Cover of Night (42 page)

“Which puts an entirely different outlook on Mr. Layton’s disappearance,” said Creed. “If they’d known about the window, they’d have realized he bolted, and logic says he took what they’re looking for with him. So now they think you still have it, and even if you tell them differently, they won’t believe you, not after all this.”

All this. Seven people dead. Creed wounded. An untold amount of damage to houses and vehicles, all for something that wasn’t even here. Suddenly overwhelmed, Cate buried her face in her hands and wept.

Yuell Faulkner was more worried than he’d ever been in his life. He hadn’t been able to get in touch with either Toxtel or Goss for three days now. He’d sent them on a simple retrieval, but they’d been gone a week. They should have been back days ago.

Bandini would be expecting to hear from him, and Yuell had nothing to tell him. He couldn’t say they’d recovered the flash drive or that they’d found Layton—nothing.

He was spooked; he admitted it. He left a light on in his office to make it look as if he were still there, in case anyone was watching the window, and left by a basement exit that put him in an alley. Fine with him. He wasn’t getting in his car and leading any watchers to his home, anyway.

He walked a couple of blocks and hailed a cab. After thirty minutes of aimlessly driving in circles, he got out, walked another couple of blocks, and got another cab. He watched carefully both times. No one appeared to be following. He took the precaution of exiting that taxi several blocks from his home and waited until it was out of sight before he turned in the correct direction.

At last he let himself into his house. The dark, familiar spaces enfolded him. Usually he could relax here, but until he heard from either Toxtel or Goss he wouldn’t be able to relax anywhere. Damn it, did he need to go out to
Idaho
himself? If they’d screwed up, why hadn’t they just called and admitted it? He’d think of something, some way to fix the situation, but he had to know what was going on.

He turned on a lamp and thought longingly of a nice stiff drink, but he needed to be in top form if anything went down. No drinks at all for him until he heard—

“Faulkner.”

Yuell didn’t turn toward the voice, the way most people would have. He dove to the side, toward the doorway.

It didn’t work. The cough of a silenced weapon only slightly preceded an explosion of pain in his back. He forced himself to keep rolling, moving through the pain and shock, and felt another bullet enter. His legs jerked wildly, spasming out of control, and he crashed heavily into the wall. He tried to reach for his weapon, but nothing was where it was supposed to be and his hand sort of floated in the air, grasping at emptiness, which was damn stupid.

A dark, faceless shape loomed over him, but Yuell knew who it was. He knew that voice, had heard it in his nightmares.

The shape pointed at his face, and there was another cough, but Yuell didn’t hear that one—or anything else, ever again.

CAL LAY ON HIS STOMACH TO THE NORTH OF WHERE HE’D mentally marked the location of the farthest firing position. It was a good place. Strategically, it was where he would have placed a shooter if he wanted to prevent someone from coming down that side of the land spit and either making it into the cut or slipping behind him. The long, narrow groove was like a bowling alley lane, without a lot of great cover—for thermal scopes, that is. He’d guessed right about them switching to regular scopes and binoculars during the day, though, and it took a sniper a helluva lot more skilled than these old boys to spot him when he didn’t want to be spotted.

Creed had always called him a naturally sneaky son of a bitch. Nice to know some things never changed.

He had waited, wanting to see when the shifts changed. The first night he had counted four different firing positions, but after that only two—the two most strategically placed to knock off anyone trying for the cut. No one could man those positions nonstop for three and a half days without being relieved and do any kind of a decent job. Not only did you need sleep, you needed food and water and the occasional trip behind the bushes. If you popped enough speed, you could stay awake that long, but you’d be hallucinating, shooting at ghosts, so paranoid you’d shoot your own self for spying, so he discounted that possibility. Either the shooters were asleep during the day, or someone was relieving them. Four shooters the first night, two after that. The math was simple. They were splitting shifts.

