29
THE NIGHT WOULDN’T END. Brandon lay in Scott’s bed in the chalet, staring at the silhouettes of roaring beasts on the wall, the razor-tipped weaponry crossed and mounted below. He lay under the covers, but he hadn’t straightened the mess his son had left on the bed. That was Scott’s job. He could pick it up himself when he got back.
He came here hoping to be comforted by these artifacts from his son, but instead found mostly torment. They haunted him. For the first time since this whole ordeal began, he felt a genuine sense of danger, of impending doom.
Something was wrong, and try as he might to ascribe it to his overactive imagination, he couldn’t make it stick. His heart raced and breath eluded him. Perhaps this was what people meant when they talked about panic attacks. It was as if he’d run a race and now there wasn’t enough air in the room to compensate. He was losing it.
When he first heard the phone, he didn’t know what to make of it. There was a distant quality to it, as if it belonged in another world. It took two rings for him to recognize the sound for what it was, and a third to realize that it was coming from the other end of the house, all the way across the giant foyer, near the door.
Who in the world could possibly be calling him at this hour?
Whitestone! With that thought, he bolted out of bed and dashed across the living room, clipping his shin on the coffee table as he made a run for the foyer.
“What’s wrong?” Sherry shouted sleepily from the sofa, but then she got it, too.
Five rings. He slid across the polished marble tiles in the entryway, and jammed his hands into both coat pockets at the same time. He couldn’t remember where he’d put the damn thing. It rang a sixth time before he finally found it and snapped it open.
“Yeah? Hello?”
“Dad!”
Brandon’s heart leaped out of his chest. “Scott!” In the living room, he heard Sherry knock something over as she scrambled to her feet. “Oh, my God, Scott, is it really you?”
“Is it him?” Sherry yelled. “Is it really Scotty?”
Brandon held up his hand to silence her, then plugged a finger into his other ear. The signal seemed scratchy, filled with the kind of background noise you’d expect from a call placed from Borneo. “If this is some kind of prank, I swear to God—”
“No, it’s really me,” the voice said, and Brandon recognized it right away as the real thing. Nothing he’d ever heard had sounded so sweet as his son’s voice; not the grandest symphony nor the sweetest love song. Breathless, his eyes huge, he nodded a confirmation to Sherry, then staggered to the steps to sit before he fell down. “Jesus, son, where are you? Are you all right?”
“No!” Scott said, his voice a harsh whisper. “No, he’s trying to kill me. And then he’s going to kill the president. I’m freezing to death and he’s going to kill me!”
Brandon grabbed the stair rail to steady himself against the spinning room.
SCOTT COULDN’T KEEP a decent signal for all the trees. He didn’t know if he was being heard at all. “Can you hear me?”
“…trying to do what? Who?”
“His name is Isaac,” Scott said. “Or maybe Thomas. I’m not sure.” Suddenly, in the head rush and the freezing cold, Scott’s mind wouldn’t cough up last names. “You’ve got to help me, Dad.”
“How, son? How can I help you?” He could hear the panic clearly, even through the terrible connection. “Hello?”
“I’m here, can you hear me?” He was talking louder than he should, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing the connection. “Send help. There’s a hunting cabin in the woods somewhere. I don’t know exactly where, but it’s along a river. A bootlegger’s cabin. That’s where he is. But you’ve got to hurry.”
On the other end of the line, in the chalet, Brandon’s free ear hurt, he was pressing his finger so hard. He heard, “cabin…woods…exactly where…bootleggers…he is…hurry.”
“Tell me where you are,” Brandon said, shouting to be heard over the static.
Scott couldn’t afford to speak any louder. He couldn’t afford to speak as loudly as he was. “I don’t know!” he hissed, his exasperation growing. “But Isaac, or Thomas, or whatever his name is, is trying to kill me.”
His dad couldn’t hear him anymore. Or, if he could, then he wasn’t responding. Scott stepped back into the snow to change the position of the antenna, breaking into tears at the terrible pain that consumed him from his toes to his groin. “Dad, please. Can you hear me?”
