Deadlock (34 page)

She left him and returned to Charlie. He was sitting cross-legged on the road, the pistol in his lap. She picked it up and tossed it under a nearby car. “Let them know what happened,” she said. “But you don't want to be holding it when they come. Not—”

She scanned the parking lot: the burning ruin of the Honda, the shattered and flipped taxicab—its driver she hadn't seen emerge—the other cab, crashed into more damaged cars, bulletholes everywhere.

“Not with all this,” she finished.

He looked up at her. “You turned out to be one interesting story.”

“We're in your debt.”

He blew air out. “If I'da given it half a thought, I'd still be in my car, watching like the others.”

“I don't think so.”

Hutch walked up. His face, arms, and T-shirt were a bloody mess. His eyes were nearly as red, glistening. He nodded at Charlie. “Thanks.”

Charlie's wrinkles deepened. He glanced back at the van. “Your boy?”

“Not there.”

The old man shook his head. “Ain't right.”

The sirens were almost on them. Laura could see the flashing red and blue lights coming from both directions on the main road. She said, “We can't be here when they come. We have to keep working to get his son back.”

Charlie said, “'Course.”

Laura helped him stand, and he groaned and pressed a hand into the small of his back.

“Look here,” he said. “Take the back road to aisle—”

The sound of crunching metal reached them. In a far-off aisle, a panel van backed away from the parked car it had struck. It roared off, breaking though an entrance barrier without slowing.

“There he goes,” Charlie observed. “Just had to leave his mark one more time on the way out.” He looked sideways at Laura. “Not your hubby, you say? So who were they?”

“Wayward youth,” she said. She was serious about that, but it seemed too kind, too dismissive for the damage they'd wreaked. She shook the thought away. “You said we should go to what aisle?”

“B, the bear. There's a hidden gate in the perimeter fence. Just tap it with your bumper. Take the service road—just a rutty dirt thing—west. It'll sweep you 'round to a freight company's parking lot. Should be able to bypass the craziness that's 'bout to converge on this place.” He cast his eyes out on the approaching cherry tops. “Go.” He pointed at Hutch. “Get your boy. Don't stop till you do.”

Hutch inclined his head and brushed past him. Macie and Dillon ran out from between the cars. They leaped at Hutch. He knelt and embraced them.

Laura gave Charlie a sad smile. She reached Hutch and touched his head. “We have to go,” she said.

Macie and Dillon had their faces buried in Hutch's neck. He turned and looked up at her. “Who's the guy in the back of the XTerra?”

She covered her mouth. “One of the soldiers who attacked us. Kind of a long story.”

“He's tied up?”

She nodded.

Hutch gently extricated himself from the children. He stood. “Get in the car. Go on, now.” To Laura he said, “We've got a lot to sort out.

Let's get someplace where we can think. A motel.”

She hugged him, and they hurried to the XTerra.

FIFTY-FIVE

Emile maneuvered the van through Denver's rush hour traffic. He kept checking the rearview mirror to see if one of the cops heading to the parking lot had spotted him. If so, the traffic would kill him; as it was, however, it kept him from transferring his adrenaline-fueled tension to the gas pedal. He reminded himself to drive with caution and awareness. It would be too easy right now to run a red light or change lanes into some other car.

He held a hand up, still and horizontal. Shaky. No wonder his shots missed so many times. Twice in one day, seemingly simple missions had spiraled out of control.

His teammates were all gone, either dead or vanished. Ben, the team leader, had bitten it at the house. An arrow through the neck. An
arrow
! It was also there that Michael had disappeared. Command Center had reported his going after the woman and kids when his helmet went offline. Now Anton—run down by a car! Taken out by some security cop! 'Course, that guard was something. He'd taken one shot, under fire, and decommissioned Emile's helmet, just like that.

