Deadlock (42 page)

“Do they have guards?” Logan said.

“I don't know. It's big enough, draws enough attention . . . you'd think they'd have an after-hours guy.”

“Can't we knock?” Logan said.

“Let's make that the last resort. Laura could have talked her way in, convinced the guy to let her and the kids stay.” He scratched the stubble on his cheek and squinted at a window twenty feet up. Wrought-iron bars covered it, but in the dark they looked rusty and unstable. “Or she could have found another way in. If they're hiding in there, I don't want to blow their cover.”

“Does it matter?” Logan said. “Now?”

That struck Hutch as a profound comment, not only true, but one that marked a critical change in their circumstances. They no longer had to worry about being chased or caught or killed. It didn't matter if the police came, threw them all in the pokey for a day or two. They were finished with all of that.

“I guess you're right,” Hutch said. He noticed a van in the parking lot, hidden by shadows. He could barely make out the logo on the side:
CRAZY CARPET CLEANERS.
If not a security guard, then perhaps a janitorial crew was in there. “I was just thinking—”

“Dad?” Logan was holding a front door open.

Hutch said, “It was unlocked?”

Logan nodded.

Hutch hurried toward it. He whispered, “Wouldn't you know it'd be the one I didn't try. Laura must have got in somehow and left it open for us.”

“It's dark in there,” Logan said.

“They're closed,” Hutch said, keeping his voice low.

They stepped in, and the door closed behind them. A hallway broke left. If they were there to eat, they'd head that way, pay at a bank of cash registers, and pick up their meals from a cafeteria-style food bar. Straight ahead, a chain blocked an arched passage to the seating areas. Hutch unhooked the chain and reattached it to the other side.

“If you see anyone, just—” He stopped. He sniffed the air. The subtle, lingering odors of flour, cheese, grease, and . . . the grassy-tea aroma of an expensive cigar. He stumbled back into Logan and turned. He lifted his son in his arms and crashed back through the door, spilling outside onto the tiled patio beyond.

SIXTY-EIGHT

“What is it?” Logan said.

Sprawled on the tiles outside the restaurant doors, Hutch scanned all directions. He expected to hear the crack of a rifle at any moment and feel a brief, hot pain in his head, before . . . nothing. Unless the bullet reached him before the sound. Unless Logan was hit first!

Rolling onto all fours, he pulled Logan into a corner near the front door and a perpendicular wall. He pressed his chest into Logan's head, trying to cover as much of him as he could. He spun around and leaned his back into the boy's upraised knees.

“Dad,” Logan said. “What is it? I'm—” Then he gasped, started to whine, then sob.

“What, Logan?” Hutch said. He pushed up into a crouch so that his torso completely protected Logan's head. “What do you see?”

This is it,
he thought.
This is how it ends. Please, Lord, not Logan.

He remembered news footage of a Jewish father and son in Jerusalem. They were heading to the boy's school when a firefight broke out between Israeli guardsmen and Palestinian militants. The father had pushed the boy into a corner and covered him with his body. Bullets kicked up dust and dirt all around them. As it cleared, the father fell away dead. The son fell on top of him, dead. The video had been the talk of the newsroom. It had been painful to watch, and a lot of lunches had gone uneaten that day.

What Hutch remembered now was how fast it had happened—mere seconds—and that the father, regardless of his resolve, regardless of his love, had been unable to protect his child.

He wasn't going to let that happen. If Page wanted him, he could have him, but not his boy. “What is it, Logan?” he said. “What?”

Logan's arm came out from behind him, pointing into the parking lot. “That van.”

The carpet-cleaning van Hutch had noticed on the way in. But he saw no one in the windows, no one standing around it.

Logan said, “That's the van Emile put me in, the one he used to pick up that other man and bring me downtown. They . . . there's . . .”

Hutch saw Logan's eyes grow moist. “What is it, son?”

“There are bodies in the back. He
tied
me to them. My face . . .” He wiped a hand over his cheek, back and forth, taking off something that wasn't there anymore. “The
smell
.”

Hutch hated Page for many things, but at that moment, he hated him for exposing Logan to human death and decay. Hutch felt his fury rising. Page—or someone working for him—had
tied
his son to corpses.

