“ But we're on the water, already set sail.”
“ Just took us off a bit. I don't want anyone showing up at the marina to find the three of us. That won't do.”
“ But the van?”
“ I'm on it.” He pointed the gun and held out the needle. “Puncture yourself with this now! Or die now!”
“ That would spoil your plans for a good show.”
“ But it would make me a hero-saving the girl, killing you! Shoot up or be shot.” Grant now recalled how it had all come down to this, having to administer the Demoral into his own arm.
After securing both hostages in the yacht, Jervis Swantor had moved his home to a private marina covered with low-hanging willows, a place no longer in use on the other side of the river. He then took a dingy and returned to the van, all the while a timer on the computer photographed his two hostages and sent out a few minutes of each directly to Cahil's website in cyberspace.
He expected little trouble ditching the van, but on closer inspection from behind the wheel, Swantor cursed the fact that it was a stick shift. He sat grinding gears trying to find reverse, sending up a cat cry to the marina residence and the moon. When finally the thing lurched backward, Swantor drove off calmly, heading for the back bayou road he had surveyed a day earlier for this purpose.
Oblong black objects-buzzards-slept on the branches of trees garlanded with eerie moss. “Witch hair,” he muttered, recalling what he had heard Spanish moss called in his youth.
Off in the distance behind him, he heard the wail of a siren. He knew the danger of being caught within a hundred yards of the van, much less in the driver's seat, but he didn't want it located smack in front of his marina address, either, should some enterprising cop locate it.
He wound through the thicket and finally came up on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi, a granite cap. Swantor first opened the driver's side door should he need to jump. He then shifted into first, holding the brake hard against the machine's desire to go forward. Tires rotated madly now as he held firm to the brake. He then shifted and rolled from the cab as the monster van screeched and squealed headlong into the air, diving nose first into the great river.
Swantor got up, mud-encrusted, feeling his heart pounding as he did so. His heart had been racing along with the van's tires. He went to the edge of the bluff to stare down at his handiwork by the half moon, crouching on his knees in the soft drizzle. Only the rear of the van showed, and if the river swelled, it would be washed downstream and perhaps consumed altogether.
Swantor made up his mind to leave and worry no more about the van. He had a long walk back to where he had left the dingy. He stood from the crouching position he'd taken, thinking of the fantastic computer film he planned on making, when suddenly his shoe slipped on the gleaming, flattened mud, where the van's tires had turned it into a slick spot of earth winking wet-eyed back at the moon.
Swantor wound up on his knees again, but this time backward, his feet and lower legs extending over the cliff in mid air. He tried to move, but each movement sent him slipping ever so slightly back toward the air and the river. He imagined if he did fall, he might well land dead atop of the van's back doors. Ironic enough, he thought.
He looked about for anything to grab hold of. Useless hanging tree moss presented itself as if to taunt him. There was nothing, no saving branch, no vine, no swinging rope. He realized how crucial this moment was. He pictured this as one of those moments that came in stark black and white, when the eye pinpointed on the fact that one's life could end or resume based upon something as slight as a single choice. No room for mistake. From somewhere overhead, he heard an owl cooing its eternal question, and he imagined what he must look like to the bird. A man in the position of prayer, teetering on the edge.
He gave a thought to his two guests back on the yacht, thought of how eventually they would be found shackled there. He wondered what authorities would make of it should he die here like this, while Kenyon and the woman were discovered on his yacht.
He could do nothing and remain here on his knees, or leap up from the kneeling position and find solid ground or find himself on his way to the bottom.
He took action, using his knees as springboard. One knee did well, but the other slid beneath him like a tire stuck in mud, landing him on his stomach. But he had managed to gain a bit more land. From there he pulled and clawed himself to safety.
He ushered the strength and breath to crawl and next to stand. The dark, empty woods around him heard his delighted laughter, but seemed not to care, and the owl had taken wing, disappearing out over the great and silent river.
DR. Jervis Swantor had made his way back to the yacht by 3:40 A.M. He was mud-caked and so he threw his filthy clothes overboard. He then showered and looked at Grant via the monitor. The other man still lay prone on the bed in the other room, muttering to himself. He turned the volume up to listen.
The infamous Skull-digger is cursing me! he thought with delight.
Swantor would send no words or photos out on the Internet that might lead to him. He knew the FBI and other authorities had sophisticated ways of locating a computer's whereabouts, but his machine scrambled such information in hundreds of different directions, thanks to his Anon program.
For the second time tonight, he spliced the tape to the section he wanted and uploaded it and sent it out to Cahil's website. “Now I'm in your face,” he said to the invisible person manning Cahil's website. He then forwarded the picture to countless other sites, after which he went to the yacht's controls and started downriver.
After a long couple of hours, he had put some distance between New Orleans and himself, meandering about the canals and anchoring the yacht in a cotton grove. He then retired to his master bedroom for sleep, glad that he had repainted her trim, and now he pulled off the stencils that changed the call numbers and name to a smaller ship kept registered and harbored elsewhere under the name of a dead uncle named Sweet.
He heard a faint crying out, but it was not a woman's voice. He only dully heard Kenyon's voice from the other end of the boat. A distant tugboat whistle wafted over the water, drifting down from upriver. He closed his eyes on the sound, feeling he had done a good night's job.
Captain Emil Hammerski had plied his trade as a tugboat captain for sixteen years along the Mississippi. In the darkness the water and the waterway, the tree-lined, fog-bound earth and sky often played tricks on a man's eyes; but traveling during the early morning hours meant less traffic and fewer problems, if you knew how to avoid the snags and continually developing sandbars. What he stared at now was no sandbar or snag, but it seemed a real enough threat-a huge black square up ahead where it oughtn't be.
Captain Hammerski knew every inch of the river from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. “I tell you, this here is something foreign to the shoals along Three Forks Bend,” he told his first mate, handing over the night-vision binoculars.
“ You sure have an eye for obstacles, Captain,” replied his first mate. “You think we ought to invest time in it or run round it?”
Busy at the moment, the captain reminded himself. His tug was pushing a barge filled with metal and wood structures for homes being built in Mobile. He was on the clock, and already running behind schedule. Slowing to look over something he could not identify would mean explanations when he showed up even later at the other end. The company's insurance would go up. He'd be to blame. The crew working the barge wouldn't care for the delay either.
He decided to ignore it, go on by. “Whatever it is… UFO maybe
… maybe a government secret of some sort… some things aren't meant to be seen,” he muttered.
His first mate, young Bryan Carsen listened to the old man closely. He had learned all he knew of the river from the captain. He stood just outside on the bow, trying to get a closer look at what the old man had discovered. It was not a natural formation, that much was for sure.
Shrouded in fog and cold, Carsen spoke to Hammerski through the window. “Whataya think it is, Captain?”
“ I just told you, not sure I want to know.”
“ Looks like a black refrigerator. Folks use this poor old river for all kinds of junk, like's as if it were a great big garbage disposal.”
“ Likely somebody's junk, all right, that thing,” replied Hammerski, puffing on his pipe.
