The Descent From Truth (13 page)

Chapter 15

Pia strolled into the maintenance barn, leaving the door open enough for Alex to slip through. He could hear the two men inside talking, but their voices were low and their words indistinct.

The murmuring stopped when they spotted Pia. One man, a big-bellied hulk with shaggy, dishwater-blond hair and a matted beard, hid his beer bottle behind the vertical beam against which he had been resting. Looking sheepish, perhaps worried, he scrambled to his feet. The other, a tall, raw-boned man of about forty, kept his seat. A long-necked beer bottle dangled from his fingers. He looked amused.

Alex had bought a ski mask at the equipment rental store when he returned Pia’s practice snowmobile. He slipped it on and, confident that the men were focused on Pia, flattened himself on the ground and wriggled through the doorway. Just inside, he paused in shadows. Overhead lights cut a broad swath between his position and the truck. He dared go no farther until the men turned their backs.

The big-bellied watchman seemed uncertain whether Pia was an interloper to be repelled or management to be respected. With a countrified accent and a Southern drawl, he asked, “Can I do something for ya, miss?”

“You want to do something?” Pia slurred her speech and walked with a swagger, as if she’d had too much to drink. “Like what?”

“Huh?”

She stood close, resting her hands on her hips. “What do you want to do for me?”

Apparently deciding she was a party girl who had strayed down from one of the clubs, he asserted his authority. “Close the door.”

She whirled about and pulled the door shut. Heading for the men once more, she pushed her shoulders back and swayed her hips.

“Hey, girl,” said the other man. Still seated, he raised his beer in a salute. “Where’s your guy?”

“Up the hill.” She peered at the man as if having difficulty focusing. “You sharing that beer?”

Smiling with one side of his mouth, he extended the bottle. He did not move from his position on the floor.

The big-bellied man still looked confused. “You ain’t supposed to be down here.”

Ignoring him, Pia tilted the beer bottle to her mouth and swallowed. She waved it upside down. “Got any more?”

“Get the chick a brew, Greg,” the seated man said. “Hand me one, too.”

“Yeah, sure.” Big Belly—Greg—moved out of Alex’s field of vision.

With Greg looking for beer and the seated man concentrating on Pia, Alex wriggled forward. Another five feet, and the dump truck would shelter him.

Greg muttered a curse.

Alex froze, his torso flattened on the dirt-littered concrete. No protective shadows. Had he been spotted?

No, something else bothered Greg. Peering under the vehicle that separated them, Alex saw the big-gutted guard squatting by a cooler and struggling to free beer bottles. The man cursed again and jerked them free. He wore no side arm, but a rifle leaned against a nearby bench. The only other weapon was a nightstick dangling from his belt. A two-way radio also hung there.

Greg stood with three beer bottles grasped in one big hand. His gaze swept across Alex’s position with no hesitation. He twisted off one of the bottle caps and upended the bottle into his mouth, letting beer gurgle down his gullet as he walked back to Pia. He tossed the empty into a nearby trash can and belched. “Whatchu doing down here?”

His partner chuckled. “She’s looking for action. Am I right, swivel hips?”

“Looking for action.” She could have been simply repeating the man’s words, or she might have been affirming them. She pulled the remaining two beers from Greg’s hand and passed one to the seated man.

He twisted the cap off of his bottle. “Open the lady’s beer, Greg. She’s real thirsty.” From his seated position on the floor, he rubbed the toe of his boot up and down her calf. “Aren’t you, honey?”

“Thirsty, yeah.”

With all his might, Alex willed her to move around the duo. They had to turn away from the door.

She could have been reading his thoughts. She handed her bottle to Greg and headed for the rear of the barn.

“Hold it, girl.” Clutching the bottle in his fist, Greg stepped into her path. “Where you going?”

“Back there.” She pointed toward the parked snowmobiles. “Have to pee.” She walked around him and headed for the shadowy area beyond.

Greg twisted the cap off her beer bottle. Staring into the darkness where she had disappeared, he raised his voice as if she were a long distance away. “So, wha’ kinda party you got in mind?”

Another chuckle from his partner. “Only one kind she’d come all the way down here for.” The neck of his beer bottle slid back and forth through a circle formed by his thumb and index finger. “Anything else she could get from the city shits in the clubs.” He turned his face toward where Pia had disappeared and raised his voice. “Am I right, hot stuff? Them city shits bore you?”

“They don’t know how to party.” She emerged from the shadows with her coat open, her belt unbuckled, and reached for the beer in Greg’s hand.

Scowling, he pulled the bottle out of her reach. A quick glance at his partner, and he began drinking.

