by Greg Iles
“I’m the negotiator. You talk to me.”
He hit her again, this time on the bridge of the nose. A river of blood gushed over her lips and chin. Coughing blood, she dug her cell phone from her pocket and handed it over. “Speed dial four. John Kaiser.”
Dr. Tarver ripped off some duct tape and bound her wrists as though he did this every day. Then he put her phone in his pocket and pulled his own cell out of the other. He pressed one button and waited. Alex knelt and hugged Jamie as best she could. The slap of beating rotors had diminished, but she could still hear them from the rear of the house. Had Kaiser landed between the tennis courts and the infinity pool? She prayed that the SWAT agents were already dispersing across the grounds.
“Edward?” Tarver said into the phone. “How close are you?…Ten minutes or less. Stay at altitude until I give you the final position…. Right.”
Altitude? Alex thought. Does Tarver have an aircraft nearby?
Now the doctor took out Alex’s cell phone, opened the clamshell, and pressed a button. “Is this Agent Kaiser?…Good. These are my demands. I want an FBI Suburban with its windows spray-painted black driven to the rear door of this house and left there. That’s the side where your helicopter is. I want a Cessna Citation fully fueled and waiting at the Madison County Airport with one pilot and its engines running. An FBI pilot is acceptable. Don’t attempt to block the driveway when we leave. Don’t ask to exchange FBI agents for my hostages. The Suburban should be here in twenty minutes or less—Stop talking, Agent Kaiser, you have nothing to tell me…. No, I’m not going to make any threats. Listen very closely, and you’ll see why. When the back door opens, do not fire. The Fennell boy will be in front of me. Remember, twenty minutes for the Suburban.”
Tarver hung up the phone and shoved it deep in his pocket. Then he picked up Bill Fennell’s shotgun from behind the sofa and fired it into the floor.
Jamie cringed into Alex’s chest when the weapon roared.
Tarver took hold of Bill’s corpse by the ankles and dragged it toward the back of the house. Alex crawled to the sofa, shoved her bound hands under it, and lifted with all her strength. She heard the back door open, then a massive grunt, which told her that Tarver was trying to lift Bill Fennell’s corpse, a nearly impossible feat with dead weight. “Yank the rope loose!” she told Jamie. “Hurry.”
She heard another grunt, this one like the sound of a shot-putter making a heroic heave, and then the back door slammed. Jamie had almost gotten the rope loose from the sofa leg when Tarver marched back into the room. Alex shook her head, and Jamie lay back down.
“You see why I don’t make threats?” Tarver said into her cell phone. “The boy’s next, Kaiser. You have nineteen minutes.”
Alex saw that he’d brought a bedsheet from the laundry room, one of Grace’s five-hundred-thread-count Egyptians. Tarver shook it open, then took a pair of scissors from his back pocket and cut two holes like ghost’s eyes near the center of the cream-colored sheet.
“What are you doing?” Jamie asked from the floor. “Making a Halloween costume?”
Tarver laughed. “That’s right, boy. And it’s going to scare the hell out of some people.”
He bent and cut the rope that bound Jamie to the sofa leg, then cut a longer piece and tied Jamie to his own body by tying them both around their waists. He left less than three feet of slack between them.
“Please don’t do this, Doctor,” Alex begged. “Send Jamie outside. I’ll go with you anywhere you want to go. I’ll shield you all the way out.”
She might as well have been talking to a statue.
“Put on my backpack,” Tarver said to Alex, pointing at the blue Kelty on the floor.
“That’s where the snakes are,” Jamie said quietly.
“There’s more than snakes in there,” Tarver said, cutting the duct tape from Alex’s wrists.
She hesitated, making sure the pack was fastened shut, then carefully shouldered it. The pack was heavy, but to her relief she felt no movement inside.
“Get ready to carry those cases,” Tarver said, his eyes on the front door. “Both of them.”
Alex suddenly realized that Tarver had made his demands only to put Kaiser and his men at the maximum tactical disadvantage. At this moment, they would be setting up interlocking fields of fire to cover the few feet of porch space between the back door and the spot where the FBI Suburban would pull up in fifteen minutes. They were rehearsing for a scene that would never be played. And they were doing it on the wrong side of the house.
