by Greg Iles
“Who?”
“You know. The doctor.”
I nocked the arrow and slowly raised my bow.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel said. “I’m out here shooting a wildlife spread on deer.”
The lie sounded effortless. Was she signaling the gunman with her hand?
“Where’s your camera?”
I pulled the bowstring to full draw against my right cheek and peered through the peep sight. Rachel’s body partially blocked my shot, and I didn’t want to shift my weight for fear of making noise.
“I lost it in the creek,” she said. “Are you a game warden?”
“Red Six to Red Leader,” the gunman said into his collar radio.
“I’ll tell you!” cried Rachel.
I leaned to my right, straining for a shot.
The gunman looked up from his radio. “All right. Where is he?”
Some bulletproof vests will stop a bullet but not a knife point. A razor-sharp broadhead should pierce what a knife would, but if it didn’t, Rachel’s face—or mine—would disappear in a cloud of red mist. I aimed for the V of the gunman’s throat, just above the top of his vest.
“What will you do if you find him?” Rachel asked.
“That’s not your problem.”
“Red Six,” crackled the radio receiver in the man’s ear, loud enough for us to hear. “This is Red Leader. Repeat your message.”
As he reached up to key his radio, Rachel screamed my name, and I loosed the arrow.
Rachel’s scream masked any sound of impact. For a moment I was afraid I’d hit her. She’d fallen to her knees, but the gunman was still standing and holding his pistol. Why hadn’t he fired? Had my arrow passed him without a sound? My bowstring was silenced. I jerked another arrow from my quiver and tried to nock it with shaking fingers.
“Red Six, this is Red Leader. This better be good.”
I expected a pistol shot, but instead I heard a heavy thud that I instantly recognized. When I looked up, the gunman was gone. I’d heard deer fall like that after a spine shot. First came the sing of the bowstring, then the knee-buckling impact and the cement-sack thud of a clean kill. The delay was what had thrown me. This man had hung in the air like a statue, unwilling to die.
“This is Red Leader, respond immediately.”
Rachel’s face was streaked with tears. As adrenaline poured into my system, I shoved her aside and looked down. The black-clad man lay flat on his back. The broadhead had pierced his throat and punched through his cervical spine. He couldn’t have remained standing more than a second with that injury, which only proved how subjective time was in the heat of action.
“Get in the truck,” I told Rachel.
“Where is it?”
“Thirty yards on. Move!”
She staggered over the fallen man and disappeared into the trees.
“Red Six, this is Red Leader, what the hell are you doing?”
I heard someone else talking through static. “…goddamn no-count radios. Go find the son of a bitch. Tell him we got coffee up here. That’ll bring him.”
The dead man’s eyes were open but already as cloudy as antique glass. I picked up his automatic and stuffed it into my jumpsuit pocket. Then I got to my knees and hefted his corpse over my shoulder. I had to grab a thick branch to pull myself to my feet, but I managed it, and then began trudging toward the truck. Anyone within a hundred meters would think Bigfoot was lumbering through the forest.
Rachel was waiting by the truck, her face almost bloodless. I staggered to the side of the pickup and dumped the corpse into its bed. When she pulled at my sleeve, I spun her against the truck and untied the sleeping bag from her pack. This I unzipped and threw over the dead body. To anchor the opened bag, I tossed both loaded backpacks on top of it.
“Get inside,” I snapped.
She did.
I climbed into the truck bed to retrieve the ignition key from my backpack, then got behind the wheel and backed out of the trees. Twice I hit patches of mud I thought would bog us down, but by slowly rocking the truck, I managed to get clear of the woods. The SWAT team must have heard the truck’s engine by now. I hit the accelerator and headed back toward the Brushy Mountain State Prison.
Only after I’d covered the first mile did I look at Rachel. She’d set her back against the door and was watching me as she would a violent patient.
“What’s your story?” I asked. “How did they get to you?”
She said nothing.
When we reached 116, I didn’t turn toward the penitentiary but toward Caryville, where the road intersected I-75.
“You think I’ve been telling them where we are?” Rachel asked.
I nodded.
“Why would I do that?”
“Only you know that.”
“If I’d wanted them to find you, I could have betrayed you long before now.”
It started to rain again, big fat drops that splatted like bugs on the windshield. I switched on the wipers and slowed down.
“Maybe they didn’t want to capture me until you’d got all the information you could out of me. Did you call them from Wal-Mart?”
She looked at me with scorn. “When that guy with the gun asked me where you were, I could have told him you were right behind me.”
