Patriot Acts (18 page)

There were a lot of things I could have said to try and help her through it, to try to make her feel better, but I didn’t say any of them. I just took her in my arms and I held her, and she let me do it.

I certainly didn’t tell her that what she’d told me didn’t change anything I’d said.

Had the positions been reversed, I would have done exactly the same thing.

Including cutting strips off a man to make him scream.

CHAPTER

SIX

We were on I-84 heading east by ten the next morning,
Alena driving the Subaru Outback she’d bought off a used-car lot the previous evening. The Outback was five years old, dark green, ran fine, and smelled faintly of cat’s urine, which explained why she’d gotten it for a steal. She’d bought it on the same ID we’d used to get from Portland to Whitefish, the same ID we used to settle up before checking out of the Grove. Before leaving Boise, we’d destroyed each of our sets. For the trip cross-country, we’d use the St. Louis ones that Sargenti had provided. Once in Wilmington, we’d switch to the Canadian, since that had been the name Sargenti had used for the reservations we’d requested.

Aside from the smell, the drive went just fine, and we didn’t push it, because neither of us saw an immediate need to. We were driving cross-country on a long shot, and neither of us had much hope that it would play out. Driving gave us both time to think, to try to come up with a better plan. I’m sure that’s what Alena did, at least; mostly, I tried to sleep and convince my body to speed along in its recovery.

It was late afternoon when we reached Lynch, Wyoming, and that seemed a fine time to call it a day. There was a Best Western not far from the Interstate, called the Outlaw Inn, and that was too good to pass up, so we pulled into the lot and parked. It was typical Best Western, long and two-storied. A minimall was across the street, replete with dry cleaner, video rental, and convenience store. It was cold, the air dry and sharp, and a crust of ice had filmed over everything, including the snow.

I was getting very tired of snow.

We pulled our bags from the car, anxious to get fresh air in our lungs and more importantly, our nostrils, then picked our way carefully across the lot to the office. The bags weren’t holding much—Alena’s laptop, the new clothes she’d bought for us after acquiring the car, toiletries, vitamins, and the spare IDs. Each of us had a gun, taken from the bodies we’d left outside the cabin in Montana. The contractors had all carried extra clips, so between us we had somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty rounds if we encountered anything that required that much dissuasion.

The office had a cowboy motif going, from the wood carving of a bucking bronco to the laminated lariat that hung on the wall beside the front desk. There was a coffeemaker with complimentary coffee, stained with the dregs it had spilled over the years, and a couch that wasn’t leather but wanted to be. Behind the counter was a display of travel-sized amenities—aspirin, toothpaste, shampoo, everything you might need if you’d forgotten to pack before meeting your mistress. A television hung nearby on the wall, burbling news softly, but instead of aiming out so the guests could enjoy it, it had been turned the other way, to service the management.

The management, such as we could see, consisted of an over-weight man who could have been anywhere from early twenties to late thirties. He watched us come through the door with an absolute lack of interest, perhaps even the hope that we would change our minds at the last minute and maybe try to find another place to rest our heads. His interest perked up a bit when we actually made it inside and he saw Alena, but then diminished when he realized that, yes, I was probably sleeping with her.

We took a room on the second floor, settled our things and ourselves, and then talked about what we would do for dinner.

“Wyoming,” I said. “Beef.”

“There must be another choice.”

“You want to try the fish they’re serving in Lynch, be my guest,” I said. “I’m thinking there’s got to be someplace with a salad bar.”

“Salad bars are worse.” She looked honestly horrified. “They’re breeding grounds for bacteria and disease.”

I looked at the clock by the bed, digital and frail. If it was to be believed, it wasn’t yet five. “I’ll see if I can find a grocery store,” I told her, and headed back down to the office.

The same man was behind the counter when I came in, speaking on the phone, but as soon as he saw me he cut off whatever it was he was saying and hung up. He hung up hard, the handset clattering into the base.

“There a grocery store nearby?” I asked.

“There’s the Get N Go,” he said, then pointed past me, out the windows and to the lot across the street. “That’s nearby.”

I followed the direction of his finger, nodded, then looked back at him.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It is, though it’s not really what I had in mind. I was hoping for something with a wider selection.”

“There’s Boschetto’s, down Elk a ways. Imported stuff, if you like that kind of thing.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but it seemed that he meant something.

“And there’s a Smith’s, out on Foothill, but you probably don’t want to go that far,” he added.

“Thanks,” I said, and walked out of the office, making sure to clear his line of sight through the windows. I looked up at the sky, the darkening gray, and began counting off slowly in my head.

