Dominic's POV
At a quarter to midnight I let my wife walk across a lawn toward a man who tried to kill her, and I don't stop her.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
I'm lying flat in the wet bracken at the bottom of the Windward meadow, forty yards from the boathouse, with Torres's earpiece in one ear and Marcus's hand on the back of my neck. The night is clear and bitterly cold. A thin moon hangs over the bay. The old stone lighthouse stands on its point like a candle, black against a field of stars.
And Serena walks.
She's in a long dark coat. Her hair's pinned up. There's a wire taped under her left breast, a hair-thin microphone, and a bone-conduction bud behind her ear, and a flat black USB stick in her right pocket that Odile has, with considerable ingenuity, filled with six hundred megabytes of nothing.
She doesn't look back.
She goes down the grass in the silver light with her chin up, past the herring weir, past the old boat racks, past the little family plot with its white fence, where a plaque says SERENA QUINN HALE, until the boathouse swallows her in its shadow.
A door scrapes.
A voice, warm and rich, in my ear: Mrs Hale. How very punctual.
"God," breathes Marcus. "He's already there."
"Quiet."
Do come in. It's far too cold to stand about.
I hear the door close.
And then a click. A soft, heavy, oiled click, the sound of a bolt shooting home.
My heart stops.
"She's in," says Torres, flatly, from somewhere on the hill. "Ready. All units, hold."
"Marcus," I say.
"Go."
We go.
***
Abel's lobster boat lies in the cove at the foot of the point, rocking quietly in the black water, with her lights off and her engine ticking.
He's at the wheel.
He hasn't said a word since we left Camden, three hours ago, except once, at Owls Head, when we passed a patch of dark sea, and he took off his cap. Caleb crouches in the bow in a borrowed wetsuit, grey with cold, sober as stone. Marcus is amidships with a bag of tools between his boots.
I climb aboard.
"Ready?" says Abel.
"Go."
He leans on the throttle.
The old boat slides out into the dark, without a sound, a long, low shadow under the cliff. The tide's making. The water slaps. I can smell weed and diesel, and cold salt, and under it, faint and sweet, the unbearable, wonderful smell of my childhood.
Whatever the water does.
Caleb's hand comes up in the bow.
"There," he whispers.
I see it.
A long black wall of stone, wet with spray, running down into the sea. A black slot at the waterline, no wider than a doorway, half hidden by weed.
A little iron door.
"The Smugglers' Hole," says Caleb. "Don't tell anyone."
"I won't."
"We used to dive for lobsters in there."
"I remember."
"I was always scared."
"You were ten."
"I'm still scared."
"Good." I put a hand on his shoulder. "It means you're paying attention."
Abel cuts the engine.
We drift in the last few yards in a deep soft silence, with the stone looming overhead. Marcus lowers himself into the water first, to his waist, in the black cold. He doesn't make a sound. He wades to the little iron door, takes a pencil flashlight from his teeth, and goes quite still.
I wait.
In my ear, very small and clear, I hear a creak of floorboards. A chair being drawn up.
Sit, my dear. Please. You must be exhausted.
I'll stand.
As you like.
Serena. Her voice is steady. Not a tremor. I could cry.
I do hope you've brought the drive.
It's in my pocket.
Splendid. And you came alone?
As you asked.
How refreshing. People so rarely do.
My teeth are clenched so hard they ache.
Marcus lifts a hand.
He's crouched at the iron door, with his face a foot from the lock and the little flashlight in his fist. He's looking at something. He's looking at it for a very long time.
I slide into the water.
The cold hits me like a fist. It punches the breath out of my lungs. My cracked ribs cry out, and my bad hand clenches and burns, and for a moment I can't see for the stars in my eyes.
I wade.
It's six strides. It feels like six miles.
Marcus doesn't look up.
"Boss," he says, in a voice so low I can barely hear it.
"What?"
"Look."
I lean in.
In the narrow beam, I see it.
The door is old, black, pitted with rust, bolted with an iron pin. And across its lower edge, almost invisible against the metal, running up from the stone and into a seam in the lintel, is a thread.
A single strand of fine copper wire.
"A tripwire," I say.
"A tripwire." Marcus's voice is perfectly calm. "Hooked into a switch. Which is hooked into this."
He angles the flashlight.
Beyond the lintel, in a recess in the rock, is a small square box. Grey plastic, about the size of a paperback. A single green LED, glowing steadily.
A battery pack.
A coil of wire.
And a single flat circuit board, the colour of a bruise.
I know it.
I've seen it before. In a photograph, in a Maine motel room, held up to the light in a pair of white cotton gloves. A timer fragment in a biscuit tin. Four stamped letters.
KRT.
"Same make," says Marcus.
"Same bomber."
"Same design. Mercer's." He lets out a long breath. "He's reused it. The old man had a template."
"Can you disarm it?"
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Six minutes. If I'm lucky."
"And if you're not?"
He doesn't answer.
Above us, a long way up, through the thin slats of the boathouse floor, I hear Brandt's voice.
I'd so hoped to be spared this, you know. I hold no grudge against you, my dear. It's only that you're so very like Walter.
He was my father.
I know.
You killed him.
I'd prefer to say I helped him on his way.
Torres makes a sound in my ear like a knife drawn over glass. I know she's recording. I know that every word is going on to the disc.
I should feel triumph.
I feel nothing but a cold, creeping, rising horror.
Because I've realised something.
I look at the wire.
I look at the slim grey line, running up the stone from the iron door and in at the seam, not toward the box in the recess, as I'd first assumed, but along the whole length of the wall, up into the beams. Following it with my eyes, I see where it goes.
It runs round the boathouse like a belt.
It's not one bomb.
It's a ring.
"Marcus," I say quietly.
"I see it."
"It's wired to the door."
"I know."
"So if we open it..."
"The whole circuit closes."
"And if we cut the wire..."
"Same result."
"And if we don't..."
Marcus lifts his head.
For the first time in the eleven years I've known him, there's something in the big, calm, weathered face that I've never seen. It's very quiet. It's very simple.
It's fear.
"Boss," he says. "He didn't build a trap for the door."
"What?"
"He built one for us."
And over our heads, in the dark, in the warm yellow lamplight of the boathouse, I hear the click of a stopwatch, and an old man's gentle voice saying:
Shall we begin?