The Inner Circle (Man of Wax Trilogy)

by Robert Swartwood

  “But how do you know?”

  “I used to be exactly where you were. I used to think there was still a chance, that there was hope. But ... do you know what hope is? Hope is hopeless.”

  Clark shook his head. Tears brimmed in his eyes. He took off his glasses to wipe at them.

  “My wife and sons,” he said, looking down at his lap, “they’re my life. They’re all I know. They can’t ... they can’t be dead.”

  At moments like these there’s nothing for you to say, so I said nothing. I looked away from him. Listened to the irregular beat on the holding cell roof. Listened to the distant, faint sound of thunder.

  Clark looked back up at me, wiped at his eyes, his nose. He gestured again at the manuscript. “How long ago did that happen?”

  “Two years.”

  “And ... are you different?”

  I nodded.

  “How so?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “In my old life, the one with my family, I never once thought I would touch a gun, let alone fire one.”

  “But you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  I sat there silent, not wanting to continue. But this man needed to hear the truth. He deserved that much.

  “In my old life, I never once thought I’d ever hurt someone, let alone”—I cleared my throat—“kill someone.”

  His face instantly went white. “You’ve ... killed people?”

  “Yes.”

  “But ... why?”

  “They were bad people.”

  “But don’t you”—he shrugged, trying to find the words—“don’t you feel guilty?”

  I took another moment to think about that. “Not really. At first I did. It wasn’t something easy to accept. But after a while ... I just became numb to it.”

  He swallowed. “When are you going to let me out of here?”

  The drops of rain continuing to tap ... tap, tap ... tap.

  “How long have I even been in here?”

  That distant sound of thunder fading away and then growing stronger.

  “Ben?” He waved at me through the bars to get my attention. “Hello?”

  The leftover drops of raining continuing to fall but the sound of thunder growing stronger and stronger.

  Clark stood up from his cot. He walked to the bars of the cell. “Are you okay?”

  The growing sound of thunder, and I was thinking about all the times I had been in here, not that many but enough to know that it was always quiet, except when it rained and when it thundered and what I was hearing now was not thunder.

  “Ben? What’s wrong?”

  Carver had specifically built this holding cell in the middle of nowhere. Besides the occasional sound of an airliner jet flying thirty thousand feet up in the air, there was almost always silence.

  “Hey”—Clark hit the bars with his fists—“Ben, are you okay?”

  The drops of leftover rain continuing to fall but the sound of thunder even closer.

  Clark said, “Do you know what you look like sitting there?”

  I’d been watching Clark from the corner of my eye, watching him get up from the cot and make his way to the bars, watching him strike the bars with his fists to get my attention. But now I turned my head, focused my gaze on his face—his face no longer resembling the man we’d rescued from Hope Springs, Arizona, the man who had been scared out of his mind and worried for the fate of his wife and two sons.

  Now his face was accompanied by a slight and subtle sneer. The tears that had been so prevalent in his eyes seconds ago were gone. He took off his glasses and tossed them in the corner. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, rubbed his eyes not of tears but the irritation the prescription had caused his vision.

  “You look just like a man of wax.” He smiled. “I have to admit, you guys are good. You knocked me out so I wouldn’t be a problem when you brought me here. So I wouldn’t even know where this place was. And you no doubt scanned me for any tracking devices. That’s smart, too. I remember reading about it when your story first appeared online. So you know what we did instead?” He opened his mouth wide and used a finger to tap one of the rear molars. “Had this baby inserted. Was completely dead until I woke up and turned it on. Didn’t see that on your cameras, did you?”

  The door behind me burst open.

  Drew rushed inside and shouted, “We have to get out of here!”

  Clark barely even acknowledged the disruption, keeping his gaze level on me. “After all this time, all the bullshit you put us through, now it’s over.”

  I didn’t know when it happened, but I had risen to my feet.

  Clark said, “You know the best way to win a game of cat and mouse?”

  Outside the thunder that wasn’t thunder was so very close.

  “If you’re the cat, you become a mouse. Let the other mice lead you back to their den.”

  Drew stepped up beside me, grabbed my arm. “Ben, let’s go.”

  “I don’t know why we didn’t try this earlier,” Clark said. “This worked perfectly. Remember, Ben, misdirection—the public falls for it every time.”

  The thunder was so close now it was distinct—not just one helicopter but two.

  I nodded at Drew, turned, and started toward the door leading outside.

  “You know, Ben,” Clark said, “I was the one that took you and your family from your house.”

  I stopped.

  “Your wife was in her underwear. I remember they were these pink silk panties.”

  The helicopters were directly above us, their rotors thumping the air.

  “She was a beautiful woman. One of a kind. Great breasts, too. I’ll admit it, I copped a feel. Nice and supple. A lot nicer than your daughter’s.”

  I spun back around and started toward the holding cell.

  Drew stepped in front of me. “Just leave it. We have to go now.”

  “By the way,” Clark said, standing with his fingers causally wrapped around the bars, “there’s something you don’t know about me. I love to torture. I get off on it. In fact, I was the one that cut off your wife’s finger. She kept crying the entire time. She kept blaming you, Ben. She kept asking why you weren’t coming to save her.”

