I picked up the pace, jogging now, the pain in my hamstring expanding and intensifying.
A new scream grabbed my attention, and I stared out into the raging wind and ice, saw a half-second glimpse of the illuminated grizzly feasting on someone thirty feet away, its jaws buried deep in their chest.
The next decent jolt of light glimmered off something shiny hanging on the wall up ahead.
I reached it but had to wait ten seconds for enough light to read by.
It wasn’t a plaque. It was a sign that read HARD HAT AREA.
I turned to head back to the door and found the bear standing between me and the wall where I needed to be.
This time, I didn’t wait for the charge.
This time, I just turned and ran like hell in the opposite direction, pain in my leg be damned, kid in my belly be damned, veering away from the wall, into the fog, passing through a heavy spray of super-cooled water droplets blowing hard into the side of my face.
A cluster of objects loomed straight ahead, and I threaded my way through ancient oil drums, risking a glance back over my shoulder to see the grizzly inside of twenty feet and closing fast.
I pushed over every drum I passed, and the boom of hollow barrels crashing to the concrete floor added the sound of thunder to the chaos all around me.
Cutting a hard left, I plunged into the howling mist, no walls, no door in sight, heard the bear careening through the oil drums behind me, and hoped I’d bought myself a few extra seconds.
I had no idea if I was even running toward the exit now, felt more like I was flying through an electrical storm.
My shoes suddenly lost traction on the concrete, but instead of falling, I managed to torque my feet to the side and slide. Glancing down at what I’d run through, I saw that I was skidding across a pond of red.
I fell onto one knee, feeling warmth soak into my pants, the warmth of someone’s blood. Incredibly, I’d wound up back at the upside-down panel.
Behind me, a roar.
The grizzly within a few yards.
I stared at the keypad, tried 666 again.
Nothing.
999.
Nothing.
The strobe light flashed, throwing up the giant shadow of the bear across the door. It was so close I could sense it, though I dared not look.
SIZZLE.
That was the only capitalized word in the Paglia quote.
Why had it been capitalized?
And then it came to me. Luther had studied the killers I’d chased. He obviously knew about Mr. K, and letters that looked like numbers had been an integral part of that case.
SIZZLE.
If you looked at it upside-down, it would be the numbers .
I typed the numbers in.
Green light.
Heard the deadbolt turn.
The bear bumped me from behind, its cold, wet nose pressing into my back.
I spun around, its face right at my chest.
It sniffed my belly.
No!
NOT MY BABY!
I cocked back my hand, and smacked it across the snout.
“BAD BEAR!”
The bear stepped backward, its ears flattening against its skull, and for a moment it looked like a giant, scolded puppy.
Then I grabbed the handle and scrambled through the door—
—slamming it behind me just as the bear pounded into it with a gigantic shudder.
He watches Jack on the monitor, tinted green from the night-vision camera.
That was a close one.
In his hand, Luther clutches the master remote control. His finger had been hovering above the button that would have detonated the explosive collar on the bear. Several times, he’d almost pressed it. Much as the bear had cost him, Jack was more valuable. The goal is to teach her something, not kill her.
Although there is a very real possibility, which he has to acknowledge, that it could ultimately come to that.
There were several close calls, and it has been quite exhilarating to watch. But as Luther had hoped, Jack prevailed.
Time to make it harder for her. He presses the microphone button, activating her headpiece.
“Nice job with Teddy, Jack. I commend you. Was I seeing things, or did you get maternal there for a moment? The mother wolf, protecting her pup?”
“I’m done playing games with you, Luther.”
“No. Actually, you’re just getting started. Do you see that water tower, a hundred yards ahead of you?”
“Yeah.”
“I need you on top of it. There’s a ladder at the base.”
“No way.”
Luther has anticipated this. He leaves the control room, walking toward the seventh circle where Phin and Harry wait.
“I suppose I can’t force you. But maybe I can persuade you. Who would you like me to burn first, Harry or Phin?”
Jack’s voice comes so low it’s hard to hear. “Leave them alone, Luther.”
“Then do what I say. Climb to the top of the water tower, or you can listen to me roast both of them alive.”
Jack doesn’t say anything for a moment.
Finally, she utters a defeated, “Fine. Just don’t hurt them.”
Luther smiles.
It would have been a shame to play that card this early. No doubt Jack would have been horrified listening to her friends fry.
