Lizzie and I both stared upward as the tower leaned toward us, tottered for a second on two wheels, and finally began to tumble back on top of the truck. The sniper’s balance couldn’t adjust to the rapid rocking. As the scaffolding fell he went flying over the safety rail in the opposite direction, flipping backward off the far side. We instinctively slid low in our seats to brace for the impact of the heavy frame on the roof of the passenger cab. But the concussion was minor; most of the frame missed the part of the truck where we were sitting.
A secondary shudder followed a second later. It came from below. The sniper’s body had passed under the truck’s frame.
I hit the brakes hard, and screamed, “Now!”
Lizzie and I had already choreographed our next move. The moment the truck stopped moving, we jumped out and starting running forward toward the eastern portal, making a rapid perusal of the inventory of available abandoned vehicles so that we could pick one for the next leg of our escape. Without consulting me, Lizzie sprinted ahead four cars and jumped into the right seat of a BMW M3.
It was a great choice. The car was a little rocket. I followed her onto the driver’s seat, found the key in the ignition, started the engine, popped the gearshift into first, turned the wheel hard left, and squealed through a gap in the orange cones into the closed lane. I accelerated through the remaining length of the tunnel, slowing once to dodge a terrified pedestrian, and once more to do a nifty slalom around the final scaffold.
By the time we were approaching the eastern portal I was already doing about eighty.
SIXTY-FOUR
At the first sign of electrical failure the tunnel administrators had undoubtedly closed both bores to traffic. Once smoke started to fill the eastbound lanes and drift out the exit portals, drivers stopped at the eastern slope entrance must have recognized that their wait to get through the tunnel was going to be a long one.
By the time Lizzie and I exited the eastern entrance to the westbound bore in the stolen M3, a couple of cops were already in place diverting vehicles that were lined up to enter the tunnel from the east into a U-turn that would permit them to go back down the hill and exit onto Loveland Pass, the sole alternative route in the vicinity over the Divide to the Western Slope. Seeing what was going on in front of us, I braked hard, slowing the M3 so that I could sneak into the orderly procession that was heading back down the hill. I feared a cop would stop us and ask how we’d managed to get out of the tunnel, but the one who saw us coming gave me a thumbs-up and waved us on. Most of the other cars in the queue joined the slowly crawling line to exit at the Loveland Pass off-ramp.
We didn’t. Lizzie and I had a different destination.
I moved into the left lane and maintained an approximation of the speed limit until we reached Silver Plume.
At that point, I let the M3 stretch her legs a little and I attacked the decline of the Georgetown hill as though I were still in the Porsche.
We were going to New Haven.
Initially I surmised that we would enjoy at least an hour’s cushion before the owner of the M3 realized that her car—the insurance card in the glove compartment identified the owner as Carrie Belvedere of Littleton—had been stolen. Before Carrie would be allowed back into the tunnel, at a minimum, power had to be restored. The source of the tunnel fire would need to be identified. The exhaust fans would need to be checked, and rechecked. The air quality might have to be sampled. The reports of sniper shots would have to be investigated.
The puzzle of the toppled scaffold and the battered Dodge pickup with the body trapped below it would need to be solved.
Lizzie disagreed with my assessment about the time all that would take. “The owners of those cars aren’t going to be allowed back into the tunnel to retrieve them for a long time. The whole tunnel’s a crime scene. The cops are going to shut down access for hours. Maybe all night. They might use the other side for two-way traffic, but the side we were in? It’s closed for a while.”
“So no one’s looking for us?” I said hopefully.
“No one in law enforcement,” she said.
The Death Angels are still looking for us.
That’s what she meant.
“Oh.”
“They’re not accustomed to taking casualties. To my knowledge, it’s never happened before. It will complicate things.”
Lizzie had said “they.”
“For them?” I asked.
“Yes. For us, too.”
“Will they try to hit us again on the way down?” I asked.
“They didn’t expect to fail in the tunnel. That was a complex op.”
