“You won’t be able to explain what you were doing here,” Francis said. “Law officials will find it suspect from the get-go.”
“No, they won’t. We have a perfectly good explanation. In fact, we have a written directive which compels us to be here,” the colonel said. He motioned Elah forward with the muzzle of the Uzi as he walked them past the white van at the end of the parking lot and on toward the trailhead.
He continued talking to them. “You forget, or maybe you never knew in the first place. The State Department, with the sign-off of the president himself, issued a directive which authorized us to cross international boundaries to follow Al-Qaeda and any other terrorist organization thought to be associated with them. I especially like that part: thought to be associated with them. Covers a lot of ground. No further authorization was necessary. Not after you and I set up our SEAL buddies for their little excursion into Pakistan. Getting prior authorization takes time, and as I explained to the powers that be, that could result in lost opportunities. That’s all they needed to hear. They couldn’t wait to sign those papers. Personally, I don’t think they wanted to know. What people really want is the necessary stuff taken care of and, following that, a nice, neat story that ties up all the loose ends.”
“And how does that explain what a depraved outfit like Cormorant is doing in Asheville, North Carolina?” Mattie asked.
Francis sighed and fidgeted with his hands. “They followed a dangerous international terrorist here. Namely, me.”
“Very good, Francis, very good,” the colonel said. He shook his head and grinned. “I can’t believe how well this is working out, like pieces of a puzzle fitting together without much work involved. You came up here to the parkway, to the very spot we needed you to be in. Saves us so much time and effort. So much less to go wrong. I could not have written the script any better.” He shook his head again. “Yes, my team followed you, a dangerous international terrorist, here. Not only a terrorist, the worst kind of terrorist, a defector. One of our own people turned against us. People hate a traitor worse than they hate a snake. People are going to hate your guts when the whole story comes out. And, conversely, they’re going to love us. That’s how it works. The only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun. And a good story. Don’t forget the story.”
“Tragically,” he continued, as if it were story-telling time in the library, “as it will be told around the campfire, we arrive moments too late. You assassinate the president. We take you out in your cowardly attempt to escape. All the pieces of the puzzle fit. I mean, jeez, with Kennedy they had to bribe the police. Get Jack Ruby in the next day to get rid of Oswald. Very messy. So messy most people still don’t buy the lone gunman bullshit. But this? This is a neat package, tied up with a bow, no loose ends.
“And you, Miss Mattie, this is icing on the cake, in case anyone has residual sympathy for Francis here. After Francis’s desperate and depraved act of betrayal, after you are both killed in a deadly gun battle with our valiant team, the investigation will lead to your apartment, where evidence will be found that Francis, a married man and the father of a handicapped girl, was shacked up with you, the femme fatale. We won’t even have to plant evidence. As a matter of fact, I think we’ll stand back and let the other agencies investigate. That will make it look even better.”
“You don’t think other people will be around?” Mattie asked. “Witnesses?”
The colonel put a finger to his ear, where a small receiver was located. He grinned and looked up at the radio tower, where a tiny figure was just visible. “Yes, go ahead and cut the feed,” he said.
“Not today. There won’t be any spectators. Not when the president and first lady have decided to go hiking here. Our friends have made sure of that. No wonder they call them the Secret Service.” The colonel laughed richly at his own joke. “Get it? Service?” He laughed some more. “And in case some busybody with a cell phone is around, we just lost cell coverage for this side of the mountain.” He waved to the figure on the tower by the antenna, but they were too far away for the man to spot them. He was already climbing down. “It happens quite often up here, you know. With the winds and so on.”
The colonel put a hand to his ear to touch the receiver. He listened for a moment, then said with his heart racing a tiny fraction, “Take the shot.”
In the distance, two pops sounded. Then the screeching of tires. After that, dead silence. In his earpiece, another message came through. “Copy,” he said. “These damned mountain roads up here. They are so unbelievably treacherous.”
