The Rule of Knowledge

by Scott Baker

  ‘And what is he doing, why was he with you?’ she pressed. He watched the light. He liked her voice.

  ‘Treashhhure. Treashuure map,’ he said. Then he died.

  Georgina slapped him again, but got nothing. Damn. She raised the walkie-talkie to her mouth and spoke to the man in the black car.

  ‘Someone else was in the crash. He survived and he has the map. I repeat, the map has been found and taken by a man called Streetlund.’

  Static. It was a call the driver had never expected to come. He thought that perhaps one day they would find the map, but he never had expected to hear that it had been found and stolen all in the one broadcast.

  ‘Do you read me, you stupid American bastard? Get down to the lower campsite straight away!’

  ‘Copy.’ She could not see it, but she knew that the black Mercedes would be squealing its tyres in an effort to get to her.

  Where would he be? Where would he run to? He had just survived a plane crash that had killed the pilot, so he could not have gone far. She had seen the blood. She looked down the hill into the wilderness. Absently she thought about the word stencilled on the plane. Azulejo – Spanish for ‘Bluebird’.

  The mile-high bridge swung in the breeze. From where Shaun had found the bundle he now clung to, it was the shortest route to what he needed most right now: a car.

  He had seen her. She did not know it, but he had seen her: the woman from the hospital. The cop. The woman whose face he had smashed into an unrecognisable mess. He had seen her. Her black hair, smooth skin and annoyingly attractive face.

  He had been less than fifteen feet away as she entered the cave from which he had only just emerged, and the moment she disappeared, he had run. Uphill. She would not expect that.

  Now he stood on the swaying bridge. There was no one here; everyone had cleared out when the plane came down. That was now nearly half an hour ago, but there were still a few cars in the parking lot on the other side. Without stopping to catch his breath, he limped and hobbled forward as best he could. The crash had knocked him about. He was missing four teeth, he had cracked several ribs, and the bruising to his body left welts that had already turned purple. The wound on his forehead had also reopened and blood streamed freely down over his eyes. He had found a leather pilot’s cap strewn among the wreckage and grabbed it to act as a bandage for his bleeding scalp. It would scar. He looked like a dead man.

  But you know what? his brain prompted as he moved out across the swinging structure. You’re not dead. You’re alive, and you have the bundle, the diary and the map.

  The thought produced a gap-toothed smile, just seconds before another explosion in his head sent him sprawling forward. BAM! Images. His fingertips tingled, the lumps he had nearly forgotten about. What was happening?

  You’re falling, his brain told him while his mind played a slideshow of images.

  You’re falling … off a bridge. Grab onto something.

  ‘Oh.’

  Shaun lashed out wildly with his hands and feet, still blinded by the pain. His hands locked around something and he pulled it to his chest instinctively. His ankle locked into something else. He curled his leg and hooked the bridge’s rope railing behind his knee. When his vision returned and he realised what had just happened, his heartbeat tripled: he had fallen, dropped and then re-caught the bundle, and now hung off the side of mile-high bridge by his legs.

  Shaun took a moment to gather himself. He looked down into the rocks and forest below him. He had survived a plane crash to nearly die falling off a bridge – why? No one was shooting at him; no one was chasing him. It had been the explosion in his head, the worst one yet.

  Aware that his ragged clothes looked like the mud-caked skins of an animal, and that his blood and grime made him all but unrecognisable, he clambered back on the bridge’s walkway and finished the crossing. He scanned the car park. Three choices: a van, blue and dating from about 1970, a small Hyundai hatchback, and, well of course, a red Porsche.

  Window smashed.

  Alarm screamed.

  Attempts to hotwire.

  Alarm screamed.

  Attempts to hotwire continue.

  Shaun admits to himself that he sucks as a car thief.

  Three minutes pass. Alarm continues.

  Ignition!

  Shaun slammed the performance vehicle into reverse and spun the car a full one hundred and eighty degrees before launching on the gas to power down the mountain.

