by Ted Dekker
“How far?” Brit asked.
“Open shaft is about a hundred yards.”
“When we hit the ground, you stay put.” Brit killed the lights. “No sound, no radio, no cell phone. If this guy’s here, he’s watching and listening.”
Tremble sat still.
A large conveyor belt reached toward the hill on their left like a black claw draped with chains and belts. The mine it pointed to looked like a black throat on the side of the hill.
“You ready?” Brit asked, stopping the vehicle.
Daniel already had his gun out. Engaged. He eased the door open and whispered to Lori. “Stay to the rear ten yards. Brit’s got my back.”
Then he was running on the balls of his feet, straight for that throat.
According to Tremble, the entrance had been boarded up, but a gaping hole on the left side would let them in. Their shoes scattered coal, and the moonlight caught the golden tan surface of what remained of the hives. The beeswax had survived thirty years only because this side of the hill had been mined last, and trucks had approached the shaft from the far side, leaving the wax mostly undisturbed.
A wax doll. Heather. If the boy wasn’t Eve, who was he?
Daniel slid up next to the mine entrance and waited for Brit to reach him with the floodlight. The moon grayed his face.
“Ready?”
Daniel nodded.
And then they were in, two abreast, facing darkness. Brit flipped the halogen lamp on. Light glared to life, flooding a long, black tunnel a hundred feet in. Large pillars ran along the left wall. Tracks down the middle.
No sign of Heather.
Daniel ran forward, stepping over rocks and lumps of coal.
No sign . . .
An ache spread through his chest where his heart raced. They were way beyond any pretense of stealth.
“Heather!” His voiced bounced off the walls. Brit’s light revealed a slight turn to the left ahead, and Daniel sprinted for that bend, desperate for the image his mind toiled to see. A chair. A woman in that chair.
Daniel spun around the turn, gun extended, and pulled up hard, panting. Then Brit caught up, and his light revealed the sight as though it were day.
An old coal car lay toppled at the end of the track. And beside the car, a steel chair.
An empty steel chair.
Daniel’s hands trembled badly. Brit walked past him and stepped up to the chair. He shone the light on a brown Heath bar wrapper that sat on the rusted seat.
Daniel felt his strength go. He settled to one knee and lowered his gun.
“They were here,” Brit said.
Lori rounded the bend and stopped behind Daniel, breathing hard.
Daniel struggled to make sense of the scene. Brit was right, Eve had been here. But he’d anticipated them. How? He took a deep breath and forced his mind to calm.
“No.” Daniel pushed himself to his feet, turned around, and walked past Lori, ignoring her sympathetic eyes. No, you’re wrong, Brit. You’re dead wrong.
“This is only one of four entry tunnels,” Brit said. “He was here. He could still be in one of the other tunnels.” Then, keying his walkie, he said “Bring them up. I want every tunnel shut off now. Let’s go!”
“You’re wasting your time, Brit.”
“I’m not willing to take that chance.”
“He’s way ahead of us!” Daniel yelled, spinning back. “He knew we’d find the wax in his tires and track this place down.” He thrust his finger out at the chair. “That’s what the Heath wrapper says.”
“So . . .” Lori looked between Brit and Daniel. “Where does that leave us?”
Daniel turned and strode toward the night sky. “Dead,” he said. “She’s dead.”
TWENTY-THREE
AN EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH OF the tunnel turned up nothing more than the metal chair and the Heath bar wrapper. Daniel paced the grounds, nudging lumps of coal, running his hands through his hair, doing his best to avoid Brit and Lori.
Grappling with a senseless thought that refused to dislodge itself from his mind.
An evidence response team was already on its way from Cheyenne. Footprints would show that one, not two people had entered the mine shaft recently. Not Eve and Heather. Just Eve.
Fingerprints on the metal chair and wrapper would match those they had for Eve. Tread marks near the entrance would show that the Dodge Caravan driven by Eve had been here several times at least. It was one of numerous locations he’d chosen ahead of time.
The Cessna Citation was fueled, ready to take them back to LA as soon as Brit was satisfied with the ground operation. An hour of pacing and Daniel began to feel the familiar dizziness that had preceded some of his panic attacks.
He found Lori speaking in hushed tones with Brit just inside the mine’s entrance. He stopped twenty feet shy and let them talk. Whatever steps they might be considering, he was now beyond caring.
There was only one way to find Heather.
Lori broke the conversation off and walked up to him. “Come on, let’s get you back to town.”
“When are we heading back to LA?”
“In the morning,” she said.
Daniel stopped her. “The morning? No, we have to get back now!”
“Brit wants some daylight. There’s nothing we can do in LA that we can’t do here.” She headed toward the Suburban. “We have rooms at the Marriott in Laramie. Let’s go.”
The senselessness gnawing at his mind turned to dread. “No, no—we have to get back tonight.” He needed to make the point with Brit, but Lori grabbed his arm as he turned.
“What you need is rest, if I have to force you into bed and hold you down myself!”
“You know as well as I do that he usually kills them within the first three days. That gives us another thirty-six hours. We can still stop him. We can’t just sit around for twelve hours.”
