Zero Option

44

Carson jumped in his sleep and then opened his eyes. He was lying on his side on the bed, still fully dressed. He felt a surge of cold panic.

Something had awakened him, something bad or threatening. His breathing was rapid and his heart was beating like a jackhammer in his chest. He rolled his feet over the edge of the bed and tried to sit up, gasping as a sheet of pain ripped across his upper back, taking his breath away.

There was bright sunlight streaming through the crack in the curtains, and he could hear the sounds of the maids’ carts outside. He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost eight-thirty. His back was really hurting now.

It took him several painful minutes to peel his shirt off, and he knew he had torn parts of a clot when he did it. He got the rest of his clothes off and got into the shower, starting it on warm and increasing the heat as much as he could stand. He gingerly washed the wound first with his hands and some soap and then with a washcloth. He did it all by feel, watching the runoff turn pink at the bottom of the tub. Then he turned off the hot water, running only cold, in hopes of reducing any swelling and to accelerate clotting. When he got out, the wound looked redder in the mirror, with a pink discoloration blooming in the skin all along the length of it.

Gotta roll, he thought, although then he realized he had no idea of where he was going to run to. Or, for that matter, if anyone was even looking for him yet. He held one of the bath towels across the wound as he searched for the television remote. Finding it, he switched on the television, punching through several stations, looking for anything about the fire. He finally found a report running on one of the Atlanta stations. He watched the overhead shots taken from a helicopter, amazed at the level of destruction, and then a press conference where some Army general was putting out a line of bullshit about the cause of the fire.

And then came that one-liner about himself. And the FBI. And the DCIS.

He sat back down on the bed as a wave of fear washed over him. The FBI.

And it wouldn’t just be the FBI; it would be every law-enforcement agency in the state. The country, maybe. Safety violations and problems with the public auctions? DCIS inquiry? Bullshit! They knew. Whatever Tangent had told the Army and the FBI, that fucking Stafford must have corroborated. He could understand Tangent squealing to save his ass, but that fucking Stafford had put the nails in his coffin.

The urge to bolt was very strong, but he forced himself to slow down and think. There was no point in getting out on the highways, even in a disguised pickup, until he had somewhere to go and a reason for going there.

Keeping the damp towel over his shoulders, he went back into the bathroom and shaved, which helped him to wake up. The guy in the rest stop might or might not have noticed by now that his signs were gone and that his plate had been switched, but eventually he would, which would give the authorities an indication that Carson had been out on the northbound side of I-85. Okay, so now he needed to get it off the interstate. He counted the packs of money and found that he had a little over six thousand in cash that he’d taken from the bags before losing them in his escape. Assuming the hundreds weren’t counterfeit, he had enough money to go to ground somewhere, maybe in one of those cabins up in the north Georgia mountains.

First he needed to get some meds for this wound, and then he needed to think. Right now, the only thing that counted was that he had the cylinder. They couldn’t be absolutely, positively sure he had the cylinder, but they would be acting on that assumption. Which meant that the cylinder was a powerful bargaining chip: The Army desperately wanted it back, and just as desperately, wanted to keep the whole deal secret Good news and bad news there, he thought as he put his clothes back on.

They might be willing to bargain with him, or they might just put out orders to kill him, justifying such an order on the basis of how dangerous the cylinder was. So, first, meds. Then he needed to hide.

He got dressed again, stuffing the bloody bath towel inside the shirt to act as a temporary bandage. He put on his windbreaker and, leaving the key on the bed, went out to his truck and got in, resisting the urge to check the toolbox to see if the thing was still there. He drove out of the motel lot and onto an access road that led back to the interstate interchange, passing a Waffle House diner on the right. He was hungry, but he was too near the interstate. It’d be just his luck to stop for breakfast and have the Highway Patrol pull in for coffee. That reminded him: He needed to get rid of those magnetic signs. Maybe he’d stop in Kmart somewhere and get some green spray paint to take care of those serial numbers on the door. And one of those Styrofoam coolers and some ice — the cylinder was definitely cooking, and that was really beginning to worry him.

The interchange consisted of an overpass for a state highway that ran north-south. He paused for a moment at the stop sign. South would take him back down toward I20 and the approaches to Atlanta. Lots of places to hide, lot of people. Also lots of cops. North would take him into the Georgia and Tennessee mountains. Fewer people, fewer cops, but the more remote his surroundings became, the more he and the truck would stick out. He made his decision: Go north, get a cabin, hide the damned truck, and regroup. He turned left to go over the interstate, then headed north toward the mountains, visible as blue-green lumps on the distant horizon. As he cleared the niter change, a sign announced the miles to three towns, Dorey, Blairsville, and Graniteville.

Graniteville. Why did he remember that name? But then he was coming into the outskirts of Dorey, where he saw a Kmart in a shopping plaza. Good enough for government work, he thought. Get some real bandages, an ointment of some kind, and some Advil. And green spray paint. Don’t forget the paint. And some ice for Baby back there.