Ravenous Dusk (85 page)

Cundieffe stopped and hugged the nearest tree, studying the ground. He knew plenty about the kind of booby-traps anti-government nuts liked to deploy, had read all the online manuals, watched all the videos one could buy at the gun shows and militia conferences, had even co-authored a piece on the subject for the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team field manual. But only now did it occur to him that he'd never seen one in the field, and he had no idea what to look for.

Greenaway's harsh laughter made him clutch tighter to the tree. "I'm just fucking with you, geek. It's all clear, just get your ass up there."

He let go of the tree and started picking his way up the hill. His imagination was still goosed up from its enhanced role in his blindness, putting tripwires, ruby laser beams and snares everywhere he looked. The depression he was supposed to follow vanished almost instantly in the dark and snow, so he trudged along in the general direction the cable had been headed. He stared at the ground intently, but the harder he looked, the denser the trees grew together, the darker it got, the less he saw.

He'd been kidnapped by an Army-trained killer who had gone rogue, not to mention insane. He was out in the woods, fumbling around in the dark on his way to meet the maniac's last victim and flush him out, with only a sniper for company. He froze and tried to make his ears hear everything from here to the Capitol, but he got no sense of where the sniper had gone to ground. Were his orders to kill Cundieffe out here? Was the whole thing a ruse? If so, it was an unnecessarily complicated one, since Greenaway could have shot him in the head at any time on their drive. More likely, the sniper was to shoot Durban—hence, both of them—once he'd served his purpose. He would have to warn Durban, once he found his cabin—if the runaway NSA man was even out here—

Snap out of it, he told himself. You're not a door-buster, you're a bookworm, but you've got to stop thinking and act, if you want to come out of this alive. See what's in front of you. Be in it—

He took a step. Nothing killed him. Scanning the ground, he took another. So far, so good. A few die-hard bushes pushed up through the frozen snow, but there were no traps in sight, no claymores or nail bombs. The hillside leveled off in a shallow ledge choked in pines, but he could just make out the rocky pile beyond ascending to scrape the lowest of the scudding clouds. He stopped and leaned against a tree, mopped freezing sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. Grateful for the level ground, he started across it, thinking, if he's out here, it'll be here. It better be, or…or what?

He didn't see anything in the dark until he took another step and all the klieg lights in the world switched on, and then all he saw was light.

He threw his arms up and hit the ground, more by accident and panic than training, but it saved his life, just the same. A white-hot buckshot wind tore down his back. He burrowed face-first into the crusty snow, scraping his face and breaking the arm off his glasses.

"Lieutenant Durban!" Cundieffe screamed into the snow, "don't shoot! I'm unarmed! I'm not here to arrest you, I just want to talk—"

He hazarded a peek up from his snow-angel foxhole, holding his glasses on with one hand. A tiny log and fieldstone cabin stood back against the foot of the rocks, windows shuttered, a Unabomber ski lodge. Two forty-foot pine trees broke through the roof. Spotlights blazed down on him from the branches, obscuring the shooter, painting a compass rose of fluttering shadows around him as he rose to a kneeling position with his arms akimbo behind his head.

"My name is Martin Cundieffe, from the FBI. I know what really happened to you, and I'd like to help you!"

No answer, but no more shooting, either. Encouraged, he pressed on. "I know what you did, and I think I know why. You want to clear your name. You want justice to be done, but you're afraid for your life. I can bring you in as a witness, not a suspect. I can help you get your life back."

A sickening knot gathered in the pit of his stomach. He wasn't lying, but Greenaway's lackey could make a liar of him in an instant.

"You're alone?" A haggard male voice shouted.

He sucked in a deep breath. "More or less. I can explain everything if you let me come in. I sincerely want to help you, and I think you know things that fit into my own investigation."

"The Bureau wants me dead. I read their mail. Don't lie to me."

"They don't know what I know," he said weakly.

