Wardell kept going because he knew that keeping going was the point. They hadn’t broken Wardell in the five years they’d had him, and they wouldn’t break him in the two weeks he had left. Tonight was the first time he’d missed his evening’s workout in a long while, and his body ached for the routine the way a junkie’s aches for a fix.
It might be too late to do things right, to go back and carry out his work on a grander scale, but that didn’t mean he had to meekly accept his fate. Those dozen witnesses who came to see him die would find a man who was going to meet his Maker looking good. He wondered who would be there. The governor, probably, and maybe Stewart, the man who’d brought him in. That prick Hatcher would be there for sure. And Wardell would stand up and he’d use his allotted time to the full and he’d look each and every one of those gawkers in the eye and tell them he’d see them in hell. And he’d make them believe it, too.
The trick was to absolutely mean it.
Caleb Wardell might have dropped off the national radar, but he’d make goddamn sure that the last people he saw remembered him.
His body listed forward a little with a reduction in road speed, snapping him out of his thoughts. Instinctively, he looked ahead. A pointless reflex. This wasn’t a tour bus; it wasn’t as though he could crane his neck out into the center aisle for an unobstructed view to the driver’s cabin and the road ahead. Instead, he moved his head closer to the window, jamming sideways against it, closing his left eye to try to see ahead with just his right.
Three hundred yards along the straight road, he could make out a pair of unmoving taillights. Even with the moonlight, the angle made it impossible to discern what type of vehicle they belonged to. A figure was silhouetted against the red glare, waving them down. An apparent breakdown. Wardell kept looking. Tried to see farther down the road. The heavy transport van accommodated him, swaying a little to the center of the road, away from the stationary vehicle as though obeying Wardell’s will. The stationary car. It was definitely a car. A sedan, a bloodred paint job showing in the transport’s headlights. Farther up the road, a black shape blocked a patch of sky. A farmhouse? A barn?
They were in the middle of nowhere, and it was the middle of the night. There had been no buildings and no side roads in miles. They hadn’t passed another vehicle in a half hour. Now there was a breakdown and a building all at once.
The transport van picked up speed again. The driver hadn’t been where Wardell had been, but perhaps he wasn’t a complete idiot. They passed the red car and the waving man, giving them both a wide berth. The man stopped signaling before they reached him. He ignored the driver and watched the tiny side window as it passed. Wardell locked eyes with him for a fleeting second. He didn’t look disappointed or even angry that they hadn’t stopped to help. He looked very calm, very focused.
They were still gaining speed, and the barn — it was a barn — was coming into view. It was an old structure. Solid construction, thirty feet high, gable roof. Wardell had acquired an almost subconscious habit of assessing every environment in which he found himself with a professional eye, deciding where the best vantage points were from both an offensive and defensive point of view. The barn was a good spot both ways. The best spot he’d seen on this road, certainly.
They were fifty yards from the barn now, and Wardell could see it was built close to the road itself. Perhaps the farmhouse it had once belonged to had been bulldozed to make way for this thoroughfare.
Something was about to happen. He was sure of it.
He trained his eyes on the roof, at the position he would have chosen, right next to the weather vane. Something didn’t look quite right with the line of the roof, almost as though—
Something big, solid, and absolutely unrelenting slammed into the left side of the vehicle, the opposite direction from where the barn sat. The van was pitched horizontally off the road, and then the world flipped upside down and sideways. For a moment it felt like Wardell was floating in zero G. Then gravity’s pull reasserted itself with an angry bump, and the transport van came to rest on its side.
Sounds, smells, noises, pain all jumbled together in a confusing mess of white-noise sensation. Wardell heard shouts, gunshots from multiple weapons, then somebody moaning. The scents of gasoline and sheared metal mingling with smoke. Wardell could taste his own blood. He was shaking his head, trying to sort everything into the correct order. And then there were big hands grabbing his shoulders, dragging him from where he lay and out into the cold moonlight.
The fresh air helped, cleared his throat and his eyes, let him begin to get a handle on things. The barrel of a gun was pressed into the back of his skull as he was pushed, stumbling away from the wrecked transport van. He glanced to the side, registered the bloody bodies of the two marshals up front, a yellow construction digger jammed a couple of feet deep in the crumpled wreckage of the transport van. Then he caught a smack to the head.
“Move it.”
Wardell got the message, looked straight ahead. The man had spoken with an Eastern European accent — evident even from just two words. Russian maybe. That was odd. Wardell couldn’t remember killing any Russians. He was marched twenty paces off the road, and then his legs were kicked out from under him. He managed to get his cuffed hands up in time to break his fall. Clarence was not so lucky, arriving a second later, face-first in the field dirt. He yelped and rolled over, his nose spouting blood. He didn’t say anything, which meant he was smarter than Wardell would have given him credit for. He just looked up at the three men with guns. Two of them grabbed one each of Clarence’s arms and dragged him away from where Wardell was kneeling.
Wardell recognized the guy on the left arm from the phony breakdown scene. The one dragging the right arm wore a brown leather jacket over a black turtleneck sweater. He was a little shorter than the other two and gave out boss vibes despite his evident willingness to help with the manual labor. The one who stayed with Wardell was built like a bear. Almost as hairy as one, too. He wore a tight red T-shirt in defiance of the temperature and cradled a pump-action shotgun. A Remington 870, that old standby.
“Good to see you again, Clarence,” Turtleneck said in accented English, ignoring Wardell completely.
Wardell glanced at Clarence, taken by surprise, suddenly indignant. This was about him?
Clarence was staring up at Turtleneck, his hands conveniently brought together in supplication by the cuffs. He took a series of sharp breaths, as though building up the courage to speak. “Don’t kill me,” he said. The broken nose meant that it came out as Dod’t gill be.
Turtleneck snorted, feigning amusement. “Not just yet.” Russian, definitely.
Without warning, the one who was built like a bear took a step forward and kicked Wardell full in the gut. He had just enough time to tense his stomach muscles to avoid serious injury, but he doubled over and coughed a few times to make it look good. He wanted them off their guard.
“What about this one?” the bear asked Turtleneck. Similar accent but thicker.
“None of our business. Take care of him.”
Wardell was still bent over, and saw the bear step toward him again as the other two turned their attention back to Clarence. He was going to kick him again, put him on his back so that he could take a clean shot at Wardell’s center mass. Mistake.
Wardell caught the swinging foot in his cuffed hands, braced his own feet on the hard-packed ground, and pushed upward. The big man yelped and toppled over backward. Wardell followed him up and over, came down with all of his two hundred pounds on one elbow dead center to the larynx. The satisfyingly visceral crunch let him know he was done with this one. He was on his feet with the shotgun in his cuffed hands while the other two Russians were still reacting. He squeezed the trigger, and Turtleneck’s chest disappeared in a red mist. Wardell pumped the slide on the shotgun, the cuffs ripping the skin on his forearms, and charged, yelling. The charge was both instinctive and practicaclass="underline" It made him a moving target and unnerved his opponent.