by Mark Alpert
The alarm was even louder than David remembered. The agent automatically let go of Michael and pointed the revolver at the noise. Then David came at him from behind.
SIMON PARKED THE PICKUP TRUCK at the rendezvous point, a sharp bend in a dirt road about a kilometer south of the cabin. He’d chosen the spot with the help of a local map he’d found in the glove compartment. Rendezvousing at Carnegie’s Retreat would’ve been unwise because the cabin was located at a dead end, and at least a dozen police vehicles were already converging there from the north. But the dirt road ran south through a tangled black forest, making it a perfect escape route into the neighboring state of Virginia.
He doused the headlights, then looked at the glowing hands of his watch: 9:21. Brock was due to arrive in nine minutes. Simon had promised him a substantial reward—$250,000—if he succeeded in delivering all four of the targets alive. The agent planned to make it look like the suspects had shot his partner and escaped into the woods. Simon suspected that the FBI might not believe this story, but that was Brock’s problem, not his.
He rolled down the window and stuck his head outside, listening for the sound of five people stumbling through the leaf litter. But all he heard was the usual noise of the night forest: the whine of the cicadas, the croaking of the bullfrogs, the wind rustling through the treetops. After a few seconds he heard a muffled boom off to the west. A shotgun blast, most likely. And then he heard an odd, high-pitched shriek and four more gunshots in quick succession. These sounds came from the north, and they weren’t shotgun blasts. He was quite adept at identifying the noises made by different types of firearms. This was a handgun, probably a revolver.
Not to worry, he told himself. It’s just the sound of Agent Brock executing his partner. But why four shots? One bullet to the head was usually sufficient. No, no, don’t jump to conclusions—maybe Brock was a poor marksman, maybe he’d fired three more times at his partner just to be sure he’d killed the man. But none of these possibilities eased Simon’s anxiety. All his instincts were telling him that something had gone wrong.
Grabbing his Uzi, he opened the pickup’s door and gingerly stepped to the ground. His right ankle was badly swollen, but he didn’t have a choice.
DAVID RUSHED FORWARD AND SLAMMED his right shoulder into the agent’s back. He hit him hard and fast and the man toppled forward, his legs flying out from under him and his chest smacking the floor. The revolver stayed in his hand, though, and he squeezed off a shot that exploded the robot dinosaur and silenced the alarm. David fell on top of him and pinned the agent’s shooting arm. He fired again, wildly, and David pounded the man’s head, smashing his knuckles against the bony knob at the base of his skull. He was following the hard lesson that his father had taught him: there’s no such thing as a fair fight. There’s only winning and losing, and if you want to win you have to keep on hitting the bastard until he stops moving. The agent’s nose broke again as David mashed his face into the floor, and yet the man kept firing the revolver. Two more shots rang out, and David heard Monique scream. Enraged, he brought his knee down on the agent’s forearm and the gun finally slipped out of his hand. But David didn’t pause for a second. He heard his father’s gin-soaked voice: For Christ’s sake, don’t give him a chance to get up! Smash him, pound him, fuck him over! And David followed his father’s instructions, followed them to the letter, until the face of the man beneath him was just a bowl of bruised flesh, with the mouth gaping open and the eyes swollen shut. David screamed, “YOU FUCKER!” into the man’s ear, but he wasn’t even thinking of the agent anymore. He was screaming at his father, that drunken murderous bastard, as he rammed his fists into the man’s purple face.
He would’ve kept on swinging until the man was dead, but he felt someone behind him, pulling his arms back. “Enough, enough! He’s unconscious!”
He turned around and saw Monique. To his surprise, she didn’t appear to be hurt. She looked at him with concern, then reached into the agent’s shoulder holster and removed his semiautomatic. “Roll him over so I can get the other one,” she ordered.
David lifted the inert body and Monique retrieved Santullo’s gun from the waistband of the agent’s pants. “Here, take this,” she said, handing him the Glock. “Cover him in case he wakes up. I’ll take care of Amil.”
“Amil? What’s wrong?”
