Never Look Back

by Ridley Pearson

  “So… what now?”

  Inside his head, Stone recognized his own depression of the last week. I’m too old for this, he told himself, recognizing it as the truth. I’m far too old, and tired, and opinionated. And discouraged. I don’t believe in it anymore. Now I see it as only a game, like so many other games, whereas before I felt it was so serious and important. But when you’re eighty-some years into life, international intelligence isn’t as important as the last few years. No. I want to live out the last few years my way. Like Sinatra sings, “My way.” Boats and warm breezes and long afternoons and rum and fishing. That’s what I want.

  Knowing he had too many plans mid-stage simply to walk out, he resolved to see the Dragonfly operation through and then retire. He had Parker Lyell all picked out to replace him.

  Oh, Josie, he thought sadly, if only you were here to spend my last few years with me. I would like that more than anything in the world. More than anything else. I still love you, I still love you so much.

  Feeling good, exceptionally good, with this decision, and promising himself to stick with it, he turned to Daniels and asked, “Did you know I’m a gourmet cook?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Always.”

  “How about I cook for the two of us?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Very. We’ll stop by the market, have Marvin do a little shopping, and drive over to my apartment for the best lunch you’ve ever had.”

  “No argument, sir. I’m honored.”

  “By the way, Chris…”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What do you know about garbage disposals?”

  Thanksgiving Day, November 27

  1:36 P.M.

  New Westminster, British Columbia

  The arrangements had been quite simple. He had instructed the parlor coachmen to wake him ten minutes before each of the four stops on the nearly thirty-one-hour trip. They had not left the train at Regina, or at Calgary, or at Kamloops. Andy had maintained nighttime surveillance and relied on his watch’s alarm—which he had set as a backup—or the coachmen to wake him before the train’s next scheduled stop.

  He had tried to catch up on lost sleep between Kamloops and New Westminster.

  And the rest had been a dream.

  The Crossword Code he had deciphered was so confused he was still not convinced it was accurate. A RIGHT code, which this was, operated off all right-hand numbers in the crossword. The first number that had a black space or a border to its right provided the number of words to be skipped in the columned clues. In this morning’s crossword, which Andy had finally received at Kamloops—closer to noon than morning—the first RIGHT was the number four. Four words into the clues was the word bacteria, found in 5 Across, which read, “Yogurt bacteria.” He had worked through the entire puzzle and had come up with:

  BACTERIA ALUMINUM BRIEFCASE

  EXPLOSIVES RIGGED

  MUST BE STOPPED SEA ONLY

  CONTAMINATED

  CONTINGENCIES ARRANGED

  HOSTAGE

  ABORT OPERATIONS

  He cracked the door open.

  “New Westminster, next stop. Still nothing.”

  Andy shut the door and imagined he could see through the walls.

  1:40 P.M.

  Borikowski had worsened.

  He was lying on the bed, his head dipped back over two pillows that lay under his neck. His nosebleed had stopped.

  The bruises were everywhere, dark and foreboding: the back of his neck; the insides of his elbows; underneath both arms. Common movement now caused an immediate blue-brown that settled into an amber-rust a few hours later.

  Lydia had not mentioned her own nosebleeds to him. Both had occurred while he had been sleeping, and she saw no reason to burden him with her plight as well.

  He had agreed to switch the devices from his wrists to hers, worried that despite the fact that he felt fine, he was not well. It did not take a medical genius to know that something had gone wrong with his ability to clot blood, which meant a simple pinprick might kill him. Tristovich had explained the procedure to Lydia over the phone when she had called from Wawa, and Borikowski knew it anyway. All that was required was to remove one of the devices, strap it to Lydia’s wrist, run it through its self-check, and then repeat the procedure using the other device. It had required five minutes and had not detonated the briefcase, which they had both watched intently during the whole ordeal.

  Now her pulse protected the germs.

  She had him sit up and worked with alcohol and cold cream on his face. “I think you are wise to do without the cosmetics.”

