Lost Lake

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Carl had doubled back after laying a false trail that he hoped would lead his trackers south. From his position behind a tree several yards away, he’d heard everything that Sam Cutler said to Vanessa and he’d seen Cutler give the order to inject her.

Carl was certain that he had met Cutler twice before, only Wingate’s man had called himself Paul Molineaux during Carl’s first combat mission and the mission to rescue the MIAs. Carl debated killing Cutler and the man who was holding Vanessa, but he rejected the idea. Cutler was right. Carl was out of practice. In his twenties, he could have taken both men out with a handgun from this distance, but Vanessa might die if he couldn’t get his shots off quickly enough or-which was equally possible-if he missed. Carl decided that his best course of action was to wait until Vanessa’s guard took her to the car, but he had to reject that plan when two more men materialized at Cutler’s side.

“We lost him,” one said.

“Okay,” Sam answered. “We’ll never get him in the dark after he’s had this much time to get away. Let’s bring the General’s daughter home.”

Carl watched them go. He’d heard what Cutler had said about the tracking device. When he was certain that Cutler and his men had gone, he disabled it. As he drove, he started working on a plan for rescuing Vanessa.

Carl abandoned Vanessa’s car in a supermarket parking lot, stole a nondescript Chevrolet, and headed south using back roads. It took him a full day to drive down the coast. On the way, he listened to the radio for the political news. Wingate was giving a speech in Cleveland. If the General went straight home, he and Carl would arrive at the mansion at about the same time.

After nightfall, Carl broke into a sporting goods store in a small town near San Diego and stole a pair of stiff-soled trail shoes, binoculars, a wetsuit, a fishing bow and arrows, several lengths of sturdy rope, and the strongest fishing line he could find. He put his booty into one of Vanessa’s duffel bags and drove toward a beach a few miles south of the General’s estate, where he’d hung out when he was a student at St. Martin’s Prep.

There were no cars in the narrow lot when Carl parked around midnight and changed into his wetsuit. The beach was deserted, too. Carl strapped the duffel bag across his back and started swimming up the coast. Fighting through the rolling water was exhausting, but thoughts of Vanessa kept him plowing ahead. Carl knew that getting into the mansion and rescuing her would be much harder than the swim. No matter how many times Carl fine-tuned his plan, it sounded suicidal.

“Getting old is a bitch,” Rice thought as he dragged his aching body and the duffel bag out of the surf and onto the beach behind the stone jetty at the end of Morris Wingate’s property. He flopped down on the sand to catch his breath. For most of his life, Carl had been in the type of shape that let him endure almost any physical hardship with a minimum of wear and tear; but now he was almost fifty and his body did not hold up the way it used to, no matter how much he worked out. Then there was the fact that he had still not fully recovered from being shot. The only thing that kept him going was Vanessa. He had betrayed her once, when he went into the army without resisting, and he wasn’t going to let her down again.

When his breathing was back to normal, Carl peeked over the jetty and surveyed the three-hundred-foot cliff that marked the boundary of the Wingate estate. When he saw the old tree still jutting out from the side of the cliff, he breathed a sigh of relief. His plan depended on that tree, and he hoped that he was half as tough as it was.

Carl’s main problem was the condition of the cliff. Centuries of a relentless assault by nature had made the surface he was about to climb very unstable. The face of the cliff was constantly sloughing. Vegetation grew in cracks in the shale, loosening it. Wind laden with moisture and salt from the sea beat at the rock mercilessly. The net result was a facade that was always crumbling and falling away. Each toe and handhold would be treacherous enough in the daytime. At night, every inch of the climb was going to be a surprise.

Carl struggled out of his wetsuit and put on his jeans, shirt, and trail shoes before scanning the top of the cliff with the stolen binoculars. When he was satisfied that there were no guards patrolling, he slung the duffel bag across his back. He was about to sprint across the beach when he heard the sound of rotary blades whipping through the night. Rice pressed himself against the jetty and scanned the sky until he fixed on a dot of light moving toward the Wingate estate from the north. Moments later the landing lights on Wingate’s helipad came on and a Computex helicopter dropped out of the sky. The General had come home.