  I tried pushing past Drew. Drew kept holding me back.

  “I said to her softly, ‘Don’t worry about it, baby. You’re not gonna feel a thing.’ ”

  Drew was stronger and bigger than me. I wasn’t going to be able to push past him. I stepped back and said to him, “Give me your gun.”

  Clark chuckled. “You were being so kind to me, Ben, not bringing your gun when I’d asked you not to. Because guns really scare me, don’t you know? They scare me to death.”

  Drew said, “It’s outside on the four-wheeler.”

  Clark’s smile started to fade. “Four-wheeler?”

  I said, “You assholes think you’re so smart? You’re not smart enough.”

  I nodded again at Drew, and we turned and started toward the door.

  “She was a real beauty, that wife of yours,” Clark said. “At least she was before I started in with my knife.”

  Drew hurried through the door to start up the four-wheelers, leaving me alone. I stopped before the door, though, and stood completely still.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you, Ben? I know you watched it. You watched me stab her here, and stab her here, and stab her here.”

  Everything in my shaking body wanted me to turn back and storm the holding cell. I had the key. I could open the cell. I could beat Clark to death with my fists.

  “Right here, Ben, right here in the throat. That’s the best place to stab someone. That way they drown to death in their own blood. That’s what really gives me a fucking hard-on. And after your wife, I went and did the same to your little bitch of a daughter.” He laughed. “But what am I saying? You watched it all, didn’t you? Of course you did. Say, Ben, how many times did you watch me kill your family?”
<
br />   Beside the door was the plastic screen covering the two red buttons. I pulled it up and hit the first, nearly smashing it to pieces. But still it did its job, frying the cameras that sent the signal to the farmhouse. Outside, I heard Drew starting the four-wheelers, their engines mostly undercut by the helicopters. Once I hit the second button, we would have sixty seconds.

  I turned back around, my hands clenched into fists, my entire body fuming.

  “Is your name really Clark?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Why don’t you stay and find out?”

  “Well, whatever your name is, when you and I meet again? I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  And I turned, smacked the second button, and sprinted outside.

  50

  There were only two helicopters, what looked through the trees to be Black Hawks, and they were doing just what I had suspected—circling around, trying to find a place to land.

  Only problem was for them, there weren’t any places to land. Not for at least three miles in any direction.

  This was, after all, Colorado. Trees covered half the state. After the Christian Kane incident, Carver had become paranoid something like that might happen again. Even worse, Simon might try to send one of his own men into the game. With that fear in mind he had us build this holding cell in the middle of nowhere. A holding cell that had taken months to construct, multiple trips with very little equipment because all that fit through the trees were four-wheelers. Four-wheelers that we used every time we came out here, toward the sound of the generator that provided electricity for whoever was inside.

  Because if the mice were smart and brought another mouse back to their den, they wouldn’t bring it back to their real den until they were sure—one hundred percent certain—that the mouse was really a mouse and not a cat disguised as a mouse.

  But Carver, being ever so paranoid, didn’t stop there. He created a failsafe on the off chance a cat did manage to make it through to the mouse’s den. He set up several flash bombs around the holding cell, some very close, others hundreds of yards away. They were triggered to go off sixty seconds after the emergency button inside the holding cell was engaged.

  Drew was already on his four-wheeler, gunning the engine. He looked back at me, started to shout something, but then his gaze shifted. He grabbed for his gun, aimed it high, and fired.

  I looked up. A rope had appeared through the treetops. A man in black was rappelling down the rope. When Drew’s bullet hit him, his body jerked and went still.

  I hurried over to the second four-wheeler. On the seat were my radio and gun. I secured the gun in the waistband of my jeans. I grabbed the radio and placed it to my mouth. There was no cell reception this far out, but shortwave radios worked from here to the farmhouse. I keyed the radio and shouted, “Ronny, Maya, whoever—bring the pickup to mile marker eighty-five. Be there in twenty minutes!”

  Drew fired at another man in black rappelling down another rope. One of the helicopters returned fire.

  “Go!” I shouted at Drew. I climbed onto the four-wheeler and gunned the engine.

  We took off into the trees ... just as the sixty seconds elapsed and all around us the flash bombs began to erupt.

  If the men in the helicopters had heat sensors—and we had to assume they did, as Caesar’s people had all the cool toys—they would be able to track us from the air. With the flash bombs, we might just be lucky enough to escape their cover.

  The daylight was fleeting but there was still just enough for us to see. Besides, we knew the trails. Carver had made it a point to create a few that crisscrossed just in case, and he had us ride them enough times that we knew all the turns. One of the flash bombs went off right by the trail. I flinched, thinking the helicopters were bombing us. Then I was past it, followed by Drew, and we rode up and over the hills and fallen tree stumps, branches slapping at our faces.

  Several minutes later we stopped and abandoned the four-wheelers. Normally we took them to a completely different location, where we stored them in a hidden shed and then walked a half mile to our vehicle. Now we were never coming back here, and we were not chancing anything.

