ELIXIR (38 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: ELIXIR
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By reflex one of the men took aim at Roger’s head, but thought twice and whipped him across the mouth.
“That was very stupid,” the Ducharme said, looking at his fingers dripping red. “Very stupid.”
He picked some glass out of his palm, still trying to save some mixture.
Roger spit some blood. “Now you have nothing but us.”
“You have more,” Ducharme said, trying to compose himself. “You have more. It would be insane to store it all in a jar.”
Antoine muttered something in French, and the silent gunman dropped to his knees and put the barrel of the pistol to Laura’s forehead.
“I am going to count to three, and when I do your wife’s brains will be all over these walls. I will not fuck around any longer. Three seconds and she’s dead.”
Ducharme had no idea about the cabin. For all he knew, the two of them had camped out in the Subaru all night.
“One …”
Laura’s face was shocked in terror.
“Two …”
Roger looked at the gun to Laura’s head. “No! Don’t. I’ll take you.”
“Then do so quickly. I’m cold.”
The gunman pulled back.
“There’s a cottage about a mile from here,” Roger began. But he never finished.
Out of the shadows, a figure flew at the gunman.
Brett.
He seized the man in a headlock from behind and pulled him to the ground, all the while with his free hand yanking away the pistol. It had happened so fast, the man was stunned.
In the flurry of movement, Laura butted the American in the genitals with her head. With a pained grunt, he folded in the middle but not before taking aim at Laura. Roger leaped to block her, when an explosion rocked the cave.
The American fell face-forward.
Brett had shot him with one hand, his other still in a chokehold on the first man.
Brett jumped to his feet with the pistol raised. The American was not dead. But his arm landed in the flames, and he rolled away yowling. The bullet had caught him on the elbow.
“Don’t friggin’ move,” Brett screamed.
The American rolled in pain, but nobody else moved. Brett grabbed the machine pistol off the ground so that he had a weapon in each hand fanning Antoine and his men. He looked wild. He looked like he wanted them to make a false move so he could blast them to hamburger.
Laura pulled herself up and helped Roger to his feet. His lip was bleeding.
He got his own gun from the American’s belt. “And you wanted basketball,” he said to Brett.
But Brett did not laugh, nor did he regard Roger.
“Up! Up!”
he shouted.
The American with the ruined elbow and smoking sleeve stumbled to his knees. When he hesitated, Brett kicked him in the butt.
“Fucking kid!”
Brett kicked him again.
He looked half-crazed. Days of fear and anger had come to a ballistic head.
Antoine muttered something vicious in French, and Brett sent the toe of his boot into Antoine’s shin.
He would have filled him full of lead had Roger not pulled him back.
“Outside!” Brett yelled.
“Brett!” Roger said, holding his hand out for the guns.
But the boy would not respond to him. He was locked into marching the men outside himself.
What cut across Roger’s mind like a shark fin was that Brett’s mind had snapped. That the sheer horror of seeing his parents about to be executed had momentarily deranged him, and that once outside in the daylight he would line them up and blast them dead.
Laura tried to reason with him, but he stonewalled her too.
Brett stuck the nine-millimeter into his belt. The machine pistol he gripped in both hands like a movie cop. He then rammed the back of one men. “Hands high.”
The man raised his hands.
He stabbed the man in the skull with the gun. “
Higher!
”
The man reached as high as he could. With one hand Brett reached around and tore the man’s belt off his pants and tossed it to Roger to tie his hands. He then whipped the belts off the others and tossed them to Laura.
When the men were bound, Brett pushed them toward the entrance, still moving under that weird autopilot.
“Wait,” Roger shouted. He picked up one of four notebooks. He looked at it for a moment, then opened it and tore out the pages and fed them to the fire.
“What are you doing?” Brett screamed. “We need those.”
“No, we don’t.”
Brett said nothing, remembering the ampules back at the cabin.
Roger tore out another handful of pages and tossed them on the fire. Then another and another.
While the fire flared, he tried not to think of the years of drudgery they represented—the meticulous around-the-clock record of everything he had done since returning from Papua New Guinea—Methuselah’s first year, his weight, chemistry; maze test results; the molecular diagrams, equations, diagnostics; the primates, Molly, Fred, Jimbo—seven years’ worth. Work that had consumed his waking hours, that had filled him with inestimable dreams. Page after page.
It was like self-amputation in razor slices.
When he was done the fire roared.
Laura took his hand as they watched for a moment. When he was satisfied, he said, “Let’s go.”
As the others started out, he yanked the golden ampule from his neck and tossed it into the fire.
He then he fell behind Laura, passing Brett who hadn’t seemed to notice and who waited to close up the rear as they all moved out of the cave.
Brett did not shoot them. He was more interested in returning to the cottage.
They had parked the Subaru in the woods out of sight from the road. But the men had found it. The seats were slashed, the ceiling vinyl torn out, glove compartment cover pried off, the floor trap opened. They had even gone through the engine compartment looking for containers of the serum.
Luckily, the engine still worked. Brett rode in the rear with the machine pistol trained on the three men. Laura drove, and Roger nursed a bleeding mouth beside her.
As they headed back to the cottage, Roger tried to get Brett to come out of his daze, but to no avail. It crossed his mind that he might have to overpower his own son when the car stopped. It also crossed his mind that the men might try something desperate to escape.
