“And they just watched?”
“They just watched. Wise finally put that dead fella in the hole and turned him on his side. Then he spoke to the men.”
Taylor shivered, even though the heat in the van was blowing at full blast. “What did he say?”
“Said the fella done bad things, but that he did, too. That the fella was with God, but that he’d be meeting the man soon enough and that maybe they could finally…”
“Finally what?”
“Finally be at peace.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No,” Burton said. “What’s crazy is that after that, we never had a lick of trouble with that village. The men there, why, they never bothered us a bit.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Scout’s honor, hoss. Scout’s honor.”
They drove in silence, until Taylor said, “What do you think of Frist?”
Burton spat out more juice. “I seen a lot of weird shit, but that boy takes the cake.” There was a long pause. “I read his file.”
“You know how to read?”
Burton snorted. “Wise asked me to give it the once-over.”
“Then you know what he did.”
“Ayep.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Burton sighed. “I ain’t seen no sign that the boy is like that anymore. Wise told me to keep an eye on him. If it seems like he’s turned back into that person? Eric said to take no chances.”
“He gave me the same order. Can you do it?”
Burton nodded. “It ain’t personal. It’s just the job.”
“Yeah,” Taylor agreed. “It’s just the job.”
John stared at the LPG canisters strapped to the flatbed truck. “No way.”
The driver, Chad Hubbard, was a stocky man in his forties, with bushy black hair and a thick mustache. He watched them argue with a bored look on his face.
The canisters were painted dull gray, and each stood over six feet tall and were bigger around than a person.
“We don’t have all day,” Deion said.
“You’re crazy if you think I’m getting in one of those,” John said, pointing at the flatbed.
“We’ll be in them, too,” Valerie said. “It’s the easiest way out of Switzerland.”
“Easiest?” John asked. “We’ll be stuffed in like sardines.” His claustrophobia had worsened after being shoved inside a bomb casing and then dropped from a stealth bomber into Times Square. “Have you ever been stuffed inside a metal canister?”
“We’ll be sedated,” Deion said.
“No way. Find something else.”
“The Gulfstream already left for London,” Deion said. “The Swiss are looking for us. We can’t stay here.”
“Eventually they’ll give up,” John said. “We can wait them out.”
“Steeljaw wants us back,” Deion said.
“We’ll be cooped up in those things and drugged out of our minds,” John said, struggling to keep from shouting. “What if the oxygen supply fails? We’d die without even waking up. What if the Swiss intercept the truck? We won’t be able to defend ourselves.”
“They don’t want to kill us,” Deion said. “They need us alive.”
Bile rose in John’s throat. “You don’t want to be stuck in there, Valerie. It’s like you’re being crushed.”
Valerie opened her mouth to speak, but Deion said, “We’re going. That’s an order.”
John gazed balefully at the canisters. “I love my country, but sometimes I don’t like it very much.”
“Maybe John has a point,” Valerie said. “If we wait—”
“Steeljaw ordered us to England,” Deion said. “We can’t wait.”
Valerie hesitated, then said to John, “I’m sure we’ll be okay. They used to smuggle people in these all the time.”
“When was the last time they were used?” John asked.
“A few years ago,” Deion said.
John blinked. “A few years? How many?”
“During the Cold War.”
“No,” John said. “No, no, no. These haven’t been used in almost twenty years!”
“Kryzowski assured me they were maintained,” Deion growled. “They tested them before they left Munich. Would I risk our lives if I thought this would fail?”
“I just—”
“Do you seriously think I’d risk Valerie’s life?”
John’s panic eased. Deion was right. He would never risk Valerie’s life. “I really, really hate this.”
John took deep breaths as Hubbard sealed the canister’s top. The pill Deion had given him had yet to kick in, and there was a terrifying moment as he blinked, trying in vain to catch some speck of light where the top might not have sealed shut.
It was no use. The canister was completely dark.
They were designed to mask their body heat, while the tops filtered the air and provided them with enough oxygen to sustain life.
The lizard part of his brain screamed that he was going to die, that monstrous things were coming for him, clawing their way through the dark, to rip and tear the skin from his bones. His bladder tightened, and he thought he might wet himself like he had as a child.
Then, in that moment of terror, he saw the Red Cross building.
The children stood in front, their faces smiling.
No.
The children turned to wave at him, their smiles widening as they pointed.
The bomb’s detonation spread so slowly that the children had time to turn and gape, then turn back and glare at him with hollow eyes.
This isn’t how it happened. They died before they knew what hit them.
The children howled in agony as the wave of destruction approached.
It wasn’t like that!
The flames engulfed the children, melting the skin from their faces and setting their hair ablaze.
The moment seemed to last forever, but the pill finally kicked in, and the images faded to black.
The light was so intense that John felt his head might explode, and then he was dumped to the muddy ground. He blinked, but the drugs made everything look like it was covered in cotton.
A man with a thin mustache stood in front of him, and two soldiers stood behind him, casually holding their HK MP5s.
John blinked furiously. Although his mind was moving in slow motion, it dawned on him that the man with the mustache was the man from the hospital.
Deion and Valerie lay unmoving in the slush three feet from him. There was no sign of Hubbard. The flatbed truck was parked next to a ten-foot concrete wall. Next to it was a brown six-wheeled Pinzgauer truck.
The frigid air was eerily silent.
“Get up,” the mustached man demanded in heavily accented English.
John staggered to his feet. The world spun, but he managed to stay upright. Deion and Valerie moaned and raised their heads, but were unable to sit up.
“Where are we?” John asked.
The man stepped forward, knelt, and snapped his fingers in front of Deion’s face. “Mr. Freeman? How disappointing.”
“Gohl?” Deion mumbled. “How…?”
Gohl rocked back on his heels. “I once interrogated a young German police officer. He told me he’d looked the other way when trucks of LPG crossed the border. It wasn’t difficult to alert the border police to watch for suspicious trucks entering or leaving the country. An old truck such as this, suddenly pressed back into service? With new paperwork? We followed it from Konstanz. I thought, perhaps, that we had made a mistake, but then it tried to leave through this abandoned road. You have become sloppy, Mr. Freeman.”
Deion and Valerie continued to groan, clearly not able to shake off the sedatives, so John asked, “What are you going to do with us?”