“It's okay now,” Hutch said. “Shhh. It'll be all right.” He gripped Logan's shoulders and held them until the boy's breathing slowed and their eyes met. He said, “Listen, I want you to run. Just start running that way. Run far. Then find a place to hide. Watch for me.”

“No! I'm not leaving, you can't make me!” Logan grabbed two handfuls of Hutch's jacket. “No!” His head drooped, and he started sobbing.

Maybe it would be best to keep Logan with him, Hutch thought. What if Page's men were outside somewhere, watching? He was sure nothing would please Page more than snatching back what Hutch had taken from him—what had been Hutch's in the first place, but he didn't think Page would care about that. He hoped he was not simply justifying a stupid decision because he could not stand to see Logan cry—and because he himself did not want to be separated from him.

He said, “Okay. You stay with me, but do exactly as I say right when I say it, got it? No trying to be a hero or anything. Deal?”

Logan repeated the instructions, fast, as though they were the magic words that would keep him with his dad.

Hutch pulled the bag around to his front, unzipped it, and withdrew the bow. He set it on the tiles beside him. He tugged out the ballistic vest. “Put this on.”

“No,” Logan said, pushing it away. “You'll need it.”

“Logan! What did we just talk about?”

Logan nodded. He let Hutch slip the vest onto him.

Hutch pulled the Velcro belts as tight as they'd go, but the vest still fit Logan as poorly as his pants did. “That'll have to do,” he said.

He picked up the bow. The attached quiver held the two arrows he had retrieved from the roof. He grabbed one of them and nocked it onto his string. He held the arrow in place with the index finger of his bow hand. That kept one hand free, while positioning the bow and arrow for quick use.

He gestured toward the van. He said, “I should go check it out, see if anyone's hiding there, waiting to sneak up behind us when we go in.”

“Don't,” Logan said. “What if it's a trap, an ambush?”

“More likely there'd be one
inside
the restaurant,” Hutch said. But Logan was right. To reach the van he'd have to walk forty feet in the open. And for what? Weapons, maybe, but he wasn't much good with firearms. Besides, he had to reach Macie, Laura, and Dillon before Page did. He prayed it was not already too late.

“Okay,” Hutch said. “You saw only two men?”

Logan nodded.

“I got one of them, so it must be only Page inside.”

Page
, he thought.
How can it be Page?

Hutch had seen him on the terrace. He'd signaled his displeasure at the arrival of the police, and he'd taken off for Logan. But had it been Page who came through the roof's door, guns blazing? Hutch had seen a helmeted soldier and had assumed it was Page.

He remembered Page's words:
What's real? Everything is an illusion.

That's the way Page saw the world, the way he lived his life. Michael had been fooled into believing he had been playing combat games. In his mind, he had shot only at actors and computerized renderings of enemy targets, avatars. But Page had sent him to kill real people. He had shown Michael a bad guy, so Michael had shot him—and had killed a child. Illusions.

Page had not been merely making a case for relativism, for the subjectivity of his actions. When he'd said
Everything is an illusion,
he'd really meant
everything
. The success of Outis depended on illusion.

His ability to control his soldiers, not only to wage war on his client's enemies, but also to eliminate his own perceived foes—it all depended on illusion.

Page had made Hutch believe they had fought each other, and that Hutch had won. Now it appeared that Hutch had arrowed someone else, had pushed someone else off the roof. Still, Hutch could not shake the sense that Page had come back from the dead. He thought he had
seen
Page die, and even now it was hard to grasp that the man was alive.

For how many centuries had people clung to the idea that seeing is believing? How long would it take to realize the eyes could no longer be trusted? Pictures were Photoshopped. Characters in video games and even some movies looked real, but never were. Page had recognized the potential of technology to manipulate perception and had built an industry around it.

Whatever had happened back on the roof, however the man had found his way here, Hutch was sure it was Page who waited inside. Who else was cocky enough to smoke cigars while trying to assassinate people?

Hutch looked at the door to the restaurant. Above it should have been mounted the inscription Dante attributed to hell's entrance: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

No, no,
he thought.
I won't do that. I can't.

