Joseph Finder - Power Play

In a few minutes I found it: a loop of cable sprouting from the concrete, a few inches above the ground.

One end of the cable dangling loose.

It had been unscrewed from its connector. That was how they'd cut off Internet access. Quick and easy. Above all, easy to screw back in when they were ready to use it.

Except for one little thing.

The connector was missing.

A little piece of precision-machined, nickel-plated brass. An F-81 barrel connector, it was called. Used to join two pieces of coaxial cable. I'd spent much of that summer fumbling with the damned things, losing them in people's basements and on their lawns.

I quickly searched the ground, just to be sure, but I didn't need to. I knew what Russell had done. Simple and clever. He'd removed that tiny, but crucial piece, to make sure no one could get on the Internet to send out an SOS.

I was impressed by Russell's thoroughness.

It also gave me an idea.

I raced over to the generator shed, where the satellite dish was bolted to the roof. At the back of the small, shingled building, I found where the cable came out of the ground and ran up the outside wall to the dish.

Kneeling, I took out Buck's knife, pressed the trigger button to eject the blade.

With one quick motion, I sliced through the cable.

If I couldn't use the Internet, then neither could Russell. I doubted he or his men knew the first thing about how to splice coaxial cable, which sure wasn't like electrical wire.

I did, though. Those few weeks of tedium suddenly seemed less pointless.

Now I had something he needed.

But as I turned to head down to the shore, I heard a voice.

It had come from the front of the lodge.

A shout, quick and sharp: "Stop right there."

Pablo had been spotted; it could be nothing else.

I turned toward the shore, taking long, silent strides along the side of the building.

Down the hill a few hundred feet a bulky silhouette descended the wooden steps of the dock. An arm extended: a weapon.

"I'm not going to tell you again."

Pablo was standing on the beach, hands at his side. He was torquing from one side to the other, as if trying to decide which way to run. Behind him, floating in the water, the black hulk of an inflatable craft moored to the dock.

I watched with a feeling of desperate helplessness. Pablo had volunteered to help, and implicit in that deal was that I'd be his protector.

Some protector.

Wayne wasn't going to shoot the kid, I was certain-not without Russell's approval, anyway. They'd bring him in, interrogate him, force him to tell them how he'd managed to escape. And where I was.

In the meantime, I'd have to grab a boat and summon help, but the time would be even shorter, and the likelihood of successfully rescuing the other hostages would have plummeted.

Would Russell then decide to make a "lesson" out of some lowly lodge staff member? There'd be no reason for him to do it, not after Grogan and Danziger. But with Russell, you never knew.

Wayne descended a few more steps, then stopped, raising his other hand to steady his grip. From here, his gun looked larger, longer than it had before. An optical illusion, maybe.

Pablo gave a high, strangled yelp, his words obliterated by the crash of the surf.

Wayne was much closer to the shore now than to me.

Torn by indecision, I raised my gun, lined up the sights. His body was a distant blur.

No. I couldn't bring myself to fire at Wayne. Besides, at this distance, I had little chance of hitting the target. And once I pulled the trigger, whether I hit him or not, everything would change at once. They'd hear the gunshot, know I was out here.

If I fired, I'd surely miss-and I'd become a fugitive.

I had to help Pablo escape. That was all I could really do now.

So I did the only thing I could think of to distract Wayne, get him to turn around, divert his attention and give Pablo the chance to run. I picked up a rock.

No way would I hit him at this distance: the greatest pitcher in baseball couldn't have beaned the guy from here. But at least the sound of the rock hitting the ground might break his concentration, cause him to turn. That was something.

Pablo raised his hands in surrender, walked slowly toward Wayne, who said something I couldn't hear. Then Pablo did something bizarre: He clapped his hands, then put his arms behind him and clapped again.

What the hell was he doing?

I hurled the rock as hard as I could, and at that precise moment, Wayne fired.

Three shots in quick succession.

He probably never even heard the hollow pock of the rock hitting the wooden step.

I saw the muzzle flash, but the shots were distant, muted pops, masked by the sound of the ocean.

Pablo twisted, jerked forward, crumpled to the ground, a small dark shape on the beach. He lay still, obviously dead. He could have been just another rock, another boulder, a pile of debris.

Mom's voice woke me, high and keening, from the kitchen downstairs: "Please! That's enough! That's enough!"

Something hard crashing. My digital clock said two in the morning.

Dad, thundering, "You goddamned bitch."

I lay in bed, not moving, heart racing.

Mom's voice, hysterical: "Get out of here! Get out of the house! Just leave us!"

"I'm not leaving my house, you bitch!"

He'd lost another job. As scary and foul-tempered as he usually was, when he got fired, he drank even more; he hit Mom even more.

Another crash. Something thudded. The whole house seemed to shake.

Silence.

Terrified, I leaped out of bed, vaulted down the stairs to the kitchen. Mom was lying on the floor, unconscious. Eyes closed, twin streams of blood running from her nostrils.

Some protector I was.

"Get up, you bitch!" my dad screamed. "Get the hell up!"

My blood ran cold. He'd gone berserk.

"What'd you do to her?" I shouted.

He saw me, snarled: "Get the hell out of here."

"What did you do to her?" I lunged, hands outspread, shoved him against the stove.

At fifteen, I was as tall as my dad and starting to get some muscles on me, though Dad was still far beefier and more powerful.

For a second, his face went slack in surprise: I'd just done the unthinkable.

Then his face went deep red. He turned, grabbed a cast-iron frying pan from the stovetop, whacked it against the side of my head. I'd backed up out of the way, but not in time. The pan clipped my ear, the pain unbelievable.

I yowled, doubled over, my ear ringing.

"We gonna do this the hard way?" he shouted, and he swung the frying pan again.

This time, instead of backing up, I shot forward, pushed him hard, everything a blur. His sour perspiration smell, his beer breath, the gray-white of his T-shirt spattered with Mom's blood.

A flash of black, the frying pan, as he pulled it back to swing again. Mom's cry: She'd regained consciousness.

Everything was happening at once, and nothing made sense, nothing but the anger inside me that had finally boiled over, the pumping adrenaline that gave me the strength to overpower the monster, to smash him back against the upper kitchen cabinet, the one with the glass windows in it and the neatly stacked dishes. To keep him from hitting me again, to stop him from hitting Mom again.

To be a protector.

The back of his head cracked into the sharp corner, where the wood veneer had peeled off, and he'd never gotten around to repairing it.

He roared, "You son of a bitch, I'm going to kill you!"

But the anger and the adrenaline and all those years of storing it inside made me stronger than he, at least for the moment. And maybe he didn't expect it from me, and maybe he was just too drunk.