Харлан Кобен - The Boy from the Woods

“Plus some bloggers and Twitter accounts.”

“This is it, my friend. Hit send.”

One last chance for Wilde to act.

He heard the click of the key.

“Done,” Gavin said.

The relief in his tone was palpable.

“We need to free the kid,” Strauss said. “You have the coordinates to send to the Maynards?”

“Do you think we should wait?” Gavin asked.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They may have more.”

“More?”

“More tapes,” Gavin Chambers said. “They could be holding out on us.”

“We can’t,” Strauss said. “This... it’s gone far enough, Gavin. That boy...”

“Yeah.” Wilde could hear the devastation now in Gavin’s voice. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“Hand me the ski mask. Let’s go finish this.”

Wilde came out from his hiding spot and pointed the gun at them. “No need.”

Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss spun toward him. Wilde raised the gun.

“If you breathe wrong,” Wilde said, “I’ll shoot you both. Gavin, I assume you’re armed?”

“I am.”

“Holster under the left armpit?”

“Yes.”

“You know the drill. Thumb and index finger. Throw it over here. Do it slowly. Saul?”

“I’m unarmed.” Saul held up his hands and twirled slowly.

“Keep your hands on the desk where I can see them. Gavin, toss the gun.”

Gavin Chambers took the gun out of his holster and tossed it on the floor toward Wilde. Wilde picked it up and stuck it in his waistband.

“How did you figure it out?” Gavin asked.

“Lots of things. But the main one was the most basic. I kept wondering how Crash could be kidnapped so close to his own home with someone as good as you guarding him. The simplest answer? He can’t. So you had to be involved.” Wilde looked at Gavin, then at Saul. “I assume you guys hatched this idea after Naomi Pine ran away?”

“We did,” Gavin said.

“Made sense. Naomi goes missing. She has a tentative connection to Crash. So you know that if Crash goes missing now, everyone will tie them together. It gave you time. It gave you the ultimate diversion. You even said it to me, Gavin.”

“Said what?”

“At my Ecocapsule. The Ghost Army. Everything you did was about tactical deception.”

“And yet here we are.”

“Here we are.”

Gavin smiled. “We overdid it, didn’t we?”

“You did.”

“I didn’t expect the Maynards to bring you and Hester in.”

“Right, that threw you. It’s why you kept insisting I concentrate on Naomi. You knew that even if I was successful in finding her, I’d be no closer to the truth about Crash. The problem is, you both gilded that lily. Saul, you show up at the hotel bar to ask me about Naomi the night Crash disappears. Why? I didn’t realize it at the time, but even if you thought Crash and Naomi were close, why would you ask me to help you? You were just planting the seed so I’d go in the wrong direction. Then you” — Wilde looked back at Gavin — “you show up at the 7-Eleven with some suddenly unearthed secret message that again was supposed to make me think that Naomi was connected to whatever happened to Crash.”

Gavin nodded, seeing it now. “You asked me for a ride to the Maynards’.”

“Right.”

“That’s when you planted the GPS tracker in the car.”

“You’re a wealthy, successful man. You always have a driver or at least an expensive car. Suddenly you’re in a Chevy Cruze? I figured it was a rental.”

“But you didn’t know for sure?”

“I was just covering my bases. Then today Saul conveniently shows up by the school. He claims to have men following me, that he has an inside source at the Maynards’. But who would that be? Hester wouldn’t talk. Neither would my people. The Maynards? Not a chance. So it had to be the kidnapper. You, Gavin.”

“Eliminate the possible and whatever remains,” Saul said, quoting Arthur Conan Doyle, “no matter how improbable, is the truth.”

“Exactly. So when Saul drove me up to Sing Sing, I planted another GPS locator in his car. After you dropped me back near the Maynards’, you drove up to this rest stop. You didn’t stay long. Just to feed the kid, I guess. Look in on him. But the day before, according to the locator in Gavin’s Cruze, he had stopped here too. Why would both of you be in this fairly remote rest stop? You two had to be in on this together. Oh, and the finger coordinates being where I was found as a kid. Again, overkill. The only reason someone would do that would be to mess with my head. Of course, I got stuff wrong too. Like I figured you just rendezvoused at this rest stop. Met up, discussed things, whatever. But when I arrived just now, I was surprised to see it was closed.”

“How did you sneak in here anyway? We have sensors by all the entrances.”

“But not in the back. There’s a Dairy Queen.”

“So you found Crash in the Dunkin’ Donuts hut.”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“Probably at the hospital. Rola took him.”

“So Rola knows about this?”

Wilde chose not to reply.

“You get why we did this,” Saul said. “You see the danger, right?”

“It took me a while to remove the blinders of self-interest,” Gavin said. “You become so enmeshed in a charismatic leader, seduced by all that he can give you, that you can’t see past his bullshit. Then Saul started pleading his case to me.”

“You didn’t need much persuasion,” Saul said. “You were already starting to see.”

“Maybe I was — the pill popping, the erratic behavior, the ease with which he could manipulate. I liked his idea of tearing down the social order to rebuild, but as I spent more time with him, it became clear that Rusty doesn’t want to rebuild. Rusty wants to destroy this country. He wants to pull us apart by the seams.”

“We two old men don’t agree on much,” Saul said. “I’m on one side of the political aisle. Gavin is on the other. But we are both Americans.”

“Our views, opposite as they might seem, are in the realm of normalcy.”

“That’s not what Rusty wants. Rusty wants to make everyone choose a side, turn everyone into an extremist.”

“Seems it worked,” Wilde said, still holding the gun on them.

“What do you mean?”

“You two kidnapped a child. You cut off his finger. If that’s not being an extremist...”

Their faces fell. Both of them.

Gavin said, “You think we wanted to do that?”

“Doesn’t matter what you wanted.”

“You tell me,” Saul Strauss said. “Would Dash Maynard have given up the tape any other way?”

“Again: Doesn’t matter. You made the choice.” Wilde said it slowly and with emphasis: “You. Cut. Off. A. Boy’s. Finger.”

Gavin Chambers lowered his head. Saul Strauss tried to hold his high, but his mouth was quaking.

“Crash was drugged up when we did that, unconscious,” Saul said. “We kept the pain and trauma to a minimum.”

“You disfigured him. Then you threatened to cut off his arm. Suppose the Maynards didn’t send the tape. Would you have gone through with that? Would you have sent them his arm?”

Gavin Chambers finally looked up. “How far would you go to save millions of lives, Wilde?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“We’re all soldiers here, so it damn well is,” Gavin said. “This battlefield might not be as obvious, but lives are at stake. Millions. So if disfiguring or killing one person, even an innocent kid, could save millions of lives, would you do it?”

“That’s a pretty slippery slope you’re standing on, Colonel.”

“The frontline troops are always standing on a slippery slope. You know that. Would we have rather cut off our own fingers to save those lives? Of course. But that wasn’t the choice. Life isn’t lived in the black and white, Wilde. People like to think so nowadays. All the online outrage, things are either all good or all bad. But life is lived in the gray. Life is lived in the nuances.”