“You knew I had an arrow pointed at your back.”
Frustration tightened her face. “Think, David. I could have hit you in the head with a rock just now. While you put that corpse in the truck.”
“I’ll think later. Right now I have to run.”
We drove in silence for a while, heading toward the deep divide that marked the line between Morgan and Anderson Counties. A bridge appeared ahead. Despite the rain, there wasn’t much water under it, but the gorge was deep, cut by years of water flowing from strip mines higher up. About a third of the way across, I pulled the truck close to the rail and stopped.
Taking the key out of the ignition, I got out and climbed into the bed of the truck. The sleeping bag covering the corpse was soggy with rain. I kicked it aside, wrestled the corpse onto my shoulder, then stood and heaved it over the bridge rail. It crashed through some branches and hit the rocks below. The sleeping bag was bloody, so I tossed it over as well. Then I got back into the cab and drove on, staying right at sixty on the twisting road.
“I didn’t know you had that in you,” Rachel said in a dead voice. “I can’t believe you’re the man who wrote so movingly about compassion and ethics.”
“This is survival. Everybody has it in them. You included.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I won’t kill.”
“You would.” I looked her full in the face. “You just haven’t been put in the right situation yet.”
“Think what you want. I know myself.”
The road was gradually straightening. I accelerated to seventy and shut Rachel out of my thoughts. I felt alone again, as alone as I had on the day Fielding died. I hadn’t realized the degree to which Rachel had been a comfort. The hardest thing to accept about her betrayal was that it meant she had never seen me as anything more than a patient. A sick and deluded man.
A wave of heat rolled through me, leaving deep fatigue in its wake. I hoped it was a postadrenaline crash, but the ringing vibration in my teeth told me otherwise. I would soon be unconscious. And this time I couldn’t trust Rachel to take care of me.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, looking intently at me. “You’re weaving over the center line.”
“Nothing.”
“Get over! You’re in the wrong lane.”
I jerked the wheel back to the right. Maybe the strain of dumping the corpse had made me especially vulnerable to an attack. There was nothing gradual about this one. I had to stop the truck.
“Pull over!” Rachel yelled.
Trying desperately to keep my eyes open, I swerved onto a small logging road and managed to cover about a hundred yards before I had to stop. I got the truck into P
ARK, then pulled the dead man’s automatic from my jumpsuit and aimed it at Rachel.
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out! And leave your cell phone in here. Do it!”
She looked out the window as though she were being asked to leap off a cliff. “You can’t just put me out here!”
“I’ll let you back in after I wake up. If you’re still here.”
“David! They’ll find us. Let me drive!”
I jerked the gun at her. “Do what I said!”
She laid her cell phone on the seat, then climbed out of the truck and closed the door. Her dark eyes watched me through the rainspattered glass. As I leaned over and locked her door, the black wave rolled over me.
A city gate stood high before me, a plain arch in a wall of yellow stone. People lined the road, some waving palm fronds and cheering, others weeping. Men held a donkey for me, and I climbed upon its back. The symbolism was important. There was a prophecy to fulfill.
“This is the eastern gate, Master. Are you sure?”
“I am.”
I passed through the gate on the donkey’s back. I heard horns blowing. Roman soldiers watched me with wary eyes. Women ran into the street to touch my robe, my hair. The faces in the narrow street were hungry, not for food but for hope, for a reason to live.
The road vanished and became a columned temple. I sat on the steps and spoke quietly to a large group. They listened with curious, uncertain faces. The words they spoke were not the words in their minds. The words in their minds were all the same: Is he the one? Is it possible?
“You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky,” I told them. “Why do you not know how to interpret the present time? I have cast fire upon the world, and I am guarding it until it blazes.”
I watched the faces. Words meant different things to different people. Men seized upon what they wanted, discarded the rest. Someone asked from whence I came. Better to answer in riddles.
“Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me.”
I left the temple and walked the alleys of the city. I wanted pri vacy, but I was accosted from all sides. Priests came to me and questioned me. Blind men could see more.
“By what authority do you say and do these things?” they asked.
I smiled. “John baptized the people. Did his authority come from heaven or from men?”
The priests answered out of fear of the mob. “Of this we are not certain.”
“Then I shall not tell you by whose authority I do these things.”
I left them seething in the street, but it did no good. They came to me upon a hill and questioned me at length. My answers drove them mad.
