‘I have Saffron Oppenheimer in custody,’ Zamora said. ‘You may want to speak to her.’
Zamora handed Saffron the phone, and watched and listened as Doug Jarvis filled her in on her grandfather’s activities. Slowly the color drained from Saffron’s face, tears welling in her eyes. She let the phone fall from her ear to clatter onto the table and looked up at Zamora in disbelief.
‘We must hurry.’
57
‘Great work, genius.’
Lopez’s voice sounded tiny in the dawn as the rising sun illuminated the endless plains and steeply rolling hills of the New Mexico wilderness. Ethan winced, shuffling about on the hard desert floor as the bark of the tree to which he was bound dug into the skin of his back.
‘I tried to reason with them,’ he shot back, looking over his shoulder to where Lopez was bound on the other side of the trunk. ‘It’s not like we’re their enemy. But they’re facing death whichever way they go and I guess Ellison Thorne doesn’t like outsiders.’
‘Thanks, Sherlock,’ Lopez muttered, struggling to escape from the thick ropes that bound her wrists and ankles and wrapped around them both to secure them to the tree. ‘We’re pretty useless without your pistol and cell phone too.’
Ethan squinted out to the east, seeing the glow of the sun nestling just below the rugged horizon. Bats fluttered across the dawn sky above him as he struggled to escape from his bonds and figure out just how long it had been since Ellison Thorne and his men had tied them to the tree. Thirty minutes? Maybe forty, no more. Forty minutes on foot, on this kind of terrain, would take them maybe two miles, three if they were pushing it. From what he’d seen, most of the soldiers were suffering from some kind of debilitating illness that prevented them from pushing their bodies too hard. Two miles then, a fifteen-minute run in this kind of terrain if he could only get free from the ropes.
Ethan froze as a noise from somewhere further down the hill caught his attention, a rustle of some kind that seemed immediately out of place in the silence of the dawn. He recalled seeing a number of small caves down on the hillside from when they’d ascended, the caves probably amplifying the sounds of movement.
‘Stay still,’ he whispered to Lopez.
Lopez fell silent as Ethan listened to the breeze in the leaves above them. Something else, the soft but unmistakable crunch of a footfall, carefully made but audible in the otherwise quiet morning air. Ethan moved only his eyes, keeping his head still as he searched for the source of the movement.
He wasn’t expecting the voice that broke the morning stillness with a cackle of delight.
‘Now, this is a sight to behold.’
Ethan saw a craggy head appear over the brow of the hill to his right, as Butch Cutler puffed his way up to the tree and squatted down alongside them, wiping sweat from his brow.
‘Fine mornin’, Mister Warner,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I see you’re in control of things as ever, keeping momentum in your investigation, so to speak.’
‘I’d have been happy to see just about any other face but yours, Cutler,’ Ethan said. ‘How about you stop showboating and cut these ropes?’
‘Seems a shame to,’ Cutler said, ‘without first recording the event for posterity.’
Cutler stood and pulled a digital camera from the rucksack on his back, snapping a shot of Ethan and Lopez scowling before exchanging the camera for a large knife. He knelt down alongside Ethan and held the blade to his face.
‘You’re lucky I don’t take bribes from men like Jeb Oppenheimer,’ he said quietly. ‘Right now, I could have earned me a dime or two.’
Ethan glanced at the blade flashing in the sunlight, and then Cutler whipped the weapon in a vicious downward stroke, the ropes wrapped around the tree parting as he sawed through them. A minute or two of frenzied hacking and Ethan and Lopez were free.
‘That’s one you owe me,’ Cutler said as he slipped the knife into its sheath at his belt.
‘How did you find us?’ Ethan asked, looking around for Cutler’s men as he stood and rubbed his wrists where the ropes had bitten into his skin.
‘I was a ranger, remember?’ Cutler replied, somewhat annoyed. ‘I found that little camp of hippies easily enough and they told me what happened. I drove down this way, the GMC you’d taken was parked down the road from here and you left a trail like a herd of bison through a wheat field. A blind four-year-old could have tracked you down.’
‘I meant who did you speak to?’ Ethan said. ‘Saffron Oppenheimer?’
‘No, your buddy from the DIA. You’ve got some powerful friends in the capital.’
‘Doug’s here?’ Lopez asked in surprise.
‘He’s on his way to New York, so he said.’
‘Which is why you’re here on your own,’ Lopez surmised.
‘Sure is,’ Cutler replied. ‘Doug filled me in on everything, asked me to come out here and make sure his little golden boy wasn’t being bullied by the natives.’
Ethan thought for a moment.
‘What did you mean about bribes from Oppenheimer?’ he asked.
Cutler smiled a cold grin.
‘The devious old bastard approached me in Santa Fe,’ he said. ‘Got his heavies to come up to my hotel room and organize a little chat. I went along with it of course, but not with any intention of following through. He wanted me to turn on my own boss, and forward anything I found directly to him instead.’
Ethan blinked. ‘Are you the only one he’s approached?’
‘Nope,’ Cutler said. ‘Either he or his men have approached mine on a few occasions. Like I said, I run a tight team. They all reported back to me.’
Ethan looked at Lopez.
‘Oppenheimer could have turned anyone,’ he said. ‘Hell, for all we know he could have bribed Ellison Thorne. He’s got enough money to buy half the population of the state.’
Lopez remained silent. Ethan looked at the rising sun now blazing across the horizon as Cutler shifted the rucksack on his back.
‘So, where to now, cowboy?’
Ethan surveyed the wilderness.
‘They can’t have gotten more than a couple of miles from here, but they’re experts at camouflage and concealment. They won’t have left an easily identifiable trail, if they’ve left one at all.’
‘Well, we ain’t got time to stand here talking about it,’ Cutler said. ‘Carlsbad Caverns are that way.’ He pointed out to the southeast. ‘Faster we move, quicker we get there.’
‘I just saw you get to the top of this little hill,’ Ethan said. ‘You were almost having a coronary, and we need to cover a couple of miles real fast in order to have any chance of catching them up.’
Butch Cutler frowned at Ethan.
‘You sayin’ I ain’t man enough for this? I’ll wind your goddamned neck in and—’
Lopez moved between the two of them.
‘All right, children,’ she said. ‘Cutler, get to your vehicle and get back-up. You know where we’re going to within a reasonable area, so get Doug Jarvis to send in the cavalry. They’ll find us quickly enough.’
‘What about the guys you’re chasing?’ Cutler protested.
‘They’re going underground,’ Lopez replied. ‘If we send in a helicopter now they’ll hear it coming and we’ll never find them. We’ve got to catch them unawares before they descend into the caves and follow them in, or this is all for nothing.’
Cutler laughed, his breath condensing in billowing clouds on the morning air as he looked at Ethan.
‘Oh yeah? And how are you going to do that then? They’ve got a two-mile head start, leave no trail and the last time you tracked them Boy Scout here got himself disarmed and tied to a tree by a bunch of geriatrics.’