too late to back off. We have to save Coop.”
“Jamie, I’m swinging the boat west. Ginny’s Creek is right over there.” She pointed. “It’s a good place to hide.”
“No. That helicopter … it might not be them. It …”
“You’re not thinking this through.”
Sammie gunned the throttle, but this time grabbed the wheel and made a hard right. He wasn’t going to let her run again. Not when they were so close to help.
He demanded she head back toward town. She didn’t say a word; he didn’t know what to do with her defiance. A moment ago he was ready to shoot her, but the girl’s determination in the face of death confused him.
Jamie sensed a shadow moving behind him but didn’t have time to react before he heard a familiar voice shouting at him.
“Dude, that is not cool.”
Michael Cooper stood rigid behind them, his weary, mud-splattered face casting a disbelieving sneer.
He reached for the gun.
Jamie looked into his best friend’s bewildered eyes, dizzy.
“Coop …?”
27
T HE BLUE HAZE of dawn terrified Ben. The sun would be up soon, and with it the final hours of his brother’s life. Ben knew what he had to do, but he wondered whether he possessed the courage. All his life he played the Chancellors’ games, succumbed to their iron will, and went along with their mission to protect the Jewel until the day of its rebirth. Even when he finally saw the light of ultimate truth – a revelation bigger than all of them – he did not find the fortitude to take a stand. Instead, he cowered in the shadows and deep into a bottle when they rejected his truth.
Now, as he rode shotgun in Walt Huggins’s secret, black SUV – pine trees whizzing past along back roads around Lake Vernon – Ben knew he had no choice but to kill again.
In the minutes since their hasty escape, Ben learned how insidious Walt could be. The hulk of a man produced a hand-held Global Positioning Satellite, modified to track the Caryllan Wave energy coursing through Jamie’s blood, a signature unique in the world.
Walt boasted of his careful planning, even while he tracked a speedboat’s progress across Lake Vernon, headed toward Austin Springs.
“Be thankful, Sheridan,” Walt said with confidence. “If I had not considered every contingency, we’d have no way to track him.”
Ben failed to hide his sarcasm. “Yeah, that’s what a good Chancellor does. Every contingency. So, did you plan for the Caryllan pulse to arrive three days ahead of your prediction? Did you also plan for Grace to die like that?”
The words fell off his lips like icicles. Walt neither mentioned her name nor showed evidence of grief, as if her death were less of a concern than a paper cut. Ben was still trying to make sense of their final minutes in the lake house and how calmly Walt carried himself.
Walt studied the road but never changed his stoic expression.
“My wife understood sacrifice, Sheridan. She played her role, and now she’s gone. We have an important task at hand: The only mission that matters.”
Ben cursed in silence. He reached into his pocket and felt the flash drive. If he reached Jamie for a few minutes, maybe the impossible could be conquered. Ben glanced down to the butt of the pistol tucked between his pants and belly. If only the SUV weren’t moving so fast.
All he had to do was fire a single shot, take the wheel then use the GPS to find Jamie. It would have been easy; if only the biggest, most fearsome Chancellor he ever knew wasn’t sitting to his left. The last time he tried to defy Chancellors older and more committed than himself, Ben failed miserably. All he wanted to do two years earlier was confront his parents with knowledge that could change their mission, alter their
