Device Free Weekend, page 12
Kai came in with fresh towels, a basket of first-aid supplies, and a new phone just like the one Jud had used to disarm Stephen fifteen minutes ago. “Let me cover it, at least.”
“Just patch it over,” Jud said, patting his arm dry with a clean towel. The towel came away red. He winked. “It’ll clot pretty soon. I’ll come back later for the full treatment.”
“Damn right.” She tore open a large self-adhesive gauze pad, squirted a line of antibiotic ointment down the middle. She squinted, aligned, then pressed the pad directly over the slashed bone frog.
Jud helped her press down the edges. “Do me a favor and get him some ice, will you?”
Kai rolled her eyes, found a plastic baggie in a drawer. She filled the baggie with ice cubes from the freezer, zipped the top closed. “I’m still pissed at you, but here.”
Stephen thanked her, took the baggie, and tried to decide where to put it: eye socket or wrist? He chose wrist. The cold felt glorious for a moment. Then it turned the invisible nail into an invisible ice dagger.
Jud tore open a second, larger pad with his teeth. Kai took it from him. He thanked her again. While she worked on applying the second layer, he took the new phone and placed a call.
In a moment, somebody answered.
“Checking in,” Jud said. “Affirmative. Long story.” He paused. “Negative. One down, one to go. Full report from the air. About that, hate to ask, Boss, but I’ll get there faster if… Affirmative. Affirmative.” He paused again, listening carefully. “Copy. How long will it take you to… No shit? That was fast. Affirmative. Out.”
Stephen said, “Can I talk to him?”
Jud ended the call, shoved the new phone into a trouser pocket, and looked over at him. “Okay, hero. Time to go.”
Stephen thought about it, reconsidered the wisdom of saying it, then said it anyway: “What if I still don’t want to go anywhere with you?”
“Then at that point my priority waiver kicks in.” Jud looked at him squarely. “Do you understand what I mean by that, Mr. Rollins?”
Stephen sighed, lifting his aching body off the wooden chair. “You might as well keep calling me Stephen.”
“Now you’re making better choices.” Jud pointed toward a back pantry. “Door in the corner, then down the stairs.”
Stephen looked to where Jud was pointing. Back at Jud.
“Go,” Jud said. “If I were planning to bury you in the cellar, you’d be getting stiff already.”
So Stephen followed instructions, feeling his heart begin to pound again. It didn’t help the throb in his forehead or wrist. Jud said a few words to Kai in a tone too low to overhear; then Stephen heard footfalls behind him.
He found the door tucked back in the corner between wooden shelves lined with dry goods. He took a deep breath, twisted the knob with a squeak of tarnished old brass, and pulled the door open.
“Down three steps, then reach to the left. The light’s on a string.”
Stephen ventured three creaky steps down into the cool, musty darkness. He gritted his teeth, holding the ice pack against his hip with his sprained wrist so that he could feel along the rough wall with his good hand. When the wall suddenly stopped being there, he reached out into the empty space, found the string. Gave it a pull. A single bare bulb cast the remainder of the staircase, and a bit of cracked cellar floor, in low yellow light.
“Down to the bottom, turn right, then stand aside,” Jud said.
Stephen continued to follow instructions, wondering about Perry, thinking, This was a mistake. I should not have done this. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned right and stood aside, crunching over a few dead insect husks scattered on the floor. Jud came down the stairs behind him.
Stephen found himself at another door in the middle of a poured concrete wall. This one looked different: newer, heavier, smooth steel. He saw a small black glass window mounted in the wall near the pull handle. Jud walked past him to the door and pressed his thumb up against window.
Servos whirred as the window slid open, the cavity behind it illuminated, and a keypad emerged.
Blocking Stephen’s view with this body, Jud punched in a long string of numbers. There came a hiss and a series of heavy clunks—the sound of pneumatic locks releasing. Jud pointed to the door and said, “Open that and go through.”
Stephen didn’t move.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Jud said. “Or dragging you behind me. You can choose.”
So once again Stephen took a breath, reached out with his good hand, and pulled the door handle toward him. The door opened with a hermetic sucking sound, like Kai opening the freezer upstairs. Stephen stood before deep, echoing darkness.
Then another light snapped on. Then more, a long repeating sequence of them, tripping awake one after another down a seemingly endless concrete corridor.
“Left foot right foot,” Jud said. “You’re doing fine.”
CHAPTER 19
ACCORDING TO THE tracker, Jud’s phone hadn’t moved in nearly twenty minutes when the call from com unit 7 finally came in. It had just been sitting there, a pulsing dot, somewhere between the house and the cottage. For all practical purposes, and a few impractical ones, Sham Rock’s mesh video network covered the main traffic areas of the island. But there were blind spots, and Jud’s phone, naturally, had parked itself in one of them.
Now that he finally understood why, Ryan didn’t know if he felt more or less bothered.
Jesus. What a couple of lunatics.
So where the hell was Perry Therkle now?
Back above deck, tablet in hand, he scrolled through the exterior security feeds. No answers to be found there.
