The Tourist Trail (10 page)

Unwilling to accept defeat, Jake remained at the conference through the final day, lingering in the halls. He never saw Aeneas again. He watched as tables were drained of books and signs, as people packed up displays. He paced the hallways, then circled back into the hall once more, finding it empty. The vegan t-shirts and tattoos had disappeared, replaced by suits, rolling luggage, and a full-color sign announcing a radiology conference.

He sat at the hotel's bar, ordered a Guinness, and stared up at the baseball game on the television.

“Where's your bracelet?”

Jake looked over to see the woman he bumped into yesterday, or who bumped into him. She was wearing a white t-shirt and a wraparound skirt, a small pack slung over one shoulder.

“I must have lost it,” he said.

“I'll bet you did.”

She took the seat next to him and ordered a vodka on ice. She didn't look at him.

“I wasn't being completely honest with you earlier,” he said. “I only recently became a vegan.”

“If only there had been some clue.”

“Now you're making fun of me,” Jake said. “I guess I deserve it.” He held up his beer. “At least this is vegan.”

“Not quite.”

“I can't drink beer? I give up.”

“You can drink most beers. Just not Guinness. Guinness uses isinglass, which comes from fish, to remove the excess yeast. But those other beers on tap are vegan.” She smiled and downed her drink. “So is vodka.”

He suspected by the way she let her shoulder rub against his as she rummaged through her bag that his lapses might be forgiven. He bought her next drink before she could find the money she was searching for. She bought the next round while he was in the bathroom. They did not talk of food or animals or each other. They watched the baseball game; she rooted for the Red Sox, and he rooted for the Dodgers. When the Dodgers lost he drained his beer. She wiped the foam mustache off his upper lip and licked her finger.

“What's your name?” Jake asked.

“Noa,” she said. “What's yours?”

“Jake.”

“It's a good thing you're a vegan, Jake.”

“Why's that?”

“I don't sleep with carnivores.”

Jake followed her to her room. There was a large nylon backpack in the corner, a rainbow-colored Tibetan prayer flag draped across the TV.

“What are you praying for?” he asked her as she removed his shirt.

“Peace.” She removed her top. “Love.” She untied her skirt and let it fall to the floor. Jake cupped her breasts in his right hand and kissed them.

“And happiness.”

No more words were spoken that night. The sex felt at times angry and at other times playful. She giggled when he licked her calves. He squirmed as she took him in her mouth, and she gave him a look that said
relax
, and he let go and let her take charge. She wanted his body, and he gave it to her and gazed up at her as she writhed on top of him, eyes closed, grinding, arched back, grabbing him at his base, to feel him and her as one.

The next morning they made love again until the bed was stripped of sheets and pillows and he had collapsed onto her. He fought back sleep as she kissed his chest.

He awoke while she was in the shower and stared at her backpack. Something told him that it contained most of what she owned, and he felt intoxicated all over again—not only by Noa but by her lifestyle. He imagined leaving his own life behind, following her and her Tibetan flag. He could see them hitching through Russia, sleeping under the stars in New Zealand, tending bar in some Caribbean country. Off the grid.

Then he remembered who he was and what he was doing here. And Gordon. What would he tell his boss? That circumstances had changed? Priorities had shifted? He could hear himself talking like an agent, hiding behind third-person sentences, euphemisms, excuses. But the truth was that he had failed. He hadn't gotten the access he needed, and now it was too late. Maybe it was time for a new career. Or no career at all.

Right then he wanted nothing more than to leave Jake behind—but more than that, he wanted to relinquish Robert, too, before he got completely lost in bureaucracy and undercover assignments, before he lived so many lives as other people he would no longer be able to tell the difference. Noa was real, genuine. He wanted to follow her, and her Tibetan flag, wherever she was headed. It would surely be more exciting than where he was headed.

Noa entered the room, towel hanging from her breasts.

“Where are you going from here?” he asked.

“I'm catching a boat to Norway.”

“Can I come?”

“You serious?” She cocked her head to one side.

“Of course I'm serious.”

“We've got a full crew, but I could squeeze you on. We'd have to share a bed.”

