Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  Shit!

  He sprang to the window, grabbed it at either side and lifted one foot to the sill—and froze there, in that off-balance position. The unexpected touch of a gun muzzle between the tendons at the back of his neck was shocking. Worse, he felt it only for the second it took him to identify it. Then it was gone . . . and now he had no idea where the gun or the person holding it were anymore. He was up against a pro. And his own gun, though covered by his jacket, was holstered at the small of his back.

  "Good evening, Constable Mandiç," he said softly. "May I turn around?"

  "Detective Constable," came the reply. "And no. You can put your leg back down—and then your hands behind your back." He heard handcuffs coming out of a belt holster.

  Shit!

  He did as directed, and waited.

  The first cuff ratcheted closed around his left wrist. The angle and direction told him she was holding the cuffs with her right hand, the gun with her left. Expected form for a right-hander. He made a fist with his cuffed left hand and punched an imaginary fat man in front of him as fast and hard as he could with it. Instinctively she kept her grip on the cuffs, which yanked her right side forward, spinning her left side and gun-hand away from him. He trapped her right elbow and pivoted sharply to his right, whipping her left arm around in a wide arc that ended abruptly when her wrist smacked against the side of the open window frame. The gun sailed out into the darkness.

  He was busy then for a while. She was young, strong, fit, and reasonably well trained. But the outcome was never in doubt. He had exponentially more experience.

  Once she was unconscious, he searched her, found the handcuff key, unlocked the one on his wrist, and cuffed her right wrist to her left ankle. He found a knife there, and unstrapped that and an empty holdout holster he found on the other ankle. Then, feeling pessimistic, he elbow-crawled to the window and popped up for a quick look.

  Good news. The one outside had stopped running away, had come back, was a dark silhouette halfway between the treeline and the house. Both hands were free, he'd left the laptop somewhere. He froze when he saw McKinnon's head briefly appear. Walker? Another cop? A neighbor?

  What difference did it make? He spoke loudly enough to be sure he was heard, and no louder. "If you do not bring it back, intact, right now, I will hurt her badly."

  Silence. No reply. No footsteps either, either running or slowly approaching.

  "Do not pretend you don't know what I mean."

  Still no response.

  He frowned. "At this moment, I have no pressing need to kill either of you. The moment I cripple a cop, that changes fast and for good. Last chance: get the laptop, hand it up through the window, and then go round the house and come in the front door. Hurry. Otherwise I start with an elbow. They're actually harder to replace than knees . . . not that it'll matter."

  "Very hard choice."

  Oh, really? The voice was surprising, too: definitely not a cop . . . but not a columnist pushing sixty either. And definitely bluffing. "Make it quickly."

  The sigh was audible. "You win." Footsteps moved away, then came back.

  "Come straight to the window," he called, because who knew whether this guy was aware that there was a handgun loose out there somewhere in the shadows to the right of the window.

  But the footsteps did come straight to the window, and moments later the laptop appeared in the opening..

  "Set it down on the sill," he said. "Good." He raised his hand high enough to be seen from outside, and pointed to his left. "Now go round that way."

  "But you told me to come in the front door. It's over that w—"

  "And now I'm telling you to take the long way round!"

  Pause. "Whatever." Footsteps moved away, to the left.

  He took the Powerbook from the window sill, set it on the floor beside him, located its abandoned power cord, plugged it back in, and stood up. Just as he heard the front door opening at the far end of the house, he saw the open door of the closet in which the cop had hidden to ambush him, and decided it might work twice.

  It did. The moment the other had approached closely enough to see the sprawled form of the policewoman on the floor, he raced heedless into the room and knelt by her side. McKinnon pushed open the closet door, took two measured steps, and knelt behind him. He held his knife to the other's throat just long enough for the fingers of his left hand to find the right spot, then was careful to get the blade out of the way as the man fell. He leaned forward and used his miniflashlight to confirm that this was not Russell Walker, or anyone he knew. The guy was about the same age as the cop, but a patdown showed he carried no weapon or handcuffs.

