Текст книги "Two Graves"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

+ Eighty-Two Hours

PENDERGAST PULLED THE SMOKING, BATTERED ELDORADO into a gas station outside the tiny town of Palominas, Arizona. He had covered the twenty-two hundred miles without rest, stopping only for gas.

He got out, steadying himself by leaning on the door. It was two AM, and the immense desert sky was sprinkled with stars. There was no moon.

After a moment, he went into the convenience store attached to the gas station. Here he purchased a map of the Mexican state of Sonora, half a dozen water bottles, some packages of beef jerky, cookies, some potted meat product, a couple of dish towels, bandages, antibiotic ointment, a bottle of ibuprofen, caffeine tablets, duct tape, and a flashlight. All these went into a doubled-up plastic grocery bag, which he took back to the car. Sitting in the driver’s seat once again, he studied the map he had bought, committing its features to memory.

He left the gas station and drove eastward on Route 92, crossing the San Pedro River on a small bridge. Past the bridge, he turned right on a dirt ranch road heading south. Driving slowly, the car bumping and scraping along the rutted track, he moved through scrubby mesquite and catclaw thickets, headlights stabbing into the crooked branches. The unseen river lay to his right, outlined in black by a dense line of cottonwood trees.

About half a mile from the border, Pendergast drove the car off the road into a thicket of mesquite, forcing it in as far as it would go. He turned off the engine, exited the car with the grocery bag in hand, then listened in the darkness. A pair of coyotes howled in the distance, but otherwise there was no sign of life.

He knew this was an illusion. This stretch of the Mexican-U.S. border, separated by only a five-strand barbed-wire fence, bristled with sophisticated sensors, infrared video cameras, and downward-looking radar, with rapid-response Border Patrol teams mere minutes away.

But Pendergast was unconcerned. He had an advantage few other smugglers or border crooks had: he was going south. Into Mexico.

Tying up the grocery bag in his suit jacket, he fashioned it into a crude haversack, slung it over his shoulder, and began to walk.

The movement of his injured leg caused it to start bleeding again. He paused, sat down, and spent a few moments unbandaging the wound by flashlight, smearing fresh antibiotic ointment into it, then binding it up again with clear bandages and the dish towels. He followed this by swallowing four ibuprofen and as many caffeine tablets.

It took him several minutes to get back on his feet. This would not do: he had a long way to go. He chewed some beef jerky and took a drink of water.

By keeping off the dirt track, away from the river, he hoped to avoid the various electronic traps and sensors. The huge tethered blimp that hovered unseen in the night sky overhead may have noted his presence, but as he was moving south, he hoped it would not trigger a response—at least, not yet.

The night air, even in summer, was cool. The coyotes had ceased howling; all was silent. Pendergast moved on.

The road made a ninety-degree turn to parallel a barbed-wire fence—the actual border. He crossed the road—certain he had now set off various sensors—arrived at the fence, and within seconds had cut the strands and forced his way to the Mexican side. He limped off into the darkness, crossing a vacant expanse of pebbled desert, dotted with catclaw.

Not much time passed before he saw headlights on the American side. He kept going, angling toward the cottonwoods along the river, moving as fast as he could. Several spotlights flicked on and the pools of light speared the desert night, scouring the landscape until they fixed on him, bathing him in brilliant white.

He kept going. A megaphoned voice echoed over the field, speaking first English and then Spanish, ordering him to halt, to turn around, to raise his hands and identify himself.

Pendergast continued on, ignoring this. There was nothing they could do. They could not pursue, and it would be fruitless to call their counterparts on the Mexican side. Nobody cared about clandestine traffic headed south.

He angled toward the line of cottonwoods along the river. The spotlights followed him for a while, with more desultory megaphoned commands, until he entered the trees. At that point they gave up.

Hidden within the protective canopy, he sat down to rest on the banks of the shallow creek of the San Pedro. He tried to eat, the food like cardboard in his mouth; he forced himself to chew and swallow. He drank some more water and resisted the impulse to unwrap his freshly blood-soaked bandages.

He estimated that Helen and her abductors would cross the border around the same time or perhaps shortly ahead of him. It was remote, barren desert country, covered in greasewood and mesquite, riddled with unmarked dirt roads used by illegal aliens and smugglers of guns and drugs. Der Bundwould certainly have arranged for transportation on the Mexican side, along one of these dirt roads leading to Cananea, thirty miles south of the border. They would be traveling this web of improvised roads, and he would have to catch them before they reached the town—and the paved roads that led away from it. If he did not, his chances of ever finding Helen dropped to almost nil.

