Private Screening (49 page)

Turning, he could not tell the redwood he had started from. He turned again, disoriented, then sick to his stomach.

Fifteen paces, he remembered.

Redwoods surrounded him. They formed a chamber of half-light and shadow, where everything seemed larger or smaller or distorted in shape.

A red coffee can.

To the side of him, still covered by its plastic lid. Next to a broken branch where Phoenix had stepped.

Lord fumbled open the can.

Inside were a cassette recorder and a tape. Around the tape was a woman's Cartier watch.

Her wrist must be quite small, Lord thought. Sweat cooled on his ace.

The Cartier showed 4:15.

Inserting the cassette, Lord pushed the “play” button.

“Only if you follow these directions,” the voice began, “will I give you Alexis Parnell.…”

Lord's head snapped up, watching as he listened. Phoenix's voice seemed to filter through the trees.

“But not before dusk,” the tape continued, “and not where cars or jeeps can follow.…”

The cold felt deeper than before.

“Upon playing this tape, return with it to your car. If you so much as move toward the telephone, you will not live to reach it. Nor will Alexis live beyond my final broadcast.”

Lord stood, turning full circle.

“You will drive another two-tenths of a mile north to a dirt path on the left. Once you turn there, you can call no one, and no one else can see you.

“All that will be left you is to come for Alexis, or let her die.”

He was still now. Listening.

“The path continues through the redwoods, to a ridge. For a few minutes thereafter, you will drive in the open.

“We can see you at every point.

“If you stop, she will die. If you do not reach our meeting place by sunset, she will die.

“Listen well.”

Through a surge of anger, Lord forced himself to concentrate.

“From the ridge, the road descends to a valley, crossing a bridge. Six miles past the bridge, you will turn left on an abandoned logging trail. Just beyond its first curve is a small grove of oaks.” Phoenix paused for emphasis. “Park beneath it, where your car cannot be seen from above. Then take the backpack from the trunk and put this tape inside.

“I will be watching. If you do not have the tape, you will not receive Alexis.”

No evidence. Nothing for Moore to follow or find.

“Through the grove, you will find a path. Follow it left for five miles.

“At its end is an uprooted trunk which resembles a lion's head. I will meet you there.

“If you reach it by sunset, she will live.”

Alexis's watch showed 4:30.

“Hurry,” the voice finished softly. “You have far to go, and time is of the essence.”

The silence was sudden and complete.

As the tape kept running, soundless, a second, cooler part of Lord saw how clever Phoenix was.

Bending back his head, he tried following the redwood trunks. He could not find where they ended.

Once he left here, no one could follow from the air.

He was still for some moments. Only his eyes moved.

Remember where you've been, Moore had said. His car was twenty yards away, and he was no longer sure in which direction.

Taking twenty careful steps, he looked to each side. Lost, feeling time vanish. Holding the cassette player and watch.

Something to his left, barely visible. A change in the quality of light.

Lord exhaled, and then walked to the clearing.

Facing the telephone, he stopped. Phoenix could have called from feet, he thought, or miles. Nothing moved or made a sound.

Her watch showed twenty minutes until five.

Lord tried to imagine how she must feel. How grateful she would be.

The telephone still froze him. Tempting him to try to use it, call for help.

Too long.

He turned away, walking to the car. His fingers were awkward as he started it.

Looking in the rearview, he returned to the edge of the road. He stopped there for a moment, the tape beside him, then headed north.

When he turned again, the second path felt like a tunnel.

Heavy branches sagged above the car. A mist hung in the air, barely different from the thin half-darkness. Within feet, Lord was forced to use his headlights.

The temperature dropped, thickening the mist.

The car slowed to ten miles an hour, a barely moving target. He drove like this for endless minutes, through the giant trunks of redwoods, branches which leapt from the mist with startling suddenness. Drained and tired and half-expecting to be shot, Lord searched for odd shapes, sudden movements, armed men at the side of the road or in his rearview mirror.