Dr. Tarver picked up Jamie as easily as he would a sack of groceries, then pulled the king-size bedsheet over both of them. Alex could no longer tell where Dr. Tarver stopped and Jamie began.
“We’re going to the boathouse,” Tarver said in a slightly muffled voice. “Listen to me, Alex. If you drop those cases, I’ll shoot him in the head. Tell her where the gun is, Jamie.”
Alex saw a jerk under the sheet.
“Under my chin,” answered the small voice.
“You walk ahead of us all the way. If you jump off the pier, I’ll shoot him. I know there’s damn little chance of you abandoning him, but people do crazy things under stress. Remember your gray-haired friend on the porch.”
Alex would never forget him. She picked up the heavy cases.
As Dr. Tarver reached for the doorknob, Alex’s cell phone rang beneath the sheet. She saw movement, then Tarver said, “I assume you’re calling to tell me that everything I asked for is being done, so you don’t need to talk. I’m watching the clock. Good-bye.” He opened the door and gestured for Alex to exit first. “Straight to the boathouse. If you slow down, Jamie’s gone.”
Alex set off across the grass, marching into the teeth of the rain. She tried to make out SWAT agents among the shrubs and trees, but she saw none. She started to look back, but Dr. Tarver shouted, “Faster!”
She was almost jogging now. Kaiser had to be panicking; Eldon Tarver had turned the tactical situation inside out. Reinforcements could not have arrived yet, so Kaiser was limited to the agents he’d brought in the chopper. He’d probably posted one or two on this side of the house, no more. Right now, they would be describing the strange parade: a baggage-laden woman leading a ghost toward the lake.
She was on the pier now. The impact of her feet echoed up from the whitecaps beneath the wood, despite the hissing patter of the rain. Barring a mistake by a nervous sniper, they would all reach the boathouse alive. Dr. Tarver had already proved that he would kill without hesitation, and even if Kaiser believed one of his men had a decent shot, he wouldn’t give the fire order. From his point of view, Dr. Tarver had nowhere to run. Fifty square miles of water might seem like a lot of running room to a man with a speedboat, but when you had a Bell 430 full of SWAT agents at your command, it was nothing.
“Move your ass!” Tarver shouted from behind her.
Alex heard her cell phone ringing faintly as she ran, but Dr. Tarver didn’t answer. One of his earlier phrases replayed constantly in her mind: Stay at altitude until I give you the final position. Who could be coming to rescue Tarver by air? A foreign intelligence service? That would be an act of war.
“Open the door!” shouted Tarver.
She’d reached the boathouse. Alex pushed through the door into fetid darkness. The gleaming white Carrera had already been lowered into the water. It rolled on the waves that crashed under the mildewed walls.
“Load the cases into the stern!” shouted Tarver. “Go!”
Alex set down the larger Pelican and climbed carefully into the pitching speedboat. She stowed the white case back near the huge twin outboard motors.
“Now the other one!”
She climbed out and retrieved the yellow case. As she stowed it, she reflected on how well-planned this escape had been. They had ordered these watertight cases long ago, preparing for an eventuality just like this one. Even if the heavily laden Pelicans went into the water, they would float, and in yellow and white, they wo
uld be highly visible from the air.
“Move up into the bow,” Dr. Tarver ordered, still under the sheet with Jamie.
Alex unslung the Kelty, then walked forward to the cushioned area where people usually sat to drink beer or sunbathe while others water-skied. A big hand shot out from beneath the sheet and jerked one of her wrists over the other.
“Hold them together!” Tarver shouted.
Two seconds later, he whipped a long strip of duct tape around her wrists. Once they were restrained, he used both hands and wrapped them so tightly that she feared they would go numb.
Her cell phone was ringing again.
This time Tarver answered. “Change of plan, Kaiser. I’m going for a cruise. If your chopper moves within three hundred meters of my boat, I’ll kill the boy without hesitation.”
Still under the bedsheet, Dr. Tarver got behind the wheel and cranked the Carrera’s massive engines. The entire craft shook with their power. The bedsheet covered the throttle, and then the boat was moving forward, steadily gaining way as it moved out of the boathouse into the slashing rain.