“That means no?”
“If we’re lucky they don’t know where we are right now.”
“They did before? They knew where we were?”
“All of your vehicles are GPS’d,” she said. Her tone conveyed her disappointment that I hadn’t figured that out myself.
Of course they are. “The plane, too?”
She nodded. “Planes are easy to track. Anyone can do it on the Web. They’re angry at you now. You stated a clear preference not to be shot. Those kinds of preferences are typically honored. That they were planning to take you out with a bullet is a clear indication that their patience is exhausted. Anything goes now. Anything.”
“My home?”
“Maybe not your home.”
“My plane?”
“Even your plane. My advice? Don’t fly it over water. If they bring it down, they’d much prefer that it go down in the water.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Lizzie found a cell phone in Carrie Belvedere’s purse. As soon as we were close enough to the city of Georgetown to be in reliable contact with a cell tower, I used the phone to call Mary’s mobile.
“Hey, it’s me. Did you capture this number when I called?”
“Yes.”
“Call me back on a land line.” I hung up.
Twenty seconds later, the tiny phone burst into the opening melody of “Material Girl.” We were a half mile down valley from Georgetown by then. I had just started trying to coax Lizzie’s eyes to see through the natural camouflage so she could spot a small cluster of bighorn sheep that was perched halfway up the almost vertical cliff face above the other side of the interstate.
Even with my help Lizzie couldn’t find the sheep. Picking out bighorns in their natural habitat is like solving a perceptual puzzle. The first time it’s almost impossible to discern their still shapes out of the rocks and grass and dirt. But after that first time it gets easier. You quiet your eyes, do some concentration/perception thing that’s a combination of Zen and gestalt, and suddenly—there they are.
The harsh canyon habitat where the sheep thrived made the cell signal crappy, but I was grateful for any coverage at all on this stretch of I-70.
Mary asked, “What’s up?”
“Are you at Centennial?”
“Yes,” she said. “The plane should be ready in about an hour. I’ll take her wherever you want, whenever you want. But you know I can’t fly into Telluride at night. That will have to wait until morning.”
“No problem. There’s a change in plans. Ready?”
“Go.”
“Good. This is what I’d like you to do.”
Lizzie never found the sheep. I wondered if she’d have a second chance. Ever. I assumed I wouldn’t get another chance to coach her through it.
I waited until we were passing the Highway 40 exit that led toward Berthoud Pass and Winter Park before I said, “You were going to tell me about the magazines.”
“I was?” she said. “It’s funny, I’ve never told anybody about the magazines. Not that anybody’s ever asked.”
I touched her leg. “The magazines are your Adam,” I said. “Aren’t they?”
She inhaled in a little gasp.
“I did my oncology residency in Texas. At Baylor,” she said as we were entering the canyons west of Idaho Springs. “That’s where I met my husband.”
Thos
e mundane revelations seemed to exhaust her. I waited almost a quarter of a mile for her to continue. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Tell me.”
“We married. Had two kids. Two girls.”
Had. Two girls.
“My husband is, was, from Jordan. He is a not-too-distant relative of the royal family.”
“Yes?” I said.
“That’s important, that he’s from … overseas. And that he’s … connected.”
“Okay.”
“We moved to Dallas. A lot happened between us. Most of it wasn’t good. But none of it was particularly unusual. It was a marriage that was dying in one of the normal ways that marriages die. One week in the fall, when the girls were four and two, I went to New Orleans for a short medical conference. When I came home, they were gone.”
“He took your girls?”
“He took my girls. He took them to Jordan.”
“To Jordan?” I repeated her words so I could buy time to look ahead. To anticipate where she was going.
“Initially, yes, I think. He never contacted me again, so I don’t know for sure. But later, after I joined the company, I was able to get hold of records showing that the girls went through immigration that week in Amman.”
