Part Four
The hospital's emergency room was quiet. It was too late in the day for work-related accidents, too early for the Tuesday night drinking crowd, mostly tourists, to start trickling in. Despite that, Chuck Travis had been waiting for news for almost an hour. The adult victim had been hurried off almost as soon as they arrived, leaving the child behind in an ER cubical. The detective inspector had managed to linger by the kid's bedside, waving his police credentials and pointing out that the otherwise-unaccompanied and unidentified boy was the subject of an ongoing enquiry. A series of doctors and nurses had come by, hooking the kid up to a drip and seemingly endless monitoring devices. They'd conversed in bewildering medicalese, and Travis, there by courtesy, knew better than to interrupt while their tones remained urgent.
It was a relief when the rapid activity subsided, leaving Travis alone with the unconscious child. Sighing, the tired policeman perched on the edge of the bed, brushing a stray curl of chestnut hair away from a sun-reddened face. He was startled when the boy stirred, flinching away from even the gentle touch. As gently as he could, Travis patted the kid's cheek, using the other hand to scrabble blindly for the call button.
"Hey there," he said softly. "Can you hear me?"
He was rewarded by a brief glimpse of burnt-honey irises. The kid moaned, screwing his eyes shut and shifting in the bed. A blur of white in Travis' peripheral vision announced the arrival of a doctor on the other side of the bed, waving him back and taking over with a hand on the kid's shoulder.
"Can you tell me your name?" the woman asked, soft but urgent. "Do you understand?"
"Dad," the word was barely comprehensible, a dry whisper. The boy's forehead creased into a frown, his eyes still closed. "Dad!"
"Your Dad is here. We're looking after him. But we need his name, so we can look after him properly. Can you tell us his name?"
"Jeff." Again, the kid's voice was slurred. He coughed hoarsely. His eyes cracked open, searching out the doctor without focussing. "He's hurt?"
Travis poured a glass of water, glancing at the doctor for permission before putting it to the kid's lips. The child sipped eagerly, raising his head a little when Travis pulled the glass away before dropping back onto his pillow, eyes slipping closed.
"And your name?" the doctor pressed. "When your Dad asks about you, we've got to know who you are, haven't we?"
A worried, confused frown crossed the boy's face. "Virgil," he said softly. "I'm Virgil."
The kid, Virgil, looked as if he wanted to say more, but exhaustion dragged him down before he could shape the words. The doctor scanned his monitors with a quick, efficient glance, frowning down at the child and making a few notes on his records. She sighed, stepping back from the bedside and turning to look at the detective.
"Inspector Travis, have you got any idea what happened to these two?"
"Shipwrecked," Travis shrugged. He looked down at the boy's sleeping face. "I'll get to the bottom of it," he promised. "How are they, Tasmin?"
"Could be worse, Chuck." Doctor Tasmin Evans dropped the formality, sighing as she dropped into the chair by Virgil's bedside. "Severe exposure and everything that goes with it: dehydration exacerbated by seawater consumption, exhaustion, hypothermia and moderate to serious sunburn on exposed skin. They'd have been in bad trouble if they'd got here much later, but all that is pretty straightforward to treat." She smiled at Travis's exaggerated sigh. Most of the cases he'd brought into the hospital over the years before he made Detective Inspector had been simple alcohol poisoning and associated minor injuries. The doctor had never seen him hovering so protectively over a 'case' before. She sighed, glancing down at her notes. "The kid has some badly bruised ribs, which we're going to have to strap up. We were a bit more worried about the father's – Jeff's – concussion. Double concussion, that is."
Travis frowned. "Are you going to make me beg for an explanation, Mina?""
"He took the first blow to the head somewhere around twenty-four hours ago. The broken wrist and rope burns around it happened about the same time. Looks like he tried to hold on to something without much success. After that, either Lady Luck turned the other cheek or young Virgil here kept him afloat somehow, because he sure couldn't have done anything about it himself."
