What Comes Next (54 page)

“Down there,” he said. “That’s the place he’s heading. At least, according to all this it is. You can’t always trust what they tell you. It sure as hell doesn’t look like the place a really sophisticated webcast would originate.”

“What do you think they’re
supposed
to look like?” Terri asked.

“I don’t know,” Wolfe replied. “California strip malls? Big city photo studios?” Then he shook his head as if he were responding to an argument that hadn’t been made. “Of course, maybe not for the type of broadcast these guys are making.”

Wolfe followed Terri’s eyes. “I guess the old guy went on foot,” he said.

Terri Collins could see that as well. She peered forward and saw the battered mailbox that marked the entry to the farmhouse, just as Adrian had earlier.

“Maybe he decided to sneak up on ‘em,” Wolfe said. “Maybe he actually knows what he’s doing and just hasn’t let on to you or me that he does. One way or the other, he doesn’t exactly know what sort of greeting he’s going to get up there, but whatever it is it won’t be real friendly.”

Terri did not reply. Every time Wolfe made an observation that mirrored her own, or was accurate to any degree, she felt a mixture of disgust and anger. That they were on the edge of territory he just
might
know better than she did infuriated her. She rapidly turned away from the sex offender and started calculating in her own head. She faced more or less the same dilemma that Adrian had.

She hesitated. She took the cell phone from Wolfe’s hands. There were well-established procedures for this sort of thing. Her department was forever putting out expansive memos underscoring correct legal approaches to crimes in progress. Investigation should have been processed and evidence collected. Reports needed to be filed. Her boss should have been informed. Warrants should have been acquired. Maybe even SWAT should have been contacted—if there even was a local SWAT team. She doubted it. Getting a well-trained team to this location would require numerous phone calls and lengthy explanations, and even then they would have to come from the nearest state police barracks, which had to be thirty minutes, maybe more, away. There was rarely any need for special weapons and tactics in rural New England. And when they arrived they would need to be briefed.
There’s a retired and possibly nutty university professor with a loaded gun somewhere around here.
She doubted they would think this was much of a reason for body armor, high-powered automatic weapons, and military-type planning.

So, no SWAT, she thought. And she had no idea if the local police even had more than one patrolman on duty, and he might be miles away. She knew she was way out of her jurisdiction and she ought to have local assistance. In fact, she knew that legally she
had
to have local assistance.

Nothing she was doing fit into any procedure she had been trained for.
If
Jennifer was here,
if
Adrian was assaulting some criminals holed up in a farmhouse, then she should be following a well-defined, mapped-out approach. Just steaming up to the front door might be every bit as dangerous as whatever it was that Adrian was doing. She was caught in a tangle of indecision. Missteps were inevitable, she expected to be second-guessed, but she realized that she had committed herself to doing
something.
She just needed a moment to figure it out but every moment that she took might be the last moment available to her to act.

She cursed loudly. “Goddammit!”

Lost in all this decision making, assessment, and impossible choices, she barely heard the distant popping noise.

Wolfe did, however.

“Jesus!” he said abruptly. “What the hell was that?”

But he knew the answer to his question.

Adrian moved crablike, crouched over, pinning his back to each board on the exterior of the farmhouse. He could feel sweat gathering on his forehead and dripping down under his arms. It was like being caught in a spotlight; the heat and glare were overpowering. He clutched the 9mm in his right hand and crept along until he reached the basement window. He was acutely aware of sounds and he sniffed the air like a dog. He thought he was more alive in that moment than he had been in weeks or maybe even longer.

He dropped to his knees in the soft ground and set the gun down. Inwardly, he was pleading with whatever god there was that watched over old men and teenagers.
Please let it be open. Please let this be the right place.

He worked his fingers up under the edge of the window frame and tugged. It moved a quarter inch.

Adrian slid sideways, facing the window, trying to get a little more purchase on the frame. He pulled again and he heard a half-creaking, half-splintering noise as the tired, decayed old wood gave way. Another half inch.

His fingernails were instantly torn and he could feel sharp pain in his hands. Wooden ridges had cut his fingertips and he looked down and saw that blood was already welling up from scratches and cuts. For an instant, he closed his eyes and told the pain to disappear, that he had more important things to do than to feel hurt at that moment. He decided that no matter what happened he would ignore all discomfort from that point on.

He grasped hold of the window a third time and leaned back, using every ounce of strength he had. He heard the wood crack, and then it came free, and he skidded back as he fell over. He scrambled to his feet and grabbed at the frame, lifting it up.

The window was narrow and small. It was no more than a foot high and twenty inches wide.

But it was open.

Adrian bent over again. It had not occurred to him that he might not fit through the small space and for a moment he tried to measure his shoulders against the opening. He told himself that whatever it was he would force himself through.
Round peg, square hole,
it made no difference. He looked down into the basement, his eyes adjusting to the variegated lights that poured in over his shoulders. His first impression was that the basement below him was dark, abandoned, and smelled of damp age. But as he swept his vision through the corners he saw lines of high-tech wiring snaking through the ceiling. None of the wires was coated with the dust that everything else was.

He looked harder and he saw that there were walls built out from a corner. The front wall had a single cheap wooden door with a bolt lock on it. It looked like a flimsy, rushed construction project that had been stopped well before the painting and decoration stage.

It was a cell. It reminded him of a larger version of the boxes he’d used with lab rats.

Adrian groped around and grabbed up his automatic. Cautiously, he pushed his legs through the small opening. There was no way to prop it open, so it bumped up and down on his back as he tried to lower himself through, knocking against his shoulders and then his head. Someone wiry, a gymnast or a circus performer, would have launched himself into the basement without difficulty. Adrian, however, was neither. He struggled to keep his balance, trying to lower himself like a mountain climber that had run out of rope.

