Authors: Patrick Lee
The strangest thing about wearing the suit was holding something. A silenced USP Mark 23, in this case. Its bobbing motion, hovering before Karl as he walked, seemed to him very much like the movement of a floating thing. Floating on nothing.
The open door was ten feet ahead on the left.
This would be tricky.
The woman—the only Tangent operator here, and maybe the only one who knew anything—was about a dozen breaths from the grave by the sound of her. He’d gotten a nice long gaze at her arm a few minutes earlier, inside the room while the guy—whoever he was—had called her people.
A random hiker, the man seemed to be.
Karl’s orders had been clear but also flexible, given the number of unknown variables in the situation. His superiors had known that Paige Campbell was unaccounted for, would arrive in Coldfoot if she arrived anywhere at all, and that she had hidden the Whisper somewhere near the site of her torture. She could not have taken it with her; nobody on foot could carry a heavy enough containment system to protect against it. She could only have concealed it near the place where, by means entirely unknown, her seven captors had suddenly ended up dead and she’d ended up free.
That mystery wasn’t Karl’s concern. It was enough that she was here now. She and her new friend. The relevant question was whether, after enduring three days of torture without breaking, Paige had been willing to trust a stranger with her secrets. Did this man know where she’d hidden the Whisper? Equally important: did either of them have the key now?
He quietly raised the upper half of the suit and holstered the weapon, making it vanish. With nothing to give him away, he moved forward, shifting his weight carefully to minimize the floor’s creaking. It creaked anyway. Well, better old wood than carpet. Technological marvel though the suit was, it couldn’t hide the depressions his feet made in a soft surface—
He nearly gasped aloud, having come abreast of the doorway to find himself staring into the bore of a Beretta, not two feet away in the hiker’s hand. He flinched and, recovering just enough to keep from taking a hard step, moved a foot to the side, out of the weapon’s line of fire.
Where the fuck had it come from? The guy had made no mention of it earlier, when he asked the fat-ass in the tractor hat about guns.
Calming, Karl stared at the hiker. The pistol was steady in the guy’s hand, all things considered. In the eyes there was fear but not panic. Had anyone visible stepped into the doorway, this guy wouldn’t have hesitated to kill. That wasn’t quite what Karl had expected from a random civilian. Well, some people had more of the devil in them than others.
He took a step toward the man. By providence the floor directly at the threshold kept its silence. His next step—also quiet—put him where he needed to be. His left hand went to the Beretta’s barrel, not touching it yet, but encircling it. His right he drew back, tensed.
Travis waited. Whoever was out there could only be feet away. He considered opening fire through the wall. He could put a shot every six inches until the clip ran dry. But if he used every bullet and missed anyway—if the killer dropped too low or was farther down the hall than he sounded—then it would all be over.
Silence now. Ten seconds at least. It was worse than the creaking.
Then he felt the gun in his hand jerk impossibly downward, as if drawn by a supermagnet in the floor—but before he could even process the sensation, pain exploded below his ear, his vision flaring white. Then black.
What had happened? Awareness came back slowly. He was lying on his chest, face to the floor, ankles bound together. His hands too, behind him—the bind felt like duct tape. Another loop surrounded his head, covering his eyes.
He was still in the room with Paige. Her breathing was worse; how much time had gone by?
Now he remembered the baffling movement of his gun, and the blow to his head from nowhere. Had it really happened that way, or was he remembering it wrong because he’d been knocked out?
A man spoke, the voice deep and without emotion. “Tell me where she hid it.”
Travis considered the options, each so bleak he almost didn’t care to choose. If he said he didn’t know, and if the guy believed him, he’d turn his attention on Paige instead. Could she even be woken at this point? Maybe, with enough pain. This guy would have no qualms about administering it. On the other hand, if Travis said he knew where the thing was buried, the guy might decide Paige was of no use and kill her immediately. Really, almost every outcome he could imagine ended with both of them dead inside of an hour.
Except one—the worst one, and probably the most likely. Without a doubt, this guy had the means to contact the team in the valley. They could be here with the helicopter in twenty minutes, grab him and Paige and be far away before help arrived.
When
would
help arrive? How long had he been unconscious? If he could stall for time, maybe it would only be a little longer. He and Paige wouldn’t survive, of course—the guy would kill them before fleeing, no question of that—but at least they’d only be dead. The lesser evil by a wide margin. Holding up the show by even ten minutes might make that possible.
“It was fun killing your friends,” Travis said.
The man didn’t respond.
“The little guy with the cattle prod, especially,” he continued. “Then again, technically, I didn’t kill him. He managed to survive. Briefly. Should’ve seen what happened to him then.”
“I hear it was fitting,” the voice said.
“No, it would have been fitting if he could have smoldered alive for three days.”
“Where’s the Whisper hidden? Did she bury it? She couldn’t have carried it far without heavy containment, which she didn’t have.”
“We played catch with it for a while, then we got bored, decided to head back to town. It’s probably just lying wherever we left it.”
The floor strained. When the man spoke again, he was closer. “Sarcasm doesn’t come naturally to a man in your predicament. It sounds like a contrivance to me, which means it has a purpose—and for now, that tells me all I need to know.”
Then he lifted something—it was heavy and plastic, from the sound it made against the wall—and left the room. He was only a few steps into the hall when Travis heard the digital tones of a phone number being punched into a keypad.
“He knows where it is,” Karl said. “And he has the key in his pocket. For now I’ve left it there, to keep him confident.”
