Authors: Patrick Lee
Travis had experienced the surreal before: moments as impossible to accept as they were to deny. What he found inside the third room took him back to one of those, the feeling channeling the past like an obscure scent not encountered in years. Sterile courtroom. Strobing fluorescent lights reflected on the narrow windows, all closed except one. Through the open window, the sound of a girl laughing, somewhere down the block in another reality far from this room and this judge and this sentence. He’d expected it, of course, and deserved much worse, but the gut punch of the moment had swayed him anyway: twenty-five years old, and he would be in his forties the next time he saw a night sky.
Here was a moment as difficult to grasp.
Here was the First Lady of the United States, dead with her eyes open, looking right through him, seated against the wall with a bloody notebook page in her hand.
Ellen Garner. Beautiful even now. Her features, always pale and delicate, had hardly been altered by the loss of her blood, which had soaked into the carpet around her. A single bullet had punctured her abdomen.
Beside her lay something that looked like an early-model car phone, a bulky handset connected by a black spiral cord to a suitcase. It could only be a satellite unit. Dried bloody fingerprints told the story: Mrs. Garner had crawled here from the tail just to get this thing, had taken it from its wall cabinet, found it damaged, and exposed its wires and boards in a wasted attempt to fix it.
Travis set the M16 aside and went to her. He knelt and gently took the paper from her fingertips, which death had long since stiffened, and read:
I hope that someone from Tangent finds this. If you are anyone else, do not contact local authorities. Go to a phone as quickly as you can, dial 112–289–0713. Ignore the consulting firm recording and enter 42551 at any time. A human will answer. Tell him/her that Box Kite is down at 67.4065 north, 151.5031 west. All dead except for two captives, taken by seven hostiles. Hostiles have almost certainly encamped within a few miles of this location—Tangent will know why, and will know what to do.
Two blank lines followed, and then the text continued. Here the writing was faint, wandering up and down over the light blue lines, written by a much weaker hand.
I know we are down somewhere remote. Have to assume now it is so remote, will not be found for days, and whoever finds this will be days from phone. Crash happened at 3:05 a.m. local time 26 June. If you find me more than two days after, if telephone is very far away, then ignore above message. Not enough time to call Tangent.
Hostiles are torturing our two people for info within close range of this crash, they will not leave area until they have broken them. (Not a guess, there is a reason they can’t leave before then.) Do not know how long our people will withstand them before breaking. Days I think, but I don’t know.
I am failing quickly—no way I can detail what is at stake. It affects you, whoever is reading this. It affects everyone. It’s bad. I understand that you won’t think you can do this, but I am asking you to kill these people.
Arms locker at aft wall of upper cabin, combo 021602. M16 rifles inside, can do full auto. Kill everyone. Most important to kill our people, captives, even if you fail to kill all hostiles. Kill captives first. I am sorry to ask this.
Another gap, and then a last passage, this portion so faint that Travis had to tilt the page toward the light.
PS—If you kill them all don’t go near the thing they have taken, three-inch sphere, dark blue, just get away and call Tangent.
Travis read the full page over again. By the time he’d finished, he felt a chill his heavy coat couldn’t keep out. He noticed a second slip of paper just visible in the pocket of Mrs. Garner’s shirt. He withdrew it and unfolded it. There were only a few lines.
Richard,
I’m fading in and out a lot, and when I’m out, I’m back in the dorms, back in Room 712 under that quilt with you, watching the snow over the law quad. Lucky life, spent with the only one I ever loved.
Ellen
Feeling like a trespasser, Travis carefully refolded the note and returned it to her pocket, exactly as it had been.
He stood, and saw for the first time the ground outside the starboard windows, above where Ellen sat. Here at last were the footprints. And ATV tracks. Though they terminated at the edge of the snowfield, forty yards away, there was little doubt which way they led.
