Orest Stelmach - The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

Johnny walked around the table and knelt down on one knee beside Bobby. Now the kid was looking down at him. Johnny lowered his voice to a near-whisper. Channeled as much compassion as he could muster into his expression.

“Hart Island is the darkest place in New York City,” Johnny said. “It’s a forbidden zone. There’s no one there but the dead. Why would a young real estate executive from London be carrying a takedown rifle with a sound moderator, a hunting knife, and a map of such a place? Why did you agree to meet him there? Why did you have no choice but to kill him?”

Bobby’s knuckles turned white. His faced turned eggplant. For a moment, Johnny was concerned the kid was going to need medical attention. Then Bobby took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. By the time he was done, all the tension seemed to have seeped out of him.

“I want to see Iryna first,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”

NADIA SQUEEZED THROUGH the cave’s passageway. It curled into a semicircle around the inner chambers. She had to shuffle sideways, left arm by her side, right arm raised and parallel to the floor. Her hand gripped the flashlight. Her back scraped the wall. She heard the sound but felt no pain. The overalls were amazing. Then she remembered. The overalls weren’t scraping the walls. She was wearing a backpack. The backpack was scraping the wall. The backpack was the problem.

She stopped, lowered her right arm, and tried to shimmy out of it. The backpack slid halfway down her spine and got stuck. Nadia pulled on the straps. The backpack wouldn’t budge.

Light flashed behind her. Rock scraped against rock. The boulder, Nadia thought. A voice. The man with the rifle. No. Two voices. Two men. Entering the passageway.

Shit.

Nadia pushed off against the front wall and tried to compress her backpack’s contents. Plastic cracked. The water bottle, she remembered. Half-empty. She straightened. Pressed against the front wall, face turned sideways. Slipped the pack off her back.

Light bounced off the walls behind her.

Footsteps. Coming.

She grabbed the knapsack by the strap with her left hand and powered forward. She turned the light on. Caught a glimpse of the next twenty steps. Turned it off. Five steps. Ten steps. Fifteen steps. Twenty steps. Flashed the light again.

A solid crystalline wall stood in front of her. Three more steps and she would have smashed her face. A crawl space at the bottom of the wall.

Light flashed forty feet behind her. Closing.

Nadia flung the knapsack into the narrow passage. Dropped to her hands and knees. Shined the flashlight into the crawl space. Saw air beyond the knapsack. Slithered into the opening and pushed forward.

The air thinned. Sweat trickled into her eyes. Crystalline dust drifted into her nose. She tried to suppress a sneeze but to her horror, couldn’t. It didn’t matter if she made noise, she realized. They were right behind her. They knew exactly where she was.

She crawled on her elbows and knees. Pushed the knapsack ahead. Kept the flashlight pointed at an angle to illuminate the ceiling and the tunnel. Considered the possibility the crawl space would end. Imagined being shot from behind, or dragged out by her legs. Or beaten with the butt of a rifle. Gritted her teeth and banished the thoughts. Crawled for twenty body lengths. Twenty-one, she counted. Twenty-two.

Light shone behind her. Voices.

The crawl space opened. Nadia scampered out of the tunnel. Stepped to the right, away from her pursuers’ line of vision. Turned in a circle and made a sweeping motion with her flashlight. Cast an arc of light at her surroundings.

The ceilings soared. Solid walls surrounded her on three sides. The fourth wall provided the only possible escape. It featured a narrow passage that gradually widened the higher one climbed. At a height of thirty feet, a human being could slip through the passage, Nadia guessed. But there was no floor. Just a crack below where the two side walls met. The only footholds were the two walls that defined the passageway.

Nadia turned the light off. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could see twenty feet in front of her. She stashed her flashlight in her pocket. Slung the knapsack on her back again. She considered leaving it but decided she might need the lighter, water, and batteries if she got stuck overnight. She scampered up the left wall. She’d scaled fifty-foot trap rock ridges in the hills of Litchfield County. Climbed up cliffs twice that height on the Appalachian Trail. Sturdy crystalline crevices provided decent toeholds and perches. It was child’s play, she told herself. Child’s play—

“Stop or I’ll shoot,” a man said in Russian.

It was a different voice. Not the rawboned man from Lviv. It was the other one. The man who’d been following them. The one with the pointed chin.

Nadia took a running start and leaped into the crevice between the walls. She spread her legs. Reached out with her hands. Her feet landed at odd angles against the two walls. Her right ankle turned in. She slipped. Started to fall. Pressed hard with her right hand against the wall to keep from falling. The rock stripped skin from her hand.

She winced. Regained her balance. Propelled herself forward, legs straddling the parallel walls. Crystal shards scraped her hands. She kept her knees bent to exert maximum force. She covered five, ten, twenty, yards.

The walls ended. Nadia found herself perched on a cliff. She had to be more than twenty feet high. She couldn’t see the ground below. She reached for her flashlight.

Light shone behind her. Headlamps.

“I see her,” a man said.

Nadia didn’t have time for the flashlight. She found a toehold and descended down the cliff. The slope eased. Nadia ran down the final twenty feet. At the bottom of the cliff, a long horizontal strip of crystal protruded from the floor before giving way to a flat surface. Nature had honed it to a sharp edge. Momentum carried Nadia toward the crystal. By the time she saw it, there was no way she could stop.

She leaped. The running start carried her four or five feet past the jagged edge. Her right foot landed on a stone instead. She turned her leg. Lost her footing. Fell to the ground.

A straightaway awaited her ahead. Nadia ran. She managed fifteen strides before the gunshot exploded. The noise was deafening. She stopped in her tracks. Waited for the pain.

None came. He’d missed.

He’d also taken his sound suppressor off, Nadia thought. As though he wanted to make noise. It occurred to her that if they wanted to kill her they would have done so by now. It seemed as though they wanted to capture her instead.

“Stay where you are,” the man with the pointed chin said.

He waited until the rawboned man with the rifle appeared behind him. He was limping. He took one look at the cliff and stopped. He aimed his rifle at Nadia. The man with the pointed chin descended down the cliff.

Nadia eyed the sharp strip of crystal. With any luck he’d trip and fall headfirst onto it. She realized her odds were low. The man kept coming though, arm extended, gun pointed at Nadia. He gathered momentum as the cliff became manageable. Broke into a slow trot as Nadia had done. She held her breath. He didn’t appear to see the strip of crystal.

But then at the last second he looked down, as though his instincts had alerted him to possible danger. He leapt. It was a weak jump off one foot only, and the back foot at that. But it was enough to clear the razor’s edge that Nadia had been hoping would take him down.