Five screws and a plate, Nicholas didn’t say. He could still see the X-ray in the viewer, still feel the sense of helpless hopelessness in his gut. “Of course it hurt. You broke your arm. If broken arms didn’t hurt, people would break them every day.”
He got the smile he was trolling for.
“But it didn’t stop you from skateboarding, did it?”
Joey shook his head.
“In fact, weren’t you back out there skateboarding with a cast on your arm?”
A giggle. “Yeah.”
“Well, that’s the Joey I’m talking to right now,” Nicholas pressed. “The one who’s tough enough to face his fears.”
“But they could kill us.”
“They could kill us anyway. We could get hit by lighting.” He reached out and pulled Josef’s hand out from under the blanket. He held it, and then covered it with his other hand. At whisper, he said, “You need to know that if they come for us, I’m going to fight. In fact, I’m going to fight all the way. What you do is up to you, and I know this is a crappy kind of choice to have to make at your age, but I want you to know that I’ll be able to use all the help I can get.”
Josef nodded. “Okay,” he said. “When do you think they’ll come?”
Nicholas turned to look out the window. Purple hues had begun to infuse the perfect blue of the sky. “I would guess after dark,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
“Suppose I fall asleep again?”
Nicholas waved away the concern as it were a pesky fly. “If you need to sleep, sleep. Who knows, but maybe you will need the rest. I’ll stay awake.”
As the boy settle back into his covers and closed his eyes, Nicholas thought about taking back the entire conversation. For sure, going along was the quickest way to stay alive in the short term, but in the long term, captivity meant only misery.
In less than a minute, Josef’s breathing became rhythmic, and then there was the slightest trace of a snore.
As he watched his son sleep, he tried to come to grips with how desperately he hated Tony Darmond.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
David felt as if he were living someone else’s life. The events of the past couple of days were so far beyond the bounds that typically defined his existence that for a moment out there on the range in the glare and the cold and the sun, he felt a little dizzy. Was it possible to have so vivid a dream?
The answer, of course, was no, but that didn’t make the surrealism of the moment any more… real.
Now they were gathered back in crazy Striker’s little house, boots off and warming near the fire, while the entire team snarfed down pizza and hotdogs. Apparently, that was all Striker had in his fridge. It wasn’t till he smelled the food that he realized how hungry he was.
He found out the hard way that Big Guy was hungry, too. Damn near lost his arm reaching for the same pizza slice as he.
Together, they ate like locusts, consuming every morsel within ten minutes.
When the table was cleared of dishes, Scorpion pulled a heavy-duty laptop out of his enormous backpack — he called it a rucksack — and positioned it so everyone could see the screen.
After a few taps on the keys, a daytime picture of Saint Stephen’s Island appeared in high definition.
“This is the latest satellite imagery we have,” Scorpion said. “The good news and bad news is the addition of more guards. Here, here, and here.”
David couldn’t see what he was pointing at.
“Look for the shadows,” Scorpion explained. “They’re easier to make out than the tops of heads.”
Of course. Once he saw that, the human forms were obvious.
“These images refresh every four minutes,” Scorpion went on. “Mother Hen will be monitoring them back at the War Room and will let us know if anything changes significantly.”
Yelena raised her hand. “I don’t understand how more guards can be anything but bad news.”
“It means that there’s something there on the property that’s worth a closer guard than yesterday. In my mind, that means that your family has arrived.”
He clicked another button, and the imagery changed to something that resembled a photographic negative. “This is thermal imaging,” he said. “Remember yesterday, when we looked, only this area at the top appeared warm? Well look now at the southern wing. It’s warm now, too. According to the drawings we found on the Internet, and augmented by records Mother Hen dug up, that entire building is stacked cell blocks. Three floors of them, except for the wing where we expect the PCs to be, which is four floors.”
“How are we going to know which level they’re on?” Becky asked.
Scorpion held up both hands, as if to ward off an attacker. “No. There is no we inside the compound, unless you’re talking about Big Guy and me. You three will be outside the compound. More on that in a minute.”
David felt an emotion that was hard to describe. Could it be disappointment that he wasn’t going to be shot at? Maybe it was just disappointment that he wasn’t trusted enough to be on the real team.
“I want to be there,” Yelena said.
“I know you do,” Scorpion said. “But this isn’t about what’s best for you, it’s about what’s best for your son and grandson. Big Guy and I have been doing this for a long time. The fact that we’re here talking to you is perfect evidence that we’re good at what we do.”
“But—”
“Hear me out. In the very best case, if everything breaks our way, we’ll already be dealing with two people who may or may not know up from down. To add a third — and with all respect, consider the possibility that you might get shot or be injured — now we’ll have more victims than operators. It’s not a sustainable model.”
David watched as the words rolled over the First Lady — they pierced her, really — he saw her try to construct an argument, and then abandon the effort when the inherent sense of it all settled into her brain.
“Big Guy and I will move heaven and earth to reunite you with your family.”
Becky tentatively raised a hand. It hadn’t been going well for her thus far, and she seemed hesitant to step in something again. “Suppose you and Big Guy, you know, don’t…” She couldn’t complete the sentence.
“Make it?” Scorpion prompted. “Suppose we get killed? It won’t happen.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I have to know that. I have to know that beyond any shadow of doubt, because if I consider failure to be an option, then failure becomes the only possible outcome.”
“That’s hubris,” Yelena said. “That’s arrogance.”
Scorpion seemed taken aback for just a few seconds, and then he shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “But it won’t happen.”
David didn’t understand the point of the question in the first place. If the rescuers died, then everyone died. What was the point of even discussing that?
Scorpion clicked another key. The thermal image became a map. “We leave from here,” he said, pointing to a spot on a service road that ran parallel to the Ottawa River Parkway, roughly south-southwest of the southernmost point of Saint Stephen’s Island. “David, you and Becky will just leave the boat trailer there, and Big Guy and I will paddle around to the northern tip of the island, and that’s where we’ll moor the boat.”
In essence what he was describing was an inverted J, a route that seemed needlessly complicated and very long.
“Why not just go straight north to the southern tip of the island?” David asked. “It’d be a lot quicker.”
Scorpion’s jaw set and he drew in a quick breath. Apparently, Scorpion didn’t appreciate being second-guessed. “Remember that getting in is the easy part. Everybody’s dumb and happy because even though they’ve geared up with additional guards, none of those guards actually expects anything to happen. After things go boom and the shooting starts, it’ll start getting hairy. It’s the getting-out part that’s difficult.”