How much worse it will be for her when she stands in their circle of hell and is forced to watch them fry.
It was cool outside, but a welcome relief from the frigid temperature of the bear cave.
I reached the outskirts of a metal fence topped with razor wire, which enclosed the base of the water tower.
“You seriously think I can climb over that, Luther? You do realize I’m eight and a half months pregnant.”
“Walk around to the other side. I’ve cut a hole.”
I circumnavigated the fence, moving over pieces of broken glass that crunched under my tennis shoes.
When I finally arrived at the opening, I stopped. He’d cut a segment out of the fencing three feet across and four feet high. I ducked through and walked the last few yards to the tower’s base.
It was an older structure, the kind that looked like a rocket ship—big metal cylinder on stilts with a pointed cone roof. A walkway circled the perimeter of the tank. The four metal struts stood bolted and buried in a foundation of crumbling concrete. For some reason, I’d expected a spiral stairway that would access the tank at the top of the tower, but there was only a narrow ladder whose bottom rung stopped six feet above the ground. A rope ladder extended down from this lowest rung, bridging the gap. It swayed in the breeze.
I froze, my stomach coiling into knots.
“Luther, please.”
“Start climbing.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m getting bored with threatening your friends.”
“I can’t do this.”
“Fair enough.”
“Wait.”
He snorted. “Make up your mind, or I’ll start—”
“Just give me a second,” I said.
Walking over to the rope ladder, I took hold of it, thinking of the oft-repeated story of Chinese women in the rice paddies, working hard up until they gave birth, then clutching their newborns to their breasts and going right back to work.
If they could do it, why couldn’t I?
I stared up the ladder, felt butterflies swarming in my lower intestines, and then something like an electrical current shot all the way down the length of my legs and through to the tips of my toes.
The ladder must have soared between seventy-five and a hundred feet into the sky, which seemed to be no more than a half hour away from full-on dusk. The low deck of clouds streaming over the tank spit a steady drizzle of cool rain, and though I couldn’t be sure, I felt certain the tower itself was swaying. Imagined I could hear the rusty metal creaking.
“Luther—”
“You have seven minutes to get
to the top, or I execute someone you love. And the fun part is that you’ll get to hear it all. Their last seconds. I have a recorder so you can hear it again and again and again.”
I shut my eyes, trying to steady the pounding of my heart. I hated heights. Despised them. For my forty-eighth birthday, Phin had taken me downtown to a Brazilian steakhouse called Brazzaz. But before dinner, he’d cajoled me into riding up to the Willis Tower’s Skydeck. On the west side of the tower, four glass balconies had been installed, which allowed sightseers to step out over the street and stand on glass with traffic moving like Hot Wheels beneath them on Wacker Drive, thirteen hundred feet below. I’d known it was sturdy, known that no insurance company in the world would issue a liability policy on such a tourist attraction if it hadn’t been safer than sitting at home on your sofa, and yet—
—I’d declined to step out.
Some primal siren in the back of my brain had physically stopped me from walking out onto the glass.
Phin, of course, had taunted me mercilessly.
And now—
“What’s the holdup?” Luther purred in my ear. “Is the fearless Jack Daniels a little bit afraid of heights?”
A little bit? Try a lot.
“Better get going.”
I reached out and grabbed the swaying ladder, the rope damp.
Heaving my pregnant ass onto the lowest rung, I began to climb, the rope ladder stretching under the strain of my weight, the metal rungs above me creaking and groaning.
I took it slow, one rung at a time, the protrusion of my belly adding another element to the challenge.
By the time I reached the first metal rung, I had warmed up from the bear cave and was sweating freely.
The metal was cold and wet, the rungs barely more than a foot wide, and the moisture on my palms made it difficult to get a secure grip.
But I didn’t think. I just climbed, adopting a side-stepping technique since my baby bump made climbing straight on impossible.
Five rungs up, the vibration of my weight caused the entire structure to shudder—a subtle, horrifying vibration I could feel in my bones.
I went on, refusing to look down, maintaining a laser-focus on the next rung, the next step, clearing my mind of all other thoughts and distractions.
Halfway up, I stopped. Not out of fear—I hadn’t dared to look down though I could feel the gaping space all around me—but out of pure exhaustion.
“How we doing?” Luther asked.
“Just catching my breath.”
