That. MacKenna said there was no was Jay would let us leave the bunker without him.
Navarro stares at something in his lap.
Jay takes a few steps so that he’s standing in the center of the bunker, midway between where I am at the desk and everyone else at their bunks. “I’m not a piece of old furniture that you need to find a home for.” He clears his throat. “I’ve been trying to give each of you a little space to deal with the...”
He falters, and I wonder how he would describe what’s happened to us. Or to him.
I wonder how he deals with all the betrayal.
I swallow a dry lump in my throat.
But as usual, Jay doesn’t give much away. “To deal with the reality of our situation.” He glances at me. “To each grieve in our own way.” He continues to move toward Navarro so that he towers over the bunk. “But make no mistake. It is essential to establish a chain of command. And I am in charge here.”
Rule number eight.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Jay might have read Dad’s book. Or maybe that bit of wisdom is something that my father and my stepfather have in common from their army days.
Jay stands up very straight. His dark hair has gotten a bit grayer at the temples since we arrived in Mexico. But the remnants of his military training emerge. “Here is the new drill. Jinx and MacKenna, I want a list of possible destinations. Places we could go after leaving here. Toby, Gus, you’re with me. We’ll handle supplies.”
Given that this is the first time that Jay’s given us any orders, there’s a pause. But MacKenna comes to sit at the kitchen table, and that settles it.
The chain of command is established.
I turn my attention back to the computer.
I quickly write a program that does a public records search. It’s based it on the theory that Esmerelda would be living in Mexico within a hundred-mile radius of the bunker. But the system Dad cobbled together is old and slow, and it takes a while for the program to run.
After the NeXT beeps again, I print out the results on paper I recycled from a weird survivalist cookbook which, thankfully, has recipes on only one side of the page.
I join MacKenna at the table, and we look through the papers. We make a list of all the people we find named Esmerelda Ojos along with notes about their location, how far away it is, how we’d get there.
“Here’s one,” I say. It’s a newspaper article about a woman who opened a cantina in San Pedro, about an hour south of us. “This would make sense.”
Pulling her cardigan tight around her chest, MacKenna shakes her head. “Look at the date of the article. If she’s still alive, she’d be like a hundred and fifty years old.”
Navarro and Jay are at the weapons cabinet in the corner opposite the comm center loading supplies into bins. They appear to be taking inventory. Navarro mutters to himself and once in a while, I recognize a word or term here or there. Glock or Colt or rounds.
MacKenna swipes up the papers and neatens them. “So how many is that?”
I check the list I made on the back of a recipe for rattlesnake chili. “Fourteen Esmereldas,” I tell her as I make my way back to the computers. “If we operate under the assumption that the person would be relatively close to my dad’s age and then sort the list based on proximity to our current location, we could—”
Navarro groans and drops the bin he was holding onto the carpet.
MacKenna and I watch as he goes to one of the bookshelves and comes to the table with a weathered atlas. He opens it and places a yellowing paper map on top of my printouts. “Esmerelda Ojos isn’t a person.” He shoots me a glare. “It’s a place.”
He smooths out one of the wide maps and taps his finger at a spot a bit removed from the coast. “At least, that’s how American tourists refer to the Ojos de Esmerelda Cenote. It’s basically a network of flooded caves. It’s pretty remote. My uncle used to take us scuba diving there when I was a kid. We had to stop the trips because the roads in that area haven’t been well maintained since the New Depression. Not easy to get in.” Navarro sighs. “Or out.”
I decoded the message from Dad last week.
MacKenna’s mouth falls open. “You’ve known that this whole time? When were you planning to tell us?”
He had been keeping his own secrets. I was trying to get us out of the bunker, while Navarro was trying to keep us in. “Maybe the same day you were planning to tell me about the satellite dish?”
Toby joins us and leans over the atlas. “This is what? Fifty miles or so from here?”
Navarro nods. “Fifty miles north.” He adds, “When it would be safer to go south,” in a low, ominous tone.
Jay presses the top on the plastic bin he’d been loading and then takes a seat at the head of the kitchen table. “I want you all to listen to me. No more secrets. Do you understand? Do all of you understand?” He looks pointedly at me.
It’s Mac who answers. “Yeah, Dad. We get it.”
“So we think what? That Marshall hid something in these caves?” Jay asks.
I shrug. “Maybe? I assume he stored equipment there. Or information. Something to help us deploy the code he wrote.”
Navarro begins pacing in the small area around the table. “Those are dangerous assumptions. We don’t know when Dr. Marshall loaded up those floppy disks, but presumably he hatched this plan while your parents were still married. We don’t know what he may have told your mother. What she knows.”
I catch his gaze, forcing him to look at me for the first time in a while. His posture softens a bit. And, anyway, he’s wrong. My parents didn’t talk. They hid everything from each other. “My mom was a spy for The Opposition while my dad was secretly sabotaging their leader. I’m pretty sure they didn’t discuss these things.” I try to give him a small smile. “Dad wouldn’t have left us the instructions if he didn’t want us to use them.”
Navarro’s shoulders stiffen. “He didn’t leave anything for us, Susan. He didn’t give us those disks or tell us where to find them. Dr. Marshall intended for us to come here and that’s it. The fact that you know enough about his coding habits to figure out how he stored the key is dumb luck, not evidence of some master plan.”
He glances at Toby, who is still staring at the atlas. “I mean, you really haven’t thought this through, have you? We have no idea who Dr. Marshall left those instructions for. We’re playing this game and don’t even know all the players. We don’t know what...or...or who we’ll find in those caves.”
Jay draws in a deep breath, and when he speaks again, it’s with a fatalism that makes my blood run cold. “It doesn’t matter. Either Stephanie knows about this place or she doesn’t. Either there’s something in the caves that can help us or there isn’t. But either way, The Opposition is waiting for us to make a move.”