The trailing vehicle dashed by without slowing.
“Thank you, lady luck.” Alex maneuvered back onto the road. Where the trail came closest to the rear of the lodge, he parked and turned off the lights but left the engine running. On foot, he made his way up the slope to where his rope dangled from the window of his third-floor room.
Variant Corporation employees had taken the entire second floor on this wing, so Frederick would be there if Pia was right about him not living with the Koenigs. Wearing his ski mask again and grasping the rope, Alex climbed to the second floor and tried to open the window directly below his but found it locked. With a foot looped in the rope to support his weight, working awkwardly with duct tape from the maintenance barn, he taped off a small square of glass just above the window’s lock. He padded the handle of his knife with his handkerchief and, mouthing a silent prayer that the room was empty or occupied by a heavy sleeper, hit the square of glass hard enough to break it. Reaching through the hole, he unlocked the window. That the lodge was still dark surprised him. It should have a backup generator that would kick in right away.
His luck held; the room was empty. As stealthily as he could, he slipped inside, inched the door open, and peered into the hallway. Weak light cast by battery-powered EXIT signs revealed the shadowy outline of a man standing three doors down and on the opposite side. A guard. That would be Frederick’s room.
Alex eased the door shut and climbed back out the window. He muscled up the rope to his own third-floor room, clambered inside, and pulled the rope in behind him. He was on the top floor, so there would be access to the roof. The hallway’s glowing EXIT sign became a beacon guiding him to the stairwell. With his rope coiled around a shoulder, he made his way to the flat roof and crossed to the other side of the wing. Leaning over the edge, he counted windows until he was above the one guarded by the sentry. He secured the rope to a ventilation pipe that projected through the roof. Hand-over-hand, he descended to the second-floor window.
As before, he taped off a small square of glass and broke it with the padded handle of his knife so he could reach through and unlock the window. The muted tinkle of broken glass sounded deafening to him in the abnormal quiet—no sound other than the distant, indecipherable voices of patrons who had poured from the darkened clubs along Main Street.
The guard posted in the hallway must have heard the glass break. He opened the door, swept the room with his flashlight, and played its beam over the blinds. The glow became brighter as he entered the room and approached the window.
Dangling from his rope, Alex leaned away. He realized he was holding his breath and forced himself to inhale and exhale deeply, his mouth open to minimize sound. Careful to avoid banging against the wall, he shifted to slide his rifle’s sling off his shoulder. He almost dropped the weapon; it wasn’t going to work. He shrugged the rifle back to its original position, pulled his supporting foot from its loop in the rope, and prepared to rappel down the wall. If discovered, he would have to depend on speed and the shelter of darkness.
The lodge’s back-up generator chose that moment to kick in. With the rest of the village still blacked out, the lodge would become a magnet for every eye, and Alex’s position put him obliquely across a courtyard from the now-lit entrance. Anyone who looked up would see him dangling there.
Inside, a night-light glowed. It turned the blinds faintly pink. Soft music filled the room. The guard stood no more than three feet from Alex, only the broken window and the imperfectly closed blinds separating them. The man held his position for an additional heart-stopping moment, then grunted and turned away. A shaft of hallway light falling on the blinds signaled his exit. The light faded as the door clicked shut.
Alex opened the window and slithered through. He wrestled with indecision about the ski mask. What if he took it off and the guard saw him? But if Frederick opened his eyes and saw a masked intruder looming over his bed, his howls would awaken everyone in the lodge. All right, Alex decided, take the damned thing off and hope for the best.
Frederick opened his eyes as Alex wrapped him in a blanket. The boy looked momentarily disoriented. Then he focused on the face looking down at him.
He hadn’t seen Alex with a haircut and shave, but maybe he would recognize a familiar voice. Hoping the music drifting from a radio near the door was enough to mask his words, that the guard would mistake him for the DJ, Alex leaned close and whispered, “Freddy, it’s me. Your old buddy, Alex.”
“Ax!” Frederick squirmed and reached for him.
“Hey, tiger,” Alex whispered. With one eye on the door, his body tensed for instant action if it opened, he finished wrapping his charge in the blanket and then a bed sheet. As quickly as possible, he knotted the sheet around his own neck to make a sling. Heading for the window, he spotted a bag of disposable diapers. He grabbed it and climbed out the window.
Back on the roof, he pulled the rope up behind him and heaved a relieved sigh. He was still in the frying pan, but getting the kid out of that room had been the touchiest step. With the rope coiled over a shoulder, he raced down the stairwell from the roof to the third floor. Back in his room, he replicated the maneuver he had used to rappel down the wall.
Less danger of being spotted now, because the room faced away from the street. The descent proved trickier this time, however, encumbered as he was with his babbling burden squirming in the makeshift sling. On the ground, murmuring softly to keep Frederick pacified, he jerked the rope free of its third-floor anchor. With one arm steadying his passenger, he loped for the sanctuary of the still-purring snowcat.