“Yes!” Brandon’s voice cheered. “Yes, I can hear you now. Whatever you just did, that was good. Now, tell me where you are.”
The sound of an approaching engine paralyzed Scott. At first, he thought it was a motorcycle, but a second later, he recognized it as a snowmobile, revved high, and coming in fast.
“Shit, he’s here!” Scott whispered. His time was up. As he’d feared, Isaac knew exactly where to find his prey. “Oh, God, he’s gonna kill me.”
“Who?” Brandon shouted. “Who’s going to kill you? What are you talking about?”
Scott was out of time. Good signal or not, he had to scramble for a hiding place. But where could he possibly go? He turned to head for the woods, and on his first step, he tripped, losing his grip on both the phone and the MagLite as he sprawled face-first into the snow.
This was never going to work. He was doomed.
• • •
“SCOTT! ANSWER ME!” Brandon shouted. “Please, son, speak up, I can’t hear you!”
Sherry stood at his arm, straining to hear. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, dammit. I think he said something about somebody trying to kill him.”
Sherry recoiled at the thought. “Kill him! That can’t be right.”
“Scott, are you there?” To Sherry: “Him and the president.”
“What?”
“Scott!”
WITH THE NIGHT VISION GOGGLES IN PLACE, the whole world glowed an iridescent green. And despite the darkness, the glare of the snow was bright enough to hurt Isaac’s eyes. Scott O’Toole had executed a gutsy escape, but when all was said and done, it would prove useless, effectively trading the quick and painless for the fearful and extended. The net result would be the same: within just a couple of minutes, the boy would be dead. A half hour after that, Isaac would be back in bed and asleep, girding himself for the task that lay ahead.
It had been a mistake to load hollow points. He’d screwed up, and he was man enough to admit it. The irony! The intent had been to make it easy on the kid. Now, as a result, he was racing through the snow in the middle of the night to finish a job that should have taken only a few seconds. If he’d loaded armor piercing rounds, or even steel jackets, it all would have ended in the warmth of the cabin. How many times did he have to learn the same lesson? In his business, compassion was the greatest liability.
He navigated the path at full throttle, easing off only when the side slope became too treacherous. He knew this trail thoroughly, and he’d traveled it most recently six nights ago, after the truck driver dropped him off. Besides the driveway, which Isaac used only occasionally for trips into town, the trail was the quickest route to the main road, which lay four miles to the east, over six little humps of ridges, just on the other side of Old Man Pembroke’s place.
He slowed to a crawl as he approached the mouth of the escape tunnel, scanning the scenery as he went. On a normal day, the tunnel entrance looked merely like a gap between a couple of giant rocks—a cave of sorts, but with a steel gate set into the stone to keep out bears and their ilk, not to mention the kind of visitors he’d had to repel this afternoon.
Isaac came to a stop in front of the opening, shifted the snowmobile into neutral and throttled it down to a low idle before dismounting and unslinging his rifle. This time, he was taking no chances. The H&K MP5 rifle with its integrated suppressor had long become his preferred weapon for close-in work. Barely larger than a pistol when
the stock was collapsed, it extended to be a thirty-inch carbine capable of taking down targets at considerable distances.
He was done underestimating the boy now. No more shortcuts. Isaac moved as he’d learned many years ago in his SEAL Team training, the weapon pressed tight against his shoulder, his knees bent, and his finger just outside the trigger guard. The weapon became an extension of his arm, the sights an extension of his eyes. If he saw it, he could shoot it, but out here, you had to be careful. Firing lanes were elusive, and no matter what kind of ammunition you’d chosen, impact with a tree trunk deflected the aim.
The boy would be hiding; it was the only weapon available to him. As in any game of hide-and-seek, victory went to the one who was most patient. Isaac moved at an impossibly slow pace, continuously scanning all compass points as he walked like a fencer, always taking care not to tangle his feet.