“I think we could manage. Do I need a ticket?”

“No. You'll work for your passage.” Her towel dropped as she walked toward him. “We all work for our passage.”

“We?”

“The Cetacean Defense Alliance. CDA. We're a new anti-whaling group. Only a year old. Ever heard of us?”

She kissed him on the lips and then began working her way down. A flash of light caught his eyes—a reflection from a descending plane. And he realized that now he, too, was back on course. Despite himself, he had achieved his objective. It was a sign, he realized, not only that he—Robert—was back on course but that Jake was meant to live just a little while longer.

“CDA,” he said, closing his eyes as Noa's tongue reached his navel. “I think I've heard of them.”

Ethan glanced across the courtroom from his modest perch on the witness stand. He'd expected a larger venue for a federal trial: wooden floors and wrought iron railings, like in the movies. But the San Diego federal courthouse was a low-rise office building, and the courtroom had a conference-room feel—the faded carpeting and low ceilings, the knee-high glass barrier separating the actors from the gallery. There were few seats in the gallery, as if to discourage spectators, and Ethan scanned each one in hopes of seeing Annie. He touched the envelope in his pocket, the one from the travel agency, and felt foolish for bringing it. She was not there.

It had been six months since Annie moved out, soon after he was called to give a deposition. She'd blamed him for Adam Cosgrove's arrest, he knew, but at least she'd stood by him, though not as closely as she stood by Adam. She spent most of her days working in Adam's defense—but at night, it was Ethan she came home to, and because of this he allowed himself to hope they might still have a future together.

Until the deposition.
Just lie your ass off
, she'd instructed him, and he intended to do just that. But when the prosecutor stared him down and threatened him with perjury, Ethan ended up telling the truth. Because of Annie, it had still felt like a lie.

Not long afterward, Adam was charged was one count of distributing information on explosives with the intent of inciting others to commit acts of violence. And not long after that, Annie packed her things. Ethan knew what he'd done wrong, but he didn't know how to fix it.

He hoped to see her here today, at the trial, thinking that maybe he would do now what he had failed to do before. He wanted to start over. And although he did not see Annie in the gallery, perhaps it was that urge to begin anew that compelled him to respond the way he did—to say, when the prosecutor asked him to repeat what Adam had done that evening in Hillcrest, that he could not remember. Even when the prosecutor repeated himself, asked him the same question in three different ways, each time Ethan told him that he could not remember.

The prosecutor's voice grew louder, the judge chimed in, the gallery began to applaud—then came the pounding of a gavel, and, mercifully, a recess.

Ethan stood alone at the far end of the hallway, looking out the tinted windows. He didn't want to be near the activists who clotted together at the other end of the hall talking in whispers, or near the government agents, the men with close-cropped hair, checking email on their cellular phones.

“Ethan.”

He turned to see Annie standing behind him. He leaned toward her, but she backed up a step.

“Hi.”

“That was a brave thing you did,” she said. “There's hope for you yet.”

“You were in there?”

“I heard.”

“It was nothing,” he said, and decided to take a chance. “Come home with me tonight.”

She smiled. “I think it's time I leave San Diego. I've been holding out for a spot on the CDA ship. I should know next week.”

Ethan reached into his pocket and held out the envelope. “There are other ways to get to Antarctica.”

“What's this?”

“It's a cruise ticket.”

“A cruise?” She wouldn't take the envelope. “Ethan, I'm trying to protect the environment, not
pollute
it.”

“You always wanted to go to Antarctica, right? We could go together. I know going on a cruise isn't the way you wanted, but at least it's a ride down there.”

She looked at him sadly. “If CDA doesn't work out—” She stopped. “I don't know. Maybe.”

“That's a start.” He pressed the envelope into her hand. “The ship leaves in three weeks. The trial will be over, we'll both be free. Just think about it.”

“Ethan—”

“Don't decide now,” he said. “I'll be on the boat, waiting for you. Just two people sharing a cabin. Roommates with benefits.”

She gave him a quick smile, and in the end, she accepted the envelope. As she walked away, she looked back at him—briefly, but it was enough to give him hope.

