The Sleeper (20 page)

There was no one in my rearview mirror; no sign of a tail. “Happy now, Griffin, you motherfucker?” I shouted. “They took the bait. Yes, indeed. Now you gonna help me get Miriam back?” The mirror was still empty.

The culvert where I parked was about a quarter mile from the stand of trees and Jeffers' Rocks, but on the far side of a low rise. The creek bed made a deep cut in the ground and gave pretty good cover up to within the last sixty yards or so. I crept forward, stalking the stalkers until I had a clear view of their positions. The Chevy Impala I'd seen at dawn was parked in the shade of the cottonwoods. No other cars were visible. Whoever was there had been there for at least four hours—and before Miriam was taken. It looked like one man was seated behind the wheel. Another was smoking a cigarette about fifteen feet away from the car, waiting.

There had to be at least one more, maybe two.

There—I saw a flash like a shiny coin in the sun and knew it was the lens of a telescopic sight down near the ground among the cornstalks, just about a hundred yards away from the trees. That shooter was in prone position with a good field of fire. And was there another? Where?

A pair of crows soared over the treetops, dancing angrily through the air, cawing and diving, then suddenly breaking away, then coming back on the attack, like they were protecting a nest. There—high in the biggest cottonwood, a man crouched easily in the branches like a frog on a stick, but with an AK at the ready. So the site was covered. And it didn't look like Miriam was anywhere near it.

The time was eleven forty-eight. I worked my way back to the truck. I left the shotgun and ammo behind the seat and put the knife in the glove compartment. Then I jogged out to Route 70 and walked up to the turnoff for Jeffers' Rocks. Unarmed and empty-handed I approached the trees.

The guy with the cigarette saw me coming a long way off. He was short and dark, wiry, maybe Indian or Pakistani, and clean-shaven with features a little like a weasel. When I got close enough to see his black eyes, he pulled an automatic pistol out of his belt and walked toward me. “You bring it?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Where is my little girl?”

“Did you bring the Sword?”

“No.
Did you bring my daughter?
”

“The Sword.
Now!
” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and held it up with his left hand. “I call and your child dies,” he said through a veil of smoke.

“And innocent blood is on your hands,” I said, “and hell shall be your portion.” For a fraction of a second I saw the bloody living remains of Abu Zubayr, remembering what I had done to him when he threatened my baby. The vision gave me a grim sense of assurance.

“
Where
is the Sword?” said the guy with the cigarette.

“When my daughter is safe I'll take you to it.”

He stared at me blank-eyed and spit the cigarette onto the ground. He looked around at the open fields, maybe realizing how visible we were, and motioned toward the trees with his pistol. As we walked he put the cell phone to his head, waiting for a number to go through, waiting for a connection to a connection, I thought, electronic cutouts rerouting the call so police couldn't track it. That was why I hadn't recognized the area code. It was probably just some coin phone in a filling station parking lot in some state far away from me and from the caller.

“Hands on your head,” said the smoker as I walked in front of him. We were passing the car. The driver had a round, dark face and the untrimmed beard of a Salafi Muslim fundamentalist. I didn't look in the direction of the cornfield or up at the tops of the trees. No need. I knew both shooters had me in their sights.

The wolf-eyed man Betsy saw at the door, the man whose voice she recognized on the answering machine—I didn't think he was here at Jeffers' Rocks. And he was the man I wanted to see. He was the one I figured was giving the orders. He was the one who was on the other end of this little chain-smoking Pakistani creep's cell phone, maybe just down the road, or maybe halfway around the world.

“Let me talk to him,” I said. The smoker looked at me half annoyed, half puzzled, and kept jabbering in Arabic. Then he listened, his face twisting in an effort to hear and understand the phone.

“Let me talk to him,” I said again. The smoker waved his gun to make me back away. “I know what you want,” I said.

Still the smoker concentrated on the phone, but now his eyes focused more clearly on me, and the gun in his right hand was raised with more purpose, pointed straight at my face. Reflexively, I backed up against the tree—the same tree, I thought, where the AK shooter was up in the branches. He wouldn't be sitting so solidly if he was trying to keep me in his sights. Hard to aim past all those branches. And with us here in the trees, the sniper in the cornfield wouldn't have a clear shot either.

