Salem's Cipher (32 page)

90

Montvale, Virginia

S
alem ignored his silent threat and ran to her mother.

She wrapped her arms around Vida, who fell against her. Her skin felt hot and loose.

“Mom?”

Vida was too heavy to hold, but it was a sick weight, the heaviness of infection and swelling and pus. Salem slid her to the ground as gently as she could.

Vida's eyes fluttered open.

“Mom? It's Salem. Mom!” A sob escaped Salem's lips. She felt hands at the back of her pants, sliding out the papers. She didn't care. Her mother was burning, her skin a purple-green all over. Her clothes were matted to her, bloody, melding and scabbing into her flesh.

“Salem!” Bel was climbing out of the hole.

Salem felt the sudden pressure of a blade against her neck as a response. The killer turned her around, never easing up on the pressure at her throat. He was deceptively strong. She knew in that moment that Grace Odegaard was indeed dead.

Bel seemed to realize the same thing, her whole body melting to the ground as her eyes traveled from the man to Salem to Vida and back to Salem.

“Noooo,” she breathed.

Ernest climbed out next. He glanced over at Ronald and paled. He stood to his full height, pulling Bel to her feet, careful of her shoulder.

“Wonderful,” the man with the blade said. He was the same person who'd tried to take them outside the Dolores Mission, the friend of the fat-fingered man. His voice was velvet and cream. Salem thought she detected a slight Southern accent underneath.

He kept his knife pressed to her throat as he shook out one of the pieces of paper he'd pulled from her jeans. “The land deeds exist. Not for long, eh?” He laughed, the good-natured sound you make when a friend forgets something that you could have easily forgotten yourself.

Ernest stepped forward. The blade pressed deeper into Salem's throat, opening an edge of flesh with a tiny pop. Warm blood trickled down her neck.

“If you want to live two more minutes, I invite you to tell me exactly what else is in that vault. I'll find out in any case after I kill you.”

“Gold.” Bel's voice was scoured steel. “Jewels. Pearls.”

“The master list of Underground members?”

“That too,” Bel said.

Salem's eyes shot up to Bel. The list was on the computer back at Lu's. Why would Bel lie about that? They were going to be dead in two minutes, all of them, and the killer would find out the truth. So why lie?

Salem read the answer in Bel's face loud and clear:
Because fuck him.

There is one basic rule of Krav Maga: use your opponent's strength and weight against them. With a knife at your throat, that means your enemy is pushing into you. He expects you to hold still as a rabbit. It's instinct. It doesn't occur to him that you might push back.

You have a second's lick before he regains his balance.

Salem didn't think. She rolled backward, away from her mom, away from the knife and into her captor, knocking him off balance hard enough that he let go of her, stumbling back a step. He re­adjusted quickly and turned toward Salem, murder in his eyes, the knife thrusting toward her in a blow meant to kill, not capture.

Ernest launched himself with an incoherent yell. The killer turned his blade to the more immediate threat, slashing the knife in a vertical arc that sliced through Ernest's throat with buttery ease. Ernest's eyes widened in shock as a gout of red spurted out from the gash below his chin. He slumped to the forest floor, solid and motionless, as the killer swiveled on Salem, who lay on the ground.

Bel had hurled herself into motion the same time as Ernest, but swifter and sleeker. She flew underneath, grabbing a rock the size of her fist, and slammed it into the killer's brain stem before his blade could claim Salem.

The killer fell toward Salem. She pushed him away, screaming. He landed on his back next to her. Bel hurried to check his pulse, rock still in her hand. She was panting, her eyes wild.

“He's dead. Look at his face.”

It was a horrifying patchwork puddle of melting flesh.

Salem was panicked, confused. “Did you smash the rock into the front of his skull?”

Bel shook her head, her pupils huge and black. She couldn't pull her eyes off the man's pooling face as she went through his pockets. She discovered no ID, only a set of knives in an intricate sheath, a silver locket, a hank of blond hair, and the papers he'd snatched off Salem. She took all but the hair.