  We hurried through the trees. We could barely hear the helicopters off in the distance. By now the men in the helicopters would have made it through the trees to the ground. They would have made it inside and found Clark—or whatever his real name was—behind the bars. But that would be it.

  Drew and I hustled for another ten minutes until we reached the highway. It was mile marker eighty-three—my guesstimation had been close enough. The stretch of road was deserted. I was about to pull out the radio when movement caught my eye. A tractor-trailer appeared around the bend. It was pulling a long bed of logs. The thing was stacked high, the heavy metal prongs on each side of the flatbed keeping them in place.

  “Try them again?” Drew asked.

  I nodded and put the radio to my mouth. Then I spotted the red pickup trailing the logging truck. Drew and I broke cover and sprinted up the slope.

  Seconds later the logging truck roared past us. The red pickup eased to a stop. Ronny was behind the wheel.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Drew climbed in first. I slammed the door shut and shouted at Ronny to move it. Ronny punched the gas.

  “What happened?” he asked again.

  “They came for us.”

  “How?”

  “The son of a bitch had a tracking device in his goddamn molar.” I lashed out, slamming my fist into the dash. “Motherfucker!”

  We drove for another minute in silence. The road twisted and turned. I didn’t know why, but when the dark sedan came speeding around the bend in the oncoming lane, something dropped in the pit of my stomach.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  Ronny glanced at me. “What’s wrong?”

  The sedan came up fast. For a moment I had the childish thought that if I closed my eyes and didn’t look at the sedan, it wouldn’t be real. But I kept my eyes open. I looked.

  For a split-second as the sedan whipped past us, the two men in the front wearing wraparound sunglasses like the Blues Brothers looked back.

  “Hit the gas,” I said.

  Ronny knew better than to question me. He heard the urgency in my voice. He pressed his foot down even more on the gas pedal, and the pickup accelerated.

  I glanced back through the pickup’s rear window. The sedan’s taillights were already flaring. The car appeared to rock back and forth for a moment, teetering, before the driver executed a hasty one-eighty.

  “Here they come,” Ronny said, his gaze momentarily on the rearview mirror.

  I reached for the glove compartment. Inside were two spare magazines—we always kept extras in our vehicles. I took them both out and handed one to Drew. Then I pressed the button to lower the side window.

  “What are you doing?” Ronny asked.

  “Heading out to get some fresh air.” I glanced at Drew. “Want to come with?”

  Drew nodded.

  I stuffed the magazine in my pocket, went to grab the caution bar. This part of the highway was not level and straight. The pavement was still wet and slick. Any false move and I would be toast. I squeezed the caution bar tight, took a deep breath, and pulled myself through the window.

  It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, not with Ronny already driving nearly eighty miles per hour. I almost lost my balance once when I attempted to put my right foot on the window, but then I managed to crawl back into the pickup’s bed. I pulled the gun from my pocket, checked the magazine, slapped it back in place.

  The sedan was coming right up our ass. The passenger’s window lowered, and one of the Blues Brothers leaned out with a gun.

  I moved toward the back of the pickup bed on my knees, aimed, and opened fire.

  Despite Ronny swerving the pickup around the curves and my heart blasting away in my chest, my aim was steady. The bullets struck the sedan’s windshield—each bullet making a sort of splat in the glass—
but that was as far as they got. There was no penetration. The driver barely even flinched.

  The passenger, who had ducked inside during my volley, leaned back out. He opened fire.

  I flattened myself on the pickup’s bed. My foot hit something solid. As Ronny began swerving the pickup even more, trying to evade the bullets, I glanced back and saw Drew lying flat too.

  “What happened?” he shouted.

  “The windshield’s bulletproof!”

  Ronny hit a tight curve, tapping the brakes enough to send us rolling across the pickup’s bed. There was a lull in the sedan’s gunfire. I peeked up and redirected my aim, this time going for the grill.

  The burst of bullets was temporarily drowned out by a logging truck roaring past in the opposite direction. This truck had a shorter bed, with even thicker logs stacked in the back. These were not contained by heavy metal prongs, but by two thick chains.

  I checked the highway ahead of us. Another one of these logging trucks was coming our way.

  “Drew!” I shouted, and lifted my chin at the oncoming truck.

  He glanced back, then nodded at me. “Keep me covered!”

  I turned back to the sedan. The passenger was leaning out the window again. I fired, first at the windshield, then again at the grill, until I ran out of bullets. I let the magazine drop, slapped in the spare, opened fire again.

  The space between the sedan and pickup was maybe two hundred yards. It was going to be tight. I glanced back and saw Drew kneeling with his left arm balanced on the side of the bed, waiting for the right moment. I knew if anyone could make this work, it would be him. He was our sharpshooter. This was what he trained for. Even if, when it all came down to it, we were relying on luck.

  The logging truck roared past and Drew opened fire. I saw the bullets tearing into the chains and logs. The first chain snapped. The second didn’t.

  “Shit!” he shouted. He looked at me, and his eyes went wide. “Ben!”

  I hit the bed just as another round of bullets tore into back of the pickup. Ronny started swerving again.

  I shouted back at Drew, “Are you out?”