Capture the Night

by Cheryl Pierson

  Before Carter could respond, McShane said, “That’s what I want from you, Captain. You tell ’em that’s what I need from your country, to allow Brendan Roberts and Peter Logan to live. You’ve got twenty-four hours.”

  “What about the hostages?” Carter asked.

  “Don’t push me, Captain. I’ll send them out a few at a time—dependin’ on your progress in gettin’ me what I’ve asked for. Meanwhile, we’ll be spreadin’ out all through the hotel. Just so’s you don’t get a bright idea of savin’ anyone on your own.” The smile was back in his voice again. “I’ll decide who needs rescuin’ from me…and who doesn’t.”

  Chapter 19

  Nauseating, that smell. Every time Alexa breathed, she was conscious of it. Death. She shuddered and burrowed closer to Johnny in the darkness. In his sleep, he drew her near. His embrace was strong, she thought. A good sign. Something positive, out of everything else that was happening around them.

  He didn’t seem as hot as before, and she wondered if it was only her imagination—the product of wishful thinking. Through the past few hours, they’d slept, off and on. More “off” than “on”, she thought. Johnny’s fever had held a tight grip, and at one point, he had dipped into an unconscious deep sleep, but only briefly. He had seemed to fight against it, and Alexa had whispered for him to try to sleep, to let go. If nothing else, she thought, he could escape the pain for a little while.

  “Don’t wanna leave you…alone.” Johnny had murmured, in a low strained voice.

  Alexa’s heart had clenched at those telling words. He was fighting to stay with her, to not leave her alone and frightened. She had swallowed hard and forced a calmness into her tone. “Johnny, please do it for me. I’ll be fine. We’ll both sleep for a little while. Please,” her voice cracked, “let yourself rest—get better.”

  His fingers had stroked her arm. “You’ll—be okay?”

  “Of course.” She moistened her lips. “Let’s just sleep together for a while. I know you’re tired. I am, too.”

  “I hope that offer still—still stands when we get out of here.”

  She could hear the teasing note, faint, but there, and it took her a minute to realize what he was referring to. Then, she smiled and laid her head next to his. “You can count on it,” she whispered.

  “I am.”

  They’d both drifted to sleep, but Alexa had awakened once as the delirium seized him and he began to mutter at first in a mixture of languages—Spanish and English.

  Keep him quiet, Daniel had said. She laid a palm just beneath the bandage at Johnny’s side. The skin felt no more fevered than the rest of him. But when she moved it to the skin of his thigh, the temperature was much warmer. She feared infection had taken hold, even though she had removed the bullet. She had lifted her hand away, and used a small bit of water to re-wet one of the towelettes she’d bathed his face with earlier.

  She drew it across his forehead and cheeks, then his neck, and he quieted.

  Now, she sat up next to him in the darkness, listening to the steady rhythm of his breathing. Her nose wrinkled again as the sick-sweet odor of rotting flesh wafted across them. She felt her gorge rise, knowing what that smell had to be. But didn’t the presence of that smell also mean a possible way out?

  Slowly, she laid the towelette across Johnny’s forehead. This was as good a time as any to go exploring. She shook her head at her own thoughts. She had never thought of herself as the adventuresome type. The divorce had changed a lot of things. She inched farther into the darkness, then carefully began to crawl. From time to time, she glanced back over her shoulder toward the reassuring round circle of light at the other end of the tunnel.

  She hadn’t gone far. No more than twenty feet from where Johnny lay. She was just ready to start back to him when the compressors turned on, and she noticed something in the darkness ahead of her.

  There was a control panel in the side of the wall that was very dimly lit by the green and red lights of the monitor buttons. Alexa peered at it, squinting through the darkness, trying to make sense of it. There was no way, without crawling closer.

  She inched forward. As she moved closer, she realized the monitor seemed to be at a very odd angle.

  Why would it be in here anyway? It should be out in the maintenance area where a person could get to it to check it once in a while. She thought of Daniel, and of his brother, who must have to come inside here and looked at the monitor on some kind of regular basis.

