The Pawn

by Steven James

  Calm, down. Tessa, calm down.

  Outthink him. That’s what she needed to do. Stall. Until she could get free.

  She nodded. “Of course.” Tried to tug her hands free, failed, but felt something in the back pocket of her jeans. What was that?

  Her razor blade.

  His eyes narrowed. “Tell me.”

  Boethius . . . Boethius . . . the name was Latin . . . masculine.

  “A Roman,” she said. “He was that famous Roman guy.” He had to be famous, after all, or else the killer wouldn’t have even bothered to ask.

  “Yes,” he said suspiciously. “And what did he write about?”

  She slid out the blade and began working it against the tape binding her wrists as she tried to figure out who in the world Boethius could be.

  Ralph called off the raid. “What do you want us to do then?”

  “Hang on a second.” I was still groggy.

  The capsule. You swallowed half of that capsule.

  I had no idea what kind of drug was in there. Something powerful. I glanced at the bodies of the dead cult members scattered around me.

  “Give me a shot of adrenaline,” I said to the doctor who had finally responded to Ralph’s call for help.

  “We need to get you to the hospital,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I splashed a handful of water from the fountain into my face. “I gotta find my daughter.”

  Ralph walked over. “Do as he says, doc,” he thundered. “Do it now.”

  Reluctantly, the doctor gave me the shot.

  I stared at my computer screen. “Tell them to wait for me,” I told Ralph under my breath. “Tell them I’m on my way but not to make a move until I get there.”

  “But no one is supposed to leave the hotel—”

  I pulled out the necklace and spoke in an urgent whisper. “Ralph, he’s got Tessa.”

  “You’ve been exposed.”

  “Marcie will help us, you said so yourself.”

  “Pat—”

  “Ralph, he’s going to torture her, and then he’s going to kill her. I have to stop him. You know I do. I’m going.”

  His face wrinkled up, then turned to steel. “Yeah,” he said at last. “OK. Go. I’ll tell them to wait for you.”

  I pocketed the necklace and slipped into the hotel kitchen, figuring there’d be a delivery entrance I could use that wouldn’t be heavily guarded. After all, most of the guards were busy controlling the panicking guests. Thankfully I only met one security guard on my way. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “you’ve been infected. I can’t let you out—” My fist found his jaw. He fell to the ground.

  “Nothing personal,” I said, stepping past him. “But this concerns my daughter.”

  I pushed the door open and ran through the driving snow to my car.

  Tessa thought and thought hard.

  The guy said Boethius was a writer. OK, so what did he write about? . . . What would a Roman guy write about? The wars? Was he a historian? A philosopher? Playwright? Had to be one of the four, really there weren’t that many other choices, not from some stupid Roman author.

  Then she noticed a bracelet dangling from the guy’s wrist. It had a word inscribed on it: “Sophia.”

  Sophia means wisdom . . . A philosopher, maybe? . . . Was Boethius a Roman philosopher?

  Her hands were almost free. Almost.

  “Wisdom,” she said. “He wrote about wisdom.”

  The man gently stroked the back of her head. “I’m impressed.”

  Then his fingers intertwined in her hair. She cried out. He pulled her head back by her hair, exposing her throat. His voice seeped into her ears. “And what is the secret to true wisdom, Tessa?”

  Oh no. Now he had her. The secret to true wisdom? Tessa had no idea.

  The secret to true wisdom . . .

  She tried to speak, couldn’t. He loosened his grip slightly.

  Say something. Guess!

  “Love,” she whispered. “The secret is love.”

  “Close,” he said. “The answer is pain.”

  Sevren curled his lips into a dark smile and told the girl, “Of course we’ll get more into that lesson when we get to the house.” Then he climbed into the cab of the ambulance and pulled onto the road to take her to his workshop.

  There. Her hands were free.

  Now for her legs.

  Almost as soon as I’d peeled out of the parking lot I realized Sevren wouldn’t head home. Of course not; it would be too predictable, too obvious. He always tried to stay one step ahead.

  So he would have another place to take the women. But where?

  I thought through the geo profile, the chessboard.

