Flee The Darkness

by Grant R. Jeffrey

  A million sparks of diamond light brightened the dark canopy of the sky as Daniel freed the boat from its harness and tied it to the side of the dock. He lowered the bags, then helped Lauren into the craft. He had to forcibly scoop Tasha from the dock and place her in Lauren’s arms, but the dog seemed content to remain on her mistress’s lap as Daniel climbed in, untied the ropes, and started the motor.

  He didn’t think there would be much gas in the tank; most people drained the fuel tanks when they put their boats up for the winter. Predictably, the engine sputtered and died when they were only halfway across the river. When Lauren gasped in dismay, Daniel grinned and picked up the oars.

  “Never let it be said that I rely completely on technology,” he said, slipping the oars through the oarlocks. “Just be glad I grew up in the wilderness. I’ve been rowing my way across lakes since I was ten years old.”

  Lauren laughed at his efforts—he was a bit out of practice, and the boat skittered rather than glided across the water at first—but as Daniel settled back and found his stroke, he realized he was grateful for the quiet. If they had come across with the noise of an engine, someone on the Canadian shore might have noticed. As it was, no one would mark their crossing.

  “You know,” Lauren’s teeth chattered as the wind blew her hair, “I feel bad about taking this boat. Leaving that old clunker is not exactly an even trade, you know.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Daniel assured her. “The boat is registered. We’ll pull it up on shore, and when the authorities find it, they’ll contact the owner.” His smile turned into a chuckle. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll be famous outlaws by then, sort of like Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “I certainly hope not! The president would be mortified.”

  As the silence of the lake flowed over them, Daniel found himself thinking of his mother. If she had seen those malicious lies on television, she had to be wondering about him, praying for him, at that moment.

  “I should have called my mother,” he said suddenly, his voice thick and heavy in his own ears. “She’s bound to be worried about us.”

  “Why don’t you call her?” Lauren gave him an encouraging smile. “We’re safe on the water, and you have your cell phone, so call!”

  “My phone’s not working now.” Daniel pulled hard on the oars and glanced behind him, searching for a smooth stretch of beach sand. “I took the batteries out. Brad told me that now the Feds can track a cell phone even if it’s not turned on.”

  A cold wind blew past him with soft moans—an eerie sound—and then he realized it wasn’t the wind moaning; it was Lauren.

  He turned to her, a question on his lips, and saw that she had reached into her shopping bag. With two fingers, she gingerly lifted her own cellular telephone.

  Daniel drew the oars out of the water, then swallowed to bring his heart down from his throat. From the look in her eyes he inferred the truth, but thought there might yet be a chance. “Has it been activated?”

  She nodded, then shook her head. “No—and yes. No, I didn’t turn it on, but yes—it’s been activated.” Tears spilled from her lashes, glittering like jewels in the moonlight. “Daniel—are they waiting for us on the other shore? Have they been following us all this time?”

  A tremor of mingled fear and anticipation shot through Daniel. Who knew? This was not a movie where the good guys waited to come galloping to the rescue. It was real life, and he and Lauren had only each other.

  Daniel felt the wings of tragedy brush past him, stirring the air and raising the hair on his forearm. The struggle might be lost even now, but he could not surrender, not as long as God gave him breath.

  “Help me think.” His voice sounded strangled in his own ears. “We’ve got to get rid of it.”

  She held it out over the water. “Should I just drop it—”

  “No!” He took a deep breath and gentled his voice. “No, honey, they’d abruptly lose the signal and know something was up. We need something that floats, something we can put it in.”

  Lauren gently set the phone on the floor, then rummaged beneath her seat while Daniel searched the shore for another boat dock. If he could only find a canoe, or some other craft—

  “What about this?” With a triumphant flourish, Lauren pulled a child’s lunchbox from under her seat. It was insulated, sealed with a zipper, and appeared to be watertight. Daniel took it from her, unzipped the opening, then dumped a couple of moldy bread crusts into the water. “It’ll do. Just drop the phone in here. If anyone’s listening, we’ll send them upriver to Quebec.”