Travis nodded, filing the information away for future reference. "You said 'first'?"
"The word is that the Levan boys brought them in?"
Travis nodded, long since accustomed to how rapidly gossip could travel in Dominga. More than enough people had seen the Levan boat's arrival and the brothers were well known locally. Mina shook her head grimly.
"Then either Tony clobbered him with the boat before spotting him, or Cal dropped him when they pulled him up. There's another lump on his skull that can't be more than five hours old. That, as much as the exposure, is what has him out cold, and he's going to feel pretty poorly when he wakes. Don't expect to get much out of him for another day or so." She leaned over the bed, straightening the covers that Virgil had disturbed when he stirred. "The boy might give you something sooner, but probably not before morning now. We'll move him up to paediatrics as soon as I've checked there's a bed ready for him, but he's tired enough to sleep through. If he really was holding his Dad out of the water for a day or more, you can hardly blame him."
"Right." Travis nodded. He sighed, glancing at his watch for the tenth time. Nine o'clock. "I should have been off duty an hour and a half ago," he told no one in particular.
Tasmin gave him a sympathetic look. "That might have to wait a while. Apparently your radios aren't working any better than the vid-phones at the moment. Your chief sent a constable to the front desk a few minutes back, said to tell you that since you'd volunteered, this case is yours, and he expects a briefing together with your write-up of the storm reports first thing tomorrow."
The doctor couldn't resist a smile as Travis let out a heartfelt groan and pushed himself away from the bed. "I'll get on it: I'll try and figure out who these folks are and if anyone's missing them yet. If they say anything else, you'll let me know?" He hesitated, one hand raised to pull aside the curtain surrounding the cubicle, glancing back down at the kid.
Tasmin shooed him with an imperious gesture.
"Get along with you, Inspector. We'll make sure they're still here when you get back. Now, do I have to call the porters to throw you out?"
Travis took her at her word, striding out through the waiting room, pulling out of the parking lot with a squeal of tires and not slowing down until he pulled his car into its reserved slot in front of police headquarters. At this time of night it was pretty quiet. Much like the hospital, the police station was enjoying the lull between daylight crimes and those committed after dark. It was a good few hours before the duty constables would have to deal with throwing out time in the local bars and the associated furore. On a bad night, the cells in the basement would be heaving before midnight.
By contrast the squad room of the detective division was empty, and except under exceptional circumstances would remain so until the morning. Precious little crime on Dominga was serious enough to keep a detective from his home and hearth, or urgent enough that it wouldn't wait until after the day's first cup of coffee. Unfortunately, pinning down the identity of two half-drowned tourists qualified. Their government, whichever it turned out to be, would expect it, and Travis intended to give them nothing to complain of in the process.
The main fluorescents were dark, but someone had left a lamp shining on Travis' desk, and the coffee machine was keeping a carafe of rich brown liquid warm beside it. A scribbled note, reading simply 'Hard luck' identified the coffee-fairy as his colleague and occasional partner Mike Kearney. He put the note aside with a snort of amusement, and poured himself a half mug-full. He was still hopeful that he could make enough progress on the kid Virgil and his dad that he needn't burn the oil much past midnight. No point in stoking up on the caffeine now if it wasn't necessary.
He flicked his computer's monitor on, sipping from his mug as he slipped into the chair behind his desk. Ignoring the pile of paperwork on his desk for the moment, he fired up his network connection, perusing his local email as he waited for the global security network to load up. Discarding a dozen departmental circulars and a reaffirmation of his instructions from the chief, he grimaced in frustration. The international police identity database was never exactly fast to load, layers of security and password protocols limiting it to a snail's pace, but nor was it usually this slow. The snowstorm of interference dancing across his screen suggested that, just for once, the problem was at the Domingan end. Irritating as hell, but hardly unexpected. A storm the size of last night's was induced perhaps once in a decade, and only then mid-ocean, with shipping and aircraft ordered to steer clear for the following week. The induction charge the malfunction had left in the air was screwing enough with electronics that Travis had been glad to find his car still worked, let alone his computer.