Karl was standing outside the front of the restaurant, far from the hiker’s hearing range. He explained his plan into the phone. When he finished, the man on the other end of the call remained silent, considering it.
The breeze had picked up since earlier, coursing down from the north through the gap where the highway transited the range. The sun, also farther north, shone blood red along the gravel ribbon.
“If your idea doesn’t work,” the man on the phone said, “then what you’re suggesting will be a terrible sacrifice.” His voice sounded hollow over the satellite connection.
“If it does work, it’s worth it,” Karl said. “Regardless, it’s the only way to get what you want now.”
More silence. Karl knew to let it play out. As he waited, he turned and stared off to the south. The hiker had guessed correctly about one thing: Tangent would send help by way of the Air Force, probably a C–17 Globemaster coming out of Elmendorf with its ass on fire, a couple Special Tactics teams ready to bail off the ramp. Elmendorf was in Anchorage, four hundred miles south, give or take. If the C–17 had lifted off within ten minutes of the call—a near certainty—it would be here within the hour. But because the hiker had told Tangent about the helicopter, Karl knew there was something else coming from Elmendorf, moving a hell of a lot faster than a cargo jet. Maybe three times as fast.
The man on the line finally spoke. “All right. Do it. When do you want the helicopter?”
Karl did the math. Even accounting for some unpredictability, the timing should be good enough.
“Go ahead and call them now,” Karl said. “Tell them to take off right away.”
Alone with the sound of Paige trying to hold on, Travis found his mind returning to the attack that had knocked him unconscious. He didn’t think he was misremembering it now. The details were clear. The gun in his hand had suddenly pulled itself down—but not just down. Down and forward. There’d even been a twist in the motion.
As if a human hand had grabbed it.
Then, half a second later had come the blow to the side of his head, from someone who must have been standing out of sight behind him.
But how? Travis had been in this small room from the moment the big guy in the John Deere hat had led him to it. There’d been nobody here. There was no closet to hide in, and the window had been closed. How had the attacker gotten behind him, unless he’d been hiding under the bed?
Even in that case, Travis knew there was some deeper flaw in the picture. Something more fundamental. But for the longest moment he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Then he remembered.
The sunlight—coming from the northwest, almost straight into the room through the window. While he’d stood there with the gun leveled at the doorway, his own shadow had been projected on the wall just inside the room, hard and sharp as a picture on a movie screen. Anyone behind him—anyone within five feet of him in any direction—would have been shown there as well. He could not possibly have missed it.
So what the hell had happened here?
In his mind he saw Paige in the clearing again, holding the Whisper, telling him humans hadn’t created it. Saying it like it was the most normal thing in the world. The most normal thing in
her
world, anyway.
What else was normal in Paige’s world? What capabilities did her enemies have? What the fuck were they up against here?
A sound broke the moment. The last sound he wanted to hear. Rotors. This was it, then. Two minutes from now, he and Paige would be dragged from the building, onto the aircraft, and then they’d be winding through the valleys at low level, probably on nobody’s radar. Maybe these people would have drugs and instruments to keep Paige alive for a while, and wake her up for a new marathon of agony.
Unless he killed her first.
There might just be time. If he contorted his body the right way, he thought he could get himself seated upright against the wall, and be standing without much trouble. His ankles were bound, but he could reach the bed in a couple jumps. Then just smother her with his shoulder. As weak as her breathing was, it would be simple.
He could make those moves. Could he make that choice? Jesus, could he do that to her? Logic, hard and clear, told him he’d regret it sorely if he didn’t.
The necessary time was slipping away now, the rotors coming in loud, like a clock ticking off the seconds at hyper speed.
With the indecision came hatred, more bitter than he’d felt in years. Hatred of these fucking people for pushing him to the edge of this decision.
And then the chopper exploded.
A concussion wave shook the building, and in the wake of its bass came the most beautiful silence Travis had ever heard. Five seconds later a fighter screamed overhead, its own shockwave rattling the window. He heard the engines whine through some kind of power adjustment, and then the roar, instead of fading into the distance, seemed to even out. The jet was circling.
Obviously it couldn’t save them from the man who was already here. Any second his footsteps would come pounding down the hall from wherever he’d gone; a quick detour to murder them before fleeing. But the worst possibility had been cancelled out. Travis had that to be thankful for while he waited to die.
Half a minute passed. No footsteps. He felt hope sliding back in, whether or not he trusted it yet.
Then instead of footsteps he heard voices, people shouting. Coldfoot’s remaining residents, probably fewer than ten, had emerged from their homes and were calling one another outside to see the spectacle. He heard a woman call Molly’s name, approaching the lodge, and then she screamed, and a moment later other voices rose around her, and the front door of the building swung in.
Travis yelled for them.
They came to him cautiously; it was a minute or more before they’d entered the room, sat him up and removed his blindfold and bindings.
Through the window, framed like a portrait, the steep ridge across the highway was strewn with the burning remains of the helicopter.
“Who did this?” the old man who’d released him asked. “Where’d they go?”
“I don’t know,” Travis said. “Any of the victims up front have guns on them?”
The man nodded, his curiosity deepening. “Molly and Lloyd both,” he said. He glanced at Paige and then returned his eyes to Travis. “You gonna tell me what’s happening here?”
“The military’s coming,” Travis said. “Maybe they can tell us both. Just get the guns and tell everyone to keep their eyes open until help arrives.”
The man accepted that and left the room.
Looking at his own shadow on the wall, solitary as it’d been before, Travis wondered if that last advice even mattered.