The boat shuddered from the impact of waves against the bow, but as the engines gained power, the sharp craft began to leap from crest to crest. Alex tried to think clearly, but no hope came to her. Kaiser probably thought Tarver was making a fatal mistake. Alex knew better. There was a helicopter out here somewhere, waiting to swoop down and carry the doctor to freedom. She wanted to signal Kaiser—there had to be a sniper watching her through a scope—but Tarver was looking right past her through the eyeholes of his ghost costume.
As naturally as she could, she faced the windshield and hunched over as though shielding herself from the rain. She saw the Bell 430 rise above the Fennell house. It climbed and climbed, then banked and arrowed out over the lake, tracking them steadily from six hundred meters out.
When Dr. Tarver turned to look at the pursuing chopper, Alex pointed at him, then stabbed her hand skyward and twirled her finger in a wide arc to indicate the motion of a rotor. She prayed that a sniper was watching her through a scope, but even if one was, what were the chances that he’d read her signal correctly? He’d probably think she was asking for aerial rescue by the FBI chopper.
Dr. Tarver was bearing for a small island that lay a few hundred meters offshore. Only about forty meters long, it was heavily wooded. Alex remembered fishing from it once, with Jamie and her father. Could it conceal a helicopter?
Tarver gunned the throttles, and the boat began to spend more time in the air than on the water. When the little island was dead ahead, he swerved to starboard, circled to the far side, and pulled underneath some overhanging trees.
“Hit the deck!” he shouted, throwing off the bedsheet and pointing his pistol at Alex. “Do it!”
She did. Soon she heard the whup-whup-whup of the FBI helicopter over the Carrera’s idling engines. Kaiser was moving closer. She knew he was torn between hanging back for safety’s sake and fear that Dr. Tarver would execute his hostages while Kaiser stood helplessly by. The rotor noise increased. Alex couldn’t make out anything through the limbs above her, but she knew Kaiser was easing still closer. Her cell phone began to ring.
“Stay down!” Tarver shouted.
Alex flattened herself between the boat seats. A moment later, two gunshots crashed against her ears. Terrified for Jamie, she looked up and saw Dr. Tarver fire a third shot into the choppy water beside the boat.
What the hell is he doing?
Dr. Tarver crouched and opened a long, narrow compartment in the deck of the boat. It had been put there to stow skis, but Tarver pulled a high-powered rifle out of it. From the ornate engraving on the stock, Alex recognized it as another weapon from her dead brother-in-law’s collection.
What happened next occurred with the terrible inevitability of nightmares. The FBI chopper dropped into sight a hundred meters from the boat. Dr. Tarver smiled, then jumped up like a hunter coming out of a duck blind and fired five shots in quick succession.
Black smoke billowed from the Bell’s turbines even before the final shot struck home. The ship began to yaw wildly in the air. Alex heard an explosion, and then the chopper began dropping toward the water. Its rotors were still spinning; the pilot was using their stored energy to try to reach the surface without shattering the spines of the agents seated behind him.
“It’s too fast,” Alex murmured, picturing Kaiser bracing himself in the doomed craft. “Oh, God—”
The chopper slammed nose-first into the whitecaps, sending a column of spray high into the air. Mercifully, there were no more explosions. Alex stood up to look for survivors in the water, but she was thrown to the deck when the Carrera sped from beneath the trees. Tarver had his cell phone in his hand, and he was yelling over the roar of the engines.
“There’s an island just east of the rendezvous! It’s small and oblong. There’s a downed chopper on one side. I’ll be on the other. Stay clear of that chopper!”
Tarver hugged the perimeter of the island, and soon they were idling in its lee. The island shielded them from the wind, but the rain still stung Alex’s face as she searched the dark sky. Jamie crouched on the deck, holding his hands over his ears as though afraid that the madman he was tied to might start firing the rifle again. Alex hunted for something she could use to cut the rope that bound them together. Jamie was an excellent swimmer, and she wouldn’t hesitate to throw him overboard if she could. But there was no blade in sight.