“No rush, but you have three minutes. I must admit, I’m sort of hoping you don’t make it.”
Sweat ran down my face into my eyes, and I blinked against the sting.
I went on.
One foot up.
Next foot up.
One hand on the rusty metal of the next rung.
Next hand on the rusty metal of the next rung.
Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.
It would’ve been monotonous if each step didn’t require more energy than the last.
If I didn’t seem to be getting heavier the higher I climbed.
If one mistake wouldn’t result in my death.
“You have one minute remaining,” Luther said.
I got my feet onto the next rung and reached up without looking.
My hand passed through air, and a jolt of stomach-churning fear shot through me. I clutched the ladder, my legs quivering with strain and panic.
The next rung above my head was missing—looked like it had simply rusted away and fallen off.
“Forty-five seconds.”
I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I found myself staring down the length of the ladder, eighty feet to the tower’s concrete base.
The world fell away and rushed toward me all at once, and I was struck by the sickening sensation of falling.
I clung tighter to the rungs and shut my eyes as Luther laughed and said, “Thirty seconds, Jack. If I’d have known this was so scary for you, I would have chosen a taller tower.”
Go, Jack. Right now. Go. Go. Go. You have to do this.
I reached up, my fingers grazing the next intact rung, got a white-knuckled grip and pulled myself up, barely managing to get my feet over the two-foot gap to the next step.
“Twenty seconds.”
I climbed as fast as I could manage, no luxury to pause between rungs now.
“Ten seconds.”
Three rungs above me, I could see the railing and the catwalk that encircled the base of the water tank.
“Five seconds.”
I fought my way up the last few steps, and grabbed hold of the railing, trusting it would hold my weight—it had to—and hauled myself up onto the catwalk and rolled over onto my back, staring up into the darkening sky as specks of water dotted my face.
Luther spoke into my ear again, but I was gasping so loud I couldn’t hear him.
After another twenty seconds of panting, I told him, “I missed what you said.”
“I said you made it, Jack. Congratulations.”
I rubbed my belly and then used the flimsy railing to haul myself up into an awkward sitting position, my legs spread. The catwalk spanned twenty-four inches, and from my vantage, a hundred feet above the ground, the view of Luther’s concrete kingdom was impressive.
Row after row of decrepit factory homes.
A six-story housing project, long abandoned.
Factories and warehouses as far as I could see—big brick monstrosities with smokestacks and vacant parking lots that had once teemed with cars, now reduced to sprawling, concrete deserts.
It was a wasteland.
No sign of life or industry or movement as far as I could see, save for a low skyline a mile, maybe two away, accompanied by the distant hum of automobiles.
It might as well have been a thousand miles from where I sat, utterly helpless, utterly at Luther’s mercy.
“Up, Jack.”
I struggled onto my feet, my legs weak, extremities tingling.
A soft, mechanical buzzing above my head drew my attention.
I looked up into the eye of a camera.
He reaches out, touches her face on the screen, says, “Smile.”
I didn’t smile at the lens pointing down at me, hanging just above the spot where the catwalk intersected with the ladder.
Beneath the camera, I spotted another brass plaque, the only thing on this tower not encrusted with rust:
CIRCLE 8: FRAUD 911
“If I believed that my reply were made
To one who to the world would e’er return,
This flame without more flickering would stand still;
But inasmuch as never from this depth
Did any one return, if I hear true,
Without the fear of infamy I answer.”
Inferno, Canto XXVII
A noise on the other side of the tank drew my attention from the plaque—sounded like a chain dragging across the catwalk’s metal grate.
I couldn’t tell from which direction it was coming, my vision blocked by the curve of the tank.
Now something vibrated the catwalk—footsteps approaching me.
“What is that, Luther? Are you up here?”
He didn’t answer.
“Luther?”
The footsteps closed in, now just around the corner on my right. I squared up and backed slowly away, arms coming up instinctively, the fight-or-flight response kicking my adrenaline into overdrive.
A small, wiry woman with silvering hair walked into view.
She wore a tracksuit like mine and held the biggest folding knife I’d ever seen. No, actually I had seen this one before. McGlade had one—it was a Cold Steel Espada with a curved, nine-inch blade. He’d carried it around for days, obsessively flicking it open like some knife-wielding badass, until it had slipped out of his grasp and stuck blade-first into his 70-inch LED flat-screen.
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