by Jon Land
“So you could have been Tiny Tim?”
“As easily as you could have.”
Kimberlain started for the door.
“You could stay for breakfast,” Peet called after him.
“I’d better get started,” Kimberlain said, looking back at him.
“But you’ll come back.”
“I already have. You gave me your answer, and I accept it. It was wrong of me to come here.”
“I am here because of you.”
“A payback, Peet. I owed you. We’re even. We can leave it at that.”
“We can never leave anything, Ferryman. You swore I was your last hunt, but then Leeds came along. Now Leeds is loose again, and you must take up the chase. And after that you will come here seeking my council with another.”
“Tiny Tim, Winston?”
Peet came out of the kitchen area, his huge bulk blocking a measure of the light shining from inside. “We are so much the same, Ferryman. Doomed by qualities we alone share. Doomed to live apart in the shadow of society’s judgments of us. Doomed to grow in power that others don’t understand and thus fear. Accept that and beware of it.”
“Beware of what, Peet?”
“The higher we soar, Ferryman, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly.”
Librarian sat in the darkened room, gazing up at the camera mounted on the ceiling above him.
“You disappoint me, Mr. Chalmers,” said a voice through an unseen speaker.
Chalmers made sure his own speaker was facing the camera before responding. The cord connecting it to his throat dangled limply down to his lap.
“It was … unavoidable.”
“Really? Then I am to believe that Hedda’s escape was due to your negligence.”
“My men should … have opened fire … earlier.”
“You should have ordered them to.”
Chalmers remained silent.
“Do not play me for a fool, Mr. Chalmers.”
“Do not play … me for one … either.”
“I’m afraid you leave me no choice. There is, after all, the additional matter of the remainder of your operatives having not arrived at the island yet.”
“Recalling … them has taken … longer than … expected.”
“I’m losing my patience, Mr. Chalmers.”
Chalmers’s hands tightened on the arms of his chair.
“Your operatives are important to me. I need them. They are vital to my plan. You will send them to the island, Mr. Chalmers.”
“Yes.”
“And you will dispose of Hedda.”
“Yes.”
“Do not disappoint me again.”
Chalmers stared into the camera and said nothing.
Chapter 9
“ARE WE GOING to die?”
The boy’s question shook her alert, and Hedda tried to sound sure when she answered him.
“We’ve come too far for that.”
“I’m scared,” he said as he tightened his pants belt. His leg was stiff and lame from the wound and ached with pain.
“We’ll be safe soon. I promise.”
Hedda made herself smile confidently and shook her head. Her mind spiraled backward, struggling to keep the last twenty-four hours clear.
That was what it had been now, almost to the moment, since she and the boy had taken their plunge from the bridge.
She had lost her hold on Christopher as they fell, then heard him hit the water an instant after her. He had already slipped below the surface when she reached him. He was unconscious yet trembling, evidence of shock. She knew the Kevlar shirt she had given him had prevented what would have been instantly fatal wounds, but depending on where the bullet had lodged in his leg it might not matter. She swam to the boy and tucked an arm under his throat. The water could not hide the scent of blood, both his and hers. Ignoring her own wound, she began to swim away. She supported the boy so his face rode even with the surface. As for herself, a breath every thirty seconds or so was all she required.
With the breaths came glimpses of the activity occurring upon the bridge above. The gunmen struggled for sight of her first and then searched for a quick route down to the river bank. By the time they found it, Hedda was well downstream.
Her own shoulder had begun to throb. Worse, she knew that Christopher Hanley’s blood was still flowing from his leg wound. Immediate action was required if he was to survive the night.
He was still her responsibility, after all. In Hedda’s mind her assignment had not ended with the bizarre turn of events at the bridge. The plunge into the icy waters might have saved their lives, but it was only temporary. Librarian would know they were alive, she was alive, and respond accordingly. The thing Hedda had to do was seize the advantage the enemy’s present confusion provided.
The enemy … her own people.
Why? And why had they lied about the boy to begin with? Deerslayer had kidnapped him, and then she had been charged with getting him back. It made no sense!
For the moment all that mattered was treating Christopher’s wound. Hedda gently dragged him up on shore into a covering nest of shrubbery. The night was warm and breezeless, a blessing for the necessity of maintaining their body temperatures at levels required for survival. There was also a half moon, which would aid her significantly in her work.
She removed a leather pouch strapped to her belt and then yanked the belt free of her pant loops. Resting the pouch on a rock beside her, she tied the belt around the boy’s thigh above the wound to form a makeshift tourniquet. Almost instantly the flow of blood was stanched. Hedda then opened her pouch to reveal various swabs, suturing equipment, and a number of painkillers and sedatives. The small penlight tucked against the pouch’s bottom was a hundred candlepower strong in an adjustable beam. Hedda wiped an alcohol-rich towelette across her hands to clean them as best she could. Her right hand closed on the penlight, and she checked the boy’s vital signs. The pulse was slow but active. His skin was horribly pale. If she wasn’t too late, it was very close.
