On Hurricane Island Read online

  When the Top Secret network finally lets him in, two emails flash Urgent. The first is a group message from the Regional Chief in Boston about the hurricane. He expects to read about emergency protocols, but instead JR tells them to review their disaster manual and passes on the announcement from Washington: In view of the impending high-security window, facility evacuations are prohibited regardless of local circumstances.

  Henry shakes his head at the monitor screen as he checks the Read and Understood box, returning the receipt to Boston. Regardless of local circumstances? Maybe this bureaucratic crap makes sense for most facilities, but the men in DC have no clue about the damage a hurricane can inflict with the assistance of Penobscot Bay waves and wind. No clue, and no desire to hear.

  A soft knock on the door startles him. Cat’s voice is muffled through solid oak. “Open up, Henry. I need to ask you something before I go.”

  Cat hands him a steaming mug of coffee and holds up her sparkly high-heeled sandals. “Do you have any idea what happened to these? It looks like an elephant danced all night at the prom.”

  He smiles. “I haven’t seen any elephants in your closet.”

  Damn. He shouldn’t have borrowed her shoes. His feet are small but much wider than hers. He should have bought his own pair sooner.

  He sips the coffee. “Have a good class.”

  “Don’t forget there’s pie.”

  “I’ll wait for you.” He kisses her cheek. He wants to tell her everything, about shoes and dresses and all of it. If only he weren’t so damn frightened of her reaction. Maybe tonight. She’s always in a good mood after spending an evening with her friends, pasting old photos in scrapbooks. Photos of their daughter Melissa jumping off the cliffs into the swimming quarry down the road or the three of them wrapped in blankets on the deck watching the sunset. Maybe tonight.

  He puts the mug on his desk, just north of the phone. The coffee will give him energy but make the heartburn worse, an unacceptable trade-off. Maybe coffee laced with Tums. Except that the rodent living in his chest, gnawing on his sternum and nourished by his nerves, seems to like antacids for dessert. Henry switches the monitor back on and stares at the screen.

  The second message is also from the Regional Chief, but this one is labeled For Your Eyes Only and signed JR, as if they were colleagues, friends even, two guys who might go out for a beer or three after a successful mission.

  Two things, Henry, it begins. First: I haven’t received your damage prevention press release yet. Forward immediately. Second: your female mathematician is high priority. The link between her and a Pakistani insurgent appears credible, as does the strong probability of an attack on the eleventh. We’ve had an uptick in chatter about death to Americans on the anniversary. Read the attached background document carefully. And don’t fuck this up.

  Henry rubs his knuckles in small circles over his sternum, marveling at how quickly the buddy-buddy tone dissipates in JR’s hands. He reads the attached document, worthless in its circular suppositions, and hits Reply to the Regional Chief’s message and types: We begin interrogation tomorrow morning. That should hold him.

  Damage prevention, that’s what the Regional Chief calls it. He wants a reasonable cover story to keep the media from sniffing around the facility. There’ve already been a few press inquiries and some blogs bleating about the public’s right to know. This is the kind of thing the PR team at Quantico usually deals with; the Bureau is fanatic about controlling all information to the media. So why would they insist he write this story? Is he being set up? No, that’s paranoid thinking. They trust him, and he knows the local scene, that’s all. He can do this perfectly well himself.

  All he needs is a plausible explanation for the presence of an alphabet soup of federal agencies on a remote island. Something sexy enough to capture the interest of the media, especially the alternative press, because those guys are bulldogs, always looking for a conspiracy. So his story must be a perfectly crafted misdirection that is close enough to the truth to feel authentic.

  A shift in perspective might help. He opens the office door and steps through the hallway into the front room. Dusk softens the plain lines of the old farmhouse. The bay window faces the Sound where the last salmon embers smolder on the horizon, outlining the small humpback shape of Hurricane Island. No matter what bad things happened over there in the past, no matter what questionable things his men are doing there now, you can’t destroy the beauty of this place.