He's wearing you down. You're tired, cold, so strung out from watching that when you finally meet, he'll take you like a child.

An arm.

Lord braked abruptly.

At the edge of the road, his headlights struck the gnarled roots of a redwood which had fallen among the others, leaving a wound in the earth. Nothing else.

Her watch showed 5:30.

When Lord started driving again, his face and hair were damp.

The mist became swirls.

The path was climbing. Moving again, he was caught in a few seconds' elation. He was still alive.

Surely that meant Alexis was.

Lord pushed the gas pedal, driving for the open valley.

For more miles upward, redwoods turned to pines on a path he took too fast. A dull ache on the back of his neck became a pounding at the temples.

His car had been lost to Moore for almost two hours, he figured, moving westward on a route they could not follow. When the path ended high on a ridge, Lord stopped.

Beneath him, a river flowed through a valley, gentler hills.

He had broken clear of cover.

For less than an hour now, the sun would cast this failing light, then vanish. The slower he drove, the better Moore's chance to find him from above, and Alexis's to die.

He had forgotten his directions.

Head throbbing, Lord played the cassette. It seemed to take longer than before.

A logging trail, six miles past the bridge. Then a five-mile path to an uprooted trunk in the shape of a lion's head.

When Lord turned, downward from the ridge, it was 6:20.

For the next ten minutes, he descended in nerve-racking slow motion to the bottom of the valley, hoping Moore's plane was circling the area, to spot his car again. He saw nothing in the sky ahead.

Past the wooden bridge were a gas station, a store, two houses. A telephone beside the road.

Lord slowed, staring.

Beyond the telephone was a mountain range; on the other side of the river, rolling hills. He was exposed.

As the telephone receded in his rearview, the road turned with the river, and it was gone.

Forty minutes until sunset.

Lord stepped on the accelerator. He had given Moore all the time he could.

Within minutes, he found the logging trail.

It quickly curved between madrone trees, hiding him from view. As he entered the grove of oaks, their branches met above his car, ending his hope that Moore could see it.

Lord felt skin pricks as he took the tape from its player.

Leaving the car, he unlocked the trunk, slid the tape in the cumbersome pack, and strapped it on. He did not stop to look inside.

Five miles from here, the outside range of his transmitter signal, with twenty-eight minutes left. He had never run that far that fast.

Pushing through the grove, he reached the edge of a hillside and saw that the river had suddenly curved from the road, below him. A path ran beside it.

Lord clambered down the hillside, sliding, grabbing branches, half-falling to the path.

From the hill he could be watched or shot. Opposite, through a thin line of birch trees, the river blocked his escape.

Along the path, following the river until it disappeared, the sun fell to meet it.

Lord started running toward the sun.

His calves were taut from not warming up. With each minute, the sun kept slipping, the river opening ahead of him. An endless line of birches moved at the corner of his eye.

His feet kept pounding.

If he made it, they would meet at dusk, giving Phoenix the hours of darkness to broadcast and then vanish. Perfect for returning Alexis, or killing an exhausted courier.

Twenty minutes until sunset, then fifteen. He imagined himself from above, a dot in fading light, too small for Moore to see.

Touching the horizon, river met sun.

Fresh wind braced his skin. So cold and strong and steady that it seemed to have nothing to stop it.

“Please, Mr. Lord. She doesn't deserve to die.…”

A first edge of sun vanished, and still more river appeared between the birches, specks of white at its end.

Lord ran faster. The wind which battered him now carried a sound, low and distant and steady.

The specks must be whitecaps.

As he ran, the pummeling sound grew deeper, the wind a bitter cold. He felt a twinge in one leg, a cramp starting. The sun was half gone.

“But you'll always be my dad, right …?”

Larger, the whitecaps came from a pool of orange on the river. But the path rose to a dune, concealing the shore; only the beating sound told of its harshness.

Once he stopped, his calves would knot in the wind and cold.