When I reached thirty, I turned and went back into the office.

This time, the handset was back in its cradle before I was through the door.

“What time’s checkout again?” I asked.

“Eleven,” he said. “It’s eleven.”

“Right, thanks,” I said, and left the office a last time, climbing the stairs back up to our room. I knocked on the door before using my key to enter, found that Alena had moved the furniture around, and was now in the corner by the closet, doing yoga.

“I think we’ve got a problem,” I told her.

She was in an abdominal stretch, her back arched and her head on the floor, her feet folded back beneath her buttocks, looking at me upside down. “What kind of problem?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. There was a remote control for the television on the bed stand, and I picked it up, switching on the set that was bolted to the bureau at the foot of the bed. It came on with genuine reluctance. I began searching for a cable news channel.

Alena exhaled, then flipped out of her position, to her feet, and I thought that was maybe just maybe showing off for my benefit. I found a twenty-four-hour news channel as she came to my side.

“What happened?” she asked.

I started to answer, then stopped myself, staring at the television. On the screen was footage of the cabin in Montana or, at least, what the cabin in Montana looked like when graced with daylight. There were police and state troopers and men wearing parkas that had letters like “DHS” and “FBI” stenciled on their backs. There were crime-scene people taking photographs, and more people moving body bags.

Then the picture cut to a talking head behind his desk, and he said the words,
“terrorist cell”
and then, on the screen, appeared two pictures, side by side.

The same two pictures Bowles had shown me in his Interpol file four nights before, the file photos of Alena and myself.

“…considered armed and extremely dangerous,”
the talking head was saying.
“It is unknown, at this time, if they still have any quantity of ricin in their possession….”

“Oh,” said Alena softly. “That kind of trouble.”

CHAPTER

SEVEN

There were sirens, and they were most definitely headed
our way.

Alena and I looked at each other, thinking the same things. Running was out of the question; every cop, sheriff’s deputy, and reserve officer in a hundred square miles was currently converging on our position. Getting onto the open road would lead to a high-speed pursuit, and that was a game we would lose. Once on the Interstate, there was only one direction we could go, and that was whatever direction we started in. Too easy to drop spikes on the asphalt, to roadblock us, to force us to a stop. Factor in the weather, that with night falling the roads would be that much more treacherous, and it just wasn’t an option. If we were going to die, I didn’t want it to be because we’d lost control of our car on a patch of black ice.

Shooting our way out was an option, but I didn’t like it, for a number of reasons. With the contractors in Cold Spring and again in Montana, the situation had been different. They’d come to the game with violence, their intentions plain; for lack of a better phrase, they’d known what they were getting into. But the idea of shooting some poor S.O.B. cop who was doing his job, that didn’t sit well with me. There were a lot of things I already had on my conscience, and many more that I would have to learn to live with. Bringing about the death of a police officer in the line of his duty wasn’t going to be one of them.

I said as much to Alena.

“Agreed,” she said, then went for her bag, pulling the MacBook from within. “Curtains.”

I went to the windows. Our view wasn’t bad, given that there wasn’t much to it, at least, not yet. It was almost full dark outside now, the overcast sky helping the night’s approach, and streetlamps had already come on. I could see the expanse of the parking lot, see the Outback parked where we had left it, and then, across Elk, the lot of the minimall, likewise illuminated. As I watched, the first car arrived, cutting its siren as it pulled in across the street. Red and blue flashed off the sheen of ice on the ground, bounced from the glass of nearby windows.

I closed the curtains, then moved to the bathroom. There was no window, not even a tiny one. I came back to find Alena at the desk, searching the drawers furiously.

“No way out the back,” I told her. “Which, I suppose, means no way in, either. And we sure as hell aren’t leaving by the front door, not unless we’re in custody, at least.”

“The Ethernet cable,” she told me. “I can’t get a wireless signal. There should be a cable in the closet or somewhere.”

I snapped back the bifold doors on the closet, came eye-to-eye with a small clear plastic bag dangling from the clothes rod. I didn’t bother to unhook it, just tore the bag loose and tossed it to Alena. She freed the cable, plugged it into the cable modem on the desk, and opened the Web browser.

“Do we have a plan?” I asked her.

“I’m working on one. The response—what are we facing?”

I moved past her at the desk, back to the window, and parted the curtains enough to peek out. The lot across the street was filling with emergency vehicles, and as I watched, a SWAT van pulled in to join the others. I wasn’t hearing any helicopters, but that didn’t mean there weren’t going to be any; only that they hadn’t arrived on-scene yet.

