Extreme Denial (48 page)

His heart pounded furiously as he rounded a curve and pointed toward the lights gleaming in almost every window of the fourteen-story Best Western hotel. “Right now, there’s a lot of activity in one of those rooms. The needle on their homing-device monitor is telling them this car is in motion.” He wanted to increase speed but stopped the impulse when he saw the roof lights of a police car in front of him.

“I’m so nervous, I can’t stop my knees from shaking,” Beth said.

“Concentrate on controlling your fear.”

“I can’t.”

“You
have
to.”

Ahead, the police car turned a corner.

Decker lifted the hatch on the storage compartment that separated the two front seats. He took Esperanza’s service pistol from where Esperanza had left it in the car when they had flown to New York. “They’ll be out of their room now, hurrying toward the hotel’s parking lot.”

“How do
you
stop from being afraid?”

“I don’t.”

“But you just said—”

“To control it, not stop it. Fear’s a survival mechanism. It gives you strength. It makes you alert. It can save your life, but only if you keep it under control. If
it
controls
you
, it’ll get you killed.”

Beth studied him hard. “Obviously I’ve got a lot to learn about you.”

“The same here. It’s like everything that happened with us before the attack on my house last Friday night was our honeymoon. Now the marriage has begun.” Decker sped onto the interstate, merging with a chaos of headlights. “They’ve had time to reach the hotel’s parking lot. They’re getting in their vehicles.”

“Honeymoon? Marriage? ... Was what you just said a proposal?”

“... Would that be such a bad idea?”

“I’d always disappoint you. I could never be the ideal woman you risked your life for.”

“That makes us even. I’m definitely not the ideal man.”

“You’re giving a good imitation of that hero I told you I dreamed about as a little girl.”

“Heroes are fools. Heroes get themselves killed.” Decker increased speed to keep pace with traffic, which was doing sixty-five in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone. “Renata and her friends will be rushing toward the interstate now. The homing-device monitor will tell them which direction I’ve taken. I have to keep ahead of them. I can’t let them pull abreast of me and force me off a deserted section of the highway.”

“Do you mind talking?”

“Now?”

“Will it distract you? If it doesn’t, talking would help me not to be so afraid.”

“In that case, talk.”

“What’s your worst fault?”

“Excuse me?”

“You were courting me all summer, showing me your best side. What’s your worst?”

“You tell
me yours”
Decker squinted toward the confusion of headlights in his rearview mirror, watching for any vehicle that approached more rapidly than the others.

“I asked first.”

“You’re serious?”

“Very.”

As the speed limit changed to sixty-five, Decker reluctantly began.

15

He told her that his father had been a career officer in the military and that the family had lived on bases all over the United States, moving frequently. “I grew up learning not to get attached to people or places.” He told her that his father had not been demonstrative with affection and in fact had seemed to be embarrassed about showing any emotion, whether it was anger, sadness, or joy. “I learned to hide what I felt.” He told her that when he entered the military, a logical choice for the son of a career officer, the special-operations training lie received gave him further reinforcement in controlling his emotions.

“I had an instructor who took a liking to me and spent time talking with me on our off-hours. We used to get into philosophical discussions, a lot of which had to do with how to survive inhuman situations and yet not become inhuman. How to react to killing someone, for example. Or how to try to handle seeing a buddy get killed. He showed me something in a book about the mind and emotions that I’ve never forgotten.”

Decker kept glancing apprehensively toward the headlights in his rearview mirror. Traffic was becoming sparse. Nonetheless, he stayed in the passing lane, not wanting to be impeded by the occasional cars on his right.

“What was it he showed you?” Beth asked.

“‘When we make fateful decisions, fate will inevitably occur. We all have emotions. Emotions themselves don’t compromise us. But our thoughts about our emotions
will
compromise us if those thoughts aren’t disciplined. Training controls our thoughts. Thoughts control our emotions.’ “

“It sounds like he was trying to put so many buffers over your emotions that you barely felt them.”