The bullet had entered his thigh on the outside eight inches above the kneecap and exited midway on the leg’s front. That meant two areas to be sutured instead of one, but at least no bullet to remove. A fair exchange. Hedda cleansed the wound and readied her suturing needle. She did not want to risk giving the boy a sedative in his weakened condition. If he showed signs of coming awake, she would have no choice, but until then she would rely on his unconscious state to be her anesthesia. Exhausted, she completed the suturing job through sheer force of will. She dressed and wrapped the leg. Already Christopher’s color was coming back. He moaned softly. Hedda stroked the boy’s forehead.
Abruptly something made her yank her hand away. The memory of another boy had stirred somewhere within her again. Another boy who had been shot, another boy whose blood had touched her. It came with fleeting impact like a late night dream recalled suddenly in the middle of the next day.
Thump!
A bullet shredding skull, spewing brains and bones from its path. The memory faded, replaced again by thoughts of her grandfather. She had helped him with the cows; milking them, tending them. The farm was far from town and secluded, leaving the animals as her closest friends. There was a horse only she could ride, a blind dog sleeping his old age away at the foot of her bed. She’d let it crawl under the covers with her at night. In the morning she liked to watch her grandfather shave. Sometimes he would scrape a hand layered with green, sweet-smelling after-shave across her face.
Hedda turned back to the matter at hand. She had to move while the night was her ally. Steal a boat or commandeer a plane to take her to one of the many friendly sites she had developed over the years. But to get anywhere at the outset, she would have to walk and carry the boy, slowing her to an unacceptable degree. A vehicle, then, she needed a vehicle… .
She carried the boy in her arms as gingerly as she could. He stirred a few times, and Hedda flirted with the notion of giving him a sedative to kee
p him from coming round. Her path through the woods had brought her within view of the road, and she sat back to wait. It was five minutes before the car pulled over to the side. Three figures emerged from it and fanned out through the brush.
A fresh jet of adrenaline surged through Hedda at the sight of her pursuers. The fools were too well dressed for this sort of work. Even more stupidly, the routes they chose took them out of eye contact with each other. Their search was perfunctory, motions gone through and no more. They probably thought she was dead. Hedda gazed back toward the car. She could reach it and be gone from here before any of them was the wiser. But the theft of the car would be reported minutes later, and Librarian would respond accordingly. She would have gained nothing.
The men had to die. It was as simple as that. Not for herself—for Christopher Hanley, whose life depended on it.
She decided at last to inject him with a sedative. This done, she readied both her killing knife and strip of garroting wire. The kills would have to be fast and silent. Hedda left the boy cloaked by the brush and flowed into the dark. She used the knife on the first and the third man, the wire on the second. She wasn’t even breathing hard as she eased Christopher Hanley into the car’s backseat and drove off into the night.
Christopher Hanley had come awake halfway into the boat ride that formed the next leg of their journey. His piercing scream had shaken Hedda from her perch at the bridge. She rushed below to find him sobbing and moaning, the victim of sedative-induced nightmares as well as the real ones that had nearly stolen his life. He clung to her and she let him, the feeling distant and foreign but somehow welcome.
“How does your leg feel?” she asked him.
“Numb. Stiff.”
“Can you walk?”
“I … don’t think so.”
“Then you won’t have to.”
He had looked at her fearfully. “I remember the shots. I was shot, wasn’t I? What … happened?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to get you home. Just do what I tell you and I promise I’ll get you home.”
The boy hugged her again. Hedda’s large frame swallowed him.
The boat had enough fuel to get them to Syria, where she enacted the next phase of her plan. The boy indeed couldn’t walk, so she rigged a crutch for him and taught him how to use it. The key to disguise was to make use of what was available, and in this case they easily adopted the cover of a woman with a crippled son. Hedda even showed him how to beg so he would fit in perfectly with the natives through the limited time they would spend finding safe haven.
They docked in Syria’s port city of Latakia an hour past dawn. The open-air market there sold far more than just fish and produce. The right price bought Hedda and the boy space on a transport plane east into Qatar. She and Christopher arrived at the Gulf Hotel in the capital city of Doha. The doorman’s eyes flashed briefly with recognition and her check-in to the Gulf was expedited. A bellhop brought her and the boy straight to a secluded room on the hotel’s seventh floor without ever having to appear at the front desk. In Doha discretion was everything.
The afternoon shifted toward night, and she managed to grab sleep in fitful bursts that actually left her more tired. She had gotten this far and knew she and the boy were safe. By the same token, though, they were trapped. Doha provided sanctuary but offered no handy escape route.
“Can’t you just call my father?” the boy asked her.
“They’ll be watching and listening.”
He hesitated. “The ones at the bridge, you worked with them.”
“Yes.”
“But they tried to kill us.”
“And they will again, if we let them.”
“There are so many of them.” He sighed.
“Less now,” Hedda replied, thinking of the three she had dispatched back in the woods the previous night. She wanted to elaborate, but there didn’t seem to be a way without alarming the boy even more.
His eyes were glistening with tears again. “But if you can’t call my father, how can he come and get me?”
“There’s a way,” she assured him. “There’s a way.”