Pia turned to the seated man. Face tilted downward, she looked at him through her eyelashes. “Do you know how to party?”

Confident that the men would not turn away from Pia, Alex rolled across the swath of lighted floor to the sheltering truck. Careful not to disturb debris that might crunch or snap, he crouched where he could see around the truck but stayed in the shadow cast by its bulk. He wondered how Pia would get the men to separate, and he worried because the answer seemed obvious.

Greg’s lanky partner levered himself to his feet, adjusted his crotch, and stepped close to her. “Have some of my brew.” He drained the bottle into his mouth and tossed the empty aside. Cheeks bulging with beer, he coupled his lips with hers.

She choked, coughed. Hands on his chest, she pushed him back a few inches. “I love swallowing it. What else do you have?”

Another kiss, this one prolonged, made Alex see everything through a red haze. Pia accepted it passively, her hands hanging loosely at her sides, her body contoured against the man.

“She shoulda brung another broad,” Greg muttered. “I ain’t standing around while you bust your nuts.”

“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar.” With his hands on her shoulders, the lanky man turned Pia so she faced away from him. He slid his hands under her arms to palm her breasts and pull her back against his crotch. His thumbs and index fingers rolled her nipples. “You can take us both. Huh, babe?”

“Not at the same time. And not with an audience.”

“We’ll give you privacy.” Grasping her shoulders once more, he turned her to face the disabled snowcat. “Have another beer, Greg. This won’t take long.”

“Nah.” Greg tossed his bottle into a trash barrel and pulled his belt up over his sagging gut. “This is my watch. I get her first.”

His partner’s voice hardened. “She’s gonna give me a blow job, and I’m outta here. She’ll be all heated up for you, ready to screw your brains out.” He guided Pia around the disassembled snowcat and out of sight.

Alex half stood, preparing to spring at Greg. But the big-gutted guard, mumbling incoherently, turned toward him. Alex ducked back down.

The other man’s voice floated from behind the broken-down snowcat. “You know what to do, honey lips.”

“Wait!” Pia sounded on the edge of panic. “God, it’s big.”

“Kiss it.”

Greg, standing in the middle of the barn, whined like a hungry dog held inches from its dinner. He took a step toward the voices.

That gave Alex the opening he needed. He edged from his hiding place.

A chilling, high-pitched scream shrilled from behind the snowcat.

Alex lunged. His shoulder slammed into Greg’s back.

The big man went down but rolled away. He regained his feet with cat-like agility that belied his fat-layered bulk and protruding gut. Cursing and swinging his nightstick, he charged.

Alex twisted and took a wild blow on his back. With the force of driving legs and swinging shoulders, he drove a fist into the big man’s gut.

Greg doubled over. A rabbit punch sent him plummeting face-first toward Alex’s up-thrusting knee. The knee hammered the guard’s chin and snapped his head back. His mouth slammed shut with a force that sent broken, blood-flecked teeth spewing from between rubbery lips. As limp as discarded clothing, he collapsed.

Intent on mayhem, Alex dashed to the disabled snowcat that hid Pia and Greg’s partner. The shrill keening continued. Crouched low, ready for combat, Alex rounded the vehicle.

He paused in confusion.

The screams came not from Pia but from the man. Curled into a protective ball with his trousers and skivvies around his ankles, he writhed on the floor, one hand covering his face, the other cradling his crotch.

Pia stood over him. Lashing out with her foot, she connected solidly with his kidney. She cocked her boot for another kick.

As Alex approached, she whirled and stabbed at his eye with a stiffened thumb. One of the maneuvers he had taught her.

He slapped her hand, knocking it away, then took a step back and ripped off the ski mask. “Alex. It’s Alex!”

She collapsed against him, her arms clutching for support. Her breath rasped as if she had just crossed the finish line after a hundred-yard dash.

“It’s all right.” He held her. “It’s over.” Tilting her chin, he looked into her eyes. “You okay?”

She nodded and clutched him tighter.

The man on the floor groaned. At some point he had stopped screaming, but Alex hadn’t realized it until he heard the groan.

Pia shuddered. She pushed back from Alex’s chest, but only a few inches. “All right.” She rubbed her face as if awakening from sleep. “We beat them.”

Her victim, still curled into a fetal ball with his trousers and skivvies around his ankles, seemed only semi-conscious. Alex pulled the ski mask back over his face and, using the toe of a boot, rolled the man face up. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

Still moaning, the man cradled his scrotum with both hands. Blood pooled in one eye.

“You told me to punch out their eyes.” Pia made a jabbing motion with her thumb, as Alex had when demonstrating combat techniques. Fingers curled, she rotated her hand. “You said twist their balls and jerk.”

