“First thing, we’ve got to get out of here,” Shawn said. “Just far enough so it’s not worth their trouble to look for us too long. Then we follow and see where they take their prisoners.”
“What makes you think they’re going to take them anywhere?”
“Sometime tomorrow a helicopter is going to land here to take the cook and the waiters away, either back home or to the next rest stop,” Shawn said. “The gunmen aren’t going to want to be here when that happens.”
“Unless their plan is to hijack a helicopter,” Gus said.
“There is that possibility,” Shawn said. “But I can think of about a million easier ways to do that. And either way, our first step is still the same. We’ve got to get away from here.”
It didn’t feel right. It felt like running away and leaving all the others to some horrible fate. But no matter how many scenarios Gus ran in his head, he didn’t see one that was even half as logical as Shawn’s plan. “Let’s go.”
Gus pushed himself up on his knees, ready to crawl back around the supply tent. Shawn grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down.
A circle of light, the beam from a flashlight, hit the tent’s back wall, then swept across its surface. A gruff voice shouted from inside. “They’re not here.”
Somewhere past the tent, another voice spoke in threatening tones: “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” It was Gwendolyn’s voice, and she sounded scared. After all that had just happened, it was the fear in her voice that frightened Gus the most.
“They probably ran off.” It was a man’s voice. Savage, Gus thought.
“Right off the mountain.” That was definitely Mathis. Why wasn’t he doing anything? Gus wondered, and then remembered kicking Mathis’ gun into the water. “They’re probably lying dead at the bottom of a ravine.”
“Possibly,” the threatening voice said. “Or maybe they’re hiding just out of reach of our lights. Let’s find out.”
“That’s a good idea.” It was Balowsky, and there was a mild slur in his voice that Gus suspected wasn’t entirely caused by fear. “We can wait until the sun comes up. Then we’ll be able to see for ourselves.”
“I have a better idea,” the threatening voice said, and then spoke up loudly. “The two of you who are hiding out there. You have ten seconds to show yourselves. If you do not surrender to me within that period of time, I will kill one hostage. And then I will kill another hostage every ten seconds after that. One. Two.”
The voice continued counting down.
Gus got to his feet.
“Are you crazy?” Shawn said.
“No, but I will be if people start dying because I didn’t walk fast enough. And so will you.”
“Six. Seven.”
“Sometimes I hate being a decent person,” Shawn said as he got to his feet.
“Fortunately it doesn’t come up all that often,” Gus said.
“Eight. Nine.”
Shawn and Gus stepped around the edge of the yellow tent. “Don’t shoot!” Shawn shouted. “We’re here.”
The five members of Rushton’s team were huddled together by the blue tent. Mathis had managed to change into his clothes, or maybe he’d never taken them off, but Savage and Balowsky were still in their pajamas. Gwendolyn and Jade wore robes, presumably over the sheer nightgowns that had been left for them.
Four men wearing camouflage, army boots, and black balaclavas leveled automatic rifles at the lawyers. Their leader stood in the center of the quad, aiming his own weapon at the ground where the four servers and the chef lay facedown.
The leader glanced up at Shawn and Gus, although the long, thick red hair and beard made it hard to tell exactly where his eyes were looking.
“Ten,” the leader said. “Too late.”
“But we’re here,” Gus said. “We came out within the ten seconds.”
“Did I say ten?” the leader growled. “Sorry, I’m dyslexic. What I meant to say was five.”
He jerked his gun up slightly and fired. A spurt of red geysered up where a server’s head had been.
“No!” Shawn shouted. He ran towards the leader, with Gus right on his heels. But before they’d closed half the distance, two of the camo-men tackled them to the ground.
The leader fired four more bullets, then wiped the red off the cuffs of his pants and turned back to the lawyers.
“I warned them not to trash my mountain.”
Chapter Forty
The march had gotten easier as the sun came up and Gus could see the rocks littering the trail instead of blindly tripping over them. But that only made him feel worse. When there was physical pain, when every step was a struggle, his entire mind could focus on the act of putting one foot in front of the other. Now his mind was free to wander, and it kept going back to the same place.
Gus had seen dead bodies before. He’d seen people die. But this was different. The casual executions kept replaying themselves in his mind, and he couldn’t shake the image no matter how hard he tried. It seemed impossible to imagine-one second those people were alive; the next they didn’t exist. Gus hoped he had thanked the servers when they’d brought him dinner last night.
The rest of the marchers were just as somber and just as silent and they walked single file along the trail. Two of the masked gunmen led them down the mountain; the other two trailed them. Where their leader was, Gus had no idea.
They’d been walking for hours now. After the execution of the chef and his servers, the gunmen had corralled Shawn and Gus with the lawyers in one of the tents. They’d allowed the ones who were still in their pajamas a minute to change into hiking clothes, and then they had all set out down the trail.
Where they were being taken, or why they were being taken there, nobody knew. Mathis had tried to ask as they were led out onto the trail, but one of their captors had informed him that the next person to utter a single syllable would be thrown off the cliff. Gus could see Mathis’ hand twitching, as if reaching for the gun he no longer had, but he backed off. Just as well, Gus had thought. He didn’t know if the kidnappers would follow through on their threat, but even if they didn’t, any altercation with Mathis might lead one of them to discover his FBI credentials, and there was no way to predict what would happen then.
Although they’d all been ordered to keep their eyes firmly on the ground, Gus sneaked a look up at Shawn.. They were separated by Savage and Balowsky, whose march had started out as a hungover stagger and only weakened over the hours, and all Gus could see of his friend was his back. That was enough to reassure Gus-and to scare him.
Reassure him because Shawn was a creature of habit and reflex, and for decades any order for silence, whether from an elementary school teacher, a parent, or a police detective, would trigger an avalanche of words. Even if it was in Shawn’s interest to keep his mouth shut, the command to stop talking acted on him like a rubber hammer below the knee; his response was completely beyond any physical control.
But Shawn hadn’t said a word then, and he wasn’t talking now. His head was down; his eyes seemed to be focused, like everyone else’s, on the ground.
What made Gus nervous was Shawn’s shoulders. Even from here he could see how tight, how rigid they were. Shawn was not someone who angered easily; his philosophy of life was that having fun is the best revenge for any ill. But Gus could feel the rage radiating out of those joints, and he didn’t know how long Shawn could keep it bottled up. When he exploded, Gus had no idea what was going to happen, but he didn’t see a happy ending for anyone.
The trail took a hard jag to the left, and Gus saw something he hadn’t seen yet-a tree. It wasn’t much, just a scraggly, struggling little runt, but it told him they’d descended past the timberline, the edge of the habitat beyond which trees are incapable of growing. The trail went inland from the cliff, and now was surrounded on