Carl knew that the arrival of the helicopter was bound to distract the guards, so he ran across the sand to the base of the cliff, then stood in the shadows listening for any sign that he had been detected. When he was convinced that he was safe, he began his ascent directly under the tree.

Despite arms and legs that ached from the swim, pain from his wounds, and wind that buffeted him mercilessly, Carl scaled the first hundred feet with only minor problems. Then two successive handholds crumbled and a foothold gave way, sending him sliding several feet down the face of the cliff. Carl stopped his fall on a narrow ledge and broke out his gear. After attaching a long length of fishing line to an arrow, he fitted the arrow to the fishing bow. From the beach the old tree was three hundred feet straight up, but now the tree was a little less than two hundred feet above him-still a long shot, but he had no choice but to go for it.

Carl aimed so that the arrow would clear the back of the tree. His first shot was short and he had to reel the arrow back. Wind blew his second shot away from the face of the cliff. Carl waited patiently for the wind to die down before taking his third shot. His muscles strained as he pulled back on the bowstring. He sighted and released. This time the arrow arced through the air, sailing over the north side of the tree and across the back. The weight of the arrow pulled the fishing line down the south side of the tree past Carl, and it fell almost to the beach.

Carl scrambled back down the cliff while letting out more line. When he reached the arrow, he took a long length of rope out of the duffel bag and attached it to the fishing line above the arrow using a fisherman’s knot. Then he let go of the arrow, moved to the north side of the tree, and pulled the fishing line back over the tree until the attached rope hung from both sides of the trunk.

After detaching the arrow and the fishing line from the rope, Carl tied a bowline loop at one end of the rope and passed the other end of the rope through the eye of the bowline, creating a noose around the trunk of the tree. Carl pulled on the rope until it tightened around the tree, providing a fixed anchor.

Now, using separate pieces of rope, Carl made a sling that looped around his chest and a seat harness that he secured around his waist, under his buttocks, and through his crotch so that it fitted like a diaper. Then he removed from the duffel bag two more pieces of rope that were roughly twice the length of his body. He tied the first piece around the rope that dangled from the tree using a prusik knot and attached a second prusik beneath the first. The prusik was a clever device that could slide up or down the rope when there was no tension on it, but would tighten and not slide when tension was applied. Carl ran the top prusik under his chest sling and attached it to his seat harness. When Carl sat on the seat harness, the tension on the prusik kept the harness secured to the rope. Carl could dangle in space without fear. If Carl put his foot in the loop formed by the lower prusik he could stand up straight and the tension on the lower prusik would keep him from sliding when he was standing. Additionally, when he stood, the upper prusik loosened and he could slide it up the rope as far as he could reach. Carl had created a simple system that allowed him to slide up the rope by alternately standing and sitting. This allowed him to climb up the tree with a minimum of effort because he could rest by sitting or standing.

When Carl reached the tree, he paused below the edge of the cliff, sagged back in his seat harness, and rested. As soon as he regained some of his strength, he peered over the edge. No guards were in sight. Carl hauled himself over the lip of the cliff. He left the rope secured to the tree so that he and Vanessa could rappel down it if they were able to escape, but he covered it with dirt and leaves so a guard would not see it.

Carl had taken two silenced nine-millimeter Glock automatics, ammunition, and a combat knife from the men he’d killed at Ami’s house. The knife was already in a sheath he’d strapped on before the climb. He took the pistols from the duffel bag before concealing the duffel in the underbrush a few yards from the tree.

Carl thought about the task that was facing him. He had to get past the guards and Wingate’s surveillance equipment, break into the mansion, and find Vanessa without getting killed or captured. Then he had to escape with her, which meant that Vanessa would have to rappel to the beach and swim down the coast in choppy seas. The whole thing seemed impossible to pull off.

The next time Vanessa drifted into consciousness a man was standing by the door, watching her, and someone else was sitting beside her bed. It was dark in the room. She closed her eyes. Thinking was such a strain.

A warm hand covered Vanessa’s. She forced her eyes open again. The lights went on and she blinked.

“Thank God you’re safe.”

It took Vanessa a moment to realize that it was her father who had spoken and a moment more for her to remember that she hated him. Anger-triggered adrenaline cleared away most of her drug-induced stupor and she tried to sit up.