Segal regretted his decision to let Jerome Guilford drive the black SUV. He told himself he should have been warned by Jerome’s choice of words when he said he wanted to take something “a little more muscular.”
Jerome did all the things Segal associated with bad drivers. He accelerated at the maximum capability of the vehicle even where quick acceleration did no good—for instance, when he could see traffic stopped a block ahead. Such overwrought acceleration demanded more dramatic deceleration, which Jerome further mismanaged by waiting until the last possible instant before slamming on the brakes. Segal could stomach it only by looking away from the road. He found some comfort in watching Jerome’s perfect brown right shoe do its frantic dance between the gas pedal and brake.
When they arrived at the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, a line of cars was backed up. The Highway Patrol had a roadblock and was turning people around in preparation for the presidential motorcade. It was taking forever, as one by one the drivers approached the officers and leaned out the window to ask what was going on. Then they had to either turn around in the limited space available or turn left and take the parkway north.
As soon as there was space, Jerome jerked the SUV onto the shoulder and accelerated past the line of waiting cars, spitting gravel and mud and clumps of grass into the air. After he showed his badge to the patrolmen, Jerome accelerated through the turn onto the parkway south.
The driving only got worse from there. Jerome had an alarming lack of finesse in handling the big, top-heavy car on the sharp turns. Segal was glad to be on the uphill side, where he at least didn’t have to stare down the steep drop-off on the other side.
After a couple of miles on the parkway, Segal said, “I’m going to touch base with Dinah.” He pulled out his cell phone. Dinah answered.
“We’re on our way, just passed mile marker…” her voice became faint and jumbled. “Just pulled … parking lot … Pisgah Inn … have Richard and …” After that, the call was dropped completely.
“I think she’s up there,” he said to Jerome. “Sometimes, the connections are dodgy on the ridge. I think she said she has Richard with her.”
“Richard?” Jerome asked.
“The crow.”
Jerome said, “Right,” not taking his eyes off the road. Apparently, the over-steering, over-accelerating, and over-braking took his full attention. He made a total mess of the driving. And yet he must have been thinking about what Segal had told him before.
“You said you think there’s a good chance we’ll find Francis Elah up here,” he said. “What makes you think so?”
“Richard the crow makes me think so,” Segal said.
Jerome frowned.
“I showed you the video of the white van with the guys getting out,” Segal said. “That was from Richard; from Richard’s crow cam.”
Jerome still looked blank.
Segal persisted. “Who put the camera on Richard? Who sent him to take video, and who sent him to Creatures 2.0 to deliver the goods?”
The ONI man inhaled and exhaled loudly and then said, “Elah? You think it was Francis Elah?”
“Who else could it be?”
“It could have been that woman at the Biltmore House, Lucile Devroe. She knows how to do that, too.”
Segal’s pulse jumped in his neck. He had not realized Jerome knew that. After a moment, he said, “No, it wasn’t Miss Devroe, I’m prett
y sure of that.” With any luck, he thought, the lovely Miss Devroe is still in Asheville, where I left her this morning.
They rounded another bend, this one toward the mountain. The SUV slid slightly off the right-hand side of the road, making Segal think he might get dragged against the rough vertical rock face like a block of aged Gouda over a cheese grater. Just when contact was imminent, Jerome yanked the wheel left. He didn’t straighten out before he was well left of the centerline, which turned Segal’s mind toward plummeting off the cliff on the driver’s side.
He pictured his cherished Elmore Leonard books and thought, I’m actually in one of his novels about to go over a cliff!
Before them was a gently curving stretch leading to a tunnel. Segal turned to Jerome and started to tell him they were too close to the edge when he heard a pop. The SUV pulled abruptly left, and in the next split-second Segal registered that their left front tire had been shot out. Before he or Jerome could react, a second shot shattered the windshield on Jerome’s side, throwing Jerome’s head against the headrest. Jerome had enough control to step on the brake, but it was too late, and he yelled “Shit!” as the car left the road and lurched over the side of the mountain.
