MatchUp

by Lee Child

  “Liz Sansborough, where are you?” Max’s voice boomed. “You’re dead. Do you hear me? Dead.”

  Shoving the iPhone back into her pocket, she spotted a rotting log ahead. Now she wanted Max to hear her, so she ran hard, pounding through twigs and leaves. Then she yelled, “Stay away from me, Max.”

  To the right, a steep slope descended into the mist. At the log she dropped onto her back, braced her feet against it, and used the strength in her legs to push. The sound of the log rolling over the slope was at first hushed in the mist, but then it hit a rock and bounced off an unseen tree, the noise exploding as it crashed down into brush.

  “I’m coming to get you,” Max shouted.

  She moved swiftly away in the opposite direction, into the trees again, leaping silently from one bed of pine needles to the next. She could hear him pounding down the slope, grunting and swearing and calling her name. Pauses told her he must have slid or fallen.

  She smiled.

  Hurrying as quietly as she could, she rounded an enormous boulder and saw the stream. It was about five feet wide and clear as glass. Desperately thirsty, she fell to her knees on the mossy bank. Cupping her hands, she scooped up water and drank. Then she splashed her face, the cold water, though stinging, like a tonic to her bruises and cuts. Wiping her hands on her jogging jacket, she took out the iPhone and touched the map icon again. No response. She frowned, checked the charge, saw it was good, and realized she had no reception. No surprise. She was out in the middle of nowhere. She had to get back to the cabin where there was wireless.

  The forest was starting to come awake from the shock of human intruders. Unseen animals skittered through the underbrush. Birds complained in the treetops. The stream sounded extraloud. She’d heard it when she’d first arrived at the log cabin and realized it could lead her back there.

  Abruptly, she heard Max searching for her, coming closer. Even in the mist, the yellow of her jogging suit would be obvious. The Rambo movies that Max and Rudy had talked about flashed through her mind, reminding her of the way the character always blended with the forest. Grabbing handfuls of mud, she smeared them over her face and her jogging suit. Soon her clothing was a monotonous brown.

  She yanked the hood up and tied it under her chin, hiding her red hair.

  Feeling the pressure of time, she ran along the moss and sand that edged the stream. She listened for Max, but he’d become silent once more.

  That made her nervous.

  With luck, he’d slipped and fallen, perhaps hitting his head on a rock on his way down into the hollow where he thought she’d run. If her luck were really good, the bastard was dead.

  But she wouldn’t count on it.

  Creeping through the mist, she reached a stand of beeches.

  She slowed and crouched. Listened. Watched.

  Then took out the iPhone and studied the screen.

  Finally, reception.

  MARTA LISTENED AS THE LODGE’S phone rang and rang.

  She didn’t understand why no one was answering. Had she used the wrong number?

  She pressed End.

  Again, she called the number for the lodge, this time double-checking that she hadn’t made a mistake.

  One of several errors.

  Nick would be furious.

  It was her fault that he’d been arrested. He should never have been at the warehouse where the stolen prescription painkillers were delivered. She’d neglected to arrange for a go-between to pick up the money they were promised—so huge an amount that Nick himself had driven impatiently to the warehouse to retrieve it, only to be grabbed by the FBI.

  And that wasn’t the only screwup he would blame her for.

  If she couldn’t make this right, she didn’t want to be around when he got out of prison.

  After the twentieth time the lodge’s phone rang, she impatiently broke the transmission and called Rudy instead of the lodge.

  FEELING A SURGE OF HOPE, Liz touched the screen’s map icon and saw a green dot that revealed her location in the middle of a large, unmarked rural area. She expanded the image and discovered an orange line indicating a road, along with a number for Highway 55. She expanded the image even more, revealing the name of a town—Marsdon—southwest of her.

  Her fingers trembling, she started to type a text message and let Simon know where she was. But all she managed was ESCAPED. OFF H55 N. Music suddenly blared from the cell phone.

  Damn.

  It sounded like the theme from the damned Rambo movies. The trumpets startled her so much that she nearly dropped the phone, touching the Send button before she intended to. As the rousing anthem reverberated through the mist, she flipped at the mute switch.

  The sudden silence unnerved her.

  Every animal in the forest seemed to have become paralyzed. Birds no longer complained in the trees.

