The sound of the helo altered. Steadied, grew louder. The Apache was lifting off.
“And you didn’t love me at all,” said Kathleen. “Did you?”
Bishop shook his head, flinching at the ache of it. “No,” he told her.
The thunder of the Apache grew louder still.
“God damn you,” said Kathleen.
She gave a strangled growl of fury and grabbed him. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his face down to hers. She pressed the gun hard against his belly. She pressed her lips hard against his lips. She kissed him. His swollen face throbbed with pain and it stung where she kept holding fast to his hair. He felt her tongue warm in his mouth. He felt the barrel of the Glock digging into his flesh. He wondered if she was going to kill him, if he’d die like this, kissing her. He lifted his hand and touched her hair as they kissed. All around them, all around the starlit swamp, all above the dead men lying at their feet in the flashlight glow, the air trembled with the sound of the rising Apache.
Then, with a harsh jerk of her hand, Kathleen forced Bishop away from her, forced him out of the kiss and let go of his hair as if flinging him away. The gun was still against him though. She stared into his eyes.
“Why did you come back?” she asked him. She had to raise her voice above the noise of the chopper now. “Why did you come back for me?”
Bishop’s gaze moved over her. The helo beat the air. The pain pulsed up his temple. He tried to smile at her with one corner of his busted mouth. “Damned if I know,” he said.
A quick laugh surprised Kathleen, burst out of her. What was it about guys like this? What made them so goddamned attractive? She shook her head. “Jesus. You’re a genuine prick, you know that.” She lowered the gun to her side. She laughed again. Shook her head again. “I gotta say that for you anyway, Bishop. Some guys are just trying, boy, but you are the real deal.”
A moment later, they both looked up. The chopper was gliding into sight above them. It hovered in the indigo air over the swamp for a moment, a black shape etched in the starlight and the low moonlight. With its blades whipping round and the Hellfire missiles hanging from its stunted wings, it really did look like some malicious insect, the Great Mosquito of Wrath, risen out of the cattails and the murky waters.
It was up there maybe two hundred feet, not high. The pulsing sound of it enveloped them. They could feel the rotor wash on their lifted faces.
“You think that’s Chris?” Kathleen shouted over the noise, squinting up at the machine.
“I guess,” Bishop shouted back. “He must be flying it.”
“You think I’ll ever see him again?”
“Nah. Any way this plays out, he’s a dead man.”
“I guess I won’t be needing this then,” Kathleen said after a moment. She tossed the Glock to the ground.
The two stood shoulder by shoulder, peering at the monster in the sky. Inside it, beneath the pilot’s seat, Bishop’s handheld computer was still searching for a signal, still trying to send its warning message to Weiss.
All it needed, Bishop thought, was a little more altitude.
Just then, with startling quickness, the Apache tilted skyward and shot up and away into the night.
Sixty-One
Suddenly, the man called Ben Fry opened his eyes.
He was lying on his cell cot. He was under the blanket, fully clothed. He had slept—for a minute—five—he wasn’t sure. There’d been a nightmare. He’d dreamt he opened a closet in his mother’s house and it had been full of butchered bodies. As he woke, his heart was beating fast, his breath was trembling. But it was all right. He remembered where he was. Calm settled over him. His hour had finally come.
Now it seemed to him that he became himself again. The meticulous, unemotional precision of his thoughts seemed to grind back into motion after a long lapse. Images like the one in his nightmare—and a million even uglier images from an entire lifetime—seemed to scrabble back into their recesses like rats scattering from a burst of flame. He could climb down from his tower now and they wouldn’t trouble him. All he had to do was follow the plan.
The capsule, that was the first thing.
The man called Ben Fry glanced at the clock—a plastic digital stopwatch he kept strapped to his cot. He had set it to time the pictures in the control booth video monitors. Forty-eight cells, each displayed for ten seconds. An eight-minute cycle. In one of his trips to the visiting room, he had seen his own cell come up and he’d begun the count from there. He waited till it was his cell’s turn to be shown. Waited till the turn was over. Then he waited a little longer to be sure. And even then, he was careful, just in case. He rolled over on his side to face the wall.