  I was still missing something . . .

  The tempo and timeline of the crimes . . . the crime distribution pattern . . . road infrastructure . . . the time-benefit ratios . . . optimal travel routes. Asheville is shaped like a football, outlined by interstates 26 and 40 . . . bodies in three states . . .

  The pieces were scattered all over the board . . . There was no pattern! None . . . The sites were scattered all over . . .

  Except for one place.

  Nothing happened in that one place.

  Exactly.

  The answer wasn’t where the pieces were placed—it was where they weren’t. All the locations, all the chess pieces, were clustered around one location where nothing happened. No murders. No abductions. No dump sites. Everything else orbited around this void, this abyss on the map. He’d tried to hide his tracks but left the biggest one of all. By trying so hard to stay away from his anchor point, he’d shown me right where it was.

  Warrior’s Peak.

  I whipped the car around and aimed it up into the mountains.

  By the time Tessa had freed her legs, she’d made a decision. There was no way she was going to let him get her back to his house. She could only imagine what he would do to her there. She crawled to the back doors and tried opening them, but they’d been locked from the outside. She threw her weight against them. Nothing.

  No, she had to get out. She had to. Even if she died in a car accident, she couldn’t let him get her to his home.

  Tessa looked around the back of the ambulance. Her eyes fell on one of the huge first-aid kits. She flipped it open, pulled out a pair of razor-sharp scissors, and headed for the cab of the ambulance.

  Icy snow bit into the windshield as I cruised up the serpentine road toward Warrior’s Peak. All the state troopers were looking in the wrong place, but there was no way for me to get word to them. No phone with me, no radio in my car. Maybe they could follow the homing beacon on the mic patch I was still wearing. I wasn’t sure how far it would broadcast. I could only hope.

  As much as I wanted to race up the mountain, I had to be careful. The visibility was low, and the road was spotted with patches of black ice. Twice my tires lost their grip on the pavement, and I almost went skidding off into the gorge.

  Then I saw the ambulance about a quarter mile ahead of me, but it was swerving back and forth like the driver had lost control.

  What’s going on?

  I accelerated.

  The adrenaline was wearing off. I was feeling nauseous again, sleepy. My vision grew blurry. I couldn’t trust my senses. I needed to get to her fast.

  I was only about a hundred meters behind them when it happened.

  The ambulance spun sideways, glided along the icy road, smashed through the guardrail, and then disappeared off the edge of the cliff.

  No, that couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t be real. I was seeing things. Hallucinating.

  I crushed the accelerator to the floor, slicing through the snow, through a dream, through a new reality I was trying to construct around myself, and by the time I reached the spot where they’d gone over I’d almost convinced myself it hadn’t happened, that I was only seeing things.

  Almost.

  But when I jumped out of the car and staggered to the edge of the precipice, I saw that i
t was real after all.

  Headlights stared up at me from three meters below. My daughter and the killer were caught on a ledge. “Tessa!” I couldn’t keep the terror out of my voice. “Are you OK?”

  Sevren’s voice came back to me, like poison blackening the day. “Patrick, is that you? I should have known you’d find—” But before he could finish his sentence the ambulance tipped back over the outcropping and dropped into the heart of the gorge, encased in the screams of my daughter.

  86

  “No!” I howled.

  I listened for the sickening crunch of metal on rock or the roaring screech of the vehicle tumbling down the cliff, but it didn’t come.

  I leaned forward but couldn’t see much. I scrambled a few meters down the cliff, toed out onto a ledge using stray roots for handholds, bent over, and then I saw them. The ambulance was caught in the branches of a towering fir tree that jutted out about twenty meters farther down the cliff. Beyond the tree, the gorge dropped off a hundred meters straight down into the valley carved by a hopeless Cherokee girl’s tears.

  “Tessa!”

  “Patrick,” she called. “Help me, Patrick!”

  Something powerful and deep stirred within me. Something bright and wild and right. Nothing else matters. You have to save her.

  “Throw down a rope,” yelled the Illusionist.

  “He’s hurt, Patrick. His leg!”