Finally though, the search window popped up, inevitably just when Travis had decided to make a start on writing up uninformative storm accounts and try the database again later. Sighing, the detective turned back to it, trying to work out where to start.
Virgil seemed the obvious initial reference point and Travis entered the unusual name as a lone search term, ticking the box that indicated he was looking for a juvenile rather than adult record. The 'working' icon appeared and the network began to grind away, quite obviously not planning to spit out any results soon. A slow half an hour, spent transcribing stories of fish shoaling in the wrong place and local folklore about seaweed, later, he pulled the window back to the front of his desktop and frowned at the hundred and fifty-four hits already identified. A hundred and fifty-fifth popped up as he watched and he killed the search angrily. He'd honestly never guessed that so many parents could be that cruel to their kids in the space of eighteen short years. True, a few of the names he'd glimpsed in his brief scan of the list had been phonetic variants on Virgil, from cultural and ethnic backgrounds where it probably sounded quite normal, but a fair few had been from the western, industrial countries most likely to have produced his shipwrecked kid.
Shaking his head, he spent the next five minutes pulling up the advanced search form, this time entering not only the boy's name, but his father's name Jeff (or Geoff, or phonetic variants and extrapolations thereof), and narrowed his search to boys between nine and fourteen years old. Either end of that range was almost certainly way out, but he'd rather be safe than risk missing the kid. The boy's accent had been almost impossible to distinguish in his slurred speech. Travis's first guess would have to be American, but again he played it safe, specifying only that the subject of his search was an Anglophone.
With the new search underway, he swivelled his chair, reaching out to top off his coffee mug, no longer convinced that this was going to be as rapid a process as he'd hoped. On the plus side, this search should run more quickly, the birth date, gender and language constraints cutting out large sections of the database before a more detailed search was made for text matching the two names Travis had specified. Even so, it was another eight minutes before the computer chimed to inform him that the task was complete. He glanced at the relevant window, clicking on the single record selected rather than trying to squint through the interference to read the one-line summary the search returned.
He expected a second window to open, giving him access to everything from the boy's full name and address to his educational and brief medical records. The identity database gave civil rights paranoids the world over nightmares. On the other hand, it sure made the job of accredited police forces around the world easier, and as a Detective Inspector in the Domingan Confederation's police service, Travis was fully entitled to access that kind of information.
What he wasn't expecting was for his computer to freeze, the database window flashing suddenly red, the mouse and keyboard unresponsive. He stared at it for a moment, baffled, picking up the mouse and tapping it futilely against the desk in an effort to get some kind of response. The red border around the search window was interrupted by the single word 'CLASSIFIED'. Confusing as that was on the ID record of a kid so young, it didn't come close to explaining what had locked up his machine.
The vid-phone window that popped up a few seconds later gave him a hint though. The internal vid-phone on a police computer was meant to be secure, unhackable. There was no way a call should be connected without Travis screening and approving it, even if he'd given his caller the necessary system ID. The uniformed man on the other end of the line, dark-skinned but with features and expression lost in a haze of interference, seemed oblivious to that. Travis winced and turned down the computer speakers as a roar of interference, mingled with unintelligibly distorted words, emerged from them. The man spoke again, and then the picture flickered and steadied.
"Is that better?" the caller asked, the nuances of his voice still lost to noise but the words coming through loud and clear. "I've boosted the signal our end."
Travis nodded grimly, wondering where to start. With the basics, he decided.
"Who are you?"
"Vaughan, NASA Security. I'm sending through my online identity confirmation and clearances now. And I'm talking to Detective Inspector Charleston Travis, right? Well, Inspector, you just tried to access Virgil Tracy's file on the ID net, and I'd very much like to know why."