Dinah guided her car into the parking lot of the Pisgah Inn, painfully aware that she had no clear plan of what to do next. Crap. She had spotted the white utility van near the trailhead, watching closely as she drove by. No sign of life. Richard seemed interested. He hopped off Lucile’s lap and sat on the center console, looking right and left out the windows. She wondered if he sensed something, perhaps danger. She rolled slowly by the inn, past the part where the rooms were. Nothing out of place.
Her cell phone rang. It was Segal, thank God. Segal would know exactly what to do. The connection was all crackle and static and vacuum. They didn’t have time to plan the next move before she lost him altogether. Dinah hung up. “It was Segal,” she said to Lucile. “I think they’re close. I think he said the mile marker, but the call broke up.”
She continued her drive-by. She knew which room Emily Elah and her daughter were in since she and Mattie had stashed them there. Considering the presence of the white van, she had to assume they were in trouble now. She nixed the idea of walking up and knocking on the door. She had to do something with Lucile. If this building was going to be the scene of trouble in the next few minutes, it was not a good place for her to be.
“We’ll drive on and find a place for you to deploy the bird,” Dinah said.
Richard hopped on the console. He looked at her as if he were offended by being called “the bird.”
She found a good spot a couple of hundred yards away, one of the scenic pull-offs, where they were alone with a magnificent panorama of Pisgah National Forest stretching before them.
“What do you want Richard to do?” Lucile asked, wringing her hands together.
“First thing we need to know is what’s going on at the inn. If everyone is inside, I guess Richard can’t help us much. But I want him to go around the back, to the side we couldn’t see. Maybe we can learn something that will help. Can you get him to do that?”
Lucile nodded. Richard nodded, too, which made Dinah wonder if he understood every word she just said. At this juncture, she was prepared to believe just about anything concerning the bird. He appeared calm, his black feathers shiny even in the car.
“Okay, give us a minute,” Lucile said.
Richard rode on Lucile’s arm as they got out.
Dinah moved away, allowing Lucile to work with Richard without distraction. She walked nearer to the road and tried her cell phone again. No luck. She remained there, nervously pacing, trying to think what to do next, wondering how close Segal was. She glanced at Richard standing on top of the car. Lucile was gently holding his head between her fingertips as if she were massaging his temples. Then she took his beak between her fingers. She had her face close to Richard’s and spoke to him softly but intensely. The scene reminded Dinah of a football coach talking to a quarterback on the sideline before a game. It was strangely intimate. Lucile made signs with her hands and pointed. After a couple minutes of this, she took a step back and picked up the iPad, presumably to check the picture from the crow camera. She nodded and made a final gesture with her free hand, which even Dinah could tell was the sign to take off.
Richard took off, wings magnificent in flight, gaining altitude.
Dinah came over and stood beside Lucile, craning her neck back and forth between the bird and the iPad.
“I’ve found it’s better just to watch the screen,” Lucile said.
Dinah tried this. Her heart sped up. She found she could not resist an occasional glance at Richard until he disappeared behind the peak of the hotel’s roof. When the picture stopped moving, they could tell he had landed on the roof. He gave them a wonderful view of Pisgah National Forest. That was it.
Nothing else there. Darn it.
Lucile said under her breath, “Come on, Richard. You know what we want.”
After a few seconds, the picture moved again and then stopped. This time, Dinah was seeing the inn from a higher vantage. Richard had landed on the branch of a red oak tree.
“That’s my bird,” Lucile said.
Dinah got a good picture, the one she wanted. It showed the walkway that provided access to the second-story rooms. This walkway also acted as a back porch for the rooms, complete with rocking chairs for taking in the view. In one of those chairs in front of the room in question was a thin man wearing camo-patterned fatigue pants and a black T-shirt. The chair was turned sideways and positioned in front of the door. The man was nervous, rocking too rapidly in the chair with an unnatural rhythm. Through the open door, Dinah occasionally saw a figure walk by. She watched for several minutes.