  Max didn’t make a sound either.

  No way he couldn’t have heard the music.

  RUBBING HIS SIDE FROM WHERE he’d tumbled down a slope, Max stalked through the forest.

  Abruptly he heard music. Trumpets.

  Rambo music.

  Then he realized it was the ringtone on Rudy’s phone. To the left. For a fierce moment Max almost charged toward it, but at once the trumpets ended, their echo subsiding into the mist.

  He found an unexpected stillness inside him.

  What would the big guy do?

  Would he charge ahead?

  No damned way.

  The scum he’d hunted never knew where he was.

  Rambo just struck out of nowhere and . . .

  Listening for any sound that Sansborough might make, he changed his phone to mute.

  Then he texted Marta.

  BITCH ESCAPED. RUDY’S DEAD. HUNTING HER.

  After studying the ground ahead of him, he stepped onto soft pine needles—exactly what Rambo would do—and moved silently toward where the music had come from.

  MARTA GAPED AT THE MESSAGE.

  BITCH ESCAPED.

  Without the woman, she had no way to rescue Nick. No way to prove that she could make up for her mistakes. No way to keep from being the target of Nick’s fury. She desperately needed help, but the rest of the gang was in Texas, working on two hijack jobs that she hoped the police would blame on a rival gang—an idea that she hadn’t told Nick about and for which he would surely now punish her.

  She pulled a .40-caliber Sig Sauer from a drawer, made sure that its twelve-round magazine was fully loaded and that a round was in the firing chamber. She scooped an extra magazine from the drawer, shoved it and the pistol into her purse, and hurried from the office.

  IN THE DARKNESS OF THE trunk, Nick struggled to breathe as shallowly as possible. The stench of the spare tire and oily rags made him sick. He thought he smelled the bitterness of engine exhaust also, but if that were true, surely he’d be dead by now. His arms ached from the tight angle at which his wrists were duct-taped behind him, but no matter how much he squirmed, he couldn’t loosen the tape.

  Sweat streaked his forehead.

  A bump sent a jolt of pain through the swelling gashes on his face. He was as furious about the damage to his handsome features as he was about anything else that the bastard driving the car had done to him. But he was even more furious because Marta’s carelessness had gotten him into this mess.

  Your sister’s waiting for you, the man had said.

  And she’ll be sorry, he vowed.

  IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT SIMON blended with the rush of vehicles on the Beltway. Back at the safe house, the FBI agent had said that he wasn’t due to be relieved until nine tonight. So the police had no idea what happened and wouldn’t be looking for the car.

  In theory.

  He tried to figure the best way to arrange the exchange and get Liz back. As he visualized vantage points around the Lincoln Memorial, he heard the ping of a text message coming through. He snatched up his phone from the seat next to him.

  What he saw made him inhale sharply.
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  ESCAPED. OFF H55 N.

  From a sender named Rudy Voya.

  Who the hell is that? And where’s the rest of the message? The name’s Russian. Did Liz really escape, or was Marta playing with him? Trying to draw him and her brother away from Washington?

  Knowing that H55 was the scenic highway west of Washington, he made an abrupt decision and took the first exit that allowed him to speed in that direction.

  LIZ CONTINUED ALONG THE SOFT bank of the stream.

  The trickle of the water hid the few sounds she made, but it also hid any sounds from Max. With trembling fingers, she typed the rest of her message to Simon.

  NE OF MARSDON. A LODGE.

  The moment she sent it, she tightened her grip on the knife and struggled to get control of herself. So far, she’d merely been fleeing. But she remembered what her CIA instructors had taught her during training exercises at the Farm.

  If you’re on the run—in the city, in the countryside, it doesn’t matter—if you don’t have a plan, if you’re just reacting, you’re going to lose.

  Following the stream had the merit of giving her a course, but when she looked again at the map feature on her phone, she found an overhead photograph of the area. The stream meandered, sometimes curving back to the middle of the forest, where Max was surely searching for her. But if she veered from the stream with no landmarks to guide her, only the phone’s GPS would keep her from wandering in the mist—and not for long. The battery-charge indicator was at twenty percent.

  Soon the phone would be dead.