"I can't discuss the specifics of an ongoing case." The rote response rolled off Travis's tongue without him having to think about it. The rules regarding journalists and inter-agency jurisdiction poachers were pretty much the same. He was still not entirely sure which category Vaughan fell closest to. An icon came up on his desktop for a received ident confirmation, and he had to resist the urge to check it, able to tell from the sound of processor fans alone that the computer was already struggling to maintain the vid-link without burdening it further. Did this man really just say NASA Security?
He didn't get a chance to ask. The security officer Vaughan appeared to be on a short tether. There was a distinctly military bark in his voice when he answered, his American accent coming through clearly despite the crackling line. "It's a simple enough question: do you know where the kid is, or don't you?"
Frowning, Travis set his lips firm, still confused as to how he'd ended up talking to the man in the first place. "What's your interest in this case? Since when has an outfit like NASA security had access to the police ID net?"
"Federal agency," Vaughan snapped. "Look I don't have time for this kind of evasion, and nor do you. You've got about two and a half minutes before the C.I.A. traces your search and comes down on your head like a ton of bricks. Believe me, I'm the lesser of two evils in front of you right now."
Travis stared. "You're joking."
Vaughan's fingers rapped an impatient tattoo on the desk in front of him. His near-black eyes were visible even through the snowstorm of interference. "I want you to look me in the eye, Inspector, and tell me what is even vaguely amusing about withholding evidence on a kid that's been missing for over twenty-four hours."
Travis buckled under the pressure, out of his depth and knowing it. "White, prepubescent male? Ten or eleven years old? Chestnut hair, mid-brown eyes? Dad a tall, dark-haired man in his forties, name of Jeff?" He paused, his eyes widening as he put two and two together. "Wait, did you say Tracy? Jeff Tracy? The Jeff Tracy?"
"You've found them." The man sounded genuinely relieved, but still urgent. "Where are they? How are they?"
"Mercy State Hospital, Dominga. Care of Dr Tasmin Evans. She tells me they'll be all right in a few days. They were shipwrecked – probably the big storm we had down here. Some of our local fishermen brought them in."
Now Vaughan did actually slump a little. "Thank God for that. Jeff's retired but he's still like family to the agency. Lucille called us for help as soon as Jeff and the boys missed their evening call home."
Travis felt a hole open up under his feet and his stomach drop into it. He'd been pretty sure that Virgil and Jeff had a traumatic story to tell. Until now, he'd assumed it at least had a happy ending.
"Boys plural?" he asked quietly. "I'm afraid we only found Virgil and his father."
It was hard to read Vaughan's expression over the still-fuzzy vid-phone, but his breathing became a little harsher.
"Jeff had three of his sons with him on the yacht," the NASA man told him in a low voice. "Scott, Virgil and Gordon."
There was a moment of silence between them. It was broken by the ringing of the more conventional telephone on Travis's desk, the sudden sound making him leap nearly out of his skin.
"That'll be the C.I.A.; they're faster than we gave them credit for."
Travis looked at his phone as if it had suddenly turned into a hand grenade. In his job, a fair amount of interagency liaison was inevitable, but the United States C.I.A. was an intimidatingly-serious new prospect. "What do I tell them?" he wondered aloud, not so much asking for advice as delaying the inevitable.
Vaughan sighed. "That you've found the ex-astronaut businessman they were looking for, so the defence contracts, and the network of personal contacts through half the US military, that have them in a flap are probably safe. But Jeff will do anything for those boys, so if you don't find his missing kids, one way or the other, they might not be for long. I need to contact the hospital, and then break the news to Lucy. I'll call you back."
With that, Vaughan's vid window closed itself. Travis stared at his screen. "Thanks," he muttered sarcastically as his screen unlocked, first Virgil's file, and then Jeff's and those of the other two boys Vaughan had mentioned, opening across it. He reached for the persistently ringing telephone, wincing as a loud crackle filled the line.
"Detective Inspector Travis," he announced, careful to keep his voice calm and level. "Can I help you?"
