“But if Cramer came up here to dig into the situation she might have run into Purdy. He couldn’t let her tell anyone what she knew. It would ruin his plan. He would have every reason to kill her.”
“And what did she swallow that he needed to get back?”
“Something that would expose the plan.”
Decker nodded but didn’t look convinced. “I guess it’s possible. But it doesn’t explain what happened to Parker and Ames.”
“So, what now?” said Robie.
“We need to find Purdy. That’s the only way to know for sure.”
“If he was behind this, won’t he be long gone by now?”
“Maybe and maybe not.”
“And if you’re wrong and he’s not behind this?”
“Then he’s probably dead.”
They left the house, and a moment later everything went dark for both of them.
ROBIE’S EYES FLUTTERED OPEN and then closed. He moved not a muscle, seeming to remain remarkably still. He was actually testing the strength of the restraints around his hands and ankles. He sniffed the air and got a lungful of noxious smells in return. Next, he listened. For anyone, anything, any type of nearby threat. Finally, he opened his eyes and shifted his gaze from one spot to the next, taking it all in.
He was in a room with no windows and no door. This puzzled Robie, but only for an instant. He angled his gaze upward and saw the ladder leading to what looked to be a trapdoor in the ceiling. He lifted his arms, until he felt the resistance. The same with his legs. He looked down, and in the dim light provided by the sole overhead bulb, he observed the chains around his limbs that were attached to a thick iron ring set in the floor. They had shackled his hands in front of him, which was the only positive development that Robie could see.
He shifted his weight to the right and saw the hulking figure of Amos Decker lying a foot from him. Decker, too, was shackled, and his chains were also inserted into the same floor ring.
Decker was also awake and staring at him. “Not good,” he said softly.
Robie gave one curt nod in agreement. They had taken both his pistols. He could feel their absence. He was sure they had taken Decker’s gun as well. “They got the jump on us.”
“Any idea where we might be?” asked Decker.
Robie once more looked around. “Underground. Air is musty with an overlay of petroleum products. No windows, ceiling trap door. I’d say maybe an old underground storage facility for an abandoned oil well.”
Decker nodded and looked around. He managed to sit up and planted his back against the wall. Robie did the same. The pair were shoulder to shoulder looking down at the thick chains that stood in the way of their freedom.
“Feel like I got hit by a truck,” said Decker. “But I can’t remember anything of what happened. And that’s saying something for me.”
“They probably deployed the same concoction I used on the woman at the Air Force facility. Incapacitation agent blended with an amnesiac component. We remember nothing that might have happened, who we might have seen, or how they got us here, although that wouldn’t be much, because the spray works pretty much instantly.”
“So do you have a plan to get us out of here?”
“Working on it.” Robie tested the chains once again. Solid, no cracks, not an imperfection or weak spot he could see. The floor ring was about two inches in width. An elephant wouldn’t have been able to defeat it. The steel plate it was a part of was securely bolted to the floor. He eyed the door in the ceiling. “That’s our only way out. I wonder if they wired it, just in case?”
“Well, I don’t see us getting that far, so what does it matter?”
Robie didn’t answer him. He reached down, lifted his sweatshirt, and unbuckled his belt.
“Don’t tell me you have some sort of acid in there to melt our chains,” said Decker, eyeing him incredulously. “I think I saw that on TV.”
Robie had removed a Velcro backing from the inside of his belt and plucked out two slender pieces of metal that had been hidden there. “Just lock picks. And this isn’t a TV show.”
He went to work on his shackles and soon had himself and Decker free.
Robie next eyed the ladder and the door in the ceiling. “Just stay here while I check it out.” He gripped the ladder and began to climb. As Robie neared the door he ran his gaze over the frame, looking for stray wires, a power pack, or anything else that would give away some sort of booby trap. Seeing none, he gingerly pushed against the wood. It didn’t budge.
“Locked,” he said. “No surprise there.”
He came back down and looked around the room. In an old bucket were four long iron spikes. He slipped them through his belt, took off his boot, and uncovered a cavity in the heel.
Decker saw a small blob of what looked like Play-Doh. “C-Four?”
“Semtex, but it does the same thing,” replied Robie as he removed something else from the cavity and worked away combining the two elements. When that was done, he clambered back up the ladder, pressed the Semtex against the door, uncovered two wires he had pressed into the blob and twined their ends around one another. He quickly retreated and grabbed Decker, and they backed away as far as possible from the door.
Ten seconds later the explosive detonated, blowing the ceiling door out of the way. Their escape path was now exposed.
But Robie didn’t rush forward. He kept a hand on Decker’s shoulder. Decker could see the intensity on the other man’s face as he waited, listening and watching.
“Okay, let’s move.”
Robie scrambled up the ladder first, with Decker following more slowly. Robie eased his head above the rim of the doorway and looked around. He jumped clear of the opening and helped Decker through. They were in what looked like a long passageway made of dirt and rock with steel beams overhead and posts set in the dirt at regular intervals. Fluorescent lights overhead provided feeble illumination.
