Scott Free (12 page)

He could smell his own fear.

Minutes passed in the silent darkness. They were out there, waiting. Plotting. Damn smart animals, those wolves. The way they worked together, and the intensity of their eyes told Scott that they knew exactly what they were doing; that he didn't have a chance against them.

Suppose this was exactly what they wanted him to do?

The thought came out of nowhere. Suppose they were an even more clever team than he'd thought? How perfect would it be to drive him into the shelter, only to encounter a fourth wolf already inside, waiting for him?

Jesus, Scott, you're losing it
. Yeah, okay, but just suppose.

I'd have seen it.
No doubt about it. But
suppose
. The thought was ridiculous. First of all, they weren't that smart, and secondly, the shelter wasn't that big. There simply wasn't a place to hide.

But suppose…

The darkness in here bore a thick, physical presence. It had weight. He couldn't see a thing. And what you can't see can easily turn you into a corpse.

He couldn't take it anymore. Keeping one hand—his bare hand—on the door, he laid the survival knife at his knee and fumbled through the darkness with his glove, feeling for the flashlight that he knew had to be there.

The pale yellow light proved what he already knew. Still, what a relief.

They hit the door panel with the force of a linebacker, and the air filled with horrendous guttural growls as they pushed against the door and clawed at the snowy doorjamb. Scott's foot nearly slipped against the impact, but not quite. Hot breath puffed against his ear.

“No!” he shrieked. “Goddammit, no!” But his high-pitched voice only seemed to double their resolve. Again and again, they threw themselves at the door, and with each impact, Scott felt things slipping. They tore at the doorjamb as if it were a bone.

They'd finally outsmarted him. When they finally forced their way through—and they would, without a doubt—he had no retreat. He was dead, his guts ripped from his body.

“Oh, please,” Scott whimpered. “Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please…”

And there it was. One of them broke through the snow at the edge of the door, next to Scott's left elbow. Just a paw at first, and then a snout, with jaws chewing savagely at the air.

Scott screamed. It was a little girl sound, and for a flash he wondered where it was coming from. Then he didn't care. Without thinking, Scott snatched the knife from the floor and used it like a hatchet to hack at the snout. The animal screamed as the knife bit deeply into its flesh, and when it retreated, it nearly wrenched the weapon from Scott's hand.

An instant later, it was back, snorting a crimson aerosol as it further mauled the air. Scott slashed again, a more powerful blow this time, amputating a chunk of anatomy from the bloody mess of fur and teeth. It stuck to the blade and flew across the shelter as he raised the blade for another plunge.

Then the snout was gone.

But Scott wasn't about to let himself be fooled again.
Surprise me once, shame on you…

He didn't move. He sat there frozen in place, his knife hand poised for the next assault.

Again, the silence overwhelmed him. First such a cacophony, and then nothing. His heart pumped raw terror through his veins, leaving him light-headed. It roared like breaking waves in his ears.

“Come on, you assholes,” he whispered.
Please make them go away.

He heard them again. Somewhere out there beyond the walls, the wolves hissed and growled, their noises reaching that same frenzied level, but they didn't sound so close anymore.

What did that mean?

Who cared? And they were moving now. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the sounds of tearing flesh.

Then he got it: Alpha dog, once the top of the heap and now just a snack for his friends. The circle of life. One creature serving all others.

And then he shuddered when he remembered Cody Jamieson. Oh, Jesus.
I should have buried him
.

But he was frozen, right? A TV dinner for wolves. Maybe they wouldn't find him.

They did, of course, but not until well after midnight.

T
HE CODE WAS DESIGNED
back when Isaac DeHaven was more paranoid than he'd been in recent years. Unnecessarily complicated, it nonetheless remained relatively secure. On the first day of every month, a person he'd never met received a $5,000 wire transfer via a Swiss bank account, which received its marching orders from a bank in the Caymans. In return, the person he'd never met, yet trusted literally with his life—Isaac thought of his contact as a man and assigned him the name Sam—ran two seemingly innocuous radio stations. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the stations were active on the amateur bands, playing a taped loop of music on one, and random Morse code transmissions on the other. By being active all the time, any potential eavesdroppers would be hard-pressed to divine the treasure from the garbage.