The General touched her shoulder. “No, rest, you need your strength.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“Vanessa, I love you. I did what I had to do to protect you.”

“From who, daddy? You’re the only person I’m afraid of.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Everything I’ve done has been to help you.”

“Like locking me up in that asylum and keeping me drugged for a year so I couldn’t tell anyone that you ordered Carl to murder Eric Glass?”

She pointed at Sam Cutler, who was watching from the door. “Like having your little spy kidnap me? Tell me daddy, while he was living with me, did Sam give you a blow-by-blow version of how we fucked?”

Vanessa’s words were slurred and lacked force. Even so, the General flinched.

“Carl Rice is an insane killer,” Wingate said. “I have no idea how many people he’s murdered. I had to get you away from him.”

“You have to murder him because he’s the only man alive who can tell the truth about the dirty little secret that can keep you from becoming president.”

Wingate sighed. “He’s delusional, Vanessa. That’s what makes him so convincing. He really believes everything he’s told you. But none of it is true. There was no secret army. I did not arrange for Carl to be drafted, and I never ordered Carl to kill Eric Glass. That was all in Carl’s head, and you believed him because you hate me. But I’ve always loved you, even when you’ve hurt me. Do you have any idea how badly I feel knowing that my daughter believes I’m so evil that I could murder my wife, a woman I loved dearly?”

The General ducked his head, and his voice caught. “I’ve never told you, but there have been nights where I’ve cried myself to sleep because of you, knowing that you…have such a low opinion of me that…”

Wingate shook his head. To Vanessa it appeared that he had been overcome by emotion, and that shocked her. She had never seen her father lose control-not even at her mother’s funeral. It was one of the things that had convinced her that Morris Wingate did not love his wife. Was the General’s display of emotion genuine or manufactured? Everything she believed about her father convinced her that he was faking.

“Are you hungry?” Wingate asked. “I’ll have dinner sent up.” He smiled in an attempt to lighten the conversation. “I have a new chef. He’s French. I stole him away from a four-star restaurant in Los Angeles.”

“It looks like kidnapping is becoming your new hobby.”

“Yes, well you’ve got a few interesting hobbies of your own,” he answered wearily. “You’ve put me in a terrible situation, Vanessa. You’re a wanted criminal. You helped Carl Rice, a multiple murderer, escape from jail. I’m your father and I love you and want to protect you, but I’m also running for my party’s presidential nomination, not to mention the trouble I could get into for harboring a fugitive. What should I do?”

“Your political ambitions are no concern of mine,” Vanessa said.

“I know you don’t believe me, but Rice is a very dangerous man. I had to get you away from him.”

“So, are you going to turn me in?”

“No one knows you’re here, and I’m going to keep it that way. I have plenty of connections worldwide from my government days and Computex. It would be an easy matter for me to get you a new identity, even a new face. You could start over in another country. You’d be safe and I’d make sure you had plenty of money.”

“So that’s it. You want me tucked away in some backwater where I can’t rock the boat.”

“I do not want you in jail because your delusions led you to help a murderer.”

“What do you have planned for Carl?”

“Carl is a problem for the police. They may never catch him. He’s very resourceful. He’s managed to elude capture for years. Maybe his luck will hold out. Did he tell you where he was going, what his plans are?”

“We didn’t know where we were going. We were going to hole up at the cabin where Sam found us and figure out our next move in the morning, after we’d gotten some rest.”

“So you have no idea where he might be?”

“No.”

Wingate glanced at Cutler. He straightened up and took a hypodermic out of his pocket.

“What’s that?” Vanessa asked.

Wingate moved quickly and pinned Vanessa to the bed.

“Something that will help you rest,” he said. “It won’t hurt.”

“I don’t want any more drugs,” Vanessa screamed as she struggled to get free.

Wingate and Cutler ignored her pleas. Sam stood over Vanessa. She bucked and threw herself from side to side. “Hold her still, General,” Cutler said as he bent forward to administer the injection. “I don’t want to miss the vein.”