“Only a little while am I with you,” I said. “Then I go back from whence I came. Whither I go, you cannot come. You shall seek me and not find me. You are of this world. I am not.”
They called me a liar.
“Yet a little while the light is with you,” I said. “Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you. He that follows me shall never walk in darkness.”
Even as I watched them, I saw my doom in their eyes. Yet I could not turn from my path. In one priest’s eyes I saw hatred, and also the death that he saw for me…a Roman punishment. But pain was not my greatest fear. A strong man could stand pain. What I could not endure was to be alone, alone again for all time—
Rachel was screaming. I blinked in confusion, and then the door at my left shoulder was yanked open. I tried to turn and see who was there, but sleep closed over me again like quicksand.
Chapter
22
Geli Bauer rubbed her eyes with one hand and poured strong coffee into her mug with the other. She was waiting for John Skow’s wife to bring him to the phone. She had slept three hours on the cot where she and Ritter had made love last night. She almost never dreamed these days, but an old recurring nightmare of pursuit by soldiers had returned. In the dream she always killed herself before they reached her. The terror before that act of release was nearly unbearable.
“Geli?” Skow said in her headset, his voice exhausted.
He had spent all night with the Godin Four supercomputer, piecing together a threat to the president from digital recordings of Tennant’s voice. Geli had already awakened him once, to tell him she’d received a report of a man missing from one of their SWAT details. At that point there had been no proof that Tennant had been there, but now…
“The SWAT team at Frozen Head found their missing man,” she said. “He’d been dumped into a creek bed from a highway bridge. He had an arrow in his throat.”
“Did Tennant do it?”
“I think so. I’ve been reviewing his background. He did a lot of hunting when he was a kid. Probably bow-hunted in the early season.”
“Where the hell would he get a bow and arrows?”
“We’re checking the security tapes of stores along the routes between the ferry and Oak Ridge. He was obviously planning to hole up for a while on that mountain. What I want to know is this. How did you know where he would be?”
“I told you, I can’t give you that.”
“Your secret source is Dr. Weiss, isn’t it?”
“Geli—”
“Who else could it be? How else could you know about Frozen Head Park?”
“If it was Dr. Weiss, you’d know it already.”
Geli knew better. “That’s why you were so skittish about a shoot-to-kill order. You knew your informer might be killed. What I don’t get is why you didn’t tell me she was helping us. I could have protected her.”
“You have a habit of asking questions above your pay grade.”
“I don’t have a fucking pay grade! I make ten times what you do.”
“But you still take orders from me.”
She wanted to reach through the phone and crush his windpipe, but self-discipline slowly reasserted itself. “When did you last talk to Godin?”
“It’s been longer than I’d like,” Skow admitted. The NSA man sounded nervous, and he wasn’t trying to hide it.
“What are the extended trips Godin and Nara have been taking for the past few weeks? They fly west and disappear for three and four days at a time. Where are they going?”
“You must have dug deeper than that.”
She would not be drawn in so easily. “Whoever’s handling security on that end is very good.”
A dry chuckle from Skow. “You have no idea.”
“Why aren’t you with them?”
No answer.
“How is all this related to Fielding’s pocket watch?”
“I’m sorry, Geli.”
Things she had noticed over the past few weeks began to push themselves to the forefront of her thoughts. “Zach Levin and his Interface Team were laid off five weeks ago. They seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. Why would a whole technical team be dropped?”
Skow didn’t reply.
She searched for a question he could answer. “Does the person handling security wherever Godin is control your ultrasecret source?”
In the ensuing silence, she realized that Skow’s reticence was not meant to offend her. He had the paralysis of a man trapped between duty and fear.
“Has this secret source told you where Tennant is going next?”
“You’ll get another list of destinations soon. I’ll get it to you as soon as I have it.”
“You do that.” She tried to push the mystery of Peter Godin’s location from her mind. “How public is our deranged-assassin story now?”
“It’s still inside the Beltway, but it’ll spread fast. The D.C. police will get it this morning. I didn’t want to go wide with it until I finished last night’s project.”
“I listened to the recording again a few minutes ago. It’s rock solid.”
“It better be. What are you going to do now?”
“Wait here for something. Anything. A whisper of where Tennant might be.”
/> “And then?”
“I’m going to go there myself. I don’t trust anyone else at this point.”
“Go there how?”
“Godin’s JetRanger is still on the helipad. You have any problem with me taking it?”
“No. I’ll keep the pilot on standby for you.” After a pause, Skow said, “Getting Tennant is personal for you, isn’t it?”