“I want to see Ryan,” Ami said as soon as the waiter left.
“He can stay with you until it’s safe to go home. I bet he’ll get a kick out of living in a hotel for a few days.”
“He will. He’s very curious.” Ami smiled. “Sometimes he drives me crazy with all his questions.”
“I understand he was pretty upset after the game.”
“He’s better now, but it’s been tough on him. He really likes Carl and he still has nightmares about what happened. He doesn’t need more violence in his life. It took him a long time to get over the death of his father.”
“That must have been tough for both of you.”
“Chad was a great father. A great husband, too.”
Ami choked up for a moment. She was tired and it was tough to control her emotions.
“I know. Betty Sato told me,” Kirkpatrick said so that she wouldn’t have to talk about something that obviously still hurt.
“Ryan was my lifeline, Brendan. He kept me going. If he hadn’t been there I don’t know what I would have done.”
“You would have done okay. You’re tough. You don’t take shit from anyone, certainly not from me.”
He smiled. Ami thought of Brendan’s own situation, carrying on bravely despite losing someone he loved.
“How did you do it, all by yourself?”
“I put one foot in front of the other and kept walking. I’m still walking. I’m afraid to stop. I guess I don’t have to tell you.”
The waiter appeared with their order. They both looked grateful for the interruption.
“I’ll check you in after breakfast,” Brendan said as soon as they were alone. “Then I’ll arrange to have Ryan picked up from school and brought here.”
“This is awfully nice of you.”
“I’m trying to make up for the way I treated you when we first met. I feel guilty about that.”
“Yeah, you were a bit of a shit,” Ami answered with a grin. “But I forgive you.”
“Good. I don’t want you mad at me, at least, not when we’re out of court.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Carl had doubled back after laying a false trail that he hoped would lead his trackers south. From his position behind a tree several yards away, he’d heard everything that Sam Cutler said to Vanessa and he’d seen Cutler give the order to inject her.
Carl was certain that he had met Cutler twice before, only Wingate’s man had called himself Paul Molineaux during Carl’s first combat mission and the mission to rescue the MIAs. Carl debated killing Cutler and the man who was holding Vanessa, but he rejected the idea. Cutler was right. Carl was out of practice. In his twenties, he could have taken both men out with a handgun from this distance, but Vanessa might die if he couldn’t get his shots off quickly enough or-which was equally possible-if he missed. Carl decided that his best course of action was to wait until Vanessa’s guard took her to the car, but he had to reject that plan when two more men materialized at Cutler’s side.
“We lost him,” one said.
“Okay,” Sam answered. “We’ll never get him in the dark after he’s had this much time to get away. Let’s bring the General’s daughter home.”
Carl watched them go. He’d heard what Cutler had said about the tracking device. When he was certain that Cutler and his men had gone, he disabled it. As he drove, he started working on a plan for rescuing Vanessa.
Carl abandoned Vanessa’s car in a supermarket parking lot, stole a nondescript Chevrolet, and headed south using back roads. It took him a full day to drive down the coast. On the way, he listened to the radio for the political news. Wingate was giving a speech in Cleveland. If the General went straight home, he and Carl would arrive at the mansion at about the same time.
After nightfall, Carl broke into a sporting goods store in a small town near San Diego and stole a pair of stiff-soled trail shoes, binoculars, a wetsuit, a fishing bow and arrows, several lengths of sturdy rope, and the strongest fishing line he could find. He put his booty into one of Vanessa’s duffel bags and drove toward a beach a few miles south of the General’s estate, where he’d hung out when he was a student at St. Martin’s Prep.
There were no cars in the narrow lot when Carl parked around midnight and changed into his wetsuit. The beach was deserted, too. Carl strapped the duffel bag across his back and started swimming up the coast. Fighting through the rolling water was exhausting, but thoughts of Vanessa kept him plowing ahead. Carl knew that getting into the mansion and rescuing her would be much harder than the swim. No matter how many times Carl fine-tuned his plan, it sounded suicidal.
“Getting old is a bitch,” Rice thought as he dragged his aching body and the duffel bag out of the surf and onto the beach behind the stone jetty at the end of Morris Wingate’s property. He flopped down on the sand to catch his breath. For most of his life, Carl had been in the type of shape that let him endure almost any physical hardship with a minimum of wear and tear; but now he was almost fifty and his body did not hold up the way it used to, no matter how much he worked out. Then there was the fact that he had still not fully recovered from being shot. The only thing that kept him going was Vanessa. He had betrayed her once, when he went into the army without resisting, and he wasn’t going to let her down again.
When his breathing was back to normal, Carl peeked over the jetty and surveyed the three-hundred-foot cliff that marked the boundary of the Wingate estate. When he saw the old tree still jutting out from the side of the cliff, he breathed a sigh of relief. His plan depended on that tree, and he hoped that he was half as tough as it was.
Carl’s main problem was the condition of the cliff. Centuries of a relentless assault by nature had made the surface he was about to climb very unstable. The face of the cliff was constantly sloughing. Vegetation grew in cracks in the shale, loosening it. Wind laden with moisture and salt from the sea beat at the rock mercilessly. The net result was a facade that was always crumbling and falling away. Each toe and handhold would be treacherous enough in the daytime. At night, every inch of the climb was going to be a surprise.
Carl struggled out of his wetsuit and put on his jeans, shirt, and trail shoes before scanning the top of the cliff with the stolen binoculars. When he was satisfied that there were no guards patrolling, he slung the duffel bag across his back. He was about to sprint across the beach when he heard the sound of rotary blades whipping through the night. Rice pressed himself against the jetty and scanned the sky until he fixed on a dot of light moving toward the Wingate estate from the north. Moments later the landing lights on Wingate’s helipad came on and a Computex helicopter dropped out of the sky. The General had come home.
Carl knew that the arrival of the helicopter was bound to distract the guards, so he ran across the sand to the base of the cliff, then stood in the shadows listening for any sign that he had been detected. When he was convinced that he was safe, he began his ascent directly under the tree.
Despite arms and legs that ached from the swim, pain from his wounds, and wind that buffeted him mercilessly, Carl scaled the first hundred feet with only minor problems. Then two successive handholds crumbled and a foothold gave way, sending him sliding several feet down the face of the cliff. Carl stopped his fall on a narrow ledge and broke out his gear. After attaching a long length of fishing line to an arrow, he fitted the arrow to the fishing bow. From the beach the old tree was three hundred feet straight up, but now the tree was a little less than two hundred feet above him-still a long shot, but he had no choice but to go for it.
Carl aimed so that the arrow would clear the back of the tree. His first shot was short and he had to reel the arrow back. Wind blew his second shot away from the face of the cliff. Carl waited patiently for the wind to die down before taking his third shot. His muscles strained as he pulled back on the bowstring. He sighted and released. This time the arrow arced through the air, sailing over the north side of the tree and across the back. The weight of the arrow pulled the fishing line down the south side of the tree past Carl, and it fell almost to the beach.