Isaac suspected that Sam was an errant fed who wanted to make some money on the side, but for all he knew, he was the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover himself. Frankly, none of that mattered too much. What mattered was accurate information, and Sam was filled to the brim with it.

The clock read 2:24 as Isaac rubbed his eyes and shook his head to clear it. At this hour, he worried about his foggy brain making a foolish error.

At precisely 2:25, he heard the stutter code of ten dots in a row, and then he was ready to copy. His Morse was a little rusty, so it took him several tries to jot it all down. Fifteen minutes later, when he looked down at his pad, he saw:

The message would repeat itself for another forty-five minutes or so before returning to a broadcast of truly random letters and numerals that Isaac figured Sam must have programmed into some sort of computer.

He poured himself a scotch, carried the message over to his favorite chair, and settled in for the chore of decoding. The sequence
6789
marked the beginning of the message, and
1234
the end. In between, every fifth letter was the one that counted, and the sequence
ab
marked the ends of words. To decode the message itself, he needed only to move each letter ahead five places in the alphabet. Thus, the first letter of the message that counted—the
x
—was in fact a
c
. The next four letters in the message meant nothing, and then the
j
translated to an
o
.

After decoding the first two words, Isaac knew that it was the worst of all possible news. His hands trembled a bit, in fact; not so much from fear, but out of a sense of loss. What would be, would be, he knew. But he'd been hoping that the serenity would last a little longer.

Isaac didn't bother to check his work, there was no need. At worst, he might have dropped a letter or two, but what would that matter?

He tore the decoded message from its pad and read it one more time before tossing it into the fire. No, there definitely was no mistake:

“Cover blown You in danger They coming soon.”

B
RANDON
O'
T
OOLE
spent the night in jail.

Well, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. He didn't relish the thought of sleeping in Sherry's chalet, and a dozen phone calls proved that the hotels were bursting at the cornices with stranded vacationers and presidential staffers. When Whitestone offered him a holding cell for the night, he'd taken him up on it. Eagle Feather wasn't Alcatraz, after all.

But it wasn't Mayberry, either.

Brandon didn't recognize the deputy seated at the processing desk, but he seemed to have a great deal of trouble understanding the chief's explanation of why their newest guest needn't be strip-searched, could wear his own clothes and did not have to be locked into his cell. “In fact, Lester,” Whitestone had said, “he's free to walk out anytime he wants to. No shooting, okay?”

He said that last part as if it were part of a child's game; as in, “no give-backs” or “no lead-offs from second.” Lester nodded, but Brandon worried why Whitestone had felt the need to say it in the first place.

Oh, the details they leave out of the brochure. Nobody mentioned to Brandon that the lights stayed on all night, or that the prisoner down the hall liked to call for air strikes in his sleep, but those were things that he could live with, given the circumstances. The toilet, on the other hand, was out of the question. Deeply stained yellow-brown, it had no seat and less privacy, and he'd progressed too far in life to do his business where everyone with an inclination to watch could do just that. Thus, Brandon tested Lester's trigger finger three times during the night as his nerve-wracked digestive system made use of the main rest room out in the office area.

If he angled himself just so in the cell, he could watch Lester at work at his tiny desk. Who'd have thought that a prison guard would be a master paper airplane architect? All night long, the deputy sat at his desk folding white copier paper into intricately designed aircraft, all of which exhibited the aerodynamic properties of a brick. Lester cursed every failure, but never lost a beat pulling the next sheet off the stack, oblivious to the world so long as he was folding and tossing.

Brandon made a valiant effort at the sleeping charade until about four, at which point he just gave up. What was the point of lying there counting roaches when he could be doing something more productive? What that something was, he didn't yet know, but just about anything would be more engaging than this.

Then he got it: The airport! If the weather lifted as predicted, he could be there when they launched the searches. And even if he could be of no more assistance than he was today, then at least he'd be underfoot one step closer to the action.

This time, as Brandon left his cell, he tossed a friendly good-bye to his jailer, but Lester didn't even look up.

The road crews had done a hell of a job. If they'd been hit with this kind of storm back in northern Virginia, the schools would have been closed for a month. Here, the roads were all but clear.