The blanket hid his hands as he worked them down under the waistband of his pants. His fingers probed the tender flesh on the inside of his thigh. He found the scar, the place where he’d cut himself. He took several deep breaths, gazing at the whiteness of the white wall. Then he grabbed a hunk of flesh between his thumb and forefinger and began to squeeze.
He squeezed hard. White flashes went off in front of him, an explosion of white pain then sparks of it sprinkling down like fireworks. The man called Ben Fry stared at the wall, his teeth gritted, his eyes bulging. A pocket of encysted pus had formed around the capsule inside him. His fingers were pushing the cyst upward. He could feel the object itself—not with his fingers but from within. He could feel its sharp edge lancing through layers of flesh toward the surface. He squeezed harder. The capsule was forced up with the pus, slicing through his interior. A wave of red agony washed down over his eyes, red agony dancing with the sprinkling white flashes. Even the man called Ben Fry was amazed at how much it hurt.
Then, with a gloppy, squirting sound, the flesh of his thigh burst open. Just like that, just like popping a pimple. He tugged the blanket aside so he could peek down and see. He saw the yellow pus burbling down over his leg. It soaked into the green fabric of his pants, a spreading stain. Making a noise down in his throat, the man worked his fingers in deeper. As the pus ran out of him, he could start to feel the capsule itself pinched between his fingertips. The gouts of pus kept coming. He couldn’t believe how much there was. Then there was blood, watery and pale. And in the middle of the red-and-yellow gush, the dark tip of the capsule itself poked out of the torn skin.
With his other hand, the man called Ben Fry caught that small tip, pinched it between thumb-and fingernail. Tears poured from his eyes as he slowly drew the thing out of his body.
The capsule was slick and slippery with his fluids. He tamped it dry on the bedsheet so he could get a grip on it. Then he took the thing in his two hands and snapped it in half. It broke pretty easily. It was designed that way. Now it was in two pieces, one shaded blue, the other red. Each piece had one sharp end and one end that was flat. Using the sharp end of one half, he poked a hole in the flat end of the other. Like poking an opening in a tube of glue. He repeated the process on the other side.
He had about six minutes left before the video camera went on in his cell again. It was plenty of time.
Ignoring the burning pain in his thigh, he rolled off the cot. He crouched down at the cell door. He used the blue half of the capsule first. Squeezed it four times, once each where the lead section of the door latched to the upright, once each where it connected to the computerized sliding mechanism. At each spot, he left a dab of viscous blue fluid. Then he used the red capsule the same way, in the same places. The red fluid and the blue fluid mixed.
The man called Ben Fry moved back across the small cell. He squatted, his back to the door, his hands covering his neck, his head down. Positioned like that, he watched the red bloodstain spreading slowly over his pants leg. He was conscious of a small hum of excitement all through him while he waited, but nothing more. He wasn’t afraid. He had planned this out in his mind, every step of it. His plans were perfect—they always were. Now it was just a matter of making them happen.
A second went by. Another.
The blue fluid and the red fluid from the capsule mixed on the cell door. Finally, there was a quiet, sizzling hiss—a near-silent explosion that blew the door free of its locking mechanism.
The instant he heard it, the man called Ben Fry leapt back to the door. He seized it by the mesh, shoved it back. The door didn’t budge. For a moment, the man felt dazzled, confused. This was not the plan. But he shoved again. And the door did slide back this time exactly as it was supposed to—not a lot, just a little. Just enough.
The man called Ben Fry squeezed through the narrow gap and stepped into the pod gallery.
He was out.
Sixty-Two
Weiss was on the phone with Ketchum when it happened. Ketchum’s deep mutter had become an angry, guttural growl.
“What the hell do you want me to do, Weiss? What the hell do you think I can do?”
“At least get them to put the prison on some kind of high alert.”
“I already talked to them. There is no high alert, they’re always on high alert. You saw the place. How much more fucking alert can it be?”