  She reached out to put her hand down, but there was nothing there. The floor was gone. Her hand flailed into the empty air, and she hit the floor with her chest. Her left hand grappled for purchase, her head hanging over a bottomless ribbon of tubing that plunged straight down. Here, the air was heavier with the smell of death, and she knew this was one of the main airshafts for the heat and air conditioning. It was not as wide as the section of tubing she and Johnny were in. Her hand struck a projectile in the side of it, and she realized that there was dim light coming from somewhere below her. She could see rows of handholds and footholds around the inside of the tubing.

  Looking into the vast emptiness below her combined with the smell to make her stomach roll. She backed away, then turned around. Her knees hurt from the ridged floor of the vent shaft.

  She raised her eyes once again to the circle of light at the end. It wasn’t there any longer. The circle was gone. How… She focused on what was blocking the light. A dark shape, not moving. Her heart stopped as she watched in silent horror. She struggled to make out Johnny’s figure, still lying where she had left him. Another man towered above him.

  Daniel? Or one of the terrorists? She bit her lip.

  Johnny.

  The flare of a match blinded her momentarily. She squinted, turning her head to the darkness again.

  “Alexa?” Daniel’s voice was low.

  Alexa let her breath out, not realizing she’d been holding it. “Yes. I’m here.” She began to crawl forward again, trembling with relief.

  Daniel had lit a small votive candle and set it beside Johnny. In the dim light, Alexa could see that Daniel held something in his hand. As her eyes adjusted, she recognized Johnny’s .38. She sucked in her breath, her gaze going to Johnny’s face.

  Daniel gave a grim chuckle. “Wha’d you think, Lex? I ain’t gonna hurt him.”

  “I’m sorry.” She moved closer to Johnny. “I guess I’m just jumpy.” She came to her feet, stiff from crawling over the hard tubing, her legs cramping.

  Daniel still held Johnny’s gun.

  “I—I had put that over there—” she nodded to where their meager rations were hoarded. “I guess it just startled me to see you standing over him like that.” With a gun in your hand.

  “Yeah, I know.” Daniel smiled. “Used to be in the Army, back in Nam. Before your time. I was a medic. I helped people.” His eyes looked past her.

  Alexa nodded, laying a hand on his arm in a gentle attempt to draw him back to the present. “My uncle was there.”

  Daniel returned his gaze to her, meeting her eyes in the dim candlelight. “Did he make it? Did he come home?”

  She shook her head. “No. His name is on the Wall. He died the day before his twentieth birthday.”

  Daniel looked down. “Lot of good men died over there. I did what I could.”

  Alexa noted the small tone of defensiveness that crept into his voice. “I’m sure you did,” she soothed

  “Yeah.” Daniel ran a hand over his stubbled beard. “I got hurt tryin’ to save one of my buddies over there. I figure you’s probably wonderin’ how I got…this way.”

  She had to get the gun away from him. Johnny didn’t trust him, and now, neither did she. Still, she couldn’t disregard the sympathy she felt. Daniel was like a child; yet, in the next moment, his eyes were ageless, and she knew he could see into her thoughts by watching her face, her mannerisms.

  “Here, let me put that back where it belongs, and we’ll talk.” She put her hand out for the gun
, and he laid it in her palm with no hesitation.

  “It’s a real nice piece,” he said. “I always liked guns. I tried to collect ’em, but it cost too much.”

  Alexa turned and put the pistol back where it had been, next to the bread. Before she could respond, Daniel went on bitterly. “Guess I won’t be collectin’ nothin’ anymore. That damn red-headed bastard stole my quarters.”

  She shook her head, not understanding. “Who?”

  “One of them. Sorley O’Brian.” Daniel hunkered down beside Johnny. He put a hand out to check his fever, then nodded, satisfied. As if he’d never brought up the terrorist or the stolen quarters, he looked at Alexa serenely as she lowered herself beside him with some lingering stiffness. “Fever’s down some,” he commented. “Is he keeping quiet? That’s the important thing, cause the way this ductwork is, sometimes you can hear things real clear in some of them rooms. And those bastards’ll be back.” He nodded to himself. “They’ll be back.”