“This is a major departure from his pattern. We have no indication he’ll proceed before the next new moon.”
“I’m not willing to take that chance! He’s not going to hold her for a whole month before . . .” His voice faltered.
Brit looked at them from the tunnel entrance.
She took Daniel’s arm and guided him to the vehicle. “Get in.”
He stepped into the passenger’s seat. Still no wave of fear. The key was there, in the protective layers of his mind. In the meninges.
Lori started the car, whipped it through a U-turn, and roared down the dirt road. They remained quiet for the first five minutes, Daniel because he didn’t know what to say, what he wanted to say. Lori because . . .
He studied her set jaw. Lori because she already knew what he wanted to say.
Sitting in the bucket seat beside her, Daniel was overcome by the hopelessness that had brought them to this point. That black space where the only alternative is no alternative at all. A mother forced to choose between the deaths of two children. A cancer victim given one last chance to ride his horse, knowing being jostled in the saddle will break all of his ribs.
A dead man walking who chooses the injection over the electric chair.
Pressure swelled behind his eyes, threatening tears. He was too tired to resist, so he let them slip down his cheeks in the dark. Lori glanced at him once, but he refused to return the look.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, breaking the quiet.
“You know there’s no other way.”
Lori drove through a red light and headed up the main drag.
“The fear hasn’t come back,” he continued.
“I know.”
“I’m alive.”
“And I’d like to keep you that way.”
“She’s going to die.”
“Even if we did think it would do any good, it’s way too early to try again. Your body needs time to recover.”
“Eve’s behind the door, Lori. All I need to do is open that door.”
“And if you don’t come back, Heather will die anyway. Have you th
ought about that?”
“I’ve beat the thought to death,” Daniel said. He twisted and gripped her arm. “Listen to me. The only advantage we have over Eve is my memory. I saw him before he killed me. We know how to recover that memory now. We have to do this. I’m begging you.”
“Even if you do walk through that door and recover that memory, what good will an image of Eve do in the short term?”
The point hadn’t been lost on Daniel. Being able to identify Eve, reproduce the killer’s face for an airing on television, putting it through the FBI’s system—they could and probably would lead to Eve’s capture at some point. But not in time to save Heather.
He released her arm and shifted in his seat. “I don’t know. But I have to do this now, while I know she has time. Not tomorrow, not in a week. Tonight.”
Lori’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. But she didn’t immediately throw out another argument. This was her way of processing. Denial and rejection, knowing all along that she would agree and accept. She was as eager to stop Eve as he was.
“Where can we do it?” he asked.
“Stop it! You’re acting like this is a line of coke we’re talking about!”
“How I deal with my death is my issue, not yours!” They were yelling now.
“What we did last night wasn’t only completely unethical; it was insane!”
“He’s insane!”
“So to stop him, we have to become like him?” she demanded.
These were useless accusations borne out of frustration, he knew.
She swallowed hard, shook her head, then spoke through her teeth. “I can’t believe I’m even listening to you.”
“Because you know I’m right. And you know it’s my choice, not yours.”
“You haven’t read up on assisted suicide, obviously.”
“Fortunately we both work for the FBI. That gives us certain rights.”
“Like killing ourselves?”
He let the comment go. They passed a Super 8 Motel and a 7-Eleven on the right. They were in Laramie, driving through traffic lights, but he could hardly remember any of it.
“Will the hospital here have what you need?”
She shook her head again. “This is crazy.”
“Will it?”
Lori slammed the brakes, searched the rearview mirror, then pulled the Suburban into a U-turn, cutting across the street.
“Where are you going?”
“The hospital,” she said. “It’s behind us.”
TWENTY-FOUR
THERE ARE TWO WAYS to do this,” Lori said, following a blue sign indicating that the Ivinson Memorial Hospital was located off a side street to the right. “With the hospital’s full cooperation, which will mean convincing—”
“Alone,” he interrupted. “No one knows.”
“That’s not going to be easy.”
“We don’t have a choice. Maybe it would be better to get what we need from the hospital and do it in a motel room.”
“It’s more equipment than you realize.” She took another corner and headed for a lighted sign that read Emergency.
“Better for you to go in dead.”
“Dead? What do you mean? Kill me out here?”
She frowned. “Pretty much. Yes. I have the benzodiazepine in my bag. For that matter, I have the epinephrine and atropine. It’s the rest I need.”
“You brought them?”
“Just the drugs. Epinephrine and atropine are standard. To be honest, I don’t know why I brought the muscle relaxant. Point is, I have it.” She pulled the vehicle to the curb and put it in park.
“I could call ahead, clear a room with a defibrillator standing by, inject you with the benzodiazepine here.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Dangerous? It’ll kill you.” She looked at the emergency doors ahead. “The drug takes at least thirty seconds to stop the heart. If the ward was ready, thinking you were already dead, and we got you in within a few seconds of injecting you . . .” She faced him. “No more dangerous than killing you on the bed.”
“So you’d just inject me while I’m standing outside the door?”
