Black Swan (26 page)

    "I got to hand it to you, Axel. You worked it out."

    "Not good enough. You can't take me back there," he said, almost as one sentence.

"How come?"

"Not as long as the Gestapo are there."

"What's the big deal with them?" I asked.

    It was hard to read his face even in perfect light, but I tried anyway with the flashlight.

    "Could you stick that thing somewhere else? I'm going blind."

    "Sorry. So what's with Hammon and company?"

    "I'm not at liberty to say, okay? They can't be there forever. I can stay here till next spring. You wouldn't believe how much shit there is in this house. Cheap brands, but who cares."

    "You could still get caught," I said.

    "I did get caught, but you're smarter than the goon squad who stops by at the exact same time every day and spends the exact same minutes walking around the house in the exact same direction. Morons."

    "No argument there. So they've been here already?"

    "Yeah," he said, turning the word into two syllables the way kids do when you've insulted their tender sensibilities.

    "So I wonder why I saw one of their cars head down the street about a half-hour ago."

    I couldn't see if that worried him or not.

    "I don't know," he said. "I only know they come here once a day. Max."

    "Good," I said. "So pack up your stuff. We're getting out of here."

    Even with the light turned away, I could see the force of his reaction.

    "Don't you listen? I said no way. You can't make me."

    I told him about the additions to Hammon's posse, including their alleged background and capabilities. He wavered.

    "If I could find you, they can, too," I said. "They could be on their way here now. I don't know what happens after that, but I bet you do."

"Shit."

    "I'm the best thing you got right now, Axel. Better than hiding in a cave waiting for the end to come."

    I watched while he jammed stuff into his backpack. It was smaller than mine, but neatly fit his laptop, some clothes, an iPod, a variety of cords and a toothbrush. I pointed the flashlight at his worn-out high-top sneakers.

    "Are those your only pair of shoes?"

    "What's wrong with them?"

    "Nothing. Follow me."

    I led the way to the basement hatch and out to the backyard. The little orange slice of a moon was struggling to get above the horizon, but it was still mostly a world of black and slightly blacker shapes and shadows, especially now that my night vision had been compromised by the flashlight. Axel lurched along behind me, literally clinging to my coattails.

    We were about to turn the corner around the garage when the trees lit up with a pale brilliance animated by windblown branches. Headlights coming down the driveway. Two sets, moving fast.

    "You still want to argue?" I said to Axel, grabbing his hand and pulling him into the backyard. "Do what I say and keep your mouth shut."

    I pulled him headlong across a patch of lawn and into the woods beyond, doing the best I could to ward off lowhanging brambles that scraped my face and tore at my forearms. Little involuntary sounds crept from Axel's lips as we entangled and disentangled with grasping bushes and spidery vines. When I saw the movement of the light above slow, I took his shoulder and pulled him to the ground, using my own weight to power our descent. We both woofed out air on impact. I put my arm around his shoulders and shushed in his ear. He nodded his head.

    I had a decent view of the back of the house from where we lay, though the headlights backlit the scene, turning everything into black cutouts. I heard car doors slam and voices calling to each other. Human shapes came into view, turning the corner of the garage, large shapes, moving quickly, crouched, holding handguns with both hands. Bright lights sprang out of nowhere, filling the backyard and revealing Hammon's mercenaries still in their sport coats and casual slacks, scanning the house with their own powerful flashlights, guns now held in one hand. Axel started to whimper, and I tightened my grip on the back of his neck until he stopped.

    One of the men flung open the basement hatch and yelled something to the others. 't Hooft and the two dopes from Sound Security came running. They studied the hatch for a few moments, then Jock and Pierre went down the hole. A few moments later, the others followed. I yanked at Axel's collar.

    "Time to go."

    We bounded up and thrashed our way deeper into the woods. At that point, all decorum was lost. My only objective was to get clear of those guys and find a calm place to plan my next move. Which happened five minutes later when we burst out onto the backyard of another stately Fishers Island home, this one with a light over the rear patio.

    I forced Axel back to the ground while I assessed the situation. A light didn't mean the folks were home, it just meant they had a light on, likely controlled by a timer. I dug out the map and compass, and my little flashlight, and tried to figure out where we were.

    "You don't have a phone with a GPS by any chance," I asked him.

    "No, but I know where we are. Almost at the airport," said Axel, a little louder than I wanted.

    "How do you know that?" I whispered, hoping he'd get the hint.

    "I walked around here sometimes at night," he whispered back. "It gets boring cooped up inside all day."

    "Which way?"

    He pointed toward the left of the house in front of us.

    "I'd go that way."

    I went back to the compass and map and found no reason to challenge the strategy. I said let's go, and took off, Axel right behind me, with no physical provocation.

    We slipped by the big house and found the road that I imagined led to the airport. I started down that way and Axel took my arm and pulled.

    "It's the other way," he whined, in full voice, which under the circumstances I had to let pass.

    "Okay," I said. "Lead on."

    We switched positions and I followed him over the hilly little street to a path that led to a wide, flat and open area that I correctly identified this time as the airport. The little shack and windsock nailed it.

    I sat on the ground and Axel followed without prompting.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Two Trees.

    "Now would be a good time to check up on the airport," I said when he answered.

    "Has cargo arrived?"

    "It has. Call it a distressed shipment," I said.

    "Maybe better to bring the old truck. Has a lid over the back."

    "It would," I said.

    "If it starts."

