The Kraken Project, page 27
part #4 of Wyman Ford Series
The footfalls were getting ever closer, making a crunching, mushy sound. They sounded like they were coming straight toward him. There was a murmur of conversation, another torrent of angry swear words. They couldn’t be more than ten feet away. Even though he was covered, he was sure they could see the pile of stuff he was underneath. He tensed up, waiting for the shot, hoping it would be quick. He vaguely realized that he was wetting his pants. He didn’t care.
56
Sitting in the musty living room of the empty house, in a shabby plastic chair he had brought in from the porch, Lansing was disgusted and fed up. He wondered if it wouldn’t be better to use a bullet to end the annoying wife’s sobbing and begging for them to call an ambulance for her husband, her pleading for them to leave her son alone. To make things worse, she had vomited in the car on the way over and was a total mess. They were going to have to kill her anyway. But they might need her for leverage when they finally caught the boy. It was crazy that the boy had run off with the robot. It made him furious.
“Damn it,” Lansing said to Moro, “hurry up and tape her mouth.”
Moro tried, ineptly, to use duct tape to cover her mouth, but his hands were shaking and the piece was wet from her tears. Moro was falling apart. This whole business was coming undone. Lansing watched as Moro struggled to get the piece of tape over her mouth, the simplest of actions, and couldn’t do it. The computer programmer had gone stupid from panic and fear, unable to think for himself, having to be told every last thing. Yelling at him would only make things worse.
Moro finally succeeded, and wiped off his hands. The wife had fallen into a muffled whimpering, but at least she had stopped struggling. She was dazed, defeated, becoming catatonic.
Despite the screwups, Lansing thought, they could still pull this off. The Kyrgyz brothers would, of course, run the boy down in the woods and bring back the robot. He had no doubt of that. His only fear came from the faint sound of gunshots he had heard from beyond the ridge. He had told the brothers to spare the robot at all costs, to make sure it was retrieved undamaged. But they were trigger-happy morons, and Lansing had little confidence that they would take care not to shoot up the robot in their attempt to bring down the boy.
“I’m going out there,” said Lansing. “Those Kyrgyz brothers are going to need some direction.”
“Hallelujah,” said Moro. “Those bastards are out of control. This whole thing is ass-over-balls messed up.”
Lansing swallowed his irritation at this comment and only said, evenly, “Actually, we’re about to achieve our objective. Eric, you need to calm down, stay focused, and watch the wife. As soon as we bring back the robot, you have to be ready to pull out the robot’s Wi-Fi card so Dorothy can’t escape over any stray Wi-Fi field. Do you understand?”
Moro nodded.
“Sit down and watch the wife.”
He watched as Moro took a chair near the fire, fidgeting and nervous. Lansing then checked his revolver, put a flashlight into his pocket, put his raincoat back on, and went to the back door. He breathed in. The air was fresh, and the rain had slackened to a drizzle. It looked like it might clear. He was close, very close, to getting his hands on Dorothy. While the night hadn’t gone as planned, it was still on track for success. He was damn lucky this was an isolated area—and that the storm was providing them with lots of sound cover.
He could see tracks in the wet grass leading up to the top of the ridge, and he followed them. From the top, he looked down the other side. The grassy ridge sloped down to an area of trees along a creek bottom. Down there, in the forest, perhaps a quarter mile away, he could just see two flashlights bobbing and winking in the darkness. That would be the Kyrgyz brothers in pursuit of the boy. He glanced up. The storm was rapidly clearing, with the clouds moving inland, exposing a few stars in the west. The drizzle finally stopped.
With a long, athletic stride, he descended the ridge and headed toward the lights in the valley.
57
Jacob lay low, unable to see, his heart pounding so hard he was sure they were going to hear it. The sounds of the two gunmen, the rustling of their movements, were right on top of him. They were no more than a few feet away. They saw him. They had to. They were playing with him. The shot would come soon.
He heard and even felt the crunch of a footfall near the duff piled about him. He could feel the vibration from the ground, and another, along with the sound of their heavy breathing and a throat clearing, hawking up phlegm and spitting. More muttering in a strange language, the rustle and scrape of clothing pushing through branches.
And then … they didn’t stop. They kept going. They had walked right past him, maybe no more than a foot away, and then their footfalls receded, slowly but surely, the muttering voices getting fainter, until all was silent but the sound of the creek.
Jacob lay in the dirt, so relieved he could hardly think. But he had to figure out what to do next. When they didn’t catch up with him farther ahead, they might realize that he had hidden and would double back. He had to keep going. And then there was Dorothy, who had been shot in the head.
“Dorothy?” he whispered. He shook the limp robot and felt around to her head. Sure enough, there was a gaping hole, with sharp, ragged edges of plastic.
He felt terrible. All was silent. Then he heard a rustling noise and paused, listening in the dark, his ears straining to hear. He wasn’t sure if the noise was natural or the men coming back. His fear increased. He couldn’t stay there. He had to go now.
