The result was that she had once again lost the trail, and it would be growing ever colder with every hour that passed. Already it was… she checked the clock. It was already four hours since the discovery that her shooter had been removed from the field. Too long.
“It’ll be dark soon,” she said to herself. Outside her window she could see the two Chinook helicopters still being readied for the journey north. Now it must wait until tomorrow.
ZELIG HAD ALSO received two messages.
But technical problems had delayed them and also caused some confusion about whether there had been any other word that had been totally lost.
The temperature in the Cascades had dropped sharply during the early part of the twenty-first. A fierce blue norther had come hacking its way down from the Canadian prairies, carrying in its churning belly the seeds of a storm from still farther away, across the frozen Bering Strait, in the ice-bound Kamchatka Peninsula of what used to be Russia.
Despite efforts to fight it off with a high-pressure steam hose, the main radio antenna became coated with glittering ice and eventually folded in the middle like a gut-shot cowboy. It had taken hours of hard, unremitting labor, in bitterly inhospitable weather, to carry out some of the repairs and jury-rig an alternative antenna.
The first message had come in just before the main antenna went crashing down.
“No sign either set players anywhere north of Illyria. Searching both ways.”
Illyria had been the agreed code name for the town of Eureka. So both the boat and the sailing ship had disappeared off the face of the planet.
Then came the blank time that their contact might have been sending them other news that had been lost. Because the only other message they received didn’t seem to quite follow on.
“One member from one home team struck out. Visiting pitcher also fouled out. Remaining players both teams gone separately.”
Zelig had sat and considered the two flimsy yellow sheets of paper. He hadn’t been surprised that both the rowboat and the sailing vessel had not been spotted. For most of the time they’d been out at sea, probably keeping a decent distance from the treacherous shore. And he knew the weather had been bleak and wet, with poor visibility.
But the second message opened up a can of worms. The operator had made the point that reception had been poor and inexact, and there could be errors in it. But the suggestion was that one of the survivors from the Aquila, or someone traveling with them, had been murdered. The visiting pitcher was obviously an assassin from the Hunters of the Sun.
Who had, in turn, been killed.
“Nanci?” whispered Zelig to his empty office.
One dead, from the shrinking group of travelers, battling toward Aurora, was seriously bad news. One hired killer less on the opposition was modestly good news.
Chapter Eighteen
Heather Hilton, eleven years old, survived the cholera epidemic that had stolen away both her mother and her twin sister, Andrea. With short blond hair and gray-blue eyes, she was well built and mature for her years. Old before her time.
She’d been standing in the bow of the rowboat as it grated against the muddy shore, ready to jump, and turned to share a joke with her father and with Carrie and Sly.
Suddenly she’d heard—perhaps felt—a vibration. A ferocious, high-pitched humming had whined past the sides of her face as she turned. It would’ve hit her if she hadn’t made that sudden movement.
She’d experienced a brief, heart-stopping sensation of fiery heat and a smell like nothing she’d ever known before. A hot, dangerous smell that came and went in an instant.
Heather was so shocked that she screamed once, her arms thrown wide. The rope dropped, and her feet slipped on the damp wood of the boat. Before she even knew what was happening, she’d fallen over the side into the freezing, shallow water.
Jim had spotted the white puff of smoke from a rifle, heard the ringing echo of the shot, seen his only child scream and fall from sight.
For a few endless moments his heart seemed to judder to a halt in his chest, his mind going totally blank. Time ceased for him as he stared at the front of the little boat, where Heather had been standing.