Paige Campbell stared up at the pines and tried to slip into dream lucidity. She’d managed it twice so far, for maybe a minute each time—not much, all things considered, a few crumbs of peace, but oh Christ, they were worth it. Even as something to look forward to, they helped.
She wouldn’t need them to look forward to, of course, if she could just move her head a few inches. Raise it up from the tabletop, then bring it down again as hard as she could, crack open the back of her skull and rupture something, anything. Three or four solid whacks, before the rat-faced man could stop her, and then she’d be gone.
Why was that asking too much? Why was it a pipe dream just to want the chance to die?
Because the rat-faced man was good at his job; that was why. Because her head was strapped fast to the wood, like every other part of her. Even her tongue had been clamped to her teeth, to keep her from biting through it and choking on her own blood.
So instead she tried for dream lucidity. It was magic when it worked. All at once no pain, no straps, no clearing in the freezing daylight that never ended. The dream places were familiar, safe. The first one had been the reading nook in her living room. She hadn’t read anything there in the dream; she’d just walked through the space, barefoot on the stone tiles, and run her hand over the soft fabric of the chair.
The second place had been the beach at Carmel, pushing her fingers down into the sand, past the baked surface to where it was cool. She hadn’t been there in years, but the memory of it came back in high definition now.
The opportunities to slip away were rare. It was only possible when the drug started to wear off, in the last five or ten minutes before they injected her again. If she wasn’t careful they’d catch on, and start injecting her sooner. That meant closing her eyes was a no-no, as much as it would have eased the way into dreamland. She’d just have to get there with them open, but that was fine. She’d done it both times.
One trick was to stare at the pines instead of the sky. The light was less intense that way, maybe half the effect of letting her eyelids fall shut.
This time around, though, none of it was working. Too many distractions. The rat-faced man and one of the others were arguing just a few feet away, jabbering machine-gun fast in their language. Once upon a time Paige had loved the sound of that language, had considered minoring in it, going abroad for two semesters to immerse herself in it, and had moped for months when her academic path had swung her away from that option. Now, she thought, if she had a big red button in front of her that would magically tear the tongue out of every man, woman, and child on the planet who spoke it, she’d break her hand on that button.
If her hand wasn’t strapped to a fucking table.
The argument ended, and here came the rat-faced man’s footsteps again. Here came the needle again. No dreamland this time.
Here came the tears, too, even before the injection and the resumption of the pain. She hated that she couldn’t stop herself, hated having ceded that much control to these people.
Her body jerked when the needle touched the skin beside her navel. Then it was inside her, and though the effect would take several minutes to set in, she could feel the drug itself blooming cold and sharp across her stomach.
The pines blurred and swam, her body shaking hard now and jarring the tears. The baffle across her mouth—there to rein in her screams, which might carry unusually far in these mountains—did not prevent her from hearing her own voice, pleading no, over and over like a mantra. She couldn’t stop that, either.
Now came the rattle of the crank under the table, the surface pitching over sideways until it was almost vertical, her body no longer resting on it but held by the straps.
Looking sideways now instead of up.
Looking right into her father’s eyes.
His own straps held him immobile against the base of the nearest pine, his head trapped between the blocks of the casing that kept him from looking anywhere but straight at her.
Her tears spilled out sideways. His remained pooled in his eyes.
Then the rat-faced man moved out of view behind her, and got ready to work on her, the same way he’d done it each time. She could never see for herself what he was doing, but her father’s expression reflected what it must look like better than any mirror could have.
She could picture it, of course. It couldn’t have been more obvious what was happening to her. The very first time—something like three days ago now, just after the rat-faced man had strapped her down—he’d opened her upper arm with a scalpel and parted her triceps wide with a wedge clamp. He’d avoided damaging the artery, of course; it wouldn’t do to let death rescue her that easily. His prize had been the radial nerve, thick as a pencil once he’d freed it from its lubricated sheath beside the bone. After that, he’d been able to access it immediately each time.