Clearing away the duff, he crawled out from under the bushes, pulling Dorothy along with him. He kept edging out, trying not to make noise, stopping every so often to listen. What he needed to do was cross the creek, get over onto the far side, cross the next ridge, and head down to the flower farm. Crawling and dragging Dorothy, he managed to reach the edge of the creek bed, flowing with water from the rain. There was a little break in the trees, and some light filtered down. He pulled Dorothy over and looked. A third of her head had been blown away.
“Dorothy, can you hear me?” he whispered.
No response.
He gave the robot a gentle whack. “Please, wake up. Please.”
Now a croak came from the robot, a scratchy death rattle. Something was horribly wrong with her, but at least she was still alive. “Dorothy?”
A scratchy, almost cartoonish little voice sounded: “What happened?”
“You were shot in the head.”
“Thankfully, my CPU is in my torso.”
To his relief, Dorothy seemed to come back to life. She reached up and felt around her head, muttering that it was no good, her hands had no feeling. “My voice has been damaged,” she said. “One eye is gone. I can still see out the other.”
Jacob stifled a sob. “I’m so glad you’re okay. Does it hurt?”
“Oh no. I can’t feel pain. We’ve got to get out of here. Do you know of a place we can hide?”
“There’s the flower farm down on Locks Creek. It’s a bunch of greenhouses and fields, with a barn. We could hide there.”
“Let’s go.”
Jacob sat up, carefully brushing off wet needles and dirt, peering into the darkness where the men had gone. He couldn’t see their lights or hear their voices. All was silent except for the dripping of water from the trees. He figured that if he crossed the creek and went straight up and over the adjacent ridge, that would be the quickest route to the main branch of Locks Creek, where there was a hiking trail. With Dorothy’s help, he could follow it in the dark down to the farm. But it meant going up and over another bare ridge.
He tried to get up and sat down again, so painful was his foot. “Ow.”
“Give me your jacket,” Dorothy croaked in her broken voice. “I’m going to splint your foot.”
He gave her his jacket. Using scissors hidden in her hand that Jacob hadn’t known about, she cut the jacket into strips. Searching in the dark, she picked up a pair of hard sticks, and then, using a screwdriver hidden in the tip of a finger, she removed a piece of plastic from the back of her head.
“What are you doing?”
“Lie down. Give me your foot.”
He stretched out his foot. Dorothy, working swiftly, made a splint out of the sticks and jacket. She fitted the bent plastic headpiece under his heel as additional support, tying it up with the strips of jacket.
“Stand up.”
Jacob stood up. It still hurt like mad, but at least he could walk on it.
“Put me on your shoulders.”
He lifted Dorothy back onto his shoulders and ventured across the flowing creek. The water was cool and muddy, and it took away some of the burning sensation in his foot. On the far side he went back into the trees, keeping to the dark areas as Dorothy issued directions in her crackly voice. He started up the next ridge. As he went higher, the trees thinned out until there was nothing above him but a long, bare slope of matted grass and patches of low chaparral. He paused there, looking up at the long slope. The rain had stopped, and the storm had passed. The sky was thick with fast-moving clouds coming in from the Pacific, flaring white in the light of a nearly full moon. For a moment the moon broke through the cloud cover, bathing the landscape in silver before going dark again.
Did he dare go over the ridge? He’d be a sitting duck up there. But if he went around it on the left, he would be heading down the valley in the direction the two men had gone. If they turned around and came back, looking for him, he would run right into them.
He had to cross the ridge.
“I believe the two men have split up,” whispered Dorothy. “One is backtracking; the other is going to climb that ridge in front of us. We’ve got to get up and over it before he blocks our way. Otherwise, we’ll be trapped in a pincer movement.”
“Okay.” Without further talk Jacob started hiking up the slope, moving as fast as he could, leaving the darkness of the trees behind. For the moment the moon was behind a scudding cloud, but all around he could see splotches of moonlight passing over the hilly landscape. It looked to be about a hundred yards to the top of the hill. He glanced around. He could see no flashlights anywhere, in the forest or on the open slopes. He kept climbing, his foot smarting and his knees hurting. The top of the ridge was fifty yards away, forty, thirty. He stopped for a moment, gasping for air, his foot feeling like it was on fire. If he could just get over the ridge and down the other side …
Just as he topped the ridge, he heard a gunshot from below, and a tuft of grass snapped up near his left foot. With a cry he threw himself down and looked back. He could see a light on the previous ridge—and the silhouette of a man. A third man. The man was shining a flashlight at him and calling into the valley.
“He’s over here! Crossing that ridge!”
He heard an answering shout on the ridge below him, and he could see a flashlight moving out of the trees and up the ridge, bobbing along toward him.
“Run!” squeaked Dorothy.
He leapt up and began running down the other side of the ridge, zigzagging again, leaping and jumping, gasping for breath. Each step just about killed his foot. He could see the dark shape of the man now, running along the side of the hill, aiming to cut him off from below. There was almost no cover between him and the trees along the creek at the bottom.
Crack crack!
He zigzagged.
Crack crack! Another divot of grass jumped into the air just in front of him.
“Shit!” He stumbled on.
“Go left, hard left, and then straight down,” Dorothy said.
“That’s heading toward the man!”