Salem crawled over to Ernest. “Help me turn him over!”

The earth was sucking greedily at the blood pumping out of Ernest's throat, absorbing the pool before it could form. Salem pressed her hands over the wound, the heat of his life pulsing against her, growing softer.

“Mercy.” The word cost him. Blood sprayed from his mouth. “Protect Mercy.”

“Bel! Go get help.”

Ernest wheezed, and his breathing stopped.

Bel clasped Salem around the waist, straining to pull her away.

“What are you doing? He's still alive. He's still got a heartbeat.” Salem looked away from Ernest to search Bel's face. It was a tapestry of sadness.

“We have to get Vida to a hospital, honey. We can send an ambulance for Ernest, okay?”

Salem glanced over at her unconscious mother. She appeared so frail, so vulnerable. But Salem couldn't leave Ernest, not when his heart was still beating.

He pumped blood for one more minute.

He never spoke another word.

A humid fog had settled into the forest.

Salem realized that she was sitting in a cloud.

91

Alcatraz Island

A
lcatraz Island, 1.5 miles across the bay from San Francisco, was named for the pelicans that originally colonized it. Most locals referred to it as “the Rock.” Humans first used it as a military fortress, housing prisoners there as early as the Civil War. The lonely and impassive concrete cell block that now defined the island was completed in 1912. In 1933, the US Department of Justice acquired the land and turned it into a storage facility for prisoners who caused too much trouble to be housed anywhere else.

The first batch of the worst of the worst arrived on August 11, 1934. The legendary prison held the likes of Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, James “Whitey” Bulgur, and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. Agent Clancy Johnson didn't particularly care for criminal name-­dropping. He just knew the old prison gave him the willies. It was a haunted house of cinderblock windows and industrial cells straight out of a Russian gulag flick.

Alcatraz had officially closed its prison doors in 1963 on order from then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. It cost $10 a day to house criminals there, compared to $3 anywhere else. That, and the prisoners and guards and their families were dumping all their sewage into the Bay. It was floating onshore.

The prisoners were moved to Illinois that same year.

Clancy figured they hadn't gotten it any easier.

In 1969 the Native Americans took over the Rock, calling Indians from as far away as Minneapolis to occupy the island for nearly two years. The Indians protested all the land and rights the US government had stolen from them over the centuries. It worked—Nixon rescinded the Indian Termination Policy in 1971 as a direct result of the Alcatraz occupation. Somehow, Clancy suspected Gina Hayes would avoid that page in the history books when she delivered her speech.

Hayes was arriving tomorrow to speak about prison reform, an area where Clancy happened to agree with her wholeheartedly. Sometime during Clancy's tenure with the FBI, prisons had turned into a for-profit business, and that didn't sit well with him. It was simple math: if you made more money the more criminals you had, you were invested in creating more criminals, and there was no more efficient criminal factory than a prison.

You maybe went in stupid—knocked over a convenience store for a pack of smokes, broke a cop's window on a dare—but you came out hard, and you brought that back to your community like an infection. Crimes in the US were dropping, but prison numbers were increasing to the tune of $25,000 a year for each of the 2.5 million incarcerated, billed directly to American taxpayers. And much of it was sliding into the pockets of the prison-owning tycoons, thank you very much. Clancy wasn't a hippie, nor was he a philosopher, but his father had raised a practical man, and he didn't like those numbers.

Hayes and Clancy parted ways from that point on, politically speaking.

Clancy wasn't sure if the Hermitage had pulled strings to assign him to dry clean the island the evening before Hayes's historic speech and in advance of the Secret Service's sweep tomorrow, or if it was legitimately part of his FBI assignment. He figured the latter, because Stone was here too. Clancy knew for a fact that the Hermitage had arranged his own shift on the island tomorrow, though. He had a job to do for them.

