Broken Angel (4 page)

“Still not convinced you’re in the mood to tell me the truth.” This time Mason only taped Rankin’s mouth. Mason tightened the thumbscrew, and Rankin’s nostrils flared with an intake of air. Rankin tried to scream against the duct tape, but the noise died in his mouth.

Mason kept tightening the thumbscrew until he heard the bones break. Then he released the thumbscrew and took off Rankin’s other shoe and sock. The broken toes on the left foot immediately began to swell with blood.

“If you scream, I’ll put the tape back over your nose. And I’ll bring out the snake.”

Mason slowly pulled the duct tape off Rankin’s mouth. The lamp didn’t give much light, but enough glowed for Mason to see the glint of tears on Rankin’s cheeks. Rankin panted with the effort to hold back sound.

Mason stroked Rankin’s undamaged right foot.

“You can beg,” Mason said. “That’s allowed. As long as you beg quietly, without screaming.”

“Please don’t hurt me anymore.” Although in his fifties and at the top of Appalachia’s power structure, Rankin had quickly become a lost, bewildered little boy. He was suddenly aware of an evil that had been invisible to him all his life. “Please, please.”

“First, you’re going to tell me how to bypass the software on your vidpod. Of course, we need to erase all of this.”

Rankin closed his eyes, nodded as if defeated.

Mason patted Rankin’s chest and found the vidpod. Rankin talked him through it, step by step.

“Just so you know,” Mason said when he was satisfied the previous minutes of conversation were erased. He secured the thumbscrew on the little toes of Rankin’s right foot. “If our conversation does get back to Bar Elohim, I’ll hunt you down. Understand?”

“Yes, yes,” Rankin said.

It’s a cold, harsh world out from under Bar Elohim’s wings, isn’t it?
Mason thought.

“We’re not finished. Confirm this for me. Bar Elohim intends to use the thermal imaging to get rid of the Clan.”

“They’re like rats. We don’t know how many there are. They scurry back into hiding at the slightest sign of danger. Thermal imaging will give Bar Elohim an accurate idea of the count. And where they disappear to. Once they are gone, Appalachians will stop hoping there’s a way Outside.”

Mason nodded, knowing it made sense. The Valley of the Clan was riddled with ancient coal mines. Only the Clan knew the secret entrances and the labyrinth of passageways between Appalachia and Outside.

“This girl,” Mason said, “the fugitive’s daughter. Why is she so important that Outside will stop the Clan?”

All these years, Outside had allowed the Clan to help Appalachians escape. It was almost official Outside policy. Now they were prepared to assist Bar Elohim?

“You’ve got the canister.” A trace of Rankin’s former arrogance resurfaced. “And you’ve been given instructions. Surely you’ve been able to guess.”

Mason blinked, his bad eye stinging. Rankin had essentially called him stupid. A mistake.

Mason put the tape across Rankin’s mouth and tightened the thumbscrew until he heard bones break again. He left the thumbscrew in place and walked to the small bathroom. He relieved himself, then enjoyed a glass of water. He refilled his glass and took it back into the room.

On his return to the chair, Mason saw Rankin arched in agony against the duct tape that held him in place. Mason smiled and sipped the water, watching Rankin watch him.

Finally, Mason released the pressure of the thumbscrew. He knew from experience that if he pulled the duct tape now, Rankin would scream, no matter what threats Mason applied. So Mason let Rankin’s chest rise and fall until it seemed the man had control over himself.

Mason removed the tape to resume their conversation.

“I have been given a canister,” Mason said. It was the size of a quart jar. He’d been told that it had an inner sleeve, and that once it was opened, an ongoing chemical reaction would trigger a refrigeration effect between the outer sleeve and inner sleeve, with such perfect insulation that once the lid was tightened, the contents of the canister would be kept at a constant cold temperature for months. “I know what I’m supposed to do with it. But tell me why. And tell me why it’s so important to Outside.”

Rankin continuously wept as he explained, and from his answers, Mason began to understand something very profound. That capturing the girl would give him everything he wanted. And that now wasn’t the time to reveal what he’d learned on the fugitive’s unregistered vidpod.

“We’re finished.” Mason stood after Rankin’s explanation. “You may go. I wouldn’t see a doctor about your toes. There’s nothing they can do anyway. Tell people you dropped something on them and that will explain why you limp. If I hear that Bar Elohim has any questions about our meeting this morning…”

As Mason peeled away the duct tape, Rankin sobbed harder. With gratitude, Mason supposed. As Rankin stood, he briefly draped his arms over Mason’s shoulders for support.