He looked over his shoulder and saw Michael still crouched on the shag rug with his hands pressed to his ears. Beside him, Professor Gupta lay on his back in a spreading puddle of blood. It was gushing from an inch-wide hole in his left thigh. Propped on his elbows, he stared in horror at the wound. “It’s coming out!” he screamed. “It’s coming out, it’s coming out, it’s coming out!”
Monique pointed at David’s shirt. “Quick, take it off,” she said. Then she rushed over to Gupta and ripped off his left pant leg, which was already soggy. “Try to calm down, Professor,” she told him. “Take deep breaths. You need to slow your heartbeat.”
She took David’s shirt—his softball-team shirt, with HITLESS HISTORIANS printed on the back—and folded it into a pad, which she placed over Gupta’s wound. She wrapped the sleeves around his thigh, tied them in a knot, and pressed her palm against the dressing to stanch the bleeding. Then she moved her other hand to his groin and began probing the area just to the left of his fly. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m trying to find the femoral artery.”
Gupta was busy taking deep breaths and probably didn’t hear her. David watched with astonishment as she dug her fingers into the old man’s crotch. After a few seconds she found the pressure point and jammed the heel of her hand against it, squeezing the artery against the pelvic bone. The professor yelped in pain.
Monique gave him a big smile. “There, that’s much better,” she said. “The bleeding will slow down now.” But her face was grim when she turned to David. “We have to get him to a hospital.”
Gupta heard her this time. Shaking his head violently, he tried to sit up. “No!” he cried. “You have to run! You have to get to Georgia!”
“Please, Professor, lie down,” Monique urged.
“No, listen to me! The man said the state troopers were coming! If they catch you, they’ll get the Einheitliche Feldtheorie!”
Monique struggled to keep the pressure on Gupta’s femoral artery and her homemade bandage. “We can’t leave you behind!” she shouted. “You’ll bleed to death!”
“As soon as the authorities get here, they’ll rush me to the hospital. Believe me, they won’t let me die. I’m too important to them.”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to leave his side. David was impressed by her loyalty. He’d gotten the impression that Monique didn’t even like the professor very much, and yet now she was willing to sacrifice everything for him.
Gupta stretched his hand toward her and touched her cheek. Then he pointed at his grandson, who was rocking back and forth on his heels. “Take Michael with you,” he said. “If the police find him, they’ll put him in an institution. Don’t let that happen, Monique. Please, I’m begging you.”
She kept her hand on the bandage, but she nodded. Then Gupta turned to David, pointing at the computer on the table. “Before you go, you need to destroy the hard drive. So the FBI doesn’t see the code.”
Without a word, David lifted the computer over his head and hurled it to the floor. The plastic case cracked open and David wrenched out the hard drive, which looked like a miniature turn-table with a stack of silver disks. Holding the Glock by its barrel, he started pounding the glass platters with the handle of the gun. He kept at it until the disks were smashed into hundreds of tiny slivers.
Just as he finished, he heard a siren. It was the wail of a state-trooper car speeding up the gravel road, maybe a quarter mile away. He listened closely and heard two more sirens a little farther off. And then he heard an even more unwelcome noise, the rapid fire of a machine gun.
He jumped to his feet. Monique was still leaning over Professor Gupta, stil
l pressing down on his bandage, but the old man was now whispering something in Michael’s ear. “Come on!” David yelled. “We gotta go!”
“Go on,” Gupta said, pushing both Michael and Monique away from him. He looked like he was getting weaker. “And don’t forget…Michael’s Game Boy.”
Crying now, Monique stood up and headed for the door. David found the Game Boy and pressed it into the teenager’s hands. Michael pushed a button and the screen came to life again. He resumed playing Warfighter at the point where he’d left off, as if nothing of significance had occurred in the interim, and he was distracted enough to allow David to grasp his elbow and guide him out of the cabin.
SIMON DEALT WITH THE STATE troopers first. Leaning against one of the trees next to the road, he strafed the windshield of the leading patrol car, killing both officers inside. The car slid off the gravel and smashed into a kudzu-covered boulder. The driver of the second vehicle didn’t see the wreck until he came around the curve, which was much too late. He managed to stop the car in the middle of the road but Simon picked him off before he could throw it into reverse. The third driver wisely stayed out of range. In the distance Simon could hear the sound of officers dashing for cover and shouting into their radios. The task was done: now the troopers would stay on the roadside, cowering behind rocks and tree trunks for the next half hour or so, allowing Simon to focus his attention elsewhere.