  Johnny shifted, but his eyes were still closed. He turned his head away from Alexa and Daniel, settling back into the rhythmic breathing. Alexa’s face felt tight with worry as she reached out a comforting hand to steady him, to let him know she was still there.

  Daniel sighed. “I got a surprise for him, though. If he comes back, I got a real surprise for him.”

  “Do you have a weapon? A gun of your own?” Alexa asked.

  “No, but I sure as hell wish I did.”

  His response was so vehement Alexa shrank back from him.

  His gaze narrowed.

  “I thought you might have some of your gun collection hidden up here…or something,” she explained quickly.

  He began to shake his head. “I don’t have nothin’like that…not no more. Like I told you, I used to collect ’em…when I first come back from Nam. But they cost too much, so I stopped. I sold back the ones I’d bought, even. ’Cause I had to, on account of my medicine was a lot of money. From where I got…got hurt.”

  Alexa sighed. She knew that finding the bomb meant they were going to have to move again…But where? Back into the maintenance area? There was no place for them there. She knew that. Unless…

  “Daniel, do you have any other place we could hide besides here?”

  He shook his head. “No. I thought this’d be good enough.”

  Alexa touched his arm. “It is. It is a good place. It’s just—” she met his eyes, once again struck by the stark juxtaposition of childlike innocence and the timeless quality that told her just how much of the world he had seen. “Daniel, I think the terrorists know about this place.”

  “No! No, they don’t, Lex. I wouldn’t take you somewheres that they knew.”

  “I don’t mean that, Daniel. What I’m wondering about is—could they have come in here sometime—maybe when you were gone—”

  “No, Sorley O’Brian tore up my place! He—He called on the radio and told that damn McShane about it. If he’d come up here before, he woulda already tore it up an’—an’ stole my quarters!” He was breathing hard, agitated. “Damn him!” His gray eyes were troubled, and Alexa knew it wasn’t just because of the prospect of the terrorists having previously discovered his “home”—he thought she doubted him.

  She took a deep breath, but before she could speak, Johnny said, “Quiet down, Williams. It’s possible that they aren’t all privy to the same information.” He was silent a moment, as if speaking had sapped his reserves of energy.

  “So, you’re awake.” Daniel pursed his lips and nodded. “That’s good.”

  Alexa glanced down at Johnny, her eyes holding his for a brief moment. She could read nothing in his expression, other than the lines that were grooved deep beside his mouth and eyes indicating the pain.

  “What makes you think they’ve been here?” Johnny’s voice was sure and steady.

  “I found something.” Alexa nodded toward the back of the length of tunnel. “Back there—some kind of control panel or something.”

  Daniel cocked his head. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “Where the ducts go down—there’s a panel on that wall—”

  “Huh-uh. There ain’t any kind of a panel back there.” Daniel reached for the candle. “I’ll take this so I can see…”

  Alexa could tell he thought she was mistaken. But she knew what she’d seen. “It had lights on it. And some kind of numbers—”

  Both men swore in unison, and exchanged a glance in the flickering light, then Daniel started toward the back of the tunnel.

  “Hope he knows what he’s doing,” Johnny muttered.

  “He seems to know quite a lot about weapons. He was a collector, at one point.”

  “Fact is, he’s not playing with a full deck,” Johnny said in a low tone. “And Nam was a long time ago.” He tried to sit up, but Alexa gently pushed him back.

  “Lie still. There’s nothing you can do until he gets back—”

  “What kind of numbers, Alexa?” Johnny asked, breathless with pain.

  “I don’t know. They were just numbers. To tell you the truth, I’d almost taken a nosedive into the ductwork, so I really didn’t pay much attention to them.”

  “Guess we’ll know soon enough.”

  “Know what?” She was beginning to be truly worried at the mixture of anxiety and resignation that tinged Johnny’s tone. “What do you think it is?”

  Johnny didn’t answer. In the blackness, she imagined him shaking his head, letting the possibilities cascade around them while he silently kept his own counsel until Daniel returned. And his silence let Alexa know exactly what he suspected.