  “It’s too time-consuming. I could not possibly sit through a session now.”

  She looked at his rugged but pale face, and helped him to lie back down. “How do you feel?”

  “As I have already told you: I feel fine. It’s strange.”

  “I am worried for you, Leonid.”

  “You are kind.”

  “No. I am worried.”

  “Don’t make me smile. It bruises my cheeks.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “Turn around. I must hide this bruise on your neck. It draws attention.”

  He obeyed and she dabbed him with creams and powders until she was able to match his original skin tone. “There.”

  “Thank you. How long to go?”

  She checked her watch: 1:41 P.M. “Ten minutes. You rest. I’ll arrange for a coachman to hail us a cab.”

  1:51 P.M.

  If Andy hadn’t seen her hips swaying, he might have missed her. He had expected them to disembark together, arm in arm perhaps; but it was not to be.

  She swayed over to a bench and sat down, and even through the safety glass of the train, Andy could feel her sorrow. Something was wrong.

  The train terminal was large and congested. Hundreds of people milled about in search of friends or their ride out of town. Children ran; old people shuffled; steam rose from the tracks.

  Moments later, a male Borikowski—whom Andy recognized by his suitcase—left the train and walked past Lydia without looking at her.

  Never look back.

  Briefcase in hand, Andy headed for the exit. Can this actually be happening? he wondered, or is it some kind of trick?

  He hurried to the door, where several older people interfered with a quick departure. He rudely pushed past. Clap, clap, clap: he descended the train’s metal stairs.

  The woman was gone.

  He looked around the terminal.

  There! Walking toward the exit…

  He briskly walked across the terminal, hat pulled over his face, anticipating trouble from the Security Service. He spotted two agents by the main exit.

  Lydia entered the women’s room.

  Borikowski was nowhere to be seen.

  Andy hurried to the ticket counter, pushed a man out of the way—to objections—and told the clerk, “Please page all Security Service personnel to track five immediately. Thank you!” He disappeared into the thick of people.

  Then he spotted Borikowski. He was just leaving the men’s room. He was holding a reddened handkerchief under his nose, which appeared to be bleeding badly.

  “Your attention please…” rang out the page, the voice echoing through the building. As the message was completed, the two Security Service men Andy had spotted, and one he had not, all rushed toward track number 5.

  The exit was clear.

  Lydia appeared suddenly behind Borikowski, and the two went out into the street.

  Andy ran to catch up with them. As he stepped through the doors, a cabbie was placing their bags into the trunk of his hack. Andy set down the briefcase and reached for the automatic, waiting to draw it from the holster.

  The crowd moved between him and the cab.

  Confusion.

  Then a glimpse of Borikowski’s profile. Andy thought, Here’s my chance. Now I blow his head off.


  The cabbie slammed the trunk.

  The crowd thickened, eliminating any chance of a shot.

  Andy flagged the next available cab, which was several back in line.

  Borikowski had never even looked at Lydia, who now climbed into the back of the cab and tapped him on the shoulder.

  Never look back.

  Andy managed to stay with them. In downtown New Westminster they rented a car, as did Andy from the competition across the street. His rental was ready before theirs, and so he was idling on the corner when they left the parking lot, a light drizzle beginning to fall.

  Ten minutes later they were parked in a line of cars waiting for the ferry that shuttled both people and automobiles across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver Island.

  His car was four behind theirs.

  Once parked inside the ship’s hold, Andy elected to remain inside his rented car and wait out the ride—a difficult decision since he knew the combination of stale air and confined space might cause him to be seasick, an affliction that had plagued him since the age of ten. Still, it had to be: This was the one place even a careless Borikowski would be watching for tails.

  Fifteen minutes into the ride, he threw up—for what seemed like the tenth time.

  The ferry docked at Nanaimo. By the time it was unloading, Andy had changed back into his smelly clothes he had kept in the briefcase. He inspected himself in the rearview mirror and approved.