“Filters. The idea was to interpret my emotions so that they were always in my best interest. For instance”—Decker tasted something bitter—”Saturday night two friends of mine were killed.”

“Helping you try to find me?” Beth looked sickened. “My grief for them threatened to overwhelm me, but I told myself I didn’t have time. I had to postpone my grief until I could mourn for them properly. I couldn’t mourn for them in the future if I didn’t concentrate right then on staying alive. I
still
haven’t found time to mourn for them.”

Beth repeated a statement from the quote he had given her. “ ‘Thoughts control our emotions.’ “

“That’s how I lived.” Again, Decker checked the rearview mirror. Headlights approached with alarming speed. He rolled down his driver’s window. Then he veered into the no-passing lane, held the steering wheel with his left hand, gripped Esperanza’s pistol with his right, and prepared to fire if the vehicle coming up on his left attempted to ram him sideways off this barren section of the interstate.

The vehicle’s headlights were on their brightest setting, their intense reflection in Decker’s rearview mirror almost blinding. Decker reduced speed abruptly so that the vehicle would surge past him before the driver had a chance to put on the brakes. But the vehicle not only rushed past; it continued speeding into the distance, its outline that of a huge pickup truck. Its red taillights receded into the darkness.

“He must be doing ninety,” Decker said. “If I give him a little distance and then match his speed, that truck will run interference for me with any state trooper parked at the side of the interstate. The trooper will see the truck first and go after
it.
I’ll have time to reduce speed and slip past.”

The interior of the car became quiet.

“So,” Beth said at last, “emotions make you uncomfortable? You certainly fooled me this summer.”

“Because I was making a conscious effort to change. To open up and allow myself to feel. When you walked into my office that first day, I was ready, for the first time in my life, to fall in love.”

“And now you feel betrayed because the woman you fell in love with wasn’t the woman she said she was.”

Decker didn’t respond.

Beth continued, “You’re thinking it might be safer to go back to what you were, to distance yourself and not allow any emotions that might make you vulnerable.”

“The notion occurred to me.”

“And?”

“To hell with my pride.” Decker squeezed her hand. “You asked me if I wanted to make a fresh start. Yes. Because the alternative scares me to death. I don’t want to lose you. I’d go crazy if I couldn’t spend the rest of my life with you....I guess I’m
not
reverting, after all.”

You’d
better
revert, he told Himself. You have to get both of us through this night alive.

16

Tension produced the familiar aching pressure in his stomach that he had suffered when he worked for the Agency. The omelette he had eaten that morning on the plane remained in his stomach and burned like acid, as did the quick take-out burgers and fries that he had grabbed for everyone while picking up equipment during the afternoon. Just like old times, he thought.

He wondered how close his pursuers were to him and what they were deciding. Did they have members of their group waiting ahead of them in Santa Fe? Maybe only a few of Renata’s friends had been stationed at the Best Western hotel, not enough to attempt an interception. Maybe they had used a cellular telephone to call ahead and arrange for reinforcements. Or maybe Decker was wrong and his car didn’t have a homing device hidden in it. Maybe his plan was useless. No, he told himself emphatically. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years. I know how this is done. Given the circumstances, I
know
how Renata would behave.

Well, he thought dismally, isn’t it nice to be certain?

When he passed the three exits to Santa Fe, continuing to speed along Interstate 25, it amused him to imagine the confusion his pursuers would be feeling, their frantic discussions as they tried to figure out why he hadn’t stopped and where he was going. They would all be after him now, though, the ones in Santa Fe as well as those who followed him from Albuquerque. Of that, he was sure, just as he was sure that he had not yet faced his biggest risks of the night—the isolation of state road 50, for example.

It was two-lane, dark, narrow, and winding, with sporadic tiny communities along it, but mostly shadowy scrub brush and trees. It offered perfect opportunities for his pursuers to force him off the road, with no one to see what happened. He couldn’t possibly keep driving as fast as he had on the interstate. At the first sharp curve, he would overturn his car. In places, even forty-five miles an hour was extreme. He hunched forward, peering at the darkness beyond his headlights, trying to gain every second he could on the straightaways, reducing speed, steering tensely around turns, once again accelerating.

