Hunted, p.21
Hunted, page 21
What was he doing?
A rumble came from somewhere outside.
What was he waiting for?
The noise outside grew louder: the roar of engines; the crunch of gravel.
“Yusuf,” she said gently, “you don’t have to do this. I promise you, we will sort this out.”
She heard the sound of his breathing, heavy, labored.
“Yusuf… just let me go. I’ll make sure you’re not harmed.”
Slowly, she got to her feet.
“Untie me.”
From outside came shouts.
She felt the tips of his fingers on her wrists, the cord rubbing against her skin.
Loosening.
The barn door crashed open.
She turned to see Kramer burst in, gun raised. Ghani too turned toward her, the hammer still in his hand. She struggled to read Kramer’s expression. Shreya shouted to her, tried to get between her and Ghani. Two shots rang out. Deafening. Disorienting. Shreya fell to the dirt-packed floor and saw blood.
CHAPTER 37
Sajid
“A searchlight,” he said.
An incandescent pillar reached down like a summons from Allah. Except its point of origin was not the heavens.
“A helicopter.”
It could not be a coincidence.
Carrie was at his shoulder.
“You don’t think…?”
He did not want to consider too deeply what it meant. For now, the only course of action was to follow it.
The sparse lights of Ripplebrook sped past, only to be replaced once more by the blanket of night. The road forked. He turned left, toward the light and the thrum of the rotors. They crested a ridge and he saw it: the searchlight, trained like a laser on the roof of a house, the area around it turned from night into day. Close by, a kaleidoscope of lights circled, flashing red and blue like a fairground ride.
Carrie let out a cry. He knew that pain. He knew the despair. He felt it too. This was the place they had risked everything to find.
All in vain. All maybe just an hour too late.
“We should stop here,” he told her.
“What? We can’t. We need to keep going! Greg’s down there. I know he is. Your daughter too!”
He understood her anger. The frustration, the rage born of impotence, all of it. He shared it, yet his fury was tempered by experience, by years of helplessness, a life of being subject to the arbitrary caprices of others. He gestured to the scene.
“It is too dangerous to venture any closer. If we are stopped, no one will believe we were simply passing by.”
He braked sharply and pulled over to the roadside. In the silence, the pitch of what he assumed was the helicopter’s engine changed: rising, increasing to a roar. He looked up through the windscreen as a second helicopter buzzed directly overhead.
“What now?”
He heard the fear in her voice.
The new arrival seemed to dance around the first, circling wider, its own searchlight fanning across a wider area. He reached for the radio, pressing seek and scanning the frequencies, ignoring the music stations and concentrating on those broadcasting the spoken word until he found it: the breathless cadences of a news reporter, shouting to be heard over the sounds of rotor blades.
Carrie slammed a fist against the car door.
“This is your answer? We sit here and listen while they arrest our kids?”
He did not know what to say. And really, it was his answer, by dint of there being no better alternative. What else was he supposed to do?
The road behind them lit up. Headlight beams filled the car. He turned in his seat, shielding his eyes. His entrails turned to ice.
Police.
They would surely stop; would surely question them: what were they doing sitting out here in the dark in the middle of nowhere? They would ask to see their identification and that would be it.
The headlights drew nearer, brighter, mesmerizing, filling his field of vision.
He turned to Carrie.
“I need to open the bonnet.”
“The what?”
“The hood! ”
He was already bending forward and reaching for the lever.
Even as the thick, metallic clunk of the release reverberated, he was pulling at the door handle and climbing out of the car. He darted forward and lifted the bonnet.
The lights were almost on top of them: full beams, blinding white. The vehicle drew level. He held his breath. It sped past spitting gravel, in seconds just a smear of red tail lights in the dark. Another followed it, then a third. He recognized a logo painted on the side. The same logo as had graced the umbrella of the young journalist who had confronted him outside Paddington Green police station in the rain.
He waited until the convoy had passed, their lights dancing and disappearing into the distance, then stepped back and pulled down the bonnet. He took a breath and walked slowly back to his open door.
The voice on the radio was still pouring forth: agents had entered the house, were searching the grounds, entering a barn. And then the tenor changed.
“There’s movement… they’re bringing someone… it looks like a body on a stretcher…”
An overwhelming hollowness took hold of him, as though his chest might cave in.
Carrie seemed to read his thoughts.
“It might not be either of them.”
“Yes,” he said automatically.
But what if it was? How would he explain that to Rumina? That he had come so close, risked so much, and still failed. In his breast it felt as though his heart might tear asunder. A gasp of despair ripped through him, escaping as though it were part of his very soul.
He felt suddenly embarrassed, ashamed of showing such weakness in front of Carrie. It was important that he maintain at least the pretense of strength despite the anguish in his heart. Had life not taught him as much: when he had lost his parents; when he had fled his homeland; when Mia had first been hospitalized? He supposed it was simply the duty of a decent man: to show equanimity so that others might be allowed emotion. So that they might grieve, safe in the knowledge that he was there, a rock against the storm.
