Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (26 page)

“Well, I’m not sticking around waiting to get arrested,” Nina said, pulling the gun from her purse. “Come on, you two. Put everything in the duffle and let’s go. We’ve got to get to the car.”

“But... but...” Walter stuttered. “But we’re surrounded!”

“They’re busy chasing after the guys in the band,” she insisted. “This is our only chance.”

Walter put the bottle of chloroform aside and then snatched up his photocopies, notes, and Iverson’s file, and stuffed them into the duffle bag. He checked around the room for any other personal items as Bell tossed in the cuffs and sedatives, zipped the bag up, and slung it over his shoulder.

“Right,” she said. “Through the kitchen and out the back. Let’s go.”

“The back? There are FBI agents...”

“I told you, they’ve got their hands full,” she said. “Come on.”

Walter almost forgot the chloroform and grabbed it at the last second before following Nina and Bell out of the bedroom.

She did seem to be right about the agents having their hands full, struggling with the vociferous Iggy inside the tiny bathroom.

“I got nothing, man!” he was shouting. “Nothing! See? There ain’t no call to be hassling a man while he’s on the crapper!”

Walter looked over Nina’s shoulder as she paused at the back door, peering out through the gingham curtains of a nearby window.

“Damn,” she hissed. “Two more out back.”

Walter looked out through the gap in the curtains. In the ambient light cast by the moon, he could see that she was right. Two more figures stood in the back yard, guns drawn, covering the back door. One of them was recognizable as the gray man who had picked up Walter and Bell at the Howard Johnson.

Walter still had the bottle of chloroform in his hand.

“Nina,” he said, holding up the chloroform. “Do you have any nail polish remover in your purse?”

“Acetone?” Her eyes went wide. “Genius!” She fished a small bottle from her purse and handed it over.

“Duct tape!” he called, like a surgeon asking for a scalpel.

Bell pulled out the tape and slapped it into Walter’s hand. Walter tore off a large strip and used it to bind the two bottles together. He loosened the cap on the nail polish remover in the hopes that even if the bottles didn’t break on impact, at least the caps would be knocked off, allowing the two chemicals to mix and react explosively.

The use of chemistry to make weapons flew in the face of his principles, so he’d never actually tried this before.

But theoretically it should work.

“Get the door on three,” Walter said to Bell. “One... Two...” His hands were sweaty, making the bottles slick and difficult to hold. “
Three!”

Bell pulled the door open and Walter threw the makeshift bomb out into the back yard. The two agents dove for cover as the bottles came sailing out and plopped down in the center of the yard.

Nothing happened.

The agents got slowly back to their feet, cautiously eyeballing the object. Both bottles were intact but leaking, generating a thready plume of foul-smelling toxic smoke, but no big exciting explosion like the one Walter had hoped for.

“Good try, Walter,” Nina said, hand on his shoulder. “Now get back. Away from the windows.”

Walter did as she suggested as she aimed her gun out through the crack in the door.

“You can’t just shoot FBI agents!” Bell said. “That’s got to be a felony or something!”

“Who says I’m going to shoot any FBI agents?” she replied with a smirk.

She shot the bottle of chloroform.

That did it.

The resulting explosion rattled the old windows in their frames, and bathed the whole back of the cabin in bewitching blue-white light. The sound was flat and hollow, like someone dropping a fifty gallon drum off a skyscraper.

“GO!” Nina shouted. She shouldered the door open, jumped down the back steps, and started running straight for the woods. Bell was right behind her, and as scared as Walter was, he wasn’t about to be left alone.

Out in the scorched yard, the two agents were down on the ground, arms flung up to protect their faces. He couldn’t tell if they’d thrown themselves to the ground on purpose, or had their feet knocked out from under them. There was a large circle of grass burning in the center of the yard, and it looked almost cheerful, like they should gather around it and toast marshmallows. The fire turned their shadows into long leggy monsters as they ran.

They all made it into the trees with no shots fired.

“Which way?” Bell asked.

“Down and left!” Nina said. “Hurry!”

The two men plunged after her down the leaf-slick slope, dodging mossy trees and jutting boulders as someone—presumably one or more armed agents— thrashed through the ground cover behind them. Walter had no intention of looking back to see who it was.

