The Tower (1999) (46 page)

The platform clicked to a halt when it hit Level One. Now it was all set. Once he was a safe distance away, Allander would call in with the cell phone in his pocket, and the current would trip the primer, which would trip the dynamite. With the diesel drum containing the initial explosion, the whole thing would go. The shock wave should blast the walls right off the Tower. And Claude and the guard along with them.

A squeal rose in his throat, and he ran back to the edge, looking down at Jade.

"The dance ends here, Marlow!" he shouted. "We bring this show to a close upon the same stage on which it began." He screamed his words to be heard over the crash of the waves. "There are three things I have on you right now, Marlow," he yelled. "Just three."

Jade looked up at him, but couldn't muster the strength to speak.

"A bomb . . . a detonator"--Allander held his arms up to the moon, the cell phone glinting in his hand--"and your gun." He pulled out the Glock and waved it in the air.

Jade clenched his eyes until he saw white dots dancing across the darkness. Of course. Blasting caps and dynamite to blow out the rock from the cranes back at Maingate. Fuel from the water pump. The fertilizer scattered by the stairs back at the house. A Timothy McVeigh special. How could he have missed it?

They had practically given Allander all the pieces of the bomb right here. Right at the prison.

He glanced down and saw the speedboat knocking against the base of the Tower. Allander could dive in, swim to the boat, and dial in to detonate once he was a safe distance away. And Jade was too weak to do anything but watch him.

Allander stepped from the parapet to the top rung of the ladder, fanning his arms to balance himself. "I am Allander Atlasia!" he yelled. He lowered the pistol so it was pointing at Jade's forehead, taking a long, last look into Jade's eyes. "Hope you said your prayers."

A wave of terror flooded Jade's body for the first time since he had begun the case. Allander was going to shoot Jade and escape. He'd be free, leaving nothing behind but a watery blast. Jade looked up into the bore of the pistol, tightening his hands around the steel railings until his biceps felt as if they were going to burst. Shoving with his legs and arms, he jerked back on the loose ladder with all his might. It shifted, rolling under Allander's feet.

Allander screamed, his arms flailing madly. The pistol fired once up into the air, kicking from his grasp and falling away. He tottered on the rung, trying desperately to throw his weight back toward the Tower. When he'd resigned himself to the fall, a calm washed over him. He tapped the bulge of the cell phone in his pocket, smiled, and leaned forward in a dive.

Jade roared as the body flew toward him, Allander's eyes open, a serene smile curling his lips. Jade could tell he would pass inches out of his reach from the ladder and would land in the water mere yards from the boat.

Seeing Allander escape was too much agony for Jade to bear, and before he was aware of what he was doing, he had wedged his leg against the stone behind a steel rung and had pushed his torso away from the Tower.

Allander's eyes went wild with fear as he saw the impossibly outstretched arms and clutching fingers shoot at him as he neared. He let out a high-pitched scream as Jade caught him, his fingers grasping Allander's shirt and pants. Jade's torso was extended horizontally from the Tower wall, his leg the only thing keeping him from dropping to death by water below.

Jade held Allander weightlessly for a moment, savoring the feel of the fabric between his fingers. Then, as the force of Allander's fall pulled them downward, Jade tightened his leg with all his might and rotated both their bodies around the point of his wedged knee. Bellowing, he let Allander's momentum carry him down and into the stone wall.

Allander's face met the stone of the Tower and came apart instantly, his nose driven back through its hole, his cheekbones shattering, his forehead giving way to the cracking lines of his skull.

The moment Allander's face struck the Tower, Jade's leg snapped. He heard it before he felt it, heard it even over the dull thud of Allander's head imploding, and the pain was unlike anything he had ever felt. He released his grip on Allander's body and it drifted away from him, down to the ocean.

For a moment, the ocean buoyed Allander on its breast, his shirt flapping in the wind like a wounded bird. A pool of crimson flowered from his head. Then, with excruciating slowness, the body sank from view until, from his upside-down perch near the top of the Tower, Jade could no longer discern where its outline ended and the ocean began. Dangling from one grotesquely bent limb, he watched even the body's wake disappear into the swells.

He was suddenly struck with an overwhelming exhaustion that left him too weak to consider moving. He prayed that his leg would not give way entirely. Every time his body swayed in the wet wind, a pain beyond description tightened its grasp on his insides.

He hung from one thin steel rung for over ten minutes before, through the thick haze clouding his mind, he heard the chopping approach of a helicopter.

Chapter
59

D A R B Y woke up alone in bed for one of the first times in thirty-eight years. She instinctively turned to her left to extend her arm across Thomas's chest before she remembered he wasn't there.

She rose from her bed with the routinized motions of a woman living alone, and pulled on a robe. She went to the kitchen, put coffee on, and called the hospital, just as she had done every day this week.

"Good morning, love. How are you feeling?"

Thomas's voice was not quite right. It would never be right again, never the voice that had wooed her and carried her in sickness and in health. But that seemed a small price to pay to have her husband alive, so she buried her sorrow beneath her gratitude.

His larynx had been severely injured, and it had taken a delicate surgery to get him to the point where he could speak at all. But he had remained optimistic all the way through, reassuring her with his eyes when he couldn't with his words.

"Oh, great. Or should I say, stable?" Thomas laughed a dry, croaking laugh. "Just three more weeks in, love."

Darby smiled. "And one more operation."

Thomas tried to laugh, but it came out a dull wheeze. "Oh yeah. Nose job, right?"

Darby laughed softly and tears moistened her eyes. "I'm leaving in five."

"Okay. I love you."

Her voice cracked and she struggled to keep it from shaking. "I love you too."

