Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [112]
They must leave immediately, he said in Italian. Other than Eros Barbu himself, only Edward Mooi knew how to bring a boat in through the channels, and the boat had not come. The siren had been a signal, a warning.
If it had been the police Mooi was warning them about, they would have been there by now—Roscani and an army of Gruppo Cardinale people with him—and the media close behind. But since the boat siren, there had been only silence. So Mooi was telling them something else.
“Salvatore is right.” Harry was suddenly looking at Elena. “We have to get out. And now.”
“How? We can’t take your brother up the elevator. Even if we could get him there, the cage is too small.”
“Ask Salvatore if there is another boat.”
“I don’t have to ask. There is not. Luca and the others took the only one there was.”
“Ask him anyway!” Harry could feel time closing in. “A raft. A float. Anything we can put Danny on to take him out by water.”
Elena looked to Salvatore and repeated Harry’s plea in Italian.
“Forse,” Salvatore said. “Forse.”
Maybe.
82
IT WASN’T A BOAT SO MUCH AS AN ALUMINUM skiff, flat bottomed, twelve feet long and five feet wide, and designed to be towed behind a boat to haul supplies or to take away garbage. Salvatore had found it near a smaller landing, around a turn in the canal, a hundred or more yards down from the first, propped up against a wall just outside a heavy door that led to Eros Barbu’s legendary wine cellar. With it were two oars, and Harry and Salvatore carried it to the water and put it in, securing it to the landing with a rope.
Then Harry stepped in and tested it.
It floated, didn’t leak, and held his weight. Bending, he set the oarlocks into place and slid the oars into them. “Okay, let’s get him in.”
Salvatore pushed the gurney forward, then he and Harry hefted it into the skiff, setting it sideways across the stern. Next, he handed Harry a bag holding a minimum of medical supplies. Then Harry helped Elena in and looked expectantly to Salvatore, but the Italian and his wife stepped back.
The skiff was too small for all of them, he said, Elena translating. There were markings on the walls high above the waterlines that would guide them out of the tunnels. Follow those and they would be all right.
“What about you?” Harry looked at Salvatore with concern.
Salvatore and Marta would ride the cage back up. Again Elena translated. They would meet them with the farm truck at a cove farther south on the lake. Glancing at Elena, he explained how to find it. Finally he looked back to Harry.
“Arrivederci,” he said, almost apologetically, as if he were abandoning them. Then he quickly took Marta’s hand, and the two disappeared back into the cave.
83
THE NOTCHES WERE CUT INTO THE CAVERN walls above the waterline, as Salvatore had said. Elena stood in the bow playing the beam of a flashlight on them as Harry rowed the skiff slowly down the channel.
Harry worked from the center, his back to Elena, his concentration on the oars, trying to keep them silent as they lifted from the water and then dropped back in.
“Listen—” Elena clicked off the flashlight.
Harry stopped, oars raised, the boat drifting. But he heard nothing other than the soft lapping of water against the rock walls as the skiff slid past.
“What was it?” Harry’s voice was barely a whisper.
“I…. There—“
This time he heard it. A distant rumbling, the sound reverberating off the walls. Then it stopped.
“What is it?”
“Outboard motors. Run for a few seconds, then shut off.”
“Who?”
“Whoever Edward Mooi warned us about. They’re here, in the canals… trying to find us…”
Hefei, China. City of Hefei Water Filtration Plant “A.”
Still Tuesday, July 14. 6:30 P.M.
Li Wen stood back, calmly watching the people hover around the wall of gauges and meters measuring the pressure, turbidity, flow rates, and chemical levels. Why they were still standing there, he had no idea. The gauges and meters were still. The plant had been shut down completely. Nothing moved.