Even as he thanked his lucky stars for the prolonged blackout, Silver Hill’s lights glowed faintly and then arced to brilliant illumination. That meant someone had discovered his sabotage in the power shed.
He turned up the volume on the two-way radio he had taken off the watchman in the maintenance barn and heard guards from various locations reporting in. Mid-way to the maintenance barns, dividing his attention between driving and exchanging meaningless verbiage with a now-wide-awake Frederick, he veered off the road. Gunning the snowcat to pick up all the speed he dared without headlights and on treacherous off-road terrain, he threaded his way through old-stand Douglas fir to the ravine that the winding road circumvented. They would find his tracks and, he hoped, assume that he was trying to save time by cutting cross-country and didn’t know about the ravine.
In the darkness, distracted by Frederick’s renewed whining and the boy’s struggle to squirm free of his sling, Alex miscalculated and almost drove into the ravine. Realizing that he was going too fast, he gunned the engine while wrenching the control stick to the side and then hit the brakes. The snowcat slid to a halt parallel to the ravine’s lip.
“Freddy,” he murmured, gripping the control stick and taking slow, deep breaths, “your mama would shoot me if she knew how close I came to closing the book on your life.” When he trusted himself to move, he opened the door and discovered they were too close to the ledge to dismount from the driver’s side. He climbed out the other side and found a spot for Frederick at the foot of a big pine tree where adjacent evergreens had sheltered fallen pine needles from blowing snow.
With the irate, increasingly vocal youngster wrapped tightly in his blanket, Alex sliced a strip from the blanket, pushed all but three inches of the woolen sliver into the snowcat’s fuel tank, and pulled it partway back out. When he lit the fabric, the flame would have to consume the unsaturated wool to get to the gasoline. The snowcat would become a firebomb with a delayed fuse. At least he hoped it would.
Using a large evergreen bough that he cut from a tree, he swept away snowy traces of their narrow escape on the ravine’s lip. Then he placed the bough under the tree by Frederick.
Frederick, his movements hampered by the blanket, writhed and shouted what could only be baby-talk curses.
Alex tried to calm the furious boy while cocooning him more securely in the blanket. “Have patience, Freddy.”
&n
bsp; But Frederick was out of patience. Screaming his outrage at the lack of mobility, he struggled to escape his wrappings.
Alex caressed the wrath-twisted little face. “I’ll be just a minute.” Backing and turning the snowcat, he positioned it head-on toward the ravine on the path that had led him to near disaster minutes earlier. Busy radio traffic told him he was out of time. With a slender evergreen limb jamming the snowcat’s throttle a third of the way down, he lit the gasoline tank’s blanket-strip fuse. Then he reached inside the cab and shifted the transmission into drive.
He had guessed right about the makeshift fuse, but just barely. A geyser of flame erupted from the fuel tank’s nozzle a split-second before the snowcat plummeted over the embankment. The tank ruptured halfway down the wall, when the heavy vehicle hit a boulder, twisted, and began tumbling sideways. The plunge ended in a spectacular orange fireball.
The pyrotechnics entranced Frederick. He had worked off his blanket and crawled the two or three feet to where snow covered the ground but had ventured no farther. Only flannel pajamas with attached booties kept the frigid air at bay, but he did not seem to feel the cold. Before the gasoline tank exploded, his crying had escalated to screams. Now he mouthed a nonstop stream of garbled syllables that Alex wished he could decipher.
The explosion also ignited Silver Hill’s security force. Radio traffic became frenetic, and a motorized din rumbled from higher up the mountain. Through the mounting engine noises, Alex heard the whoosh, whoosh of slowly revolving helicopter blades slicing cold air. Within minutes the helicopter would be airborne, its sodium-vapor searchlight sweeping the ravine’s lip, turning night into day.
Over Frederick’s vigorous protests, Alex re-bundled his young charge and walked backward into the shelter of the tree line, sweeping away footprints with the evergreen bough as he went. In the light of day a security team could read signs more clearly, and the night was uncommonly still, with no wind to disturb telltale marks in the snow. Faust would realize that Alex had bailed out of the snowcat. But the deception would buy sorely needed time.
Alex tried making a game of the trek to where Pia and the snowmobiles were hidden, but Frederick would have none of it. He kicked and screamed, expressing his resentment at being immobilized once more in the tightly wrapped blanket and his dislike of being jostled about and occasionally whipped by evergreen boughs as Alex hurried through the undergrowth. Sheer muscle power corralled the squirming, squalling youngster, and only the growing din of gasoline engines kept his high-decibel screeching from hostile ears.
As they approached the spot where Pia waited with the snowmobiles, Alex pressed the stem of his watch to illuminate the dial: four o’clock. They had a couple of hours left before daylight.
Pia, scared but with a determination she had already demonstrated, would be lying in wait with the rifle they had taken from the watchman in the maintenance barn. Alex had not considered that but realized he should have. He remembered how she had kept him in her sights until she recognized him at the maintenance barn. After making it this far, he risked being taken out by friendly fire.
