Power Play

49

Pee Wee Farrentino's delicate, feminine face had become monstrous: a welter of angry red cross-hatched scars. Ugly, just the way he wanted.

But it hadn't stopped Glover's midnight visits. Neither had my meeting with Dr. Jerome Marcus, the Assistant Clinical Director of Glenview, who'd followed the bureaucratic imperative not to rock the boat. He buried his report. He wanted a larger office.

Pee Wee's eyes had gone dead. He'd given up.

One morning, he wasn't at inspection. The morning guard, Caffrey, went to his room and found him.

He'd torn strips from his bedsheets and fashioned a noose, lashed it to the old iron radiator, managed to twist his body into the right position to strangle himself. Only Pee Wee could have done something that clever.

Caffrey, stricken, described it to us: We weren't allowed to look.

The bad wolf took me over. I felt myself propelled into a dark tunnel, no way out but forward, no turning back.

During outdoor exercise period, I made the first move. I lunged at Glover, wrested the baton out of his hands, my strength almost superhuman. The high-octane fuel of rage.

As he tried to grab it back, I slammed it against the back of his knees. Just as he'd done to me so many times.

He lurched, sprawled to the ground, roared that I was going straight to the hole. He yelled for Caffrey.

But Caffrey stood and watched.

Glover-cowering, his lip split, his eyes leaking blood-hollered for Estevez.

I slammed my fists into his face, one two one two, until I felt hard bone go soft.

One two one two.

I'd made myself Raymond Farrentino's protector, and I'd failed, and this was the only thing I could do.

He roared, an enraged beast, throwing his fists at me blindly, trying to block my punches. He caught me on the side of my face with a right hook so hard it should have knocked me over. But it didn't. I was in the zone. My rage was both a force field and anesthetic. His head jerked from side to side to dodge the blows. He snarled, his teeth bloody.

Even in my madness, my temporary insanity, I knew that beating Glover to a bloody pulp would solve nothing. It would only get me in the most serious trouble. But it felt too good to stop.

I kneed him in the stomach, and his eyes rolled up into his head for an instant. He sagged, and I slammed a fist into the underside of his jaw, heard something snap. He swayed backwards, tipped over, his head smashing into the ground.

Then something remarkable happened. Estevez, then Alvaro and a few of the bigger kids, began swarming around Glover and me. Some had homemade brass knuckles or sharpened mattress coils: an homage to Pee Wee.

We could all see the fear in his pale dull eyes. A spell had been broken. Only later did I wonder how many of them had also been Glover's victims.

As the others pummeled him with their fists and slashed with their mattress coils, knocking me aside, guards began streaming out of D Unit and the adjoining cottages, batons and Mace at the ready.

They began pulling the kids off Glover, stopping them from crossing the line, going one step too far.

A lockdown was ordered. Anyone who didn't return to his room at once would be placed in the Special Handling Unit. The word got around quickly that the punishment would be severe: transfer to what they called gladiator school-a maximum-security penitentiary for violent offenders, even worse than Glenview.

I was sent to solitary, informed that I would be brought up on charges of assault and battery. I'd be tried as an adult. Instead of getting out when I was seventeen, I wouldn't see the outside world until long after my twenty-first birthday-if, that is, I even survived.

And that was when a second remarkable thing happened: a posthumous gift from Pee Wee, his final clever move.

The lockdown wasn't even an hour old when someone found the note he'd left for me.

A few nights, pinned against the wall of his room, he'd found himself staring at the red pinpoint of light on the surveillance camera. Glover sometimes forgot to turn it off.

For Pee Wee it was simple to break into the D Unit command center, where the tapes were recorded and stored, where there was equipment to make copies. He'd sent tapes to the Division of Youth Services, the local newspapers, the local TV station. Smuggling out had been even easier, for him, than smuggling in.

That evening, I stood on my bed and watched through the tiny square of wire-reinforced glass as two police cruisers and one TV van pulled up the long driveway. Twenty minutes later, a couple of handcuffed figures emerged in the glare of the xenon arc TV spotlights. One was a gray-haired man with rimless glasses and a perfectly pressed shirt. The other was Glover, almost unrecognizable, unable to walk. He was carried by three policemen.

50

Wayne came in with a mop and a bucket full of suds. The two frightened cleaning girls-Bulgarians who'd come here for the summer to work-dutifully mopped up the blood. Russell had ordered them to the front, and Travis had untied their restraints, and at first they'd stood there shaking and weeping, probably thinking that they were next. Russell pointed out a dark red blood splatter on the rug and told them to clean that up, too. As if he didn't want to leave the place a mess when all this was over.

By now the hostages had settled down into a dazed, terror-stricken stupor, almost a trance state. No one spoke. No one even whispered. Ali was crying softly, and Cheryl stared grimly into space.

"What do you want us to do with the bodies?" Wayne asked in an unexpectedly soft voice, as he and Travis lifted Grogan.

"Take 'em out in the woods," Russell said. "Maybe the grizzlies will eat 'em."

Travis glanced furiously at his brother but said nothing.

Russell reached down, took Danziger's arms, and tried to pull the body up-I guess he was going to attempt a sort of fireman's carry-but then suddenly let go. Danziger's body slid to the floor while Russell wiped his hands on his pant legs: There was blood everywhere.

Then he grabbed Danziger's ankles and dragged him across the floor.

It left a long red smear.

At the threshold of the room he stopped. "Was my lesson clear enough?" he said.

No one answered.

Only one of the kidnappers remained in the room now: Buck, the one with the black hair and goatee. He sat slumped in his chair, looking pensive. His.44 Magnum lay on his right thigh, his right hand on top of it.

The manager was crying silently. He was lost in grief and shock, along with so many others in the room.

Cheryl was the first to speak. "Someone told him," she whispered.

Silence.

"Was it you, Kevin?" she asked softly.

"How dare you-" Bross erupted, spittle flying.

"He could have gotten it out of Danziger himself," I said. "That's the point of all these 'interviews'-playing us off against each other."

Lummis was gasping for breath, wincing, his face deep red.

"Hugo, for God's sake, what is it?" said Barlow.

"I'll be-fine," Lummis gasped. "Just-need to-to try to calm down."

Buck looked up, stared for a few seconds, then seemed to lose interest. Muffled, angry voices came from the next room: Russell and his brother, I guessed, arguing in the screened porch.

I cleared my throat, and the manager looked up at me with redrimmed eyes.

"We need to get help," I said.

He blinked away tears but said nothing.

It was obvious, to me at least, that cooperating with Russell and his guys would only get us killed. We had to contact someone, anyone, in the outside world. Even if no one else would do anything, at least I would.

"Where do you keep your sat phone?"

It took him a few seconds to respond. Clumsily, he tried to wipe the tears from each eye with the backs of his bound hands. He looked hollow. "My office," he whispered. "But that crazy guy-Verne?-asked me about it and made me give him my office key."

"That's not the phone that Russell was using, was it?"

He shook his head. "Mine's an older model. He just must have taken mine so no one else could use it."

"Your office-you keep it locked?"

He nodded. "But they took the key, I told you-"

"I understand. What happens if you misplace your key?"

"You mean, do I hide a spare somewhere?" He nodded. "Under the base of the lamp on the legal bookcase outside my office door. An old skeleton key. Opens every damned door in this old place-real high-security, huh? But I told you, he took the sat phone."

"That's all right. There's other ways."

Ali, watching us talk, said: "The Internet."

"Right. They obviously haven't cut the line if they're planning on using it to do the wire transfer."

"Landry, you see that guy in the front of the room? There's like five guys with guns out there. You've really lost it."

I looked toward the window.

Two silhouetted figures in the silvery moonlight struggled with a body, moving in the direction of the forest.

"But Russell-"

"I have a feeling that Russell told his brother he was only going to put a scare into Danziger and Grogan. Not bullets in their heads. As long as we can hear them arguing, we can count on them being distracted in the screened porch."

"And this guy?" She glanced at Buck.

I explained.

"Are you out of your mind?" she said.

51

You lost your mind?" Dad said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Trying to rip me off? You didn't really think you could get away with it, did you?"

Suddenly he had the crook of his arm around my neck and was squeezing hard. I could smell his Old Spice, his boozy breath.

"Hey!" I felt the blood rush to my head, bright spots swimming. "Cut it out!"

"We can do this the hard way or the easy way. Up to you. Which it gonna be?"

I tried to pry his arm loose, but he was much stronger. I was thirteen, tall and scrawny. Everything was bleaching out.

On the bulging muscle of his upper arm, the Marine Corps tattoo: an eagle, a globe, an anchor, a circle of stars, "USMC" in Old English lettering. I noticed the imperfections, the fuzzy lines, the blotches of green-black ink.

"You know how easy I could break your neck?"

"Let go!"

"Either you're gonna give me back the fifty bucks, or I'm gonna break your neck. Which it gonna be?"

I'd taken the money from the cigar box in his dresser to buy a bus ticket and get the hell out of the house. A cousin was at college in Bellingham, Washington. I figured the fifty dollars would get me at least halfway across the country, and I'd beg or borrow or steal the rest. Once I showed up at Rick's apartment, he wasn't going to turn me away. The worst thing was leaving Mom alone there with Dad, unprotected, but I'd pretty much given up on her. I'd begged her to leave, and she wouldn't. She wouldn't let me say anything to Dad. "Just stay out of it, sweetie," she'd said. "Please, just stay out of it."

Finally, I gasped, "All right!"

Dad loosed his grip, and I sank to the floor.

He held out his hand, and I fished the crumpled bills from the back pocket of my jeans. Tossed the wad onto the wall-to-wall carpet.

He smiled in triumph. "Didn't I teach you nothing? What kind of pussy are you, can't defend yourself?"

"I'm telling Mom."

He just snorted.

"I'll tell my guidance counselor what you did."

"You do that, and I'll tell the cops how you been stealing money from your parents, and you know what's gonna happen to you? They'll send you right to the boys' home. Reform school. That'll straighten you out."

"Then I'll just take one of your guns and steal the money."

"Hah. You gonna rob a bank, Jakey? Or the 7-Eleven?"

I sat there on the carpet, head spinning, as he went downstairs to the kitchen. Heard the refrigerator door open. The hiss of a pop-top: a can of Genny.

Mom was standing at the top of the stairs in her Food Fair smock, tears in her eyes. She'd seen the whole thing.

"Mom," I said.

She gave me a long, imploring look, and for a moment she looked like she was coming to give me a consoling hug.

Instead, she gave me another sad look and went down the hall to the master bedroom to change out of her work clothes.

52

I lay on my side as if asleep and drew my left knee up to bring my foot closer to my roped hands.

I'd lost a little feeling in my fingers, not because the ropes were too tight but because my palms had been clamped together in the same position for so long. They felt prickly and thick and useless.

But I was able to extend my hands and, despite the limited range of motion of my fingers, grasp the blade of the steak knife. And fumbling with my leaden fingertips, I got hold of the handle and pulled it slowly, carefully, from my shoe.

Meanwhile, Cheryl was talking to Ali in a low, soft murmur. "What just happened-it puts all these petty games into perspective, doesn't it? One minute I'm vowing I'm going to take this fight to the board of directors and outmaneuver Hank, and the next minute I'm wishing I could call my children and tell them I love them."

"How old are they?" Ali asked.

"Oh, Nicholas is a sophomore at Duke, and Maddy's living in the West Village. They're not children. They're grown. They're in the world. They don't need me. But…"

Now that the thing was out of my shoe, I realized how much low-level discomfort it had been causing me. I'd almost gotten used to it, as if a sharp stone were stuck in there. To get it out was a relief.

"I feel like we've just come out the other side," Cheryl said. "Got through the hard part. Both of them, we had such a difficult relationship for so long. Maddy dropped out of Hampshire and stopped speaking to me for, oh, it must have been three years or more. Nicholas still resents me for sending him away to prep school so young. He's convinced I wanted him out of the house so I could concentrate on my career."

Ali looked uncomfortable hearing her boss speak so openly. She studied the carpet. Then she said: "He's young. He'll come around."

I turned my head to make sure Buck couldn't see me. He seemed to be dozing.

Keeping my back to him-and to Cheryl and Ali as well-I positioned the knife blade up and began moving it back and forth against the rope.