It was a little over two miles from the jetty to the mansion through the woods on the south side of the General’s property. Charlotte Kohler liked to stroll along paths she’d had a landscape architect lay down through her private forest, but Carl avoided them because they would be a natural place for motion detectors. After a while, Carl saw the lights of the house through breaks in the foliage. He crept forward cautiously until there were only a few trees between him and the lawn at the back of the mansion. The grounds directly behind the house offered few places to hide, and two guards crossed on the back lawn while Carl had it under surveillance.

Carl watched carefully as the guards walked their route. One of the men crossed the pool deck near the cabana where Carl had changed into a bathing suit on his first visit to the estate. As soon as the guard disappeared, Carl made a decision.

It took the guards twelve minutes to complete their circuit. Carl worked his way through the woods as close to the cabana as he could. Everything depended on getting behind it undetected. He sprinted from the woods to the pool and dove low behind the cabana.

Carl checked his watch. Three minutes to go. He visualized the attack, going over possible scenarios. With a minute to go, Carl withdrew the combat knife from its sheath. He had made several silent kills, and he knew that he had to act without hesitation. He had already seen in such circumstances a certain phenomenon that convinced him that human beings had some kind of electrical field around them to warn them when there were other humans in close proximity. Though he didn’t know if there had been any scientific studies to support his notion, no matter how stealthy an approach, an intended victim would sense when an attacker entered this field. A moment’s hesitation was all it took to turn a sure kill into a fight to the death.

The guards passed on the lawn, and Carl’s target arrived at the pool just as the other guard disappeared around the side of the house. Carl moved as soon as the guard’s back was to him. The guard was turning as Carl attacked, but he had no chance. The knife struck home and he died without making a sound. Carl dragged the guard’s body into the cabana and changed into his clothes. Now, in addition to the Glocks and his knife, Carl had the guard’s automatic rifle and two extra clips of ammunition.

To make up time Carl walked a little faster than the pace his victim had kept, but he was still late. He spotted the other guard when they were on the north side of the mansion near the door to the cellar. This was fortunate because they were away from any windows. Carl knelt and pretended to tie his laces. He kept his head down to conceal his face.

“What’s up, Rick?” the guard asked as he came in range.

Carl shot him with the silenced Glock and dragged him against the side of the house. He tried the cellar door. It was locked. He rifled the guard’s pockets and found a key chain. The third key he tried opened the door.

In high school, Carl and Vanessa had made love in the basement’s cool darkness on a discarded Persian rug while Vanessa’s father was meeting with movers and shakers above them. The basement was still cool and dark, but those erotic moments were forgotten as Carl moved between the stacked furniture and abandoned art and up the steps to the first floor. He remembered that the basement door led to a short hall near the kitchen. He opened the door wide enough to see into the corridor.

A guard walked past the entrance to the hall, and Carl ducked behind the basement door. As soon as the guard was past, Carl moved down the hall toward him. When he reached the end of the hall, Carl stooped down and peered around the corner. The guard had stopped with his back to Carl. It looked as if he was taking a break. Carl stunned the man with a blow to the back of the skull, then choked him unconscious. He dragged him back into the basement, cuffed him with plastic cuffs he found in the guard’s back pocket, sat him against a stack of mildewed cardboard cartons, and slapped the guard back to consciousness.

The man’s eyes flicked open. They tried to focus on Carl’s face but the taste of metal in his mouth brought the guard’s eyes down to the gun barrel that was wedged between his lips.

“You have one chance to live,” Carl said in a calm, authoritative tone. “When I take this gun barrel out of your mouth you’ll tell me where the General is holding his prisoner or I will shoot you and find someone else who will tell me. Understood?”

The man nodded. Carl withdrew the barrel past the man’s lips.

“Second floor, maid’s room.”

Carl hit the man fast and much harder than he had the first time. The guard slumped sideways as Carl headed for the stairs. He knew the location of the maid’s room. He and Vanessa had screwed there one summer evening. Now that he thought about it, almost every memory he had of Wingate’s mansion was connected to sex.

Carl used the back stairs to get to the second floor. He moved down the hall without making a sound. As he drew close to the maid’s room, he heard voices. Then Vanessa screamed, “I don’t want any more drugs.”

When Carl wrenched open the door the General was pinning Vanessa to the bed and Sam Cutler was poised over her with a hypodermic needle.

