“Good-bye,” Dance said with a smile as he tapped the plate with his foot, the edge of the bridge acting like a fulcrum as it teetered a moment before slowly rising up and tipping into space.
It fell for all of two feet before it was jolted to a stop. The cuffs dug into Nick’s wrists. He tried to grab hold of the cable to alleviate the pain but found it to be too thin. It was one hundred pounds, a weight that was difficult for Dance but less than average in Nick’s workout routines. Though the pain throbbed into his constricted wrists, he easily lifted the plate upward using his shoulders and back, finally leaning back to try to pull it up and over the rail…
When all at once Dance grabbed him by the plastic ties about his ankles and lifted his legs in the air. Nick’s stomach fell upon the metal bar. Like the edge of the bridge, the green rail acted as a fulcrum. He wasn’t happy that he paid such close attention in Mr. Stout’s physics class, the disproportionate weight of the iron plate making it easy for Dance to lift Nick up and over the bridge.
And in the blink of an eye. Nick tumbled over into midair, the iron plate leading the way to a watery grave.
Fifty feet, headfirst. Nick hit the water as if hitting a concrete pavement, the water exploding out around him. The weight pulled him instantly under, his body descending into the darkness. The lake’s depth varied from twenty to three hundred feet, but at this point under the bridge it was sounded at only twenty-five. Not that the depth would have any bearing on his chances for survival.
Lungs burning, the pressure in his ears growing with every foot of his descent, Nick was pulled toward his death.
And the weight hit bottom. Nick floated upside-down like a sunken buoy. Stars danced in the periphery of his watery vision. Shafts of light glistened and broke the surface above, refracting about the depths, lighting the rocky, silt-covered lakebed.
Being a swimmer, Nick could hold his breath for far longer than most, but he had no idea of the time, nor how long his lungs could truly hold out.
But it wasn’t his pain he dwelled upon, not the suddenness of his inevitable death. It was Julia. Everything that was good in his life, everything worth living for, had been taken. He felt a crushing shame that he couldn’t save her from her fate. He had been so easily deceived, so gullibly accepting in the help of strangers, only to be thrown to his death by those who were paid to protect.
Nick was upside-down, steadily exhaling a very small amount of air to keep his nostrils from filling up and drowning him prematurely. With the glow of the surface light above, he finally caught his bearings when something bumped up against his upward-facing legs. Nick jerked his body around and stared into the vacant eyes of the dead.
There was a body, floating upright, bobbing about, his wrists cuffed together, his legs tied, with the plastic ties wrapped about a similar iron plate. And there was another body ten feet behind it. Nick couldn’t see it well, but there was no mistaking the uniform on the skinny, redheaded man. It was a police officer. And through the white shafts of light that cut down through the water, he saw the shadows of a third, dressed in a blue shirt, his long dark hair wafting in the shifting currents. He was in a graveyard, an assassin’s underwater dumping ground.
Seeing the corpses, Nick instantly understood why Dance had mentioned déjà vu.
The man immediately next to him was freshly dead, his half-mast eyes revealing rolled-back pupils, his right eye was swollen, black and blue, his mouth slack-jawed, the left side of his lower lip distended as if someone had danced on his face before killing him. He had gray hair that drifted about his face like wind-whipped grass.
Nick’s lungs began to burn, his air running low. He knew it had been a minute. Another forty-five… maybe sixty seconds and he would pass out.
He grabbed the bicycle chain that tethered him to his death anchor and pulled himself slightly deeper. He grabbed hold of the belt of the man adjacent to him, reached into his pocket with his cuffed right hand, and pulled out his wallet, holding it tight as if it would somehow save him.
But it was a useless final act. His lungs were on fire, his head throbbing with the final pulsing of his oxygen-deprived heart. It had been over two minutes, there was no doubt he would die, surrendering to the seductive call of death.
And as the last bit of oxygen fed Nick’s thoughts, he dwelled on Julia, her beauty, her kindness, and how the world would be robbed of her presence because…
Because he had failed her.
CHAPTER 5
2:00 P.M.
JULIA SAT IN HER SUV in the driveway of a modest split-level colonial in the town of Pound Ridge. Like so many of the people in Byram Hills, once Julia learned of the crash, she had rushed to the site to help. But when her eyes fell on what remained of Flight 502, and she realized it was the flight she was supposed have been on, she couldn’t stop picturing the faces of the passengers she had been sitting next to and how close she had come to sharing their fate.
Instead of working at the scene, she agreed to go pick up a doctor who had been called out of retirement to help with the emergency effort. She had driven up to Bedford a half hour earlier to get gas and now waited outside the doctor’s home while he gathered his things.
As she sat alone, her mind a whirlwind of thoughts, the full impact of what she had escaped finally fell upon her: She was not the only one who had escaped death; Julia placed her hand on her belly, knowing that two lives had been saved today.
The irony was she was on the plane heading up to Boston not for a meeting as she had told people but rather to see her doctor.
She and Nick had lived in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a year after being married. He had been transferred up there and she followed him, finding a job with a small firm in Boston. A colleague had recommended a doctor by the name of Colverhome, a man who not only maintained an impeccable reputation, but had a manner that was both gentle and humorous.
After moving back to Byram Hills, she never changed doctors, finding it easy enough to schedule her annual exam to coincide with a business trip.
She had called him earlier in the week to tell him of her suspicion, and he had arranged for a local doctor to give her a pregnancy test. The test was positive-six weeks pregnant. It filled her with an elation she had never known. She was bursting to tell Nick but had wanted to make it special. So she had arranged with Colverhome to fly up for a prenatal exam and a sonogram of the small beginnings of their child that she could frame and surprise Nick with over a romantic dinner this evening at La Cremaillere. It was the restaurant where he had asked her to marry him, it was the beginning of their life together, a monumental occasion, and she wanted the same gravitas for this most blessed-and surprising-of events. Their morning argument, the one that sent Nick into such a foul mood, had been over a dinner that would never happen. Their plan with the Mullers was a ruse to throw Nick off what would be one of the most profound moments in their sixteen-year relationship.
While they had planned on children, she didn’t intend to get pregnant until next year. Their lives were so structured, with their careers, with building a nest egg to allow them to comfortably raise children, that the actual thought of pregnancy had been far from her mind. She realized now that they had spent so much time planning, working to achieve a level of success before having kids, that the thought of actually carrying a child had become foreign.
The news of her pregnancy had taken her by surprise, and she knew it would absolutely floor Nick.
She had been so absorbed in her career as an attorney hoping to make partner that she had lost countless friends who had journeyed into motherhood leaving their aspirations behind. But the moment the pregnancy was confirmed her focus changed entirely. She knew it wasn’t hormones, it wasn’t some false sense created by the fantasy of not working. It was simply love.