The blade was razor-sharp, but it was the wrong tool. Great for cutting aged prime steak, maybe, but not so great with synthetic Kernmantle. This was a high-quality climbing rope woven from twisted strands of polyester around a nylon core. It was made for rappelling, so it had a high tensile strength. It was made to be abrasion-resistant. In other words, it wasn't supposed to cut easily. A coarser knife-edge would have had more bite. A serrated edge would have been best of all.

But what I had was a steak knife, and the wrong kind.

So I kept sawing away.

"No, he's right," Cheryl said. "I couldn't be mom and corporate executive at the same time, and I knew it."

"You needed a wife," Ali said.

"Or a stay-at-home dad. But they didn't even have a dad at all for most of their childhoods. After Bill ran off with some chippy." She sniffled. "So this is what I screwed up my kids for. So I could spend half my time trying to keep Hank Bodine from stabbing me in the back."

Once I'd pierced the outermost polyester sheath, the strands began to fray, then splay outward. The process started getting easier, until I'd got halfway through the first rope. They'd wound the rope around my wrists three times, but of course I'd only have to cut through in one place to get it off.

"I bet Hank's kids are screwed up even worse," Ali whispered. "Only he probably doesn't even care."

Upton Barlow noticed what I was doing, and he stared in astonishment. Then, to my surprise, he smiled and nodded.

"And then die in this godforsaken fishing lodge in the middle of…" Cheryl's voice got high and thin and constricted, then stopped.

I went back to sawing at the rope.

"Didn't think you'd ever see a CEO cry, right?" Cheryl said.

"Cheryl," Ali said gently.

"You know what they say-when a man's tough, he's decisive. When a woman's tough, she's a controlling bitch." She sniffed again. "That's okay. I knew that when I started. Back in the day. When all women in business were legally required to wear those stupid floppy bow ties with every blouse. At least it'll be easier for you. The clothes aren't as bad."

Finally, I was down to the last strand, and the blade broke through.

My hands were free.

But Barlow was looking at me with a different expression: alarm. His eyes darted up and to the side repeatedly, signaling something to me.

I heard the floorboards squeak.

Others were now looking around, seeing the same thing that Barlow was looking at.

I froze. It had to be Buck, and judging from the sound, he was standing just a few feet away.

Slowly, very slowly, I lowered my hands to my chest.

Tried to wind the rope back around my wrists, keeping my movements small, imperceptible from behind.

I sank to the floor, closed my eyes, feigning sleep. The carpet had that farmyard smell of wet wool.

I waited.

Buck cleared his throat. "You ladies keep it down," he said.

Then I heard his footsteps recede. I waited twenty seconds, then a minute, before opening my eyes.

Barlow nodded.

I sat up slowly. Ali, then Cheryl, saw, and their eyes widened.

"Oh, my God," Cheryl said.

53

I gave Ali a quick nod.

"Excuse me," she called out.

Buck looked around. I held my breath.

"Excuse me," she said again.

Buck came over, scowling. His jet-black hair looked stringy and unwashed.

"The hell do you want?"

"I need to use the bathroom."

"You can wait," he said, turning away.

"No, I can't," Ali said. "It's-look, it's a woman problem, okay? You want me to explain?"

Buck stared, shook his head slowly. He didn't want to hear details. Men never do.

"It's gonna have to be quick," he said at last.

She held up her hands, and he yanked her to her feet. "Move it," he said.

She walked, and he followed. Before they left the room, he slowly looked around. "Anyone moves an inch," he said, and he unholstered his gun. "You saw what happened."

I waited for a few seconds, then slipped my hands free of the rope and stood up.

Then I trod quickly along the carpet. Behind me, I could hear faint rustling, soft whispers. I turned around, held up a hand to silence them.

A low voice: "You're a goddamned idiot, Landry."

I didn't even have to look to know it was Bross.

"I hope they catch you."

"Kevin," said Bodine. "Not another word."

"Shut the hell up, Bross," Cheryl whispered.

"No way," Bross said, not even bothering to keep his voice down. "I'm not going to sit here and let this kid get us all killed."

I was just about out the door when I heard the squeak of floorboards.

"I thought I heard something," boomed a voice from the corridor.

Buck leveled his giant Ruger.44 at me. With his other hand he clutched Ali's neck.

She watched me evenly, her face a mask of calm.

Buck shook his head, cocked the revolver. "Russell warned me you might be trouble."

54

I put my hands up in surrender.

"Jesus, Landry," Ali said. "I thought Russell cut him in."

Remarkable how calm she sounded-annoyed, even.

"Not in front of the others," I said. Her poise steadied me.

"Don't move," Buck said.

I ducked my head, said quietly, "You telling me Russell didn't let you in on our deal?"

"I told you, don't move."

I took a step forward. We were now maybe six or eight feet apart. "Can we take this out in the hall?"

"Maybe Russell wanted to cut him out," Ali said. She winced involuntarily as he squeezed her neck.

I was close enough now to smell his oniony foulness, the wood fire on his clothes. "I really don't want to talk in front of the others."

"The hell you talking about, cut me out?" Buck said.

"Why the hell do you think they even brought me here," I said.

Another step. I looked up. "Because I'm the treasury guy. The operations guy. Hammond Aerospace is a company with billions of dollars in cash, and I'm the only guy who can tap into it. That's why Russell told his brother to cut me loose. He didn't fill you in? Unbelievable."

"Russell-?" That giant steel cannon of a gun was still pointed at the middle of my chest. Buck was listening now, but he was also prepared to shoot at any moment.

I took another step closer.

"I don't know how much they're paying you, Buck, but it's chump change compared to what Russell and his brother are taking."

His expression was guarded, but you couldn't miss the glimmer of interest, of greed.

"It's not just that you're getting the short end of the stick," I said very quietly. "You don't even know how long the stick really is."

"What're they getting?" he asked.

One more step. We were right next to each other now, so close that I could smell his chewing-tobacco breath. "This has got to stay between you and me," I said in a voice that was barely audible. "I mean it." My head was down, my chin on my chest. I noticed the dried mud on the laces and the soles of his boots.

"What kinda money we talking?" Buck demanded. "I want to know."

I dipped my knees slightly, but not so much that he'd notice. My back was rounded, my stomach muscles contracted.

"Why don't you tell me," I whispered.

I didn't care what he said, just so long as he opened his mouth, parted his jaws.

"Tell you-?" he began, and then I uncoiled, exploded upward, the top of my head slamming under his chin with a sudden violent force.

His teeth cracked together so loud it sounded like the snapping of bone. He made a weird uhhh sound as he tumbled backwards, sprawled onto the floor with a loud thud. His Ruger crashed to the floor alongside him.

The impact had sent a jolt of pain through my skull, but it was surely nothing compared to what Buck felt the instant his teeth smashed together.

Ali gasped as she pulled free of his grip. Someone behind me cried out, then a few more. Buck was unconscious. That I hadn't expected: I'd thought I might knock him off-balance long enough to grab his gun. Maybe my skull had struck some bundle of nerves underneath his jaw or in his throat.

"My God, Landry," Ali said. "Where the hell did that come from?" She was looking at me with a peculiar combination of gratitude and respect and, I think, fear.

"I was just about to ask you the same thing."

"But what you did just now-how did you-?"

"I don't know," I said.

But of course I did.

55

A few weeks after I'd finished serving out my sentence at Glenview, I appeared before the Family Court judge, at the advice of my Legal Aid lawyer, to request that my records be sealed. Otherwise the crime would follow me for the rest of my life.

The Honorable Florence Alton-Williams regarded me over her tortoiseshell half glasses. "Well, young man," she said in her stern contralto. "Your record at Glenview was impeccable. The warden's report on your conduct was simply glowing."

Of course it was. Neither he nor the superintendent wanted trouble from me; they didn't want any more details about Pee Wee's death to see the light of day.

"Looks to me like the right wolf won," she said.

I didn't reply.

Swooping down to retrieve Buck's stainless-steel Ruger, I tucked it into the waistband of my pants. Then I turned around to face the roomful of my fellow hostages. Everyone was awake now.

"You goddamned idiot," Kevin Bross said, even before I could speak. "As soon as Russell sees this, he's going to start picking us off-"

"That's why I need help moving this guy," I said.

Some looked at me blankly; some looked away.

"Come on. Anyone. Upton, you're a strong guy. I'll cut you loose."

"I'm sorry, Jake. Those guys are going to be back any second," Barlow said.

"Come on, Landry, let's go," Ali said. She stood at the edge of the room, held her hands out to me. "Slice these ropes off me."

"No. They'll notice you gone right away. Someone else. Paul, you know the layout of this place better than anyone. You'll know where to stash this guy."

"I'm in no shape," the manager said.

"How about your son? Ryan?"

Ryan shot me a frightened look, but his father spoke up for him: "It's a suicide mission."

"This asshole's going to get us all killed," Bross said.

"How about you, Clive?" I said.

Rylance shook his head. "It's madness, Jake."

"Come on," I said to the rest of the room. "Someone? Anyone? Do I have to do this myself? Any of you guys?"

Silence.

"Damn it," I said, and turned to deal with Buck's body myself.

"You got yourself into this," I heard Bross say. "Try and get yourself out of it. What the hell did you think you were going to do-sneak out of here? Save your ass?"

I turned slowly. "Trying to save all of our asses, Kevin," I said. "Because if you think just sitting here and being good boys and girls is going to save us, you're wrong. We have to get help."

"That's exactly what got Danziger and Grogan killed."

"Wrong. Russell killed them because they'd figured out who he is. Somehow he found that out-they could identify him. And I'll tell you something else: Grogan was the only one who knew our bank account numbers. Which means Russell's not going to get his money. And you want to guess what Russell's going to do when he doesn't get his money, Kevin?"

Bross's crooked mouth hung open in disgust. "Why is anyone even listening to this moron? He's got his head up his ass."

"No," said Cheryl quietly. "He's got guts. Unlike some of us here."

"Jake," Barlow said, "we're totally isolated here. There's no way to reach anyone anyway."

I shook my head. "There's a couple of possibilities. But I really don't have time to explain. I have to get this guy out of here. So all I ask of the rest of you is to cover for me. When they ask what happened to Buck, all you know is that he said something about being freaked out by the shootings, how he didn't want to go to jail for the rest of his life. You don't know anything more. And if they notice I'm gone, too, I said I had to take a piss, and I couldn't wait. That's all you say, okay? Nothing else."

I looked around the room. "But it only takes one of you to say something different, and we're all going to pay the price." I looked directly at Bross. "So even if you think I have my head up my ass, don't screw it up for everyone else. Including yourself, Kevin."

Bodine was nodding. So was just about everyone else, except Bross, who scowled furiously.

"No one's going to screw it up," Hank Bodine said. "Not if I have anything to do with it."

"Thank you."

"No, Jake," he said. "Thank you."

"All right. Is no one going to help me move this body?"

Silence.

"Me," came a voice from the far back corner. It was one of the Mexican waiters. The one I'd talked to at dinner.

Pablo, I remembered his name was.

"I help you," he said.

56

Pablo was small and skinny, with short dark hair and widely spaced brown eyes; for an instant I thought of Pee Wee.

But they looked nothing alike. This kid was slight of build, but scrappy, not fragile. And something else I'd glimpsed at dinner, as he apologized for spilling the wine: Behind the innocent eyes loitered a hell-raiser. A kindred spirit.

It was surprising how much easier it was to cut someone else loose than it had been to free myself. A couple of quick slashing motions using the heel of the blade, and the fibers began to give way, the strands splaying.

"There's no closet in this room, right?" I sliced through the ropes and tugged them off, jammed the two pieces of rope into my back pockets with the others.

"No closet."

"Out there?" I jerked my head toward the door as he clambered to his feet, ran behind me.

"For the table linens," he said. "But basement is closer."

No movement in the windows, no silhouetted figures. No screen doors slamming, no footsteps in the hall; not yet.

The entrance to the fitness center, in the basement, was next to the screened porch. Too close to Russell and his brother.

"How do we get down there?"

"I show you."

He knelt at one end of Buck's unconscious body, grabbing under the arms, his chest pressing against the back of Buck's neck.

The eyes came open just a bit, exposing little white crescents, and for a second I thought he might be regaining consciousness.

Turning around, I squatted between Buck's legs, grabbed his knees, leading the way out of the room.