“Haven’t they got some kind of emergency escape response?”
“Hell yeah, they got an escape response. Automated steel doors, alarms, all that shit. What’re they gonna do, set the whole thing off ’cause my private eye friend says he has a hunch?”
Weiss deflated with a sigh. Stared glumly at the woman beckoning from his computer screen. “At least they could put a guard on Ben Fry,” he said hopelessly.
“There already is a guard on Ben Fry,” Ketchum answered. “There’s a guard on everybody. It’s a fucking prison.”
Weiss’s head rested heavily against the telephone handset. When he didn’t answer, Ketchum went on a little more gently, as gently as he knew how anyway:
“Look, man, they’ve got resource problems the same as everyone. What’m I supposed to tell them? I mean, maybe with more time, we can convince them to put this Fry on some kind of twenty-four-hour watch or something, I don’t know, but the way it is…You don’t even know when this is supposed to happen.”
Weiss nodded, staring at the screen, at the image of Julie Wyant, answering nothing. It was true: He didn’t know. What he did know was that he’d lost contact with Bishop. What he knew was that Bishop said it would be soon. Soon.
He heard Ketchum sigh back at him over the line. “The trouble is, you got the warden thinking you’re crazy now. The way he sees it, there’s no way…”
But Weiss was hardly listening. Just gazing at the image of Julie Wyant in that hangdog way he had. His elbow on the chair arm, his head resting against the phone. That squeeze he felt in his heart at the sight of her—it’d become a steady ache, an ache of helplessness and frustration. He was stuck here, in this city, on this phone, while almost three hundred miles away the man who was hunting her was getting into position to learn everything he needed to track her down. And Weiss couldn’t make anyone believe it was happening…
Ketchum’s low voice muttered on and on somewhere in the background. Weiss continued gazing at the woman on the screen. And as his wandering mind began to dream itself into the amazing deeps of her mysterious eyes, a little song came to him suddenly, a little three-note tune.
Weiss straightened, blinked in surprise. It took him another moment before he realized what it was: an e-mail.
“…because the whole place is geared to keep that from happening…” Ketchum was grumbling.
“Hold it, Ketch,” said Weiss with a faint energy coming back into his voice. He clicked the e-mail icon. The picture of Julie Wyant disappeared behind the screen. He saw the mail.
“What,” said Ketchum over the phone. “What now?”
“I got something from Bishop.”
“Bishop? What the hell’s he want?”
Weiss. It worked. Wannamaker’s out. I’m in. Six tonight, I fly to some secret location out in the forest somewhere. Once I arrive, they’ll give me the details of the job. Soon as I know what’s what, I’ll make contact. With luck, we should be able to break it up without compromising…a150kmnwah-64d
“Well?” said Ketchum after a second.
Weiss didn’t answer. He was reading, thinking. Six tonight. Bishop must already be out there. a150kmnwah-64d. He must be under guard. He couldn’t type out a full message. a150kmnw. Approximately 150 kilometers northwest…
“What the hell is AH-64D?” he asked aloud.
“What?” said Ketchum. “AH-64D? What the hell is that?”
Weiss only shook his head. And Ketchum kept at him, “Hey. Weiss? What’re you talking about? AH-64D?”
AH-64D. Weiss called up his everyday search engine. Tapped the initials in. A website came back at once. “Army Technology—AH-64D—Attack Helicopter.”
“You’re kidding me,” whispered Weiss. He swallowed hard. He felt something inside him begin to come apart.
He saw it. He saw the whole thing at once, the whole picture came to him. Too late. Useless and too late.
“Weiss, what the hell’s going on, are you there?”
“Ketch,” he said. “I think they’re sending a chopper.”
“What?”
“I think…”
Ketchum snorted. “Forget it. To the prison? No chance. There’s chopper wire strung up all over the place. There’s no way to land one of those things….”
“They don’t have to land it,” Weiss said. “It’s an attack chopper. It must be armed. Son of a bitch. That’s how he’s gonna escape. He’s just gonna blow the place open.”