That left a big gap in coverage over toward the bridge, and Mellor had gone to too much trouble to make that kind of mistake. There would be another guard positioned at the bridge, armed with shorter-range weapons; that meant continuing with the two-shifts per twenty-four hours theory, two more men, for a total of six.

Six men, six civilians, meant at least two vehicles, probably more. They would be parked nearby, but off-road where they couldn’t be spotted in case anyone going to Trail Stop came along. Likely someone would, if they hadn’t already. Conrad and Gordon Moon really liked Cate’s muffins and usually made the drive at least once a week. Maybe Cate had guests scheduled to arrive. There could be a big pretense about the bridge collapse, the power and phone lines being out because of it, but that charade wouldn’t last for long.

These guys had to know they were hard up against the wall, time-wise, and they would move against the people in Trail Stop soon, against Cate, because they thought she had what they were looking for. He would have preferred not to send her back to Trail Stop, but there had been no other place. She couldn’t have come with him, and she couldn’t have stayed on the mountain; she had to have food and shelter. At least if she was in Trail Stop, Creed would look out for her.

Night would be the best time for these men to move. They had the thermal scopes; they could see what they were shooting at. But they’d made a tactical error by blowing the bridge, and the difficultly in crossing the stream went both ways. He’d had to go half a mile upstream to find a place where he could cross without being swept off his feet. They’d made another tactical error by waiting; now the townspeople had organized some barricades where
Cal
had shown them, they had spread out, and they were mad as hell.

Still, when shooting started, anything could happen, and Cate was over there.

He had two choices: slip by the three on watch, locate their vehicles, take care of the three who would probably be there resting, and go for help; or take out all six, one by one, make it look as if they’d turned on each other, and
then
go for help. He could do it; he could set that scene with no problem at all. He really liked that idea a lot. He didn’t want a single one of these bastards getting out alive.

Generally he was an easygoing guy, but you didn’t want to piss him off. Right now, he was pissed off, big time.

He kept an eye on his watch. The shift changes wouldn’t be at dumb-ass times like
nine AM
and
nine PM
; they would be straight-up-and-down times like
noon
and
midnight
, or
six AM
and
six PM
. If he didn’t see any movement at
six PM
, that meant each shooter had been on watch since
noon
and was tired, but would be on duty for another six. A smart tactician would have staggered them, had one position swapping out at noon and midnight and the other swapping on the sixes, so one was always fresh while the other was tiring, but most people went for simplicity—and predictability. It boggled the mind.

At
six PM
, all was quiet. He didn’t detect any activity.

Too bad. If a fresh shift had come on at six, he’d have waited until
midnight
, let them get tired, and they would all have lived a little longer.

As silent as a snake, each movement slow and deliberate, Cal crawled higher on the mountain, above where he’d marked the shooting locations, and began a meticulous grid search, looking for the first shooter.
Cal
had taken care to disguise his silhouette, with the olive drab blanket draped around him. He’d cut strips off the blanket and tied them around his hands and fingers, both for warmth and to keep him from leaving any telltale fingerprints on anything. Another strip was tied around his head, and small branches and leaves were stuck under the strip. When he was still, the naked eye would pass right over him.

Time passed and he didn’t see anything. He began to wonder if either he’d mistaken the location or they’d moved around; if the latter, he might well be screwed and someone was drawing a bead on his head right now. But his head remained unexploded, and he continued his painfully slow crawl, looking for something, anything, that would betray the shooter’s position.

There was a faint glint of metal about fifteen feet ahead and to the right, then a tiny green glow that immediately winked out. The stupid asshole had lit up his watch to check the time.
Dumb
. You didn’t wear a watch that had to be backlit; you wore one with luminous hands and covered the face with a peel-back flap. The devil was truly in the details, and that little detail had just betrayed the shooter. Otherwise it was a good position; the guy was prone, which made a more stable platform for shooting, and he had good cover in the rocks. His head didn’t stick up above the rocks, which was why
Cal
hadn’t spotted him before.