Two hundred and fifty pounds or more of unconscious man was even heavier than I'd expected. Dried mud crumbled from the traction soles of his combat boots.

The great room was dark and still smelled of dinner.

How many hours ago was that? Five, maybe six? No more: yet the other side of a chasm.

We threaded carefully among the jumbles of haphazardly stacked furniture.

"Where kitchen is," he said, directing me with his eyes. We struggled to balance the body between us, keep it from sagging.

"If they come in," I said, "we drop him and run, understand?"

He nodded, strain contorting his face.

"There," he whispered.

I steered Buck's knees toward the kitchen door. The small round inset pane of glass was black, opaque. That meant, I assumed, that no one was in the kitchen.

The floorboards creaked.

I pushed against the door, swinging it open into the dark corridor. The cellar door, on the left, was sturdy oak.

"There," Pablo said again. "Switch is on the wall."

I let go of Buck's right knee to grab the big black iron knob. His right leg dangled, then his boot thumped loudly against the floor.

Somewhere a screen door banged.

I gave Pablo a look, but he already understood. We were moving as quickly as we dared with our ungainly burden.

The cellar door groaned open, rusty hinges protesting. I found the light switch on the wall, flicked it up, and a bare bulb came on, illuminating a narrow, steep stairway. The ceiling was low and sharply canted.

"Careful," Pablo whispered. "The steps-no backs."

I saw what he meant at once: The wooden steps were open, had no risers. A trip hazard, particularly since we couldn't easily look down.

The steps squeaked as we descended into dank cold air, the faint odor of mildew.

The cellar was dark, seemed to go on forever. Presumably, it followed the footprint of the lodge. The concrete floor, fairly recent, had probably been poured over the original packed earth.

A new cinder-block wall ran along one side, partitioning off the fitness center, a recent addition, from the rest of the basement. Against the wall was a line of old black steamer trunks, wooden crates, neat stacks of cardboard boxes. A facing row of metal shelving displayed miscellaneous junk: old lamps, cardboard boxes of lightbulbs, an antique Waring blender. An open pantry on the other wall was stacked with burlap sacks of rice and canned beans and giant tins of cooking oil.

"We need to tie him up to something that won't move," I said. "Where's the boiler?"

"Maybe something else," Pablo said. He jerked his chin to the left.

We carried Buck's body along a narrow aisle between tall steel shelves of laundry detergent and bleach and floor wax. Now, I figured, we were directly under the great room and the front porch. Oddly, the concrete walls sloped inward to what looked, at first glance, like the floor-to-ceiling bars of a prison cell. The light from the stairwell was too distant; I couldn't make out what it was.

Pablo gently set down Buck's head; I dropped the legs. Then he located a light switch mounted on a steel column and flipped it, lighting a line of bulbs on the ceiling.

Behind the steel bars, I could see, was a room whose walls and low, barrel-vaulted ceiling were built from weathered red brick. The floor was gravel. Plain wooden racks held hundreds of dusty wine bottles.

The wine cellar.

"Yes," I said, grasping a bar and tugging. "Good."

I pulled the two lengths of rope from my pockets, held them up. "We're going to need some more rope."

"Rope? I don't think down here…"

"Anything. Wire. Chain."

"Ah, maybe…" He turned slowly and headed back the way we'd come.

The wine cellar's grate was made of stout iron bars, the finest jailhouse construction. The Chвteau Lafitte wasn't going anywhere, and neither was Buck.

A guttural moan.

I spun around, saw Buck starting to sit up.

57

His large hands pushed against the cement slab floor. I sidestepped around behind his back, then lurched forward, hooking my right elbow under his chin. The bristles of his hairy neck felt like steel wool against the crook of my arm. When I had his throat in a vise grip, I grabbed my right hand with my left, clasped them together, and squeezed.

Adrenaline coursed through my bloodstream.

He struggled mightily to free himself from the jailer's hold, flung his hands upward, twisting and torquing his legs around.

My arm muscles trembled from the exertion. In ten seconds or so he'd gone limp. The carotid arteries on either side of the neck supply blood to the brain. Compressed, they don't.

Dad had taught me the blood choke. He'd actually demonstrated it on me once until I passed out.

Pablo rushed toward me, ready to help, then watched me set Buck's head on the floor. He held up a tangled mess of brown lamp cord.

"Perfect." I handed him the steak knife and asked him to cut off pieces a couple of feet long.

In Buck's tactical vest I found a black nylon sheath, out of which I pulled a knife. This was no steak knife, either. It was just like the one I'd seen Verne take out earlier-a Microtech Halo, a single-action front-opener. I could tell right away from the logo, a white claw in a circle set against the matte black, anodized aluminum handle. At Glenview one just like it had sent a kid to the hole for six months.

I pressed the titanium firing button, and a lethal-looking blade shot forward. It kicked in my hand. A four-inch blade, partially serrated. I didn't need to touch the spearpoint to know it could take off a fingertip.

I handed it carefully to Pablo.

"ЎDios mнo!" he breathed. He had one gold tooth: lousy Mexican dental care.

"Be careful."

While he sliced lamp cord, I took out the Ruger, thumbed the cylinder release, saw it was loaded. Several of his vest pockets were stuffed with. 44 Magnum cartridges; I grabbed a handful. There was a flashlight in one of his vest pockets, and I took that, too: an expensive-looking tactical flashlight, the kind you see SWAT teams use to temporarily blind suspects at night.

When Pablo was finished, he handed the knife back to me awkwardly, blade out. He didn't know how to use it. He watched as I pulled back on the charging lever to retract the blade.

I looped some lamp cord around Buck's wrists, and we used it to pull him upright. Then we shoved him against the iron grate and secured him, spread-eagled, in a standing position. Pablo wrapped cord around his ankles while I searched the dusty floor and finally found an oil-stained rag in a corner, stiff and covered with dirt, and stuffed it into Buck's mouth, in case he came to again soon.

"I need to go back upstairs," I said. "To the manager's office."

"But is not safe to go up there."

"I don't have much choice. Is there any other way upstairs besides the way we came in?"

"No."

"Not a bulkhead?"

Pablo didn't know what the word meant, and I didn't know the Spanish. "A delivery entrance?"

He looked blank.

"La entrada de servicio," I said. "Ya sabes, el бrea dondese carga y descarga, por donde se meten las cosas al hotel. "

"Ah." He nodded, thought for a moment. "Yes, but not to upstairs."

"So there is another way out?"

"To the water only."

I didn't understand.

He went over to the iron bars, pointed out the gate in the center that I'd noticed earlier. Mounted on the gate's frame just to the left of Buck's lolling head was an old push-button mechanical combination lock. He punched in three numbers, turned a knob. Then he slowly pulled the gate open. It looked heavy, though it was surely a lot heavier with Buck lashed to it.

"In here," he said.

I followed him into the wine cellar. He pointed to an arched section of the brick wall that had no wine rack in front of it. "The old delivery entrance."

The arched entrance had obviously been bricked in a long time ago. "That doesn't really help us," I said.

"No, no, look. Is where Mr. Paul hides the very expensive wines and things."

He reached behind a wine rack and pulled out a long metal rod, then poked it into a crack in the mortar between two bricks.

A clunking sound, and the entire arched wall jutted forward.

Not a wall: a brick-and-mortar door.

"What the hell-?"

Behind the brick-paved door was a small room. A few wooden wine racks, randomly placed, held maybe a few dozen dusty bottles. A small stack of plastic file boxes, probably Paul's private records.

And a second iron gate. This chamber was actually, I saw, the mouth of a long tunnel.

"This goes right down to the dock, doesn't it?" I said. "Under the dock, in fact."

Pablo nodded. "When they built the lodge a long time ago, all the deliveries came by sea. They used to bring all the things in through this tunnel. But not for a long time. The old owners, before Mr. Paul, they closed it off."

And they'd taken advantage of the renovation to build a hidden wine cellar for the good stuff. Or a hidden storage nook. "Is this gate locked?"

"No more."

"Everyone who works here knows about this?"

"No, just…" He was suddenly uncomfortable. "Josй and I-sometimes we smoke, you know, the mota."

"Weed."

He nodded. "Mr. Paul, he fire us if he know. So Josй found this place under the dock."

"I'm going to try to get upstairs to the office. I want you to go down to the water," I said. "And look for a boat."

"Which?"

"Any one that has a key in the engine. Or a rowboat, if you have to. You know how to use a boat?"

"Yes, of course."

"When you get out there, move slowly and quietly, and don't start up the motor until the last possible minute. Take the boat to the nearest lodge and wake them up. Get help. The police, anyone. Tell them what's going on. Okay?"

"Okay." He seemed to hesitate.

"You're worried about the noise from the boat's engine, aren't you?"

"They have guns. They shoot."

"But you'll be far from the lodge."

A sudden static burst came from Buck's two-way radio: "Buck, come in."

The voice echoed in the low-ceilinged chamber. I couldn't identify it.

I returned to the outer gate, pulled the radio from Buck's belt: a Motorola Handie-Talkie.

"Buck, it's Verne," the voice said again. "Where the hell are you?"

"Maybe they look for you now," Pablo said. "Is not safe for you up there."

It all depended, of course, on what Ali and the other hostages told them. I switched off the HT. "You go," I said. "Get help. Don't you worry about me."

58

At the top of the stairs, I switched off the light, stood in absolute darkness.

Quiet.

Then again, the cellar door was two inches thick, and then there was the kitchen door: a lot of wood between me and anyone who might be searching for me. I turned the knob, pushed the cellar door open slowly. The hinges squeaked no matter how slowly I opened it.

A few steps into the dark hallway, I stopped again to listen.

Voices now.

From the great room. I sank to my knees, out of sight, and listened.

Two voices, hushed and urgent. One was Verne's, manic, rising and falling, speedy and loud. The other was Wayne's oddly high alto. The tattooed ex-con conferring with the crew-cut blond lunk.

Scraps of argument, some words and phrases more distinct than others.

"…heard him saying he was going to bolt." That was Verne.

"To who?" Wayne, now.

"-said he changed his mind. Got spooked after Russell killed those guys. Didn't want to go to jail for the rest of his life."

"He told you that?"

"…the chick said."

"What chick?"

"I don't know, whatever her name. Paris Hilton, how the hell do I know? The babe."

Something I couldn't hear, and then Verne saying, "I'll take his cut." A sniggering laugh.

Something else, then Wayne: "Where the hell's he gonna go?"

"Out there somewhere. Russell wants you to get your ass out there and look for him."

"The hell's he gonna go? Not the Zodiac-"

"They got other boats down there."

"…cut the spark-plug wires, so what's he gonna do, swim to Vancouver?"

Wayne said something else I couldn't quite make out, and then Verne said, "Christ's sake, then look in the woods."

"Can't go more than twenty yards in that forest without getting stuck. You saw that."

"You saw the guy in the jungle in Panama-he's an animal."

"And if I find him?"

"Waste him, Russell says. Can't trust him anymore."

"I'm not going to waste Bucky for taking off. That's whacked, man."

"You don't do it, buddy, Russell's gonna grease you. You know he will. He's not taking any chances. Not when we're this close to the big score."

The jungle in Panama. Special Forces, then. Military, anyway. At least these guys and Buck, probably Russell, too.

So I'd learned a couple of other things as well. The cover story about Buck had worked. They weren't looking for an unconscious comrade but a defector. They weren't looking for me, either; they hadn't yet realized I was missing.

That meant they'd search outside, not inside. I could hide here until they were gone and get to the office without being spotted.

Other, crazier ideas came to me. Fire a few rounds at those two, right through the door. The.44 Magnum rounds would penetrate the hardwood, no problem. But without accuracy: I didn't know their position. Not without looking through the round window-which would expose my location.

Sure, I might get lucky. But the odds were that I'd hit neither. Maybe wound one of them. They'd grab their weapons, and it would be two against one. And as soon as Russell and his brother heard the shots, it would be four against one.

Trying to shoot these two was insanity. Yet until they moved, I couldn't get to the manager's office.

By then, Pablo was on his way to the water. Maybe, depending on how easy it was to move through the old tunnel, he was already outside, under the dock. Even at the kidnappers' Zodiac.

Then the voices stopped. Retreating footsteps, then a screen door opening and closing. One of them-was it Wayne?-had gone outside to search for Buck.