“It’s okay. You did all the right things.”

He hugged her again, and she seemed content to nestle in his arms, standing amid the havoc they had created. Alex, however, worried that someone would investigate the noise. He released her and searched the barn’s walls and shelves for rope. He found none but discovered rolls of duct tape.

“Here you go.” He tossed a role of the tape to Pia.

She caught it. She was functioning again.

With another roll of tape, he bound Greg’s arms and legs. Pia did the same to Greg’s partner.

Alex started to toss aside his roll of tape but reconsidered and stuck it in his coat pocket. He pulled the two-way radio from Greg’s belt and hooked it to his own. “Let’s choose our getaway vehicles.”

He checked the fuel and oil levels on two of the newer-looking snowmobiles and grunted with satisfaction. They had been serviced before being stored for the night. He cranked the engines and, while they warmed, stowed his and Pia’s backpacks and the watchman’s rifle. Revving the engine slightly for supplementary power, they pushed one of the vehicles out of the barn and downhill to a heavily wooded area. “Too loud,” he said when Pia suggested riding instead of pushing. “The noise in the barn could have come from party-goers, but nobody would be out on a snowmobile this time of night.”

They moved the second snowmobile to their hiding place. Alex checked the watchman’s rifle, saw that it had a full clip. He handed it to Pia and smiled wryly, remembering his earlier skepticism about her capacity for violence. “Don’t shoot unless your life is in danger. We’re kidnappers, not killers.”

He cautioned her to stay with the snowmobiles. “Whatever happens, no matter what you hear, don’t move.” She was well hidden, and it was unlikely anyone would stumble upon her. “If I’m not back by sunup, start one of the snowmobiles and get the hell out of here.”

Chapter 16

Alex made his way back to the maintenance barn and found ignition keys for the snowcats, labeled according to the big yellow machines’ painted-on numbers. When his chosen vehicle had warmed and was purring smoothly, he drove it to the power station.

Two rooms. The first appeared to be a combination supply and break area. It held a table and chairs, refrigerator, and microwave. Its walls were lined with shelves packed with boxes and mechanical parts. No one there. An ear-splitting din from the next room identified it as housing generators. The noise rendered stealth superfluous.

He used the barrel of his rifle to ease open the door to the generator room. A man wearing protective ear covers dozed with his chair tilted against a wall in front of two generators, each the size of a garbage truck. Alex pressed his rifle against the man’s temple and snatched off his ear protectors. Following mimed directions but moving with glacial slowness, the man stretched out on the floor. Duct tape rendered him immobile.

Alex studied the room’s array of switches and levers and figured out how to shut down the generators. Overhead lights dimmed as the turbines slowed. They stilled, and pitch blackness forced him to rely on memory and touch to find his way out of the windowless building in eerie silence. He swept his gaze across the moonlit mountain and saw only shadows where lights had blazed and shimmered. Silver Hill was experiencing a total power outage.

He rushed back to the snowcat. A third of the way up the road to the village, driving as fast as he dared on the winding, narrow lane, he spotted headlights coming downhill, flashing, fading, and reappearing as they rounded sharp curves and raced past stands of trees, but growing ever brighter. He dropped his snowcat into a lower gear. When the approaching lights rounded a final turn and sped directly toward him, he stopped on the frozen trail. The other vehicle, also a snowcat, began slowing. Alex ripped off the ski mask, rolled down his window, and waited.

“What’s going on?” asked a voice from the other snowcat. The machines idled side by side, pointing in opposite directions.

“Fire in number two’s main transformer,” Alex said, thankful that the snowcat’s dark interior made his features indistinct. He could only hope the man wasn’t an electrician; the explanation was strictly ad-lib. In case the guy didn’t buy it, he clicked off the safety on his rifle. “Grid shifted to number one, the circuit breakers popped. If I put it back on line without that transformer, we’ll lose both generators.”

“Fix the damned thing. We got VIPs on the hill tonight.”

A little of Alex’s tension drained away. The man obviously knew no more about electricity than he did. “No way I’m gonna monkey with it. That’s fifty thousand volts. We gotta get a power jockey up here.”

“Where you headed?”

“I called in the problem. Boss said hightail it up the hill, so that’s what I’m doing.”

Alex put his snowcat into gear and moved on up the trail. He held his breath until the other driver backed and turned to follow. They would send someone else to check the power station before long, and getting the generators back on would be simple. However, a few minutes were all he needed.

