For the life of him, though, he couldn’t begin to understand why it was happening to them.
He pushed it all away, because the only way to keep the panic at bay was to keep yourself from thinking about it. Besides, he had a far more pressing matter to address. With difficulty, he rose to his knees, and then to his feet. He walked through the dark to the seam of light he knew to be the door, and knocked on it with his left hand.
“Hey!” he yelled. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“What do you want?” a male voice yelled, startling Jonathan out of an empty place in his head. He shifted his eyes to the remote image and saw that the sentries at the door down the hall had both turned to face it.
“Well, hold it,” the guard said again.
Jonathan couldn’t hear what was being said from the other side of the door, but the phrase “hold it” could only mean that the prisoner was asking to use the restroom.
The female guard-the shooter from the bridge-sagged her shoulders and said something that Jonathan couldn’t hear, but looked like an argument in favor of bladder maintenance. She held out her hand, and her partner gave her a key.
“Looks like they’re opening the door,” Venice reported from her screen. By giving the updates to the rest of the team, she saved Jonathan possible exposure by being overheard.
The door down the hall opened, and out stepped the young man Jonathan recognized from his picture to be Ryan Nasbe. He was smaller than Jonathan had been expecting, and he carried himself as if he was in pain, sort of hunched at the shoulders, consistent with the broken arm that Kendig Neen had alluded to in his telephone conversation.
The male guard led the way down the hall, directly toward Jonathan’s camera. He looked young, fit, and strong-exactly the opposite of what Jonathan would have liked. He was big enough to block the camera’s view of Ryan until he passed the lens, and that’s when Jonathan got his first solid look at the boy’s arm.
“It’s definitely Ryan Nasbe,” Venice reported. “And his arm is heavily bandaged. Looks like it might be broken.”
“Do you need me, Boss?” Boxers asked, his whisper barely audible.
“Negative,” he whispered.
“I’m on my way,” the Big Guy said.
“Scorpion says negative,” Venice said. “He’ll call if he needs you.”
“We need to take him now,” Boxers insisted. “These guys up here just sentenced him to death. Him and his mother both.”
All of them were past the camera now, but Jonathan could hear them in the hallway outside his door.
“Hold your position, Big Guy,” Venice said. “Scorpion is very exposed. You’ll have no cover.”
A door on the opposite side opened. “Make it fast,” the male guard said.
Jonathan considered firing up another camera so he could peer under his door into the hallway, but decided that it would take too long and risk making too much noise.
“Can you at least close the door?” Ryan’s voice sounded young for sixteen, but Jonathan liked the attitude he heard. He was more impatient than whining.
“Just do what you need to do and get it over with.”
Jonathan realized now that the unlocked door he’d encountered was the bathroom for this level.
“For heaven’s sake,” the female said. “There are no windows in there. Let him go to the bathroom in peace.”
A cell phone rang.
“I swear to God, kid. If you step out of line-if you lock the door or even think an ugly thought, I’m going to bend that break backwards.”
The door closed.
The cell phone’s third ring was cut short. “This is Brother Zebediah.”
Boxers said, “Scorpion, I know you can’t respond, but listen to me.” He was speaking a little louder now, less guarded. That must mean he was no longer directly in harm’s way. “I urge you in the strongest possible terms to take him now if you have a shot.”
Zebediah said into his phone, “I understand. Yes, sir. Right now.”
Jonathan drew his KA-BAR knife from its scabbard on his shoulder. It would take only seconds. At this distance, he could be in the hallway and have both guards bleeding to death in less than three seconds, well before they would be able to process that they were under attack. One slash each across the throat, and they’d fall like big bricks. He’d have Ryan, and they’d be out of here, and then they could sweep in and rescue Christyne.
Brother Zebediah closed his phone-Jonathan could hear the snap of the plastic-and said, “It’s time.”
“Both of them?”
“Both of them. Now.”
Jonathan glanced back at the screen of his PDA. Both of them. Christyne Nasbe wasn’t here. They’d left the door Ryan had been imprisoned behind open and unguarded. If she were here, someone would be guarding her.
“One is better than none,” Boxers said in his ear, as if reading his thoughts.
Ryan had never realized just how useless his left hand was to him until he tried manipulating himself to pee. You had the zipper, the underwear and finally the business parts. For a while there, the smart money said that he’d end up letting fly while still inside his trousers, but in the end, he got everything where it needed to be, but without much time to spare.
Then, when he was done, there was the whole matter of reassembling himself. On a different day, it would have been funny. He was smiling, in fact, when he opened the door again and addressed his captors. “Wow, do I feel bet-”
Something clearly had changed. Brother Zebediah looked way angrier than before, and Sister Colleen looked as if she might cry.
Ryan stopped and took a step backward. “What?”
They grabbed him.
The boy yelled, “Ow!” and there was a scuffle on the other side of the door. “My arm! What did I do? Please!”
Jonathan’s fist tightened on the knife handle. The screams were excruciating to hear.
There was more scuffling, and something hit the door to Jonathan’s room hard. He imagined that it was a person, and because it wasn’t accompanied by a shriek of pain, he figured it had to be one of the guards.
“Stop fighting,” Brother Zebediah commanded. “You’re coming with us one way or the other.”
“I’m not fighting you!” Ryan yelled. “You’re hurting me!”
That last part sounded farther away. A moment later, the door at the end of the hallway opened and closed, and then Jonathan was bathed again in silence.
He keyed his mike. “They’re coming toward you, Big Guy. Do not take them here. PC-Two is not accounted for. We’ll let PC-One lead us there.”
“For all we know, PC-Two is already dead,” Boxers said. Then his voice dropped again to a barely perceptible whisper. “I see them. Shit, there’s only two guards.”
“Gunslinger here,” Gail said over the radio. “I’m flooded with guards out here, white side. Soldiers. Whatever. I count fifteen, and many are armed with rifles. I concur with Scorpion. We need to let them go.”
“But I can take them.”
“Stand down, Big Guy,” Jonathan said.
Boxers hissed, “This is a mistake.”
“Stand. Down,” Jonathan said forcefully. “It’s my mistake to make.”
He wondered if the Nasbes would disagree.
Outside, Gail had positioned herself in the trees out front, roughly in the position that Jonathan had held earlier. Once the team was inside, it made sense for her to reposition herself to where the action was. And as the parade of people took to their cars, she realized that it was time to reposition yet again.
She’d been listening to the communications, so she knew that they were taking Ryan Nasbe to his execution. The presence of all the cars indicated that they had to drive to the place of execution, and that meant that she had to follow them or lose them.
She needed to get to the truck. That meant running faster and farther than she had in a very long time, but only after she’d backed away far enough from the house that she could afford to make some noise. She gave it about twenty yards-long enough that she heard the sound of engines starting-and then she started to jog. Having arrived in the daytime, yet leaving at night, she had to guess at her directions until she fished her GPS out of a pouch pocket in her pants. It confirmed that she was right.