“I can’t risk taking my eyes off the road to check the rearview mirror,” he told Beth. “Look behind us. Do you see any headlights?”

“No. Wait—now I do.”

“What?”

“Coming around the last curve. One ... I’m wrong—it looks like
two
cars. The second just came around the curve.”

“Jesus.”

“They don’t seem to be gaining on us. Why would they hold back? Maybe it’s not them,” Beth said.

“Or maybe they want to know what they’re getting into before they make their move. Ahead of us.”

“Lights.”

“Yes. We’ve reached Pecos.”

Near midnight on a Tuesday night, there was almost no activity. Decker reduced his speed as much as he dared, turned left onto the quiet main street, and proceeded north toward the mountains.

“I don’t see the headlights anymore,” Beth said. “The cars must belong to people who live in town.”

“Maybe.” As soon as the glow of the sleepy town was behind him, Decker again picked up speed, climbing the dark and narrow road into the wilderness area. “Or maybe the cars do belong to Renata and her gang, and they’re holding back, not wanting to make it obvious they’re following us. They must be curious what we’re doing up here.”

In the darkness, the dense pine trees formed what seemed to be an impenetrable wall.

“It doesn’t look very welcoming,” Beth said.

“Good. Renata will conclude the only reason anybody would come up here is to hide. We’re getting closer. Almost there. Just a few more ...”

17

He nearly shot past the
Contact Stephen Decker
realty sign before he reduced speed enough to turn into the barely visible break between fir trees. Terribly aware that he could be trapping Beth and himself as much as he was attempting to trap Renata, he crossed the wooden bridge above the roar of the swift, narrow Pecos River, entered the gloomy clearing, parked in front of the steps up to the house, and turned off the engine. Only then did he push in the knob for his headlights—the sequence activated a feature that kept his lights on for an additional two minutes.

With the aid of those lights, he got Beth’s crutches and the carry-on bag from the backseat. He felt a desperate compulsion to hurry, but he didn’t dare give in to it. If Renata and her gang drove past and saw him rushing up to the cabin, they would immediately suspect that he knew he was being followed, that he anticipated their arrival, that they were being set up. Tensely repressing his impatience, he allowed himself to look as weary as he felt. Following Beth up the log steps, he reached a metal box attached to the cabin’s doorknob. The lights from his car provided just enough illumination for him to use his key to unlock the box. He opened the lid, took out the key to the cabin, unlocked the door, and helped Beth inside.

The moment the door was closed and locked, the lights turned on, Decker responded to the urgency swelling inside him. The blinds were already drawn on the cabin, so no one outside could see him support Beth while she dropped her crutches and picked up camouflage coveralls that Decker had bought at the gun shop. She pulled them on over her slacks and blouse. As soon as she tugged up the zipper and took back her crutches, Decker hurriedly put on his own camouflage coveralls. Before leaving the cabin to go to the airport, they had already put on the polypropylene long underwear he had bought. Now Decker smeared Beth’s face and then his own with dark grease from a tube of camouflage coloring. When they had rehearsed these movements early in the evening, they had gotten ready in just under two minutes, but now it seemed tensely to Decker that they were taking much longer. Hurry, he thought. To avoid leaving fingerprints, they put on dark cotton gloves, thin enough to be able to shoot with, thick enough to provide some warmth. When Decker switched on a small radio, a country-and-western singer started wailing about “livin’ and lovin’ and leavin’ and ...” Decker kept the lights on, helped Beth out the back door, shut it behind him, and risked pausing in the chill darkness long enough to stroke her arm with encouragement and affection.

She trembled, but she did what had to be done, what they had rehearsed, disappearing to the left of the cabin.

Impressed by her courage, Decker went to the right. At the front of the cabin, his headlights had gone off. Away from the glow of the cabin’s windows, the darkness thickened. Then Decker’s eyes adjusted, the moon and the unimaginable amount of stars, typically brilliant in the high country, giving the night a paradoxical gentle glow.