No longer cold, suddenly she was burning with anticipation.
59
The whirring of an electric drill, followed by the crunch and crack of a screw biting into wood, prompted Kevin to call out.
“No!” he shouted, banging on the closet door.
They were sealing him inside.
As the drill cried out, screws splintered the doorjambs, first one, then the other.
Kevin pounded.
“LET ME OUT!”
Nothing, not a word. Just the grinding whir of the drill, now affixing the doors to the floor.
Kevin had the knife from the Learjet, something they didn’t know about, as well as the flashlight. If only he could get them to open the door, he could fight his way out. But that wasn’t going to happen.
The minutes passed, and there was even more drilling nearby, the window perhaps, or the door to the room, or both. They were sealing him up in a tomb.
“Listen to me, kid,” now came a man’s voice from the other side. The copilot spoke in a hushed, confiding tone.
Kevin took a step back, hit the wall, and sank into a squat, his heart racing. The man’s voice also had an unmistakable note of finality about it.
“We’re doing you a favor here,” the man said. “This doesn’t involve you or Sam Elliott here, and let’s keep it that way. By morning, you’re out of here, alive and well, got that? So give it a rest. Don’t be stupid, don’t fight it, you’re safe. Stupid will get you hurt, hurt bad. Be smart, sleep it off. By tomorrow, this’ll be just a nightmare you had.”
Why hadn’t the man mentioned Summer?
Kevin thought this through from several angles.
Because they already have her.
Footfalls receding.
“This doesn’t involve you and Sam Elliott here…”
For Kevin, the operating word was here. Did here mean that the cowboy was tied up in the study? That gave him some sense of hope. Isolation scared him more than claustrophobia.
His eyes lighted on the closet’s old-fashioned plank ceiling. The rough lumber probably had been taken from the property. The ceiling, casement, and walls were all constructed of one-by-six pine boards. None of the joints fit together perfectly, having withstood decades of deep winter snow and the unforgiving climate. The gaps between the boards were about the thickness of… a steak-knife blade.
Kevin stood, slipped the flashlight out of his pocket, and switched it on. A pair of metal filing boxes were stacked in the corner. He gingerly climbed atop them to inspect the ceiling. He slipped the tip of his knife into a gap between the boards and gently began to pry them apart.
60
Roger McGuiness, lathered in sweat from having spent the past hour cutting pine boughs to disguise the Learjet, delivered Cantell’s satellite phone to the lodge’s living room.
“It rang, but I didn’t answer it,” McGuiness said.
Cantell stared at the bulky phone. He’d left it behind on the jet, having seen lights on in the lodge while landing and wanting to have an excuse, if necessary, to get inside the lodge. He’d been expecting a call from Lorraine to tell him she’d arrived at the remote Nevada strip, but to his surprise the caller ID showed a different number.
He knew who it was and was thinking about when to call back as the phone rang in his hand. With McGuiness and Salvo watching, he hit the POWER button and shut the phone off.
“I’ll deal with that later,” he said.
“What now?” McGuiness asked, mopping his face with his shirt sleeve. “FYI, we’re maybe eighty or ninety miles from Hailey. We flew damn-near directly over Stanley, so we’ve got to assume we were spotted. A jet flaming out is a pretty spectacular sight, so we’re made.”
“What’s the plan?” Salvo said anxiously. “We’re out of here, right? You said the idea was to get away from the plane. ‘Radioactive’: isn’t that what you called it? All we need are the GPS coordinates to find it, right? Let’s not forget we were going to be a hundred miles away from here before we even made our demands, right?”
McGuiness feigned disinterest by flipping through a pamphlet.
“And we will be,” Cantell said. “The schedule is changed but not the plan.”
He lifted a framed topographical map from the wall and laid it on the coffee table in front of the oversized stone fireplace. The map covered an area of roughly fifty square miles, a red star stuck on the lower half of the glass next to a light blue line designating a river.
“We’re not flying,” Cantell said. “And the cowboy told me that if we float the river, it’s four days minimum”-he pointed to the map and shook his head-“mostly in a very long canyon through very steep terrain. After the first day, there are a few dry tributaries, but if you hike any of them you’re looking at thirty to fifty miles of total wilderness without trails, which would take longer than floating out on the river. And if we do that, we’re sitting ducks: they’ll be waiting for us.”
“So we’re screwed…” Salvo said.
“No, we need to be resourceful,” Cantell said. “Behind this cabin is Shady Mountain, part of the river canyon’s walls. It surrounds this part of the ranch, sealing it off from unwanted hikers, the Grape-Nuts crowd. Now, there’s rock-climbing gear in the garage, and my guess is, there’s a route set in the face of the mountain. If it’s there, it should be easy to see in daylight. But first things first: we need the girl. We need to find her fast. Then we put Sam Elliott and Shia LaBeouf in one of the rafts and send them downstream.”
“But-”
“They’re the biggest threat to us, Matt. We eliminate the threat by getting rid of them. We have to close the deal. We’re going to need time to do it. Once they’re on the river, we’ve got four days-”
“Unless,” Salvo interrupted, “they run into somebody on the river who has a phone-”
“Trips on this river are strictly controlled,” McGuiness broke in, holding up a dog-eared Forest Service pamphlet from the coffee table. “They’re not to spoil, and I’m quoting here, ‘the natural sights and sounds that campers deserve in a remote-wilderness experience. ’ In other words, this is no Disneyland.” He pointed to sites on the map. “We’re just about halfway between these two camps, a full day’s journey. If we put those two on the river about sunrise, they’re not running into anybody. The only way they would would be to stop and wait for the next group floating downriver, and then they might not have a phone. If they have a radio, it’s a day and a half before the terrain allows it to transmit. There’s a big warning in here about that. The cowboy knows about it. He won’t sit around waiting for other campers to show up. That gives us at least a couple days.”
“Screw that, it’s too risky. We should just lock them up here.”
“Good plan, Matt. Just let them dehydrate and die. Or maybe we should give them the run of the kitchen. The cowboy is our number one threat. He knows this place, the woods. He knows what our options are. We need him gone. But, last I checked, we’re not in the business of killing people.”
“Tell that to the wine currier,” Salvo protested.
“All the more reason to get out of here. Think about it, Matt: who turned on the gas valve?”
That silenced Salvo.
“The girl?” McGuiness said, usually the silent one. Cantell noted this change.
“We tell the insurance company they have to pay up. We tell them that without payment in full, the jet will blow with the girl in it.”
“No way!” McGuiness shouted.
“Hang on, relax. She’s with us the whole time, not on the jet. But we need to give them an incentive to speed things up because we don’t know how long we’ve got.”
“But if the two somehow manage to make that call…” Salvo protested.