Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller (38 page)

"What do you mean?" Sarah replied, glad to say something.

"Everything," Alex said, in the closest thing to a contemplative tone he'd ever used. "You have people with such an immense capacity for—I guess, darkness. Why aren't there any simple characters anymore? Why is it that whenever I hear about humanity it always sounds to me like a snowstorm?"

"Didn't you tell me once," Sarah said, "that the rain and the snow are the most beautiful things you can see? Didn't you say that the only time things are really real is under clouds?"

Alex couldn't prevent himself from smiling. "The truest things in a false world."

"It's just like you say, then," she said, and even in the darkness he could tell she was turning to look him in the eyes. "We need to hold on to what we know is true. That's all we've got."

"But what the hell can you hold onto when you're where we are? What's left?"

"There's always love."

Alex waved his hand. "There's never love. People like me don't get love. Love is reserved for people who believe it."

In the darkness, it was impossible for him to tell what happened next. He only knew one thing—the moment he said that, he felt a leaping course through his soul; and when her lips touched his, as he'd been waiting for for months, it was not to be believed. All he could to was drown in the moment, drinking in the kiss as though it was the only way to breathe.

At last they separated. "Still don't believe it?" she said, and he knew instantly that she was laughing.

"Did you just—"

"Yeah—I just thought—it may be a while before we can talk like this again—so I'd better make it count."

"I'm—I didn't really—that stuff I said—"

"Look," she said, her voice betraying the flying of her soul. "I don't know if you're right about love. I don't know if you're wrong—but I know I wish I could tell you everything. I wish I could answer every question you ask. I wish—I wish we knew everything."

"No, no!" His voice rose, fell, drifted slowly. "The most redeeming thing about this world is that you can never know everything. Never."

She grinned and leaned in again; their second kiss was long, slow, and serene, but just as Alex would say, it could not last forever.

Ordoñez was fighting to hold his gun steady.

"You've been very impressive, Alberto," Potard hissed, "But I'm sorry, you're just too much of a liability. You cannot remain alive. Especially not while I am in power."

"You don't even know who I am, do you, Jean?"

"I know all too well!" Potard yelled.

"No, you don't. I am Ordoñez, the only man who ever beat you at chess. I am your surrogate son, your greatest tool, your worst enemy."

Potard's arm wavered.

"I'm going to walk away now," Ordoñez said, as calmly as he could, "And I guarantee that you will be unable to shoot me in the back."

He pivoted, and turned slowly downhill, away from the cliff and the gun, silently praying to nobody. Potard let out a strange, terrifying sound, somewhere between a cry and a roar, and fired three shots five feet to Ordoñez's right. The assassin had judged him perfectly; however, he wasted no time in vanishing into the trees. If he had any ammo remaining, one bullet that had not found Alex would find Jean le Potard.

Alex had forgotten how dangerous it was to forget about the world out here—ingrained stimulus responses took hold in both of them; the moment they heard the shots, they sprang to their feet and placed their hands on their weapons. "We have to go," he said, more forcefully than he felt.

"Which way!?"

"Which way did they come from?"

Sarah closed her eyes for a moment. "That way," she said, pointing her arm.

"Where?"

Sarah rolled her eyes at her own foolishness and switched on her flashlight, then pointed again.

"You don't have an extra one, do you?" Alex asked.

"I do, actually," Sarah replied, and took one up from the ground. "I didn't think you'd have one, so I brought one."

"You're better than me," he said, and then his face turned serious. "We—we can't go together."

Sarah's face was crossed with surprise. "Why not?"

"It's—well—we're both targets. If we're together, one of us gets found, both of us have minutes or seconds left."

"You can't be serious!" she said angrily. "Together, we have two guns. Alone we have one. And we don't know how many of them there are."

"But two people are twice as easy to track, and twice as hard to hide! With both of us it would be tough to stay in the shadows."

"Well—we don't even know who it was! If it was just Hart and Anthony, we won't need any shadows to fool them. They're idiots. And even if it is the Moose Killers, look how dark it is!"

Alex's mind was working furiously on a response. Something new occurred to him then, however.
What if I don't need to defeat her every time I talk to her?

Carefully, he said, "You're right."

She looked even more surprised than before. "I'm what?"

"You're
right
. Leaving you now…well…it would be stupid. It would be wrong. And I might have done it a month ago, but not now."

Impulsively, she threw her arms around him. Taken aback, he encircled her in response. They stood like that for a long moment, the final perfect moment of their lives. At long last they broke apart.

"Make sure your safety is off," Alex said, and began walking.

"Hey!" Sarah yelled, grabbing him and turning him around. "You're going the wrong way! That's where the shots came from!"

"No, I'm going the right way," he told her, and found himself gripped by a strange mirth. He shone his flashlight toward a hill, a mile away along the shore.

A terrible thought struck her. "You don't really mean…"

"This is why I wanted to split up," he said, still walking. She hurried after him. "I'm tired of running, Sarah. We're armed. We have a chance to end this. It's going to end, no matter who's dead."

"Dead—wait—nobody's going to die." It was easy to say. However, just then, she remembered a boy lying beside a road, a loaded gun pointing at his head, an echoing crack that ended him forever. "All right, but—I'm still coming with you."

"That I didn't expect, but if you want to, you can."

"I want to, and I will."

He continued walking, and she followed him, both of them uneasy, calculated, as if every step was an act of faith. Footsteps bore them through the minutes, and their beams of light showed them that the arboreal cover was thickening—and that the ground was turning upward.

"I love you," he said, by way of breaking the silence. His flashlight beam revealed on her face a mixture of shock, disgust, and happiness.

"You've got to be kidding," she laughed.

