Hannah did not hesitate. She waded into the noise, loosed the lines with a knife when the knots refused her fingers, and swung herself up into the boat with the waterproof bag. Gabriel lifted Eli, blankets, sailboat and all, and passed him up to her waiting arms, and for one suspended second the boy hung between the dock and the boat, between the house that had been his cage and the open black water, and he did not cry out. He laughed. It was a small, startled sound, half swallowed by the wind, and Gabriel felt it go through him like heat through cold hands.
"He goes below," Hannah shouted. "Low and center. Wrap him in the dry blankets under the bench, and the life vest over everything."
Gabriel climbed in after them and did as he was told, this man who had not taken an order in twenty years, kneeling on the wet deck boards and tucking blankets around his son's legs while Hannah moved around him in the dark with the economy of a soldier checking a weapon. She had done this before. Of course she had done this before. Everything about her had been a weapon waiting for its war, and the war had come to his house, and she had stayed.
"Now," she said, and put the key in his hand. "Your signal. Your boat. Your call, Gabriel."
He started the engine.
It caught on the second turn, a low animal growl under the roar of the storm, and Hannah cast off the last line and the Claire slid out of the boathouse into the harbor with the rain hammering her canvas and the cliff of the estate falling away behind them, dark and windowless and already lost.
They had perhaps four minutes of grace. Gabriel stood at the wheel with the radio handset in his free hand and watched the water, and Hannah stood beside him with one hand braced on the console and her eyes moving between the channel markers and the shore, and below them, through the deck, he could feel rather than hear his son's heart going like a bird's.
Then the shore lit up behind them.
It was not lightning. A white beam, hard and level, swept across the water from the direction of the harbor mouth, found them, and held. A second later the radio woke in Gabriel's hand, not with a voice but with the flat electronic chirp of a hailing channel, and then the loudhailer came rolling across the water, huge and distorted.
"Vessel Claire, this is Port Authority patrol. Kill your engine and prepare to be boarded."
"There it is," Hannah said quietly. "Hayes."
The patrol boat was faster and it was built for weather like this, and it came out of the rain on their port side with its spotlight burning and its wake standing white against the black. Gabriel could see the shape of men at its rail. He could see, or imagined he could see, the long shapes in their hands.
He lifted the handset and pressed the transmit key, and his voice, when it came, was the voice of the man he had been before the bomb, the man who had survived twenty years of street violence and commercial warfare by never once sounding afraid.
"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the vessel Claire, Marlowe family aboard, two adults and one child. We are being pursued by a Port Authority patrol vessel in Massachusetts Bay. The men aboard that vessel are part of a criminal conspiracy. Their director ordered our murders tonight. I am transmitting on an open channel and this call is being recorded."
The patrol boat's loudhailer tried to talk over him. Gabriel kept the key down and kept talking, the way Hannah had taught him without ever saying it: plainly, and to whoever was listening, and without stopping.
"Coast Guard Boston, do you copy? Mayday. We have a disabled child aboard. We are not armed. The patrol vessel is not acting under lawful orders."
Static. Rain. The patrol boat closing, close enough now that Gabriel could see the water breaking white at its bow, close enough that Hannah had one hand flat on the cabin hatch above Eli's head, the way a person shields a child from falling glass.
Then the radio answered.
"Vessel Claire, this is Coast Guard Sector Boston. We copy your Mayday. We have your position. A helicopter is inbound to your location. Maintain course and speed. Patrol vessel, you are ordered to stand down and withdraw immediately. I repeat, stand down."
The patrol boat did not stand down. It surged once more, an act of pure refusal, and for three seconds Gabriel saw the whole of the next minute laid out in front of him, the collision, the black water, his son's blankets soaking through, and his hand tightened on the wheel until it shook.
Then the sky opened above them.
The sound arrived before the light, a vast hammering roar that pressed the rain flat, and then the searchlight came down out of the storm like the finger of God, a column of white fire that struck the patrol boat dead center and pinned it to the water, and every man aboard it threw his hands up against the glare, small and blind and suddenly ordinary. The helicopter hung over the harbor in the teeth of the gale, vast and steady, and its voice came down louder than the storm itself.
"Port Authority patrol vessel, this is the United States Coast Guard. Cut your engine. Heave to. You are being recorded. Any further approach on that vessel will be treated as a hostile act."
The patrol boat's engine note fell. Gabriel heard it die across the water, that long descending whine, and the white wake at its bow collapsed into the swell, and the boat began to drift, turning slowly broadside to the waves, its spotlight swinging uselessly up into the rain.