That same level of attention had not been directed to the airport parking lot, however, which resembled an expert ski slope without the slope, each mogul representing a parked vehicle. Brandon smiled at the thought of some poor sap coming home from his vacation in the Bahamas only to find that his ice scraper was buried under four feet of drifted snow.

Brandon targeted a low spot between two moguls and plowed the rental into it, breathing a sigh of relief that the space was not concealing somebody's VW Bug.

No one would ever mistake the Arapaho Regional Airport as anything but the portal to a small town. Brandon saw two buildings along the side of the parking lot, pretentiously labeled as Terminal One and Terminal Two. Combined, the two structures might have been 7,000 square feet. Inside Terminal One, he saw only three counters, each bearing that sixties-era ultramodern look. The stations paralleled a carpeted wall that identified them as ticket booths for Wasatch Airlines, Jones Car Rental and, on the far right, General Aviation. All three stations were closed, as were the metal detectors and X-ray station.

Brandon didn't know what General Aviation meant, exactly, but his instincts told him that it was the desk whose future occupant would be most able to help him out.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Brandon nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of the voice that boomed from the shadows. He whirled to see a groggy, twenty-year-old security guard standing in front of the door to what might have been a closet, his right hand hovering over the revolver strapped to his hip. “Jesus, you scared the crap out of me!” Brandon exclaimed, bringing his hand to his chest. The guard wasn't laughing. Brandon said, “Yes, you probably can. I understand they're running a search and rescue operation out of this airport, and I was wondering where I might find the people involved with that.”

“You're not supposed to be here,” the guard said. “The airport is closed. Won't open again till six o'clock.”

Brandon checked his watch. “That's only an hour from now.”

The guard confirmed the time with a glance at his own wrist. “You can't stay here,” he said.

“It must be fifteen below outside,” Brandon said. “I can't stay out
there
. I'll freeze to death.”

The guard—Freedman, according to his name tag—clearly saw the dilemma. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you,” Brandon said. He tried his best to look like the friendliest, most reasonable man in the world. “I need to talk with the search and rescue people.”

“You a reporter?” Just from the way Freedman asked the question, Brandon got the sense that an affirmative answer might very well reacquaint him with Lester the jailer.

“No, I'm nobody's reporter. My son was in the plane that crashed. I was just hoping I might be able to talk to the people who are looking for him.”

Instantly, everything about Freedman's demeanor changed. His scowl softened into something that looked like pity and he stepped forward to extend his hand. “Oh, man, I'm so sorry,” he said. “Of course you can stay here. It's cold as—well, it's too cold outside.” He hurried to pull a chair from inside the door where he'd obviously been napping and he gestured for Brandon to sit. “Can I get you anything? Something to drink?”

Brandon held up a hand and shook his head. The very thought of Hawaiian Punch at this hour turned his stomach. “No thanks. I don't need anything but directions.”

The guard disappeared behind the door again and quickly came back with a second chair for himself. “Please sit down,” he said, and Brandon obliged him. “I'm Brigham, by the way,” he said. “Brigham Freedman. And I'm sorry for being so unfriendly before.”

Brandon waved him off. “No problem. Hey, you were just doing your job, right?”
How do you know I'm not a terrorist with a good line?
Brandon didn't say.

“Thanks for understanding.”

A long moment of silence hung in the air. Brandon prompted, “The search and rescue team?”

“Oh, yeah, of course. God, where's my head? Yesterday, they had a couple of the locals up in their own planes, but today, I understand that they're rolling out the Civil Air Patrol.”

Brandon nodded as if he understood what that meant. “Okay, and where would I find them?”

“Well, they're all over. They're volunteers. I was a cadet back when I was in high school. A guy named Colonel Morris is in charge, and they'll be mustering over at Terminal Two in just a little bit, I suspect. In fact, Colonel Morris is over there now. I just saw him arrive about twenty minutes ago.”

Brandon stood. “He's in Terminal Two, then?”

Brigham stood as well. “Yes, sir, but you're really not supposed—” He locked eyes with Brandon and gave up. “Yeah, in Terminal Two. Just go through those doors there and follow the fence line.”

“Thank you, Brigham. I appreciate it.” They shook hands again and Brandon headed for the door.