He negotiated a sharp curve that sheltered him from the trailing snowcat, cut his lights, and swung into roadside undergrowth. With both hands griping his rifle, he waited for the other vehicle to pass his turn-off. Would they notice his tracks leading into the brush?

The trailing vehicle dashed by without slowing.

“Thank you, lady luck.” Alex maneuvered back onto the road. Where the trail came closest to the rear of the lodge, he parked and turned off the lights but left the engine running. On foot, he made his way up the slope to where his rope dangled from the window of his third-floor room.

Variant Corporation employees had taken the entire second floor on this wing, so Frederick would be there if Pia was right about him not living with the Koenigs. Wearing his ski mask again and grasping the rope, Alex climbed to the second floor and tried to open the window directly below his but found it locked. With a foot looped in the rope to support his weight, working awkwardly with duct tape from the maintenance barn, he taped off a small square of glass just above the window’s lock. He padded the handle of his knife with his handkerchief and, mouthing a silent prayer that the room was empty or occupied by a heavy sleeper, hit the square of glass hard enough to break it. Reaching through the hole, he unlocked the window. That the lodge was still dark surprised him. It should have a backup generator that would kick in right away.

His luck held; the room was empty. As stealthily as he could, he slipped inside, inched the door open, and peered into the hallway. Weak light cast by battery-powered EXIT signs revealed the shadowy outline of a man standing three doors down and on the opposite side. A guard. That would be Frederick’s room.

Alex eased the door shut and climbed back out the window. He muscled up the rope to his own third-floor room, clambered inside, and pulled the rope in behind him. He was on the top floor, so there would be access to the roof. The hallway’s glowing EXIT sign became a beacon guiding him to the stairwell. With his rope coiled around a shoulder, he made his way to the flat roof and crossed to the other side of the wing. Leaning over the edge, he counted windows until he was above the one guarded by the sentry. He secured the rope to a ventilation pipe that projected through the roof. Hand-over-hand, he descended to the second-floor window.

As before, he taped off a small square of glass and broke it with the padded handle of his knife so he could reach through and unlock the window. The muted tinkle of broken glass sounded deafening to him in the abnormal quiet—no sound other than the distant, indecipherable voices of patrons who had poured from the darkened clubs along Main Street.

The guard posted in the hallway must have heard the glass break. He opened the door, swept the room with his flashlight, and played its beam over the blinds. The glow became brighter as he entered the room and approached the window.

Dangling from his rope, Alex leaned away. He realized he was holding his breath and forced himself to inhale and exhale deeply, his mouth open to minimize sound. Careful to avoid banging against the wall, he shifted to slide his rifle’s sling off his shoulder. He almost dropped the weapon; it wasn’t going to work. He shrugged the rifle back to its original position, pulled his supporting foot from its loop in the rope, and prepared to rappel down the wall. If discovered, he would have to depend on speed and the shelter of darkness.

The lodge’s back-up generator chose that moment to kick in. With the rest of the village still blacked out, the lodge would become a magnet for every eye, and Alex’s position put him obliquely across a courtyard from the now-lit entrance. Anyone who looked up would see him dangling there.

Inside, a night-light glowed. It turned the blinds faintly pink. Soft music filled the room. The guard stood no more than three feet from Alex, only the broken window and the imperfectly closed blinds separating them. The man held his position for an additional heart-stopping moment, then grunted and turned away. A shaft of hallway light falling on the blinds signaled his exit. The light faded as the door clicked shut.

Alex opened the window and slithered through. He wrestled with indecision about the ski mask. What if he took it off and the guard saw him? But if Frederick opened his eyes and saw a masked intruder looming over his bed, his howls would awaken everyone in the lodge. All right, Alex decided, take the damned thing off and hope for the best.

Frederick opened his eyes as Alex wrapped him in a blanket. The boy looked momentarily disoriented. Then he focused on the face looking down at him.

He hadn’t seen Alex with a haircut and shave, but maybe he would recognize a familiar voice. Hoping the music drifting from a radio near the door was enough to mask his words, that the guard would mistake him for the DJ, Alex leaned close and whispered, “Freddy, it’s me. Your old buddy, Alex.”

“Ax!” Frederick squirmed and reached for him.

“Hey, tiger,” Alex whispered. With one eye on the door, his body tensed for instant action if it opened, he finished wrapping his charge in the blanket and then a bed sheet. As quickly as possible, he knotted the sheet around his own neck to make a sling. Heading for the window, he spotted a bag of disposable diapers. He grabbed it and climbed out the window.

Back on the roof, he pulled the rope up behind him and heaved a relieved sigh. He was still in the frying pan, but getting the kid out of that room had been the touchiest step. With the rope coiled over a shoulder, he raced down the stairwell from the roof to the third floor. Back in his room, he replicated the maneuver he had used to rappel down the wall.