Standing again, he limped down the mostly dry bed of the river, once in a while splashing through stagnant pools of inch-deep water. He might, even now, be too late.

About half a mile south, through the thin screen of trees, he spied distant lights. Moving to the embankment, he peered out and saw what appeared to be a lonely ranch, sitting by itself in the vast desert plain. It was occupied.

The moonless night provided cover for his approach. Soft yellow lights shone in the windows of the main adobe building: an old whitewashed structure surrounded by broken-down corrals and ruined outbuildings. The gleaming, late-model SUVs parked outside, however, indicated the place was now being used for something quite different from cattle ranching.

Pendergast approached the parking area at a partial crouch. He saw the momentary glow of a cigarette and noted a man at the front door of the house, watching the vehicles and the approach road, smoking and cradling an assault rifle.

Drug smugglers, without doubt.

Keeping to the dark, Pendergast circled the house. Parked to one side was a motorcycle: a Ducati Streetfighter S.

Moving now with exquisite care, Pendergast approached the house from its blind side. A low adobe wall separated the scrub desert from the dirt yard. He crouched at the wall and, with a cat-like movement, hopped over it and darted across the dirt yard, pressing himself against the flank of the house. He waited a moment for the stabbing pain in his leg to recede. Then, reaching into his pocket, he removed a small but exceedingly sharp knife and continued along to the corner.

He waited, listening. There was the murmur of voices, the occasional cough of the man smoking outside. After a moment, he heard the man drop the cigarette butt and grind it out with his foot. Then came the flick of a lighter, the faint glow of indirect light over the dark yard, as a fresh one was lit. He heard the guard inhale noisily, breathe out, clear his throat.

Pressed against the corner, Pendergast felt in the dirt, picked up a fist-size rock. He tapped it softly against the ground, then waited. Nothing. He scraped the rock in the dirt, making a somewhat louder noise.

Around the corner, the man fell silent.

Pendergast waited, then scraped again, a little louder.

Silence still. And then the low, furtive crunch of footfalls. The man approached the corner of the building, paused. Pendergast could hear his breathing, hear the faint rattle of his rifle as he moved it into position, getting ready to charge around the corner.

Slowly, Pendergast lowered himself into a deeper crouch, controlling his pain, waiting. The man suddenly whipped around the corner, rifle at the ready; in an instantaneous movement Pendergast sprang up, the tip of his knife severing the flexor tendon of the man’s right index finger as he simultaneously knocked the rifle upward and brought the rock down hard on the man’s temple. He went down without a sound, out cold. Pendergast detached the rifle—an M4—and slung it over his shoulder. He crept up to the Ducati. The key was in the ignition.

The beastly, skeletal-looking bike had no saddlebags, and he slung the improvised haversack over his shoulder, next to the M4. Once again, keeping low and to the shadows, he crept around to the three SUVs parked in the dirt lot and worked the point of his knife into a tire of each one.

He moved back to the Streetfighter, slid onto the seat, and pressed the ignition. The massive engine immediately roared to life, and—without wasting even a second—he kicked the shifter down out of neutral, eased off the clutch, and cranked the throttle wide open with a violent twist of his right hand.

As he laid a huge spray of dirt tearing out of the driveway, pushing the RPMs up past eight thousand while still in first gear, he could see in his rearview mirrors the drug dealers boiling out of the ranch house like bees, guns drawn. He briefly squeezed the clutch and kicked the bike up into second as a fusillade of shots sounded. The lights of the SUVs fired up as they started the engines, then more shots and cries of vengeance… and then all was behind him, disappearing into the dark night.

He continued south, working his way up through the motorcycle’s gears, tearing across the vacant desert. He had to intercept them before Cananea…

He urged the Streetfighter on ever faster as the immense night sky, studded with stars, wheeled overhead.

+ Eighty-Four Hours

WELL BEFORE DAWN, HE SAW A FLICKER OF RED IN THE immense desert blackness—the taillights of a vehicle moving fast through the distant brush. It was off to the southwest. Five miles farther south, he could see the glow of the town of Cananea.

Veering off, he cut across the open desert until he intersected one of the parallel tracks to the east. The vibration of the bike on the rough road, the slashing of brush against his legs, had shaken loose his bandage, and he felt blood creeping down his leg, the drops hissing on the hot muffler. He fished out another quartet of ibuprofen tablets and popped them into his mouth.