“Put down the hypo or die,” Carl said.

Cutler froze. Wingate turned his head toward the door. His mouth opened, but he stifled whatever he had intended to say.

“Put it down, now,” Carl commanded. Cutler laid the needle on the end table next to the bed.

“Get away from her and stand against the wall. Quick!”

Both men obeyed.

“I knew you’d come,” Vanessa said.

Carl moved to the side of the bed. For a brief second, his eyes left Wingate and Cutler and moved over Vanessa. In that instant, Sam Cutler slipped a Shirken out of his sleeve. The Japanese throwing star had six knife-sharp points. Cutler hurled it across the bed like a discus into Carl’s right shoulder. The shoulder went numb and he dropped the Glock. Cutler leaped across the bed. Vanessa raised her leg, catching Cutler across the knees. As he stumbled over her, Vanessa grabbed the hypodermic and rammed the needle into Cutler’s thigh.

“You bitch!” he screamed. Then his eyes started to loose focus. Vanessa knew exactly what was happening to Cutler’s body. It had been happening to hers with regularity ever since Cutler had injected her in the woods.

Wingate took a step toward Rice, then changed direction and charged out of the room when Carl grabbed the Glock with his left hand and start to aim. The shot went through the open door and into the wall, sending plaster chips spraying across the hallway. The General was shouting at the top of his lungs. Rice peered into the hall. It was empty but it wouldn’t stay that way long.

“Get up, Vanessa.”

Vanessa struggled to her feet. She wanted to move faster but her legs felt like noodles. Carl helped her stand. He knew it was going to be impossible to fight his way out of the house and escape down the cliff with Vanessa in this condition, but he didn’t dwell on the future. He would complete his mission one step at a time and whatever happened, happened. And the first step was getting out of the room.

Carl held the Glock in his left hand and gripped Vanessa’s elbow with his right.

“Concentrate, Van. We have to get out of here fast.”

“Okay,” she answered in a sleepy voice.

Carl took a step into the corridor, and a bullet almost took his head off. He ducked back inside the maid’s room as wood splinters from the door frame flew through the air. Carl slammed the door shut and jammed the chair under the knob. Then he dumped Sam Cutler on the floor and pushed the bed onto its side.

“Get behind the bed and hug the floor. There are going to be a lot of bullets coming through the door and walls.”

Carl joined Vanessa behind the bed and set out all his weapons and ammunition on the floor beside him. He had enough firepower to hold out for a while, but then what?

“What’s going to happen?” Vanessa asked. She still sounded a little spacey.

“I don’t know. We’re trapped in here. There’s only one way out-the door-and your father has that covered. Even if we got out the door, we’d have to fight our way down the corridor to get to the stairs. Then we’d have to fight our way down the stairs and through the house.”

Carl shrugged. Vanessa forced herself to focus. She was getting sharper every second and during one of those seconds she’d had a glimmer of an idea, but she’d been too groggy to hold on to it. She had figured out one thing, though. She had wondered why, if her father loved her enough to save her old pajamas, he had put her in a deserted wing of the mansion in the maid’s room instead of her old room. Now she knew the answer to her question. The General had expected Carl to come for her. All she’d been to him was bait, and this room had always been a trap.

“Carl, be reasonable,” the General called out. “There’s no way out of there. Throw out your weapons. That way, Vanessa won’t get hurt and neither will you.”

“That does sound reasonable, Morris,” Carl answered sarcastically. “I’m sure we can trust you. Maybe we can grab a bite to eat and reminisce about old times, too, like the mission to rescue the MIAs that your flunky led. You sure looked out for me and the rest of your boys then.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Carl. The only time Sam led a mission with you as a member of the team was your first mission, and you cracked up after it. You’re a sick man, Carl. I’ll tell that to the authorities. Maybe we can have you hospitalized instead of sent to prison.”

“That’s it,” Vanessa said, as she suddenly remembered her idea.

“What?” Carl asked her, but Vanessa didn’t answer. Instead, she started searching Sam Cutler. Just before they’d taken off from the airport in the Computex helicopter, Cutler had made a call on a cell phone, which he’d put in his pocket.

“Yes!” she said when she found it.