  “Shut up!” And then a smacking sound and a feeble cry.

  “Keep your hands off her!” Fire rose inside of me. The beast of anger roared, broke loose, ran wild.

  Even though the snow had let up a little, I couldn’t scramble down the cliff to help her—it was too steep and icy for anyone to free climb. No time to drive around looking for help.

  “Drop a rope,” Sevren yelled. “You have gear in your car. I saw it when you were at Abrams’s house.”

  I tried to think. Everything was becoming fuzzy again. “She comes up first,” I yelled.

  Laughter, dark and vicious. “I go first, or I start to play with her while I wait.” I thought of what he’d done to the other women before killing them. “I have a knife,” he said. “I’m good with a knife.”

  “Help me!”

  “All right!” I heaved myself up and over the ledge. “Don’t touch her. I’m getting a rope!”

  I hurried to the car and pulled out my climbing gear. His voice found me. It was calmer now, full of dark desire. I imagined him eyeing Tessa as he spoke: “Hurry, Patrick. I’m not a patient man.”

  A river of emotion churned through me. Anger. Fear. Love. Hatred. I had no idea which would win. Somewhere behind me I heard the tree creak and a branch snap off and crash into the gorge.

  Hurry!

  I took off my gun and laid it on the hood, pulled on my harness, grabbed some webbing, and scanned the area for something to tie into. Some kind of an anchor. Anything. There were no trees close by. I had to hurry.

  The only thing available was the guardrail, but a long section of it lay crumpled from the ambulance’s impact. No other choice. I tied the webbing around a section of the railing that still appeared to be intact, threw a carabiner through it, and clipped the rope into that. It was dicey, but it would hold our body weight. At least I hoped it would. No time to wonder. Just time to trust.

  I pushed the pack with my other rope and the rest of my gear out of the way, and then attached a couple of prussiks and ascenders to my harness’s gear loops.

  “Hurry!” Sevren yelled. “Or I start giving her lessons. Drop a rope and some ascenders.”

  I wasn’t about to back down. Tessa was the only reason I was willing to help him, and he knew it. If he killed her, there was nothing to motivate me. “I’m coming down for her, Sevren. Or you get nothing.”

  A short silence and then a blinding shriek that sliced all the way through me. “Patrick!” It was a cry of acute pain and final terror. “I just cut her, Patrick. Cut her good. The brachial artery, right there on the inside of the arm. Oh, it looks deep. It’s spurting. Based on my medical training, I’d say she has about four minutes before she bleeds out. I’m pretty good at estimating time of death. Trust me.”

  Dear God, please. No, no, no.

  Tears of white-hot anger blurred my eyes. “Press your hand against it, Tessa,” I yelled. “Listen to me! You have to stop the bleeding!”

  Hurry, hurry, no time.

  No time.

  I grabbed two extra harnesses and clipped them to my harness. Then I sprinted toward the edge of the cliff and launched myself away from the ridge and into the gorge. The rope sailed through my brake hand. I was on the brink of losing control and freefalling into the valley when I managed to catch myself, and control my descent. I tapped my feet off the rock face, hopped over a rocky overhang, and zoomed headfirst toward the ambulance.

  “Tessa, I’m coming. Hold your hand against the cut!”

  87

  A moment later I arrived at the ambulance and locked off, so I could hang in place. I stepped gingerly onto the hood, trying to use my weight to steady the vehicle. It was tilted but still horizontal enough for me to stand on the hood. Only then did I realize I’d left my gun sitting on the roof of my car at the top of the cliff.

  The windshield stared at me like a giant splintered eye. A web of spidery cracks withered across it, emanating from the place on the driver’s side where Sevren’s head had smashed into it. He stared through the glass at me like a snake eyeing a mouse on the other side of the aquarium. A smear of blood oozed down his forehead, making his face look wild, primal. Beside him I saw Tessa, pale, crying softly, her left arm awash in blood. Her right hand pressing against the wound.

  “Give me a harness,” said Sevren.

  “I’m taking her up.”