* * *

Memories fade with time. Unless, of course, they are captured on tape, digitized, transcribed. Like an audio recording of the lecture, submitted anonymously to the judge, and entered into evidence. When Ethan returned to the witness stand, ready to forget everything that happened that night, or any night, the prosecutor handed him a transcript. He then pressed a button on a laptop connected to a speaker.

Ethan's heroic act was nullified by a tape recorder. Ethan could fault his brain for forgetting, but how could he argue with his voice on an MP3 file? And how could Adam Cosgrove argue with Ethan's testimony?

After the guilty verdict was delivered, Ethan tried to reach Annie. He left voice mails, sent emails. He told her of the guilt he was feeling—the one thing they now had in common. Eventually, she sent him an email. She said she needed time to sort things out, that she would get in touch when she was ready. He sent her one last reminder about the cruise.

The best he could do would be to leave her be and meet her onboard the ship. There was nothing more left to do but wait. And he now knew that, faced with a life without her, he would wait as long as necessary.

During that first week on the boat with Noa, somewhere in the North Atlantic, Robert spent most days on his knees at the toilet. When he wasn't there, he was alone in bed, wishing he had never come aboard, never joined the FBI. His body heaved with convulsions, as if trying to repel some strain of virus, in vain.

Noa took pity on him, this runt named Jake who should never have been on the ship to begin with. She promised that he would adapt, that his body was only reacting to a force it did not understand. Eventually it would make peace with the motion, she told him.

She wiped his forehead with a sponge, cleaned his face. She gave him a fresh t-shirt. She forced him to drink water every two hours. In the dark, she was a soothing voice, a warm hand on the back.

She still believed he was nothing but a young idealist, a twenty-four-year-old with a passion for animals and the planet, and for her. At least that much was true: That first night, in the cramped bunk, legs intertwined, he threaded his fingers through her thick, dreadlocked hair and wished he never had to leave their bed. In her arms, his body found its peace, though he knew it couldn't last.

When he awoke the next morning, he wondered how he'd suddenly grown so frail. A man trained to kill other men, laid prone by a few waves.

When he was Jake, his life was simple, and once his stomach stabilized, he found that he liked it. He was traveling to Norway to do battle with whalers—a crew member on the
Eminence
, the CDA's first ship, financed by wealthy donors and outfitted with a helicopter to harass the whalers from above. As soon as he felt better, he joined the other five deckhands, all younger than he was. There was Tommy, a brooding, bearded loner with a smoker's voice. Brandon, a carpenter and boyfriend of Carrie, the chef. The other three were buddies from the University of Illinois whom Noa called the Three Amigos, freshly graduated and looking for an adventure, or maybe an excuse not to get real jobs. She was the boss of all of them: Every day, she told them which decks to scrub, which walls to repaint. Once the others learned about Jake and Noa, they ribbed him every chance they got. And as Jake, he didn't care. At night, under damp clenched sheets, her hips and back salty to his lips, he didn't care about anything else.

But when he was Robert, life was not so simple. First, there was his assignment—identify and arrest Darwin, an alias for the terrorist who had torched three mink farms in Idaho, after releasing the farms' unwilling inhabitants. Dry winds had turned one of the blazes into a five-hundred-acre firestorm, taking down an entire subdivision and nearly killing two firemen.

His boss, Gordon, was certain that Darwin had been a crew member on the
Eminence
—they had tracked an email linked to Darwin through a satellite data network—and he hedged his bets on Darwin sailing with the
Eminence
again. Norway was prepared to fast-track Darwin's extradition to the U.S. on arson charges; all they needed now was a face to go with the alias, a body to go with the handcuffs.

Robert had traveled light: his thrift-store clothes, a handgun hidden in his army duffel along with Jake's authentically phony passport. The night before he boarded the ship, he'd contacted Gordon for what would be the last time in weeks. Gordon didn't ask exactly how Robert got into the CDA, and Robert was not about to volunteer it. The Bureau did not permit agents to become intimately involved with those they were charged with investigating, although he learned years later that this rule wasn't always enforced. The more close-knit the organization, the more difficult it was to infiltrate, and tactics were localized to the situation.