I slid across the floor, paused to listen again.

No one out there now.

I pushed the kitchen service door from the bottom, just a few inches.

Then a few inches more.

The Ruger tucked into my belt: I needed both hands free.

Then, rising slowly, I sidled through the doorway and eased it closed behind me.

59

Looking left, then right, I surveyed the room, satisfied that no one was in sight.

Through the cavernous shadowed room slowly, cautiously, footsteps soft. I was afraid I might trip over something. But as my eyes adjusted, I was able to zigzag without tipping over a vase or a wine-glass.

Past the staircase landing, then into the hallway that led to the side entrance, the bathroom, the manager's office. Three identical wooden doors off the hall: dark-stained, five horizontal raised panels. All with black iron knobs and locksets that opened with the same skeleton key, Paul had said. First was the bathroom, the next two unmarked, the fourth had a small brass plaque that said MANAGER.

Just as Paul had promised, a legal bookcase stood outside his office door. Squat, dark-stained quarter-sawn oak, glass-fronted. The sort of gloomy semiantique furniture you might find in the courthouse office of a public defender in a small town in upstate New York.

On top of the bookcase, a brown ceramic lamp. I lifted it, spotted the skeleton key.

The manager's office door was locked, but the old key fit snugly in the lock. It turned with a satisfying click.

I pulled the revolver from my belt, held it in my right hand as I turned the knob and opened the door with my left.

The room was small, windowless, absolutely dark. It smelled of old wood and damp paper. I pocketed the skeleton key, then shut the door behind me.

I paused for a moment, considering whether to lock the door or not. Was it more important to keep the bad guys out or be able to make a quick escape? Impossible to know.

I decided not to lock it.

Then I pulled out Buck's tactical flashlight, pressed the tailcap switch to pulse the beam on for a second. In one freeze-frame I could make out a small, rolltop desk, stored its location in my memory. On top of it, an Apple iMac computer, the one-piece model with the flat screen and spherical base that was popular a few years ago.

I had an Apple computer at home. When you pressed the power switch, it chimed like the opening chord of a Beethoven symphony. Unless the volume was turned down. But you didn't know until it was too late.

Even turning it on was a risk, but wasn't everything just then? I found the power button by feel on the back side of the base and pressed it.

In a few seconds it chimed. Loud.

I sat in an old rolling office chair and watched the screen light up and come to life, listening for footfalls in the hall.

And suddenly I changed my mind, got up, and locked the door. At least if someone came by to investigate, I'd hear the doorknob rattle and have just enough time to take aim.

The screen flashed the Apple logo. Its hard drive crunched and crunched, and I waited. It seemed to take forever. If Paul had installed a password to keep out unauthorized users, he hadn't bothered to mention it.

But no, a swirly blue pattern came right up. A row of icons on the right: Internet Explorer and the Safari browser. I double-clicked Safari and waited for it to load.

And waited.

Jesus, I thought, this is slow.

For God's sake, hurry. I found myself talking to the computer, all the while listening for footsteps, knowing that at any minute I might be discovered.

But all I got was a big white box, a blank screen.

Then a few lines of text, not what I wanted to see:

YOU ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

Safari can't open the page http://www.google.com/

because your computer isn't connected to the Internet.

I quit Safari and reloaded it, and got the same error message. I clicked on the "Network Diagnostics" button and got a pane with a row of red dots and more dismaying news:

Built-in Ethernet-failed

Internet-failed

Either the modem was down or the satellite Internet connection wasn't working.

Shit.

Switching on the flashlight, I traced the modem cable to a closet. The door was unlocked, and the modem was right inside, bracketed to the wall.

Its power light was on, but the receiver light was off. That told me it wasn't getting any satellite signal. So I did what we've all learned to do in this age of balky technology equipment: I shut the modem down, waited a few seconds, then powered it back up.

No change. Nothing different.

The problem wasn't with the modem or the computer. Someone had cut off Internet access. There was no way to e-mail out.

Or wire money out, either.

60

That was the puzzling thing.

It could hardly be a coincidence that the Internet connection was down. Russell's men must have done something. After all, once they'd grabbed the sat phone, the only way for their hostages to transmit a distress message was via the Internet.

Yet without it, there'd be no half-billion-dollar ransom. So barring some accident during the takeover, they must have dismantled it. Not in here, though, or I'd have seen it. Somewhere outside.

I had to get out there and try to restore the link.

The summer after I'd got out of Glenview and before I joined the National Guard, I'd gotten a job as a cable TV installer. Before the summer was over I quit, but not before I'd acquired a few useless skills, like how to splice coaxial cable.

Maybe not so useless.

But if the line had been cut, it would take me a long time to repair it without the right tools-a crimper and some connectors and other parts that I doubted Peter the handyman kept around. When the satellite went down, they probably called the satellite company. Chances were, Peter didn't do those repairs himself. That was a fairly specialized skill.

I waited at the door, didn't hear anyone walking by. Holding the Ruger in my right hand, the key in my left, I unlocked the door, pushed it open a few inches, looked out.

No one in the hall that I could see.

As I crept along the dark hall, I glanced out a window. No one out there. Maybe Wayne was still trudging through the forest, looking for Buck. Maybe he'd gotten caught in the underbrush.

I kept looking, trying to locate the satellite dish. I vaguely remembered seeing one somewhere behind the lodge, mounted on top of an outbuilding. Which made sense: The dish didn't fit in with the rustic dйcor.

Sure enough, it was where I remembered: on top of a shed about two hundred feet from the lodge. The cable that ran from the lodge to the dish would be buried, of course. If it had been cut, there were only two places it could have been done: at the shed, or on the exterior of the lodge.

Gently nudging the screen door open, I stepped out onto the soft earth, then pushed the door closed behind me so it wouldn't slam. The pneumatic closer hissed in annoyance. Pine needles crunched underfoot. I inhaled the delicious cool air. It smelled of salt water and pine. It was a relief.

For a moment, I allowed myself to enjoy the illusion of freedom.

But of course I wasn't free. Not as long as Ali and all the others were trapped inside.

Just keep going, I told myself. Don't overthink.

Self-doubt could be crippling.

I walked slowly along the log siding, looking for a cable stapled to the concrete foundation. The wall outside Paul's office was the most logical place to find it. I couldn't risk switching on the flashlight; fortunately, the moon was bright.

In a few minutes I found it: a loop of cable sprouting from the concrete, a few inches above the ground.

One end of the cable dangling loose.

It had been unscrewed from its connector. That was how they'd cut off Internet access. Quick and easy. Above all, easy to screw back in when they were ready to use it.

Except for one little thing.

The connector was missing.

A little piece of precision-machined, nickel-plated brass. An F-81 barrel connector, it was called. Used to join two pieces of coaxial cable. I'd spent much of that summer fumbling with the damned things, losing them in people's basements and on their lawns.

I quickly searched the ground, just to be sure, but I didn't need to. I knew what Russell had done. Simple and clever. He'd removed that tiny, but crucial piece, to make sure no one could get on the Internet to send out an SOS.

I was impressed by Russell's thoroughness.

It also gave me an idea.

I raced over to the generator shed, where the satellite dish was bolted to the roof. At the back of the small, shingled building, I found where the cable came out of the ground and ran up the outside wall to the dish.

Kneeling, I took out Buck's knife, pressed the trigger button to eject the blade.

With one quick motion, I sliced through the cable.

If I couldn't use the Internet, then neither could Russell. I doubted he or his men knew the first thing about how to splice coaxial cable, which sure wasn't like electrical wire.

I did, though. Those few weeks of tedium suddenly seemed less pointless.

Now I had something he needed.

But as I turned to head down to the shore, I heard a voice.

61

It had come from the front of the lodge.

A shout, quick and sharp: "Stop right there."

Pablo had been spotted; it could be nothing else.

I turned toward the shore, taking long, silent strides along the side of the building.

Down the hill a few hundred feet a bulky silhouette descended the wooden steps of the dock. An arm extended: a weapon.

"I'm not going to tell you again."

Pablo was standing on the beach, hands at his side. He was torquing from one side to the other, as if trying to decide which way to run. Behind him, floating in the water, the black hulk of an inflatable craft moored to the dock.

I watched with a feeling of desperate helplessness. Pablo had volunteered to help, and implicit in that deal was that I'd be his protector.

Some protector.

Wayne wasn't going to shoot the kid, I was certain-not without Russell's approval, anyway. They'd bring him in, interrogate him, force him to tell them how he'd managed to escape. And where I was.

In the meantime, I'd have to grab a boat and summon help, but the time would be even shorter, and the likelihood of successfully rescuing the other hostages would have plummeted.

Would Russell then decide to make a "lesson" out of some lowly lodge staff member? There'd be no reason for him to do it, not after Grogan and Danziger. But with Russell, you never knew.

Wayne descended a few more steps, then stopped, raising his other hand to steady his grip. From here, his gun looked larger, longer than it had before. An optical illusion, maybe.

Pablo gave a high, strangled yelp, his words obliterated by the crash of the surf.

Wayne was much closer to the shore now than to me.

Torn by indecision, I raised my gun, lined up the sights. His body was a distant blur.

No. I couldn't bring myself to fire at Wayne. Besides, at this distance, I had little chance of hitting the target. And once I pulled the trigger, whether I hit him or not, everything would change at once. They'd hear the gunshot, know I was out here.

If I fired, I'd surely miss-and I'd become a fugitive.

I had to help Pablo escape. That was all I could really do now.

So I did the only thing I could think of to distract Wayne, get him to turn around, divert his attention and give Pablo the chance to run. I picked up a rock.

No way would I hit him at this distance: the greatest pitcher in baseball couldn't have beaned the guy from here. But at least the sound of the rock hitting the ground might break his concentration, cause him to turn. That was something.

Pablo raised his hands in surrender, walked slowly toward Wayne, who said something I couldn't hear. Then Pablo did something bizarre: He clapped his hands, then put his arms behind him and clapped again.

What the hell was he doing?

I hurled the rock as hard as I could, and at that precise moment, Wayne fired.

Three shots in quick succession.

He probably never even heard the hollow pock of the rock hitting the wooden step.

I saw the muzzle flash, but the shots were distant, muted pops, masked by the sound of the ocean.

Pablo twisted, jerked forward, crumpled to the ground, a small dark shape on the beach. He lay still, obviously dead. He could have been just another rock, another boulder, a pile of debris.

62

Mom's voice woke me, high and keening, from the kitchen downstairs: "Please! That's enough! That's enough!"

Something hard crashing. My digital clock said two in the morning.

Dad, thundering, "You goddamned bitch."

I lay in bed, not moving, heart racing.

Mom's voice, hysterical: "Get out of here! Get out of the house! Just leave us!"

"I'm not leaving my house, you bitch!"

He'd lost another job. As scary and foul-tempered as he usually was, when he got fired, he drank even more; he hit Mom even more.

Another crash. Something thudded. The whole house seemed to shake.

Silence.

Terrified, I leaped out of bed, vaulted down the stairs to the kitchen. Mom was lying on the floor, unconscious. Eyes closed, twin streams of blood running from her nostrils.

Some protector I was.

"Get up, you bitch!" my dad screamed. "Get the hell up!"

My blood ran cold. He'd gone berserk.

"What'd you do to her?" I shouted.

He saw me, snarled: "Get the hell out of here."

"What did you do to her?" I lunged, hands outspread, shoved him against the stove.

At fifteen, I was as tall as my dad and starting to get some muscles on me, though Dad was still far beefier and more powerful.

For a second, his face went slack in surprise: I'd just done the unthinkable.

Then his face went deep red. He turned, grabbed a cast-iron frying pan from the stovetop, whacked it against the side of my head. I'd backed up out of the way, but not in time. The pan clipped my ear, the pain unbelievable.

I yowled, doubled over, my ear ringing.

"We gonna do this the hard way?" he shouted, and he swung the frying pan again.

This time, instead of backing up, I shot forward, pushed him hard, everything a blur. His sour perspiration smell, his beer breath, the gray-white of his T-shirt spattered with Mom's blood.

A flash of black, the frying pan, as he pulled it back to swing again. Mom's cry: She'd regained consciousness.