Meanwhile, from below deck, Tom Carver’s bellyaching started to sound like it might actually be serious. He’d been shouting for Ryan’s attention for the past ten minutes; the longer Ryan let him squawk, the louder he shouted. But his tone had changed from angry to pained, and now sounded legitimately despondent. Ryan cursed aloud to nobody but the gulls overhead. He mounted the tablet in the helm console and went below to see how to make the racket stop.
“I can’t feel my hands,” Carver said, raising his flex cuffs. Were there actual tears in his eyes? “I think you cut off the damn nerves or something.”
“I’m told that’s what happens when you try to get out of them,” Ryan said. “They just get tighter.”
“Well, it hurts. Bad.”
“I thought you couldn’t feel them?”
“It’s both!” Carver cried. “It hurts and they’re numb.”
If this was a ploy, it made up in credibility what it lacked in flair. Tom did look pretty damned uncomfortable.
Ryan scanned the others. Oliver and Amanda sat with their heads back, eyes closed, bobbing along with the movement of the boat. Val Cordero sat in a more rigid posture, leaning forward, elbows on knees. Elijah Stanhope stared straight ahead at nothing.
Only Bhavna met Ryan’s eye.
“Please,” she said. “Couldn’t you at least loosen them? He’s learned his lesson.”
Ryan struggled to find sympathy. His gut hurt all the way through to the middle of his back, and he couldn’t loosen that. Nor had he brought it on himself.
Still: on a personal level, there never had been any love lost between Tom Carver and Bhavna Patel. He supposed there was something to be admired in her appeal on Tom’s behalf. If the gang back at the Rock surprised him, and she were to die in a red clover, he supposed it could be considered a tragedy.
Up top, the tablet chimed.
“All right,” he told them. “Tom, I have other priorities, but I promise I’ll change out your cuffs within the next hour. I suggest you use that time to reflect on your predicament. It’ll help you avoid similar mistakes going forward. Later, we’ll discuss supervised mobility privileges for everybody.”
Over Tom’s angry appeal, he went back above, took a deep breath, put on a smile, and answered. “Already?”
Lainie Hemford’s worried face filled up the screen.
Then the call abruptly went dead.
Then the tablet sounded a security alert, which meant that Jud had used his temporary new credentials to access the tunnel back at Sham Rock.
Jesus! Being a Bond villain was hard. Ryan ignored Lainie’s return call and checked the feeds again. He’d call them back after Rollins was home safe. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere.
Which was, even he could acknowledge, the final irony. As the head and public face of Link, a person had to get comfortable with the idea of being admired and hated by total strangers. But until the last election cycle, he’d never received what law enforcement, or any reasonable person, might consider a credible death threat.
These days, they were a regular part of life. So he’d spent an absurd amount of money building a veritable fortress, where he could be at least reasonably assured of not dying. And now here he was, barely a year after construction, dying anyway. Instead of locking his enemies out, he’d locked his friends in.
Or at least he’d damn well tried.
In one frame, he saw Jud entering the tunnel from the cottage end, none other than Stephen Adelaide Rollins in tow. Jud had what appeared to be a bloody bandage slapped over one shoulder. Rollie held his arm close to his body like a big dumb bird with a busted wing. Full report from the air, Jud had said. This had better be a good story.
In the meantime: Perry.
According to the Doppler, they had at least an hour, maybe two, before a new storm system rolled over them. But for now, the skies were clear. Prevailing wind was 26 knots north-northeast at 400 feet.
So he launched the camera drone from his secluded cove at the south edge of the San Juans.
The UAV unit was based on a commercially available model designed primarily for broadcast work and 4K filmmaking. He’d refitted it with his own signal-encryption firmware, a high-range Comsat transceiver, and a supercharged battery system, then rebalanced weight ratio, netting himself an effective range of fifteen miles. He’d have an eye in the sky over the Rock inside thirty minutes.
Logically, there was no question that Jud Bernal was more than capable of rounding up two middle-aged liberal arts graduates on his own. But Ryan was forced to acknowledge that he’d piled an awful lot on the man’s plate for one day. And he needed him back at the Village ASAP.
Teamwork time.
Stephen watched as Jud closed the door and entered numbers into another keypad, resealing them inside the tunnel. Jud then strode to a golf cart parked along the wall. He unplugged the cart from a heavy fat cord with a plug the size of his fist. He snapped the plug into a retaining clip mounted to the wall. His bandages had already soaked through, but he seemed to have perfectly good use of the arm. He nodded toward the cart and said, “Hop in. You’re driving.”
“Where does this go?”
“For a stupid guy, you seem like a pretty smart guy,” Jud said. “I bet you’ll have that figured out by the time we get there.”
Stephen cast his gaze as far as he could down the crisp rectangular profile of the tunnel stretching out before them, which disappeared around a gradual curve in the far distance. The obvious answer popped into his mind. Where else would they be going, if not the big house? “You must be shitting me.”
“Congratulations, you’re officially a VIP,” Jud said. “Now shag ass, I’m getting short on time.”
So dumbfounded by this new discovery was Stephen that he’d almost forgotten how much his wrist hurt until he’d settled into his side of the cart. He gripped the wheel, then pulled his right hand away, sucking air through his teeth.