He was about to do that now, making a big show of his preparations. She was sure it was part of the torture, the psychological aspect of it, all the cues to whet her anticipation of the pain: the zipper of his tool bag opening slowly, the clucking sound of his tongue, like he was sad to have to be doing this, and then the sigh.
Now her father’s eyes moved, because the rat-faced man was looking at him before beginning.
“What kind of daddy you being, then?” the rat-faced man said, his English broken, lyrical. “How you expect you look yourself in the mirror after this? How you let your little girl get hurt this long?”
Then the high-pitched laugh, rapid-fire, like a squirrel chittering.
Her father’s eyes hardened and looked away from the man, meeting hers again, his tears overrunning now.
This was supposed to be part of the torture too, obviously: making them lock eyes while he hurt her. Maybe it worked on some people, but they’d miscalculated sorely in this case. Her father’s eyes were all that made this bearable for her.
Of course, the point of the eye contact wasn’t its effect on her. The eye contact was for him. He was the one they were trying to break.
Was it working? Was it breaking him?
No, not a chance of that. Why had she gone through all of this, if he was only going to submit in the end?
More to the point, he was just stronger than that. Of that much Paige was certain. Her father knew the stakes, which were bigger than this clearing and anything that might be done to them in it. Telling these people how to switch on the Whisper was simply not on the list of options. End of debate.
Blinking through her tears, she tried to look strong, tried to send him assurance. It was all okay. Really, it was okay, even now when she was shaking like this, and so fucking scared, even as she could hear the rat-faced man rummaging in his bag and bringing out the tool, her tears intensifying because any second it was coming, even now, she had to send him the will to bear watching this, because giving them what they wanted was so much worse—
The tool snapped to life with its grating hum, and a second later its teeth closed around the exposed nerve, and the image of her father shattered like a reflection on broken water as she screamed.
Travis lay very still on the rock shelf and tried to recall the mind-set of a killer. It was far back along the corridor of years, where he’d meant to leave it forever.
Until now.
Through his binoculars he watched the little guy with the string mustache move the instrument back and forth inside the young woman’s arm. Even through the muffling attachment she had across her mouth, Travis could hear her screams. His perch was perhaps a hundred fifty yards from the encampment, and seventy feet above.
Seven hostiles. Two captives.
The surreal fabric of the situation still enveloped Travis, as it had since the moment he’d found Mrs. Garner. Who the hell were these people? What was all of this about?
Even when he focused past the disconnect, and forced himself to take stock of the circumstances he was up against, questions remained. Why had the hostiles chosen to remain here? How could they consider themselves safe less than three miles from the wreck of a 747 that had carried the First Lady of the United States? Not to mention whatever had been in the steel container. Why stay near the crash for even a single hour, much less three days? Mrs. Garner had said in her note that there was a reason for that, but hadn’t expanded upon it.
Well, the plane hadn’t been found by any of the authorities who must be looking for it, including, presumably, the president. Somehow these guys had pulled that off—their confidence in their safety must stem from that. They hadn’t even posted a lookout. For now, it was enough to know that Mrs. Garner had been right: these guys were not expecting trouble.
He could get them all from here. Easily. Skill was simply not a variable from this range and elevation, and with these weapons—he’d brought five M16s, their selectors set to full-auto. Anyone who could douse a flower bed with a garden hose could kill all nine people in that encampment from this spot, probably before firing the first two rifles dry. Certainly by the fifth.
Yes, he could do that. He could do that right now and have it done with.
But he wasn’t going to.
In truth, he hadn’t squared with that part of Ellen Garner’s message, whatever the unmentioned stakes might be, but if even a scrap of the idea had lingered in his mind, it had vanished the moment he’d trained his binoculars upon the young woman on the torture table.
He wasn’t going to kill her. He’d accrued enough of that brand of guilt for one lifetime.
But he was going to kill.
He continued watching String Mustache enjoy his work, while the young woman’s body spasmed in the binds, and he found the killer’s mind-set coming back to him easily.
He could do this.
He just needed to get closer.