  McKinnon sat back on his heels and sighed. A pity the man hadn't brought a second set of cuffs. He got to his feet, checked his clothing for damage, and dragged his burden down the hallway to the kitchen by one wrist, hoping for duct tape. He had no trouble locating Walker's tool drawer, but the only tape in it was masking tape, too narrow to be of use. How could a man live without duct tape?

  But in the adjacent drawer he found a large roll of Saran plastic wrap. Widowers refrigerated a lot of unfinished portions. He took the roll from its box, brought it into the living room, and rolled out as long a sheet of plastic wrap as he could. Then he dumped his newest acquaintance on it and kept rolling him over until his arms were completely pinned to his sides. He cut it with his knife and sealed it in place with masking tape. Then he twisted another length into plastic rope, bound the other's ankles with it, and used what was left over to haul him back to the spare room by, a task made even easier because he offered less friction wrapped in plastic.

  When he had them laying side by side, he checked their breathing and pulses carefully, then dismissed them from his mind and eagerly turned his attention to the laptop. It didn't take him any time to find what he was looking for, even though he had no idea what it was. All he needed to do was scan for most-recent-activity: it turned out that these days, Walker used this Powerbook only for a single purpose.

  Digging his own grave.

  11.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  Coveney Island, Bitish Columbia, Canada

  "How could I have been so fucking stupid, Zudie?" My voice sounded like an echo coming back from the far end of a cold dark cave.

  His sounded perfectly normal. "You weren't expecting an Agent Pitt to come along out of a past you didn't share."

  "I was worried about people a fuck of a lot scarier than Agent Pitt!" My ass hurt. I must have sat down too hard. I didn't recall sitting down.

  "And you assumed if they came it would be through the net. How else? The only way you could put yourself or Nika or me in jeopardy, as far as you knew, was to allow any wisp of a traceable connection to occur between you and Allen online, and you took steps to make sure there were none. You tell me: how could God himself have physically followed Allen's trail to your house? Even if that monster e-mailed a friend before he left home to kill us, he himself didn't know where he was going until he got here . . . and when he did, we killed him."

  "Still—"

  "You reasoned, intelligently, that even if you did become the victim of the first burglary in Heron Island history, any reasonable thief would focus on the expensive recent-model computer with high speed internet sitting in your office, and ignore an obsolete old piece of crap worth a hundred bucks tops. At worst, he'd open it and glance through it looking for porn—and get bored decrypting files long before he got near anything of interest. You hid the dangerous file well enough to stymie anyone but a Macintosh power user . . . and they don't tend to become burglars."

  "But God damn it—"

  "The precautions you took were more than reasonable. This is an unreasonable situation. The sooner you get over blaming yourself the quicker we can get to work on it."

  "Work on what? You've convinced me: Agent Pitt is James Bond on steroids. No way in the world is he going to walk past a superfluous laptop with its sleep light blinking. Especially o
ne disconnected from the net, two meters from an internet connection. No way in the world is he going to have the slightest trouble decrypting old Disk Doubler encryption, for Christ's sake. How long will it take him to try the date of Susan's death as my password? Third try, tops."

  "You're being—"

  "Half an hour later, max, he will have you and me by the balls, and Nika by the ovaries."

  "That is not neces—"

  "It's all there, Zudie. All of it. As close as I could make it to how it actually happened. Every thing we did. Every thing we didn't do. Chock full of verifiable facts. The exact spot we buried the son of a bitch, for example. Put it all together, you've got the single most supernaturally stupid thing anybody could possibly have done. I wrote a detailed confession of murder—"

  "You're a writer, Russell. It's what you do, it's how you manage to cope with the world—by putting it on paper where it's at arm's length. It's how you coped with the most traumatic thing that ever happened to you."

  "—and left it lying around unlocked in a building I knew the CIA would be inspecting soon—"

  "—which you were leaving at high speed, scared to death for your son, not to mention yourself."

  "A man's supposed to have brains, even when he's scared. Especially when he's scared."

  "Which man?"

