Touch of Magic (35 page)

The pounding of her own head deafened her.
Then she realized it was the time bomb ticking. She
realized that exhaustion and panic had claimed her momentarily. Now she rallied against them.

"Ellery!"

He lay on his side, still unconscious.

"Ellery!" she said more frantically.

With her arms restrained as they were, she
couldn't even pull herself across the floor. The straitjacket didn't leave her an elbow for getting a
grip. And
Ballieu's
men had tied her ankles with the
rope they didn't use on her hands.

She rolled. The body of the woman who had once
been her attacker lay directly in her path. Repulsed,
and reliving the coldness with which
Ballieu
had
killed, she steeled herself and went over.

"Ellery!"

As she nudged him, his eyes slowly opened. Outside, she could hear the sound of the departing heli
copter.

"You've got to get this unfastened!" she said, turn
ing over to show the ties of the straitjacket. "Use
your teeth. Use your tongue!"

Everything in her background told her the ties
would yield more easily than the ropes binding him. If he could just free her, she could get them both out
of here.

Twisting, she saw his eyes, still glazed, move to
ward the bomb. Nine minutes remained. He shook
his head in an effort to clear it, then bit into her
restraints.

A moment later he rolled back in defeat.

"It's no use, Channing. I don't know what the hell
I'm doing. Why'd you come?"

"To switch the film -- remember?"

As she spoke, she began to struggle rhythmically
inside the jacket. In childhood she'd tried a few
times to escape a jacket like this, but she'd never
gotten adept.
 
She had theory but no real practice. Desperation drove her.

Ellery pushed wearily up on his elbows. His eyes were dark with things unsaid. And with the inevita
bility of the outcome here.

"You almost made it," he said. "But we're not
going to outrun this thing."

Vain as it was, Channing felt herself snap with
indignation.

"What do you mean, 'almost made it'? I did make
it, Ellery -- if you mean switching the film."

He blinked. He had started to work at his own
bonds.

"When?"

She let a grin fly, even though her lips were bleeding from the way her teeth were grinding into
them in concentration.

"You were watching. Didn't you see?"

She switched the method of her wriggling. The jacket seemed to be tightening, rather than loosen
ing, around her. Ellery staggered to his feet.

"I'm going to break down that door. I can slide
the bomb down the hall with my belly."

"No,
dammit
, Ellery! Don't try to be a hero! Even
if you get through the door, there's an iron gate on the other side -- maybe fifteen feet farther. It'll be locked too."

If he went, she knew he would never make it
back. Tears were blurring her vision. For she knew
that if she were going to die, she wanted it to be like
this, half arguing with this particular man.

"Please." The words almost stuck in her throat.
"Stay with me, Ellery."

For an instant he hesitated. His eyes held hers. With a lightning-quick, decisive motion he turned and kicked a chair to its side, then bottom side up. Straddling it, bearing down with his rope-bound
hands, he tried to pry a leg loose from the metal
strip that held it.

The dial on the time bomb said eight minutes
were left.

*
  
*
  
*

"Channing?
Serafin
? Open up! It's Oliver Lemming."

Oliver pounded on the door some balding hotel
lackey had pointed him to after no one answered in
Channing's room. Oliver and his team had de
scended on the resort like demons, flashing creden
tials while their helicopter waited with its motor
running. Each discovery had added more weight to
that already crushing his shoulders. Walker dead.
No sign of Max or Ellery. Channing vanished before
her final show of the evening. What the hell had happened here? Was he too late to save any of
them?

The door opened and he saw the boy. Behind him
stood a pinch-faced, elderly man he remembered from the house in Altadena.

"What's happened here, son?" Oliver bent and
dropped a hand on the boy's shoulder to convey the
urgency he felt. "One of our men upstairs is dead. There's no sign of the others. Where's Channing?"

For several seconds he thought the kid might
hold out on him. There was something uncommon about his manner for one so young. And his eyes
were strange. They'd been scanning Oliver's face as
though it were some sort of book. Now they went distant. Dark. They gave an eerie impression of looking straight through Oliver, the walls, every
thing.

"That old clinic," the boy said suddenly. "We
found it this morning."

"If Dr. Stuart's in trouble, you had flaming well
better get her out," snapped the old man, hustling toward them.

Oliver nodded. He spoke again to
Serafin
.

"Can you show us the way?"

One of the men who'd accompanied Oliver came huffing up from the lobby. He spoke in gasps. "The
dogs needed walking. We gave them a turn through
some shrubs by the pool. They went crazy. Found
enough plastic explosive out there to blow this place
sky-high when the trigger wore through!"

Oliver's insides turned over. He set off for the stairs, not willing to chance the elevators. His concern was beyond the professional level. Had been
all along, he realized. He cursed himself. He'd trade his own life for young Bill Ellery's. And
Channing
Stuart's.