“Which way?” said Decker.
Robie looked in both directions, took a sniff of the air, examined the dirt on either side of the doorway, and said, “Footprints and airflow only come from that way,” he said, pointing to their right.
He took the spikes out of his belt and held two in each hand. They poked out between his fingers like an animal’s claws.
“If anyone’s here, that explosion will have alerted them,” said Decker.
“I’m actually counting on that,” said Robie.
A hundred feet later, Robie grabbed Decker and thrust him into the shadows right next to the wall. Robie reached up and pulled the wires from the light directly above them. This part of the passageway became far darker.
Someone was coming fast.
A few moments later a trio of men burst into view; all three were armed. They ran in a column formation.
Right as they passed, Robie struck with the spikes. He stabbed one man in the neck, spun around, and sunk two spikes into the second man’s gut, thrusting the spikes upward to his diaphragm. Both men went down, and neither would get back up.
The other man turned and pointed his sub gun at Robie. He never fired, because Decker fell on top of him. His nearly three hundred pounds pinned the man flat to the ground, and his sub gun tumbled from his hands.
Robie picked up the weapon and looked at the other two men. One was dead, the other was gurgling his last few breaths. Robie waited until he expired and said to Decker, “Let him up.”
Decker slowly rose off the man. Robie said, “Who are you?”
The man sat on his haunches and shook his head. He was around forty and his dark, curly hair was shot through with gray.
“Where are we?” said Robie.
Another shake of the head.
“Why did you kidnap us?”
This time the man didn’t even bother to shake his head. He just sat there and stared at Robie for a moment before lifting his hand to his mouth.
Robie leapt forward but the man had already swallowed something.
He
started convulsing, then foam seeped out of his mouth, and he fell sideways. He took a few tortured breaths and then his body relaxed.
Decker bent over him and checked his pulse. There was none.
“That was a fast poison,” he said.
“Sort of the point,” replied Robie.
Decker picked up one of the sub guns, and they kept going in the same direction.
There was a doorway up ahead.
Robie fingered the sub gun and looked at Decker.
“Count of three. You go left, I go right.”
Decker nodded.
“One . . . two . . . three.”
They burst into the room, Robie’s gun covering the right half of the space and Decker’s the left.
Dead center of the room stood Ben Purdy.
He wasn’t alone.
He was holding a gun to the other person’s head.
And that person was Alex Jamison.
“YOU GUYS ARE REALLY SOMETHING,” said Purdy, shaking his head. “I seem to have run out of men to take you on.”
“If you let her go, we all walk away from this,” said Decker.
“That won’t be happening,” said Purdy matter-of-factly. “You destroyed everything I’ve been working on.”
“You want to talk about it?” said Decker.
“No, I want to kill all three of you. But first, put down your weapons, or she gets an unwanted hole in the head. Do it now,” he added in a calm, measured voice. “I don’t have anything left to lose.”
Robie and Decker laid their weapons down and stepped away from them.
“I’m surprised you came back here,” said Decker.
“Well, considering the people who were going to pay me shit-loads of money are now not going to stop looking for me until I’m good and dead, I figured they might have thought the same thing. I convinced my remaining team members of that philosophy, but you’ve taken care of them, so I’m the last man standing.” He pushed the gun against Jamison’s head. “And I had to stay and repay you for all you’ve done to ruin my life. In fact, that’s my only focus in life right now.”
“I take it you followed us to Hal Parker’s?” said Decker.
“We’ve definitely been keeping eyes on you. My men heard you inside arriving at the truth behind what I did. I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out sooner. After that, well, I thought it best to bring you here. In fact, if I show photos of you three dead, my employers might just cut me some slack. It’s worth a shot anyway.”
“How’d you get all those guys into the country?” asked Robie.
“How else? Right over the little old Canadian border. It was easy.” He eyed Decker. “They found the bunker, didn’t they?”
Decker nodded.
“Was the stuff as potent as Daniels told me it was?”
“Apparently so. You do realize that ‘stuff’ would have killed millions of people.”
Purdy shook his head dismissively. “No, Daniels told me it would remain localized. It was heavy enough to where it couldn’t remain airborne in a concentrated pattern to be distributed by wind currents over large distances. It would max out at about a hundred miles in all directions.”
“Still really bad.”
“Bullshit. You want to know something?”
“What?”
“That’s why the Air Force put the kibosh on the program, Daniels told me. Because it couldn’t kill enough people. There’s your goody-good U.S. of A. The shit they do, you wouldn’t believe. And you think I’m a bad guy?”
“I don’t think, I know you are,” replied Decker.
“Yeah, well, distributing the stuff here was certainly enough to put the stop on the fracking industry.”
“And that’s what you were really being paid for,” said Decker.
“An amount of money that was truly beyond belief.”
“Even if it stayed local, it would have killed a lot of people,” Decker pointed out.