Hedda composed the note carefully, a half-dozen drafts before settling on one that would do the job. It was not possible to say everything. The trick was saying enough.
MR. HANLEY:
I HAVE CHRISTOPHER WITH ME AND HE IS SAFE. SOMEONE BY NOW WILL HAVE TOLD YOU THAT HE IS DEAD. THAT IS UNTRUE. HE IS SITTING BESIDE ME AND SAYS HE HOPES YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING ON YOUR BACKGAMMON GAME. I WAS ASSIGNED TO RETRIEVE HIM FROM HIS KIDNAPPERS, BUT MY SUPERIORS BETRAYED ME AND YOUR SON WAS CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE. I WISH ONLY TO SEE HIM SAFELY RETURNED. BUT YOUR LIFE MAY BE AS ENDANGERED AS YOUR SON’S. DO EVERYTHING AS YOU WOULD ORDINARILY AND THEN TOMORROW …
A FRIEND
The note went on to specify where and when they would meet. It was sent by fax to a contact in London with specific instructions pertaining to delivery: when Christopher Hanley’s father opened his newspaper that evening or the next morning, he would find an envelope taped to the business section. If all went well, he would have his son back tomorrow afternoon and Hedda would have a greater understanding of the reasons behind what had happened on the bridge.
“I don’t know how to thank you for this.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Hedda told the man by her side in Doha’s open-air market. “You’ve got lots more ahead of you, and little of it will be pleasant.”
They strolled about listening to the vendors make their pitches in the afternoon heat. The market was nothing more than an alleyway covered with a ramshackle corrugated tin roof. The more fortunate vendors were housed in actual storefronts rimming the alley. But the great majority had laid their wares out on blankets or small tables. The enclosed nature of the market trapped the smells and sounds within, the result being a constant throbbing clamor and assault on the nostrils from the pungent scents of spice and fresh fish.
“You’re sure we’re safe?” Lyle Hanley wanted to know.
He had come alone, as requested. If he hadn’t, Hedda would not have approached him.
“They’d stand out if they were here.”
“Just like we do.”
“That’s the point.”
“What about my son? Where is he?”
“I don’t want you seeing him until you understand what you’re facing.”
“Just tell me, is he hurt? Your note …”
“He was wounded the night before last.”
“Wounded?”
“Shot.”
Lyle Hanley wavered on his feet. “By whom?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is taking steps to insure it doesn’t happen again. You’re both liabilities to them. They can’t afford to let either of you live.”
“I followed your instructions. Nobody knows I left London.”
“Somebody knows. Somebody always knows. But that doesn’t matter because you’re not going back.”
“What?”
“Not for a while. You’re going to take your son, sir, and disappear.”
“I’m not prepared, not—”
“That’s the point, Mr. Hanley. From here you’ll go somewhere where no one knows you. You’ll remain there for three weeks to a month. Use intermediaries to get a message to your wife. Have her join you. Immediately. The three of you must disappear, perhaps forever.”
“My God …”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hanley. You have to hear this. They tried to kill your son, and they’ll try to kill you. And now you’re going to tell me why.”
Lyle Hanley stiffened.
“My superiors told me Christopher was kidnapped by Arabs because you worked for Aramco,” Hedda continued. “But Christopher tells me you’re an organic chemist, and I know now that his kidnapping seems to have been arranged by my own people. They tried to kill me two nights ago, Mr. Hanley. They tried to kill your son.”
“They gave me their word!” Hanley had raised his voice enough to draw stares fro
m the booths they were passing before. “My son was to be safely returned when my role was done. I was given assurances.”
“Role in what?”
They stopped near an alley where there was no shop or stall. Hanley swallowed hard and made sure to lower his voice before resuming.
“They came to me because of my work in toxic materials used mostly in agriculture.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Much of my career has been devoted to developing pesticides that linger on plants and crops to kill insects and parasites over a long period of time. In itself that’s nothing new. What was new was that in my versions, the poisons were transdermal.”
Hedda looked at him questioningly.
“Meaning that the compound is absorbed through the skin or outer shell,” Hanley explained. “In all other cases pesticides had to be either inhaled or digested by the pest. Transdermal means that simple touch was all that was required to produce the desired effect.”
“Death.”
“Yes.”
“And someone wanted your formula in exchange for the return of your son?”
“Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“They wanted a transdermal toxin that works on people.”
“I don’t understand,” Hedda said.
“The principle’s been around medicine for some time in the form of patches that gradually release their medication through the patient’s skin. They wanted a poison that worked similarly, that could kill by mere contact with flesh.”
“And you gave it to them.”
“What choice did I have? They had my son. They had Christopher. Yes, I gave it to them. A more complicated offshoot of one of my pesticides was all it was.”
“But equally deadly.”
“At least. Potentially more so.”
“Then you produced it.”
Hanley nodded. “And supervised the process. It was a liquid I called TD-13: TD for transdermal and thirteen for the fact that it took me that many lots to get it right. We’re going back several months now, and they’ve all been hell. Because, of course, they had Christopher to hold over my head. They provided letters occasionally, tape recordings.”
“Who were ‘they’?”
