The box he opened, chosen at random, contained neatly arranged smaller boxes, each of which held a roll of microfilm. It occurred to Pittman that SEM REP possibly meant semester report and that the numbers referred to the fall and spring sessions of each school year—the fall of 1949, for example, and the spring of 1950. The next school year would begin in the fall of 1950 and continue to the spring of 1951, thus the overlapping numbers—49–50, 50–51. Over the years, the accumulation of documents had become difficult to store, not to mention a fire hazard, so the pages had been transferred to microfilm, convenient for the school but a major frustration for Pittman.
What am I supposed to do, steal the rolls for the years the grand counselors attended Grollier? I still wouldn’t be able to read them.
Unless you take them to a library that has a microfilm reader.
But the rolls I steal might not have the information I need. I can’t leave here until…
Wait a minute. There wouldn’t be microfilm if there wasn’t a…
Pittman recalled from his previous visit that a bulky object covered by a cloth had stood on a table in a corner to the right of the door. Its shape was distinctive. He shifted toward it, pulled off the cloth, and found, as he had hoped, a microfilm reader. When he turned it on, he didn’t know which made him more nervous—the hum of the machine’s fan or the glow on its screen. He went back to the boxes, checked labels, and sorted among rolls of microfilm, soon finding one for 31–32. He attached it to the spools on the machine, wound the microfilm past the machine’s light and its magnifying lens, and studied what appeared on the screen.
What he squinted at was a class list and final grades for students in Ancient History I. None of the grand counselors’ names was on the list. He spooled forward through individual reports about various students, reached Classical Literature I, and again was frustrated to discover that none of the grand counselors had been in that course.
At this rate, it’ll take me hours to read the entire roll. There’s got to be a more efficient way to…
Ancient History I? Classical Literature I? The numeric designation implied that there were later sections of those courses, Pittman thought—II, III, maybe IV. Heat rushed into his stomach as he understood. Grollier was a four-year prep school. The grand counselors had been juniors in 1931–1932. They would be in the class reports for juniors, three-quarters through the roll.
Pittman swiftly turned the roll forward, ignoring classes marked II, reaching III, and immediately slowing. He found a course in British History in which all the grand counselors were registered and had received top grades. He found a number of other courses—British Literature, European History, Greek Philosophy, and Latin—in which the grand counselors had also been registered and received top grades. But in none of those classes did he find anyone named Duncan.
He spooled onward to a course in Political Science, and immediately his attention was engaged: While the other courses had contained numerous students, this course contained only six—the five grand counselors, plus a student named Derrick Meecham.
Pittman hesitated. When he and Jill had separated the yearbooks, hers had been for 1929–1932, his for 1933–1936. As he had learned, the grand counselors had graduated in 1933. But it now seemed to him that when he had concentrated on the M category, looking for Millgate’s name, he hadn’t come across any reference for a student named Meecham in the 1933 yearbook.
He knew he could be wrong. All the same…
He spooled forward to the spring semester for that course, and now he frowned with puzzlement. The roster had dropped from six names to five.
Derrick Meecham was no longer enrolled.
Why? Had Meecham gotten sick? His grade from the previous semester had been an A, so he couldn’t have found the course so difficult that he’d dropped it. Besides, Pittman had the suspicion that at Grollier, students didn’t have the option of dropping courses. Rather, Grollier dropped students.
Then why! Pittman thought again. He became more convinced that his memory hadn’t failed him, that Derrick Meecham had, in fact, not been in the yearbook for the following year. Pittman rubbed the back of his neck. His gaze wandered to the bottom of the screen, where the course’s instructor had signed the grade report, and suddenly he felt as if he had touched an exposed electrical wire, for the instructor’s ornate signature seemed to come into focus. Pittman tried to control his breathing as he stared at the name.
Duncan Kline.
Jesus, Pittman thought. Duncan hadn’t been a student. He’d been a teacher. That was the connection with Grollier. Duncan Kline had been Millgate’s teacher. All of them. He had taught all the grand counselors.
13
A noise made Pittman stiffen. Despite the whir of the fan on the microfilm machine, he heard footsteps on the stairs beyond the door. Angry voices rapidly approached.
Startled, he shut off the machine.
“… can’t believe you didn’t leave someone on guard.”
“But the two of them left. I made sure.”
The voices became louder.
“Were they followed?”
“To the edge of campus.”
“Stupid…”
“It’s a good thing we flew up here.”
“The outside door was still locked. That proves the records are safe.”
“It proves nothing.”
Lights came on in the hallway outside the door. Their illumination glowed through the opaque window. The shadows of men loomed beyond it.
“I took the yearbooks they were looking at.”
“But what else might they have come back to look at?”
Someone tried to turn the knob on the door.
“It’s locked.”
“Yes, I secured that door, as well. I told you no one’s been here.”
“Just get out your key and unlock the damned door.”
Pittman’s chest cramped. He couldn’t get enough air. In desperation, he swung toward the murky room, trying to figure out where he could hide, how he could stop the men from finding him.
