“It will hold five. But you really shouldn’t go.”
“Why the hell not?” Anna said.
“Death. Horrible disfigurement. Those good enough reasons?”
“I’ll risk it.”
“What if it increases the risk for the rest of us?” Sam let his serious eyes make his point.
“You can’t make me stay, Sam.”
Sam hesitated, gauging her, then took her aside. “Look, I’ll spend my time worrying about you and I won’t be as effective. Neither will the others. T.J. will be busy trying to save you.”
“Sam, don’t do this to me. I can shoot.”
“I’m not taking you. You’re obsessed with your brother-you don’t think straight.”
“How are you gonna stop me?”
“We’re wasting critical time.” She locked eyes with him and he knew he had a problem. Her hand went into her purse and she came out with a satellite phone. She unfolded the antenna.
“I gotta go,” he said. “Keep the gun. You may need it. Go in the house with the others.”
Anna said nothing, but she knifed him with her look.
Sam turned and trotted to the dock with T.J., who had been a few paces back and was listening.
“What’s she gonna do?” T.J. said.
“I don’t know,” Sam said while he watched her.
“I hate to say it but she looks like a woman who has you by the gonads.”
Even with the distance between them Sam knew she was looking right at him, and he could feel each punch of the dialer as if it were drilling his chest.
“Damn that woman,” Sam said. She was coming back toward them and talking on the phone.
“We should leave now,” T.J. said.
Sam walked up to Anna. “What are you doing now?”
“Just a minute, Harold,” she said before covering the mouthpiece. “I’m on the phone with the New York Times. Harold Butler. I’m going to give him an interview. If you get in that plane without me you’re going to read about yourself in the New York Times. You’re going to read how you left me standing on the dock at the residence of a bunch of criminals. Not only that, you’re going to read your life’s history. I can afford to forfeit the bond. And you can sue me if you want to.”
“But if I take you…”
She indicated the off button on the phone.
Sam was looking at a woman who was crazy with determination.
“This is what I get for saving your life?”
“No. This is what you get for trying to run it. Nowhere in our contract does it say you can make life and death choices for me. I am your equal. Get that through your head.”
“If you come you fight my way.”
“Since I don’t know any other way to fight, I suppose yours is as good as any.”
“You are something else.”
“I’ll grow on you. Let’s go,” she said. “Harold, I’ll call you back later.” They both ran back to the plane.
T.J. looked worried.
As Sam was walking to the plane a bad feeling almost paralyzed him. He tried to shake it off. He considered that the intruders were far ahead, trained and heavily armed, and probably impossible to catch. His small group wasn’t ready for this.
“Come here,” Sam said, pulling T.J. away from Anna.
“What about me?” Anna said.
“Just stand there,” Sam growled, about as mean as he ever sounded.
“I don’t think we should take Anna and I’m afraid this could end in disaster,” Sam said.
“You stay. The boys and I will go. If you sit here she’ll stay and there isn’t a hell of a lot she can do about it.”
“I don’t want you dead, T.J.”
“It’s the job. I wanna go, but I sure as hell don’t wanna take Anna Wade.”
“If you fly right over to the far side you could be flying into automatic weapons fire. If that happens you’ll be dead.”
“We won’t go straight. We’ll come in at the end of the island and go overland.”
“It’s your choice.”
“What are you saying?” Anna walked over to where they were standing.
“You and I are staying here to run the radio,” Sam said.
“No way.”
“Anna, I’m staying here and so are you. T.J. and the boys are going.”
The pilot was slow in reaching for the door. He cleared his throat and spoke. “What are all these guns, and this?” he said, speaking in a tight voice, his eyes hard with fear.
“Little problem,” Sam said. “These gentlemen need to go to the other side of the island, up at the other end, and look for someone.”
“With those?” the man said, still eying the armament.
“Lotta bears over there,” Sam said.
“Bullshit,” the pilot said.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars if you take them.”
“Am I gonna get shot at?”
“Probably.”
“Fifty thousand cash plus you buy the plane if it’s damaged. And I want it in writing now.”
Sam took out a pen and scrawled the deal.
“And the movie star here signs it.”
“Listen, asshole, we gotta go,” Jeff said.
“Take it easy,” Sam said. The man’s being reasonable. And now that we’re paying him fifty grand he’s officially agreed to fly through live fire.”
The pilot swallowed and looked at Sam as if he might rethink his position. The three men jumped into the plane. Sam shut the door, practically choking with frustration.
He and Anna stood in silence while the plane taxied and took off.
They watched as the seaplane flew down the island, made a turn, and disappeared in the distance. In ten minutes they got a radio call.
“Sam, they are long gone. No seaplane, no boats, no nothing. We watched as the Otter took off in the distance. There was a chopper nearby that could have come into the old orchard back here. We’re coming back.” Then there was a few seconds’ silence and T.J. came on again.
“We’ve been hit. We’ve been hit. Somebody stayed behind. We’re going to try to land.” Then more stridently. “Duke and Jeff have both been hit bad. Automatic weapons fire.”
Sam called seaplanes and a medical helicopter. The pilot got the Beaver on the water.
Twenty minutes later T.J. came on the radio.
“Damn it, Sam. Duke and Jeff are dead. Both gone.”
Twenty-five
Sam and Anna sat in a Hawker 700 jet that had leveled off at 32,000 feet.
“We have to go after them. The longer they are gone, the harder they will be to find.”
“You know, you’re trying my ego. Supposedly I’m an expert at this. We have fifty people or more working their butts off nearly twenty-four hours a day looking for escape routes from Canada. We are monitoring phones, we’re nudging the Canadian government, we’re getting informal help from the FBI and Scotland Yard without yelling too loud because of the circumstances and because governments can screw things up. They left in a private plane,
