There must be some way to lose them!
With the engine’s clamor drowning out all other sound, Meg had no advance warning of the stream until she’d almost tumbled down the rocky embankment. She put on the brakes, sizing up the rushing water ten feet below. It seemed to be about waist-deep — not exactly a raging river. But in these conditions, it might as well have been. A full-body soaking in icy water would mean guaranteed hypothermia!
The three-wheeler swerved around a stump, and the bouncing headlight beam showed her the solution. A hundred yards away, a tree had toppled across the stream, forming a bridge to the other side. No ATV could ever follow her across that.
The thought of escape gave her feet wings, and she raced to the fallen log. Her first thought was to tightrope-walk across. But one step on the soft, rotting wood made her ease herself down to a careful crawl. The trunk was eight inches in diameter, knobby and uneven, bobbing with her movements. Gritting her teeth, she shuffled forward, inch by inch. The opposite bank, thirty feet away, might as well have been another continent.
Keep moving!
Suddenly, her knees slipped on the snow-slick bark, and she was falling. Desperately, she clamped onto the trunk with her arms and ankles. She was halfway across, suspended over the cascading stream. She could hear the babble of the water —
Wait — why can I hear it?
And the terrifying answer: The motor’s off! They’ve stopped!
The kidnappers jumped from the ATV and ran to the toppled tree. “Hold on, Margaret,” Tiger shouted. “We’re coming for you.”
It was the kind of talk Meg had learned to expect from Tiger — helpful and encouraging on the surface, concealing a sinister core.
“Leave the light on!” instructed Spidey. The tree lurched as he crawled out onto the span. In a few more seconds, he would be upon her.
The thought channeled hidden stores of strength to Meg’s arms. She heaved herself back on top of the log and scrambled for freedom. The kidnapper clambered after her, barely a body-length behind.
What am I going to do when I get to the other side? I’ll never outrun him....
Her eyes fell on the stub of what had once been a tree branch. It was at the end of the span, pressed against the rocky ledge, holding the fallen trunk in place. She flung herself onto the opposite bank and began kicking at the truncated limb with her heel.
Spidey stared at her in outrage. “Don’t even think about — ”
With a snap, the piece broke off. Without the stub acting as a brake, the log rolled over on its side. With a howl of anger, Spidey was pitched free, plunging with a tremendous splash in the stream.
Meg couldn’t resist wasting precious seconds, savoring the sight of this horrible criminal cursing and thrashing around in the glacial water. The kidnappers could not follow her now. They had to get Spidey warm and dry before they could resume the chase.
“Give it up, Margaret.” Tiger’s gaze was even colder than what her partner was enduring. “You know you’ll never survive out here.”
There was one thing worse than recapture: The notion that Tiger, terrible as she was, might be telling the truth.
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ATTENTION BLOGOSPHERE — HELP SAVE MEG FALCONER!
URGENT CALL FOR DONATIONS
The FBI is playing games with Meg Falconer’s life. Does anybody honestly believe a 7th-grade girl would be a target for kidnapping if her parents hadn’t been branded as traitors? Never mind that the Falconers were innocent — the feds themselves admitted that after the parents had spent more than a year in prison.
Now the Bureau refuses to come up with 1 cent of the $3-million ransom, despite the fact that the kidnappers have threatened to kill their young hostage if the money is not paid.
This is your chance to show the FBI that we’re sick of the pain and misery caused by their bumbling. If we can raise $3 million, we can bring Meg Falconer home. Give what you can to save that little girl. Do it for a shattered family that has already suffered enough. Do it to show the government the true meaning of justice. Do it for an innocent child who just spent her 12th birthday in captivity, so she’ll have more birthdays to celebrate in the future.
Agent Mike Sorenson swiveled his laptop around so the Falconers could see the web page. “What do you have to say about this?”
Dr. John Falconer cleared his throat carefully. “Well, you know that Rufus Sehorn has taken a special interest in Meg’s kidnapping on his site — ”
“He’s supposed to be talking about the reward,” Sorenson interrupted. “I don’t see a word about it.”
“A ten-thousand-dollar reward is a drop in the bucket,” John argued. “The only way to get serious about bringing Meg home is to raise that ransom. We’re very grateful to Rufus for using bloghog.usa to do it.”
“The FBI doesn’t sanction this,” the agent said primly. “It’s the policy of the U.S. government never to pay off or negotiate with kidnappers.”
Louise Falconer spoke up, her voice firm. “You don’t have any children, Agent Sorenson. If you did, you’d understand that we have to try absolutely everything to help our daughter, and that means everything. We didn’t ask Rufus to do this for us — he came up with the idea on his own. As far as I’m concerned, that man has been sent straight from heaven. He’s working night and day for us, while our own government has basically thrown in the towel.”
It was a no-win situation. Sorenson would never convince the Falconers that he was doing everything he could. In a week-old abduction with no other leads, FBI procedure was to play a waiting game. Shouldn’t two criminology professors understand that?
Besides, no one could say he wasn’t going the extra mile for this case. It was two-thirty in the morning, and here he was, waiting up with the parents for Emmanuel Harris to bring their son home.