This whole op had been screwed up from the get-go. Spy on a family through their windows—what was that? Then the kid had shown up, calling Emile a Peeping Tom, surely ready to scream for his mom and get the cops all over them. What was he supposed to do? He'd grabbed the kid, thinking he'd restrain him in the van, let him go later. That's when it had hit the fan: “Keep the boy, kill everyone else.”

It was the sort of order that got Ben revved up. He just loved that kind of stuff. Didn't matter who it was they were after. He liked the chase, the victory. Once, after a VR simulation in which they'd wiped out a village of mostly women and old folks, Ben had acted like he had just reached the top of Mount Everest—freestyle, no oxygen for that boy. He had been whoopin' and grinnin' and ready for more. The others had been happy to have achieved high score among all the fireteams, but it wasn't exactly the mission they had signed up for.

“Dude,” Anton had said, pushing Ben and his enthusiasm away, “ain't winning better when your opponents are firing back?”

Ben had flashed his crazy ear-to-ear grin. He'd said, “As long as I get the points, I don't care if I'm taking out dogs. All of the points and none of the risk—that's my kind of mission.”

So Command Center's unexpected order had pushed Ben's let's-get-it-on button. He must have been flying high. Until that arrow got him.

All of the risk had been there. They just hadn't known it.

Emile still didn't know what to do with the kid. “Take him back with us,” Anton had suggested. And it made sense. Colonel Bryson had told them the mission involved pressuring people into doing something.

“Blackmail,” Ben had interpreted.

“Or extortion,” Anton had said.

Emile had asked, “What's the difference?”

“Blackmail's for money,” Anton had said. “Extortion's for making people do things.” He'd frowned. “I think.”

Later, after they had the kid in the back of the van—along with Ben's body—Emile had thought about the mission, its objectives and such. Kidnapping seemed to accomplish the goal: it could be for money or to force a person into compliance. That had to be why the order had been to take the boy and not kill him.

So they had been thinking “bring the kid back” when the order to intercept a different target at the airport had come through. To preserve the integrity of the previous mission, they had stashed the boy at a motel. That way, he'd be available for blackmail or extortion or whatever it was.

Also, he and Anton would not be tripping over him at the airport.

They hadn't known for sure whether the second mission was related to the first. They thought probably it was, but it didn't matter. They'd figured it out, however, after Anton had spotted the same woman from the house, waiting for their current target. It had been Colonel Bryson's directive to monitor the airport announcements to help them locate the target. He had been running all the names through Command Center's databases, looking for known associates, et cetera, when a name had hit.

It was these kinds of twists and turns that made the game so fun.

Fun
—not the word he would use now, not with Ben's body back at the motel and Anton's in the backseat. He knew many of the fireteams' members—on other teams, not just his—reconciled the danger with the entertainment by applying the philosophy
If you can't lose, why play the game?

This
was what losing looked like. Dead and missing teammates. Fireteam Bravo's score on this one was going to suck.

The second mission's requirement to mingle with civilians—in the parking lot, at the airport, driving—meant not wearing their helmets for much of the time. Command Center would not have many of the details it required to properly score a team and its members. He'd have to fill them in as best he could. That was a debriefing he wasn't looking forward to.

Emile knew Colonel Bryson was expecting a call and would be ready to give Fireteam Bravo their next order. It would probably be to return to base, since the team amounted now to only him. With or without the kid, he didn't know. Didn't care.

As he drove back to the motel, he decided Colonel Bryson would just have to wait for his call. Emile was dog tired, starving, and completely fragmented. Remedying the first two would certainly mitigate the last, making him sharper when he checked in.

Besides, how many more points could they deduct from a mission that had scored a big goose egg?

FIFTY-SIX

Julian peered through his quad's door into the hallway. By this time on most mornings, the fireteams were whipping up breakfast in their kitchenettes. Julian didn't smell burning bacon grease or pungent eggs. None of the usual guffaws and wisecracks drifted to him. They hadn't returned yet. Good.

He shut the door and crossed the den to his bedroom. He closed the door and knelt beside his bed, as if to pray. He snaked an arm between his mattresses and found Hutch's phone. Not the most original hiding place, but if his superiors searched the room—which they did periodically—they'd find it no matter how well he stashed it.

