Cut and Run

“Maybe…”

“We’re going to do this now. You and me. Ready?”

“I guess.”

“Okay.” He pried open his bad eye, gritted his teeth, and watched as the two little fingers converged, blocking what little sight he had.

A moment later he screamed. It stuck to her finger like stubborn mucus, and when she shook it off it landed on the bathroom floor, a little glob of yellowish goo.

“I got it!” she said. “I got it.” Without thinking what she was doing, she almost hugged him, then shrank back.

“You got it,” he said, swallowing a scream. His one good eye met hers, and for a moment, neither knew what to say.

The assigned hour of 2:37 P.M. growing near, Paolo checked his watch repeatedly, his good eye rotating from the distant airfield to the airspace above the field, to the rearview mirror, and back again. He’d covered the injured eye with an athletic headband worn askew on his head, a makeshift eye patch.

Arrangements had been made immediately after reporting he’d lost all sight out of the eye. He’d hoped Philippe might simply decide to send him a partner, possibly with some medical supplies, so that he could complete the original assignment. The jet coming either meant anxiety over the hostage situation or a loss of faith in him, so he looked ahead to the landing sick with nerves. His future was in the hands of others, the outcome a plane ride away, and Paolo felt desperately out of control.

The first car he saw could have been nothing. It pulled off the two-lane road on the north side of the airstrip and into a dirt turnout in front of a farmer’s maintenance shed or hay barn. When no one climbed out, Paolo kept his eye on it.

But it was a second vehicle, a dark four-door much like the first, that got his heart pounding. If he had it right, and he wasn’t sure he did, he’d seen this same car already. It had driven past the airstrip’s entrance. Now it had backtracked and entered. It drove up to the strip’s only hangar, where a man wearing a sport coat climbed out. A moment later the hangar’s electronic door opened slowly, and then this car pulled inside, meaning there was a second man behind the wheel.

Before the hangar door came fully shut, Paolo had his motor going. He rocked it off the jack and backed up across the small bridge. He took a rural road south, into farm country, having plotted this course as an escape route in advance. It was hilly and wooded out here, an easy place to lose a tail if necessary. He drove fast, but not too fast, his one good eye jumping from the road ahead of him to the road behind.

Cops or feds, it hardly mattered: Philippe had been clear about what he should do should anything go wrong.

Radio silence-no phones, no attempts to contact the compound. No e-mail. No faxes. He was on his own, his only assignment to get the little girl to the compound as soon as possible.

Crossing the stream for the second time, Paolo slowed and tossed his cell phone out the window into the water, ending any possibility of triangulating his location. It landed with a small splash.

He and the girl were on their own now. Bad eye or no bad eye, he had an assignment he intended to carry out. He felt strangely relieved. By the grace of God he’d been given a chance to redeem himself, to prove his worth.

He crested a hill, already pla

Tried not to think of what he’d do if Philippe ordered him to kill the little girl.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

In a surprisingly short time, Dr. Miller traced Markowitz’s Internet access backward from the university grid to a physical address in Florida. Armed with that address, and hoping the Markowitz-Romero-Pe

Late that same afternoon, Larson drove a rental car past a cattle farm’s unmoving windmill that stood in a field of lush green grass intermittently shorn by gray longhorn cattle looking worse for the wear in the Florida heat.

Stretching high above the flat green horizon, eighty-foot-tall telescoping steel poles held clusters of powerful gas-vapor highway lights that trained down onto the cloverleaves and rest areas. A blessing in hurricane season perhaps, but an eyesore on any other day. The occasional building crane loomed in the distance, reaching for the rare cloud like a bony finger. Randomly placed cell towers also rose from the green jungle, looking for all the world like derelict oil rigs. The only other break in the perfectly blue sky came from a musical staff of high-voltage wires strung across the highway. These were images one absorbed on the flatness of Interstate 75, heading south from Tampa: orange construction cones; bumps of black road tar in a sea of powder gray concrete; a set of smokestacks belching in the far distance.

They passed a sign indicating they’d entered Manatee County. Larson upped the rental’s speed, desperate now to reach their destination.

“You’re not coming to Useppa with me,” Larson said, having delayed it as long as he could.

“Of course I am.”

“I’ve arranged something. A buddy of mine will look after you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“At the end of this it would be nice if Pe

She bit her tongue and said no more.

Larson had left Dr. Miller both his own and Hope’s original cell phone number-the number now call-forwarded to the Siemens he’d given her, and therefore it was impossible to triangulate. Miller and Hope spoke the same language; she would be the one called with anything technical.

“Tell me she’s okay, Lars,” she said at last.

“She’s okay,” he said.

“Tell me again.”

“They have not hurt her. Guys like this, it’s all about profit and loss. There’s no profit in that.”

She unstrapped her seat belt and moved over the gap between the seats so that she could lean against him.

Larson drove on in silence, holding his breath. With each mile, he pressed the rental a little faster, and she leaned more heavily against him. He could have just kept driving.

Ninety minutes later, now on the island of Gasparilla, a hotel bellhop, clad in khakis and a green golf shirt, awaited them with a brass luggage dolly and a look of impertinence. Larson’s rental blocked the hotel’s semicircular drive, other arrivals now idling behind him.

The night air rang behind a chorus of cicadas and tree frogs. The Gasparilla I

“Tommy’ll take care of you,” Larson said.

“I don’t want Tommy to take care of me.” She turned intentionally childish.

Larson had bunked with Tommy Tomelson during a two-week in-service training at the FBI Academy a couple years earlier. He’d stayed in touch enough to know that the man had lost his wife to cancer and had subsequently taken a year’s leave from the ATF, then a short nosedive into a rum bottle, and finally sobered up enough to live the grief-stricken existence of a charter-boat captain. He was currently operating a tarpon charter out of Miller’s Marina, which served Larson’s needs well.

Tommy was up there on the veranda, smoking a Marlboro and drinking something dark, watching the tight buns and the halter tops pass by while waiting for Larson to sort things out. He was a big guy, with a fisherman’s tan and a quarterback’s shoulders, his sun-leathered face covered now by a pervasive veil of discontent and loneliness.