He shrugged into his overcoat and stepped outside, directing a slight nod to the undercover agent in the sedan parked at the curb. Where was Harris? There were reports of snow in the mountains, but Sorenson wasn’t sure where or how much.
The thought had barely entered his mind when his cell phone rang. Harris’s number appeared on the caller ID.
“Harris — where are you?”
The response was the last thing Agent Mike Sorenson had expected to hear:
“I’m looking for a place to rent a snowmobile.”
* * *
Agent Harris had suspected his plan might not be a hit with Sorenson.
“What are you talking about?” Sorenson’s voice demanded over the handset. “Where’s Aiden Falconer?”
“Relax,” said Harris. “He’s right next to me in the car. He’s okay.”
Agent and runaway were in the Trailblazer, four-wheeling through heavy snow on a winding road in the Appalachian Mountains. They had just come from an isolated power company substation. Both had watched as a satellite photograph crept out of the printer — the exact spot of the interruption in the telephone lines.
Aiden had been strangely disappointed by the picture. What had he expected to see — Meg standing under the pole, waving and smiling? Actually, he couldn’t see anything through the blur of cloud cover and snow. It had taken the station tech to point out the dangling wires, faint white threads on the infrared image.
Still, those threads were all he had of his sister. He clutched the slick paper and would not let go. Not until the real Meg was home, safe and sound.
“We’ve got a fresh lead,” Harris went on. He told Sorenson about the odd interruptions detected by the phone company.
“It’s a broken cable!” Sorenson interrupted angrily. “High winds, falling branches, ice buildup — there are a hundred possible explanations!”
“Not according to the field people at the substation. Definitely man-made, they say. And get this — one of the father’s novels features a hero who taps out a message in Morse code using broken telephone wires.??
?
“Novels?” repeated Sorenson.
“The father is an author, and the kids sometimes put his stories into action when the chips are down.” The Trailblazer skidded on the icy pavement as Harris steered into the circular drive of a ski lodge. “It’s worth looking into.”
“This is my case!” Sorenson asserted. “I decide what’s worth looking into!”
“I’ll let you know if we come up with anything.”
“No! I’m telling you to turn around and come home!”
“Maybe I should take some vacation time,” Harris mused. “Do some snowmobiling in the mountains — ”
“You’re disobeying a direct order and putting a fifteen-year-old boy in danger!” Sorenson accused.
“It’s not danger when you follow the buddy system. He’s my buddy.”
The SUV skidded to a halt at the main entrance, and Harris shut the flip phone. He skewered Aiden with a razor-sharp glare. “You’d better be right about this.”
For the very first time, Aiden looked at the man who’d imprisoned his parents and did not see an enemy. “Thank you for believing me,” he said.
Harris unfolded his six-foot-seven-inch frame out the driver-side door. “Let’s go do this before Sorenson tells the Bureau to cancel my credit card.”
The peace and quiet of the ski lodge was shattered when Harris threw open the front door and bounded in with Aiden in tow. “We’ll need a snowmobile and two ski suits, along with goggles, boots, gloves — the works!”
“Sorry, mister,” the desk clerk told him. “Our day-rental counter doesn’t open until seven.”
The agent took out an ID wallet and flashed a badge. The initials were unmistakable — FBI.
“Wake up the manager.”
One foot in front of the other …
It was all the plan Meg had left. She limped through the snow, shivering from cold and the leftover shock from her near miss. She remained under cover of the woods. Dumping Spidey in the drink had bought her time, nothing more. The kidnappers would come after her again, once he’d changed into dry clothes.
I could put them both in prison for a long time.
Her thoughts turned to Mickey, the third captor. True, he was a criminal, but Meg had never really considered the twenty-year-old a bad person. Mickey had only signed on to the kidnapping plot because he was desperate for money to help a younger brother who was in trouble with the law.
Most important, Mickey had made it possible for Meg to escape from the mountain cabin where she’d been held. Who knew what kind of shape she’d be in if he hadn’t acted?
Warmer, drier, and a lot less tired and hungry!
But not free — and that made all the difference. No matter how exhausted and miserable she might have been, if she walked far enough — staying parallel to the power lines — sooner or later she would reach help.
Suddenly, an overpowering rush of wind knocked her off her feet and tossed her into the snow.
She was more surprised than hurt. Where did that come from?
She picked herself up into a world she barely recognized. Millions of wind-driven snowflakes blurred into a curtain of chaotic white. It was a white that she felt rather than saw. In fact, she couldn’t see anything, not even trees that were only a few feet away.
Another gust sent her stumbling backward into a trunk. She clamped her arms around it to stabilize herself. Terror gripped her. Which direction had she been going? She was surrounded on all sides by whiteout conditions. Everything depended on following the path of the power lines —
And I don’t have the faintest idea which way that is.
Never before had she felt so completely disoriented. It was as if she’d been suddenly transported to the emptiness of intergalactic space — with no sense of left or right, here or there.
She spun helplessly. All directions looked equally possible — and equally wrong. Closing her eyes, she tried to call up some kind of internal compass. She took three steps and bounced off another tree, all but invisible in the boiling white.