The vehicle was now invisible in the brush somewhere on his right. He raced along, the lights of Cananea growing in intensity. According to Mime, the first thing they would encounter would be several small maquiladora factories north of the town. Paved roads ran from the factories into town, where they joined a major highway. He could not let them reach one of those paved roads. He had to catch them in the desert.

He accelerated further as the glow in the southern sky brightened, allowing him to increase his speed. Cananea was now only two miles off. Figuring he was about even with the unseen vehicle, Pendergast swerved to the west, tearing across the empty landscape, the bike leaping ditches and popping through brush. In another minute he saw the vehicle’s lights virtually due west, running parallel, and he was close enough to see that there were actually two vehicles, one behind the other—Escalades, by the look of them. They were moving fast, but not nearly as fast as he.

They had not yet, apparently, seen his headlight.

He unslung the M4 with his left hand and, keeping his right hand on the throttle, steadied the rifle across the handlebars, bracing it against his side. He checked to make sure it was in fully automatic mode.

But now the vehicles had seen his lights: they began to veer away from him, going off-road, crashing through the sparse brush.

They were too late. He was moving faster, he was nimbler, and off-road the big SUVs could not accelerate well. Coming in at an angle, he aimed the bike for the gap between the two vehicles and darted into it, braking hard in order to match their speed. The maneuver allowed him to identify the occupants of both vehicles, and it took only a moment to pick out Helen’s frightened face in the back window of the second. A man leaned out of the first and fired ineffectually at him with a handgun; Pendergast gunned the Ducati’s powerful engine and pulled away, accelerating alongside the first vehicle while letting loose with the M4, raking the car at chest level as he accelerated past. The SUV veered off, went into a skid, and then flipped, rolling over and over before bursting into a fireball.

The second vehicle had braked rapidly and was now far behind. Applying sharp pressure to the rear brake, Pendergast brought the Streetfighter into a power slide, throwing up a huge curtain of dirt, ending up with his back to the town, facing the Escalade. He waited to see what the vehicle would do.

Instead of stopping to fight, it veered off farther and went lurching over the rough plain, tearing through the low creosote bushes, heading for the paved road at the edge of town. A steady sound of futile gunfire came from the vehicle, punctuated by flashes of light.

Pendergast gunned the Ducati, fishtailing into a ninety-degree turn and then accelerating after them.

He rapidly caught up, keeping to the south in a flanking maneuver, forcing the vehicle into an easterly trajectory, away from the factories and the town. But the road to the nearest factory, lined with sodium lights, was approaching fast.

More shots rang out from the vehicle, kicking up dirt to one side of him. A man was aiming out the back window with a handgun. But the Escalade was lurching so violently that Pendergast was in little danger of being hit. He accelerated the bike, again tracing a track behind and parallel to the Escalade. He eased the rifle into position once more. More futile shots came from a man leaning out the window.

Pendergast swerved into a converging trajectory and goosed the bike, eking out one last burst of acceleration, bringing himself alongside the car and letting loose with a burst aimed low and front, taking out a front tire. At the same time, a fusillade of gunfire from the car struck the Ducati, breaking its chain and sending the bike into a slide. Pendergast rapidly worked the front and rear brakes to avoid going into an uncontrollable spin. As his speed abruptly dropped, he leapt off into a creosote bush before the bike tumbled into a narrow ravine.

Immediately he rose with the rifle, aimed, and fired again at the receding car. The Escalade was already slewing about on the burst tire, and the shot took out the rear wheel on the same side, the SUV fishtailing to a stop. As it did so, four men leapt out and knelt down by the car, unleashing a steady fire.

Pendergast threw himself to the ground and—as the bullets kicked up dirt all around him—aimed carefully. His superior weapon took out first one man, then another, in rapid sequence. The remaining two retreated out of sight behind the vehicle and stopped shooting.

Unfortunate.

Pendergast rose and, running as fast as he could—barely more than a shambling limp—charged. He kept up a continuous fire as he did so, making sure his shots went high. Suddenly both figures appeared at one side of the vehicle; one was dragging Helen with a gun pressed to her head, and the other—the tall, muscular, snowy-haired man who had piloted the plane—was crouching behind, using the others as protection. He did not appear to be armed—at least, he was not firing.