Sitting perched on the emergency cabinet, Gordon determinedly holding on to his ankles despite his protest that it was unnecessary, Scott leaned back and adjusted the throttle on the outboard motor to idle. They were perhaps half a mile from the shoreline now, and his initial euphoria at simply spotting land had been replaced by more practical concerns.
The island in front of them rose steeply out of the water. Thick jungle and sandy beaches barely obscured the outline of the apparently extinct volcano that had formed it. It was land, and that was wonderful, exciting and a life-saver in the truest sense of the word, but in the pale moonlight it also looked small, wild and very remote from the civilisation Scott was accustomed to.
It had taken them the better part of an hour to get this far, the first half of that spent trying awkwardly to refuel the mounted engine while Gordon alternated between watching his brother anxiously and keeping an eye on the barely-visible island as Scott had asked. Twilight had long since faded to nothing, and Scott had been terrified that they'd be plunged into pitch darkness still directionless, and drift away from potential salvation during the long night. It was a relief to find that, with the previous night's cloud cover a mere memory, the waxing moon gave them enough light to make out shapes and silhouettes, even if the details were lost. By the time the engine had coughed into life, the lunar radiance had thrown just enough light on the island for Scott to have confidence that the direction Gordon indicated and the vague blur against the night sky were one and the same.
His heart had lifted as he caught a sparkle of brighter light, a reflection of some kind. He'd angled towards it hopefully as the island grew in the night, hoping to find glass: a window, a car windscreen, something. Now he gazed at a sparkling, dancing stream, picked out in blue-white reflections as it trickled across the beach. He knew he should consider it a lucky find, but couldn't help feeling a pang of disappointment nonetheless.
His parched mouth and throat craved the cool water so near at hand, but he had to do something about getting there first. The beach, what he could see of it, appeared to have quite a shallow gradient, although looking at the towering volcano he'd be willing to bet there was a sharp drop-off not far from shore. In theory, if he let the tide drift them in, perhaps with a touch on the motor to help it along, he could jump out when they were close enough to the beach and pull the boat gently ashore with Gordy safe inside. There was only one problem with that idea. Scott was far from confident that his tired limbs were capable of hauling the heavy three-man lifeboat through the water, and he was pretty sure that even if he got them close, he wouldn't be able to pull it up above the tide line. Chances were that they'd wake in the morning not only shipwrecked but also marooned, the boat long since washed away. Or worse still, that he wouldn't get them both ashore at all, the boat with Gordon still inside slipping out of his grasp and drifting out of reach.
It wasn't an option he was prepared to consider for long.
He hesitated, glancing down at his tired little brother. Gordon was leaning on Scott's legs as much for his own support as to ensure Scott remained balanced. Worried, the older boy shook his head, knowing that if he was to get them both ashore and keep the boat too, he was going to have to take a risk.
"Gordy?" he called softly. Amber eyes looked blearily up at him, Gordon running one hand through unruly copper locks to push them back away from his face. "Gordon, I want you to sit down, okay? Curl up really tight – like a mouse when it's asleep. Understand?"
Gordon shook his head, hands squeezing Scott's ankles. "Not going to let you go," he insisted. "If I let you go, you're going to fall…"
"Gordon – "
"…and if you fall, you're going to be gone just like Daddy and Virgil, and I'm going to be all on my own, and that would be bad, and I don't want you to go, Scotty, and…and…"
"Gordy!" Scott slid forward, jumping down from the emergency locker and wrapping his arms around his shaking little brother. Gordon had seemed to be coping well, all things considered, putting all his trust in his eldest brother. Clearly the idea of Scott leaving him too was just too much for the six-year-old to deal with. Scott squeezed him tight, and then pulled back a little, gently raising Gordon's chin and stroking the hair back from his tear-filled eyes. "Gordy, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to leave you alone. No way. No how."
Gordon trembled, his expression uncertain. Scott's determination rang through his voice, his statement throwing down a challenge. He'd face down the universe itself to make sure his words came true, and Gordon realised that. The younger boy was still frightened, but he nodded reluctantly before burying his face back in Scott's chest.