"If they knew what I know, you'd be here to kill me," Durban answered, but Cundieffe saw him come out in front of the cabin. He was tall and sturdy, shaggy-bearded and wild-eyed, and for a moment, Cundieffe thought he must've blundered into the wrong psychotic hermit. This man looked as if he'd been out here alone for years, not a month. He wore a camo-print parka with a fur-fringed hood. A massive knife hung in a buckskin sheath from his belt, the point of the blade reaching to his knee. He cradled a Mossberg twelve-gauge pump in one arm. He wore snowshoes, and crossed the open patch of snow between them in odd, sideways steps that struck Cundieffe as signs of mental collapse until it hit him that, yes, the yard must be stiff with traps.

The mountain man stopped in front of him and prodded his sopping wet front with the shotgun. Grunt of satisfaction, then he pulled Cundieffe to his feet and led him across the yard. "So you are Lieu—"

Durban jerked him off-balance. "Shut up, I have to think. I forget where a lot of this shit is."

Inside, the cabin was bigger than it seemed from without, but Durban had packed it with a survivalist's wish list: beside a wood stove and a cot with a sleeping bag on it were stacks of canned goods, camping supplies, firearms, computers, closed-circuit monitors. Cundieffe eyed these last items with a new twinge of fear. He moved to step in front of the one that framed the Range Rover parked beside the road, but Durban had already seen it. "Start by explaining them," he said, tapping the screen.

He looked at Durban with his mouth hanging open. He felt acutely strange here, in the presence of a man who'd been only a hypothetical fugitive, a collection of files from which he'd deduced a scenario. What disturbed him was how right he'd been. The Naval officer's eyes burned patriotism and hunger for justice. He wanted to tell somebody, but was that why he also looked slightly insane?

"They're not friends. They brought me here. They're the people that operated you, got you to steal those documents. They're not the Russian mafia."

"No shit, Sherlock. Who are they?"

"A crazy old soldier and his friends. He used you for the wrong reasons, but now some good can come of it."

Durban shrugged out of his parka and went over to the stove, fed some logs into it. "You're investigating the Cave Institute? Why would they let you do that?"

"I'm—" He tapped the screen. "He thinks I'm one of them. My investigation isn't sanctioned, but I've been looking for you, to try to find you before they do."

"What do you want from me?"

Gingerly, eyes nailed to Durban's, he fished the disk out of his coat, held it out between them. "Do you recognize this?"

Durban flinched and looked away, his ruddy face paling with shame. "That's it. The disk…"

"Did you read what was on it?"

"I read enough. I didn't—"

"I need you to decrypt it here and make me a copy I can read. Can you do that, here?"

He shrugged. "I could put it on the goddamned AOL homepage from here, if I wanted to, but why should I? I've done all this to stay alive. That thing stays buried, or they'll come after me for real, and my family—"

"It has to come to light, Lieutenant, or they will kill you, and no one will ever have known it existed. If you print it out for me, I'll make sure it comes before a Congressional Committee. Your name will be cleared, justice will be done—and," hating himself for this last part, "you can go home."

Durban took the disk and went to a workstation set up in the especially cluttered space between the two pine trees. Cundieffe knelt before the stove and warmed himself at the fire, grateful for this moment of stillness, but struggling not to let his mind race in circles. What time was it? He'd left the office after midnight, so the sun would have to be coming up soon. What then?

Presently, Durban came to him with a slim stack of freshly printed sheets. "You really, really want to know what they did?"

"I need to," Cundieffe said. "The country needs to know—"

"No it doesn't," he said. "I used to believe in this country. Shit, I would've died for it, if duty called. But now…. No, no one should have to know about this."

He placed the papers in Cundieffe's hands. He started to read, and with the first sentence, all the blood drained out of his face.

He read them all the way through, then started again at the beginning, stopping only when he began to feel sick to his stomach. So wrapped up in the documents was he that he did not notice exactly when it was that someone started shooting up the cabin.

He heard a cough and looked up at Durban. The Naval officer was studying him, but the side of his neck gaped open in a hideous crater out of which freshets of arterial blood gushed as he sagged sideways and collapsed against the wood stove.

"No! God damn it, Greenaway!" Cundieffe jumped up and scanned the walls of the cabin. Between the shuttered windows and the front door hung an upside-down Old Glory. One of the shutters had a crack in it through which light spilled out into the night, and bullets spilled in. One of the computer monitors exploded, the pressurized pop of its tube like a second gunshot from within the room.