Everything was happening at once, and nothing made sense, nothing but the anger inside me that had finally boiled over, the pumping adrenaline that gave me the strength to overpower the monster, to smash him back against the upper kitchen cabinet, the one with the glass windows in it and the neatly stacked dishes. To keep him from hitting me again, to stop him from hitting Mom again.

To be a protector.

The back of his head cracked into the sharp corner, where the wood veneer had peeled off, and he'd never gotten around to repairing it.

He roared, "You son of a bitch, I'm going to kill you!"

But the anger and the adrenaline and all those years of storing it inside made me stronger than he, at least for the moment. And maybe he didn't expect it from me, and maybe he was just too drunk.

My hands clutched the sides of his head, the way you'd hold someone you were about to kiss, only I shoved his head against the corner of the cabinet again, and again, and again.

He bellowed low and deep, like a beast. Blood roared in my ears. Snot ran down my nose. His eyes bulged, looking shocked and disbelieving and-was it possible?-afraid.

I didn't stop. I was in that dark tunnel now, had to keep going. Kept smashing his head back against the sharp corner. Felt something in his skull go soft. I had a fleeting thought, in the red haze of my madness, that it was like a hard acorn squash that had suddenly turned into an overripe zucchini. The awful bellowing finally stopped, but his eyes bulged.

I finally heard my mom's voice shrilling: "Jakey, Jakey, Jakey, stop it!"

I stopped. Let go. Dad toppled, then slumped to the floor.

I stared.

"Jakey, oh my God, what have you done?"

My legs buckled. An icy coldness in my stomach, icy fingers clutching my bowels, my chest. And at the same time, something else, too.

Relief.

63

I stood in the cool breeze and the dusky moonlight for what felt like a whole minute. It might have been only a few seconds, though: Time had slowed.

Pablo was unarmed, no threat; he'd obeyed orders, had done what he'd been told to do.

He had put his hands up. He'd surrendered. There was no reason to kill him.

Wayne's gun had looked longer because it was longer: He'd screwed on a sound suppressor. Probably so as not to tip off Buck, who he thought was out here.

Grief hollowed me out, and into that hollow place rushed a far more familiar emotion. Loosing the bad wolf, giving in to the rage: There was something strangely comforting about it.

It fueled me, propelled me, focused my mind, sharpened my senses.

I knew now what I had to do.

Wayne lumbered down the dock steps to the beach. Maybe he wanted to make sure Pablo was dead. Maybe he wanted to move the body somewhere, hide it or dispose of it. Or maybe he simply wanted to check the Zodiac to see if it was okay.

The hiss of the pneumatic closer.

I peered around the corner of the building, saw Verne emerge from the side entrance. He took something out of his pocket that glinted. The flick of a butane lighter, a puff of smoke. He held the flame to the bulb end of a glass freebase pipe, sucked in the smoke, held it in his lungs until he coughed it out.

I dropped to my knees, crawled along the front of the lodge. The porch was as long as the building's faзade, raised about five feet above ground level. I moved quietly, staying close to the wooden skirting, struggling to maintain my balance. The slope down to the shore was steep.

It wasn't easy, given the sharp incline from the shore to the lodge. When I reached the wooden walkway that connected the porch to the steps that wound to the pier, I stopped.

Wayne wasn't looking up at the lodge, though I didn't think anyone inside had heard the silenced gunfire. The great room remained dark. The only light spilled from the windows of the enclosed porch at the northwest corner.

I resumed crawling, went under the walkway, which was elevated a few feet about the steep hillside, shimmied through the narrow gap between creosote-treated timber pilings, then back along the porch skirting until I was beneath the screened porch.

Once I reached the west side of the lodge, I figured I should be able to crawl the short span to the woods unseen. That was the only way to reach the shore, and the boat, without being seen, but getting through the dense forest, though-

Voices.

I sank as low to the ground as I could.

Russell was saying something, in a calm voice, that I couldn't make out. Then came a reply, and I recognized Travis: "…ain't what we were hired to do."

Their voices got softer, more conversational, and as much as I strained to hear, I couldn't.

I wondered how long it would take for Wayne to return to the lodge and report that he'd just killed a young Mexican, a member of the lodge staff-and a hostage. The first question would be how one of the hostages had escaped. There'd be a head count. They'd quickly realize I was missing, too.

Which would surely trigger further reprisals. More "lessons."

The ground was earthen and soft, but here and there were buried surprises, rocks and twigs that bruised my kneecaps. The narrow strip of lawn lay just ahead, and beyond it, the forest. The only way down to the water, the boats.

And then Travis's voice, whining, almost pleading: "-hundred million. Not five hundred million, man, come on, what are we doing here? Jesus, Russell, man, that's like a whole new level of, of-"

Russell murmured something lulling.

Travis spoke, but just a fragment floated through the air: "…your cellie from Lompoc."

Lompoc, I thought. That was a prison somewhere. A federal prison. Russell's cellmate from Lompoc prison, it had to be.

John Danziger: One of their employees got arrested in South America on a child recovery case he was working, charged with kidnapping under the international treaty agreements. Did a couple years in prison in the U.S.

Now Russell raised his voice. "No, Travis, you listen to me very carefully. All he cares about is getting the goddamned ninety-seven-point-five million dollars in his goddamned account in Liechtenstein by the close of business today. He gets that, he's cool, he's off the hook."

Who was "he"-Russell's prison cellmate?

Travis interrupted him, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

My scalp prickled.

Ninety-seven-point-five million.

Off the hook.

Liechtenstein.

Close of business today.

So this wasn't just a clever heist dreamed up by a gang of ex-soldiers. They'd been hired.

I sat up, keeping my head just below the porch floor. I waited, listened harder, finally gave up. Then, my heart knocking, I rose slowly and raced toward the edge of the forest.

64

For a moment, hidden in a dense stand of pines, I looked back at the lodge.

A tall, lanky figure stared out the porch window: Russell.

Maybe he was simply impatient, wondering what was taking Wayne so long. He had a schedule to keep, after all.

I began scrambling down the steep hill toward the shore. Coniferous forest, especially virgin, primitive woods like this, could be like Amazonian jungle. I found myself climbing through hellish, thorny underbrush, thickets of ancient, moss-covered spruces and giant Douglas firs, tendrils of protruding tree roots. Twisted, gnarled pines with boughs so densely grown together I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me. Branches whipped against my face. The forest canopy was so thick overhead that it blocked the stars.

As I stepped over a drift of leaves and pine needles, my foot struck something.

It swung forward and grasped my shin, and when I saw what it was, I had to stop myself from screaming.

A well-manicured hand. Through the blanket of leaves that had been strewn over Danziger's body I could make out the light blue sleeve of his alligator shirt.

Next to it was another drift of leaves: Alan Grogan.

And a third body concealed by leaves and twigs. With the toe of my shoe, I cleared away just enough to see a dark-skinned young man in jeans and sweatshirt. Josй, I knew at once. Pablo's friend. The first one they'd killed, when they first arrived: the gunshot we'd all heard at dinner. He'd probably seen them come ashore when he was cleaning out the boats.

Undone by what I'd just seen, I kicked free of the dead hand, lurched forward, and tripped on a root; tumbled headfirst, then cracked my forehead against a craggy rock outcropping.

For a few seconds I breathed hard, allowed the pain to suffuse my body. When that didn't work, I bit my lip, tried to will the pain away.

Head throbbing, I scrambled to my feet. My face, scratched and scraped from the branches, stung.

The roar of the waves told me I was close now.

The terrain had become so steeply pitched that I couldn't keep myself from sliding downhill. Only by grabbing at the branch of a downed tree was I able to stop just before plummeting off a scrabbly ledge into the ocean.

There was no shore here; the ledge was far too narrow. But the water was shallow, and it was the only way to the dock. Slowly, I lowered my feet into the surf, braced for a cold shock, relieved to find it wasn't too bad.

I waded along the shoreline, careful not to let the water reach my waist. Buck's revolver was in my pocket, and I wanted to keep it in operational condition.

The shoreline wound past the trees to the small beachfront. The water had gotten steadily colder, or maybe it had been deceptively warm at first; my legs were getting numb. My pant legs chafed my crotch.

There, out in the open, I could be seen from the lodge. I looked up, saw no one.

Wayne was gone. I assumed he'd made his way back to the lodge while I was climbing through the woods.

The Zodiac floated in the water, hitched to the dock.

On the sand nearby lay Pablo's body.

The Zodiac was a classic military inflatable, a commando boat with a skin of leathery black synthetic rubber. The Army donates them to fire and police departments, and sometimes they turn up on the black market.

Around twenty feet long; probably seated fifteen people. Mounted on the black plywood transom board at the stern was a twenty-five-horsepower Yamaha outboard motor. A good, light engine, powerful enough but not too loud. A pair of aluminum oars rested in brackets: much quieter.

As I approached, though, I realized that the boat wasn't just tied up. It was locked. A cable connected the Zodiac to a steel horn cleat bolted to the dock. It was a strong cable, too-thick twisted-steel wire, coated in clear plastic, its ends looping through a sturdy brass padlock.

I tried to fight back the surge of desperation.

Was there was some way to get the cable off? Hoisting myself out of the water, I climbed onto the dock, then immediately lay flat on the splintery planks so I wouldn't be easily spotted from the lodge. I leaned over, tugged at the cleat to see if I could pry it loose.

A sulfurous smell rose like marsh gas, assaulted my nostrils. As I grappled with the cleat, the metal cold and slick in my hands, I heard the splash of the water, surging and boiling against the dock's wooden posts, dark and ominous.

But the steel cleat was too secure, and the cable was too sturdy. The boat wasn't going to move anywhere. I'd have to clamber back up the hill through the forest and look for a cable cutter. Maybe in the maintenance shed up the hill.

That meant exposure, more time. Could I risk it? If I had to…

Discouraged, I arose.

And felt a hand on my shoulder.

65

Even before I turned around I knew whose hand it was. I hadn't heard Wayne's approach: I'd been distracted, and the surf had masked the heavy tread.

Now I found myself looking into the little black hole at the end of the sound suppressor threaded onto his black SIG-Sauer.

You don't put a silencer on a gun unless you mean to fire it.

"Boy, you're full of surprises, aren't you?" he said. "Nowhere to run, you know."

Buck's revolver was in my pocket, if I could get to it in time. But an unsilenced gunshot would draw notice from the lodge, attention I didn't want. The knife would be a better idea.

If I could pull it out without him seeing and killing me first.

I took a long, slow breath. "Who says I want to run?"

"Just put your hands up, Jake," he said, "and come back inside. I don't want to hurt you. I really don't."

He didn't know I'd seen him pull the trigger.

I reflexively glanced at Pablo's sprawled body, on the sand behind him.

His eyes remained locked on mine; he knew what I'd seen.

"Come on, now, let's go," he said. "Hands up, Jake, and you won't get hurt. I promise."

I'd barely heard him talk before. The man who'd just killed Pablo had a surprisingly gentle manner. His piping voice was almost melodious.

And he knew my name, which was interesting.

I'd killed once before and thought I'd never have to do it again.

I didn't want to.

Don't make me do this.

"Jake. You see, you really don't have a choice."

"No, I really don't."

"All right," he said. "Now we're talking."

I bowed my head as if considering my options, and my right hand felt unseen for my back pocket, very slowly pulling out the knife.

Pablo had died because I couldn't bring myself to kill for the second time in my life.

It really was that simple. Not just that I'd misjudged Wayne, though I had. But that I couldn't do it.

I could now.

Nodding, I thumbed the trigger button and felt it jolt in my hand as the blade ejected.

And then I lunged at him.

The man who'd just killed Pablo. I saw him as if through fog.

My heart raced. A quick upward swipe against his throat, and his mouth gaped in surprise, exposing the tiny jagged teeth of some feral woodland creature.

His knees buckled, and he toppled backwards. The dock shook. His pistol clattered, slid almost to the edge of the dock.

Now I had the knife against his throat, my knees on his chest. The blade caught the moonlight. It glinted and sparkled. Blood ran from a gash just below his neckline.

"You know what this knife can do," I said. "Answer a couple of questions, and I'll let you go."

He blinked a few times, and I saw, out of the corner of my eye, his right hand start to move. I pressed the blade against the skin. "Don't."

"What do you want to know?"

"What happens after you get your money?"

He was blinking rapidly: nervous. His eyes shifted up and to his right, then back. "I can hardly breathe, you know. Your knee-"

"What happens to us?"