“There aren’t any treaties with Jordan? To bring them back here? What about custody and—”
“Shhh,” she said gently. “I’m thorough. I checked every avenue five times in five ways. It doesn’t matter what the law says or what the treaties say; Roger wouldn’t have stayed in Amman. Never. Not even for the girls. He hated it there. Despised his parents. Where he took my girls next, I don’t know. But he got them new passports; I’m sure of that. New names. Maybe even a new mother. Remember, he’s connected. Me? I’ve spent the last eight years of my life looking … for my girls.”
I slowed as we approached the speed traps in Idaho Springs. The combination of the memories and the intrusion of civilization seemed to quiet Lizzie. Not too far away on the other side of town was the steep hill where I’d encountered the flatbed with the oil drums.
I told myself to focus.
She said, “The magazines?”
It felt like a non sequitur. I said, “Yes?”
“In my work, now, I get a lot of free time. It’s important to me, the free time. I use it to travel. I imagine places he would like to live, places he dreamed aloud about when we were together. He was a restless man, never satisfied, always felt that happiness was waiting for him someplace else. Maybe with someone else. So … I travel to places where I can picture him. Warm places. By a pool. At a golf course. In Scottsdale. Las Vegas. Austin. All over Hawaii. Palm Springs. Ojai. You know Ojai? It’s a long list. Places in Europe, too. But only southern places. Provence. Sicily. Barcelona. Northern Africa, too. Tunisia. Mexico. I’ve been to Costa Rica looking for him. All over Australia. Thailand, too. I went there after the tsunami and looked at the faces of all the dead children.”
“God,” I said.
“When I get someplace where I can see him living, I’m ready with a list of the good schools, the private schools, the best schools—the man I married is a snob—and I wait outside for the kids to go into the school, or later, to come back out. I take pictures. Back in my hotel, I examine every face of every little girl. Trying to find mine. Trying to find my girls.”
“What are their names?”
“Andrea and Zoe.” She smiled. “A to Z.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“The magazines I get all have pictures of children in them. Mostly girls. Pretty girls. Happy girls. Girls on horses. Girls at the beach. Girls dancing. Girls dreaming of being pop stars. I turn pages every night, hoping …” Her voice became almost inaudible. “Hoping.”
I downshifted to begin the climb up toward El Rancho.
“Each day when I leave my apartment, I toss the previous night’s magazines into the trash chute. If I let them pile up, if I let them remind me of the futility, I get hopeless. So I throw them away. I start fresh again each night. New girls. New hope. New faces.”
She fell asleep as we crested the ridge at El Rancho.
I wanted to wake her and comfort her and cajole her into telling me what was going on with my son. I didn’t. I consoled myself that I’d know within a few hours.
There’s no highway to carry traffic north along the Front Range of the Rockies after drivers on I-70 exit the foothills onto the high plains. The closest northbound freeway is I-25, which snakes through the heart of Denver about ten miles east of the mountains—too far away for my purposes that night. Although I would have preferred to stay on a freeway, my best choice from the bad alternatives was to take Wadsworth Boulevard north toward my destination.
Traffic was tolerable, traffic-light timing was acceptable, and Lizzie and I pulled onto the access road to Jefferson County Airport exactly fifty-eight minutes after we had exited the tunnel.
We were early.
I stopped the stolen BMW in the lot of the fixed base operator where I had arranged to meet the plane. Lizzie stirred, saw where we were, and asked me if I had any change. I gave her the coins from my pocket. She jumped out of the car, peeled away, and found a pay phone near the corner of the building. I followed her and eavesdropped. She knew I was listening but she didn’t seem to care. She was calling the laboratory to get the results of my blood work. I watched as she jotted down numbers for most of a minute. All I heard from her end of the conversation was “yes, go on,” “okay,” and “got that.”
“Well?” I asked, when she hung up.
“For now everything looks okay. There are no anomalies in your liver functions. That would be a big concern. But some of what I asked them to look for isn’t done yet. I’ll have to check back with them again in the morning.”
“Why not use your cell phone?”