“SWAT just pulled up,” I told her. “I’d guess at ten minutes before they cut the power.”

“The news showed the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.”

“They’ll have been notified,” I agreed. “The Feds will want to run the show, which means they’ll put the brakes on the locals, keep them from rushing us, even if they were inclined to do that, which I doubt. How many people in Lynch, you think?”

“Twenty thousand? Perhaps thirty?”

“Not a big SWAT team, then, and probably not a lot of experience on it, either. They’ll do it by the book, all the more so because they think we’re so damn dangerous. SWAT tactics are universally the same. They evacuate the immediate area, form a perimeter, and then wait. They’ll try to negotiate us out, especially if they believe we’re in possession of a chemical or biological agent.”

“Don’t forget the federal response.”

“I don’t know DHS’s reach,” I said. “Figure they’ll scramble a major unit on us, maybe a Delta Squad, maybe the Hostage Rescue Team out of Quantico. So four hours, maybe five before they can reach us.”

“Longer, I’d think. Closer to eight. They have to deploy, then transport, then arrive on site, then redeploy.”

“Speaking of which,” I said. The SWAT team in the lot outside the Get N Go was scrambling, men with rifles running beneath the lights in several directions at once. I tried to get a count of what I was seeing, and it confirmed what I had suspected. It wasn’t a large team. On the basis of that, then, they’d secure the perimeter before trying to convince us to come out. Whatever they had for the breaching team, if they decided to come in and take us by force, I didn’t know. Before I pulled back from the window, I caught sight of a news van approaching.

“Local media’s arrived.”

“Good for them. The SWAT team, did they have night-vision?”

“Couldn’t tell.”

“We’ll need to know,” she said.

I considered, then reached for the remote control and showed it to her. She actually grinned.

“Very clever,” she told me.

I shoved the remote into my back pocket, moving to look over her shoulder at what she’d been doing with the laptop. Apparently, she’d been Googling Wyoming airports.

“We’re going to need an airport,” she explained to me. “Preferably an international one.”

“The idea being to convince them that we’re still here while we’re actually on a plane to parts unknown?”

“If we are quick, it will work. They will not breach the room unless provoked or until they have no other choice.”

I was at the bureau beneath the television, now, yanking open the drawers. The television was still rambling news, and for the time being, it seemed, wasn’t talking about us. That wouldn’t last much longer. If the initial story was national, then the addition to it currently playing out in Lynch sure as hell would be, too. I kept searching, and in the lower right-hand drawer found the phone book for Lynch, as well as a copy of
Hustler.

“Remind me to have a word with housekeeping,” I said.

“What? Why?”

“Never mind.” I started flipping through the listings. “Lynch has an airport, the Sweetsprings County Airport.”

“International?”

“Are you kidding me?”

She was typing quickly. “If we check in for international flights, we only have to clear security once before arriving at our destination.”

“Fine, but we were going to Wilmington.”

Alena glanced from the laptop to me, and she actually looked annoyed. “We don’t
go
to the destination. We get on a flight routing to Paris, say, but that requires changing planes somewhere on the East Coast—Dulles would be ideal. Then we simply walk out of the airport, rent a vehicle, proceed from there.”

“There’s an international airport in Casper,” I said, discarding the phone book and taking a look at the ceiling. It wasn’t terribly high, just out of my reach. I tried to remember the grade of the roof, how severely it had been raked. “Probably one in Cheyenne, as well.”

“Denver is closer,” she said. “Here, the local airport has connections to Denver. Also a flight school. That will be useful.”

She snapped the laptop closed, then reached around and pulled the cord from the jack. While she did that, I pulled myself up on the dresser, began pushing at the ceiling. It gave with pressure, and as soon as I verified that, I punched at it. My angle on it was bad, and I couldn’t get much force behind my blows, and all of the bruises on my torso came back to life when I did it. It took three tries before I broke through with my fist. Debris and dust floated down, coating my arm and face.

“They’ll be looking for a man and a woman traveling together,” Alena said.

I began tearing a hole in the ceiling. “We’re going to have to split up.”

“Once we’re clear, yes. We will rejoin one another at the hotel in Wilmington, but each of us will have to travel by a different route to get there. The longer we can convince them we are still here, still trapped in this room, the more time we will have to escape, to get further away.”

The phone started ringing.

“You take it,” Alena told me. “You must convince them to wait, that they do not need to storm the room.”

I hopped down from the bureau. Alena had risen, replacing her laptop in her bag, and I gave her a lift up to where I had just been standing. She resumed widening the hole I’d made in the ceiling, working slowly to keep her efforts silent as I went to answer the phone.

