The Nowhere Man

39 To the Brink

Snow flurried even under the canopy of pines. Evan worked a switchback beneath the trees of the southern slope, sticking to a furrow cut into the mountainside to keep his head low. He had a hitch in his step, and his ribs ached; all that fighting had taken a toll.

He didn’t know the south sniper’s position, so he paused again, snapping the night-vision goggles down over his eyes and peering across the crest. The NVGs cast everything in a green glow.

He swept his gaze up the hillside, caught a set of eyes glinting back at him.

He reeled away, banging against a boulder before realizing that the eyes belonged to a white-tailed deer. It stared dolefully at him across the night before bounding off with a twitch of its legs.

Evan crouched by the boulder, catching his breath and reaching back for the wilderness skills he’d learned as a young man. The three keys to survival: shelter, fire, water. He’d been taught how to pick a spot — high ground, cleared space — and to frame out a hut, shingling leaves over branches. But the current situation wouldn’t allow for that yet. There would be only sporadic rest stops until he was out of the valley and across the range.

He was running on increasingly numb legs. Any stop could kill him. And yet if he got too cold, his body would lock up and he’d die of exposure. Which meant he had to balance himself on the razor’s edge, running himself to the brink of freezing before pausing to reheat over a fire.

To the brink but not an inch further.

He drove on up the slope.

René surveyed the wreckage of the spa, his jaw tensing until he could feel knots at the corners. David stood behind him, an ice pack pressed against his pretty face where it had struck the pebble-studded bench inside the mist room.

One of René’s men struggled to fish Calaca’s corpse from the pool; another mopped blood from the tile. Manny was downstairs safing the lab, and René had dispatched Dex with the remaining three guards to follow Evan’s tracks. The snow proved helpful, the footsteps clearly marked. A radioed update had informed René that Evan had backtracked a few times to obscure his trail but hadn’t had enough time to pull it off convincingly.

Dex was good with footprints.

René rubbed his eyes until they burned.

David removed the ice pack and pressed gingerly at the bruise coming up on his forehead. “Guy was like a typhoon,” he said. “It was pretty insane.”

René opened his bloodshot eyes. His thumb and forefinger held dust from the foundation he’d dabbed over the spider veins on his nose earlier. The look he gave David must have held everything he was feeling, because David recoiled from it, blanching. Fear had stripped away the kid’s seen-it-all veneer; he looked his age, not a day older.

David cleared his throat. “I’ll be upstairs.”

René said, “You’ll be right here until Manny gets back.”

For once David offered no pithy retort.

As if on cue, the elevator doors opened and Manny emerged. He ran a tongue across his gold teeth, one cheek quivering nervously beneath the eye. “You’re gonna want to see this, boss.”

René felt something inside him turn to ice.

Evan ducked under a half-snapped tree trunk, hurdled a snarl of branches, pressing up the face of the mountain. The crisp air charged his lungs, set them tingling. Though he’d made it halfway up the mountain, the final incline looked to be the steepest.

As he scrabbled up a cracked sheet of shale, his boots sent pebbles cascading behind him. He tumbled over the brink into a bed of decomposing needles. The sharp tips poked his palms as he shoved himself back up.

He paused to tie his boots even tighter but had trouble gripping the laces, his fingers fumbling around the cords.

Another few minutes and he’d be too cold to help himself.

Though the sun remained below the horizon, a curtain of dirty gray showed to the east, starting to rise across the black bowl of the sky. It was just light enough that he might risk a fire. Given the condition of his fingers, there wasn’t a better choice. He stopped, panting, warring with himself.

I will get to you. He’d promised the kid.

And he pictured that yellow shipping bill floating away on the wind outside the holding house in Fullerton, the last record of Alison Siegler.

He had to heat his body just enough so it could keep driving forward.

He scanned his surroundings with the NVGs, looking for any sign of the sniper. Nothing.

Inside a ring of close-set trees, he cleared a small patch of ground. He gathered a few fallen branches. Melting snowflakes clung to the bark, so he used the piano wire to strip the wetness and expose the dry wood beneath. The wire pinched his pink hands. It was a sloppy, imprecise process, but it got the job done.

He coiled the piano wire back into a coaster-size loop. British secret-service agents used to hide Gigli surgical wire saws in their clothes during World War II, and Evan took a cue from them now. Yanking the padded insole out of his left boot, he slid the wire up toward the toe and then replaced the insole on top of it. As he laced up his boot again, he felt barely a bump beneath the ball of his foot.

Next he removed the packet of Doritos from his waistband. By now they were mostly crushed, but he selected a few of the bigger pieces and arrayed them on the ground. One of the lesser-known benefits of Doritos is that they’re highly flammable.

With a fingernail he scraped a gob of pine pitch from the nearest trunk and smeared it across the crushed chip fragments to increase the combustibility. Then he tore two strips from the bottom of his undershirt and braided them into a rope, which he tied to either end of a not-too-thin stick to form a bow. His fingers were growing numb; had he waited a few minutes more, he’d have been unable to form the knots.

Now he sawed the rope back and forth rapidly across another stick held perpendicular, causing the stick to spin in the makeshift tinder. Before long he busted a coal, which he flicked into the bits of chips. A few steady breaths stoked it high enough to catch the humble heap of branches, and then a tiny fire flickered beneath his outheld hands, warming the palms.

Normally he’d bring water to a rolling boil before drinking it, but he didn’t have anything to use as a pot, and besides, he trusted fresh-fallen snow. He warmed himself, chewed a bit of ice, then ate an apple. The whole time he kept his NVGs lowered, scanning the hillside and the valley below.