“Every plan has collateral damage. The Pentagon builds that into every scenario. What’s the civilian death count going to be? How many kiddies will bite the bullet? Price of doing the business of war. There’s nothing innocent about that. We’re just like everybody else.”
“No, we’re not. And I didn’t realize you were at war with your own country,” commented Robie.
Purdy eyed him. “I was just a grunt. All I ever would be. But I had brains and ambition. Which led me to this point. The risks I took. All the work. For nothing.” In his anger, he tightened his grip on Jamison, causing her to cry out in pain.
“Ticking time bomb?” said Decker. “You mentioned that to a guy in the bar. That’s how we got on to you. Only back then we thought you were a good guy.”
Purdy grimaced. “I had just found out all the stuff and hadn’t decided what to do about it yet. And I was drunk at the time. Finding out that you’re sitting on a possible Armageddon will cause you to drink. I regretted it the moment I said it, but I didn’t even remember who I said it to.”
Decker said, “With your smarts you could have gone to Silicon Valley and made a lot more than Uncle Sam was paying you.”
“They couldn’t pay me what these guys were, not if I busted my ass for a million years. I could have made the Forbes list. I’m not kidding.”
“And who was paying you?” asked Robie.
“People that even if you knew who they were you couldn’t touch.”
“Why’s that?”
Purdy grinned. “Because they’re valuable and trusted allies of ours, that’s why. We’d never expose them for what they really are. Don’t you read the newspapers? We’re suckers. We know they’re bad but we do nothing. And you want to know why? Oil! It makes me sick.”
“So did the collateral damage calculation include your mother?” queried Decker.
Purdy’s expression turned grim. “That was your fault, not mine. You went there to question her, my partners got nervous, and they took care of that end. I wasn’t happy about it, but I had no choice. Just so you know, I was going to buy her a nice place, take care of her. But what did she have really to live for? You saw her place. It was shitsville in the middle of nowhere. Wherever she is, I think she’s better off.”
Both Jamison and Decker flinched at this cruel comment.
Robie said, “And who gave you the right to make that decision for her?”
“I gave myself the right!” Purdy snapped.
“Can you answer a question?” said Decker.
“What?”
“Did you kill Irene Cramer, Hal Parker, and Pamela Ames?”
Purdy looked genuinely confused. “I know Hal. I hunted with him. I didn’t know he was dead.”
“Well, we’re not sure he is. But he is missing. And the others?”
“I’ve never heard of—what were the names again?”
“Irene Cramer and Pamela Ames.”
He shook his head. “I had nothing to do with whatever happened to them.”
“Okay, so where does that leave us?” said Decker.
“With the three of you dead and me not. I couldn’t believe you dropped your weapons. That was a mistake.”
Decker glanced at Jamison. But she wasn’t looking at Decker. She seemed to be looking past him, when she suddenly slumped downward as though unconscious, causing Purdy to reach forward and grab at her.
The next moment Decker felt something fly past his ear.
The spike embedded several inches deep in Purdy’s eye socket. He screamed from the impact and shock, dropped his gun, and staggered back. Then he went into convulsions and fell to the floor, where he continued to gyrate and pull at the spike for a few more seconds before his clutching hands fell away and he grew still.
Robie came to stand over him as Decker helped Jamison up. Then Robie reached down, pulled the spike free, and threw it on the floor. “What a prick,” he said quietly.
He looked back at Decker and Jamison. “Nice pickup on my signal, Jamison.”
“Nice throwing with
that spike,” she replied breathlessly.
“You guys ready to get out of here?”
“That would be a hell yes,” said Decker.
It was still dark outside, though in the horizon could be seen the first few streaks of dawn.
The building they had been in appeared indeed to be an abandoned storage facility of some kind, with rusted equipment parked behind a leaning ten-foot-high chain-link fence.
They had found their guns and phones, along with the keys to the SUV parked out here.
Robie drove them back to town in the SUV.
“I’ll get some people out to where they took us to scrub it of the bodies,” said Robie.
“So Purdy did all this for the cash,” said Jamison. “And sacrificed his own mother in the process. What a piece of work.”
“How’d they snatch you?” asked Decker.
“I went out to get in the SUV, and the next thing I know I woke up on the floor.” She glanced at Robie. “What Purdy said about the people behind this suffering the consequences. It mirrored what your boss said.”
“Yeah,” said Robie.
“Is that really how it’s going to go down?” she asked.
“Probably.”
“And that doesn’t piss you off?”
“Every molecule in my body.”
“And you’re just going to let it happen?”
Robie eyed her in the mirror. “I didn’t say that, did I? But that’s for another day. And you can’t tell anyone about finding Purdy and what happened back there. That will do this country no good and might unleash some nightmare scenarios that are far better avoided.”
Decker and Jamison exchanged glances. He said, “That’s a tough favor to ask, Robie.”
Walk the Wire Page 34