Mason felt an unusual swell of affection for the man. After all, Mason owned him.

THREE

I
t was just after dawn, and her father’s written words echoed in her head, words spoken from the letter.

She was thirsty. Frustrated. Afraid.

She was exhausted too, only able to hobble as she leaned heavily on a walking stick she’d made from a broken branch. The previous night, after leaving the cave, she had stumbled down an embankment and twisted her ankle badly, forcing her to rest every few minutes. She estimated she’d only traveled about a mile over the rugged terrain. Soon enough, she would be found.

She’d have to go down to the stream for water. But not until she found the strength to move ahead. Resting, she leaned one hand against the sun-warmed granite of a large boulder. A tiny brown spider crept onto her wrist, but she didn’t brush it away. The spider continued down one of her long fingers before moving back onto the rock and disappearing into a crevice.

Freak,
she thought. Not that she needed a glance at her fingers to remind her of it. Every furtive step along the path in the shadows of the trees told her that she was a freak. A monster, and hunted because of it.

It was as if the forest around her conspired to prove it to her. A half hour earlier, she’d walked around a fallen log, almost into the jaws of a bear caught in leg traps, dead long enough to be a rotting corpse, swarmed by flies.

She’d never felt more alone. Before, she’d relied on the safety and comfort of her papa. No matter how difficult day-to-day living was, his love and the small, small world the two of them had created had been enough to cushion the apartness she felt.

But now she was without him, and the physical separateness alone she could have endured. Had she been simply lost, it would only have been a matter of finding a way back to him.

No, it wasn’t the physical separation that put her into her black loneliness.

Papa had betrayed her. On the mountaintop, he’d slipped a letter inside the microfabric. Its words had burned into her memory.

“We had agreed—the woman I loved and I—that as soon as you were born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap you in a towel to drown you in a nearby sink of water…”

She was a freak, and Papa had known it from the beginning. He’d wanted to put her down like an animal because of it. His letter said he’d been overwhelmed by protective love. More like overwhelming pity. Because she’d been born a monster.

There was more than her freakish body that spoke of his betrayal.

In the cave behind the waterfall, she’d found supplies in a backpack as he promised and a note directing her where to go next. Follow the stream downward into the valley that led to the town of Cumberland Gap, and there she was to wait at a certain place until the stroke of midnight.

The letter proved he’d known that he would bring her to a mountaintop and send her away; the equipment left in a hidden place behind the waterfall proved his intentions twofold. Yet Papa had not said a word to her about it. He’d found a way to abandon her. He dropped her into the abyss.

What did her future hold? Nothing a normal human hoped for, she knew. No home. No family. No love.

Maybe if she wandered long enough, her thoughts and loneliness and anger would drive her insane. She’d become what Papa had believed she was from the beginning.

An animal.

FOUR

S
ummer heat and humidity gave the small town of Cumberland Gap a drowsy, peaceful feel, with clear blue sky above the thickly leaved branches of the tall oaks. Tall, steep hills towered over the town, covering much of it in shadow.

In a small apartment suite above a store, near the window that overlooked the corner of the town square, Carson Pierce sat in a worn stuffed chair, watching a physician, sitting on a bed in the center of the room, tend to Jordan’s wounds.

Pierce wore jeans and a loose black T-shirt that did a moderate job of hiding how muscular he was. Forty, he could pass for thirty. Any traces of advanced age could be found in his world-weary eyes, a blue so pale they verged on gray. He’d started his career outside the law, so talented that he’d been recruited by the government. Now inside the law, Washington-trained for covert missions, he operated no differently than he had at the top of one of the most ruthless gangs in New York. The only thing that had changed was his objectives.

This was just another assignment to him, and as badly as he wanted to return to the freedom of Outside, he couldn’t until it was finished.

Three days of chase, and the objective was in front of him. A fugitive on a makeshift bed, dying. Jordan Brown. Pierce had no sympathy for the injured man, who had slipped into Appalachia years ago to avoid warrants for murder, arson, and intelligence crimes.

The physician leaning over the man clucked an indiscriminate sound of judgment and stood.

