Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

“Our mystery man below,” said Filipov, “was in the military. Special forces.”

Smith stared over his shoulder, breathing hard. “Fuck me,” he said, pointing. “Look at this!”

The article sported a small photograph of a group of agents at the graveside. And there, standing with his hands folded, was a tall, pale man in a black suit. While his face was blurry and indistinct, everything about the figure matched the man in the hold — the paleness, the blond hair, the pale eyes and lean physique.

The caption named him as Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.

“Christ,” Filipov breathed out. “He’s a fed .”

There was a silence, broken only by the pattering of rain on the windows.

“Well, that’s it,” said Smith. “We throw the motherfucker overboard.”

“You really want to kill him?” asked Filipov.

“We’re not killing him. We’re just putting him back where we found him. Nature will do the rest. Who’s gonna know? He’ll wash up somewhere weeks from now and nothing will connect him to us. We sure as hell can’t keep a fed on board.”

Still Filipov said nothing. He was sorely tempted. The prick had really gotten under his skin. He opened a small cupboard below the chart table, removed a bottle of scotch, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull. He felt the liquid make its fiery way down his throat. It felt good. He took another.

“I say we go back offshore of Crow Island,” Smith went on. “Dump him there. Not far from where he must’ve disappeared. No one’ll connect us to him.” He paused, then grasped the scotch bottle. “Mind?”

“That’s pretty strong stuff for a Mormon,” said Filipov.

“Lapsed,” said Smith with a grin, sucking down a mouthful. “We put the watch back on him. And the ring. No evidence left behind.”

As the scotch set his belly afire, Filipov could feel a remarkable clarity taking hold in his mind. He waited for Smith to talk himself out.

“Fuck the watch,” Smith went on. “We can’t take the risk. With Arsenault maybe about to talk, we can’t take any risks at all.”

“Arsenault,” said Filipov.

“Yeah, Arsenault. I mean, if he talks, they’re gonna be after us hammer and tongs. And if they find a kidnapped fed on board, the drug charges will be the least of our worries—”

“ Arsenault ,” Filipov repeated.

Smith finally stopped talking. “What about him?”

“The feds have him.”

“What I’m saying .”

“So… we’ve got ourselves a fed.”

Silence.

Filipov turned his gaze full on Smith. “We offer a trade. This man Pendergast for Arsenault.”

“You fucking crazy? You want to pull that shit on the feds? We’ll be dead so fast, you won’t have time to finish pissing off the stern.”

“Not if we go to ground. And I know just the place. Listen. The feds have no idea where he is. There’s been nothing in the papers about it. They don’t know he’s on a boat, and besides, that would be the last place they’d look. As proof we have him, we’ll send them the ring and amulet.”

“This is crazy.”

“If Arsenault cracks, it’s over. We spend the rest of our lives in prison.”

“You really think he’s gonna crack?”

“I think it’s possible. They’ve had him now… what? Almost a month?”

“But to kidnap a fed for an exchange…” Smith lapsed into silence.

“The beauty of it is that it’s simple. The work is half-done: we already have him and nobody knows where we are. We’ll drop one of the crew on shore with the ring and amulet. He’ll mail it to the feds from, say, New York City. Our demand is simple: release Arsenault and give him a one-way ticket to Venezuela. When we hear from him, we set this Pendergast free. If not, Pendergast dies.”

“Set him free? He’s seen our faces.”

“Good point. So when Arsenault’s freed, then we put the fed back in the water. Where we found him.” This idea gave Filipov a sense of satisfaction.

“Son of a bitch.” Smith furrowed his brow. “I don’t know. We kill a fed, they’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth. This guy’s elite. He’s got friends.”

“But we’ve got money. And a boat. It’ll take awhile for them to piece it all together — and by the time they do, if they do, we’ll be long gone. If Arsenault talks, we’re going down anyway.” He delivered the clincher. “It’s a miracle this guy just fell into our laps. We’d be crazy not to take advantage of it.”

Smith shook his head. “It just might work.”

“It will work. Roust up the crew. I’m calling a meeting.”

Filipov stood on the forward deck, breathing in the perfume that wafted from the great spruce boughs jutting from the trees growing out of the bluff just above and ahead of the boat. It was a calm, cold, sunny fall morning. All was going as planned.

The captain had discovered Bailey’s Hole when he was a teenager running pot from Canada into the United States in a sixteen-foot Boston Whaler. He’d never told anyone else about the hole — ever. Not even when he began running Charlie from Phinneys Cove, Nova Scotia, to Fairy Head, Maine, on a succession of lobster boats and draggers. It was a perfect hiding place, and Filipov had saved it for a time when he really needed it.

That time had come.

Bailey’s Hole lay on that wild stretch of coastline between Cutler and Lubec, not far from the Canadian border. It was a deep cut in the granite coastline, with sheer cliffs on three sides, overhung with giant spruce trees whose shaggy limbs provided cover from above. The northern side of the hole was actually undercut, the granite rock forming a sort of frozen wave of stone under which a boat could be hidden so completely as to be totally invisible. The few lobstermen who worked the area shunned the hole because of its wicked, fifteen-foot tides and jagged underwater terrain that ate their lobster traps and sliced their lines.

It had been no joke easing the Moneyball into Bailey’s Hole. Filipov did it at slack tide, at night, when the currents had ceased and the surface was calm. There was no way to drop anchor: the ground would eat an anchor just as readily as a lobster trap, and in any case there wasn’t enough swinging room to accommodate an anchored boat. Instead, Filipov had strung cables from both shores, wrapped around spruce trunks, leaving enough slack to allow the Moneyball to rise and fall with the tides.

It was a tricky operation that had taken half of the night. Filipov was happy with the result. They were well hidden along a wild shore, with the nearest town twelve miles away and the closest house at least eight. There were no roads and no trails anywhere nearby. The shore was part of a large piece of forestland owned by the Montrose Paper Mill, in Lubec. The only people who ever came out there were loggers… but there was no logging at this time of year.

On the way to Bailey’s Hole, they had dropped off one of the most reliable and resourceful members of his crew, Dalca, with the ring and amulet and a wad of money. His mission was to go to New York City and mail the two items and a photograph of Pendergast, along with their demands and instructions, to the New York Field Office. Dalca would then disappear into the city, lie low, and await the outcome.

After dropping off Dalca on a lonely stretch of coast, Filipov had taken the Moneyball north to Bailey’s Hole.

He had taken careful precautions. Long before reaching the hole, Filipov had ordered the boat’s GPS and all cell phones to be turned off, their batteries removed. Anything that could be used to track them was shut down.

He’d considered the problem of communicating with the FBI. There had to be a way to do it without betraying their position. Fortunately Smith, the first mate and computer guru, knew how to set up an untraceable, encrypted email system. Filipov himself understood a good deal about computers, and together he and Smith had worked it out. They used a program similar to Tor, but more advanced. Called BLUNT, it quadruple-encrypted all Internet communications using PGP and re-routed them through myriad computers around the globe, making it almost impossible to trace the signal back to its original IP. Within BLUNT he and Smith had set up a temporary, disposable email service called Insurgent Mail on the dark net, which was — so they believed — impregnable even to the NSA.