“Logan,” he whispered. “Grab hold of my belt. Squeeze it tight. Don't let go.”

He closed his eyes. He imagined that he was about to enter the woods on a hunting excursion: stealth mode, high sensitivity to sounds, every move intentional, no wasted energy. He called to mind his objectives: Macie, Laura, Dillon, alive and away from Page; Logan and himself too.

He pictured the hurdle to reaching those objectives: Page. He'd be armed, wearing the black SWAT-type clothes he'd worn on the terrace, and he'd have that helmet. Hutch would have to find a way to combat the advantages the helmet gave Page. He thought of a few things that might work. He felt the bow in his left hand, the arrow under his index finger. He took a deep breath, rose, and opened the door.

Crouching low, feeling the tug of Logan's hand on his belt, he stepped inside.

SIXTY-NINE

Hutch eased the door closed, and darkness engulfed them like a fist. He felt a curving wall on his right. He knew it circled around to the exit doors and a small room. He followed it, Logan clinging to him, until the lighted green letters of an exit sign showed him the doorway he wanted: a small security office. Here, a guard could monitor the closed-circuit cameras positioned around the restaurant and control the lighting and other features.

Hutch felt a desk, a Styrofoam coffee cup—still warm, and the glass screens of the monitors. He pushed a button and a screen came on, displaying static. He pushed another button, lighting up another screen. He found a panel of switches next to the monitors and began flipping them. The static on the screens changed to black. A distant exit light in the corner of one told Hutch they were working, staring into the darkened building. He found another bank of switches and toggled one up.

“A light just came on in one of the eating areas,” Logan whispered from the doorway.

“I did that,” Hutch said. He toggled the switches, one after the other.

The monitors showed the restaurant springing to life. Every few seconds the images changed as the monitors cycled through the cameras, showing the lagoon at the restaurant's epicenter, trees with twinkling lights, whole areas of empty tables, the kitchen . . . where Page was leaning against a stainless-steel countertop, puffing on a cigar. He lifted his gaze to the fluorescents overhead, nodded, and tossed the stogie aside. He raised a helmet off the counter and slipped it over his head.

“What are you doing?” Logan said. “Aren't we safer with them off?”

Hutch pointed at Page on the screen. “Not when our enemy can see in the dark. The lights even things up a bit.” He continued flipping switches. Lights in the ceiling and mounted to the walls came on, marching toward them from deeper within the big space. Overhead lights illuminated the security room and exit area.

Logan hissed out a scream. His hand covered his mouth.

Hutch looked past him to a body facedown on the floor. It was an older man, wearing a security guard's uniform. His hat lay a few feet away. A puddle of blood fanned out behind his head like a halo in a Renaissance painting. The liquid had found the cracks between the floor's tiles and fingered out from the main pool along them. The man's holster was unsnapped and empty.

“Don't look,” Hutch said. A flash of thought, like a poke on his shoulder, reminded him to be glad the boy's experience with the corpses in the van hadn't jaded him to the horror of death.

He turned back to the controls and flipped a switch labeled
WATERFALL
. The humming of a pump kicked in somewhere. Next came the sound of splashing water. He said, “I think those helmets enhance sound. The water should mess things up for him.”

A monitor flipped back to the kitchen. Page, still helmeted, was stretching his back, rotating his arms. He picked up one of the machine pistols Outis favored, slung its strap over his head, and headed for a steel-covered door with a port window. The image changed to the arcade room: flashing pinball machines, stand-up video games, and skeet ball lanes.

Hutch stepped past Logan, knelt beside the guard, and felt for a pulse. Nothing.

He moved with Logan to the bottom of the wide ramp that would take them to a viewing area in front of the lagoon and waterfall. The pool's surface was one level down, but this higher ground offered better views of the diving platform and kept customers from getting wet when the performers plunged into the water. At the viewing area, diners could go left and back into a faux Mexican village, angle slightly left around the lagoon into the arcade and game rooms, or take a sharp right into what resembled a beachside resort. It was in this resort area that Hutch, Laura, and Dillon had eaten lunch.