But he remembered how the room had looked during daylight. There’d been no other door. There was nothing to hide behind. If he tried to conceal himself beneath a table, he’d be found at once.
The only option was…
The windows. As he heard a key scraping in the lock, a voice saying, “Come on, hurry,” Pittman rushed to a window, raised its blind, freed its lock, and shoved the window upward.
“Stop,” one of the voices in the hallway said. “I heard something.”
” Somebody’s in there.”
Bennett’s unmistakable nasally voice said, “What are you doing with those guns?”
“Get out of the way.”
Pittman shoved his head out the window, staring down. He had hoped that there might be something beneath the window to break his fall, but at the bottom of the two-story drop, there was nothing except a flower garden.
“When I throw the door open, you go first. Duck to the left. Pete’ll go straight ahead. I’ll take the right.”
Pittman studied the leafless ivy that clung to the side of the building. The vines felt dry and brittle. Nonetheless, he had to take the chance. He squirmed out the window, clung to the ivy, and began to climb down, hoping that there weren’t other men outside in the darkness.
“On three.”
Pittman climbed down faster. The ivy to which he clung made a crunching noise and began to separate from the bricks and mortar.
Above him, he heard a crash, the door being thrust open. Simultaneously the ivy fully separated from the wall. As Pittman dropped, his stomach soaring, his hands scrabbled against the wall, clawing for a grip on other strands of ivy. The fingers on his bandaged left hand were awkward, but those on his right hand snagged onto vines. At once those strands snapped free from the wall, and he dropped farther, grabbing still other ivy, jolting onto the ground, falling backward, desperately bending his knees, rolling.
“There!”
a man yelled from the window above him.
Pittman scrambled to his feet and raced toward the cover of the rear of the next building. Something kicked up grass next to him. He heard the muffled, fist-into-a-pillow report from a sound-suppressed gunshot.
Adrenaline made his stomach seem on fire. Needing to discourage them from shooting again, he spun, raised his .45, and fired. In the silence of the night, the roar of the shot was deafening. His bullet struck the upper part of the window, shattering glass.
“Jesus!”
“Get down!”
“Outside! He can’t go far on foot! Stop him!”
Pittman fired again, not expecting to hit anybody but wanting anxiously to make a commotion. The more confusion, the better. Already lights were going on in dormitory windows.
He raced past bushes, rounded the back corner of the next building, and tried to orient himself in the darkness. How the hell do I get out of here? He left the cover of the building, running toward the murky open meadow. A bullet whizzed past him from behind. He ran harder. Suddenly a shadow darted to his left, someone running parallel to him. He fired. In response, another bullet whizzed past, from his left. A car engine roared. Headlights gleamed, speeding toward the meadow ahead of him.
With no other direction available, Pittman veered sharply to his right. He zigzagged and veered again as a third bullet parted air near his head. In the darkness, he’d become disoriented. Dismayed, he found that he was running back toward the school. The rear of the buildings was still in shadow, but the commotion was causing more lights to come on all the time. Feeling boxed in, he took the only course available, charged up to the back door of the nearest building, prayed that its lock hadn’t been engaged, yanked at the door, and felt a surge of hope as it opened. He darted in, shut and locked the door, felt the impact of a bullet against it, and turned to sprint along a hallway.
But he’d bought only a few moments of protection. When he showed himself outside the front of the building…
Can’t hide in here. They’ll search until they…
What am I going to do?
This building was evidently a dormitory. He heard students on the upper floors, their voices distressed.
Witnesses. Need more witnesses. Need more commotion.
He swung toward a fire-alarm switch behind a glass plate and hammered the butt of his .45 against the glass. The plate shattered with surprising ease. Trembling, he reached in past shards and pulled the switch.
The alarm was shrill, reverberating off walls, causing picture frames to tremble. Despite its intensity, Pittman sensed the greater commotion on the floors above him, urgent footsteps, frightened voices, a lot of them. A welter of shadows in the stairway became students in pajamas scurrying to get outside.
Pittman hid his weapon and waved his right arm in fierce encouragement, as if he was their benefactor, his only interest their safety.
“Hurry up! The place is on fire!”
The students surged past, and Pittman went with them, storming into the arc lights that blazed in the night. He saw gunmen to his right but knew that they didn’t dare shoot with so many students in the way, and as the students dispersed in turmoil, Pittman darted toward the next building on the left, lunging inside.
There, he again broke the glass that shielded the fire-alarm switch. Activating the alarm, wincing from the ferocity of the noise, he rushed back in the direction he had come, toward the front door.
They’ll expect me to go out the back. They’ll try to cut me off, some of them coming through here while the others wait in the darkness behind the building.
He pressed himself against the wall next to the front door, and at once it was banged open, gunmen charging into the building. In the same instant, students came scurrying down the stairwell. Amid the confusion as the gunmen and the students collided and tried to pass one another, Pittman scrambled out the front door, students swirling around him. But instead of continuing the pattern he’d established to race toward the next building on this side of the square, he took what he felt was his best chance and sprinted directly across the square, veering among students who milled sleepily, their bare feet obviously cold, frost coming out of their mouths in the glare from the arc lights. He heard the fire alarms and students swarming out of adjacent buildings and gunmen shouting, chasing him.