CHAPTER 38
Greg
Aliyah stared at him.
Before she could rise, he walked over to her and placed a hand over her mouth.
“Aliyah, listen to me.”
And then he heard the scream.
Not from her. From outside.
He stumbled to the window; saw Yusuf dragging a woman across the dirt toward the barn. Aliyah was on her feet now, rushing for the door. He lunged after her, caught her arm and dragged her to the window.
“I’m your only hope. You need to trust me.”
He saw the emotions play out as she stared out of the window.
“But this isn’t… Miriam said…”
“Miriam’s lying. We gotta go, now!”
She turned to him, and in that instant, he saw something change within her: a flicker of the eyes, a stiffening of her shoulders. Maybe she finally got it. Whatever it was she was thinking, it buoyed him.
She gave him a nod.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
He led her down the stairs as from somewhere outside came the growl of distant vehicles. Fear heightened his senses. There was no time to think. He led her to the kitchen and out the back, running through the mud, breathless till they’d hit the treeline. Now, behind him he heard the shouts of men and then gunshots. He glanced back but saw nothing in the darkness; no one pursuing them. At least not yet. They seemed to be concentrating on the house and the barn. It wouldn’t take them long to widen their search, throw a ring around the whole place. He and Aliyah needed to move. Fast.
They pushed on, ten minutes of nothing except the sound of their own ragged breathing, until finally they made it to the car.
“Are they dead?” she asked.
He didn’t know. He couldn’t believe that Miriam wouldn’t have prepared for this, that she wouldn’t have some kind of contingency plan. What mattered though was that they drive like hell; as far away from Estacada and Ripplebrook and Miriam and whoever else was after them. He’d figure the rest out later.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that Miriam was using you. Whatever it is she told you, it was a lie. She’s not some bleedin’-heart liberal goddess. She’s fucking ex-military. She’s right-wing as they come, and she’s got friends in high places. She sent Yasmin to die. And she’s got the same plan for you and Rehana.” Where was Rehana, for that matter? And where was Jack?
He asked her.
“They left.” Aliyah’s voice deadpan. “They were gone by the time Yusuf brought me back. Is Jack one, too?”
“One what?”
“A Nazi.”
He turned to her. Her eyes were fixed on his neck, its treacherous ink once more safely covered up.
The fucking tattoo.
“I…” He struggled to find the words. “There’re some things about my past I ain’t told you. I should’ve told you, but…” How was he supposed to explain it? It was better just to come out and tell her.
“After the attack… after Kandahar… when they shipped me back home… after the operations, when they told me I might not walk again, I ended up… in a very dark place. I was freaked, Aliyah. For months I was in a bed, with nothing to do but surf the goddamn internet. Fuck, I don’t know. It felt like my life was over. I needed to feel… I needed someone to blame. Okay? It wasn’t just the raghead Taliban bastards, it was the fault of all Afghans. All Muslims. It was stupid, really. They were just fighting us ’cause we were in their country, but that’s not how it felt.”
Why was he telling her this? He needed to get to the point.
“Anyway, after my recovery, I ended up back home, at my mom’s in Bronson; no job, no nothing, just a whole lot of shit in my head. I fell in with a bunch of punks—doin’ all sorts of shit for cash: stealing, mugging, armed robbery. They didn’t want me at first, on account of my leg. But I told ’em of my time in the army, and that I hadn’t been just some grunt. I’d been an engineer. I had skills. Skills they could use. I don’t even know why I was trying to impress them. They were a bunch of fuckin’ assholes. I guess it just felt good to be wanted; to be part of something. Long story short, me and two others were robbing a convenience store. The owner must’ve set off some kind of silent alarm because the next thing we know, there’s a cop car pullin’ up outside. One of the guys, Big Pete, panicked. He took a baseball bat to the head of the clerk. A minute later, the police were comin’ in the front and Pete and the other guy were runnin’ out the back. I couldn’t keep up of course, on account of the fucking leg, and ended up gettin’ caught and sent down for aggravated assault and robbery. It was in the pen that I got this thing.” He tilted his head to the side.
“You became a Nazi?”
The way she said it, the way she looked at him—he felt a hot wave of revulsion well up inside of him. Disgust at himself… but that wasn’t him. That had never really been him.
“It was about protection, self-preservation. When you’re inside, you gotta choose a side. If you don’t, you’ll end up dead.”
“And you just happened to choose a bunch of racists.”
“You think the blacks in there weren’t racist? Besides, I was still angry. Angry at everything, but I… I never believed in any of that shit. But that’s how I ended up with the ink.”
He stammered into silence, then felt the anger well up inside of him. He wasn’t on fuckin’ trial here. He’d just saved her life, whether she believed him or not.
“Look, I don’t care what you think of me. There’ll be time enough later for you to shout and scream and call me a son of a bitch, but right now… right now, we got to disappear.”
He felt the needle of her stare, yet kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead. It seemed to take an eternity for her to respond.
“And how do we do that?”
Now that was a good question.