  "Huh? OWWW!"

  He had grabbed me by the ears, hard. He was at arms' length, on his knees, a big nearly naked pale hairless walrus with a face reminiscent of Tony Soprano as a fat child. "Listen to me. You're absolutely right: the cartoon superheros in the adventure fiction you love to read would all be disgusted with you. At this very moment, Jack Reacher is curling his lip, Hawk is saying something ironic about you to Spenser, and Travis McGee thinks you're as helpless as Meyer. Okay? You're a total failure as Superman. The Saint would be ashamed of you. Parker thinks you're a pussy. Accept that. Deal with it on your own time. Right now, you're in the real world: work the problem."

  "Okay."

  My voice sounded normal again. The rest of the room was there, once more, and the universe outside. I could feel my lungs filling and emptying.

  "What time is it, Zudie? After nine? Okay, obviously the first thing to do is c . . . " I trailed off.

  "Oh," Zudie said sadly. "That's too bad."

  Well, why would I memorize my son's cell phone number? Christmas and birthday calls I make on a land-line. And why would a Vancouver police officer who wanted only to forget she ever knew me have given me her cell? If there was any way to look up a cell phone number, I didn't know it, and if there was, I was sure theirs would both be unlisted.

  Wait—Zudie had a laptop and internet, I could . . . oh damn it, that was no good either. Jesse used an e-mail address that was just a random string of letters and numbers, to defeat spammers.

  Could I call some friend of Jesse's in New York and get his cell number from them? Not for hours, even if I could think of one; it was after 1:00 AM there now. Could I call the Vancouver cops, and try to use my newpaper credentials to con Nika's cell number out of them? Ha! I remembered how much fun I'd had, a few years ago, just trying to get the cops to tell me over the phone where I could find Police Headquarters.

  I could call my own house. If Jesse were within earshot, heard my voice on the answering machine, maybe I could get him to come inside and pick up the phone. Or maybe Agent Pitt would hear me, and I'd have given him a phone number traceable back t—

  "Zudie, do you even have a phone out here?" No land-line, obviously, and where the hell would be his cellphone relay? Whatever, he'd stand out like a sore thumb, a single-number cell zone like that.

  He pointed across the room to his laptop. "VOIP. Untraceable."

  I sighed. "Boy, that would be useful, if I could just think of somebody to call. But I can't think of anyone on Heron who'd take a message to a stranger hiding in my neighbor's barn without asking questions. At least, no one I'd feel right sending out in the dark with Agent Pitt on the loose. Of the two RCMP on the island, the good one has slammed car doors shut on his own head three times just that I know of. It's a perfect—" I saw his face, broke off, took a deep breath. "You're right."

  "Work the problem."

  "Okay. Step one: define parameters. I say Pitt won't make a move until at least one AM. He almost has to have taken a room in one of the B&Bs down in the Cove, and that's the one part of The Rock where there are people walking around on sidewalks under streetlights noticing one another until midnight or so, most nights. So I've got a window of four hours. To get my ass back to my place . . . get Jesse clear . . . grab that damned Powerbook 1400 and physically destroy its internal drive . . . then hook up with Nika and find us all a safe house for the night. Tomorrow, we can cook up a way to get him out here and in your range, so you can figure out how to neutralize him. Zudie, tell me you've got a boat stashed. Something fast and powerful that a child could operate, fully fueled and ready to go."

  He hesitated. "Well, I've got a boat."

  Just from the way he said it, my heart started sinking. "Show me."

  We went outside. The rain had gone, at least for now, and there was a steady warm breeze. Night had fallen. I followed Zudie's pale form through the darkness, and whenever I grew uncertain of my next move, he knew it, and called back directions. Before long we came to a sort of seaside grotto, like a cave open on three sides, easily accessible but concealed from the air.

  The boat was a two-man kayak. I looked around frantically without finding anything with an outboard, or fuel cans for one.

  "Shit, Zudie—"

  "Engines make noise, draw attention. I don't ever need to go anywhere farther or faster than I can paddle. You can't sink one of those."

