Page 15 of Murder Island

Back on deck, I pulled anchor and helped Kira unfurl the sails. The wind was blowing from the north. The sheets filled right away. Kira took the wheel and maneuvered us out of the shallows.

As soon as we were underway, I went back down into the cabin and pulled the envelope from my pocket. I satdown on one of the berths and tore it open. There was a single page inside—thick bond paper with my ancestor’s handwriting in black pen.

It was dated June 15, 1939.

To anyone who has inherited the Savage name—

If you are reading this, you’ve managed to get past all barriers to uncover my most secret plans. By now, you also know about John Sunlight, and how important it was to hide this work from him.

Sunlight and I were two sides of the same coin. I believe that any small turn of fate could have flipped either of us in the other direction. Good to bad. Bad to good. Or maybe we both possessed a measure of each.

For the sake of the world, I pray that the good is stronger in you—and that Sunlight and his evil are gone forever.

Clark Savage, Jr.

That was it. No secret codes. No magic formulas. I wondered what Doc Savage would think if he knew that John Sunlight’s great-granddaughter had led me to his hidden cave—and that she was the woman I loved. I doubted that he would have seen that twist coming.

I folded the letter and tucked it into a corner of the hold. Then I went back up on deck. TheAlbatrosswas heeling with the wind. I could tell from the sun that we were headed farther south, the opposite direction fromhome. Was Kira tacking? Or maybe heading to port for supplies?

I walked back along the starboard rail to the cockpit. Kira had two hands on the wheel and her eyes on the horizon. We were moving past the western shore of Andros, pointed toward the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America.

“So when are we heading back north?” I asked.

I expected her to say “wrong question.” But this time she actually gave me an answer.

It was one word.

“Never.”

Not a joke or her usual sass. She was serious.

I let it sink in for a few seconds.

“Wait,” I said. “We’re running away? I thought we had more battles to fight together, you and me. Savage and Sunlight against the world, remember?”

Kira stared straight ahead as she gripped the wheel. “I’ve been fighting my whole life,” she said, “since I was a little girl. You were my way out—my way of putting the past in the past. Today was the last of it.”

Kira pulled me toward her with one arm and kissed me hard. Then she pulled back and looked me in the eye. “I’m done with fighting,” she said. “And you’re all the home I need.”

Something had changed in her. I could see it. Until this moment, I’d been the reluctant hero, resisting everystep of the way. I always saw Kira as hard-core, somebody who would never give up.

I actually felt a huge release inside. Maybe we were finally on the same page. Maybe we could both leave the bad stuff behind. Maybe, like my great-grandfather hoped, the good would finally win out.

I still wanted to know where we were going.

But that could wait until tomorrow.

CHAPTER 16

Bagram, Afghanistan

IN A METAL bunker at the edge of an abandoned airfield, a young woman in a figure-shrouding abaya sat in front of a military-grade laptop. Her desk was covered with spreadsheet printouts. Dozens of pages with hundreds of entries. Items, quantities, customers, prices. But at the moment, the image on the laptop had her full attention. And it was making her furious.

The young woman’s name was Lial. She had no idea where she was born. She had no memory at all of her life before age five. All she knew about her genealogy was that she had inherited features that could pass for several nationalities, including Afghani.

Lial’s black niqab was pulled back to expose her face. Her long black hair was bunched and clipped on top of her head. She leaned toward the screen and played the same grainy security-camera footage over and over again.It showed the top floor of a building in Chicago exploding into smithereens.

When she rewound and played the detonation sequence in slo-mo, she could see the whitish glows that marked the placement of the charges. Precise and professional. She couldn’t have done better herself. The news reports that followed were what bothered her.Enragedher. No bodies recovered. Which meant that the two targets were still alive.