Life crept back into his face and arms.

Just a few minutes more and he’d be on his way.

The elevator doors opened on the blood-spattered basement. René emerged through the fog of his own disbelief, blinking to ensure that what he was seeing was in fact real.

Spoiled blood dripping from tattered IV bags.

Medical machinery reduced to wreckage.

Dr. Franklin’s fragmented head resting on the sodden sheets of the gurney.

The tangle of images knocked around inside him, sharp edges slicing beneath the skin, rising up his throat until he bellowed his rage at the ruined medical lab. It was a roar of rage, yes, but laced with pain.

He sensed David and Manny shrinking away behind him, backpedaling to the walls, giving him space.

René’s chest heaved as he caught his breath. He’d relocated many times before, and he would relocate again. But this time he’d have to rebuild from scratch. New equipment. New doctor. New blood.

Amid the remnants of the once-glorious operation, the safe rose, gleaming and intact. René crossed to it, running a finger across a dimple in the chrome plating where a round had been repelled.

He said, “Unlock it.”

Manny stepped forward, fumbling at his key ring.

“Are you sure?” David said. “You swore you’d never—”

“Unlock it.”

Manny rammed the key home and turned the weighty dial. The lugs inside released with a clang, and the door parted from the frame on well-greased hinges.

Inside were several small glass vials and two filled syringes.

René removed a syringe, and Manny took a quick step back, as if what it contained was contagious, airborne.

It was not.

But it was scary enough to deter proximity.

René touched the pad of his thumb to the plunger. The power of the ages held in the span of his hand. He cleared the air from the syringe with a hint of pressure from his thumb.

Manny’s radio crackled, one of the trackers calling in: “—recogimos sus huellas. Quizá hay una fogata delante y—”

Footprints and a campfire. They were closing in.

René snatched the radio from Manny’s trembling hand and held it to his mouth. He regarded the gleaming tip of the needle. “Bring him to me.”

Evan kicked snow over the ashes, stomping out the embers. Feeling had returned to his extremities, and he didn’t want to risk lingering over the tiny flames any longer. Lowering his NVGs, he gave another spin, searching the mountainside.

A wink of reflected light caught his eye. Way up by the brink, ten or so klicks distant, a man lay prone on an outcropping of rock, angled slightly away.

The south sniper.

Evan’s last obstacle.

The man swept the rifle slowly back and forth, scanning the hillside below.

As the scope moved to turn full circle, Evan dropped to the cold earth behind a tree trunk and lay still. He exhaled down into the collar of his jacket so his clouding breath wouldn’t give him away.

When he risked a look again, he saw that the sniper had directed his attention to another stretch of the rise. Dawn was leaking through the valley, sending a glare off the new-fallen white.

If Evan could get across the swell of land beside him, he’d be out of sight, his path to the summit clear. Once he made it over the brink into the vast surrounding mountains, René’s men would never catch him.

One more stretch of snow and he’d be free.

He checked the sniper again, but the man was still facing away.

All clear.

Evan bolted.

The uneven earth jarred his boots, the dense pines jolting back and forth, as much obstacle course as cover. He crested the rise and saw the ground slope away. He slid down on the soft-packed snow, dropping over the final swell, dipping from the south sniper’s vantage.

He was beyond reach.

He’d made it.

He lay for a moment, catching his breath, enjoying the sight of the wide-open sky above. Then he shook snow from the cuffs of his pants and started to stand.

He’d just pulled himself up to full height when a wedge of tree trunk exploded two yards from his face as if hammered free with an ax. Before he could process what had happened, he heard the big-caliber signature boom across the valley.

For a moment his thoughts spun in freefall. It made no sense. The south sniper was lost to a fold of the mountain behind him. And the shot’s trajectory was wrong.

He scrambled into motion, heading for the nearest tree line. A bullet kissed the top of his shoulder, fraying the thick coat and obliterating a branch. He juked left, a half-assed wide-receiver move, but already his legs were throbbing, his boots skidding on ice.

Another shot whipped overhead, annihilating a pinecone. Splinters rained down across his shoulders.

Any way he turned, he was in the crosshairs.

The pinecone was a message, sent from the base of the valley. An incredible shot.

With dawning dread Evan put it together.

The north sniper had moved out of position, coming across the range to pin him down from an unexpected angle. This man who had taken a pinecone off Evan’s palm from five hundred meters.

And Evan was in the middle of an open patch, fully exposed. One wrong step and he’d be missing a limb.

He froze.

He could feel his heartbeat in the hollow of his throat.

He gritted his teeth.

Bowed his head.

Then he raised his arms, raised them high and wide so they’d be visible through a scope. He waited, his breaths jerking through his chest, steaming in the night air.

After a time he heard footsteps crunching through the snow behind him. The sound of reckoning.

The footsteps neared, but he didn’t dare turn around, didn’t dare move. Not until a kick to the kidneys knocked him to the ground. Dex stood over him, his head cocked with some sentiment that couldn’t quite make it to his eyes. Two narcos flanked him, their AKs pointed at Evan’s chest.

Dex’s big hands swung at his sides, the tattoos flashing. Too-broad smile. Bloody scowl.

One painted mouth dipped into a cargo pocket. The fingers came out gripping the hinged-open shock collar. Wearily, Evan lifted his head from the snow to see the big hands nearing. His vision clouded.

Even so he could hear the collar clank shut around his neck.