  Just looking at the thing made me tired. I understood perfectly now why he was so incredibly fit for our age: he had to be. Well, it was a two-holer, at least. "Can you paddle us to Heron Island?"

  "At this time of night? No. Sorry. Too many people awake. No place I know to land where I wouldn't have to come in range of way too many."

  I suppressed a groan—a pointless gesture with him.

  "I really am sorry, Russell. But you'll be fine. You've got four hours to do a little over an hour's worth of paddling. It won't be anywhere near as hard as rowing that big Zodiac you arrived in, and you'll make much better time, and I think the rain will hold off long enough. Keep it slow and steady and you'll be fine. You can afford to stop and rest whenever you need to. The current will be with you, going the other way. The wind direction could be better, but it could be worse, too. Heron's right next door. Try a trip to the mainland, sometime—now that's a workout."

  I told myself he was right. Heron was a far larger navigational target than Coveney had been, easier to see, easier to hit. I could do this. "Okay, how—"

  "Launch straight out and paddle like mad. It'll be nuts for awhile, and then all of a sudden you'll catch a current. It'll let go of you a couple of hundred meters out. When it does, head north. That way. As soon as you're far enough around to see Heron, make straight for it."

  I knew if I hesitated I'd never go. Without even looking ahead I jumped into the rear hole of the silly little thing, figured out how to sit, figured out how the paddle wanted to be held, got Zudie to show me how to attach a leash like telephone cord to it so I couldn't lose it. It was wet in there, but not too bad. Zudie showed me where water, flashlight, first-aid kit and flares were stashed, and shoved me off.

  He was right: for the first little while it was nuts. Water changed direction and speed unpredictably, spray kept lashing my face, the actions I took sometimes seemed to have no effect at all and other times seemed to have more than I'd expected. More than once I glanced off rock, either seen or unseen, and was glad I was in a kayak instead of a big rubber donut. And then all at once I felt that current Zudie had spoken of take hold of me and start rushing me out into deep water. My speed increased, to the point where I stopped using the paddles to make sure I wouldn't lose them. Distance started to op
en up between me and the island behind me. I grinned, starting to enjoy myself. I let the magic carpet carry me until I felt it losing steam, and then I put my paddles back in the water and started heading north. It was enormously easier than rowing the damn Zodiac had been. I glanced back at the shore and saw Zudie, a pale smudge against the blackness. I waved, but did not see him wave back. I must be invisible to him. And out of telepathy range, too. I resumed rowing, chose a slow, steady pace I knew I'd be able to keep up.

  And felt my right lung let go.

  Spontaneous pneumothorax is not the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. Not even the very first one, when I was fifteen. The scariest so far was hearing Susan's diagnosis and prognosis. Next scariest would probably be the time, centuries before that, when I watched an angry biker put two slugs through the rear window of my car and then bring the Luger around until it was aimed right between my eyes. I can still remember his.

  But it's up in that range.

  Even now. Despite all the years of weary familiarity. Despite the fact that it had been years since the last really bad one. Maybe partly because of how long it had been: the surgery that had changed my lung collapses from life-threatening to highly unpleasant had been done more than thirty years ago—without warranty or expiry date, in a charity ward. But there isn't even that much rationality to it. Maybe it's just the intimacy of the pain. Inside your own personal chest, you feel a giant hand clamp down on one of your lungs and start to squeeze, and it might as well be squeezing your adrenal glands. A state of panic is not improved by entering it with a halved air supply. Every breath reinforces the fear.

  And even the fear was less powerful than the dismay I felt.

  God damn it, I did not have fucking time for this now! My son was in serious danger. My friends were in serious danger. I was in serious danger. This was not the time to be laid up in bed for a few days, living on tea and packaged food and watching all seven seasons of The West Wing on DVD again. I had to undo my own monstrous stupidity, or at least warn Jesse and Nika of it—I had to. Fuck this stupid lung collapse, I didn't have time for it, it was just going to have to wait. I put the paddle back into the water and took another stroke—