“You may have noticed that my colleagues are pretty well connected with the mobile-phone network.”
I nodded. “What’s going on with Adam, Lizzie? Please.”
She shook her head. “You’ll leave me behind. I can’t let that happen.”
The Lear from Centennial didn’t land for another ten minutes. I recognized the familiar green spiral on the plane’s tail as it rolled past the midpoint on the runway during its landing.
As the plane taxied to the FBO, I could see through the windshield that Mary was in the right-hand seat.
“That’s our ride,” I said to Lizzie.
She didn’t hear me. She was beside me on the lounge sofa, curled up into a fetal ball. Again, sound asleep.
Mike came out to meet us and got us settled; Mary stayed in the cockpit. The Lear’s nose wheel went aloft at 10:54. Not too long after takeoff Mary came back to the cabin.
She seemed to be focusing an unusual amount of attention on Lizzie, who was on the couch in the back of the cabin.
I gave Mary a big hug and asked her about her cousin. We spoke in whispers.
“She’s doing some deep-sea fishing in the Gulf for a few days. The boat is chartered in my mom’s name. I think she’s safe.”
I liked the plan. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Flight time tonight? Any idea?” I asked. “How are the winds?”
“Jet stream’s not going to be much help. Weather’s going to be a problem over the Great Lakes. Five hours and change is my current estimate. Could be more if we have to dodge a storm or two. With any luck we’ll get in just before dawn. Given the hurry, we didn’t have a chance to get any catering on board. Are you hungry? I can check the galley for you, see if there’s anything left in there.”
“I’m good,” I said. “I’ll try to sleep.” I motioned for her to sit down across from me. “Do me a couple favors? Don’t worry about turbulence. And avoid the Great Lakes.”
She frowned. But she said, “Okay.”
“How did it go at Centennial?” I asked.
She glanced, again, at Lizzie. “When you called the generator was
already installed, and we were just about to run tests on the electrical system. After I talked to you, I told everybody your plans had changed and that we could finish up the next day. If anyone outside was watching us it looked like we were giving up for the night. We locked up the hangar, turned off the lights. Mechanics drove home, none the wiser.”
“How did things go with Jimmy Lee? Any trouble getting the Lear?”
She made a dismissive face. “You kidding? With the offer I made? Jimmy jumped at it. Mike was cool about doing the extra night flight when I told him that there was a thousand-dollar bonus for each leg in addition to a generous layover allowance. I assume you don’t mind.”
Mike was a pilot friend of Mary’s. The Lear, Mike’s baby, belonged to the insurance company that my friend Jimmy Lee worked for in the Denver Tech Center. Mary had arranged to trade flight hours in my Gulfstream for some hours in the Lear. The Lear was slightly faster than the Gulfstream, but my plane was bigger and had better range. I’d told her to offer one and a half G-IV flight hours for one Lear flight hour to sweeten the trade.
It was a great deal for Jimmy’s company. I knew he’d go for it.
“I don’t mind at all. You’ll get the same bonus Mike gets. Tell LaBelle. No one saw the two of you go back to Centennial?”
“When I left the airport I drove over to Mike’s condo in the Tech Center. He lives in one of those high-rises off Belleview, keeps his car in the garage downstairs. You can’t see it from the street. We used his car. I didn’t show my face again until we were in the hangar. If someone followed me, they probably think I’m doing a … sleepover.” She smiled.
“You trust Mike, Mary?”
“Mike’s … good people. Yes.”
“Flight plan for tonight?” I asked.
“The FAA thinks we’re heading to Hartford. It’s one of Mike’s usual routes—all those insurance company headquarters that are there?—so if anyone’s tracking this plane, it shouldn’t raise any suspicion at all; they’ll assume he’s carrying an exec to a morning meeting. In a few hours, we’ll file an amended flight plan. Are you sure you don’t just want us to go into Hartford or one of the New York airports? You can drive to New Haven pretty quickly from some of those fields. I can have a car waiting.”
Kill Me Page 33