Page 67 of Dangerous Secrets

If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine him back, the man who’d become her lover and then, crazily, her husband in the short space of a week.

Her husband.

Now gone.

Midnight, November 28

Sixty miles south of St. John, New Brunswick, Canada

The Vor had saidthe ocean journey would take about a week and he’d been right. Of course.

Arkady was a scientist. The rigor of science, the fact that the laws governing this world were knowable through reason, had kept him from going insane in the Gulag. But if the Vor woke up one day and said that the sun was going to rise in the west, why then Arkady would get up in the morning and look to the west for the sun.

He was up on the deck, his first taste of fresh air in a week. They’d called him an hour ago, as he knew they would. A quiet knock on the steel bulkhead to let him know they were approaching their destination.

Now they were approaching land. The coastline was dark, visible only because it was darker than the surrounding ocean reflecting the light of the crescent moon. This part of the coast was as deserted as Siberia. No one to see them come, no one to see them go.

Arkady breathed deeply. The air smelled of nothing but pine trees for a thousand miles, with no hint of industry. Man’s hand here was light. Just as it was in Siberia. The earth would be better off if mankind were to simply disappear.

Arkady believed that with all that remained of his soul.

The Captain was good at his job. The ship had doused its lights, but he put into a narrow inlet as if driving into a parking lot. Arkady looked overboard and was surprised to see a long jetty. There were no other boats, nothing else at all, actually, just this lone, long jetty stretching out to sea.

Waiting on the shore was a truck. Anonymous, a little battered and mud-spattered. The license plates were smeared with mud. Arkady had no doubt that the heart of the truck, its engine, was top of the line.

He climbed down the ladder and waited quietly as two crew members brought up the container and offloaded it to a four-wheel hand truck. They worked smoothly and quickly, manoeuvering in the darkness as if it were noon.

Arkady watched as they placed the container in a special compartment in the back of the truck. Until they opened the partition, there had been no sign of the secret compartment. Suspicious border guards would have to actually measure the inside and outside dimensions to discover it. Arkady had never been to North America, but he understood that, however heightened security might be at airports, road border controls between the United States and Canada were light.

There was barely enough space for a comfortable chair and six liters of mineral water. Arkady wouldn’t be as comfortable as he’d been up until now, but it would only be for a little while. And he’d survived worse, much worse.

They would get through. The Vor had thought of everything.

For a second, in the freezing midnight Canadian cold, on a clear night, with the Milky Way a cloudy rope across the sky, Arkady felt at one with the universe.

Arkady had one last phone call to make. The truck driver told him that though there was light snow in Vermont, the roads were clear. They should be in Parker’s Ridge tomorrow in the late afternoon, in about 18 hours. He hauled out his last untraceable cellphone, the red one.

As always, Arkady thrilled to hear the Vor’s voice when he answered.

“Our good luck with the weather is holding.” He looked up at the inky winter sky. “Brilliant sunshine, warm winds. Weather forecasts say that the weather will hold for about 18 hours.”

“Excellent news, my friend. See you soon, then.”

The red cellphone met the same end as the others. The SIM card was broken and buried underneath a juniper bush, the rest of the phone crushed beneath his bootheel and tossed into the Atlantic.

Arkady watched as the ripples the plastic made edged their way outwards, then subsided gently.

The last stage of a chain of events that would change the world.

The Captain and his crew had already boarded the ship, which was turning to head back out to sea. The Captain and his crew had been efficient carriers. Arkady would report this back to the Vor. There would be many other trips. The Captain would retire a very rich man.

Arkady was left with the truck driver, who awaited his orders.

“We depart now,” Arkady said quietly in English and the driver nodded.

With one last look at the night sky, Arkady climbed into the secret compartment and waited to be sealed up with his dangerous cargo.

November 28,

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