Once again Pendergast threw himself down and aimed, but he did not dare fire.

“Aloysius!” came a thin scream.

Pendergast aimed afresh. Waited.

“Drop your weapon or I will kill her!” came a sharply accented cry from the man using her as a human shield. The three figures were backing up now, away from the Escalade, the white-haired man keeping behind the other two.

“I will kill her, I swear!” the man screamed. But Pendergast knew he wouldn’t. She was his only protection.

The man fired at Pendergast twice, but the handgun, at a distance of a hundred yards, was inaccurate.

“Let her go!” Pendergast cried. “I want her, not you! Let her go and you can walk away!”

“No!” The man gripped her desperately.

Pendergast slowly stood, letting his rifle fall to one side. “Just let her go,” he said. “That’s all. There will be no problems. You have my word.”

The man fired another shot at Pendergast, but it went wide. Pendergast began limping toward them, rifle still held to one side. “Let her go. That’s the only way you’ll get out of here alive. Let her go.”

“Drop your gun!” The man was hysterical with fear.

Pendergast slowly laid his gun down, stood up, hands raised.

“Aloysius!” Helen wept. “Just go, go!”

The man, dragging Helen backward, fired at Pendergast again, missing him. He was too far away—and too panicked to shoot straight.

“Trust me,” Pendergast said in a low, measured voice, his arms held out. “Release her.”

There was a moment of terrible stasis. And then, with an inarticulate cry, the man abruptly threw Helen to the ground, lowered his pistol, and fired point-blank into her body. “Help heror chase me!” he cried, turning and running.

Helen’s scream pierced the air—and then, abruptly, cut off. Taken completely by surprise, Pendergast rushed forward with an inarticulate cry and within moments was kneeling beside her. He saw instantly that the shot was fatal, blood flowing rhythmically from a hole in her chest—a bullet to the heart.

“Helen!” he cried, voice breaking.

She grasped him like a drowning woman. “Aloysius… you must listen…” Her voice came as a gasped whisper.

He bent down to hear.

The hands clutched tighter. “ He’scoming… Mercy… Have mercy…” And then a gush of blood stopped her speech. He placed two fingers against the carotid artery in her neck; felt the pulse flutter in her very last heartbeat, then cease.

After a moment, Pendergast rose. He limped unsteadily back to where he had dropped the M4. The white-haired man appeared to have been as surprised as Pendergast by this development, because only belatedly had he started to run, following the shooter.

Pendergast knelt, raised the weapon, and aimed it toward his wife’s murderer, a fleeing figure now five hundred yards distant. In a curious, detached way he was reminded of the last time he had gone hunting. He sighted in the figure, compensated for windage and drop, then squeezed the trigger; the rifle bucked and the man went down.

The white-haired man was a powerful runner; he had already overtaken the killer and was now even more distant. Pendergast took aim, fired at him, missed.

Taking a slow breath, he let the air run out, sighted in on him, compensated, and fired at the man a second time. Missed again.

The third attempt clicked on an empty magazine even as the man disappeared into the vastness of the desert.

After a long moment, Pendergast put the gun down again and walked back to where Helen’s body lay in a slowly spreading pool of blood. He stared at the body for a long time. Then he got to work.

+ Ninety-One Hours

THE SUN STOOD HIGH IN A SKY WHITE WITH HEAT. A DUST devil whirled across the empty expanse. Blue mountains serrated the distant horizon. Scenting death, a turkey vulture rode a thermal overhead, turning lazily in a tightening gyre.

Pendergast dropped the last shovelful of sand onto the grave, slapped it down with the flat of the rusty blade, and smoothed the sand into place. It had taken him a long time to dig the hole. He had gone deep, deep into the dry clay. He did not want the grave disturbed by animal or man.

He paused, leaning on the shovel, taking shallow breaths. The wound in his leg was once again bleeding freely from the exertion, soaking through the last of his bandages. Beads of sweat, mixed with the mud, trickled down his expressionless face. His shirt was torn, slack, brown with dust; his jacket shredded, his pants ripped. He stared at the patch of disturbed ground, and then—moving slowly, like an old man—bent down and took hold of the rude marker he’d fashioned from a board he had taken from the same abandoned ranch house where he’d found the shovel. He did not wish it to be too obviously a grave. He took the knife from his pocket and scratched, in an unsteady hand:

H. E. P.

Aeternum vale

Limping to the head of the grave, he pressed the sharpened base of the marker into the earth. Taking a step back and raising the shovel, he took careful aim, then brought the head down onto the marker’s top with a bone-jarring impact.