“I can’t guess how long it might be until this man is conscious again,” Dr. Ross said. Ten years younger than Pierce, he looked twenty years older. Pudgy, soft hands. “What exactly happened to him?”

“Fell.” Pierce was still furious about that. When they’d finally trapped the man, despite clear orders, Mason Lee had signaled one of the bounty hunters to release his dogs, driving the man backward over the cliff. The fugitive had dropped to a ledge in the dark; it had taken an hour to pull him back up, then hours of night travel back down the mountain to where he’d found the local sheriff and demanded a place to keep the man.

“Hard to believe all this was just from a fall,” Dr. Ross said. “He’s ripped up, like an animal got hold of him.”

The dogs had been savage, and the bounty hunters slow to pull them off. Last night, when Pierce and one of the Appalachian bounty hunters carried Jordan in, he had been conscious, occasionally screaming in pain. If the man was going to die, Pierce wanted information first. Pierce didn’t like using torture; he’d hoped pharmaceuticals would do it, but Jordan had fallen unconscious too soon after Pierce had gotten him into the apartment.

“I doubt you’re a stupid man,” Pierce said to the physician. “Does this really seem like the kind of situation you want to ask questions about?”

“From a medical viewpoint, I need—”

“You need to set his bones, stop the bleeding, and find a way to get him to open his eyes again. Nothing more.”

“I will not be intimidated,” Dr. Ross said.

It surprised Pierce. The physician looked softer than that.

“Sheriff Carney tells me you have a seven-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son.” Pierce walked to the window. “The less you know, the better for them. Your silence buys them a lot of protection.”

The threat was a bluff. While other Outside agents had no compunction about abusing their training and authority, Pierce would not hurt the innocent, especially children. He remembered how his parents had died, futilely trying to protect his sister. He saw his memories in black and white, his parents’ spilled blood like dark oil.

Pierce was confident, however, that his bluff would not be called. Because Sheriff Carney had sent Dr. Ross, it would be obvious that Pierce had the sheriff’s official support, which meant implicit support from Bar Elohim. Small town like this, the physician would know about the bounty hunters that Pierce had hired and had probably heard one of them was the feared and legendary Mason Lee. Bounty hunters did not travel without that same official endorsement from Bar Elohim.

Dr. Ross closed his eyes for a few seconds. Muscles quivered at the side of his jaws. He opened his eyes again and met Pierce’s steady gaze. It was a pleasant surprise for Pierce. He appreciated men with true strength. The physician was not afraid, Pierce could tell, but he wasn’t a fool either, so he didn’t vocalize his protest.

Dr. Ross knelt beside the dying man and opened the satchel he’d brought into the suite for this house call.

He pulled out a hypodermic needle and syringe filled with clear liquid, tapped it to rid it of air bubbles. With a cotton swab and disinfectant, the doctor prepared Jordan’s shoulder for an injection.

Pierce had no interest in how the physician intended to bring the man back to consciousness, so he looked out the window again, noticing below and across the street the sheriff on a bench beside a huge man with a boyish, innocent face.

Pierce gave the two of them little more thought. His mind was on wrapping up the assignment. Capturing the girl.

They’d found the blouse that Jordan had been using to draw the hounds. Somewhere along the way, she must have made it down the face of the rock. The valley was narrow enough that Mason Lee and the dogs would pick up her scent eventually.

Pierce hoped she would be found alive. She deserved that chance after all that had been done to her.

Yet he knew this would not be possible. She might not have survived the climb down. Or, more likely, she would not survive Mason Lee, armed with his legendary shotgun and an equally legendary lack of discrimination in its use. If Mason found her, he had a dry-ice canister, with very specific harvesting instructions. Pierce would have preferred to handle it himself, but he needed to be here if the man on the bed became conscious again.

All things considered, the assignment should be wrapped up in a day or two. If the fugitive talked, Pierce would learn more about where he sent the girl and why. It might be helpful. At the least, it could lead to more arrests, but that was simply to help the Appalachians. It was part of the agreement that Bar Elohim had brokered with Pierce’s employers to allow Pierce inside.

Pierce didn’t really care about the politics. His concern was simply to fulfill his assignment, then return Outside. Back to where it was normal.

Pierce moved away from the window, and his eyes were drawn back to the torn man on the bed. His blood had soaked through the bandages, and in the light of the room, it seemed as black as the blood in Pierce’s memories.