He hobbled up the road to the cabin. The first sign of trouble was the open door. The second was the trio of bodies lying on the floor inside. Only one of them was dead—an FBI man with an absurd mustache, Brock’s partner obviously. His brains were splattered on a nearby wall. A diminutive Indian man, the esteemed Professor Gupta, lay unconscious in a pool of blood. Someone had field-dressed his leg wound, but the bandage was already soaked. And last but not least, Agent Brock writhed on his belly, groaning in pain and spitting out pieces of his teeth.
Simon stood there a moment, deciding what to do. Swift and Reynolds, his primary targets, were probably not far away, running blindly through the woods with their teenage companion. Under ordinary circumstances, Simon would’ve pursued them, but his ankle was growing more and more inflamed and he knew it wouldn’t support his weight much longer. For now, he’d have to be content with interrogating Dr. Gupta. Assuming that the old man didn’t die of shock, chances were good that he could reveal where Swift and Reynolds were headed.
Brock staggered to his feet. His face was a bloody mess but he was otherwise serviceable. Working together, they could probably carry Gupta through the woods to the pickup. Simon grabbed the back of Brock’s neck and shoved him toward the professor. “I have a new job for you, Mr. Brock,” he said. “And if you want to stay alive, I suggest you take it.”
Chapter Nine
LUCILLE KNELT BESIDE THE BODY OF TONY SANTULLO, A twenty-four-year-old agent who’d graduated from the academy just six months before, and forced herself to look at the gaping hole in his temple. Taking a deep breath, she pushed all distractions from her mind, all thoughts of guilt and anger and frustration, and concentrated on reconstructing what had transpired in the cabin. She examined the position of Santullo’s corpse and the pattern of the blood splatter. She noted the presence of two more pools of blood at the other end of the room, suggesting additional casualties. And she surveyed the mechanical debris scattered across the floor, the broken computer case and the shattered hard drive and the plastic remnants of some kind of robot.
Agent Crawford stood behind her, holding a radio to his ear. “Brock, come in,” he shouted. “Come in, come in. Respond at once, over.”
Lucille shook her head. To be fair, there was a chance that Agent Brock had pursued the suspects into the woods and wasn’t responding to radio contact now because he lay dead or wounded on the forest floor. But she doubted it very much. For the past twenty-four hours she’d suspected that there was a traitor on the task force, and now she knew who it was.
“Come in, Brock,” Crawford repeated. “Come in, come—”
He abruptly lowered the radio and cocked his head, listening to some noise from outside. After a couple of seconds Lucille heard it, too: the beating of helicopter rotors. She rose to her feet and followed Crawford out of the cabin. They looked to the northeast and saw three Blackhawks skimming over the hills, their spotlights illuminating the treetops below. It was the advance guard of the Delta Force, arriving ahead of schedule.
NAKED TO THE WAIST, DAVID ran headlong into the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing but he charged forward anyway, trying to follow the sounds Monique made as she crashed through the undergrowth. With his left hand he groped at tree trunks and branches, and with his right he clutched Michael’s elbow, dragging him along. The teenager screamed at first, but after running for half a mile or so he became too winded to protest. They tore through the black forest as if they were running on air, propelled by sheer terror.
They came to a clearing and Monique stopped short. David almost plowed into her. “What are you doing?” he hissed. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
“Where are we going? How do you know we’re not running in circles?”
He looked up at the stars. The Little Dipper was to their right, which meant they were traveling west. He took Monique’s hand and pointed it to the left. “We should go this way, start heading south. Then we—”
“Oh God, what’s that?”
Three points of light rose above the treetops behind them and hung in the sky like bright new stars. As David stared in that direction, he heard the roar of helicopter rotors in the distance.
He grasped Michael’s elbow and pushed Monique forward. “Go, go, go! Get under the trees!”