  Georgina had heard the alarm and knew what was happening, but she had been too far down the hill to do anything about it. She saw the red Porsche speed past while she was still five minutes away, but had no doubt who drove the car at breakneck speed. It was the man who had stolen the map. The man she would catch. The man she would kill. The chase was on.

  Unsure of exactly where he was, Shaun knew where he was going. He had to get the map to safety, to the only person he could trust – he had to get it to Tim.

  He raced around the mountain curves and sped east towards Washington DC and his brother.

  Tim had worked his way into the world of politics. He had gone from running his own mechanic shop in North Carolina to practising as a lawyer, and then being elected as a Senator in the nation’s capital. Shaun was proud of his brother, but he had not seen him since that night four years ago, on the anniversary of their parents’ deaths, when Shaun had said some things that he had immediately regretted.

  Tim was so busy these days that Shaun had never really had a chance to apologise, and over the years it had become harder to even try. It had started with reminiscing about old times, and had escalated to his accusation of Tim abandoning him to seek his fame and fortune in the big city. Tim had left the house furious and deeply hurt. Shaun knew the truth of it; he knew that Tim had sacrificed a good deal of his own ambitions to change oil filters simply so Shaun could finish school.

  All of the money Tim had earned had gone towards his little brother’s tuition, and Shaun knew it. Shaun, though, had prided himself on never asking Tim for anything. Tim had seemed unusually provocative that night, but Shaun had hated himself for a long time over what had happened; pride, however, had stopped him from making the trip to DC.

  Shaun looked at the bundle on the seat next to him and was thankful that this mass of animal skin would prove to be the catalyst for what should have been done a long time ago. That thought kept him company for the next two hours, the last uneventful hours Shaun would ever have.

  CHAPTER 64

  The only thing that looks cooler than a speeding red Porsche is a speeding red Porsche with bullet holes. Shaun would have agreed had he not been inside the Porsche in question, particularly considering that the number of holes was increasing rapidly. Every time he thought he had outrun the sleek black Mercedes, another identical car seemed to join the ranks from somewhere almost on top of him. His reprieve had come to an abrupt end twenty minutes ago.

  There was nowhere to turn on these winding roads; nowhere he could swerve or duck and hide. All he could do was gun the engine and rely on the German-engineered sports car to do its thing. The problem was, no matter how fast he went, the bullets seemed to travel faster.

  He thought there were five, maybe six of them now, but he could not be sure. It was a matter of odds when it finally happened. Although Shaun had managed to put distance between himself and his pursuers, he did not manage to completely escape the hail of sub-machinegun fire that spewed forth from the motorcade.

  One stream zigged across his trunk, another tore into the side of the chassis, but it was a single round that punctured his rear right tyre that caused most of the problems.

  The car’s back end began to float and drift, and sparks flew as the metal rim ground on the asphalt. It was the next sharp corner that proved his final undoing. The left-hander sent the back end wide, and as Shaun tried to compensate, the Porsche fishtailed violently.

  When the impact came, it hit hard. The solid pine tree did not yield an inch of its hund
red-year-old trunk to the small red tin can that wrapped itself around the tree’s base. Shaun was getting sick of crashes. It seemed that this time, he would surely be crushed, but as it happened the seatbelt held him tight and it was the front end of the car, near the axle, that bore the brunt of the impact.

  Still they came.

  He struggled to free himself. Popping the latch, he gathered the bundle and escaped through the passenger window. The glass further shredded his clothing and sliced his skin, but by now it was all part of one cumulative mess. The lights from the motorcade not a minute behind him now shone through the trees in the night. They were coming and Shaun had to—

  BAM!

  The explosion in his head knocked him to the ground again. He scraped around for the bundle he could not yet see through the blinding pain, and he fell flat on his stomach in the mud. He could hear them now. Close.

  Again, his fingertips tingled and itched. Scrambling to his feet, now thoroughly caked in mud, blood and grime, Shaun plunged into the forest. His fingertips burned.