  How long until the sun went down? Could she hope to find her way out of here by then, or would she be forced to hide in the dark?

  The lodge.

  Earlier, without cell-phone reception, she’d thought about heading back there until she came within Wi-Fi range and could contact Simon. But now that she’d been able to send a text, her only thought had been to put as much distance as she could between her and Max. It was counterintuitive for her to go back to the lodge. Max would never expect it. She thought about the weapons there and the communications equipment. She could lock the doors and send for help. The place looked like it had the strength of a bunker. Max and whoever came to help him wouldn’t be able to break in before the police arrived.

  Ready with the knife, she turned away from the stream, stepped warily over patches of leaves, and headed toward her best chance to survive.

  MAX RECALLED WHAT RAMBO HAD said in the second movie.

  The best weapon’s the human mind.

  Yeah, right.

  The guy’s got a body like a chunk of granite and he wants to talk about his mind. But he decided the advice was good. He didn’t know the first damned thing about chasing someone through a forest the way Rambo did, with his bow and arrow and knife like fucking Tarzan. It didn’t matter. All he needed to do was be smart.

  And use his phone.

  He assumed that, when the outburst of Rambo music had suddenly ended, it meant that Sansborough had put Rudy’s phone on mute. Not that it mattered. He and Rudy had each installed the “find” app on their phones, adding each other to the lists. When he opened the app and told it what to look for, son of a bitch, a map appeared. A dot showed that Rudy’s phone was to his left, heading toward the lodge.

  He knew what that meant.

  She was trying to get to a gun.

  He almost raced in that direction, but couldn’t do that without making a lot of noise and warning her.

  Be smart.

  He picked up a rock and hurled it high into the air, throwing it as far as he could, way beyond where he estimated Sansborough might be. The rock crashed down through mist-cloaked branches, snapping twigs, thumping onto the ground and bouncing. Its trajectory was almost straight down. He hoped it would make Sansborough unable to guess from which direction it had been thrown. He used that noise to hide any sounds that he himself made while he simultaneously moved parallel toward where Sansborough was.

  That’s smarter than Rambo.

  When he saw that the dot on his screen came to a stop in reaction to the noise from the rock, he grinned and hurled another in that direction, high and far. Again, he used the crashing, snapping noise to prevent her from hearing him step carefully toward the lodge.

  Definitely.

  Smarter than Rambo.

  He tossed another rock.

  With luck, he’d be waiting when she crossed the parking lot.

  WHEN SIMON SAW THE HIGHWAY 55 road marker, he resisted the urge to drive faster, needing all his strength of will to continue to blend with the stream of traffic. If a policeman stopped him and wondered why he was driving a car that wasn’t registered to him, if the policeman used that excuse to search the vehicle and looked in the trunk, it would all be over.

  His phone chimed.

  Another text coming through.

  Again he felt pressure in his chest as he looked toward the seat next to him and saw that Rudy Voya had sent a new message.

  NE OF MARSDON. A LODGE.

  ANOTHER ROCK CRASHED THROUGH UNSEEN branches beyond Liz, breaking twigs and crunching down onto leaves.

  The echo reverberated through the mist.

  The afternoon’s chill sank deeper into her, aggravated by her growing fear about whatever trick Max was planning. Obviously he was using the distraction of the rocks to hide any sounds he made. She doubted that he could have gotten ahead of her.

  Which meant he was throwing rocks from behind her.

  That tactic could work for her too.

  She slipped the phone back into her pocket, freeing her right hand so that she could pick up a rock. She turned and threw it high in the air, imitating what Max had done. Maybe she’d get lucky and hit the bastard.

  At a minimum she hoped to confuse him.

  The rock struck an invisible branch and made more noise as it dropped past other branches. She used those precious seconds to risk the subtle sounds she couldn’t avoid, as she clutched the knife and crept onward.

  MAX FLINCHED FROM THE CRUNCHING sound that his shoe made on the gravel of the parking area. The forest had been a vague hulking presence in what was now a misty drizzle. Now all of a sudden there weren’t any shrouded trees ahead of him. He stepped back onto soft earth and inched quietly to the right toward where his phone showed that Sansborough wasn’t far from him.

  He thought he heard her moving past trees.

  But maybe not.

  It didn’t matter.