Without apology, Petra pulled a Kleenex from the packet in her bag and swabbed the cup clean as she’d been taught by her mother when drinking after strangers. It did not occur to her, when pouring from that thermos, that she was trusting this stranger in ways far more intimate than a shared cup.
Her face a parody of itself, Petra stuck her tongue out after her first sip. “Gaah is right, John.”
“Call it insurance and drink the lousy stuff. We can get a refill in Albany,” he said. She sipped slowly and obediently, and all too trustingly. And somewhere between Worcester and Springfield, she began to nod, only faintly aware when he lifted the cup from her indolent fingers, and the sun was in her eyes and the muted thrumm of the Ford lulled her into complete lassitude.
Petra was snoring lightly when the Ford stopped for fuel in Rotterdam, west of Albany. She did not wake when it turned southwest in the dusk on Route Eighty-eight, nor when the headlights first began to reflect from signs mentioning Elmira. She did not even open her eyes when, sometime later, the adhesive tape began to encircle her wrists and ankles.
ELEVEN
Gary Macallister didn’t mind the Snake Pit graveyard shift, not even when he drew gate duty. There was so little to do, he could pull a paperback from his lunchbox and read maybe six chapters of Stephen King before first light. When a car did come through after midnight it was usually Ullmer’s old Volvo. Not this time, though.
Gary laid the book facedown under the counter as he spotted lights heading his way, and stepped outside standing tall, tugging at his guard uniform coat. Wickham, the shift captain, had long ago pointed out that when anybody came onto the grounds this late, it was most likely NSA brass on some level. Not this time, though.
The black Ford flicked its lights as if waving for attention, turning aside instead of stopping with its nose at the gate so that Gary had to walk around the corner of the guard shack. Wickham had also said, though it did not yet occur to Gary, that this maneuver kept the video monitor, steadily swiveling to scan the gate area, from seeing past the shack. Gary sighed; probably the driver was lost. It had happened before. Not this time…
Gary saw a girl asleep in the front seat but, as he strode around the front of the car, did not see the driver clearly until he emerged, and thanks to the lingering spell of Stephen King, Gary nearly fainted. Above a worn, zippered leather jacket the driver’s face was the face of a monster, puffed and grotesquely flat, and then Gary realized the man was wearing pantyhose stretched over his head. Gary would have pulled his sidearm but the man had beaten him to it, pointing what might have been a Glock automatic pistol at belt-buckle height.
“Hands on your hips,” said the gravelly voice, not a voice he recalled and not one he enjoyed hearing. Gary complied and swallowed hard. The man glanced quickly at the shack, perhaps judging the location of the video camera. Then he gestured with the pistol. “Turn around and sit down. Give me your coat and hat.”
Gary did it, knowing he had to stay calm enough to memorize the car’s license number and a hell of a lot of other things, having trouble because he was trembling with a rage that was tempered by fear. He felt the muzzle of the handgun behind his ear as he dropped his coat on macadam. “Behave and you’ll be okay. Get cute and I blow your head off. Understood?”
Gary managed to say, “Yeah,” on his second try. He felt his sidearm slide from its holster, heard the rattle and click of its ammunition falling into the man’s hand, knew the weapon was useless as it was thrust back into place. He clasped his hands behind him on command and heard a zipper whine, then felt wide tape binding his hands tighter. At another command he lay prone, wondering if he should try kicking as the tape circled his ankles, knowing damned well he wouldn’t, realizing as his legs were forced back with tape connecting his belt to his ankles that he couldn’t even crawl, now.
“You’re doing fine,” said the voice he couldn’t see, but he doubted it because the last silver strip of duct tape went across his mouth. Gary figured then that the man intended to kill him.
But maybe not yet. From the tail of his eye, Gary saw the man drop the old leather jacket, then don the uniform coat and hat, backing around the edge of the shack now, facing Gary and waving cheerfully as he disappeared toward the shack’s door. And Christ, but it was cold lying there at one o’clock in the morning! A moment later, just as Gary began to test his bonds, the man was back, hatless, cutting the tape from Gary’s belt and ankles with a clasp knife that could have been used for shaving.
The man’s arms were short and thick, and hauled Gary upright as if he weighed nothing. “Open the gate,” he demanded, and Gary had a flash of hope as he rounded the shack with his captor on his heels until he saw his own hat hanging from the video monitor. Wickham might still get curious about that, if he was watching the monitors. Or he might not.
That pantyhosed son of a bitch was sure good with tape, Gary thought, feeling fresh tape link his left wrist to the back of his belt before the clasp knife freed his right hand. Another flash of desire, this time to use the alarm signal, until the man said, “By the way, the woman is a hostage. I want to see something in there, that’s all; then I leave. Punch the wrong access code or get me into a gunfight and she dies. But not before you do.”
Gary flexed his hand carefully, and then punched the code in, and the gate began to slide open. He felt himself propelled outside; watched the man toss his old jacket into the car; then he was made to lie across the Ford’s sloping hood, holding on with one hand, as the man drove the car slowly around and through the opening. He almost fell off as the car stopped, the driver still armed and watching as he stepped back to the shack to retrieve the hat with a flick of his hand. Gary knew the monitor at Wickham’s station would not show the edge of the open gate; its field of view was limited to things outside the gate. You weren’t supposed to have to worry much about what went on inside.
The man parked near the lowered doors of Blue Hangar, which had been partitioned off a week before so that even the guards could not see what was in half of it. The Ford stood where perimeter arc lights permitted a slice of shadow, before the guy got out and whipped the tape from Gary’s mouth. Gary began to wonder how much the bastard already knew about the place. Evidently quite a bit: “Who’s your shift captain, and how many others on this shift?”
Gary swallowed. “Too many. Look, face it, buddy, you better quit while”
That was as far as he got before the man backhanded him, grabbing him by the collar, leading him to the passenger’s side of the Ford where the woman still slept. “You face this,” said the man. “I succeed: I leave the woman with you and we all live. I faiclass="underline" we all die, no ifs, ands, or buts. That’s a promise. It means you and I are on the same side. Which do we do, live or die?”
“Shit,” Gary muttered. “Shift captain is Cully Wickham, he’s probably at the comm center. Gabe Trotti’s the other man. Makes his rounds on a weird schedule the comm center gives us.”
“Stays with the shift captain between rounds?”
“How’d you know?” asked Gary, but got no answer.
His captor was silent for a moment, then said, “You know where the monitors are, so you know the best way for us to get to the comm center. We wait for Trotti to make his rounds and follow him back, and we all get to live. Or you screw up,” he added grimly, “and we don’t.”
Gary nodded. “I better have my hat and coat if this is going to work,” he said, wondering again if the guy was going to slip up because if he did for even an instant, by God, Gary would be on him like a coat of paint.
But the man was very careful, shifting hands as he shrugged out of the coat, keeping that evil little weapon pointed where it would give a man a new navel, roughly thirty-eight caliber. He tossed the coat, then the hat, to Gary and followed as Gary moved off toward the hangar’s air-conditioning plant. Gary pulled his ID card and slipped it into the slot, then moved inside the welcoming blackness and waited, crouching. This was it, the moment when he had an advantage because he could see out but no one could see in.