  The forest was not kind in the dark. Branches lashed his face as he ran, whipping and poking at him. His bare feet were punctured and bruised, and his toenails were like the overgrown paws of an animal. Still he ran. He heard a screech behind him. They had arrived at the car.

  Torches flashed their light past him. He ran on. CRACK! The shot rang into the night and somewhere off to his left a leaf fell from its branch. Shaun never saw it. He clung to the bundle in his arms for dear life. They must not get it. He had to keep going. Maybe he could reach the road, flag a car down. He was sure the road looped around here somewhere on its lazy meander down the mountain. BAM! Images. He was out for more than a second this time, and when he opened his eyes, he was face down in the mulch and mud of the forest floor. Shit! This had not happened to Fontéyne, had it? He was on his feet for only a few hundred yards this time before BAM! Again. ‘Arrghh!!’ Shaun clawed at his head with his free hand.

  He scratched his face in the process. Blood streamed from the cut on his forehead again – it just would not close up properly – and the bumps on his fingertips throbbed like the pressure inside would make them burst. Man, what was going on … BAM! Every few seconds now.

  He could hear them behind him, but then, as he scrambled through the darkness he fell down something steeper. He felt the crunch of torn cartilage between his ribs as he rolled and bounced against rocks and trees. All the time he clung to the bundle. He could not stop. He was too exhausted. He relied on his inertia to carry him forward. He ran. Fell. Ran. Fell.

  He did not run for himself anymore; he was nothing but a vessel for the diary, for the map. He carried it like his own child, using his body to shield the bundle when he fell. Still he sprinted on.

  Blind in the night, downwards he rushed, the bushes whipping and tearing at him. BAM! He did not go down, but ran on like a footballer knocked off balance on his way to the end-zone.

  CRACK! This gunshot was more distant, more ambient. He did not hear it land. On he ran.

  The ground fell away down an embankment. Shaun half-tripped, half-ran as he burst through a thicket and the ground changed again.

  Hard.

  Road.

  Lights.

  BAM!

  As Shaun Strickland flew through the air, his last thought was simply that the last explosion was not entirely in his head. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  CHAPTER 65

  Voices. Lights. Nothing.

  Movement.

  Neck burns.

  Fingertips burn.

  Nothing.

  Gunfire.

  Voices.

  Nothing.

  Shaun woke. Pain. The first thing he felt was the pain. Even before the light. His eyes were heavy, impossibly heavy. He was lying flat. His head fell to the side. He saw a man standing next to a bed. He saw the man reach out, brush the hair off someone’s face. His eyes were so heavy.

  Shaun fought to focus. To see the face. To see … Lauren.

  To see Lauren. Alive. Alive, lying on a bed. His eyes travelled up the arm. The man turned and walked to the end of the hall, to an open elevator door. The door started to close. The man turned, and though Shaun could not see his face, he thought he looked familiar. God, how long had he been asleep? Shaun refocused as another man, this one wearing all black, walked over to the bed. He raised his hand to the bed and pointed, pointed with the long silenced muzzle of a gun—

  Shaun acted on instinct. He did not know whether he was awake or asleep or when exactly in time it was. All he saw was a man pointing a gun at Lauren. It was too far away. Too far to reach her. Thoughts raced faster than light.

  Lying flat on a hospital bed, there was something running into his own arm. A tube. Connected to the tube, a stand.

  Although it happened fast, for Shaun it seemed distorted into slow motion. He grabbed the stand with one hand and swung it. The heavy end of the stand, which contained the trestle wheels, slammed into the side of the man’s head.

  The man in black flew backwards, pulling the trigger twice as he fell. The cannula ripped from Shaun’s arm as he rolled off the table and dropped to the floor. He scrambled on his hands and knees, feeling pain from every point in his body.

  When he reached the man, he pounded with his fist. His hand, unknown to him until this moment, was broken. He gritted what teeth he had left and bared the pain as he pounded the man’s face. There was no aim in his blows, there was only rage. And it took a woman’s scream to break his trance.

  The woman was Lauren.

