The helicopter set down its pontoons on the water at the end of the pier leading to the shore near the cabin. The pilot killed the engine but left the rotors idling, a clear signal that he expected to be airborne again in exactly ten minutes.

“Ten minutes,” he said, not looking at me. “Not a second more.”

I didn’t answer. I was already out the door, running down the pier and up the rocky path toward the cabin.

The door was unlocked. I’d expected that—Daniel had left in a hurry, and neither of us had thought about locking up. The cabin smelled of stale coffee and cold ashes. The grandfather clock ticked steadily, its pendulum swinging like a metronome counting down my remaining time.

My mind catalogued the mission: anti-parasite medication from the bathroom cabinet, the film and wax cylinder from Daniel’s darkroom, and a phone call to confirm our story broke. Three tasks, ten minutes, everything riding on execution.

The bathroom was a narrow room off the hallway, its medicine cabinet a rusted metal box above the sink. I opened it with more hope than confidence. Inside: a bottle of ibuprofen, a half-used tube of toothpaste, a small jar of antifungal cream, and—there—a prescription bottle labeled Metronidazole, with Daniel’s name on it. The prescription was dated three years ago, but the bottle was still half full from last year’s giardia (a.k.a. Beaver Fever) scare. Perfect. The label’s medical enough to sell the bluff, and JD won’t know the difference between anti-parasite and anti-bacterial in his current state.

I pocketed it, along with a second bottle of multivitamins that I emptied into my palm and refilled with a few ibuprofen tablets. The combination looked like a regimen—pills of different shapes, sizes, and colors. It was a bluff inside a bluff. But if JD was desperate enough, he wouldn’t question it.

I left the bathroom and crossed the living room to the door. Outside, the afternoon light was beginning to fade, casting long shadows across the clearing. The outhouse sat at the edge of the treeline, its weathered wood blending into the forest.

I approached it slowly, breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell. The door creaked open. The seat was still there, the “depth” still visible—a painted illusion designed to deter casual inspection. I pulled the loose board beneath the seat, revealing the staircase.

The basement was dark and cold. Knowing I didn’t have time to light the lantern, I relied on feeling for the recordings in the dim light coming in through the gaps between the wooden walls above. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see he phonograph sitting on the workbench, its wax cylinder still in place. The undeveloped film reel was beside it, untouched.

I grabbed both, wrapped them in a cloth I found on the shelf, and tucked them into my jacket.

Five minutes gone. I had five left.

I ran back to the cabin, slammed the door behind me, and crossed to the kitchen. The black dial phone sat on the counter, its rotary face cold and unyielding. I dialed Murphy’s number. I didn’t know if he’d be there, but it was the only number I had memorized.

It rang twice. Then: “Murphy’s Corner Store.”

“Murphy, it’s Al. I need you to listen and not ask questions.”

“Al? Where are you? The newspaper—”

“The story. Did it break?”

A pause. “Front page. Tribune ran it this morning. Valdorian gold coins, debased currency, the whole thing. It’s spreading like wildfire. Even the national papers are picking it up.”

I closed my eyes. The echo was out there.

“Good. Now I need you to do something else. Call Sarah Chen. Tell her—tell her that JD Ruff is here, at the cabin. He’s holding Daniel. And he’s under a deadline. She needs to make sure someone in Ottawa knows about the withdrawal clause before midnight.”

“She can’t—”

“Just tell her, Murphy. Please.”

Another pause. “I’ll do it. But Al—what are you going to do?”

I looked at the clock. A minute and a half left.

“I’m going to keep playing the game. Oh, I just had a thought! Daniel and I would love to have an order of your famous fish and chips!”

“Fish and chips?” I could hear a confused Murphy say as I hung up.

I gathered my jacket, the medicine bottles, and the wrapped recordings, and stepped outside into the fading light. The helicopter was still waiting, its rotors turning slowly. The pilot watched me approach, his expression unreadable.

I climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door.

“Back to the shack,” I said.

He said nothing. But he lifted off, and within seconds we were airborne, the cabin shrinking behind us, the lake stretching out like a mirror of grey and gold.

I looked down at the medicine bottles in my hand. The bluff was fragile—a house of cards built on a lie. But it was the only card I had. And as we descended toward the far shore, I saw Daniel standing alone near the boulder, watching the helicopter approach.

JD was not beside him.