“Sir?”

Brandon turned.

“I hope they find him.”

Brandon smiled. “Don't worry. We will.”

 

B
RANDON WAS WILLING TO BET
that Terminal Two never saw commercial traffic. As he passed through the double doors, the building's red brick façade gave way to the baby-shit–colored concrete block that Brandon had come to associate with military facilities, a decorating style emulated by many buildings at his own plant. The green tile floors bore the the look of pure efficiency that never would have been tolerated by paying customers. Then again, it wasn't as if the residents of Arapaho County had a lot of options to choose from.

The first set of double doors led to a second set, and from there, Brandon found himself in a large room littered with a dozen mismatched desks and chairs and telephones. Most looked as if they hadn't been used in years, and if it weren't for their precise arrangement in rows, he might have guessed that Terminal Two was little more than a ground-level attic.

Sounds of movement drew his attention to the left rear corner of the terminal, where he saw a man in a green flight suit hunched over an ancient computer screen, involved in what looked to be a game of Free Cell. Brandon started that way, and the click of his heels on the lineoleum alerted the man that he was not alone anymore. Startled, the man jerked around and fixed Brandon with the glare of someone who was annoyed to be caught in the act of relaxing.

“You must be Colonel Morris,” Brandon said, noting the silver oak leaves embroidered on the man's epaulets.

“I must indeed,” the man said, rising. Around five-ten, with black hair that had just begun to gray at the temples, Morris looked to be about forty-five. He had the physique of a swimmer and the smile of an insurance salesman. “What can I do for you?”

Brandon led with his hand, which Morris accepted. “My name is Brandon O'Toole. My son is one of the people you're looking for this morning.”

Morris looked instantly uncomfortable. “Oh,” he said, and as he searched for more words, nothing seemed to come to mind.

“I have an unusual request,” Brandon said, getting right to the point. “I spent all day yesterday down in Eagle Feather, waiting for word in the chief's office of how you guys were doing.”

Morris's expression darkened even more.

“Oh, I know not much progress was made. Weather and all of that, and that's fine. Well, it's not fine, but at least I understand. Anyway, I was wondering…Do you have any kids?”

The question caught Morris completelty off guard. “Excuse me?”

Brandon just let the question hang there.

“Well, yeah,” Morris said with a shrug. “I've got two, one in college, one just starting high school. Why?”

“Good. So, surely you can understand my circumstances. The frustration of waiting, powerless.”

Morris seemed to know where this was going, and he wasn't happy. “I'm sure it must be very difficult for you. Hell, impossible for you. But if you're about to ask if you can go along—”

“Don't say no,” Brandon interrupted. “Not just yet. No is too easy an answer. I want you to think about it first. I could tell you that I spent four years in the Air Force—which I did—and I could tell you that my current business is all about defense systems and such—which it is—but I know all of that is irrelevant. You've probably got standing orders not to do the very thing that I'm asking you to do, but I'm asking you to think about it really, really hard.”

Morris sighed and made a pained face. It was too early in the morning to have to weigh decisions such as this. “Look, Mr….”

“O'Toole.”

“Mr. O'Toole, I appreciate your situation, I really do, but you hit the nail right on the head. I'm an officer in the Air Force Reserve, and in my spare time I'm the commander of this CAP squadron, and if you've been in the military, you know that regulations rule. You also appreciate what happens when those regulations are violated. I can't just—”

Brandon held up his hands to cut Morris off. “You're about to say no, and I still don't think you've thought it all the way through. For example, the regulations say you can't have civilians in the aircraft with you, right? Isn't that what you were about to tell me?”

Morris's scowl returned. “Well, yes, but—”

“Okay, then, tell me this. What do you intend to do if you find them?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, my son and his friend are both civilians. If you find them, and it's physically feasible to pick them up, you'd do that, right?”

Morris rolled his eyes. “Mr. O'Toole, it's not the same thing and you know it.”

“I don't know anything of the sort. In fact, because you are an officer in the Air Force Reserve, and therefore an intelligent, thoughtful man, I believe that the more you think about it, the more you'll see that civilians are civilians, and that as circumstances change, so can the requirement to rigidly stand fast to the rules.” Brandon was making this up as he went along.