It wasn’t until a few hours later that his name was noticed by someone in the D.C. FBI office, and a call was made. A corporal walked into the tent with a cell phone and handed it over.
“What’s this?” Mercer asked.
“Get-out-of-jail-free card. My CO says you can now leave anytime.”
He took the phone. “This is Mercer.”
“Is there always so much death and destruction in your wake?” Special Agent Kelly Hepburn asked.
Mercer grinned, tired and thankful, and said, “Yeah, on most days there is.”
19
With the area under evacuation orders, Niklaas Coetzer had had no problem finding a house to break into with his prisoner. He’d motored back almost to where they’d started before he spotted a place that was set far back from the flooding stream. Coetzer had grounded the Zodiac and hauled the nearly catatonic Roni Butler onto dry land. He used a folding knife to slash the inflatable’s remaining air cells and dragged the tattered remains of the boat with him to be disposed of later on.
The farmhouse was larger than the one Roni had owned, a two-story with a minefield of children’s toys littering the lawn — bikes, miniature tractors, and the wrecked shell of a wading pool. The front door, unsurprisingly, wasn’t locked.
“This is Bob and Ellie Loomis’s place,” Roni said when she finally realized where she was. “They’ve got kids. What are you planning on?”
“I need dry clothes and transportation, and you need to tell me what you told him.”
“I ain’t telling you nothing,” Roni snapped at him.
He backhanded her so hard that her head snapped around and her lip split. “Yes, you will.”
She laughed and thumbed the trace of blood from her mouth. “That the best you got, you foreign prick? I had a husband who would kick my ass for days straight. Gave me black eyes so often people thought I was part raccoon, and more broken bones than I can count. You better step up your game if you think a little love tap like that’s gonna make me talk.”
“Shut up,” he snarled.
“Or what? You’ll hit me again, you dickless asshole? You beat up old women? How badly did you screw up your life to end up here? Ever think about that?”
“I said shut up!” Coetzer roared and jammed the barrel of his automatic pistol hard enough under Roni’s chin to force her onto her tiptoes.
She saw the madness in his eyes and knew if she so much as swallowed he’d pull the trigger. A tense second passed before the South African pulled his weapon from her throat and pushed her farther into the house. It was dank from the rain and dark from the lack of electricity. Light filtering in through the windows was weak and watery.
He thrust her into a kitchen chair. The table had been cleared prior to the Loomis family’s evacuation, but the dirty dishes were left in the sink and the plastic tray attached to a high chair near the table was littered with uneaten Cheerios. Coetzer rummaged through the drawers; he didn’t find tape, but a ball of string would suffice.
Roni thought about resisting, but in the end she let him tie her to the chair. The twine was thin, so he had to wrap it around her wrists and ankles multiple times to make certain she couldn’t move.
“I am sorry about this,” he said as he worked. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. But hey, your friend from the library? We tied him up just like this — he’s fine and you will be too. Just tell me what you told Philip Mercer and I will leave.”
He wasn’t looking at her when he was talking, but Roni could still tell he was lying. Sherm Smithson had told her that the men who trussed him up and tossed him into the back of his closet had worn masks the entire time. But Mercer’s presence at her house had altered their plans, and neither one had covered his face. And this man was so easily identifiable that she knew he couldn’t let her live.
“As to your earlier question, about what made me the way I am? That’s a story that started with my grandfather, Piet Coetzer. He was an expert marksman who would have represented South Africa at the Olympics in Berlin. When the war broke out a couple of years later, our country narrowly sided with the Allied cause rather than stay neutral. My paps knew his duty. He became famous for training thousands of soldiers how to shoot, so they could join the Allies in defeating the Nazis. He even wrote a training manual. He was a great man, my grandfather, and he inspired me to join the military when I was of age.
“Only problem was…I accidentally shot and killed a man during a training exercise. He was a black man, and he outranked me. This was right after the blacks took over my country, and so I was charged with murder. It was race politics bullshit and everyone knew it, but I had to stand trial. They acquitted me, and yet I was forced out of the army anyway. So I became a mercenary. You know what this means?”
“You’re a hired gun. A thug.”
The man sucked at his teeth. It was a nervous tic she’d noticed since their time in the boat.
He nodded. “Now we’re called contractors…and we’re paid a king’s ransom to risk our necks so your soldiers don’t have to fight. But back then…yeah, we were hired guns. I worked for some good people, mostly as a bodyguard and doing hostage rescue. I never shot first and I never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me. I lived by a soldier’s code.”
“And soldiers slap old women?” Roni sneered.
“One patrol went horribly wrong,” he replied with a trace of bitter regret. “We were on a mission to rescue three aid workers who’d been snatched from a bush hospital, when we came across a camp in the jungle. I believed these were our kidnappers, and we were putting the men under observation when the fighting started. I don’t know which side fired first, but it turned into a fookin’ mess…guys were dropping left and right. That’s the only time in all the years before or since that I ever got shot. A few of my mates were dead and a couple of us were pretty banged up, me included, so we retreated back to the hospital to report what had happened.
“Turns out they weren’t the terrorists we were looking for — just a bunch of zoo types looking for monkeys or apes or some goddamn thing. They patched me up as best they could, but the police wanted to question me about the incident. I had to get out of the country, and by the time I found another doctor to look at my injury, well, there wasn’t much he could do. After that, jobs became harder to find and I became a lot less choosy…and eventually, as you said, I became a hired ‘thug.’ ”
Coetzer cinched the final knot and regarded Roni with hard eyes. “So, what did you tell Mercer?”
“I gave him my peach cobbler recipe,” she replied, without missing a beat.
“Lady, I don’t want to hurt you but I will just the same. I work for a very big corporation now, and there’s a lot of money riding on the success of my mission. The kind of money even rich people kill over. Billions of dollars. Tell me and I’ll go away, and I’ll make sure you are never bothered again.”
“You start with flour and shortening, and don’t dream of using anything but fresh peaches.”
“What is it with you pigheaded Americans?”
“I’ve seen your face,” Roni said. “I know your voice. You are going to kill me as soon as I tell you what you want. Sherman’s girlfriend freed him already, and he called me when you were outside my house. He told me you and your sick little partner wore masks. Now that I can identify you, you have to kill me. I might be old but I want to keep on living, so I’m going to prolong this for as long as I can. And the whole time you’re hurting me, the pain will be my reminder that I am still alive. You’ll also need baking powder, ground cinnamon—”