He headed north, toward a place called Damascus. The road to Damascus. Where Saul had seen the light and become Paul. He might have laughed at the Sunday school simplicity of the irony. It wasn’t far. Less than twenty minutes on the 211; a little longer taking the back roads.
How long had it been since he was last here? Five months? Six? Not that long at all, and at the same time it was eons. An eternity. A different life.
The rain was coming down again. Not too heavy but uninterrupted. Fine by him. Suburban streets took shape. Familiar like old acquaintances. A few miles more, then a couple of turns and they’d be there.
She hadn’t said much since he’d told her about prison. Maybe she was still coming to terms with it. With all his shit. Or maybe she was just disgusted. Maybe that fucking swastika on his neck had changed everything between them. Maybe she’d run again, first chance she got.
And if she did, he’d a mind to let her go this time. Let her just do whatever the hell she wanted. You couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved. And then he was back full circle to Saul and Paul and the realization that no, if she ran, he’d go after her.
The turn was up ahead, beside the wreck of a blue mailbox that listed at a sixty-degree angle. He slowed and took the turn, following the road till he reached the house and garage at the end of it, then killed the engine.
“Where are we, Greg?”
“A friend’s place,” he told her.
He looked up at the house, at the hollow windows, at the screen door rusting on its hinges. No sign of life. Deader even than he remembered it.
“Come on.”
He reached for the handle, pulled his hood up and slowly maneuvered his legs out. He headed for the garage. The doors were unlocked, as they’d been for the best part of fifty years, he guessed. Slowly, carefully, he pushed them open, making sure not to put pressure on his bad knee, then stepped inside, welcomed by the smell of engine oil and the dust of ages.
He let out a breath.
“She’s still here.”
The sound of Aliyah’s footsteps behind him.
“Who?”
He flicked a switch on the wall. A striplight flickered to life.
“Who?” said Aliyah. Her tone stronger this time.
“She hasn’t got a name.”
He walked further into the garage and pulled at the corner of the dirty brown tarp, as he had done countless times before, in that other life. The one before Miriam. The sheet slid off and he gathered it and placed it beside the doors.
He turned and gazed at the convertible, its once smooth white paint job now bubbled in places with rust, its roof gray with age. It didn’t matter. He would never tire of looking at it. Aliyah too stared.
“What the fuck is that?”
“That,” he said like it was his own child, “is an Alfa Giulietta Spider.”
“It looks like a piece of shit. How old is it? A hundred?”
He ignored the sarcasm.
“Closer to sixty. It’s been in here for over half that.”
“I’m not surprised. It looks like a bloody death trap.”
She walked over to the car and rapped her knuckles off the bodywork. He flinched.
“It’s safe. Trust me.”
And it was. Sam Cotter had paid him good money to fix it; good money for the parts and paint at any rate. The work, well, that was a labor of love on his own account. It would have been nice to have finished the job—maybe some new panels where the rust had turned the sheet metal into a colander; and he’d a hankering to paint it blue—but the Lord and pancreatic cancer had taken Sam, and he’d crawled back inside a bottle at the Hog’s Back and that was the end of that.
Come to think of it, he’d first met Sam at the Hog’s Back too. Just an old man, propping up the bar most afternoons. Beer-handed conversation along the counter which had turned into something resembling friendship, mainly because the two of them had nothing else in their lives.
“What are we doing here?”
Aliyah’s voice bringing him back to the present.
“We need a different car.”
“What’s wrong with the car we have?”
He headed back out of the garage, Aliyah running to keep up with him.
“Jack was driving it,” he said. “He’ll know the license plate. And if he knows it, then whoever he and Miriam are working with will know it. Half the damn country’s covered in cameras, and most patrol cars got some kind of software that recognizes license plates. Now there ain’t supposed to be any federal database that covers the whole country, but fuck that shit. We could be a thousand miles from here and some camera might pick up our plate and the Feds, or maybe Miriam’s friends, would know about it. We can’t take the risk.”
He opened the trunk of Jack’s car and pulled out the brown duffel bag with his and Aliyah’s clothes. That battered old bag had been through a lot. Almost as much as he had. He closed the trunk and headed back into the garage. The keys to the Alfa were in the footwell, just where he’d left them. The trunk opened with a squeal of metal and he stowed the bag. He turned to find Aliyah staring at him.
“So this is your answer? This prehistoric heap of junk?”
“It’s not junk.”
He ran his hand over the coachwork. He knew every dent, every gnarl, every welt. Aliyah might know books and state capitals and chess moves, but he knew cars, and this one was special. Just as important, it was clean and taxed and no one would be looking for it. And it was free of chips and sensors and all the other shit they stuck in vehicles these days. It was an analogue machine in a digital world and it would get them out of Oregon.
“What matters is it won’t show up on any databases as stolen. It’ll buy us time.”
“But look at it. It’s not exactly inconspicuous.”
He gave her the merest hint of a smile. The car was making him feel good.
“Trust me. By the time we need to ditch it, we’ll be a couple of states away.”