"Don't worry, Jake," he said. "We're not leaving anyone behind."

I studied his face, saw the very beginning of a smile, no more.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I said, though I knew.

He didn't answer. I slid the blade lightly against his throat. A fresh line of blood appeared.

"Hey!"

"Who hired you?"

"You did."

I slid the blade again, a bit harder this time.

"You don't get it, do you? We're just employees like you. Just doing a job. Come on, Jake. Seriously, now. There's no need for violence."

I gritted my teeth; my hand trembled. He probably thought I was frightened.

I wasn't, not anymore. "Tell that to the kid on the beach over there."

"I saw that. It's a shame."

"I saw it, too," I said. "Watched you put three bullets into him. One more question, Wayne. What did you say to him at the very end?"

Now he was unable to stop his smile. "I told him to dance the cucaracha."

Tears blurred my vision.

Wayne took a deep, labored breath. "He looked like a puppet, didn't you think?"

Blood roared in my ears, and I was in the dark tunnel, speeding along, no exit.

This time I slashed without holding back, and a geyser spewed from his neck, spilling over his camo shirt and vest. He made a choking, gagging sound. His right hand grasped the air, the fingers twitching.

With both hands, I gave his body a hard shove. It made a great splash.

66

The adrenaline began to ebb from my bloodstream, leaving me rubber-limbed, feeling played out.

I stood, though my knees were barely able to support me. Wiped the blood off the knife, then retracted the blade and slipped it into my back pocket. I fought off a wave of nausea. Then I remembered Wayne's SIG-Sauer, picked it up from the edge of the dock, slipped it into my waistband.

Tried to summon the strength to climb back up the hill, through the tangled underbrush, to go to the toolshed and try to find a pair of bolt cutters.

And then, from somewhere up the hill, came a high-pitched cry.

A female cry, quickly stifled.

Coming out of the eastern side of the lodge, the area where Verne took his smoking breaks, were the silhouettes of two people, one shoving the other.

It was Verne, and he had a woman with him.

I raced up the wooden steps, right out in the open, no longer caring whether Russell or anyone else was watching.

As I approached, I heard scuffling. For a few seconds I couldn't comprehend what was happening, why Verne was kneeling on top of Ali, pinioning her down, why something had been stuffed into her mouth and her skirt was pulled up and her soft vulnerable flesh was exposed, but the moment, the very second I understood, my brain stopped working.

67

I was in that strange and familiar place where my pulse pounded steadily and the anger shot through my veins like high-octane fuel. I was possessed by a single-minded purpose. I was in a trance, in a tunnel. The whole world had collapsed to just him and me.

Verne looked up, startled, as I rushed up to him, but it wasn't easy for him to move. Not with his pants pulled down that way, his discolored white jockey shorts down around his knees, his engorged phallus a beet-red upturned thumb sprouting from a mop of mossy brown pubic hair. Not while he was struggling to hold Ali down with both hands and feet.

She was writhing and bucking against him, trying to free herself with all her strength, but her hands were roped together, and she was far overmatched in any case. Her face was red from exertion. Her cries were muffled by the panties he'd stuffed in her mouth.

Then, scowling at me, still kneeling on Ali's thighs, he lifted his right arm, swung it behind him to grab for his holster, entangled in his trousers.

I had Buck's gun in my pocket and Wayne's pistol in my waistband, but in my adrenaline haze I'd forgotten about both of them. I reared back and drop-kicked him, hard, in the throat. Something in there crunched and gave way.

Verne made an oooof sound, then emitted an enraged, animal-like growl. He wobbled, knocked off-balance, but quickly righted himself, got back up on his knees and tried to stand as he grabbed his pants to hitch them up.

Ali twisted away. Her face was scratched and her lipstick was smeared and her eyes leaked tears. Her blouse was ripped, exposing her bra.

He seemed to have given up on his gun, for the moment. Instead, as he propelled himself up from a squatting position, he grabbed my foot, twisted it, and slammed his other fist into my solar plexus. I doubled over, staggered backwards, the wind knocked out of me.

My entire world had one single purpose: inflicting a very personal violence on that monster.

Back on his knees, he had his revolver out now and was aiming at me. He shuddered and twitched, his gun hand shaking. His eyes danced. The meth might have speeded up his reaction time, but it had also fried his nervous system; he couldn't hold the gun steady.

I grabbed his gun hand at the wrist with one hand, twisted the gun in my other, and jerked it backwards. His finger had gotten stuck in the trigger guard, as I expected it would, and as I wrenched the gun out of his grip, his trigger finger bent way out of joint, obviously broken.

Then, flinging his gun out of the way, I slammed my elbow into his face. He went uhhhh, toppled backwards. He groaned, struggled up to a sitting position, gasping for air.

I flashed on that image of Ali trapped beneath his knees and arms, her nakedness exposed, her beauty and vulnerability, and what little restraint I had was gone.

Grabbing his sleeves from behind, I slammed the entire weight of my body against the back of his head, lifting my feet off the ground, throwing all my weight into it, forcing his head down. His throat gurgled. His neck bent all the way forward until his chin nuzzled his chest, and I felt his head jolt forward, then he made a short, sharp gasp as his neck audibly snapped.

For a few seconds, I lay on top of him. Then I rolled off him, heart racing, panting and heaving.

I rose, went over to Ali, lying exhausted on the lawn, and knelt and pulled out the gag. I threw my arms around her, squeezed hard. Her face was hot and wet against my shirt.

I held her for almost a minute. She'd begun to sob. I held her tight and waited. When her sobs slowed, I let go, took out the knife, and slashed through the ropes to free her hands.

68

We need to get him out of here," I said, picking up the rope I'd just cut off her and jamming them in my pocket. "And we've got to get ourselves out of here, too. Before someone comes looking for him."

"Landry," she said, rising slowly. Her voice shook. "What you just did-"

"Later," I said. "Come on, help me." Verne's little stainless-steel revolver lay on the grass. I grabbed it, and slipped it under my belt.

I grabbed Verne's legs, and she took his arms. She looked dazed but kept moving. He was lighter than Buck had been, but still Ali struggled. Her strength had been sapped.

The edge of the forest was just a few feet behind the shed. We'd only gone a few feet through the dense underbrush when she dropped his arms. "I can't," she said, panting.

"This is far enough." The body couldn't be seen from the house, with the shed in the way.

Then I began rummaging through his vest, grabbing all the spare ammo I could find. He had an extra couple of magazines in one of the pockets, already loaded.

We stood behind the shed. Her face was shadowed.

Her lipstick was smeared and her face was scratched and tear-stained. It broke my heart. Gently, I put a hand up to her face and wiped away her tears, the smudged makeup. I wanted to feel the satin skin of her face. She closed her eyes, seemed to respond to the consolation in my touch.

"Are you okay?"

She nodded, began sobbing again.

"Ali." I stroked her hair.

"Who the hell are you, Landry?" she whispered.

69

There isn't any time," I said. "Any second, Russell's going to realize we're both missing. If he hasn't already. We'll talk some other time. Right now I need your help."

She asked all sorts of questions, her mind firing on all cylinders.

"'Close of business today' has to refer to close of business in Europe," she said. "Liechtenstein. Which is, if I remember correctly, next to Switzerland. Nine hours ahead of us. If their banks keep the same hours as our banks, that means Russell probably can't transfer funds after seven in the morning here."

"Did you notice a clock in the game room?" I asked.

"No. But sunrise here is around five A.M. this time of year-I remember going over the schedule. So it's maybe four thirty. The other thing is that he has to wait for our bank in New York to open. Around nine, I'd guess-six o'clock here. So he has one hour to make everything happen."

"And we have about an hour and a half."

"You know what's strange about this whole thing?" she said at last.

"What?"

"Think about how well briefed Russell seems to be. How well prepared. How much he knows about the company."

"He has a source inside the company," I said. "Has to be."

"But do you think it's possible he's actually working for someone inside Hammond?"

I was silent for a moment. "That's what that guy Wayne said, only I didn't quite get what he meant. I asked him who hired them, and he said, 'You did.' Meaning Hammond, I'm guessing."

"Someone here?"

"Possibly."

"But for what?"

"Good old embezzlement, maybe."

"Not so easy these days," Ali said. "Not since Enron, anyway. Too many people looking at the books."

"So if you want to steal a load of money, you've got to get creative, right?"

"I suppose so. Not my area of expertise. But why do something like this-a kidnapping? Why hire Russell and his men to try to pull off something so big and messy and downright risky?"

I nodded. "Only one reason, I figure. If you're trying to make people think it's something it's not."

"I don't follow."

"That's the thing that's been bothering me about this kidnapping-how obvious it feels. How…I don't know, almost staged."

"Staged?"

"You ever hear of something called an autosecuestro?"

She shook her head.

"Happens in Latin America from time to time. It's a staged kidnapping. A self-kidnapping. People fake their own kidnapping, to raise money from insurance companies or employers. Even from their own family members."

"A hoax, then."

"Of a sort."

"But…what kind of massive greed would make someone do something so insane? All this bloodshed."

"Maybe the murders weren't supposed to happen. Maybe Russell's just out of control. And maybe it's not greed."

"Then what?"

"Maybe desperation."

"Huh?"

"Look at all the guys on our management team-they're not reckless types, right? Greedy, sure, some of them. No doubt. But they're not motivated by the big score."

"So what would drive them to do something like this?"

"Fear."

"But who?"

I shook my head.

"Maybe the question to ask is, who had the chance to meet with Russell privately?" she said.

"We all did, right? When he did his 'interviews.'"

"But when problems came up, when decisions had to be made-whoever hired Russell would have had to talk to him in private. So he'd need a way to do that without the rest of us noticing. An excuse."

"Anyone who asked to use the bathroom could have talked secretly with Russell, and we'd never have known it."

"And Upton Barlow asked a bunch of times," I said. "Because of his prostate problem. And Geoff Latimer, with his diabetes."

"Did you know he was diabetic?" she said.

"I never met the guy before today. Though I did see syringes in his suitcase."

"The weird thing is, when I was working in HR, I never saw any medical claims from Latimer that had anything to do with diabetes."

"Geoff Latimer? Get real. Of all the guys here, Latimer strikes me as the least likely to do something like this. And besides, who's more loyal to Cheryl?"

"And she's loyal right back. Like that crap that Bodine's threatening to bring before the board about how Slattery was pushing to strengthen computer security and she turned it down?"

I remembered Slattery saying he could wire as much money as he wanted to out of Hammond's treasury from a laptop at a Starbucks. "What about it?"

"You saw the way she took the fall for it."

"Took the fall? I thought it was her fault."

"That's Cheryl. 'The buck stops here' and all that. She was persuaded not to implement Slattery's plan-by one of her most trusted advisers."

"Geoff Latimer," I said, and stopped.

70

The night sky was still blue-black and clear and crowded with stars, but a pale glow shimmered at the horizon.

We raced around the back of the lodge, staying low to the ground. Ali took Verne's stubby little Smith & Wesson revolver because it was small and fit her hand, and she was frightened of semi-automatics. I kept the Ruger.

I stashed the SIG-Sauer to use as a backup, just in case we needed it.

Tucked away in the trees behind the lodge was the maintenance shed. It was a rustic old structure, weathered and shingled. The paint on its door was peeling. An ancient brass padlock on a rusted steel hasp secured the door. It was unlocked, though; it came right open, just as the manager had said it would.

Inside was the overpowering odor of oil paint and insecticide and gasoline.

The floor was old plywood. I closed the door behind her, clicked the flashlight on, and set it down on a bench. It illuminated a circle against the shelving on one wall, casting the cramped interior in a dim amber light.

I unclipped Buck's handie-talkie from my belt and switched it on, dialed up the volume. It was still on channel 5, the one Russell's men had been using.

But channel 5 was silent, transmitting only a thin static hiss.

"They could have switched channels, right?" Ali said.

"Or they're not using it. I want you to monitor this, okay? Listen for anything that might tell us what they're doing. And keep that gun in your hand."

"Where are you going?" She sounded alarmed.

"I want to see where Russell and his brother are."

"Why?"

I gave her a level glance. "If they're in the screened porch, I might be able to take them by surprise."

"Take them…?"

"Shoot them, Ali. Take them down. One or both."