The smoker put the muzzle of his pistol right up against my heart, which was about at the level of his face, then stepped back, his arm straight out, sighting my chest. “
Tamam,
” he said into the phone: “Okay…” He was following orders step by step. He didn't have to think. But something was bothering him. He kept turning his gun on its side, flicking it with a wrist motion, a kind of gangsta-rap thing that made a good macho gesture in a video, but made this guy look real nervous. He was losing control. If he kept that up, I thought, he was going to kill me before he meant to. Now his eyes settled on mine and he listened to the voice on the phone, but he couldn't quite make out what was said. He was rubbing the side of the pistol with his thumb and flexing his three outside fingers. I watched the trigger. And his eyes. He'd lost focus, like he was trying to see across the miles and read his boss's lips.

I sidestepped and caught the wrist of his gun hand, twisting it behind his back in a move as old as kung fu. Like wrenching a turkey leg, I popped his right arm out of its socket and he gasped, voiceless with pain, and dropped the pistol, but he held on to the phone in his left hand like he thought Motorola—or the man at the other end—was going to save his life.

Bullets blasted down from the branches above us, but the biggest branch protected me in that first second. The Pakistani creep wasn't so lucky. His face and skull seemed to melt from the top down. I wiped a chunk of brain off my face. Some of the blood seeped into my mouth and I could taste the salt. Leaves floated through the air like autumn, cut by the rain of lead. I stayed close to the trunk of the tree, shifting position. The man in the branches didn't have any discipline. He was going to use up all the rounds in that AK just about—now.

For a second the click of the clip release was the loudest noise in that stand of trees. I dove for the smoker's 9-millimeter pistol, rolled, aimed, and fired. The shooter fell part of the way down, but was stopped, half-crucified, by the branches, the empty AK dangling from a strap over his shoulder.

The bearded driver was starting the Chevy's engine. From a prone position I was able to send one round through the windshield. He slumped back. The engine coughed and jerked and died.

The sniper in the corn wouldn't be able to get a clear shot at me as long as I was in the trees and as long as he stayed where I knew he was. But he was going to move. Might be moving now. If I sprinted for Crookleg Creek, I might make it, but then he would come hunting me, and if he had any skills at all he could catch me easy before I got to the culvert.

I pried the little Motorola out of the smoker's tobacco-and bloodstained fingers. There was no one on the other end of the line. I pushed the call button, redialing the last number, and I waited. A minute must have passed. I stared out at the corn for any sign of movement, but there was a light breeze rustling the stalks. I couldn't see anything that would give the sniper away.

“Mr. Kurtovic,” said the voice on the phone.

“That's right,” I said, surprised, and then surprised again a fraction of a second later when my own voice echoed back, electronic and hollow,
“That's right.”

“What has happened, Mr. Kurtovic?”

“Your men—
your men
—are dead—
are dead,
” I said. The echo was enough to make you crazy.

“
Some
of my men,” he said. “There are many left. And they will kill you, Mr. Kurtovic. And your daughter will have to die, too.”

“I am ready to give you—
give you
—what you want—
you want.
”

“You should have brought it with you.”

“You don't get anything unless you give me my daughter—
daughter.
”

“What do you propose?”

“Call off your man in the cornfield—
cornfield.
Call him off—
him off.
”

“And then what?”

A big chunk of wood exploded off the tree beside my head and sent splinters into my cheek. I hit the dirt and crawled toward the Rocks, expecting a second shot and a third, but they didn't come. I tasted blood again, but this time it was my own.

“You sound out of breath,” said the voice on the cell phone.

“Call him off,” I said, trying to talk over the echo and ignore it. Through the gaps in the trees I could see the cornfield, but still no sign of movement.

“I would like to hear your plan first, Mr. Kurtovic.”

I wondered if the voice and the sniper were the same. “It's now twelve-oh-nine,” I said. “If Miriam walks into the lobby of the Super 8 Motel at one o'clock—
o'clock.
I will know, and I will tell you, then—
then
—where to find the Sword of the Angel—
the Angel.
”

“Why should we trust you?”