Whang!

… He was sitting before a small fire, deep in the heavily wooded flanks of Cannon Mountain. On the far side of the fire sat Helen, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and hiking boots. They had just completed the third day of a week’s backpacking trip through the White Mountains. Beyond a glacial tarn, the sun was going down—a ball of scarlet fire—highlighting the peaks of the Franconia Range. Faintly, from far below on the mountain, rose voices and snatches of song from Lonesome Lake Hut. A pot of espresso sat on the fire, its aroma mingling with the scents of wood smoke, pine, and balsam. As Helen turned the pot on the fire, she glanced up at him and suddenly smiled—her unique smile, half shy, half assured—then set two tiny porcelain espresso cups on the firestone, one beside the other, with a neat precision that was totally her own…

Pendergast swayed, gasping with the effort of the shovel’s blow. He wiped one unsteady forearm across his brow. Mud and sweat smeared the tattered sleeve of his suit. He waited, standing in the blazing heat of the sun, trying to catch his breath, to summon the final dregs of his strength. Then, once again, with a gasp of effort, he lifted the shovel. The weight of it caught him off balance and he staggered back, fighting to steady himself. His knees started to buckle, and before he tottered yet again he brought the shovel head down onto the marker with all the strength he could muster:

Whang!

… London, early fall. The leaves on the shade trees lining Devonshire Street were kissed with yellow. They were walking toward Regent’s Park, having just exited Christie’s. Rising to a dare of Helen’s, he had just bought at auction two works of artwork he’d loved at first sight: a seascape by John Marin, and a painting of Whitby Abbey that the Christie’s catalog had listed as being by a “minor Romantic painter” but that he thought might be an early Constable. Helen had smuggled a silver flask of cognac into the auction, and now—as they crossed Park Crescent and headed into the park proper—she began to quote in a full voice the poem “Dover Beach” for all to hear: “The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair…”

He had dropped the shovel without realizing it. It lay across his shoes, askew, the point half buried in the loose soil. He knelt to pick it up, then quite abruptly fell to his knees; he reached a hand out to steady himself but it slipped and he collapsed to the ground, the side of his face in the dirt.

It would be easy, remarkably easy, to stay like this, lying here above Helen’s body. But he could hear the slow drip, drip, dripof blood onto the sand and he realized he could not let go until the work was complete. He raised himself to a sitting position. After a few minutes, he felt just strong enough to stand. With supreme effort, using the shovel as a crutch, he stood—first the left leg rising, then the right. The pain in his injured calf had gone away; he felt nothing at all. Despite the fierce glare of the sun, darkness was creeping in around the periphery of his vision: he had but one more chance to set the marker permanently in the ground before he lapsed into unconsciousness. Taking a deep breath, he grasped the handle of the shovel as hard as he could, raised it with shaking hands, and—with a final spark of strength—swung it down against the headpost.

Whang…!

… A warm summer night, the trill of crickets. He and Helen were sitting on the back veranda at Penumbra Plantation, tall glasses in their hands, watching the evening fog creep in from the bayou, glowing in the moonlight. The mists rolled first over the marshy verge, then the formal garden, then the carpet of grass leading up toward the big house; they eddied about the lawn, tendrils licking at the steps like a slow-motion tide, whitened to ghostliness by the orb of the moon.

On a wheeled server nearby sat a pitcher of iced lemonade, half full, and the remains of a plate of crevettes rémoulade. From out of the kitchen came the scent of grilling fish: Maurice was preparing pompano Pontchartrain for dinner.

Helen looked over at him. “Can’t it just stay like this forever, Aloysius?” she asked.

He took a sip of lemonade. “Why not? Our entire life lies ahead of us. We can do with it what we like.”

She smiled, glanced skyward. “Do with it what we like… Promise on the moonrise?”

Gazing in mock solemnity at the amber moon, he put a playful hand across his breast. “Cross my heart.”

He stood in the middle of that vast, empty, brutal, and alien desert. The darkness crept deeper across his vision, as if he were looking down a dark tunnel, the end of which was moving farther and farther away. The shovel slipped from his nerveless fingers and clattered to the stony soil. With a last, half-audible sigh, he sank to his knees and then—after a swaying pause—fell across the grave of his dead wife.