His toes stretched into the void. He swung a few inches to the right, and then the left, trying to find something that he might be able to drop to, but his feet flailed the air uselessly. He could feel his grip sliding on the window frame. He did not know how far down the floor was, perhaps only a few feet, but it felt like he was balancing above a crevasse that fell a thousand. Gravity pulled at him, and he took a deep breath and dropped.

He hit the cement floor hard, his ankle buckling beneath him, and pain shot through his leg.

But the crash of his fall and his sudden gasp of pain was obscured by a sudden high-pitched scream of animal agony that came from behind the bolted cell door.

The final knot fell apart, and Jennifer realized that the hood was loose. It was only a matter of lifting it up and removing it.

She hesitated. She no longer cared if she was breaking any of the rules. She no longer feared what the man and the woman might do to her. There was only a single option remaining. But she was caught in a tangle of thoughts that somehow she didn’t
want
to see her world in her last seconds. It would be like standing on the edge of her own grave and peering down into the dirt-rimmed hole that welcomed her.
This is where Number 4 dies. As expected.

And then these feelings were replaced by an overwhelming anger welling up within her, unchecked and bursting like water through a broken pipe. It was not as if she wanted to fight back any longer—that opportunity had disappeared minutes, hours, days earlier. It was more that she couldn’t stand not being who she really was as she took her final breaths.

And so…

She screamed.

Not words. Not a sentence. Not anything other than a huge cry of disappointment and rage. It was a noise that gathered all she would miss of life in the years to come and remade them into a long, drawn-out cry of despair.

It was muffled by the hood but still it filled the room and soared past the walls and up through the ceiling.

Jennifer was only barely aware that the sound belonged to her. She had no idea
why
she had let loose. But as the scream faded from her lips she reached up and tore off the hood.

As before, at the end of the small wonderful moment when she’d thought she was escaping, light blinded her. At first she thought it was the man or the woman flooding her with a spotlight. But almost instantly she realized it was just the regular bath of illumination that had constantly filled the cell while she had been confined in blindfolded darkness. She blinked rapidly. She shielded her eyes with her free hand and then rubbed her face. The entire room suddenly seemed a different quiet than before. She had to strain to hear her own rapid-fire breaths as they came in short bursts.

It took seconds to adjust sight, sound, and hearing, but when she did she saw the gun and it seemed far uglier than it had when she first blindly discovered it at her feet and could understand it only through touch. It was jet black and evil and glistened in the harsh overhead lights. She looked away and suddenly caught sight of Mister Brown Fur, tossed cavalierly to the side of the room, a discarded lump of twisted brown. She didn’t know why she hadn’t heard the woman drop the toy, but without thinking she jumped up and crossed the few feet, grabbing him up and cuddling him to her chest. She stood, rocking sideways with joy that she was no longer alone. Then she reluctantly returned to the interview chair, plopped down, and picked up the gun.

Jennifer and Mister Brown Fur stared at the camera.

She wanted to kick it over but she did not.

One more time, she looked around. Every wall was solid. The door, she knew, was locked. There was no exit. There never had been. She’d been a fool to imagine there had ever been any way out of the room other than the one she was about to follow. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, apologizing to herself and to her companion. She hoped no one else heard her.

She lifted the gun and started to tremble. Her hands were quivering and she clutched the bear even tighter, as if Mister Brown Fur could help settle her twitching muscles and steady her shaking hands.

She put the gun to her head, hoping she was doing it right. She stared into the camera lens.

“Are you getting all this?” she asked. It sounded weak.

She wanted to be defiant but she could not find it inside her. A huge wave of sadness and defeat washed over her, drowning all her thoughts of anything that was once Jennifer.

It’s all over now,
she insisted to herself.

“My name is Number Four,” she said to the camera.

She was too scared to shoot and too scared not to shoot, and in that momentary hesitation she heard something that confused her even more. It was a single word and it seemed to come impossibly at the exact same time from someplace very far away and someplace extremely close. It was a long-forgotten memory calling to her and it echoed in the room around her.

“Jennifer?”

Michael suddenly bent to the computer monitor.

“What the hell was that?” he said quickly.

Linda crowded beside him.

“Did you play any effects?” he demanded.

“No! I was watching, same as you. Christ! The same as
everybody
!”

“Then what—”

“Look at Number Four!” Linda said.

Jennifer was shaking wildly, like the edge of an untrimmed sail flapping in a powerful breeze. Her body quivered, head to toe. The gun, pointed at her forehead, seemed to droop down slightly, and her head turned toward the sound of her name.

“Jennifer?”

She wanted to cry out
I’m here!
but she didn’t trust that what she imagined she heard she actually did hear.

Instead, she told herself,
It’s them. They’re lying again. It’s just another fake.

But slowly she shifted in her seat and stared at the door. She heard the lock turn and the door started to open.

Jennifer realized that this time
she
had a weapon.
They’ve come to kill me,
she imagined. She moved the gun away from her forehead and trained it on the door.

I’ll get one of them, Mister Brown Fur. I’ll at least take one of them with me.

She sighted down the barrel.

Kill them! Kill them!

The door swung open slowly.

Adrian peered around the corner.

The odd thing was he didn’t know what to expect.

He kept telling himself that he’d seen her on the street, and then in pictures at her house. He’d seen her on the computer with Mark Wolfe at his side. He’d seen the room and the bed and the chains and her mask, so he should have been able to picture what he was opening the door to, but all of these things had dropped away and he felt as if he were opening a door onto a blank slate. The only thing he was able to remind himself to do was to keep his own weapon ready.

What he saw first was the gun aimed directly at him.

His first instinct was to jump back and his muscles gathered like those of a mongoose suddenly spotting a cobra about to strike, but then he heard his son’s calm voice coming from a canyon within, saying,
It’s her.