  Every few months Cat brings home brochures from the realtor’s office where she works as a receptionist. “It’s a great time to sell waterfront property,” she says, dropping the brochures on the kitchen counter.

  Over his dead body. After all those years working in Bangor and coming home only on weekends, he isn’t budging. This is his home, even though having the detention camp across the sound feels like shitting in his own backyard. These islands are—they should be—worlds away from terrorism and the mess in the Middle East.

  That’s it! The Three Sisters Islands are worlds away, but their rough landscape is a perfect location for field simulation training for intelligence operatives before posting them abroad. It mimics the environments new agents will find in hot spots around the world: rugged terrain, unpredictable weather, and unreliable communication technology.

  “Maine Weather is just like Afghanistan, right?” He can just hear some smart-ass reporter ask, but he’s got the spin-ready answer: “Afghanistan, no. Not Iran either. But it’s actually pretty close to North Korea.” Yes.

  He writes the press release, detailing the critical role of training exercises in successfully waging the war on terror. He proofreads it, then sends it out blind to his select list of press contacts around the state. He sends a separate copy to the Regional Chief, curbing his impulse to address it to JR, then logs off, shuts down the computer, and sets the anti-tamper alarm. Swiveling his chair away from the computer extension, he stands up and stretches.

  He’s never told Cat that at first JR demanded that Henry live at the camp. He refused, explaining that he could see keep a careful eye on the camp from home. Damn, he could see the island from his porch without binoculars. When they insisted, he told them that it would end his marriage and he’d leave the Bureau before he let that happen. They gave in, but it was another demerit in his file.

  Like Dr. Cohen’s cell phone, mocking him now from the desk blotter. Breaking the chain of evidence is a huge and ugly black mark, possibly enough to get him fired. He presses the power button on the phone and stares at the screen-saver photo of an orange cat. It was totally out of character for him to take the phone. He prides himself on deliberating carefully and developing a cogent plan before acting. It was just an impulse, he tells himself, but he knows better. His training included psychology and profiling classes as well as media spin. You don’t have to be Freud to wonder if an agent who would do something like this, something so clearly against the rules, was having doubts. You would question his motivation, his loyalty even. If an agent under his command took the phone, Henry would fire him.

  Damn! Henry slams his fist on the desk. He might question some of the Bureau’s current methods, but his integrity is mostly intact. And since he has the phone, he should be moving ahead with the investigation; he should listen to her voicemail. The more he knows about Dr. Cohen, the more effective his interrogation will be tomorrow morning. He looks at the three new messages, all from “Jess.” Over the years, he has become hardened to the escalating messages from relatives, intensifying from concerned to anxious to frantic, but he still feels uncomfortable handling this phone.

  He plays the first message on speaker.

  “You’re late, Gee. Call me soon as you can.”

  In the second message, the voice is tighter.

  “Gandalf? Sweetheart? What’s going on? I got a little nervous when you didn’t call from the gate, but I figured you were working on your paper. When you didn’t call at six, I checked online and the Detroit flight land
ed on time, so where are you? Call me. I love you.”

  He thinks briefly about Cat, wonders how she’d react if he disappeared into thin air. Of course that’s immaterial, because why would anyone want to abduct him? He hesitates, then listens to the last message.

  “Gandalf. It’s 9 p.m. and I’m officially freaked out. I called your hotel, and you never checked in. The airline won’t tell me anything. They transferred my call to some security office, and I hung up. The police say it’s too early to file a report. Their asinine rule is not to open a case until someone has been missing for twenty-four hours. I just know that something horrible has happened. Please call me the second you hear this. If you hear …” Her voice breaks, followed by the connection.

  Before he can really think it through, his finger touches the “call back” box. A photo icon pops up, a woman with a gray braid and a tabby cat draped over her shoulder. She answers on the first ring.

  “Gandalf? Sweetheart?”