Chapter 17
When Silver Hill’s lights blinked out, Theo Faust was in his suite at the ski lodge with Carol, the woman he’d met on his second night at Silver Hill. The wing of the lodge set aside for Variant Corporation personnel did not have suites, so he’d been obliged to settle on the third floor in a separate wing. Not that it made any difference. If anything, some distance from underlings was good. Too much togetherness bred disrespect.
He and Carol had spent a couple of hours at one of Silver Hill’s night clubs. Back in his suite, he’d talked her into showing him that she could do a better dance routine than a stripper he had admired at the club. A minute into her performance, with Faust relaxing on the couch sipping chilled vodka, the lights began dimming. Seconds later, the room went dark.
A call to the desk clerk revealed a village-wide blackout. “We’ll have the backup generator running in a matter of minutes, Mr. Faust.”
Probably just a technical glitch, but Faust had not survived as commander of a Special Forces company and worked his way into the confidences of Variant Corporation’s owner by relying on assumptions. He phoned Silver Hill’s security desk.
Yes, the man who answered the phone assured him, someone had checked the power station. “There’s a problem with a transformer.”
“The man who told you that. Is he an electrician?”
“No, sir. He’s security. But he talked to a guy from the power station.”
“Someone from the power station? Or someone in it?”
A momentary hesitation. “They met out front.”
“Does he know the man he talked with?”
“Well, he . . . he didn’t say.”
Faust swallowed an urge to read the careless SOB the riot act. “Did he enter the power station, make sure everything is normal?”
“I figure he must have. I didn’t talk to him personally.”
“Are you in charge tonight?”
“Yes, sir. I’m the shift supervisor.”
“Then talk to the man. Meanwhile, send two armed guards to check inside the power station. I want a definitive report within fifteen minutes.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
A moment after Faust hit his cell phone’s end call button, the hotel’s backup generator kicked in. In the somewhat subdued lighting it provided, he studied Carol. She had removed her shoes and blouse before the lights went out. He sat back on the couch and motioned for her to continue. Minutes later, naked and on her knees between his thighs, she concentrated on opening his fly.
His thoughts, however, kept drifting to Pia. Alex must have given her quite a ride while they were stranded together up on Black Oak Ridge. Why else would she abandon her son to run away with him?
But women were like that. His own mother had cut out when he was just nine. At first he’d thought it was his father’s fault, that she’d taken a powder because of the beatings. Couldn’t have been that, however, because another woman moved in a couple of months later, and the more abuse his father heaped on her, the tighter she clung.
Anyway, it was time to flush Pia out of his head. “Okay, hot lips, let’s get serious.” He pushed Carol back far enough that he could stand and strip off his clothing. “Stay,” he ordered when she started to get up. Naked, he grasped a handful of her hair and directed her face to his groin.
His cell phone chimed. Without letting Carol cease her ministrations, he snatched it off the coffee table. “Faust.”
The security shift-supervisor reported in. “My guys found the power station jockey tied up. He says half a dozen men rushed the station, overpowered him, and shut down the generators.”
Faust pushed Carol away, shoving so hard that she fell on her bottom. Half a dozen men, my ass, he thought. Alex is back for the kid. “Get on the horn to the man guarding Mr. Koenig’s son. Make sure there’s no problem there. Tell the guy to stay awake.”
“I already did that, sir. He says everything’s quiet. I sent another man as a backup.”
“Did he check the room?”
“Yeah, he looked around in there. Anyway, there’s only one door—nobody can get in without going through him.”
More assumptions. “Tell him to check again and call you back with confirmation. And post a third man there. I want two of them inside the kid’s room at all times. Also, dispatch four men to reinforce the guard around Mr. Koenig’s chalet.”
Faust ended the call and glanced at Carol. She had gotten to her feet. “Get dressed and get lost.”
“What?” She looked dazed.
“Get out.” Ignoring her, Faust slipped on his pants and shirt.
As he was pulling on his socks, the phone chimed again. “The kid’s gone,” the security shift supervisor said. “Looks like the perp got in through a window.”
“Have them check every room.” Alex wouldn’t be in a room, however. To come in through a window, he would ha
ve rappelled down from the roof. From there, he’d have rappelled to the ground. “Crank up the helo, have it drop a squad at the bottom of the road leading down the mountain. Nothing and nobody gets through without being searched.”
Faust broke the connection and hit the speed dial for Carlos Escobedo, his second in command. After two rings, a sleepy voice came on the line. Faust had barely finished briefing the man when he heard a distant explosion. “Meet me at the village’s security HQ,” he said. He rang off, tossed the rest of Carol’s clothing into the hallway, and pushed her out of the room. Leaving her there half-dressed, sputtering and cursing, he headed for the security station. It was in the office building up the mountain from the lodge.
Flanagan, the head of local security, was at the station when Faust arrived. The red-headed security chief told him about the wrecked snowcat. “Whoever hit the power station and grabbed the kid thought they could cut cross-country and didn’t know about the ravine. They’re history—the kid is too. No one could have lived through that.”
The Descent From Truth Page 14