“What choice do you have?—
you have?
”

“To kill everyone you love, and then you.”

“You'll always have that option, won't you?—
won't you?
But this is your one chance to get the weapon you want—
you want.
”

A single bullet ricocheted off the rocks a couple of feet away from my face.

“Was that one close?” asked the voice on the phone.

“Do you want the Sword—
the Sword?
”

“Yes. Keep the phone and call again from the motel.”

 

When I got back to the truck I was shaking from adrenaline, shaking like I couldn't control it. The sniper was out there watching, tracking, waiting for orders. The creek water was cool on my face as I washed off the blood. I toweled off with my T-shirt and put on an old blue-jean jacket I kept stuffed behind the seat. I put the killers' phone in one pocket and used my own phone to call Betsy.

“Have you got Miriam?” she said as soon as she picked up.

“Not yet, but I will. Have you got everything?”

“Got it.”

“Then meet me—”

“I got what you wanted and put it where you wanted. There's a room behind the old photo department. It's in there. But I don't want to see you again until you've got Miriam.” She hung up, and she didn't pick up again.

 

The six screens in the security office at the Super 8 monitored twenty-four cameras that flashed video of just about every angle outside the building, the main hallways inside, and the kitchen and laundry areas, too. The hotel's deputy manager, Ira Jacobsen, went to school with Betsy. I told him I was thinking of putting in a video security system at my house, and asked if I could watch how this one worked. Ira was friendly enough. “Sure,” he said. “You look like you could use some security. You're pretty beat up.” I just smiled and pulled up a chair, looking at the screens.

The portico was empty in the front of the hotel. There were only a half dozen cars in the lot behind. The hallways all looked pretty much the same. In one, a maid pushed a service cart. The front drive was still empty. I could see cars racing by on Route 70. None slowed or turned into the motel driveway.

I was so fixed on the front of the hotel that at first I didn't see the little kids walking through the parking lot in the back, walking in line, almost like a parade, just the way they learned to do for field trips at school. Now I saw them more clearly, and they looked frightened. Some of them were crying. They were the kids from Miriam's playgroup. But I didn't see the teacher, Mrs. Watkins. And I didn't see Miriam.

“Ira,” I called to the manager. “Ira, where is this camera pointed?”

“North parking lot,” he said. “Out the back.”

The kids were already inside the hotel, looking around, lost. One of them with long red pigtails, Charlene, was carrying a rolled-up piece of paper, like some painting she'd made at school.

“Where is Miriam?” I asked her.

Charlene shook her head. “She went away.”

“Where?”

Charlene started to cry, waving the paper. “Mrs. Watkins said to give this.” I picked her up, holding her against my chest while I unrolled it. “CALL NOW,” it said. The words were written in big crude letters like fingerpaint, but the color was reddish brown, like dried blood.

I punched the redial button on the killers' phone and waited, desperate for someone to pick up. “Mr. Kurtovic?” The man's voice.

“Yeah.”

“The service road. Now.”

I sprinted across the lot behind the hotel, vaulted the split-rail fence, and ran toward the only vehicle there, an old crew-cab Dodge pickup with a cap on the back. It was parked facing away from the motel, the engine running.

In the backseat was a gaunt, fair-skinned man with a shaved head, hollow-looking eyes, and barbed-wire tattoos that wrapped around his neck and the biceps on his arms. The driver in front had dark skin. I would have said he was Mexican or Central American. And he had three teardrop tattoos on his cheek. These men didn't look like pious Muslims to me, they looked like gang members. Then the one in the back looked down at his groin. Miriam was lying across his lap, and he held her down easily with one hand while he put the barrel of a .357 Magnum against the back of her head, pushing her face toward the seat.

I felt that kind of calm, almost like a trance, that comes with extreme anger. It's a different plane of hatred. Real quiet.

The driver made a gesture with his hand like he was talking on the phone. I put the Motorola to my ear.

“Get in the truck,” said the voice. “You and the little girl will get us what we want. And then we will be finished with you.”

“For good?”

“For good, Mr. Kurtovic.”