"Jesus, Landry!"

"Will you be okay in here?"

"You're worried about me?"

"Can you fire the revolver if you have to?"

"I know how to use a gun."

"I know you do. I'm asking if you can bring yourself to do it."

She inhaled deeply. "If I have to," she said. "I think so."

The first surprise was the porch: No one was there. It was dark and empty.

The second surprise was the game room, where the wooden blinds had been drawn. They'd been open all night, though the windows had been shut. With the blinds down, I couldn't risk firing.

That meant they knew we were out here. They'd taken precautions.

Dropping to the ground, I waited about a minute, listening for any movement, waiting to see whether I noticed anyone looking out. When I was fairly certain I wasn't being watched, I got to my feet and ran back to the shed.

Standing outside the closed door, I said in a low voice, "It's me."

The door came open slowly. Ali stood there, revolver in her hand, looking like a natural. Her eyes were questioning, but she said nothing.

I went in, shut the door behind me. "They know," I said.

"They know what?"

"That I'm out here. Maybe that you are, too, by now."

"How can you be sure?"

I explained.

"So what does that mean?" Ali said. "What are we going to do?"

"We go to Plan B. I'm going to shut off the generator. Which will do two things."

"They can't wire the money without power," she said.

"Exactly. And unless I splice the cable back together. Which means they're going to have to cooperate if they want the funds. It'll also disorient them. And in the confusion, I'm going to try to get back inside without being noticed."

"Inside? For what?"

"To get the others out. Meanwhile, I want you to stay here and see if you can find a heavyweight bolt cutter."

"For the Zodiac," she said.

I nodded.

"If there was a bolt cutter here, you'd have grabbed it already, Landry. I know what you're doing. You want me to stay here."

I hesitated for barely a second. "Right," I admitted. "I don't want you out there if they start shooting."

"Yeah, well, I'm not staying inside here. I want to do what I can."

"The best thing you can do is stay alive. If anything happens to me, maybe you can get help. Maybe there's a rowboat down there you can take."

"Don't lie to me, Landry. If there were a rowboat, you'd have mentioned it already."

She knew how my mind worked, of course. "All right," I finally said. "But at least wait here until the power goes out. Keep a watch on the house." I edged the door open a bit and looked out. A faint glow was visible in the kitchen window. "When you see the generator shut down, run over to the kitchen entrance."

Then I thought of something. I swept the walls with the flashlight. Tools hung in perfect rows on Peg-Board or on hooks on the wall. Cans of paint and paint thinner and plastic bottles of garden chemicals and hose-end sprayers lined the narrow wooden shelves. Motor oil and dry gas and spare spark plugs on another shelf. Piles of stuff on the floor, the only thing out of place.

Neatly folded on a shelf next to the paint cans, I found something that would work: a canvas drop cloth. I shook it open, then took out Buck's knife and sliced a long rectangle.

"Could you lift up your skirt?" I said.

She looked at me curiously, then got what I was doing. She pulled up her skirt. I positioned the little Smith & Wesson revolver on her thigh, then wound the canvas strip around both the gun and her thigh, just tight enough to secure the weapon in place: a decent makeshift holster.

"I wouldn't mind an explanation," she said.

I pulled the skirt back in place. The gun was still visible through the fabric, so I made a few adjustments, repositioning the revolver closer to the inside of her thigh, where it no longer protruded.

"Element of surprise," I said. She nodded.

"Try it," I said. "Make sure you can do it fast if you need to."

While she practiced, I ran the flashlight up and down the walls, shined the beam on the piles on the floor.

Noticed the crates that didn't belong here.

A cache of spare ammo, it appeared. Russell's men had brought the crates in with them and stashed them out of sight. No firearms that I could see, though.

Then my eyes were caught by several red cylinders about the size and shape of Coke cans. Black markings on them: AN-M14 INCEN TH

"This stuff is theirs?" she asked.

"Right."

"So what are they?"

"Thermite hand grenades."

"Hand grenades?"

"Thermite. Incendiary."

"What for?"

"The Army uses them to burn things down fast. Much faster than splashing gasoline around, and a whole lot hotter."

"My God. You think that's what they're planning to do before they leave? Toss in one of those? Burn the lodge down with everyone inside?"

"That's my guess, yes. But not until the funds go out."

"Which he can't do until the power goes back on. And you fix the satellite cable."

"Exactly."

"Landry," she said. "These grenades. Are they something-we could use?"

"Maybe." I was quiet for a few seconds while I thought about it. And then I explained how.

"I'm going out," I said. "You sure you want to do this? If you're at all-"

"Of course I'm scared," she interrupted. She attempted a brave smile. "But don't worry about me. I'll deal."

"You always do," I said, and turned to leave. "I'll meet you at the back of the lodge. As soon as you see the lights go out."

"Landry," she said. "Make sure you come back."

71

The door to the generator shed was unlocked, of course. Inside it was hot, smelled of machine oil; the floor was a concrete slab.

I panned the flashlight across the gray sheet-metal acoustic enclosure around the generator: a Kubota eighteen-kilowatt. It ran quiet, with only a muffled thrumming.

I flipped open the generator's control panel door and studied the array of knobs. There was a power knob, a fuel valve, various gauges and digital indicators.

The two-way radio, clipped to my belt, chirped.

I froze, listened. Heard nothing.

Turned the volume up.

That was the sound of someone pressing the transmit button. But no voice followed. As if someone had started to transmit, then changed his mind. Or maybe hit the button by accident.

I turned back to the control panel. Just shutting the power off wouldn't do much good. It might throw Russell and his brother into momentary confusion, maybe even flush them out of their sheltered positions.

But just as likely it would heighten their paranoia. Russell would summon Peter the handyman, who'd try the remote start switch inside the lodge. Which wouldn't do it.

The fuel knob, though: There was an idea. Turn off the power, let the engine die, then close the fuel valve and wait a minute or two. When the power switch was turned back on, the fuel valve, too, everything would look normal. But the generator still wouldn't work.

They'd flip the remote start switch, and the generator's starter motor would turn over and over like an old car on a subzero morning. Maybe Russell would send the handyman out to deal with it. Probably accompanied by Travis, to make sure the handyman complied. Travis, of course, would be armed-they knew I was out here, too.

It would take the handyman a long while to figure out what I'd done-he'd check out the control panel, find all the knobs on, everything in the right place. A bafflement. And meanwhile, Russell would be desperate: No power meant no way to get what he'd come for.

The radio chirped again. I stopped.

"Jake."

Russell's voice, tinny and flat from the transmission.

"Time to come back inside," he said.

I stood still. Don't answer, don't let him know you can hear him.

In the background, frenzied shouts.

But Russell's voice remained calm. "I know you're out there, Jake. You really should come back. Your girlfriend's worried."

72

I switched off the flashlight. Turned the HT's volume down, not off. The generator remained on.

I pushed the shed door open slowly, looking to either side.

No movement out there as far as I could see.

Keeping in the shadows, I crept along the perimeter of the yard, around the back toward the maintenance shed, where I'd left her.

Even in the gloom, at a distance, I could see the shed door open, the light on inside.

She wouldn't have left the door open and the light on. She wasn't that careless.

I took a few more steps, scanning side to side, alert for any movement.

The shed was empty. Ali was gone.

The radio chirped. "It's over, Jake. She's right here. Hey, remember that Glock 18 you know so much about? Well, she's about to learn even more about it. Firsthand. The best way."

A second or two of silence, then a female voice, a torrent of words, loud and frantic and distorted.

"DON'T DO ANYTHING HE SAYS STAY OUT THERE STAY SAFE DON'T DO WHAT HE SAYS-"

I almost didn't recognize Ali's voice. I'd never heard that kind of fear in her voice before.

I grabbed the Motorola, but at the very last second willed myself to stop.

Don't answer.

He won't do anything until he knows I can hear him. Otherwise, for all he knows, he's talking to dead air.

Don't answer.

Russell's voice cut off her cries. "You don't want to test me, Jake. You know what I'll do. All I want is for you to come back inside."

He paused. I kept silent.

"Once we do the transfer, you and your girlfriend and all your colleagues here can go home," he said. "But if you don't get back in here-well, it's your choice. Like I say, you always got a choice."

73

The screen door hissed as I pulled it shut.

The hall was dark, but light poured out of the open door of the manager's office.

I approached silently. Even before I saw who was sitting at the desk, I caught the faint sweet trace of his Old Spice.

Geoff Latimer looked up, startled, then his face slackened in astonishment.

"Roomie," I said.

"Jake!" he said. "You-were you able to get word out?"

I came closer to the desk. Saw a list of numbers printed on a sheet of paper next to the keyboard: Hammond's bank accounts. "Couldn't get the Internet to work," I said. "You having any luck?"

He shook his head, eyes guarded.

"It must have been awkward for you," I said quietly, "when Cheryl asked you to run the internal investigation."

"Awkward?" He looked even paler than usual.

"'Who will guard the guards?,' right?"

"I don't understand."

"Stand up, Geoff," I said.

"You shouldn't be here. Russell told me to do the funds transfer, and he's going to be back-"

"Where do you inject yourself?"

"Where do I what?"

"The insulin. For your diabetes. Where do you inject it?"

"Jake, you're not making sense."

"Only three places a diabetic normally injects insulin," I said. "What's your place?"

"My-my stomach-but we don't have time for this, Jake."

I grabbed his shirt, yanked out the tails.

His smooth, pale belly. Not a mark.

His eyes were keen.

I dropped the shirt. "You told Russell to kill Danziger, didn't you?"

He swallowed. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"John knew. He'd figured out you contacted Russell through some old buddy of yours who ran a security firm Russell used to work for. So Danziger had to die, isn't that right, you son of a bitch? Grogan, too."

He glanced at the door. Maybe he was expecting Russell or Russell's brother to save him. Turning back, he said, "Jake, this is insane. I'm trying to help us. You're wasting time we don't have."

"That's true," I said, and I took out the revolver and placed it against his forehead.

"Jesus!" he gasped. "What the hell is this? Put that thing down now!"

"All to get rich, huh?"

"Jake, where'd you get that gun? Get that damned thing off of me!"

I pressed the end of the gun barrel harder into the pasty skin of his forehead. I could see the red mark it left. His eyes welled with tears.

"But I'm thinking it was more complicated than that. You stole money from the company, put it in some 'special purpose entity' offshore. But then the investment tanked, right? And you had to cover the loss, fast. Something like that?"

"Will you please put that gun down?" he whispered. "That thing could go off if you're not careful! Are you crazy? I'm trying to get us help, Jake."

"You needed to come up with a hundred million dollars somewhere. You were desperate."

"Who is putting these insane ideas in your head? Is it Bodine? Slattery?"

"I don't think you meant for things to happen the way they did today," I said. "You didn't hire Russell to hold the company up for half a billion dollars, did you? That was his idea. You were totally clear in your instructions, I'm sure. A hundred million, right? You told him to make sure it looked like he and his guys were just some backwoods hunters who got the bright idea to take a bunch of businessmen hostage, hold them up for ransom."

He stared at me, frantic. His eyes were brown, trusting: child's eyes.

I jammed the end of the barrel harder against his temple, and he gasped. "You knew Russell had a lot of experience in situations like this, but you didn't do your due diligence, did you?" Then, even more softly: "You didn't want people to die, did you, Geoff? Tell me that wasn't part of the plan."

Tears spilled down his scrubbed red cheeks.

"No," he whispered. His face seemed to crumple. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this."

"How was it supposed to happen?"

But Latimer didn't answer. He closed his eyes. His lower lip trembled.

"What's that you like to say-pigs get slaughtered?"

"No!" he cried. "It wasn't for me! I never made a dime!"

"So how was it supposed to happen?" I whispered. "Russell's guys would hold the company up for a hundred million dollars, then let us all go free? They'd get their cut, and you'd cover your loss? And no one would find out about the money you embezzled from Hammond? Was that how it was supposed to go down?" I grabbed his bony shoulder, shoved him toward the door.

"Please, Jake, do you think I had any idea what was going to happen?"

"Thing is, Geoff, you still don't," I said as I pushed him down the hall.

I shoved Latimer into the great room, the revolver at his back.

Russell stood behind Ali, an arm around her neck, his Glock to her temple. He didn't need to say anything: He had a gun to Ali's head and wouldn't hesitate to kill her if it suited his purposes.

