Deadfall (25 page)

Beside him, Dillon sniffed, and he realized the boy was crying. He had lost his father, which meant another success to Declan. He was sure there were others he didn't know about. He could not help but believe there was something about Phil,Terry, and himself that somehow neutralized Declan's power.

What was it? What had they done differently from David and Dillon's father? He had been there when David died. Had almost died himself. To find a common denominator, he needed to know more about how Dillon's dad had died. Regardless of how potentially crucial the details could be, he would never ask them of Dillon. He needed to find Laura. He could not return to town, and he had no way of knowing where she might be. She was with Terry and, he hoped, Phil, but now, after this much time, he didn't know where any of them were. Then it dawned on him.

“Dillon?”

The boy barely glanced at him. His eyes were red and leaking. He did not seem ashamed, as though his grief supplanted every other feeling in the spectrum of human emotion.

“Dillon, why do you want us to head north?”

In a small voice Dillon said, “There's a cabin.”

“A cabin? What about it?”

“Mom said to go there.”

“Then that's where we'll go.”

Dillon looked at him, really looked at him.

“If that's what you want, Dillon, that's what we'll do.Your mom is a smart lady, setting up something like that way before she could have known that you would ever need it.You want to go there?”

Dillon nodded.

“Do you know how to get to this cabin?”

Dillon nodded.

“Without . . . wait a minute . . . I have a map.” Hutch retrieved the vinyl topo map from his inside pocket. “Will this help?”

Dillon shook his head. “Don't need it. It's by the fire.”

“The fire?”

“Last year's fire. It burned miles of forest, but Dad and I went back to the cabin and it wasn't burned.The fire came really close, but it turned away. Dad said that proved the cabin was special.”

Hutch remembered flying over the burned land. How many miles from the campsite had their pilot said it was? He couldn't remember, but it wasn't too terribly far. Fiddler Falls and Black Lake had been evacuated, the pilot had said.

“Is it walking distance from your house?”

Dillon shook his head. “Dad takes a Jeep.”

“How long a drive is it?”

Dillon shrugged. “Couple hours.”

“Are the trails really bad? Like this one?” Hutch didn't want to go to a cabin to meet Laura if it would have been just as easy to get to Black Lake. But at the rate they were going, Black Lake was considerably farther than a couple of hours.Ten, twelve maybe.

Dillon raised his eyebrows. “Not
this
bad.”

Hutch used his thumb to wipe a tear from Dillon's face. An intimate gesture he hoped Dillon would recognize as a sign of caring. He wanted the boy to trust him and to know he wasn't alone. He said, “I can't get there without you.You need to be my navigator. Can you do that?”

Dillon smiled and nodded.

Hutch held out his hand. “Partners?”

Dillon took it in his own. His grip was surprisingly firm.They shook.

Hutch looked out the windshield. In the dark, the road did not appear nearly as rugged as it was. “So where to, Mr. Navigator?”

“There's a trail a little ways back. It leads into the hills above town. We go that way.”

“How far back?” In an effort to throw pursuers off their tail, he had started toward Fond-du-Lac to the west before circling back to head for Black Lake, due east. He could not be sure the trick had worked or that Declan hadn't spotted them after they'd changed course. He dreaded the possibility of running headlong into them.

“Just there!” He turned in his seat and pointed.

Hutch saluted. He popped the vehicle into reverse and backed off the road. He threw it in drive and pulled onto the road, heading back the way they'd come. He prayed he was making the right decision.

33

Julian appeared in the doorway
of the office Declan had appropriated for his headquarters and bedroom. Hunched over a briefcase full of electronic equipment, Declan glanced up briefly, then again to hold on Julian. The boy held the arrow he had found in the field in one hand, tapping it against his leg. He had brushed his long dark hair down over his forehead, as was his style.The bruise and gash were not evident. Still, he looked as miserable as a death-row prisoner after his last meal.

“What?” Declan asked impatiently.

Julian shuffled in. “Dec . . .” He paused, searching for words. “I don't know about this.”

“What's
this
?”

“All of this, everything we're doing up here.”

Declan straightened. “What's the problem, Julie?”

The boy shrugged, seemed to study the tile floor. “Pru's video . . . I mean, who kills people and puts the footage in a video game? Isn't that like saying, ‘Look what we did'?”

Declan laughed. “You gotta trust me, kid. First, everything we do up here's going to get scrubbed clean. You don't think Dad would leave us exposed, do you?”

“I don't think he—”

“
Whatever
happens here, Julian. He'll take care of it, okay? He always does. Besides, Kyrill's going to tweak the images, change the look of the people, the town, the landscape.We might run it all through a filter to make it look computer generated. The important thing is, we'll get the physics right—the explosions, the crashes, the facial expressions. It's going to take gaming to the next level, wait and see.”

Julian nodded, the movement seeming to take all his strength. He turned to leave.

“Julie.” Declan approached him. “You've got to get over this, dude.” He wrapped an arm around Julian's neck. “If every bump and bruise puts you out of the game, you might as well not play at all.”

“I didn't ask to come.”

“You like hanging with me. Dad wanted you to.”

“I didn't know . . . never mind.”

“I won't. But you gotta grow a spine, okay?”

“The doctor said I got a
concussion
, Dec.”

“He gave you meds, didn't he?”

“Yeah, and I don't know if the way I feel is from the knock on the head or all the pills. I'm sick and dizzy. I feel like I'm moving underwater.”

Declan slapped Julian's forehead, hard.

The boy cried out and tried to jerk away, but Declan's arm held him firm. He waited until Julian stopped struggling, then said flatly, “Get over it.” He released him, went to the case on the cot, shut the lid, and latched it. “Bring this out to the Jeep,” he said.