  The sun, held low in the sky by winter’s feeble fingers, shadowed a handful of litter that scattered across the pavement, finally falling into the choppy water. A line of cars waited to leave the island. Two children played with a ball.

  Andy was sitting in his foul-smelling car, waiting for the other drivers to come below. When they finally did, he watched carefully as a man unlocked the door to Borikowski’s rental, two cars up. He didn’t believe his eyes! The man had used his right hand to turn the key, had used the index finger of his right hand—a finger Leonid Borikowski had no use of.

  This man was not Leonid Borikowski.

  3:15 P.M.

  Nanaimo, Vancouver Island

  Frantically, Andy searched the two rows of vehicles through the dim light of the hold of the ship. Happy tourists and Vancouver Island natives walked with some difficulty between the tight aisles created by the parked vehicles. He could only think of two possibilities: one, Borikowski was leaving on foot; or two, as a final precaution, he would switch vehicles here. There was a surprising resemblance between the man who had just taken over the rental and Borikowski’s most recent face, so Andy favored the switch. He continued his search for Borikowski, knowing there was at least a chance the agent had altered his looks yet again—possibly in the ferry’s restroom. The traffic of people eager to depart had swelled to a chaotic proportion, making his job increasingly difficult.

  A gangling man with sun-bleached blond hair hung his weight from a chain and opened the large door at the stern of the ferry. As the ribbed door slowly lifted, allowing a pale yellow light into the hold, Andy spotted the common denominator. Only two of the twenty-odd drivers reached to adjust their rearview mirrors. One was the man two cars ahead, Borikowski’s impostor; the other was behind the wheel of a shiny new pickup truck to Andy’s left and further up the line. In that instant of time, Andy strained to see whether or not the driver used his index finger, but could not see clearly. His instincts jumped to believe it was, in fact, Borikowski.

  But where was the woman?

  This, now, was his final choice. Not unlike a difficult moment in chess when faced with anticipating an opponent’s next move—the strategy—he was reduced to an educated guess. He didn’t believe the agent would leave the ship on foot. Too easily spotted, he told himself. He chose the man in the shiny new pickup truck and decided to follow.

  Engines revving, the ship rocking slightly in its slip, the cars began to leave, two by two. Light sifted through the thick blue exhaust, casting zebra shadows throughout the hold.

  He wasn’t certain until the small truck stopped in front of the clapboard terminal and picked up the almond-eyed woman. She carried an aluminum briefcase.

  He followed the pickup—and most of the other cars—south on 19; but at Qualicum Beach the pickup exited onto 4A, and turned again onto 4 West, following signs into the sleepy town of Port Alberni. Andy played his familiar game of falling well behind the vehicle. He allowed a Mazda to pull between the pickup and his rental on the way into town.

  His heart began to race. It couldn’t be much longer.

  He managed his first good look at Borikowski when the agent and his woman entered an inexpensive restaurant situated in the center of town. Now he was certain!

  Fifteen minutes later, precisely at four-thirty, Andy watched as the two left the restaurant. At that exact moment, two cars slammed into each other up the street, forcing a truck loaded with large logs to come to a stop in front of the restaurant. The accident pulled Andy’s attention away from the two.

  The move deserved an award.

  The drivers of the two dented vehicles jumped out and began a convincing fistfight in the middle of the street. Bystanders rushed to drag them apart. Andy quickly glanced back to the sidewalk, but all he saw was an aluminum briefcase being yanked up into the passenger side of the tractor-trailer by a slender arm. They had switched again!

  Andy unconsciously checked an inside pocket of his multi-pocketed coat and touched two clips to his automatic. He knew Vancouver Island well enough to know what the logging truck meant—this was the end of the line. He assumed the truck was headed for the thickly forested section of Vancouver Island to the west. Several small fishing communities dotted the isolated shoreline there, tucked into small rocky inlets—all ideal locations to board an agent onto a waiting ship. The trucker would know the idiosyncrasies of the labyrinth of unmarked rugged dirt roads that webbed the forests; a fine plan that would insure no one could follow on this last leg.