Something in the way she'd looked at Bill that first day had made Oliver hope she might not only do the job, but also prove a good match for Bill in
more ways than one. Bill deserved that.

Now, running, Oliver Lemming couldn't outrun
the dread that the plan he'd conceived, which had seemed so reasonable at the outset, could be responsible for both their deaths.

*
  
*
  
*

"My father -- could get out of one of these -- in
under two minutes."

Channing fought and bunched at the straitjacket.
Strands of hair had plastered themselves to her forehead. She seemed to have changed position in
side the folds of canvas, but time was going to defeat
her, Ellery thought. Four minutes remained on the
clock.

He pushed himself to continue his futile sawing at
the ropes behind him by watching her face. No fear
showed there, only fierce concentration. And a wounded professional pride, he recognized with a
final amusement that choked as it passed over him.
If he could just figure a way to get her out of this
alive, then running second to Reid all his life would be okay. If he couldn't, his one prayer was that she'd
still be this lost in concentration when the time ran
out.

"Another minute -- and I think I'll have it!" Chan
ning said, panting.

But Ellery saw the clock hands on the timer slip
to three.

When the bomb went off, it would take out this whole floor. Maybe more. He knew by the size of
the charge wired to it. Savagely he bore down on
the half-sawed rope that held him and heard it snap.

He rubbed his wrists as he flung the loops off and
rolled over on his belly. His hands felt numb. His
fingers grasped the bomb expertly, and he felt its rhythm.

In his mind he could see every wire and turn of its
circuitry. He knew its intricacies. New as it was, he knew his fingers could probe and coax it apart. Ex
cept for one thing. This configuration of wires grew
extremely sensitive to tampering as it approached
the moment of detonation. They'd already crossed
the margin of safety. If he tried to disarm it now, he
could blow them both up.

He spoke aloud the words that were in his mind.

"It's too late."

Channing had ceased her struggle, but now she
resumed it. Ellery rolled to his feet.

There was one particle of a chance remaining. He
couldn't untie Channing's feet in time, and he
couldn't carry her far enough, but maybe he could
get the bomb
out.
Charging
like a football player, he threw his
weight against the locked door. The old wood splin
tered. Another hit, the shock waves traveling
through his chest to his healing wound, and the
door gave way.

Two minutes. Racing back, he jerked over
Khadija's
body and grabbed the pistol he'd seen at
her waist. With his hands tied, it had been useless.
Maybe not now.

"Roll into the vault. Pull the door closed behind
you," he ordered.

Carefully, as slowly as he dared, he picked up the
bomb in his left hand, held firmly at his fingertips. Maximum shock absorption. Keep it as isolated as
possible from his body's movements.

"Like hell I'll hide -- " began Channing, still
writhing inside her straitjacket.

"Roll!" he shouted.

Ignoring the sweat that wanted to pour from him,
and moving as cautiously as possible, Ellery moved
across the room and through the open door. If
Channing survived, she could put out the word on
Max. If she survived, she could tell Oliver the film
had been switched.

The iron gate loomed in front of him. Channing was right. It had been locked. He stepped back and
fired at the lock, braced mentally for a larger explo
sion.

There was only silence, and the ticking of the
bomb in his hand. He dared not look at its timer
now. Dared not even think. The corridor ahead of
him seemed endless. There was a window at the
end.

Ellery had the sensation of someone else, not him at all, walking
down the empty hall. The someone
else tried to move with speed but was hampered by
the need for caution. His limbs were made leaden
by the burden suspended ahead of him.

Ellery knew that the someone who planted his
feet so carefully was moving toward his death. Yet
he moved with determination. What would it be
like, the end, when it came?

Channing's hair, and a picture of her hands as
they moved, came to him. The freckles that sprinkled her forearms. The way she liked to roll her
sleeves.

She'd been right. Nothing ever really vanished.
Almost from the first, no matter how he'd struggled
against it, the desire to risk facing what he felt for
her had been there.

He had reached the window. There were iron
bars over it. Calmly, detached now from the sec
onds trickling out to make way for a roaring, instan
taneous death, he shoved the butt of the pistol he
still held through the bars and smashed the glass.

Nervelessly
he let his left arm slide into night air
and dropped the bomb. He watched it hit the dark waters of the swimming pool below and sink.

Dazed, he brought his attention up to the win
dow in front of him and moved back a step. He was
alive. Breathing raggedly, he retreated another
step, another step, still staring at the window with a sense of doom.

Then the explosion hit.

The force of it flung him down the corridor. He
felt himself hit the floor. Part of the ceiling fell. Debris bombarded his shoulders, his legs, as he
brought his arms up to protect his head.