He detected a soft click and snapped his head toward the door, pressing the phone against his chest. After a quarter minute, he suspected the sound had come from the refrigerator in the other room.

He stood and went into the bathroom. He locked the door, lowered the toilet lid, and sat on it. Leaning over, he rested his forearms on his thighs. Between his knees, his hands turned the phone over and over. He thumbed it opened and turned it on. To conserve the battery, he kept it off when he wasn't around to hear it ring. He watched it power up.

His stomach sent a message of distress. He ignored it. Next, his throat tightened, and he ignored that too.

Something occurred to him. He stood, turned on the shower, and returned to the seat. The screen's backlight had gone out.

He took a deep breath, held it a few seconds, then let his lungs deflate. His finger punched a button. The screen lit up, displaying the first digit. He tapped out the rest of the number. The phone felt cold against his face.

Half a continent away, a phone rang. He pictured the setting: a bedroom in a middle-class home. Nothing extravagant, because his father never gave anything away if he could help it, and he could almost always help it. Two hours later there, so the sun would have had a chance to heat up and fill the room with bright yellow light.

Three rings.

Julian's guts felt loose, like he'd almost reached the top of a tall roller-coaster hill when the car plunged in reverse.

“Hello?” Her voice was soft, careful.

He remembered the last time he'd seen her. He'd thought then that she was going through life walking on eggshells, afraid of cracking one. She had not always been that way. Nearly the opposite: bold, happy, gung-ho for life.

“Mom?” Julian said. “It's me.”

“Jul . . . Julian?”

“I just, just . . . I miss you.”

Silence . . . too long, the silence. Maybe her heart couldn't take it after over a year. “Mom,” he said, “please don't hang up.”

Her sobs came over the line. They were the final blows, or they were
permission
. His own tears came. They welled up from his chest and poured out, loud and scalding on his cheeks.

Logan Hutchinson twisted against the duct tape that secured his neck to the bathtub faucet. He had long ago given up trying to free himself. He wanted only to
move
. Every muscle in his body ached from all sorts of abuses: getting tossed into van interiors, motel walls, the bathtub; having his arms wrenched backward, his wrists tied to his ankles, tape wrapped completely around him, even his knees bound together with a plastic ziplock thing; then not being able to move out of an awkward, uncomfortable position for hours.

The washcloth stuffed in his mouth was soaked with spit. He kept gagging on it, choking because the snot that came when he cried clogged his nose. To breathe he'd had to first blow the gunk out of his nostrils—over the bulging tape that covered his mouth, down his chin. His chest and stomach were covered with it, snot and tears.

The man who'd tied him up had been the van's driver—Anton, Emile had called him. He'd said, “Don't barf, kid, or you're dead.”

He almost had barfed. But he knew there was no place for it to go but in his throat, maybe his lungs. He realized only then that the man had been serious. When he'd felt the urge, when his stomach had churned and wanted to get rid of the KFC Laura had picked up for dinner, Logan closed his eyes and thought of tough guys in the movies enduring worse without puking. Did Will Smith lose his lunch when he was hanging by his leg in
I Am Legend
? No way. Never.

Logan had, however, peed himself. More than once. He wasn't embarrassed; it was just a thing people had to do. What he didn't like was the slow-drying wetness and the odor he had to endure since the first time, how many hours ago. It didn't help that he could also smell blood, like a jar of pennies. It was all over him, but mostly on his jeans over his right thigh—slowly darkening, becoming stiff. The blood had come from a body the two guys had tossed into the back of the van with Logan. He tried not to think about it.

Anton had bound him so thoroughly, he could barely wiggle his shoulders or move his knees a few inches in either direction. He had heard the two men talking and knew they were worried about more than his getting loose; they didn't want him making any noise. They didn't want him screaming or pounding or kicking. Nothing. That told him they were going to leave him alone.