"Yeah," he replied, wishing he could capture his words and drag them back into his mouth. "Let's just say that."

They kept moving, and Alex felt a hand clasp his.

Ordoñez waited.

Sitting against a tree with his flashlight on the ground, still switched on, and his gun in his hands, he ran his eyes over the forest again. Looking for Alex, he'd realized, was not the way to find him. To find Alex Orson, you had to make him come to you.

He could hear, drifting from far away, Jean le Potard cursing the moon and the lake in French. His ears passed over the sound, and settled on something much more interesting.

Rustling. Disturbed leaves. Rattling twigs. Something far-off, and yet nearer to him than his own hands.

Silently, he made for the path.

The moment that came then was one of the worst of Alex's life. It grabbed him, threw him against a wall, watched as he rolled helplessly onto the floor. Directly into the beam of his flashlight, less than twenty yards away, stepped Alberto Ordoñez, as coolly calculated and efficient as Alex remembered him. In a rehearsed motion, he turned to face them, and Alex could tell exactly what would happen next.

"
Hide!
" he shouted wildly. He grabbed Sarah's arm with both his hands and dragged her off the slightly worn section of grass they had been following, into a heavier cover of trees to the right of the path.

"Alex, what—"

A staccato explosion tore through the forest, ravaging the air where they had been seconds before. "It's him!" Alex yelled. "We found them, all right!
Run!
"

She needed no further convincing. They hurried onward, dodging between trees, watching a foreign beam of illumination sweep across the scene. Ordoñez knew exactly where they were, and the moment they were caught in the light, they would become sitting ducks. Both of them forced their way through thickets and bushes, heading towards unknown goals. Alex was again losing himself in running; he scraped against a tree, tripped over a thicket, scratching his legs in a nest of thorns. Ordoñez crunched twigs yards behind him, and he rolled over quickly, inadvertently crying out as a bullet ricocheted off a tree three feet above him. He rolled onto his feet and ran again into the darkness, terrified, his heart pounding in his throat, ready to spill out. Ordoñez was giving him no time to react—shots were landing to his left, to his right—if he could only have some time to reach the rifle—

--he was heading downwards, into darkness, stumbling along the quickest way he could find. Something was lost, he knew it—his running was leading him away, Ordoñez was chasing only him. He reached out for Sarah's hand—and touched air. She was gone.
She's just gotten lost. We've just gotten separated. She's fine.
Shining his flashlight behind him, he found that Ordoñez had gotten turned around in the darkness. Suddenly, he remembered something he'd said only minutes ago—that he was tired of running; and yet here he was, doing it again. His long-awaited moment had finally arrived.

He slung the rifle over his shoulder and held it at his waist; then, with a full unleashed of the fury in his spirit, he pulled the trigger and held it down, spraying the forest with bullets. He was filled with an overtaking rage; and suddenly was not only shooting at Ordoñez, but at the Moose Killers, at his father, at the world which had taken Jake and ruined the greatest part of his life. It was mirthful, almost freeing, to see Alberto Ordoñez diving for cover from
his
wrath.

After a few seconds, he dragged himself down again, so as to save ammunition. Ordoñez wouldn't risk moving until he knew the coast was clear, so Alex had gained an advantage of a few seconds. He veered sharply to the right, and headed towards the central path again; he needed to get to an open area, where he could find his way—and where they could be evenly matched.

Sarah didn't know exactly what had happened—she had been running from Ordoñez, and turned uphill, heading for light. The next thing she knew, she was standing alone, in a wood that could have passed for idyllic. She searched the trees, knowing better than to call out, but eventually had to face the fact that she had lost sight of Alex—and could only hope that a long burst of rapid gunfire exploding from the lower trees did not find its target. With nothing else to do, she headed slowly upwards, looking to find her way to relative safety.

She came to the outer ring of the small wood, and was almost dazzled by what she saw—snow. She was overcome, as if she'd never seen it fall before; she wondered how she could have never noticed the intricate patterns, the swirling dance of the blizzard, the blanket of white. The sky had opened up, and the white was cascading, almost like rain. She crouched behind a bush and gazed out at, wanting nothing more than to be part of it, to be it.

And yet she was still watchful. Through the snow she saw a dark shadow; with a deep intake of breath, she realized that it was a human figure. He was too large to be Alex and too short to be Ordoñez; the only conclusion Sarah could reach was that he was one of Ordoñez's thugs…and if that was true, there was only one possible course of action. Gritting her teeth, trying to shield herself against what she was about to do, she pulled the trigger.

Nothing. An empty click. She let it fall from her outstretched hand.

Anthony. He knew. I should have known he'd emptied it.

All she had managed to do was alert the figure. The man turned rapidly around—and an ancient memory clicked into the center of Sarah's mind. An old photograph, from a newspaper article read through a fog of tears. The night she learned that she was an orphan.

Jean le Potard,
the caption had read.
Believed to be a leader of the Moose Killers.

Potard's eyes found her; the evil behind his face pierced her. He yelled, raised his own weapon.

Do what Alex would do. Change the world.

She roared, screamed, and charged out of the thicket, hurling her full weight into Potard's torso. Potard grunted in pain and involuntarily stretched out the hand that held his gun. Sarah leapt at his arm and knocked it backwards, causing the weapon to fall out of sight. Enraged, Potard swung his arm at Sarah, knocking her backwards through the snow. She sprang up as quickly as she could, and threw her arms around Potard's neck, dragging him to the ground. They rolled apart in the freezing layer of white, and Sarah dove it him again, punching, clawing, and biting whatever she could reach. Potard kicked with his leg and launched her away from him. Upon landing, she felt herself skid, and clawed for a hold—but not before sliding long enough to feel her legs dangling over an abyss.