Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

“And with such computers in short supply,” he continued, “that makes them a good lead. We have guys spread out from accelerators at Stanford to cyclotrons at U of M, Indiana, and Duke.” He saw a sparkle in her eyes. “What is it?” he asked.

“By now, knowing you guys, you’ve confirmed where he last was seen?”

“Stanford- Palo Alto, yes. Just before that, Wash U. And he was in any number of places before Palo Alto. We’re still chasing his travel, his finances, and the like. It’s a job even tougher because Justice is not eager to let anyone know he’s missing.”

“But that’s stupid!”

“Government work,” he said, as frustrated by it as she was.

“What department at Wash U.?”

“Planetary Sciences, I think it was,” he answered.

“Makes sense. Weather prediction. That would be a Silicon Graphics or even a Cray. Those machines create processor reports, ways to determine a machine’s activity, even if they’re not showing Markowitz himself as having been logged on.”

He welcomed her excitement, her computer expertise surfacing. “I’m assuming we’ve checked all that,” he told her.

“I can’t just sit here,” she said. “Can you?”

“No.” For one thing, he’d fall asleep.

A look of defiance overcoming her, she said, “Good. Then let’s check for ourselves. I’ll need access to the processor reports. We can start at Wash U. ”

“I can’t take you out in public.”

“I thought the best place to hide a person like me was out in the open.”

He felt himself losing ground. She had the will of seven. He felt a heat hanging between them, wondering if she felt it, too.

“Trust me,” she said, “I’ve become something of an expert in the art of disguise.”

He told her if she slept for a few hours, he’d consider it.

She nodded her assent.

Larson double-checked his BlackBerry. No messages. Rotem would understand his going AWOL, would contact him when he was certain FATF was safe again, the internal threat contained. Fatigue was getting the best of him, he realized.

Hope brought him out of it. “The point being that if they aren’t going to bring Penny to me, then we’re going to find her without them. I haven’t spent a single night without Penny since she was born. Not one, single night .” Her lower lip trembled despite her efforts to keep it steady. “This is my first.” She looked up at him then, her eyes carrying anger, frustration, and a mother’s pain.

Her hands were right there on the table, and seeing them Larson felt compelled to reach out and surround them with his, which he did. Of all he’d done that day, he considered this his biggest act of bravery. Hope did not pull her hands away. Instead, just as the awkwardness of the moment required him to let go of her, she looked up and they met eyes, and his hands stayed where they were.

“Thank you,” she said.

The bathwater continued to rise, and Penny along with it. Lifted, it seemed to her, by the fingers of angels come to rescue her. Extremely cold at first, she’d managed one more bump into the faucet to make the handle point up at twelve o’clock, resulting in a lukewarm stream. Even so, Penny was cold, shivering cold, and she wanted out of the tub.

At a little over the halfway mark, the rising water hit the overflow drain, forcing Penny to wedge her head in front of the soap dish mounted into the wall tile in order to then hold the toes of her right foot over the vent in the drain and allow the water to continue to fill.

Water still seeped out, but there was more water coming in than going out. The tub continued to fill.

She peed in her pants, into the tub, unable to hold it. Sight of the yellow stream motivated her. Soaked through, the duct tape had lost some of its stickiness. The tape at her knees came loose, her knees able to bend, her ankles wiggling.

She hooked a knee, rolled over the edge of the tub and crashed onto the floor of the bathroom, face-first, a splash of bathwater following with her. As she sat up, she saw the water on the floor was pink. Blood pink. Her nose screamed with pain, and she screamed right along with it-a muted, worthless cry forced through a knotted sock. The thin puddle of water grew as she kneeled. A dead fly floated past. This all but yanked her to standing.

Then, her knees giving out, she sank back and collapsed onto the toilet with a loud bang. Try as she did, she could not get hold of the chip of pottery she’d hidden in her sock. It took her several minutes to get feeling back into her legs. Her strength returned, she kicked and fluttered, and tried everything to break the tape at her ankles, but it held.

Soaked through to the bone, more determined than ever, she rose, held her stance, and hopped toward the bathroom door, angling like a penguin to use her right hand, still taped to her waist, to try to open the door. Locked.

She remembered the man with the scars reversing the doorknob. On her side of the door the knob now had a hole in it. But Penny knew such doorknobs. More than once she’d locked herself out of her room and then watched as her mother did the clothes-hanger-in-the-hole trick to pop the lock. Another time she’d used a paperclip.

Penny spun, hopping like a rabbit. She looked for anything that might work as a pin or nail to shove into the doorknob and free the lock. And there it was, right on the bathroom counter: a thin piece of silver metal. She moved, and it moved. A mirrored reflection of her own belt.

Her arms and hands held to her sides with tape, she nonetheless fingered the belt and drew it around her waist toward her fingers. The buckle caught on the first belt loop. But this proved close enough for her to deftly unfasten her belt with outstretched fingers. It did not go smoothly. She fell back onto the toilet twice, losing her balance, only to stand again and continue with her efforts. Finally, the belt buckle came open and Penny sprang forward, hopping a little to position herself before inserting the buckle’s metal tongue into the doorknob. She pushed and nothing happened. She pushed again. Click .

She had to push her arm against the knob and slide down to make it turn. It took four tries before the door finally came open, the bedroom lit only by the shifting colors of the TV.

Her face exploded into a smile: She’d done it. Better, she’d done it herself . Along with the fear, the dread of Him returning, came a gleeful sense of accomplishment. Usually Mommy did everything; told her what to do; made all her decisions. Somehow, this one act of floating herself out of the tub and winning her freedom was the best feeling she’d ever had.

Wanting nothing more than to find her mother and tell her everything she’d been through, all that she’d accomplished, Penny hopped toward the motel room’s door, determined to open that one as well. She was on a roll; why stop now?

She was just past the bed, past the TV bleating out its news, when the door seemed to jiggle.

She stopped, frozen.

The door didn’t just seem to jiggle, it was jiggling. And it wasn’t the loud TV making it move.

She wanted to turn and head back to the bathroom, would have given anything to mop up the dark stain of bathwater that now loomed at the junction of the door, her wet footprints where she’d hopped across the carpet. But her legs would not move, would not cooperate.

The door came open.

Again, she screamed one of her muted screams.

It wasn’t Him.

In the blue flickering light of the television, she saw the blistered face and red dripping eye of a two-legged monster.

By the time the morning sun set the Mississippi ablaze, broken only by the rolling brown V s cut into it by slowly moving river barges, Larson and Hope were eating bagels wrapped in butcher paper and drinking OJ from plastic bottles in the second-floor offices of Grossman Iron and Steel, five acres of dirt dedicated to mountains of scrap metal. Beyond the yard, a massive twenty-foot wall had been erected forty years earlier by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back the river’s spring floodwaters.