"I don't hear them," Stephanie said.
"That doesn't mean anything," Elizabeth said. "They're not going to come up the trail whistling Dixie."
"I hate this," Stephanie said. "This is what they do all the time, isn't it?"
"Pretty much. I don't know how Selena does it. I know I couldn't."
"I heard something," Stephanie said. "It came from that way."
She pointed at the path that led down to Emile's small boat on the west side of the island.
"Nick cleared that," Elizabeth said. "There's nobody in that direction."
Even so, Elizabeth pulled back the hammers on her shotgun. The double-click of the hammers sounded loud in the humid night.
"Careful," Emile said. "The triggers are very sensitive."
"Oh, hell," Stephanie said under her breath.
Five men dressed in black and wearing berets and body armor emerged into the clearing in front of the house. They fanned out. Two came toward the porch.
Elizabeth put her mouth next to Stephanie's ear. "The others don't know they're here." Her voice was hardly a whisper. "They'll come up here and walk into an ambush."
Stephanie looked around. "Where's Emile?" She said.
The old man was gone, vanished somewhere in the growth.
"We have to try and stop them," Elizabeth said.
"How?"
"Wait till you can't miss. I'll shoot at the ones closest to the house. Make it count."
Stephanie lifted the rifle to her shoulder and took aim. The movement caught the eye of one of the men. He shouted. His gun came up.
Elizabeth fired. The 12 gauge kicked back hard into her shoulder. A swarm of buckshot caught the first man in the chest and throat and lifted him off his feet. The tiny report of Stephanie's .22 registered somewhere in the back of Elizabeth's mind. A second man went down. Elizabeth fired the other barrel at the third man. His head vanished in a reddish cloud of blood and bone. The body stumbled and fell. Elizabeth had the shotgun open and was fumbling with shells, trying to reload.
The fourth man swung his weapon toward her. She froze, the shells motionless in her hand. Her mind stopped.
Emile appeared behind him. His machete swept across in a gleaming arc that took the man's head from his shoulders. Blood fountained high into the air. The last mercenary fired. Emile jerked and stumbled backwards and fell to the ground. As the old man's killer turned toward Elizabeth and Stephanie, a volley of shots from the trail sent him reeling sideways. He collapsed into the undergrowth.
Nick and the others ran into the clearing.
"Jesus," Ronnie said, staring at the slaughter. Two of the bodies were headless. The ground in front of the house was wet with blood.
"Selena, you stay here," Nick said. "We need to clear that trail."
The three men disappeared down the path.
Stephanie stood holding the 22, grim faced. Elizabeth looked at the headless corpse of the man she had killed. The shotgun was still broken open in her left hand. She bent over and vomited.
Selena went over to Emile. His eyes were wide open, the front of his chest covered with blood. She knelt by him. He'd been her friend. She had always felt safe with him and now, because of her, he was dead. She had brought death with her to the island. Her eyes filled with tears. She brushed them away.
She was 14 years old, away from the island in Emile's small boat, the first time she'd gone out fishing with him. The sun was half risen, the first light of day gleaming in a golden white path along the blue Caribbean waters. Emile was showing her how to bait her hook.
"Like this, you see? The hook is very sharp. Be careful with your fingers."
"Will we see a shark?" she asked.
Emile nodded in a serious way. "It is possible. If we see a shark, we will stay inside the boat and we will be fine."
"I would like to see a shark," Selena said.
They had stayed out all morning and come back with several fish for dinner. They had not seen any sharks.
"Emile," she whispered, "I'm sorry."
She reached out and closed his eyes. She got up and went to Elizabeth and took the shotgun from her hands. "Are you all right, Director?"
Elizabeth throat was dry. She wiped her lips and swallowed. "Yes. I'm fine."
"They must've landed after Nick checked out that side."
Elizabeth's milk white skin was even whiter than usual.
"You'd better sit down," Selena said. "You look pale."
"I'm all right," Elizabeth said.
"You're sure?"
"It was his head," she said. "I wasn't ready for what it looked like when I pulled the trigger and his head disappeared. I'll never forget that."
CHAPTER 42
They buried Emile near the house where he'd spent most of his life and marked the spot with a wooden board. Selena stood at the foot of the new grave.
She looked down at the fresh earth and sighed. "I don't know what to say. He was a good man."
Nick put his hand on her shoulder. "That's as much as any man can hope for," he said. "You don't need to say anything else."
The bodies of the men they'd killed presented more of a problem. Selena showed them a deep cleft that ran like a scar across the land, a few hundred yards from shore. Nick heard a faint sound of water lapping somewhere below.
"There are old lava tubes filled with water under the island," Selena said. "This opens onto them. We can dump the bodies in here and they'll feed the sharks."
Ronnie and Lamont looked at each other. Selena's voice was cold.
They dropped the bodies into the cleft and went back to the house. The team met around the dining table.
"I've found out where those signals came from," Stephanie said. "I traced them to the Denver International Airport."
"You're joking," Nick said. "DIA? How could they be based at the airport?"
"I know a lot about DIA. It's at the heart of one of the major conspiracy theories floating around the internet. Most of them are really off the wall but I like to keep track, just in case one of them turns out to be more than a theory. I think that's what's happened here. Do you know anything about how DIA was built?"
"Why don't you enlighten me?"
"The project went way over budget, I mean way over, hundreds of millions, maybe a billion."
"That's a lot of over," Ronnie said.
"Where did the money go?" Selena asked.
"Part of it was ripped off, like it always is in big construction projects like that. But a big chunk went into constructing buildings that were buried under tons of earth."
"Why would they build them and then bury them?"
"The reason given at the time was that they were in the wrong location," Stephanie said. "Everyone made noises about waste, a few wrists got slapped and that was the end of it. Construction went on. What's even more interesting is that the story about the buried buildings changed."
"Changed to what?"
"Instead of buildings, the structures that had been buried never existed at all. Then the story was put out that the pictures of excavations and construction were really pictures of the underground tunnel system."
"Is there a tunnel system?" Ronnie asked.
"Yes, for the rail line that goes between concourses. There's also an abandoned baggage system that didn't work. It was supposed to be state-of-the-art but it never worked right. When they fired it up, it destroyed bags and threw them into the air. They finally gave up on it and sealed it off. It takes up a lot of space under the airport."
"Well, it was a government project," Lamont said. "Sounds like another bureaucratic screw up."
"That's just it," Stephanie said. "It wasn't a government project. The airport was privately funded. It was built by something called the New World Airport Commission."