“I'm going back to Sea Ranch,” she had said. “I'd like you to come. You know, when you get free.…”

Think of Alexis.

The whitecaps were fifteen-foot waves where river met ocean. The dune he ran toward seemed thrown up by the pummeling of a shoreline he could not see.

The sun was a sliver.

One minute left. Phoenix haunted him now.

“Phoenix gave one reason for wanting you to come. I'm not sure there aren't others, are you …?”

In an aching final sprint, Lord reached the top of the dune.

It was like nothing he had ever seen.

Miles of black sand strewn with the dead trunks of redwoods left by the punishing surf, then stripped and bleached by wind and sun and salt water. Some lay piled across one another like the bones of mastodons; others were hewn by the elements into modernist sculpture. The bark of newer redwoods peeled in rotting strips.

Panting, Lord searched the debris.

It was desolate, endless. Waves crashed through jagged rocks with the sound of an explosion, rushing onto the beach to suck back the closest tree trunks in a savage undertow, to be met by more waves exploding. Two hundred feet from them, Lord felt spray. Wind stung his eyes.

Suddenly, he stopped searching.

To his left, the roots of an enormous redwood were torn open in a gaping jaw, beneath an eye hollowed by wind.

No one was there.

When Lord turned, he was alone.

On each side of the river, brush-covered cliffs rose steeply from the beach. The only way out was as he had come, or south along the shore. His legs began tightening in the cold.

He was to wait by the lion's head.

Remembering Moore's instructions, Lord moved stiffly away from it, toward the ocean, putting as much distance and as many logs as possible between himself and where Phoenix might appear. He stopped just short of the surf, its colors basic now: slate-gray rocks, a red haze on the water. Spray hit him that he could not see.

He turned from it.

The green mountains became a shadowed yellow-brown. The waves at his back half-deafened him; with each successive crash he imagined being caught and then swept out in a riptide. His heart raced.

A distant figure stood atop the dune.

It wore no hood. In the failing light, they watched each other.

The figure was alone.

There was something slung across his shoulder, a boxlike shape hanging from his belt. His hair seemed dark; he did not have a beard.

Lord could not see his face.

The figure raised one arm, and waved him forward.

Lord's skin crawled.

A wave struck his calves, pulling him back. When he caught his balance, looking up again, the figure was an outline.

Wind whined at his ears; his legs were turning numb. It was half-light now.

Cupping both hands, Lord called out, “I want to see her.” His strained voice seemed to carry on the wind.

The figure remained still. Behind him, the full moon became clearer, larger.

Lord waited for some sign or motion.

There was nothing.

Lord shivered.

“Where is she?” he cried out.

The figure did not move or answer. And then the light changed, and his outline was part of it. Lord was no longer sure that he saw him.

His eyes strained.

Metal, glinting in first moonlight, where Phoenix had stood.

Lord unslung the backpack and held it by one strap. Not certain Phoenix was moving, yet sensing him grow larger.

His free hand touched the transmitter.

“Stop,” he called out. “Show me Alexis.”

The figure grew clearer. Coming.

“You've got no hope with him up close.…”

Split seconds to decide.

Perhaps she was hidden on the beach. Phoenix might take him there once he had the money.

“You're supposed to help us bring her back. Get yourself killed, and you've been no help at all.…”

Distance closing, the figure growing larger.

Activate the signal, Moore had said. Run and hope the FBI could find them with it, and then Alexis.

“
I
have to see her
—”

There was no answer. Backlit by the moon, Phoenix seemed to step from darkness. An outline with a rifle aimed at Lord.

Sixty feet now. Moving closer.

“
Stop
—”

Fifty feet.

Lord pinched the transmitter.

The figure froze; the box it carried was a scanner.

Whirling to his left, Lord threw the backpack into the surf and ran in the opposite direction.

His steps were hobbling and painful. Twisting, he saw Phoenix dive after the money.