He was glad Nina seemed to know where she was going. He remembered they had parked the car at the end of an overgrown track that led to that burnt-out shack, but he didn’t have the slightest clue where that was in relation to the cabin. It was hard enough to avoid getting lost in the familiar halls of MIT. Out in the dark woods, he was worse than useless.

From behind and above, Latimer’s voice squawked through the megaphone again.

“No point in running, Bishop! Bell! We know where you live. We know where you work. You’ve got no place to go. All you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable!”

“Just keep going,” Nina hissed.

Walter was panting like a dog, his heart hammering. The running. The panic. It was too much. He didn’t think he could take it anymore.

Nina slid down an embankment and stumbled on ahead. Walter and Bell crashed down after her, clinging to each other to keep from falling. When they reached the bottom, teetering and pinwheeling their arms for balance, an agent stepped out from behind a tree, flicking on a flashlight, his gun drawn.

He was surprisingly young, with lots of fluffy blond hair that vigorously defied whatever grooming products he’d used to try and tame it, but his face was cold and serious.

“Drop your weapons,” he said, tipping his chin at Nina’s pistol.

They were caught. Their backs were against the U-shaped embankment they’d just tumbled down, and the only way out was past the agent.

Nina let her gun drop to the leafy forest floor and slowly raised her hands. Walter felt a terrible desperation welling up like bile in his throat as he thought of Miranda, the usherette at the theater who would die in less than two hours if they couldn’t get to her first.

There was a quick blur of movement between the trees. The blond agent crumpled first to his knees, then awkwardly to his side.

Behind him was the shadowy form of Special Agent Iverson, trench coat flapping open and a gun held butt-first in his right hand. He knelt beside his pistol-whipped associate and checked his vitals.

“He’ll be fine,” Iverson said. “Go on.”

“Thanks!” Walter said. “How can we ever repay you for saving us again?”

“You want to repay me?” he asked. “Whatever you do, don’t let Latimer capture the Zodiac. He’s become obsessed, and can’t be reasoned with. He thinks Zodiac is the ultimate nuclear weapon, and all he cares about is controlling him. It’s up to you three to prevent it.”

The fallen agent groaned, eyelids fluttering as he struggled to regain consciousness.

“Now go. Run!”

The enormity of what Iverson was saying barely had time to sink in before Nina grabbed Walter’s hand and pulled him away.

“You heard the man,” she said. “Come on, Walter.
Run!
We’re almost there.”

A moment later, Walter could hear Iverson’s voice up above.

“They have another accomplice!” he cried. “Caucasian male, thirties, about six one and bald, with a beard. I saw him sap Davis, and then the four of them ran off, that way!”

There were more agents thundering through the trees, but farther back and up the slope to the left, misled by Iverson’s ruse. Walter lurched after Nina and Bell, chest heaving, as they dodged through a thick stand of young elms. He saw something dark ahead of them, beyond the trees, which quickly resolved itself into the blackened timbers and tar paper walls of the ruined shack. The nose of the rented car stuck out from behind its far corner.

They ran to it, hopping over charred debris, opened the doors and threw themselves in, Nina and Bell in front and Walter in back. Nina jammed the key into the ignition and cranked it.

The big V8 roared to life.

She dropped the shift into drive and stomped on the gas. It was too much. The tires spun in the leaf mold and mud, going nowhere.

Two agents were crashing through the elms. Walter could tell by the glint of moonlight that they had guns out.

“Easy,” Bell said.

“I got it,” Nina said. “Got it.”

She let up on the accelerator and tried again, more slowly this time. The wheels caught. They were rolling.

An agent grabbed at the car, catching a side-view mirror and smacking the driver’s side window with the butt of his gun, starring it. Nina sped up, roaring down the narrow track, and the agent let go as a tree threatened to scrape him off. The other agent skidded to a stop behind them and fired.

Walter and Bell ducked, but Walter heard no impact, and the next second they had taken a curve. The agents were out of sight.

“Not out of the woods yet,” Nina muttered.

Walter frowned, thinking it a very obvious thing to say, then realized that she meant it metaphorically.

