by Dean Koontz
There is no way to spot her in this shadowed valley where spreading fire dances and, in its dancing, throws off a thousand phantom figures of shadow, light, and smoke. Its many voices—some sibilant, some full of croak and crackle—provide cover for any sounds she makes.
His injured hand throbs, stiff and all but useless. The thin haze of smoke makes his eyes itch and water. Although he is standing still, he finds himself breathing as fast as if he were running.
The Range Rover is not at this moment threatened by the blaze, but suddenly he is sure that her intention is to disable it, so he can’t drive out of the woods. She means to strand him and then stalk him through the bewildering, shifting shapes of fire and shadow.
He is a man of reason, self-taught but highly learned, a man who lives by facts and numbers and sharp calculations, with a seldom exercised imagination, with no taste for fantasy in literature or films. He is likewise proudly free of all superstition. Brains and brute strength are all he’s ever needed. Yet a previously unknown sensation crawls his spine, prickles his nerves, and in spite of the growing heat in the glen, a coldness arises within his chest.
Furious that some primitive belief in the uncanny is embedded in him and waiting for the right circumstances to conjure it, Ivan is determined to repress it and assert himself as a man of reason, fearless action, and unstoppable force.
There are two threats to the Range Rover—the spreading fire and the woman who set the fire. If he must kill her, rather than capture her, in order to drive the vehicle out of the glen before the fire consumes it, then he will.
And when he presents Jane Hawk’s bloody, broken body to his smug superiors, maybe he’ll shoot them, too, if they don’t promote him as he has long deserved.
Pistol in his right hand, arm straight out in front of him, he strides down the shadowed slope, as fearless as a terminator robot from the future, turning his head left and right, scanning the woods for a target, periodically glancing back, moving fast because she would expect him to come slowly if he came at all.
32
SUCH WAS THE CLEARANCE UNDER the Range Rover that Jane had to lie with her head turned to the side, one cheek flat to the earth.
He might assume that she had taken up a position on the level bottom of the glen, behind one tree or another, where shadows hadn’t been faded by firelight. Or he might think she’d gotten into the Rover, intending to ambush him as he reached to open the driver’s door.
She didn’t believe he would give any credit to the possibility that she was lying concealed under the vehicle.
For one thing, because of his size, he could never squirm beneath the SUV; and so he’d assume that the space wouldn’t accommodate her, either. In chaotic moments, a hunter of people had a strong tendency to calculate the options available to his target based on his own limitations if he’d been the hunted one.
Furthermore, it seemed reckless of her to commit herself to such a confining space. Given her reputation and her success taking down people at the top of the conspiracy, he wouldn’t expect her to be so imprudent.
What seemed like a rash act to a man like him, however, was simple necessity to a mother whose child remained a couple hundred miles away, in peril and arguably the second-most-wanted fugitive in America.
If she’d meant to kill the man, she would have done this a different way. But there were questions for which she urgently needed answers.
With bright appetite, the second fire grazed across the south slope, hungry but not yet ravenous. Unless a stronger breeze sprang up, the flames weren’t likely to reach the Rover before Jane’s quarry appeared.
Most of the smoke rose through the trees, drawn toward cooler air, but a thin haze drifted under the Rover. Although the growing conflagration had many voices, the cover it would give her when she moved wasn’t sufficient to mask a cough. She breathed into the crook of her elbow, the sleeve of her sport coat against her nose, peering over her forearm at the floor of the glen where perhaps the big man would appear.
She cursed him silently, willed him to arrive, commanded his attendance as if she had the power over him that he would have over the “adjusted people” who had been injected with nanomechanisms, prayed for his deliverance into her hands. Suddenly there he was, visible to her only from the ankles down, evidently committed to boldness, moving fast, heading directly for the Range Rover.
Then he did something she had not expected.