    "When you get to the shack, flash your lights three times. Then look to the south, southwest. You'll see a flashlight. Head that way. Keep your lights off on the way over if you can."

    "Keeping them on is more the problem."

    Now all I had to do was wait, something I was ill-suited to do. Though not as bad as Axel. Almost immediately he started to twitch and wriggle while humming a discordant little melody. He clutched his backpack to his chest as if expecting someone to come along and snatch it away. All I could think about was lighting a cigarette and pouring a finger of Absolut, so who was the sorrier case?

    "Why'd you run, Axel?" I whispered.

    "We discussed that already. None of your business."

    "Keep your voice down."

    "You're the one who's talking."

    "I'm whispering. You don't know how to whisper?"

    "I know how to whisper," he said, demonstrating poorly.

    "What made you pick that house? You can tell me that."

    "All the phony security signs. Who'd be fooled by that?"

    "Not Two Trees," I said.

    "The airport guy? What's he got to do with it?"

    "He's coming to get us."

    "Oh, the wisecrack about distressed shipment," he said. "You'd be distressed, too."

    "I would. It took some guts to do what you did."

    "Not really. I didn't have a choice. How'd you find me?" he asked.

    "The Hillman's IP address. A wireless card would have been smarter."

    "I don't have a wireless card. You were on N-Spock? I started working the help desk when I was eight years old. After school. We might have overlapped."

    "If so, not by much."

    "Anika gave you my emails?" he asked.

    "Just the back end. Not the messages."

    "I don't know why she did that."

    "She was worried about you," I said.

    "That's not what I mean."

    I was going to ask him what he did mean, but I caught sight of headlights coming down the long driveway toward the airport shack. I told Axel to hug the ground, and I did so myself. A pickup truck with rounded fenders and roof rolled up to the shack and the headlights went out. Then they flashed three times. I rolled over on my back, held up my flashlight, switched it on and waved it at the truck for a few moments. Then I rolled back and saw the antique pickup lumber over the grass toward our position. When he was twenty feet away I stood up and flashed my light again. He turned toward us and stopped.

    "You'll have to move some crap out of the way, but there's plenty of room back there for both of you," said Two Trees when I reached the driver's side window of the mid-fifties Chevy pickup. I could smell the moldy upholstery, causing an eruption of lost memories of my father's 1957 Belvedere.

    "Take us down the road to the Swan, but don't stop till you get a hundred yards past the gas station. I'll slap the fender when we're clear. I'm in your debt."

    "Yeah, yeah, climb in the back."

    True to his word, there was some stuff in the way, but we managed to cram ourselves in under the hard cover, and with a great deal of effort, pull the hatch closed behind us.

    "We're going to suffocate in here," said Axel. "There's not enough oxygen. I can already feel it."

    "No, we're in luck. These old trucks were built to haul hunting dogs. So they had a special ventilation system back here. Lots of air."

    What those old trucks also had was a type of suspension designed to maximize concussive forces when traveling over rough terrain. So the next few minutes were devoted to finding handholds, bracing ourselves and avoiding crushing each other as the bed of the truck lurched like an amusement park ride gone haywire.

    When we hit hard asphalt and things settled down, Axel said, "That thing about the dogs? Pure bullshit."

    "You're not suffocating, are you?"

    Even on smooth road, it wasn't the most comfortable ride. The vibrations were nearly as bad as the noise, which was barely endurable. I tried at first to divine the route Two Trees was traveling by general movement, but the roll, pitch and yaw made that impossible. Miraculously, I could hear snippets of music coming from the cab. Mothers of Invention.

    This wasn't the ideal moment to reflect on the spasmodic turns my life seemed to take, despite my best efforts to maintain an even keel, to simulate the order of a well- configured flow scheme, but that's the way my mind worked. There wasn't time to trace and make sense of the path that had led me from agreeing to pick up Burton Lewis's new custom sloop from the builder in Maine, to being tossed about the bed of a superannuated pickup truck with a terrified, autistic Swiss, barely a step ahead of pursuing mercenaries in the employ of one of the country's leading software developers. But that was the long and short of it.

    It made me angry, but at whom it was hard to tell. I'm not so simple as to think the universe cares enough about one mangled, benighted engineer to orchestrate such an elaborate muddle, but it makes you think.

    The exact direction of our flight was hard to make out, though the velocity was clear. I could hear it in the roar of the engine and the metallic whir of the old gear box. I'd worked on 50's and 60's Chevies at a repair shop when I was in high school, when those cars weren't that old and I was too young to think the mechanic's vocation was anything less than noble and essential. So, as I lay there beside the whimpering Axel Fey, all I could think about were carburetors and linkages, tappets, spark plugs and distributor caps, pressure plates and sloppy universal joints. I could hear

them all, and feel their plaintive irregularities in the primitive reaches of my consciousness.

    And then it all shuddered to a stop. It was too soon to be at the drop-off point, so I stayed still, encouraging Axel to do the same by a firm grip on his forearm.

    "Howdy, Two Trees. Wazup?" I heard someone say from somewhere outside the truck.

    "I'm driving home," said Two Trees. "Wazup with you?"

    "Driving home from what? I didn't see any plane come in."

    "It was a stealth bomber. They're invisible. Don't you read the papers?"

    "Some people think you're a witty guy. Not me."

    "There's help for that," said Two Trees. "Get a sense of humor surgically implanted. Think how much more fun you'll have."

    "What's in the bed?" asked the voice.