  Lauren placed the phone in the box, Daniel zipped it shut, then flung the container out onto the river. Both of them sat silently as the lunchbox rocked on the water’s surface, then rode the current upstream and disappeared into the night.

  “Four or five miles an hour,” Daniel remarked, squinting into the darkness. “That’s how fast the river flows. With any luck, that phone will be leading them on a wild goose chase by morning.”

  “Do you really think they’ve been following my phone? Daniel, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know—”

  Daniel cut her off with a smile as he picked up the oars. “Honey, I should have remembered about your phone. And we’ve made it this far, so we’re not giving up. Maybe they have been behind us, but they’re not here now. So let’s keep going.”

  She sniffed and nodded, then hugged Tasha close to her chest and stared at the surface of the lake with wide, watery eyes.

  Twenty miles away, General Kord Herrick frowned as Archer’s limo pulled off the road and into a gas station. With an impatient gesture he directed his driver to do the same, then rolled down the window as the van followed the limo into the darkness of the deserted station.

  “What is it?” he barked as one of Archer’s aides came running toward his van.

  “The signal is weakening,” the aide explained, spreading his hands in a sheepish gesture. “The telephone battery must be going dead. But we have them moving eastward on the St. Lawrence River.”

  Kord bit back a curse and consulted his map. The St. Lawrence River flowed from Lake Ontario toward Montreal, then emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. If Prentice had used a boat—and he surely would, as it was an ingenious way to avoid the border guards—he could come ashore anywhere he pleased, leaving his pursuers to search miles and miles of shoreline.

  Kord winced as an odd twinge of disappointment struck him. Closing his map, he pinned Archer’s aide in a brutal and hostile stare. “Tell the general to regroup his men,” he said. “I’m going back to New York to meet with Romulus. There has to be another way to stop this man. I’m tired of playing cat and mouse.”

  “Yes, sir.” The aide snapped a salute, then jogged back to Archer’s car.

  Kord turned to his driver. “Take me to the nearest airport,” he said, his voice heavy with weariness. “I am finished here tonight, but tomorrow I will find Daniel Prentice.”

  “Mrs. Davis?”

  Turning his back to the frigid wind, Daniel smothered a smile as Lauren huddled against him for warmth. They stood outside a busy market in Kingston, Ontario, at lunchtime, and Daniel had patiently fed coins to the pay phone until the call to Florida went through.

  Daniel caught Lauren’s eye as he tried to explain the situation to his mother’s next-door neighbor. “Mrs. Davis, this is Daniel Prentice. Yes—I know, I’ve been on television. No, it’s not true. Mrs. Davis, could you please run next door and bring my mother to the phone? No, I can’t call her. Yes, I’ll wait.”

  Daniel rolled his eyes, signaling his frustration with the talkative woman. Lauren pressed her lips to his for a brief kiss, then pulled away with a simple admonition: “Be patient.”

  A moment later, his mother’s breathless voice rolled over the phone lines. “Daniel! Is that really you?”

  “Yes. Mom—I can’t talk long.”

  “Goodness, Daniel, why didn’t you call me at home?”

  “Your phones are tapped, Mom.”

  �
��They are not!” Her voice rang with indignation.

  “Trust me, Mom, they are.” Daniel caught Lauren’s hand, then smiled into the phone. “Mom—I married Lauren. We’re safe, and we’re together. And we’ve decided to do something about Adrian Romulus. Just watch television tonight, and then be prepared. The media will probably be swarming your place by tomorrow morning.”

  “Daniel, they’ve already been here! They’re saying that you killed Brad and his wife—”

  “It’s a lie.” Despite his resolve not to dwell on the horror that had befallen Brad and Christine, Daniel felt his throat tighten. “It’s the work of Romulus’s general, a man named Kord Herrick. But we’re safe right now, and I have a plan. But I wanted you to know I’m okay and that I love you. And I wanted you—” he stumbled over the unfamiliar words—“Mom, I want you to pray for us. Will you?”

