Caller unknown, p.39
Caller Unknown, page 39
Ed came forward. His hands twitched as he reached out for the detonator. If it hadn’t been for Sarah, he would have quite deliberately released the trigger and blown them all to kingdom come. Instead, he stared at Mrs. Frome’s slim, blue-veined throat, desperate to crush it. The blood pounded in his ears, but he got control of himself and reached out so that his hand closed on hers. It was cold. Like a corpse’s. She smiled at the touch, but the smile didn’t reach her periwinkle eyes.
“My, your hands are warm. I expect your wife appreciates them on a cold night. Now, take hold and don’t let go.” She pulled her hand suddenly from his grip. In a split second his was clutching the lever. Sweat dripped into his eyes despite the cold.
“Good, I think you’ve got the gist of this,” she said. “Are you ready, Mr. Frome?”
“Sure,” the giant man answered.
“Then I’ll leave you to it.” She looked Ed up and down, as if inspecting him at muster. He guessed he didn’t look much with his swollen head and filthy clothes. Blood was beginning to seep out from his arm wound. “Goodbye, Edward,” she said. Her voice was a bit strangled. Why? She turned abruptly and walked out of the station.
Ed stared after her. Frome jerked his head. “OK, jackass, we’re going to take a little walk together, through that gate. You remember? Armageddon?”
They exited. He saw Mrs. Frome was walking up the road toward Ashland. He could now see another car parked up there, some sort of red sedan, near a bend in the road a couple of hundred yards away. He looked behind, but Sarah was invisible in the gloom of the office.
“I’ll be back,” he called. There was no answer.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Frome pointed the shotgun toward the back lot. Ed remembered the way well enough from ’70. He went ahead, both hands on the detonator lever, Frome’s heavy breath and steps behind. There was no sound: just the dead, leaden absence of winter. The grass of the spoil mound at the back of the station was brown and covered in patches of snow. Behind was the forest. There was the faintest suspicion of a track between two birch trees and, prompted by the shotgun barrel, Ed took it.
Images popped in his head like camera flashes. The moments before the OJ. The crucifix swinging. The children chanting.
Here was the gate in the rusted chain-link fence. The padlock hung from the latch.
He felt the pressure of the shotgun barrel on his back. “OK, do the numbers,” Frome ordered.
Ed turned. “Gonna be difficult with this thing.” He held up the detonator.
“You don’t have to hold it with both hands. One will do.”
They stared at each other, then Ed released his right hand from the lever, keeping the left clamped in a dead man’s grip. He carefully lifted up the padlock. There were eight numbered tumblers. The brass rotators should have been stiff, having been left to the elements for twenty years, but the tumblers ran easily enough.
He thumbed the numbers: 66161614.
The great bronze jaw of the padlock fell open. Frome pushed Ed away with the barrel of the gun, unhinged it and pulled the gate open with a rusty squeal. He indicated the way with the gun.
Ed clamped his right hand back on the lever and went forward. The dripping forest closed around them and everything became twilight. It was below thirty and dressed in only a shirt he was cold enough that his hands were turning numb. He feared the detonator might slip from his frozen fingers.
The faint trail was obstructed by branches and deadfalls, the fallen wood mossy and spongy. The path soon began to go up a hillside; rocks and muddy declivities filled with ice made the footing treacherous. He looked closely at the path for evidence that Jim had come this way the week before, but he saw no signs.
He and Frome exchanged no more words, concentrating on their footing. Ed slipped once, but kept his death grip on the detonator. By the sound of his heavy breathing behind him, Frome was struggling with the climb. Wherever he’d been these last twenty years, it had not been a gym.
After a half-hour, they reached a ridgeline and emerged from the trees, panting, into daylight.
It was a place of flat, gray rocks. Below them was a panorama of land stretching some twenty-five miles to the distant Appalachians. The waves of the trees swept away westward, as close-packed as the stalks in a rye field, undulating over ridges and mountains. Below them was the blue eye of a lake in the green immensity. Far in the distance, a bald eagle circled lazily.