The footprints in the snow made the whole game ridiculously unfair. Slightly more difficult to see in the flat green light of the night scope, they nonetheless led from the mouth of the tunnel, up an adjacent hill, where they became more difficult to follow. Difficult, but far from impossible.
Isaac knew that Scott had taken the satellite phone, so it only made sense that the boy would want to find the higher ground, and sure enough, that’s just where the footprints led. And there, up ahead, the light of the phone’s display might as well have been a lighthouse beacon. It was almost too easy.
The boy had chosen a deadfall as his hiding place—as logical a spot as any—and as Isaac climbed through the tangles of branches and tree trunks, he yet again found himself admiring the kid’s guts. He couldn’t imagine making this climb barefooted.
Thirty feet away now, Isaac quickened his pace. Stealth was irrelevant now. If Scott jumped up and bolted, he’d shoot him on the run. If he continued to try to hide, he’d shoot him where he lay. Now, it all came down to a seventy-five-cent bullet.
“Hey, Scott,” he taunted from fifteen feet away. “Why don’t you just stand up and make this easy?” But of course, the boy didn’t move from his spot in the corner of the log. Isaac sighed. “Well, what the hell,” he said, and he closed the distance in five seconds.
Only, there was no one there.
Down the hill and through the trees, the grinding roar of the snowmobile motor ripped the night into a thousand pieces.
Isaac whirled at the sound, firing at the blur of movement. The gun bucked against his shoulder and the action clacked, but even in the stillness of the night, the gunshot was merely a whisper.
SCOTT HAD THE THROTTLE TWISTED all the way to full before his butt had even hit the seat, and as he engaged the clutch, he was gone like a NASA launch, accelerating through a cloud of exhaust and snow and noise. For the next thirty seconds, it was all about speed. Speed meant survival, it was really that simple. As he struggled to maintain control of the vehicle, he wondered where all the shooting was. He’d expected to be making this escape in the proverbial hail of bullets.
He got his answer when the snowmobile’s windscreen shattered, followed a half second later by the tink of a bullet punching a hole somewhere else on the machine. Another buzzed past his ear, and he crouched as low as he could and twisted the throttle to its limits and beyond. All around him, tree trunks sprayed high velocity chunks of bark. There for a second, it seemed as if every tree were exploding, and the vehicle itself vibrated from two more hits somewhere.
But he raced on, the treads on the snowmobile kicking up a rooster tail of powder.
Scott had no idea how fast he was going—it didn’t matter—but thirty seconds after the whole thing began, after he knew that he was safely concealed by the shelter of the next hill, he didn’t let off a bit. He didn’t need to. Maybe his eyes had just become adjusted to such things these past few days, but with the glimmering moon overhead, filtered through the trees, the trail laid itself out perfectly for him. After a minute or two, he even found the switch for the vehicle’s headlight.
He didn’t know where the trail went, but that, too, didn’t matter; all trails went somewhere.
As he powered toward the crest of the next hill, Scott realized that he had won. He’d beaten the odds again. On this night, Scott O’Toole was invincible. And in spite of the agonizing cold, and the fear that pounded in his temples, right at that particular moment, he knew without a doubt that he was the luckiest teenager on the planet.
ISAAC LOWERED THE WEAPON from his shoulder and looked at it as if it had let him down. Even with the action set to full-automatic, the bastard had still gotten away.
“He set me up,” Isaac mused aloud, genuinely amazed that he’d taken the boy’s bait. “He knew I’d go for the obvious and he doubled back on me.”
A buzzing sound, not unlike that of an angry insect caught his ear, and he cocked his head curiously as he stared down at the telephone. The line was open!
Scowling, Isaac brought the phone to his ear. “Scott!” someone yelled. “Scott, are you there?”
“Who is this?” Isaac asked.
“Oh, thank God!” the voice exclaimed. “Is that you, Scott?” Then, as if to someone else, he said, “It doesn’t sound like Scott.”
“Who are you?” Isaac asked again. “Are you his father?”
“Yes, I’m Brandon O’Toole, Scott’s father. Is he there?”