Personally, the island gave Clancy the creeps. It resembled one of those raised pieces in the Game of Life, the green plastic bluffs with a road carved through them, only on Alcatraz, the road was carved around the edges, and it was a walking path with a bunch of haunted old buildings sprinkled in the middle. A red handprint marked the door of the prison. Inside, the floor was bomb scarred. Clancy was fine keeping this search cursory. Stone was going to town, though, checking every nook and cranny on the weird old prison as if he could locate a gun that someone genuinely wanted hidden.

As if anyone who really wanted Hayes dead would stuff the gun on the island in advance, rather than contract with someone who was not only allowed to bring a gun with him but was required to do so when working.

Clancy stared through a barred sliver of window, watching Stone sprint up the stone steps of the old recreation yard, the shadow of the rickety water tower concealing his partner for a moment. No way could Clancy do that, even on a good day. His bones were the same age as the rest of him—seventy-two. That's when he wondered if he was up for this job. The money sure would be nice. He and Jenny could retire to the Caribbean.

He chuckled, and it turned into a smoker's cough, a habit he'd given up five years earlier but which still rattled around his lungs. Who the hell was he fooling? If he had all the time and money in the world, the first thing he'd do was leave her.

Maybe he'd take up fishing. Buy a hut somewhere, gawk at the tourist girls. Drink beer.

Yeah, he liked the feel of that on his back.

He patted his gun and strolled back into the sunshine.

92

Virginia

T
he drive from Beale's vault to Lynchburg General Hospital should have taken an hour. Bel chewed it up in half that. Salem called the police on the way, giving them the coordinates to the vault and the three bodies—Ernest, Ronald, and the assassin. She also called the hospital.

The staff was ready when the rental car screeched up to the emergency room door.

Vida Wiley was rushed into surgery.

Salem and Bel waited.

Salem's mom was alive; Bel's was not. Ernest was dead, leaving Mercy a true orphan. There were no words, so the two women simply held each other, the warmth of Bel's body merging with Salem's, shoring her up, grounding her.

“Salem Wiley?”

She and Bel shot to their feet. The doctor wore a blue gown and matching head cover.

“How is she?” Bel asked.

The doctor grimaced. “I was a field medic in the first Iraq War, and I've never seen wounds so infected. But it looks like she'll pull through. Four broken bones, 173 stitches, severely dehydrated, and a fever of 104, but she'll make it. We have her on an antibiotic drip along with other fluids.”

“Is she conscious?”

“She goes in and out.”

“Can we see her?”

“If you don't tax her. We've fixed all the trauma we can identify, but she's not out of the woods yet. She needs rest.”

He led them to her room.

It was silent but for the hum and beep of Vida's monitor. She was motionless, blanket pulled to her chest, arms stuffed with needles. Salem ran to her, unsure where to touch her. She was covered in bandages and bruises. Anger and horror wrestled inside Salem.

“Mom?”

Bel went to the other side of the bed and gently brushed Vida's hair back, careful not to touch any flesh. “Hey, Vida,” she said softly.

There was no response except the steady beep of the heart monitor.

Bel smiled down at the woman. “She came to my U of C graduation. You knew that, right? Her and my mom together, like an old married couple.” Fat tears rolled out of her eyes. She swiped at them. “I thought of her as my second mother. Good thing I have a spare, right? You're okay sharing?”

Salem matched Bel's tears. “I'm okay sharing. And you know what else? Someone wise once told me that as long as you and me have each other, we can do anything.”

“That does sound smart,” Bel said, sniffling. “What super-­intelligent person said that again?”

Salem smiled sadly and leaned over to kiss the one visibly unscathed spot on her mother: her ear. When she pulled away, she gasped. “Bel, they cut off part of her lobe.”

Bel nodded sadly, as if she'd expected that and more.

“Bel.” Vida's voice was a breath more than a sound.

Bel and Salem exchanged a look laden with surprise and joy. Bel leaned in. “I'm here. So is Salem. You're in the Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia. You're safe. You don't have to say anything. You need to rest.”

Vida's eyes twitched under her lids. Salem was wondering if she'd imagined the sound when Vida's eyes shot open. She jerked, then groaned. Her eyes fell shut. “You're both here. Both the girls.”

