'Oh yeah. And leave the harbor unguarded on a dumb hunch. Come on, Roamer. Let's go look up here.'
Sam hoped they didn't take the dog too near the madrona tree. Roamer would smell his personal items in an instant.
The dog barked and the man kept insisting. Finally the man with the water theory lost.
'Look at Roamer now. He's back in the damn fire pit. That guy's not in the water. See, he's back to circles again.'
Sam was getting numb. A nap sounded good. Just give up and sink and be done with it.
He thought about the sigh that kills, and about the microbes that live thousands of years and people who do not, and methane disasters and nuclear triggering. One certainly seemed to have nothing to do with the other. If Haley didn't arrive quickly, he might never know. Actually he might never know even if she did.
He went under and had to struggle to get another gasp of air. But there was no air. He took some big strokes and at last he broke the surface. If he died, he would miss the answer to the most incredible riddle of his life. They'd left the beach more confused than the dog. If it hadn't been for the stupidity of the handlers, the dog would have beat him.
Now the ocean might beat him.
Sam began swimming toward the beach, thinking only that very few jobs were worth his life.
This one might be.
CHAPTER 28
The Lake amphibian 270 turbo was, in essence, a flying marine hull. Like larger amphibious aircraft, the entire body of the plane landed in the water. It had a single engine that sat up on a pylon on top of the plane. It would carry four people in relative comfort, land on the water or at an airport with equal facility, and was FAA certified.
Haley and Grant looked over the south end of the airport and saw only one deputy pulling through the gate near the fueling station.
'They were all over this place,' Grant said, 'but I think they've moved on to the houses.
They don't know about this amphibian. It belongs to my brother and, to tell you the truth, I haven't flown it all that much.'
'Uh-oh,' Haley said. 'How many water landings?'
'Unassisted?'
'What's that mean, 'unassisted'?'
'Without my brother touching the controls.'
'Have you ever flown it alone?'
'No, but I've made unassisted landings,' Grant said.
'How many?'
'Well, what difference does it make?' he said. 'I'm here and we're going, unless you want to fly it.'
'Let's just go.'
'That's the spirit.' Grant went one door down from the end of the hangar row immediately adjacent to the main passenger terminal and quickly unlocked the hangar door while Haley remained hidden inside his shop hangar. Once he had the doors open and the plane out, she ran out and jumped in.
Grant didn't bother with a preflight inspection.
Without hesitation he cranked up the engine, applied full power, and began a takeoff roll with no lights on.
'Can you see?' she asked.
'Not well,' he muttered, and hit the lights. They illuminated the cop.
As if someone had jolted the deputy, he hit the gas, spun the tires, and pulled around as if considering whether to drive into them. But he was slightly off center to their left and, in a couple seconds, they would miss him by a few feet. Turning on all his lights and his siren, he waited like the lone bowling pin in the second frame.
'Damn it.' Grant kept it at full throttle. They gained speed, aiming for a space between the hangars at the far southern end of the runway.
'You're not going to make it.' Haley thought of the cop car, the tethered planes, the hangars, and the chain- link fence at the end of the taxiway.
'The hell I'm not.'
They were passing through forty knots; they needed to hit sixty.
'You'll never clear the planes.' She gripped her armrests.
The cop wasn't moving, probably in love with his life.
'Hope he knows I can't stop,' Grant mumbled.
Now it appeared the deputy was backing up. Grant eased back on the yoke, lifting the front wheel. The stall warning went off as their right wing shot over the cop's hood.
'Whew,' he said. Then the plane staggered into the sky, missing the cop car and the planes by inches, but the hangar roof by quite a few feet.
Haley's stomach was upset, but she was alive.
Grant's legs were visibly shaking.
'Cop probably pissed his pants.'
'I almost did,' Haley said.
Immediately they turned over the harbor and were beyond it in seconds, dropping down to two hundred feet.
'Grant?' she shouted. 'How did Ben keep this secret with so many people? And why did he keep it from me, when so many others knew?'
Grant glanced at her. She knew it was unwise to be firing questions at him now.
'Only one thing I can figure,' he said. 'Ben was protecting you.'
'They have Sarah James at Lopez,' Frick told Khan. 'Finally. By Ben's beach house, as it happens. I'm gonna take care of it.'
Khan looked dubious, as though he understood Frick's methods and suspected his pleasure in them. Frick didn't have time to be irritated. Khan was pointing.
'What the hell?' Frick looked out the conference room window and saw lights from an aircraft taking off from the airport. Running to the hallway past a bewildered special deputy, he grabbed an M4 from the corner. Out on the patio he started aiming at the plane, a mile distant, and coming in his direction.
Khan came out and stood beside him.
'You're gonna shoot down an airplane, right in front of Friday Harbor?' Khan asked.
'You're damn right. Get her; then get Chase.'
'You don't want Haley Walther alive?'
'I want her, unless I can't have her,' Frick said. 'Then I want her dead. With that plane she gets away and probably beats us to Anderson's research.'
Frick now had his finger on the trigger. The plane was approaching almost dead on. He waited.
'Uh, excuse me,' McStott said apologetically from behind him. 'We found something more.'
Sam was kicking and swimming and thinking about whether there was any chance he would live. Fleetingly he decided that next time he might try a full nelson on the dog, temporarily putting it to sleep in lieu of swimming in the North Pacific in the late fall.
His limbs were starting to become spastic and it was difficult to swim at all. His leg managed to hurt despite the growing numbness. Occasionally he reached down with his toe, trying to touch the bottom, but got nothing. As he realized that he couldn't swim much longer, that his body would just quit from the cold, he tried to guess how far it was to the beach. His mind was muddled; it wouldn't think right.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, he told himself. It was all he could think to do.
Somewhere he heard his cell phone beep, so he couldn't be too far from the shore. He'd thought he'd turned it to silent. Evidently under the profile 'silent,' he had inadvertently used a quiet beep for the designation silent. He
