All of a sudden, other people were swarming around. Somebody had a foam fire extinguisher and sprayed the flames out.
“What the hell?”
“What happened?”
“How’d it…?”
“Something from the house?”
“You okay?”
Banner felt anger, wanted to yell, What took you so fucking long? at the others, even though she knew that only a few seconds had passed since she’d first noticed the man on the roof of the command center.
The agent she’d sent after Wardell reappeared from around the side of the command unit, shaking his head.
“Anything?” Banner asked.
“Yeah,” the agent said, beckoning. “Come see this.”
Banner moved around to the other side of the command center, a few of the other men breaking off to follow her. The first agent was there, pointing up at something on the side.
“Looks like you winged him.” He was pointing at a smear of blood down the blue and gray paint of the big vehicle. Banner looked at the smear, then the ground below it. There were no obvious pools of blood on the grass, which meant Wardell might not be wounded too badly. A pity, but it was something. From here, it was a mere twenty feet to the trees.
“Go,” Banner said, but she didn’t have to. The men who’d followed her around were already running for the woods. A couple of them had flashlights.
“Medic! Need a medic over here!”
Banner turned around to tell whoever was yelling that the two men were way beyond medical help. Then she realized the shout had rung out from farther away, closer to the house. One of the agents was crouched next to a body lying less than ten yards from the burning house. She ran toward them, holding up an arm to block the intense heat from her face. She reached them and looked down at the man on the ground. It was Castle, and he was in a bad way. The shirt under his vest was so soaked with blood that it was impossible to tell how many wounds there were. Banner loosened the straps on the vest and ripped the shirt open. Looked like a gunshot, definitely. She shucked her own jacket off and bunched it up, used it to put pressure on the wound. Castle winced and his eyes flickered open.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” Banner said. “Just hang on, Castle. Hang on, you stubborn bastard.”
She thought she saw the ghost of a smile on his lips. It gave her hope. She kept talking. “Where’s Blake?”
With painful effort, Castle raised his left hand a little at the wrist and three fingers and a thumb dropped down a little. It took Banner a second to realize he was trying to point.
He was pointing in the direction in which Caleb Wardell had fled.
48
The chilled, rain-damp night air sucked in and out of my lungs as I ran between the trees. After the burning house, it was beautiful. The rain was still falling fast and hard, but the woods afforded some shelter from the deluge. Wardell was up ahead of me. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him as he crashed through the undergrowth. Brilliant white light sliced through the tree cover and swept in front on me in a wide beam, and I realized Banner or somebody else had called in the helicopters. That was good and bad: good because it meant somebody besides me had seen Wardell escape into the woods, bad because I wasn’t betting on them being able to distinguish between the two armed men running in the same direction.
About thirty feet ahead I saw the shape of a man leap an obstruction and then seemingly vanish into the earth, suggesting the ground dropped away beyond. The undergrowth was thick and the going slow; it took me longer than I’d have liked to reach the obstruction — it was the thick trunk of a fallen tree, and sure enough, there was a forty-five-degree incline beyond it. I braced myself on the trunk and felt something tacky in the wetness. Blood. I raised my fingers to my face to try to confirm it, and that’s when I heard the click of a handgun being cocked.
“Drop it.”
The FBI agent who’d spoken was six feet from my face, the muzzle of his Glock 23 a good deal closer.
“I’m with the—” I began.
“I said drop it, asshole.”
I did as I was told, opening my fingers and letting the Beretta drop to the forest floor. I looked at the agent. I didn’t recognize him. Maybe that didn’t mean much. At night, in a dark blue FBI-branded raincoat and matching baseball cap, everyone looks pretty much identicaclass="underline" man or woman, black or white. But it also meant I couldn’t rule him out as being with the thin man.
“I’m with the task force,” I said.
“Hands on your head, asshole.”
I complied. “You know, my name isn’t actually ass—”
“Shut up.”
“The man you want is down there. He’s getting away.” The agent opened his mouth, no doubt to either tell me to shut up again or call me an asshole again, or possibly both, so I cut him off. “Call it in, Agent. Talk to Banner. My name’s Blake, I’m a civilian adviser. I’m on your side.”
The agent’s eyes narrowed and he tightened his grip on his Glock. Then, carefully, he took his left hand off the gun, reached for his cell phone, and hit a couple of buttons without averting his gaze one millimeter from me.
“It’s Riley. I got somebody. No, it’s not the target. Get me Agent Castle.”
That made my mind up. By the time the guy at the other end of the call went looking for Castle, discovered he was out of the action, found Banner, and she managed to convinced him I wasn’t the enemy, Wardell would be in the next state.
A lot of people think a gun will go off if the guy holding it flinches. That’s not true, not with modern firearms. The standard FBI-issue Glock 23 for example, like the one that was pointed at my head, has three separate safety mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge: an external integrated trigger safety, a firing pin safety, and a drop safety. A lot of safety, in other words.
That means it takes conscious thought to squeeze the trigger, not to mention resolve. All in all, there’s a lot less effort involved in knocking somebody’s gun aside, especially when you’re dealing with a law-enforcement practitioner who’s been trained up to the eyeballs to make sure there’s a clear threat before firing. The most important thing is not to telegraph the action. So I didn’t. I just kept eye contact with the agent, kept breathing regularly, then opened my mouth as though I were going to say something else.
Then I just reached out and punched his wrist out of the way. Before he could readjust, I grabbed the gun with both hands and twisted it down. I felt the bone in his finger snap on the trigger guard. As he opened his mouth to cry out in pain, I yanked the gun out of his hand and slammed my right elbow into his nose. The guy went down as emphatically as the Titanic, and a whole lot quicker. I tossed the gun deep into the pines, retrieved my own from the ground, then put my left hand onto the fallen tree and vaulted over and onto the incline.
I scrabbled down the slope, trying to balance speed with some regard for safety. It wasn’t easy in the dark; the pines dotting the slope blotted out the sky as effectively as a blackout blind, and I realized why they were called the Black Hills. I could barely make out the ground, never mind what was ahead of me. The incline suddenly became more pronounced, and any control over my speed of descent evaporated. All of a sudden I was running full tilt. And then the inevitable happened: My foot landed on a loose rock, which gave way and sent me tumbling face-first. I brought my arms up around my head as I hit the ground and kept falling. I grabbed around for purchase on a root, a bush, some grass… anything to slow my fall. My right side impacted off something large and unyielding — had to be a tree. It knocked the wind out of me but absorbed some of my momentum. The fingers of my right hand brushed against the leaves of a bush, and I closed my fist around a handful of it. The handful ripped away, but I was moving slower again. I was able to roll onto my back and use my heels and my palms to brake. I caught my breath and looked down.