Jud reached down for him and punched a power button in the dash. The button glowed to life, and the cart produced a faint hum. Next, he twisted the transmission knob to F for Forward. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Holding his right wrist in his lap atop the ice baggie, steering with his left hand, Stephen pressed the accelerator experimentally, and forward they went. He banged the rear tires steering away from the wall, jostling their shoulders together, causing the ice bag to slide off his knee and drop between his feet. Then they were off, tooling along down the smooth corridor under whisper-quiet power.
“I don’t remember reading anything in any of the magazine articles about a half-mile-long secret tunnel,” Stephen said.
“Wouldn’t know. I don’t read those magazines. Let’s pick up the pace a little, Grandma.”
Stephen gradually pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The cart wasn’t built for speed, but they zipped along at a brisk enough clip to put a breeze in their hair.
The tunnel was about double the width of the cart, with perhaps seven vertical feet between ceiling and floor. Stephen marveled at the construction of it. He marveled at the existence of it. Why would Ryan build such a thing? He probably could have built himself a guest island with all the dirt he must have excavated from this one. Stephen began to wonder more seriously if his old friend really did have a screw loose somewhere. Maybe even a retaining bolt.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Jud said, “Sure.”
“How long have you been with Link again?”
“Didn’t we go over this?”
“Remind me.”
“Coming up on ten years,” Jud said. “Mr. Cloverhill hired me a couple years after I got out. I wasn’t in a very good spot back then, but he gave me a shot. Started out checking badges at the front desk.”
“I thought you said you started out driving?”
“Yeah, well. Sounded better than receptionist.”
“Why did you leave the military?”
“Shattered my knees.” His tone remained perfectly conversational. “But don’t get any new ideas.”
Stephen glanced over. Jud rode casually, one foot on the dash, like they’d just made the turn at the clubhouse and were heading for the back nine. “You still move pretty well.”
“I get by.”
“And how did you come to work for Ryan, anyway?”
“You mean Mr. Cloverhill?”
“I thought Kai said he mostly goes by Ryan.”
“He probably mostly does,” Jud said. “I still call him Mr. Cloverhill. And none of this matters. I’m a motivated employee with passion for my work, and that’s really all you need to know.”
“I guess the money must be good.”
“Very. Start letting up, we’re almost there.”
Stephen saw the end of the tunnel approaching. He slowed down, braked, and brought the cart to a stop near a door that looked identical to the one they’d left behind.
“Stand over there,” Jud said. “Don’t forget your ice.”
At the door, Jud repeated the process: thumbprint, keypad, hiss-clunk. This time he opened the door himself and gestured Stephen through. “Ibuprofen for pain and inflammation,” he said. “Hit the ice again in three hours. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.”
Stephen walked through the door, passing from the industrial chill of the tunnel into a perceptibly more residential warmth. He turned and said, “Look, can you at least tell me…”
But Jud was already closing the door in his face with a clang. There was a pause; then the locks reengaged.
Silence.
Stephen turned to find himself in a basement room of the big house, where he’d started his day: large, open plan; flat wool carpet; track lighting. He saw modern art and vintage arcade machines evenly spaced along the walls: Galaga, Rothko, Ms. Pac-Man, Pollock, Donkey Kong, O’Keeffe. There were billiard, air hockey, and foosball tables scattered about the central space. The glassed-in corner looked out on giant video screens depicting a vacant patio rimmed in seagrass.
He couldn’t begin to know what to make of it. Stephen followed the hallway leading out of the room until he spotted the floating stairs going up. He could hear voices now, somewhere above him. Arguing.
He took the stairs up to the main floor. The others were gathered in the sitting area, bickering heatedly. Will noticed him first: a glance, then a double take, eyes widening.
Emma noticed Will, then followed his eyes all the way to Stephen, confusion on her face.
“Hey, guys,” Stephen said. “I’m home.”
CHAPTER 20
EMMA SAID, “STEPHEN?”
She vaulted herself out of the sofa, heading straight for him. Stephen hadn’t had the first clue how good it would feel to see her until she was there. He accepted her hug with a gratitude that bordered on craving. It hurt all over.
“Where did you come from? How’d you get in?” She looked at his face. “What happened to you?” Then she saw his wrist. “Where’d you get ice?”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you guys,” Stephen said. “I don’t know if you’ll believe any of it. I’m not even sure I do.”
“Just try us,” Beau said. “We’ve got some crazy shit to tell you too.”
The others trailed after Emma, milling around him. Everybody looked shell-shocked. Stephen still couldn’t get over what he was seeing: window views replaced by giant video screens, just like in the basement, everywhere he looked. They really could see us in here, he thought.
But he must have thought it aloud, because Emma said, “They who?”
“Can we go sit down?” Stephen said. “I feel like I fell off a bridge.”
“Get over there,” Beau said. “What do you need?”
“I could use a glass of water.”
Beau peeled off in search of water while Emma and Lainie stood aside, opening a path to the furniture.
“We’ve been trying to call Ryan back,” Lainie said. “He’s not answering.”
“Call him back? You talked to him? Call him back how?”