  But the diversion worked against them by lasting a few seconds too long. Positioning himself behind the waiting truck so that neither mirror would show him, Andy walked carefully ahead to the trailer of stacked logs. With everyone’s attention drawn to the fight, Andy ducked under the piled logs, climbed over the rear axle, and pulled himself up onto the boom of the trailer. Heavy chains held the logs in place. He took hold.

  Gears complained and the rig slowly rumbled forward.

  Twenty minutes outside of Port Alberni the road changed to dirt and the driver turned on the speed. Where the hell was the hostage? Andy wondered. He hung on, bouncing viciously against the boom, bruising his back, knuckles white. His empty stomach left him little reserve strength. The wet, freezing wind iced his exposed skin. Frostbite patches settled into his cheeks and hands. A tremendous bump! The boom slammed against his testicles. He thought, Maybe I’m supposed to fight like hell and still lose—get mowed over by a truck in the middle of fucking nowhere, never found, never missed. No. Not like that. Please God. Not like that.

  He gripped the chains more tightly.

  Then a cold rain began to fall.

  ***

  Had it been hours? Minutes? It felt like days. Time had no meaning here, hanging by a chain beneath a thundering logging truck. The water soaked him in no time. His groin throbbed with pain.

  Shifting gears and a flicker of lights through the smoke-like dusk of a cloud-covered sunset. Then, so suddenly, so loudly that he nearly lost his hold, an incredibly high-pitched whine pierced his ears. The truck whisked over an extremely old pivot bridge, a turnstile bridge meant to rotate on a center axis, not a drawbridge as he had first thought. As the tires hit dirt again, Andy lowered his head to see off to the side, spotting a small wharf area and cannery. A cul-de-sac. The driver down-shifted to make the turn. Andy loosened his grip, heaved with his remaining strength, and rolled like a son of a bitch.

  The crush of the fat, black, twin rubber tires missed his left shoulder by only a fraction of an inch. He continued rolling, o
ver and over, until he heard the soft crunch of pine needles, and then, after another fifteen feet, hit the base of a pine. His face was scratched and bleeding, his hands scuffed, his shoulder aching as if partially dislocated. He smiled. Lying perfectly still, his eyes searched through the encroaching darkness, studying the surroundings. Through the copse of pines, he saw the truck come to a stop out on the pier. Beside it, the superstructure of a towering crane, once used to hoist fish from a ship’s hold, jutted into the sky, its metal dark and old. Behind it lay the time-worn tin walls of the cannery. Andy sat up slowly and carefully, checking for broken bones. His nose, ears, and small fingers were numb. Over the groan of the semi, he heard the diesel of the crane start up. It belched exhaust into the veiled sky. He crept twenty yards on hands and knees to the far edge of the trees, an area cluttered with several dilapidated cabins.

  The ship, a hundred-foot ocean trawler, had twin booms that held netting lines and veed above either side of the vessel like long fingers. Andy watched the crane remove the two topmost logs from the truck and set them on the pier. Then he watched as the crane’s cable was reattached and a casket was hoisted into the air. The hostage? Dead?

  He sprinted in a shadow along a seawall toward the pier, head tucked low, moving with long strides. He edged along the wall and ducked under the pier as all eyes followed the suspended casket, which was placed safely on board.

  It was even darker under the pier, which reached a good twenty yards into the water, supported by clusters of pitch-covered pilings. Salt-encrusted conduit pipe hung from the underside. Water splashed four to five feet below the pier. Andy gripped the conduits, tucked his body into a tight ball, and began swinging, hand over hand like an ape, toward the waiting ship. Then, as he was halfway to the ship, a line fell in the water and was drawn up the side and out of sight.

  The ship was leaving.

  His hold, in fact the entire dock, shook as the trees were returned to the logging truck, which was about to back up. Andy hurried. Arm over arm, he raced back to land. Over his shoulder the ship pulled away from the dock. Faster! he coaxed himself, building up a rhythm, now only yards from the seawall. Hand over hand.