Ketchum was silent a long second. “Weiss,” he said then. “Now I think you’re crazy.”
Weiss stared at the screen. Pressed the phone so hard against his ear it hurt. He felt a cold sweat forming on the back of his neck. Too fucking late.
“Weiss,” said Ketchum. “Weiss.”
Weiss grunted, “Yeah?”
“I can’t tell them he’s gonna blow the place open with an attack helo, man. He’s gonna break out of his cell—which he can’t do—and break into Pomeroy’s—which he also can’t do—and then attack the place with an army chopper? I can’t tell them that, Weiss.”
Weiss licked his dry lips. He tried to swallow again but couldn’t. “No,” he murmured hoarsely.
There was a pause. Then Ketchum asked, “When the hell is this chopper supposed to attack?”
Weiss gave a silent, sickly laugh. If Bishop was 150 klicks into the wilderness, there was no way his handheld could’ve gotten a signal on the ground. And if Bishop were in a plane, he would’ve radioed the cops. Weiss understood this too: He’d put the handheld right into the helo itself so that when it took off…
“It’s already airborne,” he said hoarsely.
“What?” said Ketchum. “What?”
But Weiss, as if he were in a dream, slowly set the phone down in its cradle. Too late. He had been too late. All of it, everything he had figured out, was useless.
He sat staring into space, defeated.
Sixty-Three
As for Chris, this was the moment of his life. His past had fallen away like four walls falling. He felt balanced on the pinpoint of the wind. The low moon was sailing with him. The very horizon line was in the power of the stick between his legs. The beat of the rotors above him, the beat of the engine in his bones, the familiar sight of the green world through the helmet’s targeting monocle…It was all he had ever wanted. All he had ever wanted was to be like this, like an Army pilot. He felt as if the sky were carrying him in its arms.
Seated below and in front of him, in the gunner’s seat, was Hirschorn. Chris could see his fine face reflected on the windshield. He could hear his voice in his headset, now and then murmuring a new direction in his ear. Every time he looked at the man, he experienced a great wave of feeling for him, a great wave of devotion.
He was so grateful to be back in his employer’s good graces. Only a few hours ago, he had stood waiting for Hirschorn’s goons to fire a bullet into his brain. Only forty-five minut
es ago, he had knelt in the mud while Hirschorn slapped him, while Hirschorn ordered his wife to be taken away and shot. Ever since the Army had cashiered Chris, things had been that way for him. Bad juju, nothing right. But now, Hirschorn had given him another chance. Hirschorn had put him in the pilot’s seat. He would have died for Hirschorn then. He loved him.
The Apache swayed low above the oak tops. They were moving at a solid night speed, about seventy-five knots. Chris watched the featureless landscape scroll by on the GPS readout.
“We should be about thirty-five miles northeast,” said Hirschorn in his ear.
Chris nodded. “Roger that.”
They were half an hour away from the prison.
Sixty-Four
In the prison, no one suspected a thing. No alarm had gone off when the man called Ben Fry blew open his cell door. There was no alarm for a blown cell door because a blown cell door was not considered a possibility. A discreet little red square on one of the control booth readouts went on to indicate that a door was disengaged; that was it. Unfortunately, the control booth officer wasn’t looking at the readout at the time.
The control booth officer was named Mike O’Brien. He had a rough but friendly face. Wispy red hair. Canny Irish eyes. He was short and stocky, still muscular, but getting a little paunch around the middle. He was thirty-four years old.
Mike had drifted into corrections work after getting out of the Army. He had been happy enough at first to go from job to job but then he’d gotten married and he wanted something steadier. Corrections turned out to be it. It wasn’t the greatest work in the world but it was regular and secure. And the fairly dependable schedules made it possible for him to plan his life and to spend time with his wife and daughter, which was the main thing to him. His wife, Maura, was just a slip of a thing but she ran Mike’s world with a firm hand and he revered her. Their two-year-old daughter was named Caitlin and Mike loved her as if she had strung the stars.
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