There was no obvious way forward; the ground fell away perpendicularly in all directions. “Where now?” Ed asked.
Frome gestured to the right. Now Ed saw it: there was a narrow rock ledge, only some two yards wide, slanting down the cliff face. The treetops swayed in the breeze 200 feet below.
“Go on,” Frome ordered, waving the gun. Ed stepped down. Frome came behind. He nudged him with the shotgun barrel again and Ed nearly stumbled.
“Easy,” Ed said through gritted teeth. He set off downward, careful on the ice and slush-rimmed ledge. The sheer fall to his left was an almost physical presence. He tried to counter the vertigo by pressing against the sloping face of lichen-covered granite on the right. Some twenty yards further on, there was a recess in the cliff face.
Of all the man-made anomalies in the wilderness, here was one that outstripped all of the others. Set into the cliff was an iron door with a steel wheel fixed into its middle. The door was held in a metal frame some four feet square.
It was the sort of hatch you might find on a nuclear bunker, its face riveted and reinforced with steel bands, with hinges on the left. Evidently, when opened fully, the door would lie flush with the cliff face. Under the wheel was a brass inlay a couple of inches high and six inches wide. There were eight numerical tumblers and an unlocking switch set into the plate.
Beyond the steel door the ledge vanished after a few steps into empty air.
“Welcome to Armageddon, kid,” Frome said.
“What now?” Ed asked.
“You do the numbers again.”
Ed took a deep breath. Now everything relied on Jim’s work. He repeated his movements at the gate, releasing one hand and slowly manipulating the tumblers on the door face. His eyes were tearing with cold; his hand was by now numb and the numbers in the inlay difficult to align with the bar. All the time he was conscious of the steepling drop just two feet behind him. Eventually he had all eight lined up: 66161614. He pushed the Enter button and there came a kerchunk as the locking mechanism disengaged.
“OK, now get the wheel,” Frome said.
“What about this?” Ed asked, holding up the detonator. “Need two hands.”
“Think you’re smart, don’t ya?” Frome answered. He pointed the shotgun down the ledge to where it ended in the sheer drop. “OK, get down the path a ways, right to the end.”
Ed shuffled along to the very limit of the cliff. He looked down. The snow-covered pine and spruce tops below waved languidly in the winter air. He thought this was likely the last thing he would ever see.
“Now, hands up against the face and keep ’em there,” Frome commanded. Ed did so, flattening himself against the cold, gray rock, right hand firm on the detonator lever.
“Hey, kid, you don’t have to ball the rock, you know.” Frome laughed. He leaned the shotgun against the cliff face, never taking his eyes off Ed, ready to pick it up if he made a move. He grabbed hold of the wheel and turned it counterclockwise until there was an audible click from the latch.
He smiled, hauled back on the wheel, and the door hinged open. In a nanosecond, Frome’s smile disappeared. In Ed’s last glimpse of him there was an O of surprise in that bird’s nest of a beard.
Ed closed his eyes and there was white light and a detonation like a thunderclap. The cliff face bulged and shook from the explosion, rocks fell on him, and a fist-shaped one glanced off his shoulder, nearly unbalancing him.
He embraced the rock for a few seconds after the cascade had passed. He had saved his sight from the flash, but he was, once more, utterly deaf from the explosion. Both his eardrums felt as if they’d burst. The hatchway door had been blown flat against the cliff face, missing him by inches. It now hung drunkenly from one hinge. Smoke eddied out of the interior. There was no sign of Frome or the shotgun.
Ed carefully levered himself off the cliff face, wobbled toward the void, nearly overbalanced and then thrust himself back onto the face. With his ears gone, his balance had gone too. He took hold of the open hatchway.
