Midas Code (13 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

I’
m not getting on one of those death traps,” Tyler said.

He kept watch at the stable door while Stacy hurried to cinch up the straps on the saddle of a second horse. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him nervously changing his grip on the pistol and realized that he was more scared than she was. She had marveled at how he had calmly disarmed a massive explosive, faced down Orr, and dispatched a gunman without breaking a sweat. Now she was the one trying to quiet his nerves.

“Come on, you big baby,” she said. “It’s just a horse. How else are we going to get away?” Cavano and her men would discover their hiding place any minute.

“You go. I’ll try for the car.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’ll get yourself killed. Don’t tell me you’ve never ridden.”

“I have. About twenty-five years ago. That’s why I’d rather take my chances with Cavano.” He wouldn’t look at Stacy.

They’d already gone over their options, and there weren’t any. The cars at the front of the house would be impossible to reach without getting captured. Calling the police wouldn’t help. At best, Cavano would say they assaulted her bodyguard and destroyed her property. Tyler and Stacy would be hauled off to jail, endangering any chance of meeting Orr in Naples on Sunday.

Some of Stacy’s fondest memories were of riding her horse, Chanter. Dressage and jumping occupied a big part of her childhood, not to mention chasing rabbits around the fields after the harvest. She hadn’t had the opportunity lately, but saddling the horses had brought it all back. Technology marches on, but riding equipment hadn’t changed significantly in hundreds of years, so she finished outfitting the horses in record time.

“We’re ready,” she said. “Are you coming or not?”

“Not.”

“You’ll ride a motorcycle and not a horse?”

“A motorcycle goes where I tell it to.”

Now she got it. He was a product of the mechanical age, and he didn’t like it that a horse had a mind of its own. Something must have sparked this irrational fear, but she didn’t have time to dig into that now.

She marched up to him and grabbed him by the arms. “You are going to get on that damned horse, and we’re going to get the hell out of here, do you understand me?”

Bullets ricocheted off the door, and both of them dove to the ground. Through the crack in the door, she could see four men running toward them, snapping off shots with their pistols.

“All right,” Tyler growled as he rolled to his feet. “We’ll do it your way.”

Stacy leaped up and handed the reins of the nearer horse to Tyler, who acted as if she’d given him a used tissue. He eyed the horse, but another crack of gunfire goaded him into action. He put his foot in the stirrup and, in the most ungainly display of horsemanship she’d ever seen, clambered into the saddle. He pawed at the leather.

“Where is the horn thing?” He was talking about the grip on the front of Western saddles.

She mounted her own horse. “It’s an English saddle, so it doesn’t have one. Just keep your feet in the stirrups and don’t let go of the reins. Follow me. Your horse will do the rest.”

Stacy trotted to the large door that was open at the opposite end of the stable. With a jab from her heels, the horse launched into a gallop.

Over her shoulder she saw Tyler’s horse go into a trot, with Tyler bouncing up and down like one of those rubber balls on a paddle board.

“Say ‘canter’!” she yelled.

Tyler cried, “Canter, dammit!” and his horse took off, with him barely holding on. He looked like an idiot, but he was moving.

They’d gotten fifty yards when Cavano’s men burst out of the stable. One of them lifted his weapon to fire, but Cavano raced out and pushed him aside, sending his shot awry.

“They’re worth more than you are,” she screamed in Italian loud enough to be heard even at that distance. Stacy couldn’t tell if Cavano meant them or the horses.

Two Range Rovers raced around the drive and skidded to a stop to let Cavano and her men pile in. They weren’t giving up. Cavano just wanted to get closer so that they wouldn’t injure one of her precious horses. The Range Rovers took off after them, spraying gravel from all four wheels.

Stacy angled her horse toward a stand of trees to the right. If she and Tyler could get through, it would give them some breathing room while Cavano and her men went around the long way.

Tyler’s eyes kept darting up to her and down to the horse. He didn’t look terrified, but he sure didn’t look happy, either.

She slowed to a trot to get through the dense thicket of oaks and shrubs. They wove through, Tyler cursing as branches swatted him.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.” He sounded anything but.

In seconds they were through to another pasture. Stacy kicked into a canter, and they raced across the field. To Stacy, it felt perfectly natural. Tyler, on the other hand, crashed into the saddle instead of using a half-seat, a method of supporting yourself in the stirrups during a gallop. She could only imagine the amount of pain he must be experiencing to his privates. From his grimace, she’d say extreme.

They’d put a few hundred yards between themselves and Cavano, but the Range Rovers were catching up fast. Any moment they’d decide to take another shot, no matter what happened to the horses.

