His eyes bored into mine. He was crazy, of course, but that didn’t matter. As long as there was the slightest chance that David was still alive, I had to play along.
“All right,” I said. “I’m with you.”
He stared at me, blinking. His eyes had filled with tears.
“Really?” he said in an almost inaudible voice. “You really are?”
I nodded. He let go of me abruptly and moved away, rubbing his head.
“I can’t believe this, Phil! It changes everything.”
He fell to his knees suddenly, hands clasped together, trembling with tension, head bowed in silent prayer. I felt a surge of nauseated terror. Whatever Sam was up to, this was no scam. He believed.
“OK, here’s the deal,” he said, getting up. “You saw the hall, right? No one there. It’s the first time that’s ever happened. Mark’s turned them all against me.”
He measured me with his eyes for a moment. I tried to look sincere.
“What happened,” he went on, “the last time some of our guys left the island, one of them didn’t come back. That created problems, and now they’ve gotten worse. Andy, the guy who went along that time, told Mark what really happened. Mark told the others, and now they’re all freezing me out.”
“What did happen?”
He shook his head impatiently.
“I can’t explain all that right now. Just trust me, all right?”
He clapped his hands together and began striding up and down the room.
“What we need to do here, we need to buy ourselves some wriggle space. Unload Mark and get the others back in the zone, so if the news is bad and he tries anything, it won’t gain traction. Get me?”
Thirty seconds before, Sam had been on his knees, now he was wheeling and dealing. I liked him better this way, but both seemed equally real to him.
“So the question is how we do that,” he continued, still pacing. “Here’s the deal. We get everyone together in the hall. I announce that Mark has rebelled and fallen from grace and that you’ve replaced him as Ore, my spiritual son. Then to clinch it, we have a big ceremony where you’re reunited with your son.”
I felt my hands contract into fists, the nails digging painfully into my palms.
“So he’s here?” I breathed.
Sam looked confused.
“Who?”
“David!”
He laughed.
“You think you were seeing things? Of course he’s here!”
He shook his head.
“Man, the trouble we went to! First we had to follow you guys around for a month, work out what the deal was. Then Melissa and two of the guys had to move out there, get one of the kids here into that school, touch base with all the parents, buy a car, rent a place … It cost us a fucking fortune! But that time I talked to you in the bar, I knew that was the only way. You needed to be broken before you could heal. I still remembered the way it used to be back at that house, the two of us studying Blake together and rapping about everything under the sun. Those rimes were precious to me, Phil, but you’d retreated into this prison of work and family That sickened me! And I swore then and there that I’d free you, whatever the cost.”
I fought to control my anger. That wouldn’t save David.
“So where is he?” I asked.
Sam waved vaguely.
“You’ll see him soon enough. It’ll look better if you don’t meet until we do it in front of the others. It’ll come across as more genuine, know what I mean?”
This was too much to take. The rifle was still lying on the bed where he’d left it. I grabbed it and pointed it at Sam.
“Where is he?”
His eyes seemed to glaze over.
“I thought you were with me,” he murmured.
“I want my son! Now!”
Sam stood staring down at the floor. His expression had become infinitely weary.
“Then go find him,” he said.
I stabbed the rifle at him.
“Tell me where he is, you asshole!”
Sam sighed deeply.
“Guy was killed, I was in Vietnam?” he said. “Best buddy of mine. Had a Purple Heart he got leading a patrol to rescue a downed aircrew deep in Cong territory. Know how he went out? Another guy went out on the toot one night, came back to barracks and started fooling around with his MK-16, making like it was a guitar, dig? And it went off and this guy gets one through the spine. Since then I never keep loaded weapons around.”
We looked at each other. He took a step toward me, reaching for the rifle. I pulled the trigger. There was a dull click. Sam took the gun from my unresisting hands. He opened a drawer in the chest and took out a metal pack which he clipped to the underside of the rifle. Then he turned to me, holding the weapon loosely.
His eyes did not leave mine. The barrel of the rifle moved languidly up and to one side, crossing over my body, until it was pointing at the wall. There was a shattering noise, a burst of explosions, maybe four or five. The air convulsed briefly and a sleet of splinters fell all over the room. I looked at the wall behind me. The bullets had passed straight through the solid tree trunks, gouging out a huge crater.
I turned back to Sam. The gun was now pointing directly at me.
“What do you think would happen if I pulled the trigger now?” Sam mused quietly.
I gazed back at him, my heart racing. The organ itself suddenly felt absurdly vulnerable, lodged right there at the front of the chest in its cage of fragile bone.
“That’s what you should be asking yourself, Phil,” Sam continued. “The answer to that question is the answer to all questions. Think about it.”
I nodded, as though we were having a normal conversation.
“OK, I will,” I said.
Leaving that room was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. Sam held the gun on me the whole time, and I had no way of knowing whether he would use it or not. It felt as though I was learning to walk all over again after a stroke. Every movement had to be planned and willed and then painstakingly executed.
Dusk was drawing in, filling the empty reaches of the hall with darkness. The fire had gone out and the air was cold and damp. I walked across to my room, the floorboards squeaking underfoot. My brain was awash with a mixture of fantasies with a factual solidity and facts which I would have dismissed a few hours earlier as fantastic. Which was harder to believe, that David was alive or that Sam had engineered his kidnapping? That my son and I might soon be reunited, or that we were both in the hands of a God-intoxicated maniac and his wayward gang of followers?
At first I was inclined to dismiss the whole thing as a cruel trick. After all, the kidnap victim had been selected at random. Each child chose his or her own colored thread, and only one led out of the room. Then there was the question of David’s clothing, drenched in his own blood. I’d only seen the child on the rock for a brief moment. Maybe Sam had just dressed up one of the kids to look like David. His picture had been in all the papers.
But I soon realized that these factors did not really create a problem. The kidnappers could easily have had another bag of threads which were all the color of the fatal trail, and simply substituted this for the other when David came to make his choice. If it had been obvious that he’d been targeted, I might have suspected Sam earlier. As for the blood, they could have drawn off some of David’s and used it to soak the clothing. Sam had told me that Melissa used to be a junkie. She would be good with needles.
I switched on the light and looked around my room. My overnight bag was where I had left it, all packed and ready for my abortive departure. On top of it lay a piece of paper neatly folded in two. I picked it up and opened it. On the inside was a rough plan of the compound, showing the hall and the shacks all around. Most of this had been done in blue ballpoint, but one of the houses, the furthest downhill, had been drawn in red. There was no message and no signature.
I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Just a few hundred yards away, on the island across the strait, normal people were getting on with their normal lives. There were telephones and TVs, cars and ferries, police and mail carriers, schools and libraries, stores and bars. Just a few hundred yards, but it might have been another continent, even another century.