To be an undercover, you must be good at telling lies
, Gordon always said. And Robert was good, perhaps too good, especially when it came to lies of omission.

Noa was not his usual type. Robert had grown up dating blond cheerleaders, prom queens. The ones who knew their way around the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom. But he was not Robert on this boat. He was Jake. Jake the vegan. Jake the nonconformist. And Noa was Jake's type. She wore tunics and loose-fitting hemp dresses, the swaying fabric encouraging Robert's imagination. Dreadlocks falling past her shoulders. Her skin a light brown and without defect, the skin of her mother, she said, who was from India. She'd been with the organization since its founding, and had made every mission once it acquired its ship: traveling to Iceland to battle the whalers, to the Galapagos to battle the longliners. She oversaw the deckhands, from menial chores to raising anchors to dropping Zodiacs in the water. She had the toughest job on board. While the bridge officers and engineers worked in shifts, the deck was always on call, and people always called on Noa first.

She was as strong and sturdy as anyone on the ship, and bore all the stubbornness of her father, a onetime professional hockey player from Montreal. She drank and smoked, as comfortable at sea and with the crew as if she'd been born on board. Jake would have followed Noa to every corner of the earth she planned to visit.

But Robert had a job to do, and once he gained his sea legs, he reluctantly went to work. He narrowed down his list of suspects: the mechanic, Randy; the first mate, Hudson; and Tommy, his primary suspect. Tommy was the explosives expert at CDA, and, after a long night of drinking, he told Robert why.

“I was in charge of the Iceland operation,” he said. “We snuck on board and deposited Molotov cocktails in the storage holds of the four largest whaling vessels while the ships were in harbor and their crews asleep on land. By the time the coast guard arrived, it was too late. In one hour, we had taken out a third of the fleet.”

Right then, Robert could have arrested Tommy, called the Norwegians, and gone home. But he wanted to be more certain that Tommy was Darwin; he wanted more evidence. At least, this was what he told himself. In truth, Robert didn't want to go home. Not yet. And it wasn't as if Darwin was going anywhere either. What would be the harm in waiting?

Most of all, waiting meant few extra weeks with Noa. Robert felt himself steadily, inevitably slipping deeper and deeper into character. One evening, Aeneas joined everyone in the galley with a bottle of whiskey. Until then Robert hadn't seen much of Aeneas, but he could tell that he was in a mood. Their helicopter pilot, Aeneas grumbled, had the flu. “Guess I'll have to take her up,” he said.

“Like hell you will,” Noa said. “You can't fly that thing.”

“I can fly it,” Robert said.

“You?” Noa asked. “Where did you learn to fly?”

“My dad was a pilot. He taught me years ago.”

Aeneas squinted at him. “Did he teach you how to land on the back of a galloping ship in thirty knot winds?”

The next day, the crew gathered around the upper deck to watch Robert's audition. The bird was an aging Robinson two-seater, suitable for covering traffic in L.A., but highly questionable for navigating the high seas of the north Atlantic. Yet Robert had little trouble lifting off the deck and landing again—and days later, he was the one, on a clear windy morning off the coast of Spitsbergen, who sighted their first Norwegian whaler, the
MV Nørstad
. The ship, loaded down with two whale carcasses, one hanging from each side, appeared to be close to killing a third.

The crew went into battle mode and quickly caught up to the whalers. Although the
Nørstad
was twice their ship's size, Aeneas brought the
Eminence
diagonally in front of its path, both ships blaring horns. As long as the
Nørstad
changed course, there would be no collision. But the
Nørstad
did not change course.

The moment of impact seemed to happen in slow motion, with the deck of the
Eminence
heaving to the left as the
Nørstad
ground into it. Tommy manned a water cannon and drenched the
Nørstad's
bridge while Robert and the others tossed smoke bombs onto their deck. The
Nørstad
veered right and pulled away, taking along with it an indentation and blue paint chips from the hull of the
Eminence
. The
Nørstad
fled at full speed, and the chase was on.