Up ahead, Stacy saw a potential lifesaver. A river, forty feet across, knifed through the field. The only visible crossing was a wooden footbridge just large enough for the sheep grazing on the other side. It would be tricky, but the horses could make it if they stepped carefully.

“Head for the bridge!” she yelled.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled back.

“I don’t want to die!”

“Neither do I!”

Despite his protests, she didn’t stop, but slowed to a trot, allowing time for Tyler’s horse to get nose to tail with hers.

She pointed her horse straight across the bridge. They’d get only one try at this.

Her horse stepped onto the bridge. She nudged it forward, and the horse bolted ahead. The wood groaned under the load, but the bridge held. She was almost to the other side when she heard a tremendous splash behind her.

When she reached the pasture on the other side, Stacy wheeled around to see that Tyler had plunged into the water. The horse must have lost its footing and jumped into the river. She didn’t think the horse had fallen, because Tyler was still on top of it, although he was now soaking wet.

His horse charged out of the river, trailing a torrent of water behind it. They rode through the herd of sheep to the top of the next hill and stopped when they saw a hedgerow blocking the way forward.

“Did you see that?” Tyler yelled. “This is why I hate riding!”

“You’re no John Wayne, that’s for sure.”

“And this horse isn’t Seabiscuit.”

The roar of the approaching engines put a stop to their argument. Safely out of pistol range, they watched as one of the Range Rovers went into a four-wheel drift to avoid the river, barely skidding to a stop before it hit the edge.

The other Range Rover decided to go for it, but the bridge was too narrow. It plowed into the river with a great splash, burying its nose in the mud, and came to a stop. Men scrambled out of the open windows and waded back to the opposite shore.

The passenger door of the dry Range Rover opened, and Cavano stood with her hands on her hips staring up at Stacy and Tyler. There was no smile this time, just a look of pure hatred.

Stacy squeezed her legs to get the horse moving, and they rode along the hedgerow until they found an opening and left Cavano behind.

“Where to now?” she asked. She was completely lost.

Tyler pointed to his left. “On the way to Cavano’s mansion, we passed a town about a mile that way, I think. We can try to get a car there.”

They rode fast, worried that Cavano would find some way to cut them off or intercept them at the town.

When they arrived at the quaint village, the pedestrians didn’t give them a second glance, as if it weren’t unusual at all to see riders on horseback on the main street.

The sound of a train horn indicated something even better than a car to hire. They rode two more blocks and found the station. After handing their horses over to two astonished teenagers, Stacy and Tyler hopped aboard the train as it pulled away.

Stacy asked one of the passengers where they were headed. With a disdainful glare at Tyler’s sopping form, he told her they’d be at London’s Victoria Station in a little more than an hour. By the time Cavano found her horses and figured out their destination, they’d be long gone.

Stacy felt much better now that they were out of danger. She smiled at Tyler and took his hand to pull him forward, as if they were a loving couple on a holiday trip gone wrong. As they made their way down the aisle, she said, “That ride wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Tyler gave her a dirty look and said nothing. He waddled to a seat and eased himself down. For the rest of the trip, the only time he talked was to ask the ticket collector where he could get a bag of ice to sit on.

TWENTY-SIX

T
he midday sun poured through the windshield of Clarence Gibson’s semi cab, overpowering the truck’s balky air conditioner. He slammed his hand on the dashboard and swore a streak that the Lord wouldn’t be proud of. With a full load in the trailer behind him, the engine strained as he climbed the twisty back road over the Virginia Appalachians.

In his thirty years with Dwight’s Farm Services, Gibson had never complained about his job, but he was tired of truck maintenance at the company being a low priority. Just last week he’d been hauling a load of fertilizer to a farm down in Blacksburg when the bearings on the drive axle seized, leaving him stranded for three hours out in the middle of nowhere until a tow truck made it up from Roanoke.

He rolled down the window, but the wind didn’t help. Not with this humidity. The sweat continued to pour down the back of his neck, and his shirt was completely soaked. At least the radio worked, although there was only one country station.

It had been ten minutes since he’d turned off the state highway headed for a farm west of Deerfield. In that time he’d been passed twice by cars that didn’t want to wait behind his groaning rig. One of them even jumped the gun and didn’t bother to wait for a passing lane. Probably some doped-up college kids who were going to get themselves killed someday.

And now behind him was lucky vehicle number three, this time a white van. It was accelerating fast behind him on the first flat section Gibson had seen since the highway. There wasn’t another car in sight, so he waved the van around and pulled over onto the shoulder to let him by.

The van shot past and roared ahead. Gibson pulled back onto the road and tried to coax a little more speed, hoping to get a bigger dose of the natural breeze. He poked his head to the side to get closer to the airflow, then snapped it back when he saw the van weave back and forth three times and then stop dead across the road, blocking the way.