“What?”

“Mr. Morse? This is Bobby Galloway with the Lynch Police Department. I’m here to help you.”

“You’re what?” I asked.

“I’m here to help you.”

“What makes you think I need your help, Mr. Galloway?”

“Well, Chris, it seems there are some people who think that there was this incident in Montana a few days ago involving some law enforcement officials,” Bobby Galloway told me, using his best hostage-negotiation voice. It wasn’t bad, pleasant and with a definite promise of friendship. “We’d really like to get that sorted out. There’s a lot of confusion about what happened back there.”

“Not from where I’m standing.”

“That’s the thing, there are always two sides to every story.”

“You want to help me so much, why do I think that if I open my curtains and look out the window I’m going to be seeing the SWAT team surrounding this hotel?”

“Well, Chris, unfortunately things have gone beyond where I can just come over there and chat with you. We’re going to need to bring you down to the station, try to sort this out there.”

“You’re going to arrest me?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, we do have a warrant for your arrest, Chris. We also have a warrant for Danielle’s arrest. We’ve been told that she may have been wounded, is she doing okay, does she need any medical attention, anything like that?”

I took a second, trying to get my thoughts ordered as quickly as possible. So far, Bobby Galloway was proving himself to be a very good negotiator, better than I’d expected given the circumstance and the location, and that meant I was going to have to be very careful in what I said to him. Asking about Alena was mining, trying to gather intelligence.

Galloway had the potential to become our greatest ally,
if
I could convince him that he had control of the conversation, that he could keep me talking, and more, keep me willing to talk to him. That would be ideal, because it would allow him to turn to his superior, his chief of police or whoever, and say the same, that he could keep us from being a danger to ourselves and the community, that he could keep us stable until HRT or whoever arrived. That maybe he could get this resolved peaceably, without needing to storm the room.

He could buy us the time we needed to get away.

“Chris? Is Danielle doing okay?” Galloway asked.

“She’s fine,” I told him. “She’s more than fine, she’s never been better.”

“How about you? Are you injured at all? Do you need any medical assistance?”

“I’m doing fine,” I said. Then I added, “I’ve got everything I need right here with me.”

It was a deliberate opening, and he took it, but he took his time. A worse negotiator would have jumped on the line like a politician on a vote, but Bobby Galloway waited almost three seconds before speaking.

“Yeah? What do you have in there that’s so helpful, Chris?”

“Don’t you worry about what I have or what I don’t,” I snapped. “I’ve got everything I need, that’s all you need to know.”

“All right.”

I let a pause start, then, trying to sound pissy, said, “Can I ask you a question? Am I allowed to ask questions, here?”

It was as calculated on my part as anything he had said on his, because I was giving him exactly what every good negotiator wants to hear: I was giving him power. Three minutes into the conversation at the most, and psychologically—at least from where Galloway was standing with his headset and his paper cup of coffee at the mobile command post across the street—I’d turned the first corner he wanted me to take. I had asked his permission, and that meant that I’d put him in control.

“Sure, Chris,” Galloway said. “Go ahead.”

“You guys want to arrest me, why don’t you just come up to the door and come and get me?”

“Thing is, the information I’ve been given says that you two have some dangerous stuff up there. That you’ve got some firearms and ammunition, like that, maybe even something that could make a lot of people really sick.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, coming up here would probably be a bad idea, Bobby. It would probably make a whole lot of people a whole lot more than just sick.”

“There you go, that’s what’s got us where we are, here,” Bobby Galloway said. “You want to tell me about what happened in Montana? You want to talk about that?”

“No.”

“This is a good opportunity, Chris, this is a good chance for you to tell your side of things, you hear what I’m saying? There are always two sides, it’s like I said, and from where we’re sitting out here, I mean, it looks like you’re the bad guy, so it would be good to hear your side. You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I’m sure,” I told him. “I’ve got nothing to say about Montana.”

To my side, Alena had finished clearing the hole in the ceiling, just wide enough now that I could fit through it. She quietly dropped from the bureau, took the last chunk of debris and set it on the floor, then began clearing off the other pieces she’d pulled from where they rested on the bed.

“All right, Chris,” Galloway said, after a moment. “I’m going to take a couple minutes here and consult with my superiors, maybe use the bathroom, get another cup of coffee. You should think about what I’ve said, see if we can’t work this out.”

“Sure,” I said, but it went into dead air, he’d already disconnected. I did likewise.

“He hung up?” Alena asked.

I nodded. “He’s pretty good.”