Even allowing for his being out of condition, he didn’t think he’d ever run so fast. His jogging shoes hit the ground perfectly, his legs stretched, his sweat suit clung to his movements as it had so many mornings when he had gone jogging before heading to work—before Jeremy had gotten sick. He felt as if his increasing effort was the distillation of every race he had ever entered, every marathon he had ever endured. Inhaling deep lungfuls of air, pumping his legs faster, stretching them farther, he surged between buildings on the opposite side of the square and kept racing into the darkness behind them.
This was the direction from which he had initially come down off the ridge and across the meadow, approaching the campus. In a frenzy of exertion, he managed to increase speed, spurred by the buzz of another bullet parting air near his side. They’ve crossed the square, he thought. They saw where I went and followed me.
From the square, he heard the roar of cars. They’ll soon drive behind these buildings. There’s no way I can outrun…
He changed direction just in time, almost banging into the side of a building. His eyes, stung by the glare of the arc lights in the square, were only now adjusting to the darkness, and in confusion, he took a moment to realize that he’d reached the stables.
Men shouted behind him. A bullet struck the stone side of the building. Pittman whirled, went down on his left knee, propped his right arm on his other knee to steady his trembling aim, and fired toward the men pursuing him. They cursed and dove to the ground. A car fishtailed around a building, its headlights blazing, and Pittman fired toward them, missing the headlights but shattering the windshield.
Immediately he ducked back, knowing that the muzzle flashes from his pistol had made him a target. More bullets struck the side of the building, splintering stone. From somewhere on the other side, horses whinnied in panic. Pittman swung around a corner, approaching them. He reached a fence and opened its gate, scrambling back as horses charged through, escaping into the night. The more confusion, the better. He had to keep distracting his pursuers.
Then racing across the horse pen toward the opposite fence, he heard the roar of the cars speeding toward the stables. Have to get ahead of them.
A horse had stopped on the other side of the fence. With no other choice, Pittman clambered onto the rails. He’d once written a story about the stables near Central Park. He’d taken a few lessons. His instructor had emphasized: “When afraid of falling, keep your legs squeezed as tightly as you can around the horse’s sides and clamp your arms around the horse’s neck.”
Pittman did exactly that now, leaping off the fence, landing on the horse, startling it, clinging as it reared, but he was prepared and the horse wasn’t. Compacting his muscles in desperation, he managed to stay on, and now the horse wasn’t rearing. It was galloping, hoping to throw off its burden. Pittman clung harder, jolted by the horse’s rapid hoofbeats. He leaned so severely forward, clutching the horse’s bobbing neck, that he didn’t think he provided a silhouette for the gunmen.
From behind, the headlights of several rapidly approaching cars lit up the meadow around and ahead of him. The roar of the engines and the noise of the galloping horse were too great for Pittman to be able to hear if bullets whizzed past him, but he had to assume that his pursuers were shooting at him, and he furiously hoped that the uneven meadow, its bumps and rises and dips, would throw off the gunmen’s aim in the darkness.
Without warning, the horse changed direction. Unprepared, Pittman felt his grip slipping, his body shifting to the right. About to topple, he clamped his legs so tightly around the horse that the pain of the effort made him wince. His rigid arms completely encircled the hors
e’s neck. The cars sped nearer, bumping across the meadow, their headlights bobbing, gleaming, as the horse changed direction again, but this time Pittman anticipated, and although his body shifted, he felt in control.
He was wrong. Deeper shadows loomed before him, suddenly illuminated by the headlights. The forest seemed to materialize out of nothing, a wall of trees and bushes forming an apparently unbreachable barrier that so startled the horse, it reared up, at the same time twisting sideways, and Pittman’s grip was finally jerked free. As the horse’s front hoofs landed heavily and the animal twisted again, more sharply, to avoid colliding with the trees, Pittman flew in the opposite direction. Frantically praying that the horse wouldn’t kick backward, he struck the ground, flipped, and rolled, the wind knocked out of him, the pistol in his jacket pocket slamming against his ribs.
He rolled farther, urgently trying to avoid the panicked horse, to save himself from being trampled. Immediately the horse galloped away, and Pittman faced the headlights speeding toward him. He stumbled to his feet, struggled to breathe, and lurched toward bushes, stooping to conceal himself. Bullets snapped twigs and shredded bark from trees. He crouched lower, hurrying among the thickly needled branches of pine trees. Bullets walloped into trees and sliced needles that fell upon him. Hearing car doors being opened, he spun, saw the headlights through the trees, and fired, surprising himself that he actually shattered one of the lights.
At once his pistol no longer worked. In dismay, he pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The .45 felt off balance in his hand. Its slide remained back, its firing chamber open. Heart sinking, he understood. He had used all his ammunition. He had more in his jacket pocket, but his pursuers were so close that there wasn’t time for him to reload, and he didn’t have confidence in his ability to remove the pistol’s magazine and refill it in the dark.
Desperate Measures Page 21