  The emotion in her voice frightens him. What possessed him to call this woman, presumably the most important individual in the prisoner’s world? It’s cruel and that isn’t like him. His cheeks flame, and he hangs up.

  He powers off the phone and locks it in his desk drawer. Whatever came over him, whatever the twisted reason, he’s done with it. He’ll punish himself; he’ll go upstairs and read in bed until Cat gets home. No silk and lace and satin for him tonight. He stands up, feeling weary and shaky and old.

  But he can’t get comfortable, no matter how he arranges the pillows. He can’t read. And even when Cat gets home and joins him in bed, he can’t sleep. Like so many other nights recently, worry consumes him. Worrying about the changing protocols of the last few years and how increasingly uncomfortable they make him feel. About Tobias and his increasing volatility. About his daughter Melissa working in Washington where she’s being influenced by all the wrong people. About the storm coming and how unprepared they are. Most of all, he worries about Cat.

  Some wives are supportive; he devours their posts on the blogs. They understand that dressing in silky fabrics means nothing about manhood. He and Cat have a good marriage. They bicker like any couple, arguing about moving into town or how often to invite her parents to dinner, but rarely disagree about important things. Of course, Cat might consider him wearing dresses important.

  Well, it’s important to him too. Silk and lace and satin against his skin enlarge him, make him greater than his everyday self. He imagines dancing with Cat in the privacy of their bedroom. Candlelight and soft music. In his fantasy they both wear satin dresses; hers is ruby red and his deep teal. They move together slowly, sensuously, in harmony with the soft crinkle of fine fabric. The waiting, the foreplay, is exquisite. Cat moves first. She takes her time with the long zipper from neckline to hips and slips it off his shoulders. He shimmies out of it. Then he unzips her dress, which spills onto the floor with a satiny whisper. They alternate, undressing each other one item at a time: matching lace brassieres, one nylon stocking at a time, ivory panties of the finest silk.

  Except that doesn’t sound one bit like his Cat. She’s more likely to run screaming from the bedroom, lock herself in her sewing room, and call their daughter in DC. Giving Melissa one more reason to despise her father, one more reason to add to her long list, with what she calls his despicable career choice right at the top.

  But tonight he is too tired to figure out any of this. Tonight he just craves sleep. He closes his eyes to the shadows, spoons himself around Cat’s warmth, and times his breathing to her muted snores.

  11. GANDALF, 11:35 P.M.

  The rotating searchlight from the guard tower tosses parallel bar shadows into the room. They creep in slow motion along the wall, across the floor, and onto the bed, warping and twisting as they move. For hours, Gandalf has been lying curled up on the cot, eyes wide open and heart racing, staring at the patterns. Her brain tumbles over itself, clumsy, inarticulate, paralyzed.

  It is true that nothing truly horrible has happened to her yet, if you don’t count being hooded and cuffed and kidnapped. She tries to find that fact comforting, but it just means that the unspeakable possibilities are all in the future, looming over every next second. Tormenting images coil back and forth between imagined scenes triggered by Norah’s interrogation, those from her own mental file, and worrying about Jess.

  Normally with a big storm threatening, she and Jess watch the Weather Channel together. Looking up from grading papers, Jess might deconstruct the coverage as fiction, identify the emotional uses of landscape and setting, critique the cardboard characters, admire the pacing and rising action. Gandalf might interject her own professional expertise, scrutinizing the science, demanding more rigorous evidence, and criticizing the over-simplification of the weather models’ predictions.

  Lying in her cell, Gandalf does not need a television to precisely visualize the programming. The earnest members of the Major Storms Team—who thought up these self-important job titles, anyway?—are no doubt alternating between building Hurricane Gena up as the storm of the century and remarking endlessly on the uncanny resemblance to the 1954 hurricane. Jess will not appreciate the parallels, but it is striking that during this very week over six decades ago Hurricane Edna spawned hurricane watches from Georgia to Cape Hatteras. And now Gena is spinning towards New England along exactly the same pathway. All week at work Gandalf followed the storm, noting the deep trough developing along the eastern seaboard. She never expected to be facing the fury of a major hurricane on a puny island somewhere in maritime Maine without the benefit of her sophisticated computer prediction equations. Without even the weather app radar on her smartphone.