The whup-whup of rotors reached her again. She froze. Was this Tarver’s accomplice? Or had Kaiser summoned aerial reinforcements? The Highway Patrol and the DEA almost certainly had helicopters based in Jackson, not to mention the sheriff’s departments of the surrounding counties.
She could hear the chopper descending through the black sky, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see it. The rotor noise grew to a roar, and then a group of lights flashed on fifty meters above the boat. No wonder she hadn’t seen the damned thing! It was dark gray, almost indistinguishable from the sky. As she watched the chopper descend, hope died within her. Dr. Tarver was talking to the pilot on his cell phone, carefully guiding him in.
The rotor blast drove her to the deck, and static electricity crackled around the boat. As Dr. Tarver shouted above the thunder, she suddenly realized why he hadn’t cut the rope binding him to Jamie. With the FBI so close, simply escaping was not enough. Tarver needed insurance to guarantee his survival.
Jamie was it.
CHAPTER 54
The gray helicopter hovered next to the speedboat in the rain, so low that whitecaps were washing over its skids. A huge door slid back, opening a space big enough for a squad of marines to rappel through. At Dr. Tarver’s signal a black man leaped from the helicopter into the speedboat.
“Load those cases!” the doctor shouted, pointing to the Pelicans in the stern.
While the newcomer hustled to the back of the boat, Tarver slashed the rope binding him to Jamie, then wrapped the end still tied to Jamie’s waist twice around his hand like a leash. Alex got to her feet, waiting for a chance to do something, anything. Tarver jammed his pistol into his waistband, then pulled the high-powered rifle out of the ski locker and tossed it into the hovering chopper.
The black man had already loaded one case and was going back for the other. Dr. Tarver lifted Jamie into the crook of his arm, then planted his right foot on the gunwale of the boat and prepared to toss Jamie into the rocking chopper.
“Aunt Alex!” Jamie screamed, his face white with terror. “Don’t let them take me!”
As Jamie flailed against Tarver, Alex lunged forward and grabbed for the pistol at the small of Tarver’s back. Her fingers closed around the butt—
Then she was gazing up from the deck, the left side of her face numb. She saw a blurry image of a black man staring down at her with a gun in his hand. Sure that she was down for the count, the man made two more trips to the stern of the boat. As he stepped over Alex for the last time, the Kelty
pack in his hand, she struggled onto one elbow, then to her knees. Looking over the pitching gunwale, she saw Tarver grinning from the chopper door while the black man secured the cases inside.
Jamie was nowhere in sight.
When Dr. Tarver turned away to help the loader, Alex saw the chopper pilot, and her breath caught in her throat. It was the gray-haired man who had visited Tarver’s clinic yesterday. In that frozen moment, she realized he was also the army officer standing with Tarver and the blonde in the VCP photograph in Tarver’s office. Then she saw Jamie strapped into a seat behind the pilot, his face a mask of fear. Alex saw the terrified eyes of Grace on her deathbed, dying with the awful knowledge that she was leaving her son in the care of a monster.
Alex looked frantically around the boat, but Dr. Tarver had left her nothing: not a flare gun, not an ax. He had even taken the key with him. When the helicopter lifted into the sky, she would be left alone in the roaring storm, and Jamie would be gone forever. She screamed from the depths of her being, a cry of utter failure and desolation.
As if on cue, the chopper dipped its nose and began to rise. Twenty feet, forty, sixty. As it rose, the pilot kept the open door facing the boat, and Alex soon saw why. Dr. Tarver had picked up the rifle and was now kneeling in the door, aiming at her chest. Some distant part of her brain screamed, Drop! Yet her body remained frozen. If she could not fulfill her promise to Grace, what did her own fate matter? She would watch Jamie until he disappeared, no matter what the cost. If Grace called her to account in some other world, she could at least say she had done that.
Waiting for the muzzle flash, she saw a blur of white descend in front of Dr. Tarver’s face. The bedsheet? No, that lay discarded on the deck behind her. Then she saw Jamie, his face beside the flapping whiteness. He’d thrown his little arms around Dr. Tarver’s neck. As the black man appeared in the door and grabbed for Jamie, one of those little arms jerked something tight.
A drawstring, Alex realized. The croker sack!