  “Oh, honey.” Even a thousand miles away, Daniel could hear the love in her voice. “Daniel, I’ve never stopped praying for you.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Your prayers were answered.” He caught Lauren’s eye. “Lauren sends her love, too. But we’ve got to go now.”

  He hung up the phone and drew Lauren close, and both of them shivered with a cold that had nothing to do with the freezing air. The SAGE base, which had once been a part of NORAD, lay two hundred and ten miles to the northwest, and Daniel had less than twelve hours to reach it.

  “What do we do now?” Lauren asked, lifting her gaze to meet his.

  Daniel pulled the wallet out of his pocket and counted the money inside. Five crisp Canadian hundred-dollar bills remained. “You’re going to pray that the owner of this market has more sympathy than sense,” he said, tucking the empty wallet into his pocket. “And I’m going to go inside and ask him to sell a poor newlywed couple that truck and a tankful of gas—” he pointed to a pickup in the parking lot—“for a measly five hundred dollars.”

  A soft woebegone expression filled her eyes. “Oh, dear.”

  “Better start praying. If we ever needed a miracle, it’s now.” Tossing the words over his shoulder, Daniel walked into the store with more confidence in his step than in his heart.

  At a temporary command center at the UN, a uniformed Community soldier strode up to Kord Herrick and handed him a sheet of paper. “Two hours ago, sir. The giant ear picked up Daniel Prentice’s voiceprint.”

  “Good.” Kord took the paper and studied it. “Who is Charlene Davis?”

  “No one important, sir. But she lives next door to Amelia Prentice, our suspect’s mother. The call went out at 12:13 from a pay phone at a market in Kingston, Ontario.”

  Rubbing the side of his nose, Kord turned and considered the map he’d hung on the wall. They had begun to lose the cellular phone signal near Montreal, but Kingston lay just across the river from the Thousand Islands. Daniel Prentice was too clever—somehow he had managed to send them miles out of the way. Still, what was in Ontario? Prentice probably thought he was safe in Canada, and he had to be feeling a little more relaxed or he wouldn’t have risked calling his worried mother.

  Thoughts of the Treasury Department computers had ceased to bother Romulus. At his urging, officials from the European Monetary Union had tested the computers today, and all programs had operated without a hitch. The programmers had run a few advance deposits through the newly-merged systems, and all the post-January 1, 2000 dates had registered without a single hitch.

  “Prentice must have been telling the truth,” Romulus told Kord earlier this morning. “All systems are operational, and nothing seems amiss. Relax, General. He can run, but he cannot hide for long.”

  But Kord could not rest. Prentice was a loose cannon; he was too bright and knew too much to wander free—especially tonight, when Romulus would speak to the world from a news booth at New York’s Times Square.

  Romulus’s advisors had been working on the plan for weeks. As soon as the fabled ball dropped, the cameras would cut to Adrian, who, in a five-minute video clip, would demonstrate how the Millennium Network would eradicate crime, simplify life, encourage productivity, and unite the world in a global community. If, however, Prentice managed to break the story of Romulus’s behind-the-scene manipulation of American politics anytime between now and midnight, Adrian might not make it out of Times Square alive.

  Kord sank into a chair and absently drummed his fingertips on the desk as his eyes searched the oversized map. Prentice had twelve hours between his phone call and Adrian’s international speech. A man could fly virtually anywhere in twelve hours, but Prentice was traveling with a woman and a dog, and both adults had been implanted with a Millennium Chip. So he would avoid planes, trains, and buses, but he could drive twelve hundred kilometers in twelve hours. . . .

  Kord stood and squinted up at the map. “Can anyone tell me,” he asked, directing his comments to the bustling room filled with agents, soldiers, and security personnel, “if anything significant lies within six hundred miles of Kingston, Ontario? Narrow it down to areas in Canada, focusing on computer companies, educational centers, television stations, military installations—”

  “That’s easy.” A nearby American soldier lifted a bushy brow. “There’s Ottawa’s Silicon Valley in the north, Kingston’s Royal Military College, Canada’s Communication Security Establishment in Ottawa, Canada’s Governmental Security Administration east of Ottawa. All of those would be possible targets, and all are fully operational. And then there’s the old SAGE base, right outside North Bay, near Lake Nipissing. It used to be part of NORAD, but it’s been inactive for over a year. Nobody up there now but a couple of guards and a maintenance crew.”