  “Some kind of—of bomb?”

  Johnny remained quiet for a moment longer before he replied, “It could be. If I could just take a look—” He broke off without finishing his thought, and Alexa heard him shift beside her once more, followed by a muffled curse. She put a hand on his wrist, and in that next second, the floating candle came toward them again.

  Daniel knelt down, setting the candle beside him. “We gotta get outta here,” he panted. His eyes met Johnny’s. “It’s like we thought—a bomb. Looks like it’s set to go off in a little more than twenty-four hours from now.”

  Johnny closed his eyes, passing a hand over his face. “How did they get it in here?”

  Daniel shrugged. “Same way I get around, Johnny. Through the ductwork. It’s easy enough. Probably why those two bastards took a room on the top floor—Farley and Latham.”

  Listening to the exchange between the two men, Alexa’s heart raced. “If they came into the ductwork through their room and set up the bomb, then they probably didn’t come any farther into this part of the tunnel. They would have no reason to—unless they heard noises or talking—”

  “They probably had it set up a few days ago,” Johnny replied, his voice strained. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t be back to check on it.”

  The candlelight flickered, casting Johnny’s face into the light before the shadows filled the space again. He looked at Alexa. “We’ve got to get you out of here. It’s not safe—”

  Alexa put her hands over her mouth. Not safe? It had never been safe! She forced back the threatening hysteria, wanting to laugh and cry all at once.

  Johnny squeezed her wrist. “Listen to me, Lex.” His voice was firm. “I want you to go with Daniel. No—don’t say anything.” His jaw tightened, as if he might be thinking of a better way to tell her what he wanted to say. There was none. He was telling her to leave him.

  “I—want you to go with Daniel,” he repeated, “and get somewhere safe—out there.”

  “What are you going to do?” Alexa asked. She didn’t like what she suspected.

  “I’m gonna—gonna try to defuse that—fucking bomb…”

  “Don’t do this!” she whispered, desperate to keep him with her and Daniel.

  “I have to, Lex.”

  She shook her head in angry denial. “Don’t you think that they’ll have planned to escape before the bomb
goes off? That means we’ve got at least twenty-four hours—”

  “If the government gives them terrorists what they want, we don’t have jack shit. Beggin’ your pardon, Alexa,” Daniel interjected.

  Johnny nodded. “That’s how I have it figured, too. Soon as they make their best deal, they detonate the bomb. It could be any time.” He looked at Alexa. “If our government gives in to their demands, and McShane and company get away, all he’ll have to do is push the button. It could be anytime, Lex. We can’t bank on twenty-four hours, or for that matter, twenty-four minutes.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” she whispered.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Maybe they have a tracking device of some kind,” she said. “If you cut the wires, they may know it instantly. Then they’ll come up here to look.”

  Daniel rubbed his chin. “Could be,” he muttered. “She could be right about that.”

  “Besides that, what if you—you aren’t successful?” Alexa pressed. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything other than the polite euphemism for blowing them all sky high.

  Johnny grinned. “Then I guess I’ll just speed all of us along to where we’re headed anyway.”

  She didn’t smile.

  He sobered again. “Look, if we wait, we lose the chance to take some of them with us.”

  “If we wait, our government may resolve things with them and we may walk out of here along with the other hostages,” she countered.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “That ain’t gonna happen.” He spoke with a surety that made Alexa turn to face him. He shook his head. “Not from the way they talk.” He shifted uncomfortably.

  “What did they say?” Alexa sat up on her knees very close to Daniel, looking into his eyes.

  Daniel nodded toward Johnny, who was watching them from half-lidded eyes. “What he said, Lex—”

  “You knew they had a bomb?” Alexa reached out with both hands, curling her fingers into the fabric of Daniel’s shirt roughly, her voice rising. “Why the hell didn’t you say something?” Her chin trembled and she bit her lower lip, then closed her eyes. Daniel stared at her, wide-eyed, as if he didn’t know whether to hug her or push her away.