Lucile was silent.
“What do you think?” Dinah finally asked her. “I think it’s just the one guy.”
“And you’re sure that’s the room Emily and Suzie are in?” Lucile asked.
A figure came to the door. “That’s Emily!” Dinah said.
Emily Elah stuck her head out, her short dark hair swinging. It looked like she asked the man something. He reached for his waistband and started to pull out a gun, but instead barked something at her and motioned her inside with his other hand. After she withdrew, he settled into his chair, rocking even more rapidly, taking frequent glances into the room.
Dinah studied the situation, trying to come up with a plan to get this guy out of the way. Judging from the earpiece he wore he had a radio. If she was going to take him out, it would have to be done before he could use his radio or get off a shot with his pistol.
“I need a distraction,” Dinah said.
“What do you need me to do?” Lucile asked.
Dinah shook her head. “Oh, no. Segal’s already going to kill me for getting you this close to the action. I’m not taking you anywhere near that guy.”
“Maybe I don’t have to get that close to him,” Lucile said, batting her eyes.
On the other side of Mount Pisgah, the black SUV bearing Segal and Jerome Guilford sped on and went completely off the pavement. Segal put his arms in front of his face as he felt the nose of the vehicle rotate into a sickening downward orientation. The speed was diminished by Jerome’s braking and by the crash through the guard rail, but as they reached eighty degrees to horizontal the speed picked up again as they continued down the grade. It felt like a vertical fall to Segal except when the wheels crashed into the ground, jolting the car. At first, there were no trees, only coarse grass and huckleberry bushes. Then he saw trees coming up and braced for impact. Solid impact didn’t happen, only glancing contact with branches. The scraping of limbs across the hood and windows was frighteningly loud and added to the confusion but did little to slow the SUV.
When the big impact came, it came suddenly and without compromise. The airbag smacked Segal in the face as it exploded in front of him. After that, he was disoriented by the quiet and the lack of forward mov
ement as the airbag deflated with the smell of burnt rocket fuel and engine coolant.
The reality of his situation came to him piece by piece. He felt his weight against the seatbelt and shoulder harness. He saw trees outside the window to his right. The car was still pointed downhill at something like eighty degrees. In other words, it was almost standing on its nose. He looked forward and down, trying to see what they had run into, what had stopped their descent. Then he saw it: a narrow footpath forming a terrace in the side of the mountain with trees on the downhill side. The SUV was wedged against a large poplar tree preventing it from falling farther.
He reached out for Jerome Guilford in the driver’s seat. Guilford was slumped forward against the shoulder strap and seatbelt, the deflated airbag below. There was blood. Most of the windshield was shattered, and tiny, jewel-like fragments were everywhere. He remembered that the windshield had exploded violently inward on the parkway. It seemed long ago and far away from their current situation.
“Jerome, are you hit? Are you okay?” Segal asked.
Jerome groaned as if waking from a long sleep. Segal studied him carefully. Small cuts around face and neck. Segal also saw a larger red splotch on his right shoulder.
Jerome opened his eyes.
“Jerome, are you all right?”
He groaned and tried moving each of his limbs. When he got to his right arm, he let out a gasp.
“That’s what I thought,” Segal said.
Jerome closed his eyes again. “How are you?”
It was a good question. Segal checked himself out. “I’m okay. I think I’m okay.”
Jerome kept his eyes shut. “I think I’m going to need you to drive.”
Segal saw that the SUV, even though almost vertical, seemed to be held firmly in place, wedged between the bank and the huge poplar tree, and was in no danger of falling over or resuming its descent. “I don’t think we’re driving anywhere. Not anytime soon.”
“Where are we?” Jerome asked.
Segal’s eyes went to the trail and followed it into a grove of locust trees. There, he seized upon a horizontal board nailed to a post. It had some writing on it in yellow letters. “We’re on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail,” he said.
As the Crow Dies Page 25
