“Look on the bright side,” Shawn said. “Soon they’ll be firing them in here.”
“Why do you think I’m trying to tear a hole in this tent?” Gus said.
“I didn’t know that’s what you were doing,” Shawn said. “I thought you were using the tent wall as your blanky.”
“I never had a blanky,” Gus said. “Or a binky or a noo-noo, or any other stupid piece of cloth to make me feel better. And if I did, it wouldn’t have been yellow, nylon, and attached to a tent that gun-wielding maniacs were about to invade.”
“I do see how that could defeat the entire purpose of a security blanket,” Shawn said.
“I was trying to make a way out for us.”
“Oh, if that’s what you want,” Shawn said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a Swiss Army knife. “Try this. I grabbed it out of my pack. Silly me, I thought it might come in handy at some point.”
Gus could have kissed Shawn. Or plunged one of the knife’s many blades into his heart. It all depended on whether he decided to focus on Shawn’s forethought or on the fact that he’d been sitting there for what seemed like hours watching Gus uselessly tug at the tent fabric.
Instead he pulled the longest blade out of its slot and plunged it into the nylon, then ran it along the seam between the wall and the tent. The stitching fell away like ice cream under a blowtorch, and in a second there was an opening big enough to crawl through.
“The supply tent is right behind us,” Gus said. “If we can get around that, we’ll be in the darkness and they won’t be able to find us.”
“Unless they brought flashlights,” Shawn said.
Gus lifted the tent wall and wriggled through, then rolled until he hit the soft wall of the supply tent. He waited there silently until Shawn rolled against him. There was another burst of gunfire from across the camp. Gus thought he could hear Jade crying. “We’ve got to help them,” he whispered.
“You’ve got the knife,” Shawn said. “Go for it.”
“There are at least two people with automatic weapons out there,” Gus said.
“And you’ve got eight blades, plus a screwdriver, corkscrew, tweezers, nail file, and magnifying glass,” Shawn said. “I feel sorry for them.”
There was no point in glaring at Shawn in the darkness, but Gus did it anyway. “We can’t just let them kill all the lawyers.”
“No matter what the bumper sticker says,” Shawn agreed. “But charging into the middle of a gunfight waving a magnifying glass isn’t going to help anyone. Unless they’re really, really big and having trouble seeing us puny humans.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“First thing, we’ve got to get out of here,” Shawn said. “Just far enough so it’s not worth their trouble to look for us too long. Then we follow and see where they take their prisoners.”
“What makes you think they’re going to take them anywhere?”
“Sometime tomorrow a helicopter is going to land here to take the cook and the waiters away, either back home or to the next rest stop,” Shawn said. “The gunmen aren’t going to want to be here when that happens.”
“Unless their plan is to hijack a helicopter,” Gus said.
“There is that possibility,” Shawn said. “But I can think of about a million easier ways to do that. And either way, our first step is still the same. We’ve got to get away from here.”
It didn’t feel right. It felt like running away and leaving all the others to some horrible fate. But no matter how many scenarios Gus ran in his head, he didn’t see one that was even half as logical as Shawn’s plan. “Let’s go.”
Gus pushed himself up on his knees, ready to crawl back around the supply tent. Shawn grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down.
A circle of light, the beam from a flashlight, hit the tent’s back wall, then swept across its surface. A gruff voice shouted from inside. “They’re not here.”
Somewhere past the tent, another voice spoke in threatening tones: “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” It was Gwendolyn’s voice, and she sounded scared. After all that had just happened, it was the fear in her voice that frightened Gus the most.
“They probably ran off.” It was a man’s voice. Savage, Gus thought.
“Right off the mountain.” That was definitely Mathis. Why wasn’t he doing anything? Gus wondered, and then remembered kicking Mathis’ gun into the water. “They’re probably lying dead at the bottom of a ravine.”
“Possibly,” the threatening voice said. “Or maybe they’re hiding just out of reach of our lights. Let’s find out.”
“That’s a good idea.” It was Balowsky, and there was a mild slur in his voice that Gus suspected wasn’t entirely caused by fear. “We can wait until the sun comes up. Then we’ll be able to see for ourselves.”
“I have a better idea,” the threatening voice said, and then spoke up loudly. “The two of you who are hiding out there. You have ten seconds to show yourselves. If you do not surrender to me within that period of time, I will kill one hostage. And then I will kill another hostage every ten seconds after that. One. Two.”
The voice continued counting down.
Gus got to his feet.
“Are you crazy?” Shawn said.
“No, but I will be if people start dying because I didn’t walk fast enough. And so will you.”
“Six. Seven.”
“Sometimes I hate being a decent person,” Shawn said as he got to his feet.
“Fortunately it doesn’t come up all that often,” Gus said.
“Eight. Nine.”
Shawn and Gus stepped around the edge of the yellow tent. “Don’t shoot!” Shawn shouted. “We’re here.”
The five members of Rushton’s team were huddled together by the blue tent. Mathis had managed to change into his clothes, or maybe he’d never taken them off, but Savage and Balowsky were still in their pajamas. Gwendolyn and Jade wore robes, presumably over the sheer nightgowns that had been left for them.
Four men wearing camouflage, army boots, and black balaclavas leveled automatic rifles at the lawyers. Their leader stood in the center of the quad, aiming his own weapon at the ground where the four servers and the chef lay facedown.
The leader glanced up at Shawn and Gus, although the long, thick red hair and beard made it hard to tell exactly where his eyes were looking.
“Ten,” the leader said. “Too late.”
“But we’re here,” Gus said. “We came out within the ten seconds.”
“Did I say ten?” the leader growled. “Sorry, I’m dyslexic. What I meant to say was five.”
He jerked his gun up slightly and fired. A spurt of red geysered up where a server’s head had been.
“No!” Shawn shouted. He ran towards the leader, with Gus right on his heels. But before they’d closed half the distance, two of the camo-men tackled them to the ground.
The leader fired four more bullets, then wiped the red off the cuffs of his pants and turned back to the lawyers.
“I warned them not to trash my mountain.”
Chapter Forty
The march had gotten easier as the sun came up and Gus could see the rocks littering the trail instead of blindly tripping over them. But that only made him feel worse. When there was physical pain, when every step was a struggle, his entire mind could focus on the act of putting one foot in front of the other. Now his mind was free to wander, and it kept going back to the same place.
Gus had seen dead bodies before. He’d seen people die. But this was different. The casual executions kept replaying themselves in his mind, and he couldn’t shake the image no matter how hard he tried. It seemed impossible to imagine-one second those people were alive; the next they didn’t exist. Gus hoped he had thanked the servers when they’d brought him dinner last night.
The rest of the marchers were just as somber and just as silent and they walked single file along the trail. Two of the masked gunmen led them down the mountain; the other two trailed them. Where their leader was, Gus had no idea.