I had Latimer, the man who'd hired Russell, but he was only useful if Russell still needed him at this point. And that I didn't know.

I noticed Travis standing about ten feet to the side of his brother, his gun aimed directly at me. The room blazed with light, every lamp switched on. I wished I'd taken the time to shut off the generator, as I'd planned to before Russell had seized Ali. The cover of darkness could have been useful just then.

I tried to calculate the geometry of the situation, but there were too many unknowns. This much I knew for sure: It was two of them against me, and the only thing between Ali and her death was the twitch of a trigger finger.

Something struck my lower back, a supernova of pain exploding and radiating and doubling me over. I sprawled to the floor. For a moment, everything went white. I gasped, rolled over on to my side, saw who had kicked me from behind.

That jet-black hair and goatee, that towering physique, the pinkish face abraded and badly bruised. But otherwise the man wasn't much worse for wear.

"Well, what do you know," Buck said. "I had a feeling I'd be seeing you again."

74

Let her go, Russell," I said as I struggled to my feet, still clutching the Ruger.

"That your big idea, swapping Latimer for your girlfriend?" Russell said contemptuously. "Come on, buddy. I really don't care what happens to him at this point."

But Latimer had broken free anyway. He now stood between Travis and Buck, his bodyguards. His face was flushed, his eyes furious.

"You know, I really should have killed you first," Russell continued.

"That's all right," Buck said. "I'll do it for you. Happy to oblige."

Ali was staring at me. She seemed to be communicating silently; but what, if anything, was she trying to say? I saw the fierce resolve in her eyes: Maybe she was simply telling me not to worry about her, that she was fine, she was strong. But I already knew that.

Or maybe she was waiting for me to give her a signal, to tell her what to do.

I didn't know what to do.

I raised the pistol, moving it from man to man to man, aiming at each, one at a time. But Russell knew I'd never risk a shot at him. Not while he had his gun on Ali: his human shield. Even if my aim were perfect, it would take no more than a jerk of his finger on the trigger at the instant of his death, and she'd die, too.

"You have to take him out," Latimer said, his voice echoing. "He's the only one who knows anything now."

"I don't work for you anymore, Geoff," Russell said.

Both his brother and Buck had guns pointed at me. I wondered whether Travis would actually pull the trigger if Russell ordered him to. I had no doubt that Buck would.

"Actually, Russell, I don't think Geoff's really thought this through," I said. "See, you need me alive."

"Do I?" Russell sounded almost curious.

"If you want the Internet connection to work, anyway," I said. "You do want your money, don't you?"

"Ah." Russell nodded. "I see. Well, it's all hooked up now."

"No, Russell, it's not. One of your guys must have screwed up-cut the line."

Russell smiled.

Buck said, "Guy's bluffing, Russell."

"Don't take my word for it," I said. "Ask Geoffrey."

"How's the satellite working, Geoff?" said Russell.

Latimer hesitated a few seconds. "Something's wrong with it. I couldn't get connected. He must have done something."

"Should have brought your A team on this job," I said. "Sloppy. You see, Russell, I worked as a cable installer once for a couple of months. Not one of my favorite jobs, but I guess you never know when a skill might come in handy."

I waited a beat, but Russell didn't reply. "Call me crazy, but I've got a feeling you're not really an expert in splicing RG-6 coaxial cable."

Silence.

"How about you, Buck?" I said. "Or you, Travis?"

Silence.

"Didn't think so. The handyman sure isn't. Ask him. Guy can probably do anything with a boat or a generator or a busted dishwasher, but when the satellite goes down, I'll bet you the manager gets on the sat phone and calls the satellite company. You planning on calling the cable company, Russell? Ask for a service call, maybe? Wait a couple days for them to get all the way out here?"

"We don't need him for that, Russell," Latimer said. "Even if he's telling the truth, we don't need him to fix the line. I'm sure the handyman can figure it out. The main thing is, there's only one person who knows about all this. You have to take him out right now."

Russell glanced at Latimer. Smiled again. "You know, Geoff," he said, "I think you're right." In one swift, smooth movement, he removed the Glock from Ali's head. I swung the Ruger around to aim at the center of his chest, gripping it with both hands, and in the instant before I could pull the trigger to take him down, an explosion rang in my ears.

Latimer slumped to the floor. Ali screamed, jumped, but Russell's arm held her tight against his body.

I stared, at once relieved and horrified.

"Now, Jake," Russell said calmly as he replaced the gun against Ali's temple, "my brother's going to escort you outside and watch while you repair the line. I know you care whether your girlfriend lives or dies, so I'm sure you won't try anything stupid."

"I'll take him outside," Buck said.

"Thank you, Buck," Russell said, "but I don't think that'll be necessary. Jake's going to return your gun to you. He'll be unarmed. Jake, place the Ruger on the floor. Slowly."

I paused. Breathed out slowly.

Russell jammed the Glock into Ali's temple, and she gave a cry.

"All right," I said. "But here's the deal: As soon as I fix the cable, you let her go. I'll signal you when I'm finished, and you can check. Confirm the Internet connection's working. If I keep my end of the bargain, you keep your end. Okay?"

Russell nodded, smiled. "You don't give up, do you?"

"Never," I said.

75

Travis kept his distance, his weapon trained on me.

I knelt at the side of the shed where I'd cut the cable, and held up one end for him to see. A glint of copper in the moonlight.

"Can I have a little light here?" I said.

With his left hand, he took out his flashlight and switched it on, blinding me.

"Out of my eyes, please."

He shifted the beam toward the ground, shined it on the loops of cable coming out of the earth against the shed's concrete foundation, then at the severed ends.

I said, "You do this, Travis?"

"What?"

"One of you guys must have cut this."

Travis sounded surprised to be asked, even irate. "No."

"I'm going to need some stuff. A crimping tool, a couple of F-type male connectors, and an F-81 connector. And a cable cutter and a pair of pliers. A toggle strip tool, if they have one."

Travis shuffled a foot on the gravelly sand. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"If they have it, it's going to be in the toolshed. If they don't, I'm going to have to wing it. We need to find out, fast."

"How the hell do I know what they have?"

"You don't. I'll have to look."

He shined the flashlight into my eyes again. I shielded my eyes with a hand.

"I'm going to have to ask Russell."

"You check with your brother every time you wipe your ass? If they have anything, it'll be right here, in the shed." I touched the shingled wall. "Let's take a look. You guys don't have time to screw around."

He hesitated. "All right."

The diesel engine inside was chugging away. Didn't he wonder why the tool shed had a generator inside? But he didn't seem to know one outbuilding from another, and he probably wasn't thinking too clearly. He was intent only on keeping me from going anywhere or doing anything.

Instead of coming around to the front to the shed door, I rounded toward the back.

"Hey! Door's over here."

"Yeah, and the key's hanging on a hook back here," I said, and kept going. I muttered, "Or do you want to call for Big Brother and ask him for permission to get it?"

He followed, still trying to keep a distance, his gun on me, the beam in my eyes.

"Will you point that flashlight over here, please?" I said, not indicating anything. "And not at my eyes?"

"Where?"

"Shit," I said, stopping by a gnarled old pine whose branches raked the shed's low roof. "It's not here. You see it anywhere?"

The cone of light swept up and down the shingles: quick, jerky movements, impatient.

"Shit," I said. "We're going to have to get the handyman out here to open up the shed."

He moved the flashlight beam from the ground up to the shed's low roof, then down again. I could see him hesitate, trying to figure out how to get out his two-way while keeping the gun on me and putting the flashlight away. As he did so, I stepped closer to him, pretending to search for the missing key. He clicked off the flashlight, jammed it in a vest pocket, and felt for his HT.

"Wait," I said. "I think I found it. Sorry about that."

Wayne's SIG-Sauer, nestled in a crook of the old pine's tree trunk. I grabbed it, swung it around, and put it against his ear.

"One word," I said, "and I'll blow your brains out."

He hesitated just long enough for me to grab his gun hand at the wrist and twist it, hard. He was amazingly strong: all that prison muscle. But finally I was able to wrench it out of his hand.

His left fist crashed into my cheek. He didn't have room to maneuver, to aim his punch or get a decent arc, but still the blow was incredibly powerful. A jagged lightning bolt of pain exploded in my eyes, my brain. I tasted blood.

But that didn't stop me from thrusting my knee into his groin. He expelled a lungful of air through my fingers. The whites of his eyes flickered briefly, and he grunted, looked sick.

I shoved the gun into his ear, but before I could say anything, his fist smashed into my temple, so hard that pinpoints of light danced before my eyes.

Don't give in to it.

I kneed his groin again, slammed his head into the tree trunk, then swung the pistol against the side of his head with all of my strength.

He went right down.

Slumped against the tree and slid to the ground. His eyes were open just enough to see the whites.

But he was out.

76

I tied him up with some of the rope I'd cut off Ali, then popped out the magazine of his Colt Defender, checked to make sure it was loaded. It was. The SIG was down at least three shots, so I jammed it into my back pocket as a backup. Then I headed to the other shed.

My father had what he called a "toy box" of war trophies and deactivated training grenades he'd brought home from Vietnam. When I was maybe six he explained to me what an incendiary grenade was. A little later that afternoon, as I ran circles around him trying to get him to play hide-and-seek, he hurled one at me.

To teach me a lesson.

Only after I stopped crying did he explain, with a hearty guffaw, that you had to pull the pin first or it wouldn't detonate. I'd always assumed it was a dummy grenade, but with my father you never knew.

The stash of weapons and supplies was still in the shed.

There were four thermite grenades, but I only needed one.

Five minutes later, when I'd finished my prep work, I returned to the lodge.

77

Russell's eyes narrowed. He knew something wasn't right. He didn't even have a chance to ask where his brother was.

"We got a problem," I said.

"What problem?"

"You," I said, and I held up the grenade for a second, just long enough for it to register.

I grasped the pull ring, tugged it out, and then I hurled it at him.

"You crazy son of a bitch!" he screamed, diving out of the way.

Ali shrieked and jumped free, and Buck leaped away, too.

The confusion gave me enough time to pull the Colt Defender out of the waistband of my pants and squeeze off two shots. Russell was a blur. When the bullet struck his shoulder, he roared, then crashed into the overstuffed sofa, his gun dropping from his hand, sliding a good ten feet or more.

Buck canted to one side. A crimson starburst appeared on his shirt just above his vest.

Muffled screams from somewhere close by: the game room?

Russell, back on his feet, hesitated for an instant, as if deciding whether to reach for his gun.

The fury in his face told me he now understood that I'd removed the primer from the grenade; he was not a man who enjoyed being duped.

I aimed the pistol and fired another round, but then something moved in my peripheral vision.

Buck, summoning a final burst of malevolent strength, had somehow managed to raise his gun. He fired. I glimpsed the tongue of flame at the end of the muzzle, felt a fireball of pain explode inside my right thigh.

The floor came up to hit me in the face.

My forehead and cheekbone felt broken, the pain ungodly. Everything was spinning. I struggled to get upright, finally managed to stagger to my feet, then Russell swooped at me, kneeing my solar plexus.

I sagged, fell backwards, retching, the gun dropping to the floor. I couldn't catch my breath. He grabbed my hair, jerked my head upward, slammed it back down against the floor.

Blindly, I swung at what I thought was his face but connected with something softer: muscle.

I tried to lift my torso at the same moment that he jammed his knee into my wounded thigh, and everything went white and sparkly.

The room and everyone in it danced and jiggered before my eyes, turned liquid. I could see Russell, purple-faced, reach back to slip something out of somewhere (was it his boot?)-and in his fist something glinted: a blade, a long-handled knife, the point of a spear-and he drew it back in his fist with a guttural, bestial roar, aiming directly at my heart, and I was paralyzed, watching Russell in his animal rage, the silvery gleam of the knife blade, and I was too numb to fully grasp that he'd finally won.

I thought: This is the bad wolf.

I tried to plead, but only a grunt came out, and I was slipping away, no longer had the strength to grab the gun out of my pocket, to do anything but-

The top of his head came off.

Red mist. The blast numbed my ears.

He toppled, blood everywhere.

Ali held the Smith & Wesson in a perfect two-handed grip, shoulders forward, an ideal stance.

Her hands were shaking, but her eyes were fierce.