  Of course. Kord’s eyes sought the map again. A defensive base, even an inactive installation, would have radar equipment, a satellite dish, and rows and rows of mainframe computers, most of them still monitoring the globe.

  “Get the jet.” He whirled to face the American aide who’d been assigned to him. “And get me a helicopter out of—” he threw up his hand—“whatever airport is closest to North Bay. And find me two snipers, the best we have. Tell them we are leaving immediately.”

  Daniel drove the last twelve miles in a blizzard. The snaking black road disappeared under a blanket of white, but he plunged blindly ahead, careful to keep the old truck a steady fifteen feet to the left of a long line of telephone poles. Lauren sat next to him, her arms around the dog, her teeth chattering as she prayed aloud for guidance and protection. For the first time in a long time, Daniel discovered that prayers lifted on his behalf didn’t annoy him.

  The sky was black velvet, through which fat snowflakes hurtled down like falling stars. Daniel leaned forward to squint through the arc made by the windshield wipers, then jabbed his finger at the glass. “There!” he called, pointing to the small roof near the lake shore. “That’s the cabin.”

  “That’s your cabin?” Lauren’s luminous eyes widened in astonishment. “That shack?”

  Daniel grinned at her. “What did you expect, a Swiss chalet?”

  A betraying blush brightened her face. “Well—yes. I read in your dossier that you had a Range Rover registered in Canada, and I imagined that you kept a nice little summer place up here.”

  “I garage the Range Rover at the airport. The shack is sort of a squatter’s place. The government owns the land, but no one seems to mind if people fish here on occasion.” Daniel swung the truck toward old Henry’s cabin, then parked beneath the snow-laden branches of a pine tree.

  He shut down the engine, then reached out and took Lauren’s hand. “Right through there, about three hundred yards away,” he explained, pointing through the whirling white snow, “is the satellite dish we need. I’m going to string our wire from that dish to this cabin. At precisely midnight you are going to go on camera and tell the world that Adrian Romulus is a murderer and a fraud.”

  Her breath quickened. “And that he tried to poison the president?”

  “And that there is no Morning Star Trust and no nuclear threat.” Da
niel reached up and caressed her cheek. “And after we warn them that he just might be the Antichrist described in the Bible, we’re leaving this place as quickly as we can. They’ll be able to track us the instant we link to the satellite.”

  Lauren pressed her lips together and nodded, and Daniel smiled, realizing that he had found the one woman in a million who could pull this off. Through her role in the White House people had come to know and trust Lauren Mitchell. Most important, she possessed the courage to look into the camera without flinching and tell the truth about Adrian Romulus.

  “You and Tasha can wait in the cabin.” Daniel moved his hand to the door and prepared to step out into the whirling snow. “I’ll get everything set up, and then I’ll join you.” He glanced at his watch and saw that it was eleven thirty. The storm had slowed their progress considerably, but there was still time.

  “Be careful.” Unguarded tenderness lingered in her eyes as she looked at him. “I’ll be praying for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Daniel drew a deep breath, then stepped out into the slashing white wind.

  Kord Herrick cursed as he slid on the icy tarmac and nearly fell. He should have been with Adrian in New York, surrounded by beautiful women and with a hot drink in his hand, but instead he was carrying an explosive device in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Canadian yokels who had absolutely no concept of the word urgent.

  Death was too merciful for a man like Daniel Prentice; he ought to be tortured, lobotomized, and pulled through the streets in a cage. Someone ought to ride before him, shouting, “This is what happens to those who dare to resist the good of the Community, the plans for our future! This is what happens to those who oppose Adrian Romulus and the powers that will unite the world!”

  A gust of wind whooshed under the jet and blew past Kord, lifting the hair at the back of his head, whipping his coat tight around his middle. One of the snipers shouted something and pointed toward the golden windows of the airplane hangar, but Kord shook his head, anxious to get on with the chase.