Cundieffe went to Durban. He was dead. The fur trim on the hood of his parka smoldered and ignited flames which Cundieffe saw spreading across the floor to the cardboard cartons of firewood, the racks of supplies, the jerry cans of gasoline for the generator—

Cundieffe stuffed the papers in his coat and ran for the door.

NO! Stop! The shooter waited for him to come out. He had to get out without getting shot, if at all possible. He lay down on the floor and turned the knob, threw the door wide. A volley of semi-auto lit up the cabin's interior through the open doorway, but he couldn't hear shots from outside, or see muzzle flashes. He crawled back into the cabin, relieved to see the fire wasn't spreading as fast as his imagination had told him it was. The place would undoubtedly burn down by morning—long before the sniper got tired of waiting for him to come out—but nothing would explode, for the moment. He checked the closed-circuit monitor.

The Range Rover sat by the side of the road, still, but a human-shaped hump lay in the ditch almost under the vehicle, and another sat silhouetted in the back with its head against a star-shaped mess on the side window.

He started to look for a back exit when a shadow filled the front door. "Agent Cundieffe?" It wasn't Greenaway's sniper. Cundieffe ducked behind a row of shelves with his hands wrapped tight around his legs.

"Agent Cundieffe, it's safe to come out. We followed you out here…"

He looked around for something he could use as a weapon. Boxes of foil-wrapped, freeze-dried food were closest. The gun rack was behind the door, and Durban lay on his Mossberg, burning himself out already, at the foot of the stove.

The figure entered the cabin, stepped over Durban, and looked behind the intruding tree trunks. Cundieffe heard him doing something to the computer, peeked out, and saw him hunched over the hard drives under the trestle table between the trunks. His back to Cundieffe. Out of sight of the door. Not particularly concerned.

Cundieffe stood and rushed the stooped figure. His foot snagged on something. He stumbled and fell into the firewood, a honking bark of surprise and pain yanked out of his mouth.

The figure turned on him, pistol in one hand, ROYAL PICA disk in the other. It was Agent Macy or Mentone, he forgot which—anyway, the one who was supposed to be male. It smiled at him as if he'd been expected but late, but with such a person as him, how could you stay mad?

"Find anything back there?" he asked dryly. "We're almost ready to go, here."

Cundieffe took a step closer, it almost became a dead run at the Mule agent, gun or no gun. Get a hold of yourself.

Someone with a big rifle filled the doorway. Cundieffe stiffened and started to duck again, this was going to be messy, but then he saw it wasn't Greenaway's man—Wiley, that'd been his name. This one wore a camo poncho over a full suit of black body armor, and had a portable telescope strapped to his head, pushed back above his eyes, which were flat brown buttons on his blank face.

"What happened here?" Cundieffe asked.

"You were kidnapped. Mr. Greenaway and his gang of rogue soldiers were conspiring to commit treasonous acts with their associate, Lieutenant Durban."

"I don't suppose any of it will make CNN, though, will it, Agent Mentone?"

"Macy," the Mule corrected, then shook his head. "Situation's changing fast, Cundieffe. A state of emergency exists. Maybe even a state of war. Sacrifices will have to be made." Agent Macy shut down the computers at a power strip and started unplugging them. Cundieffe stood there numbly. He could think of nothing to say, no reason why they should not shoot him. The air was choked with the smoke from Durban burning.

From behind the computers, Agent Macy said, "Walk Agent Cundieffe down to the car, Mr. Loeb. I'll be along, momentarily. Agent Mentone will know what to do with him."

Cundieffe walked out into the forest, not noticing as Loeb fell in behind him. He started across the darkened yard, let himself be steered around it and all the way down the hillside. Loeb pushed him in an erratic path back down to the road with the cyclopean night-vision telescope on. He never made a sound. Cundieffe couldn't even hear him breathing over the runaway train of his own heartbeat. His hand gripped Cundieffe's shoulder when he saw something, and jerked him. It was only by blind luck, apparently, that Cundieffe had blundered up to the cabin without getting himself killed.