33
LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES SINCE the first fire flared, but in that brief time, this transformation from Thoreau to Poe, from a tranquil sylvan retreat into a Halloween-night scene, the previously noble trees now grotesque black shapes backdropped by veins of fire that bleed out in a steadily greater flood…
Ivan Petro has nothing to gain by caution. The glen is a stage, and the bitch controls it as if she’s both author and director. She has set the scene, designed the visuals, put the Rover in the center of the proscenium arch, and she’s given him only one entrance to the play—down the path he’s taken and straight to the driver’s door. If she hasn’t used these distractions to flee, if she’s watching, she sees him approach and chooses to let him get closer to the vehicle.
Every ancient, moss-mottled tree trunk offers an assassin cover, and Ivan worries that the bitch might even have climbed into one of these long-enduring oaks to lie upon a sturdy limb and stare down at him through a filigree of leaves.
He has been transformed no less than has the glen. He can smell his own sour sweat, and his stomach feels as if a knot has been tied in it. For the first time in maybe eighteen years, since he repaid his father’s violence with some of his own and freed himself from the hell that is family, he suffers a surge of acid reflux so strong that a bitter taste arises in the back of his mouth.
If the bitch is hiding in the Rover, she isn’t in the cargo area, because even lying flat in that space, she’d be only an inch or two below the windows, too easily seen. She isn’t in the front seat, either, because there would be too many obstacles in her way—steering wheel, pedals, console—nowhere to get low except in the footwell that serves the passenger seat, where she would be too visible in spite of the darkness gathered in the vehicle.
So if she’s in there, she must be on the floor behind the front passenger seat, with her back pressed to the door, her feet braced against the transmission hump, her gun in a two-hand grip, waiting for him to appear, fire-lit, in one of the side windows.
If she’s crouched against the farther flank of the vehicle, rather than inside it, that’s all right, too, because what he’s about to do is likely to move her to act and, by acting, make a target of herself.
Approaching the driver’s side, before there’s a chance she can see him from in there, he squeezes off three quick shots, shattering the window into the rear seat, blowing out the window on the farther side. He’s a little jumpy and in pain and totally pissed off, so one round is off the mark and shatters the glass in the driver’s door.
If she’s in there, she should have been startled into returning fire. Nor does she rise from the farther side of the Rover to cut him down.
Ivan scans the witchy trees, the shadowy north slope, the south slope beribboned with fire, but there is no sign of her.
Expecting a bullet in the back of the head or straight on in the face, using his throbbing left hand, he fumbles with the handle and opens the driver’s door. The interior light comes on. He can see into both the front and back seats, and Jane isn’t in either.
He sits behind the wheel and, wincing in pain, pulls the door shut. All it’s about now is getting out of here faster than fast.
The electronic key is in his pocket. The Range Rover has a push-button ignition. He doesn’t put down the pistol, but holds it ready, using his bad hand to start the engine.
Born off the sloped south wall of the glen, phantom snakes of smoke serpentine through th
e shot-out back window on the passenger side, and a fit of coughing racks Ivan. For a moment, he forgets how to release the emergency brake, fumbling for a lever that he recalls from a previous vehicle.
Fire is seething close on the south slope. Burning debris has ignited the layers of leaves on the floor of the glen directly ahead of him. Suddenly he’s more concerned about being trapped by fire than he is about Jane Hawk.
Which is a mistake.
When he looks away from the south slope to remind himself where the brake release can be found, he is at once aware of a presence rising beyond the imploded window in the driver’s door.
It’s her.
She’s got the Taser XREP 12-gauge. Before Ivan can bring his Colt .45 around and kill her, she fires point-blank.
The four electrodes on the nose of the cartridge hook the side of his bare neck, and the first charge, the localized charge, stings as though he’s thrust his head into a wasp nest. He’s aware of the pistol falling out of his hand. When the chassis separates from the nose of the Taser projectile, he doesn’t grasp the wire by which it dangles, but then a second set of longer electrodes deploys. He’s slammed by the primary charge, vision dazzled into brief blindness by internal fireworks as colorful as any Independence Day display, his teeth chattering until his jaws lock, pain coursing from his scalp to the soles of his feet, every fascicle of nerve fibers short-circuiting. Paralysis.