  Shaun scrambled to grab the gun that lay on the floor some feet away. He forced himself to stand. He turned to grab Lauren, but she pulled away from him.

  He did not have time for this. They were coming. He knew this bit. He reached forward and pulled Lauren off the bed. As she screamed and lashed out at him, her fingernails biting chunks out of his cheek, he tried to speak, but no words came out of his dry, cracked throat. How long had he been out of it? He dragged Lauren down the hall as she kicked and screamed for her husband to help her. People stared, but thoughts of intervening disappeared as soon as they saw the black, silenced Heckler & Koch that Shaun carried in his free hand.

  He noticed absently that some of his wounds had been dressed. His head was now wrapped in a large white bandage that looked like a headband against his grubby hair.

  He pulled Lauren towards the stairs. BAM! His head exploded in pain again, but he noticed that his fingertips did not burn this time. Coming around the corner from the other end of the corridor, a man dressed in a police uniform lifted his gun and fired. Ceramics near Shaun’s head exploded and Lauren screamed. Shaun spun and returned fire. The cop dropped, clutching his thigh.

  Lauren did not understand. Reaching the stairwell, Shaun hurried his confused wife down at dangerous speed, causing her to miss steps and stumble. They hit the flat of the next level running and immediately spun left to where he knew the laundry chute would provide an escape. Yes, he knew this bit.

  Shaun could hear the sounds of someone bounding up the stairs from below, and more than anything, he did not want to stop that desperate man. That earlier version of himself. He knew he must not interfere.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Lauren demanded as they burst through the swinging door to the laundry. The occupants of the room, two orderlies, jumped in shock at the intrusion. Shaun tried to shout at them, but only a cracked shriek came out. When he waved his gun in the air, they got the point and cleared the room. He immediately began to dig into the open laundry trolleys and throw sheets down the chute. He had to let go of Lauren to do so, and he did not think twice about raising his weapon at her to deter her from trying to escape. As soon as he was satisfied, he motioned to Lauren with the gun, indicating she should jump.

  ‘Whooa, no. No way buddy,’ she said, shaking her head.

  Shaun heard gunshots from the hallway and did not hesitate. He grabbed her roughly and, opening the chute, shoved her through
.

  Once he was sure there was enough time for her to clear the way, he dived after her. He landed with a thud. Words cannot describe the pain he felt at that moment. His ribs rolled over each other as the wind was knocked out of him. He could not even groan in pain.

  After a second, he became aware of the sound of hard-soled shoes running across cement. It was Lauren leaving. Escaping. No, no, no!

  Shaun forced himself up and off the pile of sheets. He pushed his way through the door and looked out into the familiar delivery bay where he had climbed aboard the DHL delivery truck; it seemed so long ago, but it had been only three weeks from his perspective.

  There she was, running away out into the open. He tried to speak, but he could not. She was leaving, and she would never know. He had found her, and she was alive, and now she was running for her life, away from him. He moved to the edge of the bay and saw her back as she crossed out into the night. He could not lose her.

  Not again.

  ‘Lauren!’ he called. She did not stop.

  ‘Lauren!’ he tried again. This time she slowed a little.

  ‘Lauren, stop, please!’ His voice, stronger now, was full of pain and grief. He was crying.

  She slowed her pace, then she came to a walk. She turned and looked back into the delivery bay, expecting to see her husband’s face to match his voice. Instead, she saw delivery trucks and the hobo. That crazy man they had saved and who had repaid them by taking her hostage. He could barely stand. She looked at him hard, and as she slowly took a step towards him, the voice came again. The raggedy-looking hobo lifted one arm towards her weakly and called out.

  ‘Lauren. Please. Wait,’ he sank down to his knees and bent forward, one arm still outstretched.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ she asked cautiously. He was still holding the gun.

  ‘Lauren. Please, you have to—’

  BAM! His head exploded with pain again, and once more images flashed in his head. Images of places, people, moments. He was not sure he recognised them all, but they were gone before they could be examined.