“I’m taking my hand off your mouth. Yell and you’re dead. Understand me? Nod your head.”
He nodded his head. The hand dropped away from his jaw and relieved him of his revolver.
He still had the flare pistol. The whisper anticipated him: “Don’t even think about it. Drop it easy, right by your foot.”
He let go. There was the slightest thud when it hit the pine needles.
“Hands behind you now.”
He obeyed, felt something harsh against his wrists and judged it to be heavy wire of some kind—possibly coat-hanger wire. He drew breath but then something plunged into his mouth and he sucked for breath in panic before he realized the man was gagging him with a wad of cloth. He felt a strip of fabric go around his face and then the man was knotting it tight at the back. An abstract corner of his mind appreciated the economy with which it had been done.
He kept in mind what Cutter had said. He’s not a killer. It would be an unfortunate time for Cutter to be wrong.
Then something dropped to the earth; the man stoped to pick up Ross’s flare pistol. He saw two things: Kendig’s profile and a short piece of half-inch galvanized pipe. He’d been bluffed—it hadn’t been a gun at all.
There was the scrape and growl of cars coming up the drive. He felt the pressure of the gun—his own—against his back. The two cars rolled into sight, high beams jiggling across the porch; the cars swung wide and stopped nose-out in tandem and the drivers slid out and hunkered against the fenders; Ross saw Greiff lift the bullhorn. The metallic voice was magnified and unreaclass="underline" “FBI. Come out of the house with your hands empty. You’ve got one minute.”
The FBI man with Greiff lofted a shotgun and cocked its slide with a good deal of racket.
There was a whisper in Ross’s ear: “Where’s Joe Cutter?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
Greiff said on the bullhorn, “Thirty seconds. Then we fill the house with tear gas. Come on out—we’ve got you surrounded.”
“Stay put,” Kendig whispered and Ross thought of making a run for it when the gun pulled away from his back but Kendig was still right there; Ross saw the flare pistol rise past his shoulder. For a moment he thought Kendig was going to crown him with it and he flinched involuntarily but there was no blow. The flare pistol hung in the air above and behind his left shoulder.
“Ten seconds,” Greiff roared.
Simultaneously there was a whump close in Ross’s ear. It took him a moment to realize what it was: Kendig had fired the flare pistol, using Grieff’s racket on the bullhorn to mask the sound of the discharge.
Then the flare ignited. High in the air above the woods across the yard—probably not far from where Cutter was posted. It bathed the trees in harsh brilliant white light and suddenly men were crashing through the forest and Ross heard voices calling across the night in harsh tones.… Then Kendig was spinning him with a hard grip on his arm: “Come on—move.” And Ross was being propelled through the saplings, stumbling, yanked upright and pushed on by Kendig’s powerful grip.
He skittered through the trees and suddenly they were out in the open swath he’d discovered before and Kendig was shoving him down the steep pathway; he slid and stumbled his way, eyes on the ground, avoiding stumps, trying to keep his balance with his wrists wired behind him. It was getting hard to breathe through his nose but Kendig kept shoving and yanking. He caromed down into the heavier forest and then Kendig slowed them down and they were walking, following a broad path among the trees, still hearing the hunters baying up at the far side of the yard; he heard Cutter’s distinct voice, louder than the others, calling for order and after that the racket diminished.
Abruptly there was a heavier mass in front of him in the deep forest shadows. He didn’t realize what it was until Kendig pulled the door open and shoved him into the passenger seat of the car. The door slammed against his right elbow and before he had time to react to it Kendig was behind the wheel flicking a switch and pushing a button. The engine roared and immediately they went bucketing forward, crashing through loose brush which he now saw had been piled there on purpose. It was a thin tangle of deadwood and it gave way easily before the thrust of the powerful car; Kendig spun the car onto the blacktop and the rear wheels bounced from side to side before they dug in and propelled the car forward, pinning Ross back painfully against his trapped forearms.
When he twisted around to look back he saw a car pulling out, coming after them—the one Cutter had left at the foot of the driveway.
Then he looked at Kendig. It was the first real look he’d had at his captor.
Kendig was smiling—gently and happily.
The FBI car wasn’t gaining but it was keeping up, maybe two-tenths of a mile behind them; he kept looking back for it and saw it intermittently on the straightaways. This was an old car but it must have had a souped-up mill and heavy-duty suspension for the bends; Kendig was treating it like a sports car and it was holding the road like one. It was all pretty damned neat, Ross conceded.
Kendig curled the car onto a straightaway and then his right hand came across the back of the seat and Ross ducked away but Kendig was only untying the gag and when he realized that he stopped flinching. He spat the gag out and Kendig said, “What are you, FBI or Agency?”
Ross didn’t say anything and Kendig nodded. “Then you’re Agency. A Bureau man would be proclaiming it to the sky, full of indignation. You’re working with Cutter on this?” Kendig spared him a quick glance. “Sure. You’re Ross, aren’t you.”
“Yeah.” His voice was hoarse from the gag and he cleared his throat several times.
“You’ve come up in the world from the third floor.”
“What are you trying to prove, Kendig?”
But Kendig didn’t take the time to answer that. He had his eyes on the mirror and Ross twisted his head to look. The FBI car was still there, maybe a little closer. It was a long straightaway and farther back he could see the glow of headlights above a skyline.
Kendig said, “They’ve got three cars, haven’t they. We’ll have to lose those.”
“You’re bottled up on every road in this county, Kendig.”
“You haven’t got that kind of manpower. Don’t try to bluff me, Ross, you haven’t had enough practice.”
They soared over a hilltop and then the road plunged into a series of tight bends on the down-slope; they had to slow to twenty and even then the tires squealed and whimpered.
At the bottom there was a drain-off ditch beyond the outside of the curve, no guardrail. They went into the bend at about twenty-five and Ross saw Kendig yank something with his left hand, down beside the seat. Then Kendig gunned the engine and they gathered speed down the flats.
Kendig wasn’t using a map but he knew what he was doing; either he’d explored the roads or memorized a map. He took a left turn at an intersection and they bumped along a dirt road that looked to Ross as if it ought to be a dead end but it let them onto another paved byway and Kendig only followed that a mile and a half before he cut to the left again into the pines and went up a narrow chuckholed track past a cluster of farms. Chickens cackled in the night from the disturbance. They came into yet another blacktop road, made a gravel detour and emerged onto a wider concrete highway. Kendig had fled southeast from his farm but now if Ross’s sense of direction hadn’t packed up they were rolling almost due west.
Then Kendig pulled over onto the verge. He stopped the car and patted Ross’s jacket and lifted his wallet and ID folder.
“Now you add that to your sins,” Ross said.
Kendig ignored it and pocketed Ross’s wallets. “I want you to give Joe Cutter a message. Tell him I’ve finished writing the book. I’ll be carrying it with me. Every now and then I’ll stop somewhere and mail off another chapter. I’ll keep a crucial page here and there, just as I did with the first ones. I’m playing fair—I haven’t hidden the manuscript with a lawyer to be opened in the event I don’t check in or anything like that. If you and Joe can catch me you’ll catch the manuscript with me. But the longer you take, the more pages they’ll be receiving at the publishers. And I’m likely to start mailing out those evidential pages any time. Tell him that for me—he ought to enjoy the news.”