34
FOR A MOMENT, IVAN PETRO is a child again, shaking with pain, cowering in the shadow of his father, gagging on the refluxed acid that burns up his throat and forms a bitter pool in his mouth, as it had so often during those years lived in nervous expectation of the old man’s violence. Ivan is too weak to run, too confused to hide, clenching his jaws to keep from expressing the raw ferocity of his hatred, which will only earn him more hard slaps, more punches, more cruel pinches.
He tries to swallow, but he can’t, so he hangs his head and lets the acid drool from his mouth into his lap. When he raises his head, he thinks their house is on fire, and he is bewildered as to the cause of this disaster. Then he realizes that he’s a grown man who has put the things of childhood far behind him. He is sitting in a vehicle, his wrists zip-tied to the steering wheel, and the truth of time and place returns to him.
He turns his head to his left. She’s standing a few feet from the missing window, her face reflecting the firelight from the south slope, that perfect face radiant like the face of a goddess, one eye brown, the other blue.
His speech is thick at first. “Your eyes are two colors. You lost a contact. I know which is true. Blue is true. Jane Hawk’s eyes are blue.”
“And you’re Ivan Petro.”
“You took my wallet.”
She tosses the wallet through the open window. It strikes his face and falls into the stomach acid on his pants.
The air smells of smoke. There’s a haze of it in the Rover. Leaf fires and weed fires burn low throughout the glen.
“Where did you first make me?” she asks.
Because his mind isn’t yet as clear as it needs to be, he says, “Placerville. You came out of some market with a deli bag.”
“Where is it?” she asks.
“Placerville? You know where it is. You’ve been there.”
“Don’t jerk me around. Time’s running out. Where did you plant the transponder?”
He shouldn’t have mentioned Placerville. “You were sleeping, so I put it up your pretty ass.”
She raises a pistol, a Heckler, and points it at his face.
He smiles scornfully. “You think I buy that crap about how you’re a cold-blooded killer? Spare me your evil eye.”
“I’ll kill a hundred of you to save my boy.”
“He’s dead already. They filmed it for you. Slit his belly open and let him scream to death.”
She only stares at Ivan. One blue, one brown, plus the round black eye of the gun muzzle.
A bead of sweat passes between his eyes and down his nose.
She lowers the pistol. “You’re parked in dead leaves. Fire under the gas tank soon. Maybe it’ll do the job for me.”
The engine isn’t running. She switched it off. Ivan can drive with his hands bound to the steering wheel, but even if she didn’t take the electronic key, he can’t reach the push-button ignition or the emergency-brake release.
His pistol is still on the passenger seat, where he dropped it.
He wheezes as if the smoke has gathered in his lungs. He fakes a coughing fit while he strains to strip the teeth of the zip-tie on his right wrist, which is cinched low on the steering wheel, not in her line of sight. It’s a ratchet latch; straining against it draws it tighter; it can’t be loosened once snug; it can only be cut. He coughs and strains nonetheless, because his wrists are as thick as ankles, and he is 275 pounds of hard-trained muscle and bone, and his hatred for this bitch is more intense than ever it was for his father. No power on Earth is greater than hatred, for it can destroy nations and fuel genocides in which millions die. He is empowered by hatred so virulent and implacable that no binding can restrain him.
She moves back a step or two. “The transponder. Quick now. Or I’ll go search for it myself, leave you to burn.”
He can’t pretend to be racked by coughing forever. Continuing to strain against the zip-tie, he buys time by telling her what she wants to know. “The kid hasn’t been killed, not even been found yet.”
“Then maybe you have a chance.”
“Transponder’s attached with epoxy. Can’t remove it.”