  “OK, let’s discuss it then.” He looked at his watch and then at Tessa’s arm. “A couple minutes from now, it won’t really matter, will it?”

  Anger boiling. Boiling.

  “All right. All right.”

  Tessa groaned softly.

  I cursed him in my heart, but I didn’t say anything for fear he might hurt Tessa worse. I lowered myself toward the driver’s door. The impact from the fall had jarred it open, and it swung loose on broken hinges. I handed him a harness, and he started pulling it on. His face wrenched in pain as he did. Tessa said his leg is hurt. I saw a bloody scissors on the floor of the cab and a crimson stain spreading across his pants leg.

  Good for you, Tessa.

  She was squeezing her arm, stopping the flow of blood.

  “Hang in there,” I told her. “It’s going to be OK.” She nodded. She looked so fragile. So broken. “I love you,” I said. “I love you, Tessa Ellis.”

  He clipped in. “All right. Hand me the ascenders.”

  I did.

  Think, Pat. Think!

  At that point we were both attached to the rope, but I was above him, balancing on the hood, locking off the rope with my right hand. He wouldn’t be able to ascend until I got out of the way. “Now,” he whispered, and seemed to be weaker from the effort of struggling with his leg. “Get out of the way and then unclip.”

  C’mon, Pat. Think. Do something.

  Then he added, “Toss that other harness, or I’ll sit here for a while.”

  “You have to let me take her—”

  Tessa moaned and slumped back against the door.

  “You’re killing her,” he said softly. “It won’t be long now.”

  I dropped the other harness into the gorge. Now I had no way to take Tessa up the rope. I had no idea what to do; she was bleeding to death within reach of me, yet I was powerless to help her.

  I slid onto the hood and unclipped. The storm had picked up again, and the metal was slippery with snow. I was staring through the cracked windshield, just inches away from my daughter, watching her die. I heard a weak cry and then she said, “I love you, Patrick.” Then her eyes rolled back. She went unconscious.

  “No!”

  Sevren lau
ghed as he eased out the door. “Looks like you were too slow once again, Dr. Bowers.”

  88

  “I’m coming for you,” I said to him. “Wherever you go, I’ll find you.” I was getting dizzy again. The world was spinning. Sounds were eating into colors. The drugs. Oh no. Not now. The scent of a thousand snowflakes overwhelmed me. If only I hadn’t left my gun on the car.

  “So, then.” A smile slithered across his face. “A rematch.”

  He slid one of the ascenders up the rope.

  Nausea swarmed over me.

  “I think I’ll pay Agent Jiang a visit tonight . . .” he said.

  Everything was a blur. You can’t let him get up that cliff.

  “I have a couple lessons I’d like to share with her.”

  Get him closer.

  I whispered to him.

  He stopped. “What?” he said.

  He loves to control others. Lien-hua said he has to be in control. I said it again, softly, ever so softly. Then I smiled and laughed at him.

  He leaned toward me. “What did you say?”

  I was struggling for breath. I felt myself slipping toward the edge of the hood. Toward the edge of the world. I reached back behind me for something to hold onto. Nothing. But instead of thinking about how I was going to die, all I could think of was how I’d let Tessa down. Let Christie down.

  His leg is hurt.

  My fingertips found the ridged outline of the windshield, and I curled them around the thin lip of metal, willing every pull-up I’d ever done into the tips of my fingers.

  I whispered once again. He leaned close and sneered. “You’re pathetic. Begging like a little baby. I expected more out of you. Good-bye, Patrick Bowers.”

  Yes, he was close enough.

  This time I didn’t whisper: “Checkmate!” With one motion I twisted my body toward him, swiveling my leg and smashing my boot full force into the wound on his leg. His scream was bright and searing and very satisfying. It was a good, solid, bone-crunching kick that even Lien-hua would have been proud of. I’d hit him with his brake hand loose on the rope, and he hobbled backward, teetered on the edge of the hood for a moment, and then spun off into the valley. I heard the rope sailing through his Figure-8 and waited to hear him rip off the end of the line and plummet to his death, but somehow he was able to grab the searing rope in his palms.