“We are, Mom. And Bel's right. You need to rest. We'll stay by your side.”

A tear leaked past Vida's eyelashes, rolled over her cheek, and was absorbed by a white bandage. “You can't.” She cleared her throat, but her voice didn't grow any stronger. “Gracie is dead.”

Bel made a sound, a cross between a whimper and a cough. “We know.”

Vida blinked her eyes open again. It seemed to take a great effort to keep them that way. “Isabel, it was quick. She was scared, but she wasn't in pain.”

Salem reached across her mom and clasped one of Bel's hands. She could read the agony in her friend's face, could see her trying to file it away but having no place to put it.

“Where's her body?”

A sigh rattled through Vida. “Minneapolis, I think. I don't know.” Vida gazed at Salem. “You cut your hair, baby.”

Salem touched her short curls. She'd forgotten. “Why didn't you tell us?” Her hand flew to her mouth. That's not what she had intended to say.

Vida grimaced. “About the Underground? We hoped you'd never have to know. We trained you in case we were wrong.”

Salem's emotions were oil and water, betrayal and love. “We had a right to know.”

She caught the rest of the words before they left her lips—
Gracie didn't have to die
. If Salem and Bel had been told about this world, about their training, they could have used it earlier to obtain the codes. It hadn't had to happen like this.

Vida was painfully silent for a long moment, her eyes glistening. “Now you do.”

Salem realized in that moment that she was wiser than her mother. The enormous sadness of that gagged her. She swallowed past it as best she could and held her mom's hand, mourning who they used to be.

“Did you get inside Beale's vault?”

Salem held up the scrolls. They hadn't left her person since Bel'd slammed the rock into the killer's brainstem.

Vida chuckled. It turned into a cough. “That's my girl. You need to fly to San Francisco and take them to Lu. She'll know what to do.”

“We're not leaving you,” Bel said.

“You are, and you're leaving now. Look at me. Both of you. Look at what's been cut off of me, pounded into me, sliced open on me. This is what they want to do to Gina Hayes.”

The women locked eyes over Vida.

“I don't know how the Hermitage intends to do it, just when and where: Alcatraz, tomorrow.”

Salem felt the words like a slap. “But how can we stop it?”

Vida's eyes fell closed. Her skin had grown shiny and wet-looking. “Get those papers to Lu. You can't trust anyone but her. She has a plan. Go to her.”

“Vida? Who gave you this information? Vida?”

Vida didn't answer Bel. Salem glanced at her monitors but couldn't read them. She ran into the hall calling urgently for a nurse. “My mom just passed out.”

The nurse jogged into the room and checked the equipment. “She's stable.” Her glance was admonishing. “You wore her out.”

Bel glared at the nurse until she dropped her gaze. When she did, Bel said, “We won't bother her anymore. Give us a moment in here, please.”

The nurse reluctantly stepped out of the room. Salem suspected she was looking for someone with the authority to kick them out.

Bel walked around the bed and looked Salem in the eye. “What do you want to do?”

Salem knew what the old version of her would have said: stay by her mom's side until she was well enough to fly back to Minneapolis, and then never leave the house again. “Exactly what my mom said. Take these papers to Lu and save Hayes.”

Bel's lip twitched. “I can do it. You stay with Vida.”

Salem turned back to her mom, leaning in close to her ear. “Hey, Mom. I know you can hear me. And I know you're in good hands here. If you could talk to me, you'd tell me to stay with Bel, right? Heck, you did with your text.
Follow the trail to the end, no matter what. Stick close to Bel
.”

“Salem.” Bel sounded exasperated.

“We're not arguing,” Salem said. “You call Lu. Tell her to get us plane tickets out. Have her send someone here to keep an eye on Mom. And then we go. We finish this together.” Salem held up the scrolls.

Bel snorted in disbelief, then laughed, her face puffy from crying. “Why not? My schedule is clear. Why don't we topple a corrupt organization and save a United States Senator?”

“Exactly,” Salem said, kissing her mom's cheek again, lingering for a moment. “Time's wasting.”