I was all over him, fighting him for the pistol, which I knocked out of his hand. It went skidding under the car. He was young, strong, and desperate, probably sure I was going to kill him. All those years of rock climbing and working out had given me tremendous strength in the upper body, and believe me, I needed it then. We rolled around on the ground, grunting and cursing, each of us trying to subdue the other as traffic roared by on the interstate.
There was no way around it — at the first opportunity I popped him in the jaw as hard as I could hit. Stunned, semiconscious, he relaxed, and I leaped up.
The radio was squawking, something about backup help being minutes away. My young fool hadn’t waited; if I had been a killer he would more than likely be dead. He didn’t know that, though, and probably never would.
I couldn’t leave him lying beside the road to be run over, so I picked him up bodily and tossed him in the back seat of the cruiser. I threw his pistol in with him and retrieved mine from where he dropped it. Then I grabbed the key from the ignition and threw it as far as I could. I was sprinting for my car when two unmarked sedans skidded to a halt, one behind the cruiser and one in front of my heap. The drivers and passengers came boiling out of the cars. There were four of them in civilian clothes, and they came on a dead run with drawn weapons.
“Freeze!” the man in front roared, his weapon leveled at my belt buckle.
It wasn’t as if I had a lot of options. I lifted my hands. One of the men dashed in and snapped the dangling cuff around my other wrist, then two of them hustled me into their car. Behind me I heard a shot.
One of them got behind the wheel, and the other jumped into the passenger seat. In seconds we were rolling.
“You fucking assholes!” I roared. “For the love of fucking Christ! You people didn’t have to shoot that cop!”
The guy in the passenger seat turned and slapped me in the face with his pistol, which threw me sideways and stunned me.
When I managed to get back to a sitting position, he stuck his pistol in my face and snarled, “I want the address where Kelly Erlanger is hiding, and I want it now.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me like you did that cop? Stick it up your ass!”
He whacked me again with the pistol and I passed out.
“He spoke to me today in Russian,” Basil Jarrett said to Linda Fiocchi as they ate dinner. They and Mikhail Goncharov were sitting at the small round dining table in the cabin by the Greenbrier eating trout fillets that Jarrett had cooked in a pan over an open fire. Goncharov held his knife and fork in the European manner and ate with gusto.
Goncharov’s glass was empty, so Jarrett poured him another glass of wine, then refilled his and Fiocchi’s glasses. That killed the bottle.
“He seems to have regained his appetite,” Fiocchi said wryly. Goncharov was working on his third fillet.
A few minutes later she said, “He never sleeps for more than an hour, then he wakes up talking and thrashing. Nightmares, I think. He wakes me up every time.”
“So how did a man who speaks only an eastern European language get out here in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains?”
“I don’t know.”
Jarrett helped himself to another fillet. He was hungry, too. “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Goncharov finished his fish and his wine, smiled at his hosts, then wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down near the stove. He went to sleep while Jarrett and Fiocchi sipped coffee. The first nightmare came fifteen minutes after he drifted off. The room he was in was afire, he was choking on smoke, men were shooting…
When I came to, the guy in the passenger seat was using a cell phone as we rolled along an interstate choked with traffic. I was leaning back against the seat, slumped toward the right door, with my hands cuffed in front of me. I took two deep breaths, waited a few seconds for my head to clear.
Nobody needed to tell me I was in real trouble. Obviously these guys had followed me from Dorsey’s to the airport. They must not have had enough men to follow both me and Grafton, so they had stayed on me. They were going to get Jake Grafton’s name and address from me one way or another, then they were going to kill me. I knew it and they knew it. They weren’t going to ask nicely or appeal to my better nature. Even if I managed to say nothing before they beat me senseless or shot me to death, I had Grafton’s telephone numbers written on my left hand in ink. They would find them eventually.
I thought about this, took one more deep breath, then reached forward, put my hands over the passenger’s head, and jerked backward with the cuffs against his neck while I rammed my head into the back of his. I used every ounce of strength I had… and heard his neck snap.
The driver glanced sideways at me, his eyes as big as saucers, the car swerving dangerously. I didn’t take the time to get my hands away from the dead man — I smashed the driver in the head with my left elbow as hard as I could.
The car caromed off a semi that was in the fast lane, then headed toward the right side of the highway. I managed to get my hands free of the corpse and got both hands around the driver’s neck as we shot off the highway, went up an embankment, and smashed head-on into a huge aluminum light pole. My death grip on the driver’s neck kept him from going through the windshield, because in the excitement he hadn’t put on his seat belt.
The seat back broke loose, and I wound up jammed against the dashboard, the driver half under me. I still had a good grip on his neck, so I used it. Strangled him like a chicken.
Every window in the car was broken; glass pebbles covered everything. In the silence that followed the crash I could hear imperious noises coming from the cell phone. It was on the floor. I could hear it but couldn’t see it. I jammed my hands down there, groped all over, and a miracle happened. I found it.
I said into it, “I’m coming to get you, motherfucker,” then snapped the mouthpiece shut and put it in my pocket. The car doors were too twisted to open, so I went out through a window and headed for the woods at a hell-bent trot. The thought that there was another car full of these dudes roaming around someplace had finally occurred to me. Mom always said I had a one-track mind.
Deep in the trees, well away from the lights of the cars whizzing by on the highway, I stopped to empty my stomach. When the spasms stopped, I leaned against a tree for a while. I couldn’t stop shaking. Too much adrenaline, I guess.
Personally, I think this James Bond gig is vastly overrated.
In the evening gloom under the trees I was temporarily safe. That calmed me down. When my stomach was under control and I had caught my breath, I managed to get a small pick set out of my pocket. It looked like a jackknife and contained three picks mounted as if they were blades and a torsion wrench that could be removed from the handle. I selected the pick I wanted by feel and inserted it like a shim under the teeth of the left cuff, jamming open the ratchet that held the cuff. Ten seconds later I had the right one off and tossed the cuffs away.
As the shock and adrenaline wore off, I realized I was oozing blood from the side of my face. Not from where the guy slugged me with the pistol, but from whacking my head on the dashboard when the car hit the pole.
I saw the flashing lights of a police car slow and stop by the wreck. Time to boogie. Ten minutes later I came out of the woods in a residential neighborhood. Walked between two houses and found myself on a paved street. Several cars passed me from time to time. An hour passed before I finally came to a convenience store with a pay telephone mounted on the outside wall of the building. I had been reading street signs, so I knew roughly where I was. I called Jake Grafton on his cell phone and told him what had happened in as few words as possible and gave him my location.