Less danger of being spotted now, because the room faced away from the street. The descent proved trickier this time, however, encumbered as he was with his babbling burden squirming in the makeshift sling. On the ground, murmuring softly to keep Frederick pacified, he jerked the rope free of its third-floor anchor. With one arm steadying his passenger, he loped for the sanctuary of the still-purring snowcat.

Even as he thanked his lucky stars for the prolonged blackout, Silver Hill’s lights glowed faintly and then arced to brilliant illumination. That meant someone had discovered his sabotage in the power shed.

He turned up the volume on the two-way radio he had taken off the watchman in the maintenance barn and heard guards from various locations reporting in. Mid-way to the maintenance barns, dividing his attention between driving and exchanging meaningless verbiage with a now-wide-awake Frederick, he veered off the road. Gunning the snowcat to pick up all the speed he dared without headlights and on treacherous off-road terrain, he threaded his way through old-stand Douglas fir to the ravine that the winding road circumvented. They would find his tracks and, he hoped, assume that he was trying to save time by cutting cross-country and didn’t know about the ravine.

In the darkness, distracted by Frederick’s renewed whining and the boy’s struggle to squirm free of his sling, Alex miscalculated and almost drove into the ravine. Realizing that he was going too fast, he gunned the engine while wrenching the control stick to the side and then hit the brakes. The snowcat slid to a halt parallel to the ravine’s lip.

“Freddy,” he murmured, gripping the control stick and taking slow, deep breaths, “your mama would shoot me if she knew how close I came to closing the book on your life.” When he trusted himself to move, he opened the door and discovered they were too close to the ledge to dismount from the driver’s side. He climbed out the other side and found a spot for Frederick at the foot of a big pine tree where adjacent evergreens had sheltered fallen pine needles from blowing snow.

With the irate, increasingly vocal youngster wrapped tightly in his blanket, Alex sliced a strip from the blanket, pushed all but three inches of the woolen sliver into the snowcat’s fuel tank, and pulled it partway back out. When he lit the fabric, the flame would have to consume the unsaturated wool to get to the gasoline. The snowcat would become a firebomb with a delayed fuse. At least he hoped it would.

Using a large evergreen bough that he cut from a tree, he swept away snowy traces of their narrow escape on the ravine’s lip. Then he placed the bough under the tree by Frederick.

Frederick, his movements hampered by the blanket, writhed and shouted what could only be baby-talk curses.

Alex tried to calm the furious boy while cocooning him more securely in the blanket. “Have patience, Freddy.”

But Frederick was out of patience. Screaming his outrage at the lack of mobility, he struggled to escape his wrappings.

Alex caressed the wrath-twisted little face. “I’ll be just a minute.” Backing and turning the snowcat, he positioned it head-on toward the ravine on the path that had led him to near disaster minutes earlier. Busy radio traffic told him he was out of time. With a slender evergreen limb jamming the snowcat’s throttle a third of the way down, he lit the gasoline tank’s blanket-strip fuse. Then he reached inside the cab and shifted the transmission into drive.

He had guessed right about the makeshift fuse, but just barely. A geyser of flame erupted from the fuel tank’s nozzle a split-second before the snowcat plummeted over the embankment. The tank ruptured halfway down the wall, when the heavy vehicle hit a boulder, twisted, and began tumbling sideways. The plunge ended in a spectacular orange fireball.

The pyrotechnics entranced Frederick. He had worked off his blanket and crawled the two or three feet to where snow covered the ground but had ventured no farther. Only flannel pajamas with attached booties kept the frigid air at bay, but he did not seem to feel the cold. Before the gasoline tank exploded, his crying had escalated to screams. Now he mouthed a nonstop stream of garbled syllables that Alex wished he could decipher.

The explosion also ignited Silver Hill’s security force. Radio traffic became frenetic, and a motorized din rumbled from higher up the mountain. Through the mounting engine noises, Alex heard the
whoosh, whoosh
of slowly revolving helicopter blades slicing cold air. Within minutes the helicopter would be airborne, its sodium-vapor searchlight sweeping the ravine’s lip, turning night into day.

Over Frederick’s vigorous protests, Alex re-bundled his young charge and walked backward into the shelter of the tree line, sweeping away footprints with the evergreen bough as he went. In the light of day a security team could read signs more clearly, and the night was uncommonly still, with no wind to disturb telltale marks in the snow. Faust would realize that Alex had bailed out of the snowcat. But the deception would buy sorely needed time.