“Close enough. Directly into the same vein we used earlier.” Lori closed her eyes. “This is nuts.”
“If I went in dead, or close enough, the emergency room would only be concerned with my resuscitation,” Daniel said. “Right? What would you say to the agency?”
“An acute cardiac failure resulting from the stress of losing Heather. You died a week ago—I think I can make the case.”
Montova would freak, but Daniel was beyond caring at the moment. “Okay. Tell me what you need.”
“Get in the back.”
She retrieved a small black handbag from the back, filled a syringe with the same powerful muscle relaxant she’d killed him with last night, and slid into the backseat.
The light from the streetlight under which they were parked paled her complexion. She quickly cleaned his neck with a disinfectant patch from one of those sealed packets, cleared the syringe.
“You’re sure about this?” she said.
“Make the call. We’re running out of time.”
Lori snatched up her phone, punched in 9-1-1, and stared into his eyes. Her tone was urgent.
“This is Dr. Lori Ames with the FBI. I have an agent who’s suffered a heart attack, and I’m transporting him to Ivinson Hospital. Can you patch me through?”
Her eyes didn’t waver from his. Her own apparent concern began to unnerve him.
She reached the emergency ward, introduced herself in a terse voice, and demanded to speak to the physician in charge immediately. Not until she was connected to the party she needed did she shift her eyes from his.
“I’m about a couple minutes out. From what I can tell, the patient is in cardiac fibrillation. I need a gurney standing by outside, everything else in the closest available room. Manual defib, epinephrine, atropine—all of it.”
She listened for a brief moment, then snapped her phone shut.
“Okay, here’s how we do this. You’re going to lie down on the seat. I’m going to insert the needle and have you hold the syringe while I drive around the block. Don’t push the plunger until I say. Empty the syringe, pull the needle free, and apply pressure with this gauze. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath. “Lie down.”
Daniel lay flat, legs dangling off one side.
Lori swiped his neck once more, turned on the overhead light. “This will sting.”
It hurt like hell.
She took his hand and put it on the syringe. “Got it? Don’t touch the plunger until I see that gurney. Clear? I don’t want that drug in your system until I know they’re ready.”
“I’m counting on it, trust me.”
She climbed through the seats, pulled the Suburban into gear, and drove.
“You okay?”
The needle in his neck shifted with the jostling vehicle, forcing him to grip it with both hands. But the thought of a needle inserted into his jugular was more disturbing.
“Fine. How much longer?”
She didn’t respond.
His neck stung and he wondered if he’d pricked the inside wall of his vein. Did veins have nerves? He was about to ask her, when the car surged forward.
“Okay, I can see them with the gurney, two paramedics right by the street. This should be good, it should be good. Okay . . . okay, do it. And get that syringe out quickly.”
Daniel held the syringe with his left hand and pushed the plunger to the hilt with his right. He yanked the needle out, pressed his neck with the gauze pad. Dropped the syringe.
“Daniel?”
“Done.” The pain kicked in faster than he remembered. Like a mule. He instinctively grabbed his chest, closed his eyes.
As before, the certainty that he’d made a terrible mistake settled on him as his heart began to fight the deadening drug.
“Oh, G
od . . .”
Ben Kingsley had said those words as Gandhi being assassinated. Oh, God. The next scene was his funeral procession. A white casket. But in that casket, a black room.
Daniel felt his consciousness waning. Lori was yelling orders, he could hear that much. Then his body was sliding down the seat. Handled roughly onto something flatter. A gurney.
He was dead. Even if his heart hadn’t stopped beating yet, he was dead.
But his heart had stopped beating. And his lungs had stopped breathing. The oxygen in his mind was running out fast. Soon it would go into those extreme throes of survival that generated the electrochemical responses he desperately needed to open the door.
A violent flash of light. A flood of images.
And then Daniel’s world went dead. Only he wasn’t dead, dead. He was in the black room.
He heard a deep, long, sucking sound, a breath that echoed softly around the square room. Daniel scanned the walls. Then turned slowly to each corner, expecting to see the child.
But he found himself in an empty room. No boy, no giggling, no wax doll with bees crawling from empty eye sockets.
“Hello?”
His voice filled the room. Then it, too, was gone, leaving only the sound of his lungs pumping air. And time was running out. Was there any correlation between the length of a near-death experience and the time one was dead?
Then Daniel saw the door, just visible in one shadowed corner. The boy’s voice rang through his memory. Eve’s in there.
He walked toward the door, took the silver knob in his right hand, then thought twice about opening it. Behind it was—what—the wailing and gnashing of teeth?
He twisted the handle and pulled the door open. Stepped tentatively inside another room with black walls. From all appearances, identical to the first room.
Same walls. Same checkerboard floor. Same absolute stillness.
Same giggling.
Daniel spun to his right and stared into the corner. The boy squatted on his haunches, staring at him with the same ghastly black eyes and taut-skin face, smiling. The single most disturbing image Daniel had set eyes on.
So disturbing that he couldn’t speak.
“Hello, Daniel,” the boy said, in the innocent voice of a child. “I see you.”