What in the world?

Gibson stuck his foot on the brake. The truck shuddered to a stop less than twenty feet from the van. Though they were sopping wet, the hairs on the back of his neck pricked up. If the van had a flat tire, why didn’t the driver just pull over to the shoulder? Something wasn’t right.

The van door slid open, and two men clad in black from head to toe jumped out holding M4 assault rifles. They wore balaclavas, so Gibson could see nothing but eyes. He lunged for the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver he kept in the glove compartment for emergencies, but the passenger door was thrown open before he could get to it. He stared into the black depths of the barrel that could introduce him to his maker.

An accented voice yelled, “Get out now!”

Gibson put his hands up.

“Now!”

He unlatched his seat belt and opened the driver’s door. A hand snaked in and yanked him out, tossing him to the ground.

The passenger door slammed, and the one who had pulled him out said something Gibson didn’t understand, but he’d certainly heard the language before on TV. Arabic, or at least something along those lines.

Terrorists? What would they want with him? He was a middle-aged, overweight nobody.

“I don’t have—” he started.

“Shut up!” the man yelled, and punched him in the back with the butt of the rifle. Gibson went down on his stomach, sucking for air. The knee in his back made breathing even harder.

The taller of the two walked over to the plain silver trailer, reached under the metal chassis, pulled out a white box the size of a pack of cigarettes, and pocketed it. That’s why they’d shown up in the middle of nowhere. They’d used some kind of tracking device.

The other one grabbed Gibson’s hands and twisted them behind his back. He felt cool plastic zipcuffs locking his wrists together. The two of them hauled him to his feet, hustled him to the van, and pushed him inside. He fell to the floor. Another set of zipcuffs went around his ankles.

The first gunman raised his rifle above his head and shouted, “
Allahu Akbar!
”

“
Allahu Akbar!
” the other cried in response. Then he ran back to Gibson’s truck. The van door slammed shut.

This was a hijacking? It seemed crazy, but the sound of his truck revving told him that it had to be true.

Although the past few moments had seemed like a lifetime to Gibson, they couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds. Whoever they were, his kidnappers had planned this well.

The van took off, rolling Gibson against the back doors. His phone was still sitting on the passenger seat of his cab, so calling for help wasn’t an option. He struggled to sit up, but the winding roads tossed him down every time he made any progress. In twenty minutes he was exhausted. He asked where he was being taken, but he was met with stony silence.

Twenty minutes later, the van slowed and turned onto another road. Instead of the smooth hum of asphalt, Gibson could feel the tires crunching over dirt. He thought it must be some kind of driveway, but it kept climbing uphill, and the ride got rougher, bouncing up and down over deep ruts and potholes. They didn’t stop for another half hour.

When the van came to a halt, the driver, still in his balaclava, wrenched open the door and held a Beretta 9 mm on Gibson. He then unsheathed a wicked-looking blade, but he did nothing more with it than cut the ankle ties.

“Out,” he said.

Gibson draped his legs over the side of the van and stood briefly before falling to his knees. His feet had lost all feeling. It didn’t matter, though. He could see where he was now. They were surrounded on all sides by the thick woods of the George Washington National Forest. The weed-covered track they’d crawled along was a barely used fire road.

He had been brought here to be executed.

“Up!” the man shouted.

Gibson’s heart pounded with fear, but he wasn’t going to make it that easy for this terrorist. He got to his knees.

“Why don’t you make me?” he said, sounding much braver than he felt.

The terrorist kicked Gibson. He fell over hard and rolled into a ditch. Before he could get up, he heard the crack of the pistol and a searing pain at his right ear. He fell back to the ground, his eyes away from the terrorist. The headshot hadn’t killed him. Should he get up and keep fighting or play dead? He held his breath.

The door slammed shut, and after making a three-point turn the van accelerated back down the road.

Gibson remained motionless for another minute until he realized that he must be the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. He sat up and felt blood coursing down his temple, but he was alive. The angle into the ditch must have thrown off the terrorist’s aim. With all the blood, the shooter had just assumed it was a kill shot.

Gibson thanked the Lord for His mercy and then found the sharp edge of a rock to cut the tie on his wrists. With his hands free, he ripped off the bottom of his shirt and pushed it against the side of his head. It would stanch the blood, although it wouldn’t do anything for his headache.

As he trudged down the road back to civilization to report the hijacking, he pondered why they had targeted his truck. Sure, he could see Arab radicals taking a load of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer, the explosive compound used to make bombs like the one that blew up in Oklahoma City.

But he had no earthly idea what two terrorists would want with one hundred cubic yards of sawdust.