“I’m afraid your son is dead,” Isaac said. “And I’m the man who killed him.”
He disconnected the line, then opened it again for one more call.
30
IT WASN’T JUST HIS HANDS and feet anymore.
As Scott tore through the wilderness, the wind lashed at his face and his ears as well, making them feel brittle as glass. Tears flowed from the onslaught, only to freeze on his face. If he didn’t find shelter soon, his escape would mean nothing, merely an opportunity to die somewhere else in the vast wilderness. Even the invincible, it turned out, could freeze to death. For a while, he tried backing off the throttle to cut down on the wind, but then he worried about the additional exposure time, and then he sped up again.
He found himself longing for the times when a mere plane crash seemed like a huge problem.
Speed, time and distance had no meaning for him anymore, all of it measured in slices of forever. A crushing fatigue overtook him without warning, leaving him dizzy and slightly disoriented. For a moment there, as he contemplated what life would be like without fingers and toes, it seemed as if the woods were moving past him at a rate much faster than the snowmobile was moving forward. Sven’s warnings about death by exposure tried to infiltrate his thoughts, but he pushed them away, wishing that he’d never attended that goddamn gloomy class.
When he first saw the glimmer of light ahead through the trees, he assumed it to be a hallucination, and sure enough, when he blinked his eyes, it was gone. A few seconds later, though, it returned, only to blink away again, and Scott realized that the trees and hills were playing hide-and-seek with him. On one sighting, it would be on his left, and then as he steered his way down the trail, it would reappear on his right, only to disappear again among the trees.
At first, he thought the light was moving—maybe another vehicle—but as he got closer, he realized that with the twists and turns in the trail, he was the one moving relative to the light, not the other way around.
Scott smiled, in spite of his agony. It was a house, that much he could tell. And the trail led right to it. Elated, he tossed his head back and cheered, “Invincible!”
He was going to make it, after all. He’d step inside, tell the owner what had happened, and wait for the police to come and rescue him.
He thought of Isaac again. Surely he knew where the trail led, and just as surely, he’d be along soon to settle all accounts. Okay, then, new plan: He’d alert the owner to the danger ahead, and they could drive together to safety. It couldn’t be any simpler.
Scott slowed to barely moving as he navigated the last turn, finding himself at a T-intersection with what looked to be a
driveway.
The snow here was churned and broken, two tire tracks clearly visible, leading to an old pickup truck parked in a doorless garage. Scott pulled to a stop as close to the front door as he could manage, peeled his numb fingers from the handlebars and dismounted. It wasn’t like walking on broken glass anymore. It was like walking on fire.
The door opened as he raised his fist to knock, revealing a short disheveled old man who smelled of stale sweat and alcohol. His stringy yellow hair hadn’t been washed or combed in days. “Come in,” the man said. “You look like hell.”
Scott more stumbled than stepped into the little house. It smelled like a concentrated version of the old man, and was furnished in Salvation Army rejects. He could see the whole place in a single glance. “Thank you,” he said.
“Take the chair by the fire. Get yourself warm. You’re lucky if you ain’t frostbit.”
Scott did him one better, limping to a spot ten inches in front of the fire. The intensity of the heat was nearly as agonizing as the cold. “Thank you so much,” Scott said again. “But we can’t stay here. There’s a man chasing me—”
“I know,” said the old man, drawing a curious look from Scott. “You’re Scott O’Toole. I’ve been expecting you.”
That’s when Scott saw the gun in his hand.
BRANDON SAT ON THE SOFA, his arm around Sherry, watching Barry Whitestone hang up the telephone. He didn’t like the look on the chief’s face. “What?”
The chief cocked his head curiously. “The call traced to Waco, Texas.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Sherry blurted. Brandon agreed.
“I asked them to recheck twice. That’s where it came from.”
“Do you have a name?” Brandon asked.
“That’ll take a little longer,” Whitestone said. As much to himself as to anyone else, he added, “That just can’t be right.” He looked to Brandon. “Tell me again what he said.”
Scott Free Page 26