A severed cord hung from the inner locking mechanism of the hatch; its other half was on the floor and ran into the darkness of the interior. The eye-prickling stench of cordite billowed out from the smoke-choked interior. There was a small cave beyond. Through the smoke he saw stacked boxes in drab military olive-gray with stenciled serial numbers. One or two of the boxes had been opened, revealing pale packages of plastic explosives. There was a case of semiautomatic rifles, another case of gleaming bronze cartridges. Pieces of bulletproof armor lay scattered over the floor like dismembered body parts.
There was one empty box. Jim had chosen well when he’d come up the week before. Stenciled on its side was “Claymore M18A1.” Blown back into the interior and mangled against some boxes were the bent scissor stands of the device. The twin double feet stuck into the air like the limbs of a dead insect.
Ed had told Jim where to go and what to do. And, that Thanksgiving morning, his dead friend had done what he’d asked.
Seven hundred steel balls had been blasted into Frome at 4,000 feet a second.
Ed stumbled into the smoke-filled interior. Positioned in the back of the cave was an open packing case with semiautomatic rifles. A smaller metal ammunition box had been breached next to it and one of the carbines already had a banana-shaped magazine fitted. Jim’s work, perhaps. Ed lifted it clumsily with one hand and hung the strap over his shoulder.
If all else had miraculously gone his way in the last few moments, the detonator now threatened to end everything. Mrs. Frome would have heard the Claymore explosion down below. As far as he could tell, it had just been her and Mr. Frome. What would she do now? He struggled back to the ledge. He looked down. Far below there was a scattering of red and black on the tops of the pines. Frome’s mackinaw and parts of his body. His head swam. He clenched his eyes, then his teeth.
He went up the ledge, reached the summit of the ridge and plunged back into the trees again. He hurried down the rocky, slippery path, fearful of a tumble and of dropping the detonator in his hand. Each time the borrowed boots skidded, it sent a cold thrill to his heart.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
It seemed hours before the path’s gradient eased and he saw the brick and concrete of the gas station and the red of its star sign through the forest ahead. He carefully unslung the rifle with one hand and laid it on a waist-high granite rock, one of the many that broke the leaf- and stick-strewn hillside, and disengaged the safety before rehanging it, Rambo style, under his right arm. The detonator remained gripped in his left hand.
He knew that, whatever you saw in the movies, the chances of being able to control let alone aim this weapon in a one-handed stance were next to nothing. But it was all he had.
The gate in the chain-link fence was still open. He used the cover of the mound to peer over the back lot of the station. Empty of life. If the explosion had brought the cavalry, they were well hidden.
His hearing was coming back a little now; he could hear his boots on the gravel as he skirted the mound and crouched behind the parked Corolla, the rifle clumsily raised in front of him. From here he could see the office entrance beyond the pump island with the mannequins flanking it. They were the only figures in sight.
But 200 yards up the road, the red car toward which Mrs. Frome had been heading when he’d last seen her was idling in a cloud of exhaust. He could make out the light blue of Mrs. Frome’s parka in the driver’s seat. But was there another figure behind her, on the back seat, craning forward? Whoever was in the car had a perfect eyeline on the gas station. There was no way of getting into the office without being seen.
He called out. “Sarah!”
He thought he heard a faint answer through the ringing in his ears.
He made up his mind to make the dash.
“I’m coming!” he yelled. Again, maybe there was another barely audible sound from the interior. There was something odd about it: something he didn’t really understand until a long time afterward.
He broke cover and ran.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
The FBI investigators told him afterward it was the trip that saved his life. He had taken only half a dozen steps forward and had reached the point where the yellow school bus had turned into the station twenty years before when he fell. The nylon jacket with the yellow Snoopy badge that Shannon had been wearing that day had never been recovered from the gas station lot. Ed had found it those ten years ago and hung it on the rusted air pump. The first storm had blown it down into the weeds. There, like the patient eye of Bear and all the haunted things of the kids’ childhood, it had waited. It had not decomposed, but had blown back and forth across the lot for another ten years, spending some time hooked on the chain-link fence before another gale blew it back onto the gravel. Snoopy had faded and peeled away, and the nylon had frayed and degraded, but was resilient enough to still be intact. Ed’s left foot stood on what remained of its body and then his right hooked into what had once been its hood and he fell face first toward the gravel.