Tommy lowered a Zodiac into the water. His goal was to toss a length of barbed wire in front of the
Nørstad
, disabling its propellers. The idea of attacking a three-hundred-foot ice-strengthened vessel with an inflatable boat and some sharp wire seemed nothing short of martyrdom. Yet Robert was first in line to man the bow and toss out the prop fouler. At that moment, he wasn't sure whether he was simply authenticating his role, or whether the adrenaline he felt was due to something else. The more time he spent with Noa, the more blurry the lines between crime and mercy became.

Robert held the heavy gauge, razor-barbed wire in his gloved hands as Tommy piloted the Zodiac. They careened off the wake of the
Nørstad
, but Tommy kept the nose on target. They soon pulled parallel with the ship. Water drenched them from above; the
Nørstad
also had a water cannon. When Robert looked up he saw the whale, dangling by a chain around its tail, its nose underwater, blood streaming from its belly and jaw. Its eye was still open and a flipper trembled.

“They let 'em bleed out first,” Tommy said.

At that moment, everything disappeared: the FBI, the job he had to do, even Noa—everything but the whale struggling before him. Robert wished he had his handgun on him; he wanted to put this poor animal out of its misery, and even take a few Norwegians with it.

Tommy swerved the Zodiac into the path of the ship, and Robert threw out the prop fouler. They followed the ship for a few minutes, but the
Nørstad
continued on without pause. The device had failed.

And when Robert returned to the ship, he was no longer playing Jake, the environmental activist; he
was
Jake, the environmental activist. He climbed up onto the helicopter pad, put on his helmet, and started the engine. He could see Noa waving him down from the lower deck. She would be saying that it was too windy, that the waves were too high to land safely, and she would be right. But before she could get to him, Robert had cranked up the blades until the helipad shook. The noise was deafening. He had taken up the helicopter just twice on this trip, in calmer waters, but he could not let that whaler alone. He waited until the
Eminence
crested a large wave before pulling off the pad, careful to ascend quickly.

It took Robert just a few minutes to catch up to the
Nørstad
by air. He circled the ship like a hawk, looking for a weakness of some kind, trying to figure out what he could do to slow it down. He moved up a few hundred yards ahead of the ship, descended and then ran straight for the bridge—as if he were on a suicide mission.

As he got closer he could see the men in there, mouths shouting, eyes wide. For a second Robert considered following through, taking this dicing blade right into that bridge and taking as many bodies and arms and legs as he could—fitting retribution for their torture of that whale. But then he thought of Noa, and he veered right at the last moment. And even as he returned to the
Eminence
, even as he struggled to land while the ship bounced over strong waves, he could see only the whale's large unblinking eye gazing at him.

Once Robert was back on board, they tried to return to the
Nørstad
, but the whaling ship had disappeared, and its size and speed was no match for the
Eminence
. Aeneas tried for several hours to locate it again, to no avail.

So they headed farther north, well past the northern reaches of Norway, hoping to locate other whalers, to interrupt another hunt. They circumnavigated the islands of Svalbard without any luck, refueled at Longyearben, Svalbard's only port, and continued north, with nothing but ice between them and the North Pole.

The journey was long, and in the rare moments when neither of them was working, Robert and Noa would escape to her cabin, stay naked in bed for as long as they could, slivers of the midnight sun breaking through the porthole.

“You're kissing infinity,” she said when he placed his lips on her right wrist.

“Why'd you get this tattoo?”

“To remind myself every day that anything is possible,” she said. “It's so easy to be depressed when you see the things we see. You can be a vegan to save the world, or you can be a vegan to make the world a less sucky place to live.”

It was moments like these in which Noa talked the most. She told him everything about CDA, about the crew, about Aeneas. Robert worried that the FBI agent in him was all too obvious as he asked question after question: What were the histories of the first mate, the second mate, the chief engineer, the head chef, the nurse? Yet Noa must have seen all his questions as innocent curiosity, or passion for the cause; she answered every one.

Robert had begun to hope that Tommy was not Darwin, that Darwin was not on board at all. If Darwin were revealed, Robert would have to make the arrest, turn the boat around—and Noa would exit his life as quickly as she'd entered. So many ifs, with seemingly no way to avoid the inevitable, the heartbreaking inevitable.