“If you want to live, tell me true.”
“True. You’ve got to hammer. Hammer it apart.”
The white-hot pain in his right hand now exceeds that in his left, the plastic tie cutting into his flesh, his fingers slick with blood. But he thrives on pain, eats it and is nourished by it; he has grown from child to man on a diet of pain.
“It’s in the back wheel well. Passenger side.”
“Who’ve you told about my Explorer, the license number?”
“No one. Those bastard poachers would take you, take all the credit, and keep me down.”
He can smell his hot blood dripping from his hand. A blackness pulses around the perimeter of his vision. The pain is so terrible that it brings into his throat another flood of bitter acid, which he swallows hard to repress.
“What’s wrong with you?” she wonders.
“You twisted, crazy bitch. You. You’re what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re sweating more than it’s hot.”
“Makes me sweat bullets, telling me I’ll be left to burn.”
“You’re doing something there.” Having backed away, she approaches again. “What’re you doing?”
He chokes on another rush of acid, and it foams from his nose, and his breath stinks as if it is the exhalation of a corpse.
35
SITTING BEHIND THE STEERING WHEEL, Ivan Petro reminded Jane of a realistically detailed special-effects mannequin like those that had sometimes been used in old horror movies made before computer animation became ever better and cheaper, when the script called for the head to explode. The cords of muscle in his neck were as taut as winch cables. His skull almost seemed to inflate: flushed face swollen and streaming sweat, nostrils flared, eyes protuberant, the arterioles in his temples prominent and throbbing. Yellowish foam suddenly gushed from his nostrils, and he let out a cry that seemed to be an expression equally of rage and despair, and following that cry came a stream of vicious obscenities in a spray of foul spittle, as if he meant to kill her with the intensity of his hatred.
When she stepped close to the broken-out window in the driver’s door, she saw his right hand against the steering wheel, like the carved-stone fist of some wrathful god who could cleave the planet with a single blow; the zip-tie embedded in the flesh of his wrist,
blood oozing as black as tar in the half-light, his shirt sleeve saturated to the elbow.
That band of hard, binding plastic was a quarter of an inch thick, and the angled teeth of the one-way ratcheted clasp was a marvel of design. The zip-tie had proved far more reliable than handcuffs. She had never known anyone to be able to free himself after being properly manacled. It simply wasn’t possible.
Ivan Petro surely realized the futility of this struggle. Yet his fury escalated, his hatred intensified, his effort increased, as though this brief imprisonment had driven him into raving madness, so that he’d strive to break free until a cerebral artery ruptured and death flooded through his brain.
The zip-tie snapped.
His sledgehammer fist flew from the steering wheel, braceleted in bloody plastic, a volley of blood drops spattering the dashboard, the windshield, even as the damaged hand dropped toward the pistol on the passenger seat. Cut muscle, sprained tendons, injured nerves didn’t affect him, as if some mystical entity had taken possession of him, some dark spirit not constrained by the laws of nature.
Jane said, “No,” and he said, “Yes,” and she shot him twice in the neck as his hand came off the passenger seat with the pistol.
Stunned, Jane backed away a few steps, feeling as if she had crossed from the waking world into a manic dream without the need to fall asleep. If he’d snapped the zip-tie, then maybe anything could happen. Maybe the ravaged flesh of his bullet-torn throat could mend before her eyes and the bullets whistle backward through the smoky air and into the barrel of her Heckler and return to the magazine, as if they had never been fired.
Ivan Petro remained slumped in the driver’s seat, however, and the dreamlike horror began to relent—until, as fire flared through the leaves around the Rover, she recognized something chilling about the angle of the dead man’s head. It was tipped slightly forward and toward his right shoulder. The posture of Petro, behind the wheel of the Rover, was similar to that of her Nick when she had found him sitting in the bathtub, dead by his own hand. No, not just similar. The same. The angle of the head, the bloody throat.