The guy was totally focused on a slow, continuous sweep with the scope, even after all these hours. He didn’t sense
Cal
’s nearness, even when
Cal
was just a whisper away. He died without even knowing Death had come calling, his spinal cord snapped at C-2.

It was a difficult maneuver to perfect. It required skill, technique, and a lot of strength. Another obstacle to mastery was that not many people were stupid enough to let you practice on them. For that reason, it was often practiced in real-time situations, where a mistake could be costly.

The guy just went limp, the stink telling
Cal
he was dead, though the audible snap had been proof enough for him. He patted the body until he found the hunting knife on the man’s belt, which he’d known would be there. He drew the knife and inspected it as much as he could. It would do. He slipped the knife inside his belt and hoped to hell he didn’t accidently stick himself, then quietly heaved the guy up and over the rocks, as if he’d slipped. It happened. Too bad.

He picked up the man’s rifle and put it to his shoulder, his eye to the scope as he scanned the mountainside, looking for the bright glow of thermal signatures. Aha. The next position was a hundred yards away and somewhat lower, for flatter, more accurate shooting. Farther still, about where he judged the bridge to be, was another flare of light. That was it. Three, just as he’d thought. He scanned higher and lower, making certain. Nothing, except for some small animals and a couple of deer.

The rifle was a fine piece of work; it felt like magic in his hands, the balance perfect. Regretfully, he held it over the rocks and let it join the guy who had owned it. Now it really did look like an accident, as if the guy had stood up to take a piss, tripped, and went headlong down the rocks, taking his rifle with him.

Silently, he began stalking the next shooter.

Goss could feel it all going to hell. He sat in the tent playing
Texas
hold ’em with Teague and his cousin, Troy Gunnell, but his mind wasn’t on the game and he was losing regularly.

Toxtel was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After telling the old guy what they wanted, they had heard…nothing. Not a peep out of them. You couldn’t negotiate with people who wouldn’t talk. They hadn’t seen any movement over there lately, either, but Goss knew damn good and well they were moving around behind those fortifications they’d thrown up. They had somehow retrieved their dead. Teague had said they’d either drenched themselves with icy water or somehow mounted some kind of rolling barricade they could hide behind, which sounded like something out of a movie about a medieval war, so Goss went with the simplest explanation: water.

Teague was so proud of those fucking scopes, and they could be fooled by cold water. Great.

Teague was sort of losing it, too. He looked like hell, and he was popping ibuprofen as if they were candy. But he was functioning, and except for being obsessed with this guy Creed, he made sense when he talked. His three pals didn’t seem to notice anything funny about him, so maybe it was only that he was still dealing with the effects of a concussion. Having been there himself just a week ago, Goss could sympathize.

Today two guys had come blowing down the road as blithely as if they hadn’t driven around the fucking Bridge Out sign back at the highway. Yeah, they’d seen it, but thought it could have been there by mistake. Any idea how long it would take to repair the bridge? A couple of days, maybe?

They were just the sort of dimwits, Goss thought, who would complain long and loudly to anyone they thought could get the bridge fixed. Any day now, someone with the highway department would show up.

Maybe there was some sort of cosmic soup from which they all drew the same thoughts, because Teague suddenly said, “Your guy looks ready to flip out.”

Goss shrugged. “He’s under a lot of pressure. He’s never failed to deliver before, plus he and the boss go back a long ways together.”

“He’s let his ego get involved.”

“I know.” He had quietly helped that by spurring Toxtel on at every opportunity, agreeing with the most asinine of ideas, putting the most extreme twist on any view Toxtel came up with. Toxtel wasn’t an idiot, far from it, but his pride was at stake and he didn’t know how to back down because he’d never
had
to back down before. An unbroken string of successes could become a handicap if it went on too long, because a guy lost perspective.

Toxtel had definitely lost perspective.

Maybe it was time to end this and move on, Goss thought, suddenly feeling cheerful at the idea. There was no way the lid could be kept on this fiasco. Too many people had died, too much damage had been done. All he had to do was make certain this blew back on Faulkner, and that was the easiest thing in the world to do.