  What kind of emergency preparations could they possibly have on this island?

  If she were home, she would calmly and carefully explain the weather system, and Jess would roll her eyes at what she considers excruciating detail. But she is not home, and Jess is probably making deals with any remote gods she can muster, promising to never again ridicule Gandalf’s geeky enthusiasm for a sudden dip in the jet stream or a back-door cold front.

  Right about now, when Jess cannot stomach another second of hurricane hype, she will turn off the television and start roaming their darkened apartment. There will be enough Manhattan nightlight filtering through the tall windows to make lamps unnecessary. Jess might run her fingers along the spines of the heavy hardcover books on Gandalf’s shelves. Not a brightly colored jacket in sight; they are esoteric tomes, arranged in a manner Jess finds incomprehensible. Perhaps she will sit at Gandalf’s large oak desk, usually bare on top except for a stack of journals and the ceramic mug she uses to hold pens. Jess made her the mug for their second anniversary; she painted the wizard motif to match the tiny wizard charms on gold chains they exchanged when they moved in together.

  “Embrace your inner wizard,” Jess whispered when she fastened it around Gandalf’s neck. And then they both laughed, because nothing in the universe was less likely.

  Gandalf’s hand flies to her throat and touches the gold wizard.

  “Are you awake?” The words, halfway between a whisper and a sob, come from under the bed.

  Norah.

  Carefully, Gandalf pushes her cot slightly away from the wall. An inch, then two. Finally six inches, making a gap big enough to let her face fall into the crack, her ear and mouth hopefully concealed from whatever snoop devices the guards might be using.

  “Are you okay?”

  Norah laughs, a smothered, choked-off laugh. “Just great.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m lonely. Freaking-out lonely. Climbing-walls lonely. Would you talk to me?”

  Gandalf closes her eyes. Terrific. It is just her luck to be incarcerated on some godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere with a needy, talky-therapy type. If they are going to survive this, whatever it is, it will require more than sharing personal histories.

  Hold on just one minute, Jess’s voice warns inside Gandalf’s brai
n. Don’t be so judgmental. Don’t alienate your only potential ally, even if you are not yet totally convinced you can trust her.

  “What do you want me to talk about?” Gandalf asks.

  “Anything. About you.”

  “There is not much to tell. I’m an academic mathematician. My work is tangentially related to triangulation theory.”

  “So, why did these guys pick you up? Is there a military use for your research?”

  “Not until we figure out how to manipulate severe weather and that is decades away. My work is only of interest to a few dozen mathematicians scattered around the globe.”

  “So maybe it’s not your work. What about family, friends? Is your husband a double agent for Iran or something? Or maybe your kid is a campus activist?”

  Usually her personal life is off-limits. She knows that the younger faculty members consider her cold and aloof. One year at the department reception, she heard a teaching assistant whisper “Ice Lady” in her direction. But this setting and Norah’s distress require some disclosure on her part. And it will be easier to talk without seeing reactions on Norah’s face.

  “I am not married,” Gandalf says. “No children.” She is fond of Jess’s son David and his family but has never felt particularly maternal towards them. “I live with my partner, Jess.”

  “Jesse?”

  “Short for Jessamine. She’s an English professor. What about you?”

  “Separated. Two daughters, eight-year-old twin girls.”

  When Norah does not continue, Gandalf says, “You must really miss them,” then chides herself for such an inadequate response. She was born missing the gene for girl-talk. Norah is still silent, so Gandalf continues. “Jess always wanted to explore Maine someday. She probably had something else in mind though, like kayaking or hiking. Do you know anything about this place?”