Scott sighed, holding his brother for a few seconds longer before easing gently away from him. "Gordy, I'm not going to fall in, okay? I just need to get us to the beach over there. And it might get a little bumpy." He sighed, looking down at Gordon's quivering lips. "Okay, Gordon, you can hold onto me if you want. I'm going to turn the engine back on and then jump back down here, okay? As soon as I jump down, we have to tuck up tight, just like I said. Can you be ready to do that?"
Again, Gordon gave that short, scared nod. He was reluctant to release his elder brother completely, and he watched with worried eyes as Scott pulled himself wearily back up onto the closed emergency locker, sitting with his legs dangling down into the lifeboat and his body half-twisted so he could reach for the motor controls while keeping an eye both on his little brother and the coastline ahead. Taking a deep breath, Scott locked the rudimentary directional controls and, bracing himself, threw the throttle full open. The boat surged forward, and he gave it the briefest moment to steady, determined not to prove his brother right. Then he slid back across the locker, tackling Gordon to the deck and wrapping himself around his little brother, head and arms tucked in.
The impact threw them back against the locker, adding to Scott's already extensive collection of bumps and bruises. The bottom of the boat made a harsh grating sound as it climbed the beach, the noise all-pervading and seemingly never-ending. The motor roared as the propeller lifted free of the surface. Robbed of resistance, it over-revved, choked and cut out. The grinding of sand and stones against the keel went on though, the lifeboat riding higher on the beach than even Scott had intended. The vessel rocked from side to side, and the boys rolled with it, Gordon letting out a frightened scream as he clung to his brother. An age passed, the noise and movement gradually subsiding. When the boat settled, it was with a lurch that left the deck listing steeply to one side. Scott rolled to that side of the deck, Gordon slipping from his grasp. Both boys scrambled to their knees, balanced more on the side-wall of the dinghy than its bottom, their eyes searching one another out in the moonlight.
"There, that wasn't so bad now was it?" Scott tried, his voice shaking.
Pale in the silver light, Gordon stared at him. Scott was growing concerned by his silence when the little boy giggled. Scott stared as Gordon tried to suppress his giggles and ended up hiccupping instead. He chuckled, the younger boy's laughter becoming infectious, and closed the gap between them, running his eyes up and down Gordon in the moonlight to check for injuries. Finding none, he gave his brother a light swat on the back of the head before taking his hand.
Climbing down from the boat was a tricky task, the angle making it difficult to find solid footing. Scott dropped to his knees as soon as he'd set Gordon down, burying his hands in the sand and gulping back tears of relief at the feel of solid ground. Gordon stayed close, hand on Scott's shoulder as they looked up and down the length of the beach and the impenetrable blackness of the jungle that rose from it.
The adrenaline surge was passing now, combining with the ordeal of the day to leave both boys shaky and exhausted. Scott knew that he should scout their surroundings, unpack their supply cabinet and figure out a way to make a proper shelter. Instead, he let Gordon lead him over to the freshwater stream crossing the beach. He sipped the water cautiously, not sure whether his parched tongue was even capable of detecting any contaminants. He'd meant to keep his brother away from the unpurified water, going back to the boat to fetch what was left of their bottled supply for Gordon while risking the stream himself. Gordon didn't wait for Scott's permission though, falling to his knees by the shallow bank and scooping up handfuls of the cool liquid. Sighing, Scott did the same, too tired and weak to do anything else.
Gordon was asleep on his feet by the time they'd drunk their fill. Scott picked his brother up, letting the younger boy's head rest on his shoulder as he carried him to the tree-line. There was no way they were going to risk the forest tonight, but dry palm fronds littered the ground around the base of the nearest trunks. Putting Gordon down, Scott pulled a pile of the dead foliage aside, checking for anything living amidst the leaf litter. Satisfied for now, he guided his sleepy brother into a hollow between a slender tree trunk and its roots, pulling the warm, dry leaves back over them as they curled up together, asleep in moments.