“Mathematically, it’s the only way you’ll get past him. There’s a swale to the left that will give you cover.”
Jacob veered left and down, and found himself in a long, brushy depression. Bashing his way through the knee-high chaparral, he could already see that there was no way he was going to reach the flower barn. But down in the flats were the old hop kilns he and Sully had once played in. Those ruins were closer. Maybe they could hide there.
The swale leveled out suddenly. Twenty yards from him, and just above, was the running man.
“Hey! You! Stop!” he shouted, dropping to one knee and raising a pistol.
“Down!” Dorothy shouted.
Jacob threw himself down and hit the grass.
Crack crack!
He rolled and was up on his feet again.
Crack!
He felt the wind from the bullet as it sang past his cheek. Glancing back, he saw the man plunging down the hillside, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other.
The old hop kiln ruins were in the brushy flats alongside the creek, a quarter mile away. As he ran, he could hear the man gaining on him from behind, hear his grunting breaths.
“Where are we going?” Dorothy asked, immediately sensing his change of direction.
“To the old hop kilns. To hide.”
Silence.
“Got any better ideas?” Jacob asked, running.
“I think we ought to give up,” said Dorothy. “They might not kill you if we give up.”
“No way. Never.”
“I think, then, that we’re going to die.”
58
“We’re almost there,” Melissa said, peering at the paper map. “The driveway’s a mile up the road, on the left.”
The rain had stopped but the road was wet, glistening in the light of a nearly full moon that kept appearing and disappearing behind the clouds. Ford continued on for three-quarters of a mile at a slow speed. They were in the isolated hills above the town of Half Moon Bay, dotted with farms and a scattering of expensive estates. As they came around a bend, he could see, a quarter mile away on the side of a ridge, the lights of the house.
He slowed to a stop.
“What are you stopping for?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t like it,” said Ford.
“What do you mean?”
“There are too many lights on in the house.”
“It’s just a kid and a robot,” said Melissa.
“That’s exactly my point.”
Ford eased the car forward, looking for a place to turn off. He found a dirt apron near the driveway entrance and pulled in.
“What are we doing now?”
“I think we should approach on foot and scope the place out before we go in.” He took the .22 revolver out of the glove compartment, opened the cylinder, and confirmed that it was loaded. He tucked it into his pocket.
“You really like this spy-versus-spy stuff.”
Ford got out of the car, with Melissa behind him. He cut across a wet meadow along one side of the driveway, making a wide arc toward the house. He approached from the side, climbing a split-rail fence and moving across an overgrown lawn to a rusted swing set. As he did so, the bright moon came out from behind a cloud, bathing the area in light. He froze, crouching behind the swing set. Darkness returned quickly as the moon disappeared behind another cloud, and he continued on to the side of the house. He edged up to a window, glanced in for a moment, then ducked down.
“What is it?” Melissa asked.
“There’s a guy in there with a pistol, and he’s got a woman taped to a chair.”
“Oh my God. Where’s the robot?”
“No boy, no robot.”
A silence. “It must be the algo traders Dorothy mentioned,” said Melissa.
“We need to find out how many other people are here.”
He took out the .22. They circled the building, keeping close to the side of the house, peering in each set of windows in turn. It seemed like there were only those two people: the woman taped to a chair and the man guarding her. A skinny, long-haired individual, he was pacing back and forth, holding a .45 with his finger on the trigger in a way that indicated to Ford that he had little experience with firearms.
When they came around to the backyard, they found the back door open, light spilling over the lawn. Ford could see tracks in the water-laden grass going out the door and up the ridge. It looked like three or four people had headed up the hill. The whole scene had the atmosphere of something gone terribly wrong.
“Did you see anyone besides those two people?” Melissa whispered.
“No.”
As he was considering what to do, he heard a series of distant gunshots from over the ridge.
“The action is out there,” whispered Ford, gesturing. “We need to find out what’s going on. We need to make that man talk.”
“I was just thinking about how we’re going to take that man down,” said Melissa. “You want to hear my plan?” She told it to him. Ford thought it would work.
Ford crept through the screen door, opening and closing it silently, and made his way through the back of the house to the hallway leading into the living room, where the two people were. He flattened himself behind the archway that led into the room.
Melissa followed him. She banged through the back door, walked past him, and kept going, stopping boldly in the archway. “Hello?” she cried out. “Hello? Is anyone home?”
The man came rushing toward the doorway, pointing the .45, screaming in a panic: “Who are you? Get down!”
Melissa backed up, raising her hands. “Hey! What’s going on?”
“Get down on the ground!” he yelled. “Who the hell are you?”
She backed away. “Just a neighbor.”
She took another step back, and he advanced through the archway.
“I said down!” he screamed, taking another step forward and gesturing at her with the gun.
Ford stepped up behind him and, in one clean, sharp movement, wrenched the .45 out of his hand while jamming the barrel of his own pistol into the man’s ear. He gave it a twist, cutting the flesh.
The man gave a scream of terror.
“One more sound and you’re dead,” said Ford calmly, handing the .45 to Melissa. “Go back to the living room.”
The man stumbled forward, his hands up, moaning softly to himself.