“Those guys are going to catch us in a matter of minutes,” she said, “if we don’t find some way to slow them down.”

The paved road appeared ahead of them. Nina swerved out onto it in a spray of gravel, then rocked back into line and sped down the hill. Walter looked behind. He couldn’t see anything at first, but then he could. Headlights raced under the trees, reaching out for them.

“They’re coming,” he said.

Nina barreled down the gravel road at a terrifying speed. This was no Volkswagen Beetle, but she didn’t seem intimidated by the Detroit behemoth, and slung it along the twisting track with an admirable—if heart-stopping—fearlessness.

At last they came to the state highway. Nina bumped up onto it without braking, then roared west with her foot pinned to the floorboard. The highway was smooth and clean, but almost as twisty as the smaller road. They were screeching around the curves.

“This is where they’ll catch us,” she said.

“Then what do we do?” Walter asked. “What’s the point of running?”

“For a scientist,” she replied. “You have very little imagination.”

Another dirt road was coming up rapidly on the left side of the road. Nina glanced in her rearview mirror, then swerved toward it, killing the LeSabre’s headlights. Bell hung on with both hands. Walter grabbed the door handle and looked back. The FBI cars still were out of sight behind the curve of the highway.

The big car slammed down onto the dark dirt road at speed, almost smashing Nina’s head into the ceiling as the jolt sent her bouncing out of her seat. She drove forward about ten yards then hit the brakes and skidded to a stop in the muddy gravel.

She, Bell, and Walter looked back. A narrow sliver of the highway was just visible through the trees. One second. Two seconds. Three. Two sets of headlights howled by, and then two seconds later, a third.

“Is that all of them?” Bell asked. “How many were there?”

“I didn’t see,” Nina said. “But if there are any more, they’re probably still up at the cabin, trying to catch Roscoe and the boys. Time to go.”

She turned the headlights back on, put the LeSabre in reverse, and backed out of the side road onto the highway. But instead of going east, she went west.

“You’re going the wrong way,” said Bell. “The connector to the Five is west.”

“They’re going to turn around eventually, William. I don’t want to be behind them when they do. We’ll take the 101 back.”

“Didn’t you say that took longer?” Walter asked. “We need to get back to San Francisco as soon as possible.”

“That’s okay,” she replied. “I’ll just go faster.”

Walter exchanged a look with Bell, then put his seatbelt on. It was going to be a long trip.

Miranda was wrapping up her shift at the Roxie, sweeping cigarette butts and scattered popcorn out from under the seats and turning out the lights inside the candy display cases. She tossed out the last of the sad, mummified hot dogs that had been spinning on the hot rollers all day, and wiped down all the spigots on the soft-drink dispensers.

It wasn’t the best job in the world, but it certainly wasn’t the worst, and she got to see all the movies for free. She’d proved herself to be so reliable that she’d been given a set of keys, and the added responsibility of locking up every Monday night. She took that responsibility very seriously.

Monday nights were usually pretty dead, anyway. They were closed on Tuesday, and Wednesday was when they changed the feature, so by Monday night, pretty much everyone already had the current film.

Besides, who goes to the movies on Monday night?

This past week they’d been running this French animated film called
Fantastic Planet,
which she had to admit she didn’t really understand. Clearly she wasn’t the only one, since it hadn’t been very popular, and this last late show had been nearly empty—except for a young couple who were way more into each other than the movie. And that same creepy guy with the glasses who’d come in alone every Monday night for the past month.

For some reason, that guy had left early, twenty minutes before the end of the movie, and Miranda wasn’t sorry to see him go. She always had the feeling that he was watching her when she wasn’t looking.

As she reached into her purse to get the keys to lock up the theater, her fingers brushed against a bottle of Miss Clairol Born Blonde hair bleach. She’d been carrying it in her purse for a full week now, trying to get up the nerve to use it. On her way through the lobby, she paused to look at her own reflection in the mirror behind the candy counter.

Skinny, no kind of body at all beneath her polyester uniform. Freckles. Stick-straight brown hair. Such a blah-bland Breck girl. No wonder Matt barely even noticed that she existed.