I didn’t know if that was good or bad. But I knew, with certainty, that the next few hours would determine everything.

The helicopter touched down on the lake. I stepped out in the freezing water, the medicine bottles in one hand, the recordings in my jacket. The pilot kept his helmet on, assuming he was leaving with JD soon.

Daniel walked toward me, his face unreadable.

“JD?”

“Retching behind the shack. I provided more details on the spores and the lytic parasite,” he winked at me. Daniel looked at the bottles in my hand. “What is that?”

“Metronidazole. Ibuprofen. And a lot of hope.”

He stared at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he smiled.

“You’re learning, Al.”

I handed over the bottles and wrapped recordings to Daniel. “I had a good teacher.”

We turned to see Mr. Ruff emerge from behind the cabin, wiping his chin and clutching his belly, loudly moaning and pale-faced as ever. He had lost his muddy cowboy hat somewhere, and his boots had sick on them. We winced as he spoke to us, the breeze carrying the sour evidence of his distress.

“My friend, here is the drug regimen that will help flush the spores from your intestine, and if you feel the slightest gut pain, take the whole bottle with a glass of cooking oil immediately to halt the emergence of the parasite from the spores,” Daniel said firmly, as if prescribing a treatment to a patient. He turned to me and said, “I was explaining to JD that I visited the secret research lab down the road that used graduate students studying bat diseases as a cover for their bioweapon counter-measures research..”

“Your assistant gave me quite the shock… if this got out I would have been a goner!” JD groaned, grabbing the pills and then asking, “Where are the recordings? I may be able to appease the King of Valdoria if I can at least present these and spin the newspaper story as a fabrication on your part.”

Daniel nodded, helping the pathetic, stumbling man back into the helicopter. I looked at the helicopter pilot, thinking that the Valdorians were certainly going to deal with him in a way that made sure that the events and conversations that happened this afternoon were never going to leave his lips. I shuddered at their callousness and was anxious about how we hoped to keep free from their treachery.

The helicopter lifted away, spraying us with cold lake water, and disappeared into the low hanging clouds, the sound of its blades fading quickly, leaving the two of us alone again on the shoreline.

“That stuff about the secret research station nearby is true,” Daniel confessed, “and there was indeed a bioweapon counter-meaures project that was being worked on with respect to lytic parasites spread through spores in contaminated food and drink.”

“No kidding. Were you whispering this information in my ear while I slept?” I mused aloud. “I had no idea how I hit on the idea of embeded parasites that could kill the host when activated.”

Daniel laughed, “Maybe it was bathroom reading? I might have left the research paper lying around somewhere. And that was why I had the Metronidazole handy.”

“What did you tell JD that made him so physically ill?”

“I explained that he was probably infected at a Valdorian state dinner or private event, his meal and wine spiked with the spores. Once ingested, the spores will embed themselves in the lining of the intestine and stick there until it receives the chemical signal in another spiked meal or beverage. The parasite will then emerge from the spore and immediately bore through the gut wall, releasing lytic enzymes that destroy the organism along with the surrounding tissue, resulting in fatal perforations throughout the intestine and no sign of the organism. The victim only has a few minutes to live, and it is in complete agony as the contents of the gut spill into the abdomen and the lytic enzymes start eating away and other internal organs. It’s like being disemboweled from the inside out.”

Daniel went quiet, his face grimacing in fear at the thought of the horrible pain he was describing. Then he added, “JD was informed by the Valdorians that he was infected with something that they could activate at any moment of their choosing and cause him to die an agonizing death. He didn’t know the specifics, but they demonstrated it to him with one of his aides. It must have been terrifying to watch.”

I kept quiet, now realizing that Daniel rarely ate or drank anything offered to him from anyone but his most trusted insiders like myself. I became convinced in that moment that I should start doing the same.

Looking up at the grey sky and then scanning the shoreline around them, Daniel said, “Well, maybe we should try to find that canoe. Let’s continue our hike back to the cabin and maybe we’ll come across it. I think it’s safe to say JD and the backup he called for are not coming. He got what he wanted, including the belief he can free himself or survive the spores keeping him under the Valdorian King’s thumb.”

I followed Daniel as we re-traced our steps back to the boulder we were hiding behind and continued the long hike to the other side of the lake, leaving the shack and it’s secrets to the Universe behind us.

*** This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ***