The Distance Beacons (30 page)

Eventually we saw a glow off to our right. I immediately doused the lantern and set it down on the floor. It would just get in the way now. I grabbed Gwen's hand and, with guns drawn, we walked toward the glow.

Our hands were slippery with sweat before long. I strained to hear, to see, to be ready for the battle that might start at any moment. There were no voices anymore (suddenly I wondered if I had ever heard them) and the glow was no brighter. I was so tired of darkness. I was so tired. Gwen bumped into something, and I could hear the sharp intake of her breath as she stifled the urge to cry out. I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.

The glow seemed to get brighter finally, and we groped our way toward it along the wall of a long gallery. We came to the end of the gallery, and I signaled Gwen to stop. The light was clearly stronger. I saw a rotunda with a high painted ceiling, a small circular wall in the center, and other galleries branching off from it. The light was strongest to our left now. So we turned left, following the light—

—and I almost fell over Pete Santoro.

He was sitting in a metal folding chair and leaning back against the outer wall of the rotunda. He seemed to be half-asleep. His half-closed eyes gazed at me, but I don't think he saw me. I think he saw the bandages on my arm—a mummy, for sure. I think he saw his worst nightmare coming after him in the flesh.

He screamed. The noise echoed in the rotunda, making it sound twice as loud. Santoro scrambled off in the direction of the light. I caught a glimpse of some Egyptian-looking statues. I dived after him. Gwen had a better idea. She shot him in the back.

The noise was deafening. I looked back at her, my heart pounding. She had come damn close to hitting me. Her eyes were wide, and fixed on the man she had just shot. He crawled a foot or two, and then stopped. Blood started leaking out from beneath him. Gwen stood motionless, her gun still aimed at Santoro. "Get down, Gwen," I said. "They're gonna be—"

There was a gunshot from behind the statues. Gwen flopped onto the floor. I couldn't tell whether or not she had been hit, because then the light disappeared, and we were in darkness yet again.

"Gwen!" I whispered urgently, but another shot let me know it wasn't a good idea to talk. I crawled to the inner wall of the rotunda, and followed it around until I was out of the line of fire.

I lay there as my eyes became accustomed once again to the darkness. I was a wreck. Had I screamed when Santoro screamed? Private eyes don't scream. They do what Gwen had done. They shoot the bastard.

Didn't matter. I had more pressing issues to consider. Like Gwen's safety. And how to fight a gun battle in the pitch black.

Something wet plopped on my head, and I started. There were two more plops before I figured it out. The roof was leaking. I heard a plop down below me, and I realized that the rotunda was open to the first floor, and the wall I was leaning against kept your casual museum-goer from plunging to his death.

I heard movement in the rotunda. Was it Gwen—or Eddie Grimes? There was another gunshot. What was going on? I risked peering over the edge of the wall, but I couldn't make out anything. Grimes could have been inches away from me, for all I knew.

There was a thud and a muffled curse. It sounded like a man—Eddie Grimes, then. Maybe he had stumbled over Santoro's body. So he was coming this way. I picked up a chunk of plaster from the floor next to me, and I flung it into the darkness. It hit against a wall, and immediately there were two answering shots—aimed, I assumed, at the wall. That was encouraging. I couldn't make out anything in the brief flashes, but one of the shots could have come from Gwen.

And Eddie Grimes was probably one confused thug. I tensed myself and inched forward. If he was still coming this way, he wouldn't be expecting anyone crouched to his left, ready to spring.

Another step, and I could see his outline in the darkness. I raised my gun—and decided not to shoot. I couldn't be absolutely sure of who it was, and I didn't want to make a mistake. I paused for a moment to summon up my energy. Water plopped onto my head. The figure in the darkness breathed quick, frightened breaths.

I leaped forward.

I came in low to keep him from having a chance to use his gun on me. My head hit him on the knee and knocked him backwards. He fired wildly into the air. I felt his leg to make sure it
was
a he and not Gwen. The leg was definitely male, so I tried to shoot him, but he lashed out with his arm and knocked the gun from my hand as I fired. That meant I had to jump across his body and pin his right arm to the floor to keep him from shooting
me
.

Grimes pulled at my hair with his left hand as he tried to loosen my grip on his arm. I howled with pain but didn't budge. Instead I banged his arm on the floor until he too let go of his gun.

And then we were just two bodies rolling around in the dark, like energetic lovers. I didn't feel like a lover, though. Grimes was hurting me in the few remaining spots on my body that hadn't already been hurt.
Help me, Gwen!
my mind screamed. But how could Gwen figure out who to help?

Grimes broke away from me finally. I caught up with him by the inner wall. We were standing now, each trying to push the other over the edge. I didn't have any strength left, and soon my head was dangling out over the emptiness, and it seemed like just a matter of time before Grimes sent me tumbling down into the puddle on the first floor.

Your gonna die too.

Not yet, not yet. I found a reserve of energy somewhere, out of my anger or fear or will to live, and I decided I very much did not want to take that tumble.

So I maneuvered my leg between his legs, and I kneed Grimes where he very much did not want to be kneed.

He let out a low "Oof" and his grip on me loosened for just a moment. But that was time enough for me to switch positions with him and give a shove, and suddenly he wasn't next to me anymore. There was a scream and a thud and a little splash, and then there was just the plop, plop, plop of the water dripping from the roof.

I collapsed against the wall and stared down into the darkness. I felt dizzy, nauseated. For a moment I thought I might lose my balance and follow Grimes. For half a moment I thought maybe I
should
follow Grimes: who was I to take someone's life? He was a jerk and a bicycle thief, but he was human. I hated death. To be on the safe side, I stepped away from the wall.

And I felt a gun pressing into my back.

"Don't move," Gwen said. Her voice was trembling.

I breathed a sigh of relief. "I wouldn't dream of moving," I replied.

"Oh Walter, thank God."

I turned, and we embraced. Her whole body was trembling. "It's all right," I said. But there was no time to comfort each other. "I think we'd better go find the—"

I didn't have a chance to finish the sentence. My words disappeared in a beam of light that was suddenly aimed at us. I raised an arm to shield myself, but the light was too strong after so much darkness, and I had to shut my eyes against it.

"Move apart," a voice said from beyond the light. "Drop your weapons."

I knew that voice, but it was not at all the one I expected.

Chapter 21

We obeyed. Gwen's weapon fell with a clunk near Santoro's body. I didn't have a weapon to drop, so I just raised my hands. Meanwhile my eyes started adjusting to the light, and behind it I could make out the figure that went with the voice. The fringe of white hair. The icy blue eyes. The gray-green uniform.

How had General Cowens managed to get here? He really had found something when he searched through Gwen's things, I decided. But where were his troops? And why hadn't he stopped the gun battle? I was puzzled. And, of course, frightened.

Cowens was holding a large flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other.

"I just came to rescue my friend here," I explained. "You know—the meddling reporter Gwendolyn Phillips? Those two that we killed—they're the ones who did the kidnapping. There's another one downstairs. We locked him up. Interrogate him if you want. You can get the truth out of him."

Cowens didn't respond at first. Finally he said, "I've been too lenient with you all along, haven't I, Sands?"

And I thought: Why is he alone? And why had he come out of the same statue-filled room from which Grimes had appeared?

And why had he resisted my participation in the case every step of the way? Why had he tried to pin the blame on me, even when it didn't make the slightest bit of sense to do so? Why had he agreed so easily to let me take Fenneman on that wild-goose chase to Charlestown?

"You're the one behind this," I whispered.

"Don't be ridiculous, Sands," Cowens said. "
You're
the guilty one."

"
You
wrote the threats from TSAR," I went on, as things clicked into place. "You started the file on TSAR to distract Bolton, not the other way around. And you had the kidnappers wear sandals to distract me. We played into your hands all along."

"Every soldier in New England is looking for you, Sands. You proved your guilt by escaping from us. It's a pity such a talented young man turned out so badly."

"So arrest me."

"I'm afraid you may be much too dangerous to arrest."

Then why didn't he shoot me? I realized that he wasn't quite sure what to do. Had I told anyone I was coming here? If he didn't kill us, could he manage to bluff his way out? I didn't seem impossible. "Why am I dangerous?" I asked. "Who' going to believe what I say about any of this? Even if people didn't think I was guilty, I'm the guy with the theory du jour after all."

"People believe the strangest things," Cowens observed.

I decided this had gone far enough. Time to act like a private eye. But how did private eyes act in situations like this? I decided that I needed a trick, but the only one I could come up with was the old "Look out, the president is behind you" trick. It would have to do. "Listen," I said. "Before you do anything you might regret—maybe Gwen and I can help you. You're short a couple of people right now, so maybe you ought to consider—" My eyes slid to his right. "No, Ann, don't do it!" I shouted.

Cowens didn't flinch. "Oh, come on, Sands," he murmured. Then he raised his gun—

And Gwen whipped a gun out of her back pocket and shot him.

The beam of the flashlight veered away from us, up toward the ceiling of the rotunda. Cowens fired, and we both dived for cover, back around the corner in the long gallery from which we had come. I cautiously peered out to see what Cowens was up to. He was lying on the floor; he still held the gun, and it was still pointed in our direction. The flashlight was on the floor next to him, and its beam shone on his face like a spotlight. The front of his uniform was bloody. "Damn you," I heard him mutter when he saw me. "Damn her." Then he kicked the light away and fired in my direction. I pulled back.

"Where'd you get the gun?" I whispered to Gwen. I was slightly in awe of her.

"From the guy I killed," she explained. "I picked it up while I was waiting for you to beat the other one."

"Oh." She was certainly making progress as a private eye. I thought about the failure of my "Look out, the president is behind you" trick. Gwen would be too polite to mention that. I hoped.

I had more important things to worry about, however. I couldn't tell how badly Cowens was hurt, but I figured it was time to try and get some information out of him.

"I was right, wasn't I?" I said, keeping my head back out of the range of his gun. "It was you."

We waited a long time for a response. The water plopped. The wind howled. I could make out the sound of the general's shallow, ragged breathing.

"It...was... me." The words sounded as if they had been pulled out of him by an iron claw. "She had... to be stopped."

"But why?" I asked. "You've followed orders all your life. Why change now?"

"Yes, yes, I've followed orders," he agreed, with more energy. "I've been a good soldier. No one can deny that."

"Why then? Because her referendum was jeopardizing America?"

There was another pause. "That's right," he said finally. He sounded resigned now. The confession had begun. Why not complete it? "Everything I've worked for. At risk. For what?"