His right arm shot forward in an attempt to brace himself. His right finger was on the trigger of the semiautomatic and as he impacted the ground it discharged, a three-shot burst that tanged around the cast-iron pumps and pinged off the asphalt. His left arm also attempted to brace. His knuckles slammed hard into the gravel, scraping them back to the bone and jarring the detonator out of his fingers.
Again, it might have been false memory after the explosion, but there was something slightly off about what happened in the next two seconds. The detonator spun away, the released lever springing from the body of the device. He may have screamed her name as he watched it open.
There was no explosion. Not in the two seconds. The bomb had not gone off. Sarah was alive.
He had those two seconds of this possibility.
Then the possibility ended.
The gas station suddenly rose into the air, as if pushed up by a giant hand from below. It paused, suspended, a few feet up, still the blocky shape of all gas stations worldwide, red brick and white outer finishing, for a millisecond intact and composite. Then a white cloud with a red core blossomed out of the place where the gas station had once stood, just as the building fell back into it.
Time, which had stopped, now went very fast and the heat displaced by the falling masonry flew outward. The heat flashed over his flesh and cooked it, his hair burned. The sound wave hit a second later. Objects were in the cloud of fire, fragments of rock and metal and cloth; the tailor’s dummy with the bridal gown streamed over him.
His senses gave up. There wasn’t much more they could endure. Certainly not this maelstrom. The lights went off. Blackness.
The blackness was filled with pain, and there was more pain when he woke in the emergency room in Portland where he had been medevacked. Now the pain became mental as well as physical. Sarah was dead.
When the FBI investigators were allowed to speak to him after a week of recovery they found him closed, unforthcoming. They had arrived at the scene an hour after the explosion as the short winter’s day closed in. Ed’s unconscious body was the only recognizable human in the vicinity. He had third-degree burns to his face and hands. Afterward, they found Mr. Frome’s shredded flesh in the trees beneath Armageddon and a crisped mummy that might have been Fallows in the wrecked Huey.
Even less identifiable were the human remains found in the cratered ruin of the station. The bones discovered there were denatured by the intense heat and unidentifiable: the underground tanks had exploded and a raging petroleum fire had lasted some five hours, reducing everything within the forecourt precincts to ash. It had to be assumed the bones, no more than crematorium relics, once belonged to Sarah Constance.
The device he had been told was a detonator was a hoax. The gas station explosion had been set off by a wired rig.
The bunker had been examined, the stolen US Army reserve armaments and explosives recovered. As much as he had been lucky to survive the gas station explosion, the FBI informed Ed he had been doubly lucky to escape the booby trap, laid by an explosives expert, that had killed Frome. They assumed this had been put in place by Typhon to protect their cache and Frome had accidentally triggered it.
They assured him they would find the people who murdered his wife.
But first there was the small matter of questioning him about the last ten years.
What was behind the identity theft? Had he abducted his wife? Where had he been in the missing two days after he was last seen at the Miami offices? Why were his blood and teeth marks at the murder scene of Gail McReedy? What did he know about the arms cache? He didn’t need to pretend: he honestly couldn’t remember much. What he did remember was that he had acted in self-defense. After medical offices in Miami and Boston were raided, it was determined that Ed’s blood and dental records had been stolen and evidence planted at the McReedy murder scene. In retrospect, the CCTV footage confirmed that he couldn’t have been in her room long enough to commit the crime. The lead detective who had suggested this in the first place was taken off the case.
Ed’s interrogators never questioned any of the other deaths: Carl, the two goons at City Point, Bailey by the Kennebec, Doc’s team, Fallows, David Krige, and Jim Dove… He was never publicly linked with the deaths of Catrine and Shannon. The two women were deemed lone wolves: unhinged by their childhood experiences, extremists turned against society, Catrine’s action inspiring Shannon’s. Cases closed.