Julian was touching his forehead and examining his fingers. Declan saw the blood. The kid really did have to toughen up. Reared in a world of chauffeured cars, tutored education, and nannies to towel you off after every shower, it was easy to be soft.

Poverty and rough streets often drove people like their father to inhuman levels of work and determination, innovation and manipulation. So it was more than ironic and sad that the children of self-made men were pampered to the point of weakness and dependency. If these kids accepted only the comforts and did not go out of their way to find the challenges that would make them strong, they would be nothing more than possessions to be placed where they looked pretty, displayed as evidence of their parents' humanity.

Declan and Julian's father had sired five children, each from a different wife. Declan's slightly younger sister was institutionalized somewhere in Europe. A younger brother, older than Julian, had killed himself five years ago.Then there was the baby, two-year-old Clarissa, from Dad's current wife, who was three years younger than Declan. So two Page siblings were already lost, either dead or as good as. Declan was determined to avoid their fate.

He had offered to help Julian as well, but his little brother didn't seem interested in being his own man. Money bought lots of things—freedom to live and travel in opulence, to experience the entire ban-quet of life's possibilities; power and control over people. But it did not make you strong. Only struggle did that. Adversity. Poets said it: “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars”—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Buddhist philosophers believed it: “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey”—Kenji Miyazawa. The Christian Bible confirmed it: “See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.”

So what were people born into wealth to do? How were you supposed to grow strong when there was no weight, no friction to challenge your muscles, your mind, your will? Unless you were satisfied being nothing more than a consumer, a spender of inherited fortune, you needed to create the challenge, the struggle, the friction. You needed to cut a tree down and catch it.To set your house on fire and leap through the flames.To kill and not be caught, or be caught and beat the rap.

Grudgingly, Julie snatched up the case. He stopped at the door. He said, “I want to go home.”

“I know.” Declan thought a moment. “Come here.”

Julian didn't move.

“Come here,” Declan repeated.

Julian turned and walked back.

Declan untied a bracelet from his right wrist. Gestured for Julian to lift his arm.

“I don't want that,” the boy said.

“Yes, you do. It's peyote root from the Apaches. It'll make you brave.”

Julian shifted the arrow to the hand that also held the case. He raised his wrist.

Declan indicated the arrow. “What's that for?”

Julian shrugged. “I like it. It's cool.”

Declan tied the bracelet to him. “There,” he said.“Your first amulet. Wait'll you see what that does.”

Julian looked at it. He rotated his wrist.

“Yeah?” Declan said.

Julian nodded. He shuffled out.

Declan called, “Cort! Cortland!”

She breezed in, considerably perkier than Julian.

“I want you to stay here,” he said.

“Dec—” she started.

“Keep your eye on the place. Lock the doors after we leave. Don't unchain the auditorium doors. Where's your gun?”

She lowered her head.

“Cort?”

“I think it got destroyed in the explosion out back.”

“Or those guys out there got it?” he said, realizing but not caring that his tone was like kicking the already shaky scaffolding of her selfconfidence.

While the doctor was tending to Bad and Julian, he, Kyrill, and Pruitt had gone out to examine the destruction. Shockingly, there had been no bodies, no body parts. He did not know how that last strike had missed. At least two—and he had thought four—people were in the kill zone when he fired.

Too many glitches in the system. He supposed weeding them out was in part what he was there for in the first place. He only hoped that the deficiencies lay in one of the other divisions' workmanship and not in the control pad Declan's own company had designed.This was an ideal opportunity to show his father that video gaming was no longer about distraction and entertainment, but touched all aspects of life, especially when it came to the industry of war.

Unfortunately, the glitches he was discovering extended beyond technology. The people around him were as defective as miscoded programs.

Julie was being a wuss, not at all the stand-up guy Declan thought would emerge on this trip. Certainly he was not as savvy about the way things were as Declan had been at his age.

Bad, his most effective soldier, had allowed himself to get shot—by an
arrow
at that! He wasn't down for the count yet; Declan intended on pushing him as hard as ever, on showing him that winners didn't run home crying at the first sight of blood.

And now Cort. Declan and the guys had spent countless hours disabling vehicles, collecting keys, searching for communication devices, and locking up as many guns as they could find, either on their own or by coercing their locations from townsfolk. It took only one rogue individual to muck everything up. He'd seen it before: Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, even The Lord of the Rings—and
that
little troublemaker was a hobbit! And here Cortland goes and gives a weapon to these interlopers, his own real-life Bruce Willises. One of them already had a gun, as the shattered window of the Hummer attested. But either the people who came into town last night did not include the gunslinger, or something had happened to his weapon. Otherwise why resort to a weapon as primitive as a bow and arrow? As every shooting game proved, the more technology invested in a weapon, the better it was. Spears beat knives, pistols beat spears, automatic rifles beat pistols, bombs beat rifles, and Declan controlled the weapon that beat them all.

But despite his belief in the value of escalating technology, he knew that one man with one bullet could change the course of history.
“For
want of a nail” and all that,
he thought.

He turned away from Cortland to retrieve his Jean Dunand wristwatch from the desk, but primarily to emphasize his displeasure. He said, “When Julie comes back from the car, tell him to get you a gun from the stash we locked up.” He fiddled with the clasp on his watch until he heard her footsteps heading for the door.

He glanced over his shoulder. “And, Cort? You won't lose this one, right?”

She nodded and left.

The Slacker was in a metal case the size of a hefty paperback book. He plucked it up from the cot and followed her out of the room, stopping in the corridor.

“Pru!” he called.

Pruitt stepped into the corridor from the next room. He held the camera in his hands. An LCD monitor jutted out from the camera body. Declan could see flashes of moving color on the screen. A cord dropped down from a plug in the camera, then looped up to Pruitt's ear. “Yeah?”

“Have you reviewed the footage so far?”