She hung up and sat on the couch in the living room, sipping her coffee. The very couch where they had met Jade time and time again, she realized, where he had helped them in his own guarded way.

She had come to care greatly for Jade. She had come to respect him and almost love him. She knew that some part of her emotions had to do with his role in protecting them, and some part had to do with her son. Though she didn't understand, entirely, her feelings for Jade, she sensed them, as if through a fog that wouldn't lift. It saddened her that they would never see Jade again. There was too much there for her, too much there for them. He had freed them, finally and painfully, from a lifelong ache, but she could never forgive him for it.

She heard the soft rattling of the mail truck outside and she rose and went to the door. It was a splendid morning, she thought as she moved down the walkway to the mailbox.

Turning to face the sun, she fanned through the mail. Mostly bills and mailers. At the bottom of the stack was a plain white envelope, her name and address written neatly in black.

Opening the envelope confirmed it: a single earring.

Placing it back in the envelope, she crumpled them together into a ball and walked over to the trash can at the end of the driveway. She lifted the lid and tossed the small ball of metal and paper inside.

She whistled softly to herself as she headed back inside, closing her eyes and tilting her face to the sun. It was a splendid morning.

Chapter
60

T H E room was dark, as always. Once again, Travers sat in the gloom, across the desk from Wotan. She held a thick folder in her lap.

She inhaled deeply and continued. "Well, sir, that just about covers it."

"Very well," Wotan said softly.

"We've placed Marlow's money in an account that he can claim when he gets out of the hospital." Travers cleared her throat. "Although we're not really sure when he'll get out, sir. I put in an order to cover his full medical expenses."

"Very well."

"He did . . ." Travers tilted her head back a little, biting her bottom lip. "He did a good job, sir."

Wotan nodded once, running his fingertips over the dry socket of his eye. "Put the file to rest," he said, turning his attention back to some papers on his desk. A long silence ensued as Travers watched him work.

"I didn't understand it before, sir. Your faith in him. Marlow. How did you know?"

The room was quiet for so long that she began to wonder if Wotan was going to respond. Just as she was rising to leave, he looked up from his desk. He picked the bullet slug from the ashtray and held it up in the dim light.

"Do you know what this is, Agent Travers?"

She shook her head.

"It's a slug. Early in my marriage, when my wife was still alive, my girl was kidnapped. She was my . . . our only child. Four years old. She had just learned to ride a bicycle with training wheels alone to the end of the street." He spoke with no emotion at all, as if reciting a memorized passage.

"Marlow was a young agent at the time, fresh out of Quantico. It was his first kidnapping case. He pursued her kidnapper with such determination and vengeance that I could have sworn the burden was his instead of mine."

Travers listened tensely. "And he saved her, sir?"

"When he found her kidnapper, my child had already been raped and killed." Wotan stared directly into Travers's eyes, refusing to flinch.

Travers finally looked away.

"When they meet the devil, they always bring something back," Wotan said. "Marlow brought this back to me." He held the slug between his thumb and forefinger and then gripped it tightly in his fist. He looked back down at the papers on his desk. "Do you think we'll be seeing him again, Agent Travers?"

Travers looked down at her hands, in her lap. "I hope so, sir. I hope so," she said, then stood and walked to the back wall. She twirled the combination lock through a series of numbers, then used a key that she'd removed from her pocket. She swung the metal door open and rolled out a tray with raised edges. It protruded into the room like a small morgue slab. Laying the file carefully inside, she tapped it once with an open hand and then slid the vault shut, slamming the door.

She walked across the room to turn the large metal wheel of the exit door, and left without saying a word.

Wotan sat alone, the darkness settling around him like a cloak. In the dark, he cracked the knuckles of his right hand with his thumb. They snapped loudly, the sound echoing off the hard walls. He made a fist with his thumb inside and tightened it, cracking the joint. He repeated the same ritual with his left hand. Then he stood and walked to the door.

The light cast from the small fixtures in the room did not touch him. He did not maneuver to miss the light, but it seemed the shadows came to meet him, laying themselves over his body and across his path. He turned the wheel and the lock disengaged with a click.

He stepped out into the corridor, and just before the thick metal door closed behind him, his hand crept back through the small gap into the empty room. It groped on the wall for a moment, then found what it was looking for. He flicked the wall switch and the room was flooded with light.

Chapter
61

W I T H his lower body wrapped in a hardened cast, one leg in traction, stitches threaded through his left cheek, and an incessant hammering in his temples and ears, Jade looked at the bare white walls of his room and the single plastic tray before him, and wondered why he was alive.

So far, his only happiness during his days in the hospital had come from his recollections of the case. He had heard the shattering of Allander's skull, he had felt it in every muscle of his body, and he still heard the gory crunch and felt the dull vibration in his dreams and his drugged hours awake.

He knocked the tray across the room with a hand wrapped in a soft bandage and winced in pain as it clattered on the tiled floor.

This room was his new home, it seemed. He pictured his house sitting empty, an occasional breeze blowing through the back screen and shaking the pictures taped to the walls. It seemed so far away.

He thought that Travers had come to see him, but now he wasn't sure if it had been a dream. It had seemed real; he thought he remembered her oddly sad face looking at him, the lingering touch of her fingers across the scar on his cheek.

She had smiled at him, though her eyes remained sad. "You beat yourself up pretty good, Marlow. Guess you don't need me around to do it for you."

And he had tried to answer her, but his voice had been thick with sleep and drugs. It was so hard for him to turn to face her, to shift out of the indentation his body had pressed into the mattress. After what seemed an eternity, he made the words come out: "Maybe I didn't handcuff you just to piss you off."