“Brett, that’s not a regular gun. Squeeze the trigger and thirty rounds will come out.”
Brett didn’t respond, but Roger was certain he got the idea. From the way the men sat frozen, they got it too.
They drove the rest of the way without another word. Yet Roger couldn’t help but feel irrational pride in his son.
At the head of the logging road was a clutch of police and news vehicles. Uniformed officers waved them to stop.
As Laura braked, Brett shouted, “
No!
Don’t stop!”
Laura leaned on the horn and motioned frantically that they were coming through. The police recognized them, but before they could force Laura to pull over, two agents of the FBI glanced inside.
“It’s them,” one of them shouted.
Roger recognized Number 44 from the Town Day race.
“Pull over.” Guns drawn, the two agents tried to open the locked doors. They wanted them to surrender right here and get into the waiting black Hummer.
But that was not the agreement. Nor was Brett going to let them. “Keep going!” he shouted to Laura.
Laura lowered the rear window so the agents could see Brett with a TEC-9 machine pistol trained on the three men.
“They tried to kill us. We’re not stopping.”
Number 44 wore an FBI photo ID: William Pike. The man with him was Eric Brown. Roger recognized the name. Brown sized up the situation, then shouted for the police to let them through.
Instantly three motorcycles pulled out to escort them to the cabin, several vehicles pulling behind.
At the bottom of the road was an even larger swarm of people and vehicles—unmarked cars, news vans, police cruisers, people with cameras, even some locals with kids. Maybe a hundred or more people.
On the lake floated two pontoon TV helicopters and a seaplane. It was insane, Roger thought. How the hell did they assemble so fast? And up here in the middle of nowhere! The nearest major town was Lake Placid.
Somehow the word had leaked, no doubt from the broadcast people to keep the story breaking from minute-to-minute.
Roger would bet his life they were here not to clap eyes on the FBI’s most wanted man but the guy who wouldn’t die.
What bothered him was all the people moving in and out of their cabin. Men in uniform and in plainclothes. They had probably torn the place apart for Elixir. He scanned the front yard and whispered a thanks the old fridge had broken down.
As Laura pulled near the broken lawn fountain, one reporter kept up a monologue into his microphone as he trotted alongside:
“The lakefront house was deserted, and wild speculation was that the Glovers had either taken off or were abducted. But as we speak, they are returning in a black Subaru Outback …”
The police waved them into the drive, and the crowd made a path. In the distance Roger spotted a frontend loader waiting in the event that he announced the Elixir supply was buried.
People were shouting and pressing around the car with cameras while the police tried to keep them back. But it was impossible. They had not expected the media blitz.
Laura parked as police and FBI jackets made a wall around them. Agent Brown carried his gun low but he wanted Brett to surrender the weapons.
Roger pushed his way to Brown. “Get these people away.”
He didn’t know what kind of trauma Brett was suffering, but he was not responding to him or Laura. And the charge of the crowd might make him start firing. “Don’t touch him, and he won’t hurt anybody,” Roger shouted. He was smeared with blood. “These are the bad guys.” And he pulled Ducharme and the others out of the car.
Brown barked some orders for the police to clear a path.
Reporters shouted questions and cameras were jamming for shots. Brett looked at the breaking point. His eyes were still wild, yet he stuffed himself behind the men and pushed them to the steps of the cottage.
Somebody made the mistake of pushing into Brett. He flashed the pistol at him in reflex, and the guy jumped backward. Nobody else interceded.
The crowd parted like a school of fish for the three bound men and the boy in the weird trance with both hands gripping the large black gun.
Without a word, Brett marched the men single file to a step shy of the porch where he commanded them to turn and face the crowd.
He then climbed onto the porch behind them and held the gun to the back of Ducharme’s head.
“Brett,
no!
Don’t do it.
“Please!”
But he did not hear Roger. Nor his mother’s cries.
Nor did he see the marksmen on the old woodpile, their high-powered rifles trained on him.
“Tell them,” Brett said to Ducharme.
The crowd hushed and pressed in, a wall of humming cameras and directional microphones all gawking at the boy and his hostages.
“Tell them!”
“Tell what?” Ducharme asked.
“Tell them how you killed Betsy Watkins and blew up the plane.”
Ducharme made a bemused smile. “If I don’t, are you going to kill me in front of the whole world?”
Brett pushed the barrel of the gun to the base of his skull. “You bet your friggin’ life I am.”
Ducharme looked over his shoulder. When he saw Brett’s face his smile fell.
“One …” counted Brett.
The crowd gasped and police marksmen raised their guns, not certain where to aim, or what to do. They couldn’t shoot a boy on global broadcast.
“Two …”
“Brett, don’t,” Laura pleaded. “Not this way.”
“Three!”
And he rammed Antoine’s head with the gun again.
“Okay,” he said and swore in French. “What do you want me to say, you crazy kid?”
“The truth. Tell them the truth.”
“Christopher Bacon did not kill Betsy Watkins …”
“Keep going,” Brett warned. “The plane …
“He did not plant a bomb on flight 219. It was associates of Quentin Cross.”
“And you.”
There was a long pause.
“And you!”
“And me.”
“Louder.”
“And me.”

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