The wind tore through the woods, piercing her body with cold. It propelled the snow into her with such force that every flake stung her face like a tiny ice needle. Doggedly, she leaned into the storm. It felt as if the tempest could blow her over at any moment.
Each step was an effort now, a struggle against the gale. Or was the snow the problem — blowing, drifting, deeper around her legs every minute? Worst of all was the thought that she didn’t know if she was going the right way — or any way for that matter. She could very well be walking in circles.
Even more hobbling than the storm was the reality that pressed down on her: In this weather, there was no telling how long it would take her to make it to civilization. There was no telling if she would make it to civilization at all.
There was no telling whether Meg Falconer was going to live or die.
Aiden and Harris were on the snowmobile, heading up the side of a mountain, when the blizzard hit.
The first onslaught nearly flung Aiden clear off the machine. The barrage reminded him of the time he’d been hit by a huge wave while bodysurfing — a manhandling force of nature. He tightened his grip on Harris’s ski suit and ducked low, using the driver as a windbreak. It was like being in a tunnel, dense snow blasting past on all sides. The brilliant halogen headlight that had illuminated the line of telephone poles now showed nothing but a wall of moving white.
Harris slowed but did not stop. “You okay back there?” he bellowed over his shoulder. The words were barely audible over the Ski-Doo’s engine.
Aiden’s own well-being was the last thing on his mind. “If it’s this bad for us — ”
A sharp gust took his breath away, but the train of thought wasn’t hard to follow. They were protected by down-filled ski suits, goggles, and Gore-Tex boots and gloves. Meg had none of these things.
The agent read his concern. “We can’t be sure of anything yet!”
Aiden pressed into Harris’s back and tried to convince himself that his sister had taken cover somewhere, away from the wrath of this brutal blizzard. He even toyed with the awful wish that he’d been wrong about the Mac Mulvey distress call. That would put Meg still in the hands of her kidnappers, but at least she’d be safe from the storm.
This is the kind of weather people die in....
Harris hunched over the console, staring into the headlight beam in a dogged attempt to see through the airborne porridge.
When the tree trunk came into view, it seemed to explode out of the snow, hurtling toward them from point-blank range. Frantically, Harris yanked on the handlebars with all the strength in his six-foot-seven frame. For a split second, Aiden was positive the Ski-Doo would flip over. At the last second, the treads bit into the snow, and the machine righted itself, veering away from the woods, collision, and disaster.
Aiden tried to calm the drum-solo beating of his heart into a stable rhythm. Navigation should have been simple — follow the clear-cut until the agent’s handheld GPS system told them they had reached the coordinates of the broken cable. But in zero visibility, simply maintaining a straight line was next to impossible. Harris’s grip on the controls was so tight that his body felt carved from granite.
Suddenly, the engine of the Ski-Doo went silent.
“What happened?” Aiden demanded as they glided, losing speed. “Why are we stopping?”
“We’re here,” Harris announced over his shoulder.
“No we’re not! We’re nowhere!”
With a whump, the Ski-Doo coasted into the base of a telephone pole that appeared out of nowhere.
When Aiden got up, the wind very nearly knocked him off his feet. Never in his fifteen years had he experienced this kind of blizzard. The air was solid snow. Every breath left him choking on a mouthful of slush.
“What now?” he managed.
Harris tossed a flashlight to Aiden and switched on his own. With a groan, the agent began to shinny up the wet pole, the nylon fabric o
f his ski suit slipping and sliding.
“Wait — she can’t still be up there, can she?” Aiden stepped back for a better look and something touched his face.
He reached out and grabbed it — the severed end of a phone cable, hanging down from the line above.
“I’ve got it!” he shouted. “Agent Harris — I found the wire!”
He held it to his chest. Meg cut this. The idea of touching something his sister had touched was practically magic.
Harris jumped down and examined the cable. “Bingo.”
“But the SOS was hours ago,” Aiden said dejectedly. “She could be miles away.”
Harris played his flashlight across the white on white. “No tracks,” he commented. “Everything would be long buried by now.”
And then the beam fell on an area of shallower snow at the edge of the trees on the lee side of the storm. The wind had blown much of the powder into the clearing, so the cover was only a few inches here.
You couldn’t call them footprints — not anymore. But there was no question that they once had been. Ever-so-slight oval depressions at regular intervals. Left, right, left, right.
“I’d say that’s just about the shoe size of a twelve-year-old girl,” Harris said.
“Yeah, but which way was she heading?” asked Aiden. “Are the tracks coming or going?”
“Impossible to tell,” the agent decided. “We can only follow them into the woods. They disappear in the deeper snow.”
“But what if that’s the wrong direction?”
Harris was already striding back to the Ski-Doo. “If we don’t find her, maybe we’ll find what she’s running from. Either way, we’ll know more than we do now.”
The tall man crammed his long legs into the machine, and Aiden took his place at the rear. The engine roared to life in a cloud of ice crystals.
They entered the forest, driving much more slowly. The faint tracks threaded a slalom course through the trees.
Aiden held on to Harris and to this hope: If they could pinpoint a broken wire in a far-flung wilderness in the middle of a blizzard, surely they still had a chance of locating his sister.