Page 54 of False Flag

Not that Vicki would be able to access the drive any time soon, but Staci had reached the Hail Mary stage. She’d been on the island for ten days now, and with every passing day, her ability to communicate via phone, text, or email got worse.

Accounts that worked one day with limits were defunct the next. Her phone was basically a paperweight at this point.

For all intents and purposes, she was trapped. She’d signed contracts that prevented her from sharing any information on Letora Island unless it was related to her background research, but she couldn’t contact experts or interview locals while she was on the island. An island she could not leave without a boat.

She hadn’t been able to call Freya since the second night.

It was the perfect setup, really. The fact that those first calls went through had lulled her into a false sense of security, luring her into the center of the sticky web.

She should have told Freya to send a boat for her the moment she knew Beau was here. It was what she’d wanted to do. Now the only S.O.S. she would be able to send would be a message in a bottle.

From the beach on the west side of the island, she could see Vancouver Island. It was right there. But she might as well be in the middle of the Pacific on the lost continent of Mu.

On her second day here, she’d gone for a walk to explore the island, only to be met with security personnel as she went deep into the forest that pushed up against the developed compound.

“This is a restricted area, Ms. Allen.”

By day three, she was used to the fact that the guards always used her name, even though she hadn’t crossed paths with them before. The entire security staff had been briefed about her. She wasn’t to be trusted.

The only place she was allowed to walk without being sent back was the harbor. But that was another formidable barrier. The water was cold—dangerously so if she were trying to swim a distance that would allow her to escape—and quite rough in bad weather, which they’d had a fair amount of in the first week.

Now the weather was fine, but the boat situation hadn’t improved. The only boat permanently moored in the harbor was for the exclusive use of the tech team residing in Orca House. They were not sharers.

There might be boats hidden away in the large, locked boathouse, but the only way she could get inside to see was if she took a swim.

If she showed up on shore in her wetsuit, her intention would be obvious, and there was that cold-water thing without the wetsuit. Plus, there might not be a motorized vessel she could steal. The idea of canoeing while soaking wet wasn’t impossible, but the odds were that someone on the security team would stop her. And, of course, she’d be guilty of theft.

She didn’t know where Canadian law stood on piracy and wasn’t about to google it from a Lost Civ computer to find out. If she did, she’d likely see results specifically tailored to her on the artificial web.

In the days since she’d arrived, Geoduck House had reached capacity with expedition team members. In addition to her and Lloyd, there were a half dozen people on the team. The three who’d shared their flight: Dahlia, Riley, and Philip; and three men who’d arrived in the days that followed: Kyle, Matty, and Stephen.

Everyone on the team was white. Dahlia, the only woman, was younger—in her late twenties—while the men were all in their thirties and forties.

Of the men, except for Lloyd, Staci struggled to remember who was whom. They avoided her for the most part and worked in separate offices from the one she shared with Lloyd. With the exception of Dahlia—who was Gerard’s assistant and podcast producer—Staci had no clue what each person brought to the team. Lloyd had said they weren’t scuba certified, so she assumed they had something to do with the land survey, but they showed no interest in her current assignment, which was to reach out to government agencies and landowners to secure access to properties for survey.

She should be reviewing the project research design, but Gerard had failed to supply that, always promising she’d have it “tomorrow.”

Her primary problem at this early stage was that Gerard failed to provide guidance on where he wanted to conduct fieldwork, and she was clueless without research questions to build on. Permits and access—her number one job—required precise knowledge. And, again, research questions.

She did her best to focus on what she could do, feeling more than a little irked to know there had been absolutely no reason for her to have dropped everything and move within days.

She could have had another week with Fezzik. She missed her furry buddy desperately. Geoduck House, for all its residents, was damn lonely. In the moments when she did get along with Lloyd, he invariably attempted to flirt with her, which brought a fresh wave of discomfort.

She couldn’t help but wonder if Gerard’s plan had been to isolate her as soon as possible in the hope that once she lost access to her ordinary world, she’d start drinking his Kool-Aid.

As if her scars wouldn’t remind her that these people would eagerly hurt her to advance their cause.

All she could do was occupy herself with her work to the degree that was possible. So she researched the process of applying for permits and gathered what she could for background research. There was almost certain to be a shoreline survey of the American San Juan Islands in addition to the Nanaimo River, where the Hepburn Stone had been found.

She spent her research time following tangents likely to be irrelevant simply because the sideways journeys through history were more interesting than everything else.

She did a deep dive into the Pig War between the United States and the United Kingdom. A dispute over which strait—Haro or Rosario—was the international border between then British Vancouver Island and US Washington Territory, as described in the Oregon Treaty of 1846.

The dispute, which began in 1859 with the shooting of a pig, wasn’t resolved until 1872 with the aid of arbitration provided by German Emperor Wilhelm I. Aside from the poor pig, there were no casualties on either side.

Staci couldn’t help but wonder what the Coast Salish people—separated today by an artificial border into Canadian First Nations and Native American tribes—thought of the fact that the US and UK could solve that dispute with a bloodless war and arbitration, while the land they fought over had been stolen with an attempted genocide.

There were many tribes to consult with in the area, including Lummi, Saanich, and Samish. She intended to contact them using her private email address and planned to ask how they framed the Pig War in their oral and written histories, or if they even gave it a second thought.