They dove into the woods again and scrambled up a rocky slope. The going was tougher here, more rugged. Monique tripped over something and landed with a cry. David rushed to her side, but as he bent over to ask if she was all right, he heard a slow deep voice say, “Stop right there.” Then he heard the sound of two rifles being cocked into firing position.
David froze. For a moment he considered making a break for it, but when he turned around he saw that the Game Boy in Michael’s hand was still turned on. The light from the screen was feeble, but it was enough to serve as a target.
A flashlight came on and the beam ran over them. Through the glare David tried to see the man who was holding the light, but all he could make out was a hefty silhouette. Probably not FBI, he thought. More likely a local sheriff or state trooper. Not that it made much difference at this point.
“What y’all doin’ out here?” the hefty man asked. “This ain’t no place for a picnic.”
He sounded genuinely puzzled. David squinted into the flashlight beam and saw, to his relief, that the man wasn’t wearing a uniform. He wore a pair of overalls and an extra-large flannel shirt, and the firearm he was pointing at them was a shotgun, not a rifle. To his left was another man with a shotgun, an old toothless fellow wearing a John Deere cap, and to his right was a short, stocky boy, maybe eight or nine years old. The boy carried a homemade slingshot and had an oddly flattened face.
“You hear me?” the fat man said. He had a thick brown beard and a dirty bandage taped over his left eye. “I asked you a question.”
David nodded. These were the backwoods hunters that Professor Gupta had mentioned. A grandfather, father, and son, no doubt. West Virginia mountain men, wary of outsiders. Probably not too inclined to sympathize with a black physicist and a bare-chested history professor. But they were probably not too fond of the government either. David wondered if he could use this fact to win them over. “We’re in trouble,” he admitted. “They’re coming to arrest us.”
The fat man fixed his good eye on him. “Who’s coming?”
“The FBI. And the state troopers. They’re working together.”
The man snorted. “What’d you do, rob a bank?”
David realized, of course, that he couldn’t tell the truth. He had to think of a story that the hunters would believe. “
We didn’t do anything wrong. It’s an illegal government operation.”
“What the hell do you mean by—”
He was interrupted by his son, who suddenly let out a high-pitched squawk, like the call of a tropical bird. The boy’s face broke into a distorted smile and he swayed from side to side, as if buffeted by the wind. With a jolt, David realized what was wrong with him. The boy had Down syndrome.
The fat man paid no attention to his son. He kept his shotgun pointed at David. “Look, are you gonna tell me what’s going on here?”
All right, David thought. They had something in common. That was a start, at least. He pointed at Michael, who was crouched on the ground and rocking back and forth. “They’re after our son!” David shouted. “They’re trying to take him away from us!”
Monique stared at him, aghast. But the lie, although far-fetched, wasn’t completely absurd. In the dark, one might easily be persuaded that the dusky-skinned teenager was their son. And the hunters seemed to accept the possibility. The hefty one lowered his shotgun a few degrees, pointing it at their feet now. “Your boy, is he sick?”
David put on an indignant face. “The doctors want to put him in a mental hospital! We left Pittsburgh to get away from the bastards, but they followed us here!”
“We heard some shots a while back. Were they shooting at you?”
David nodded again. “And now they’re bringing in reinforcements. You hear the helicopters?”
The rotor noise grew louder. The boy with Down syndrome gazed at the sky. The old fellow in the John Deere cap exchanged looks with the fat man. Then both of them lowered their weapons. The fat one turned off his flashlight. “Follow me,” he ordered. “The trail’s this way.”
SIMON RECOGNIZED THE HELICOPTERS BY their silhouettes. Blackhawks flying low, just a few meters above the treetops. That was a Delta Force tactic, flying nap-of-the-earth, below radar coverage. Simon’s pulse raced—his enemies were near. The soldiers who flew into Chechnya, the ones who killed his wife and children, might even be among them. For a moment he considered firing his Uzi; a lucky shot could take out one of the pilots. But then the other Blackhawks would surround his position and the game would be over. No, Simon told himself, better stick to the original plan. You’ll kill far more of them that way.