Chapter 24 - The Midnight Convoy
"Why did you do it, Vivian?" I asked, my voice breaking across the crackling satellite link. "Why did you come to my house? Why did you kiss David like that?"
A bitter, broken laugh came through the speaker.
"Because Croft had a gun to my spine from a sniper van sixty feet from your bay window, you idiot," Vivian sobbed softly. "He told me if I showed any hesitation, if David didn't look completely paralyzed and compromised by my presence, he would put a round through David’s forehead through your kitchen glass. I had to make David look guilty. I had to make you look like a shattered, irrational wife who was having an emotional breakdown so when the police reports were filed later, nobody would believe your testimony."
She took a ragged breath.
"I stole Croft’s cryptographic key from his briefcase twenty minutes ago while he was meeting with his legal counsel inside the private hangar. I sent the raw data files to your email, Claire. It contains the shell company registrations, the bank wire transfers to the county sheriff, and the names of every judge Croft owns on the Puget Sound bench. But you have to get out of Chelan. Croft just ordered the Chelan municipal substation to shut down the northern grid. The black-ops team at the lake has clearance to burn that orchard to the ground."
The connection went dead with a high-pitched electronic snap.
Outside the cottage, the deep darkness was suddenly fractured by a flare of brilliant white light. A magnesium illumination flare hissed into the upper canopy of the apple trees, turning the midnight orchard into a terrifying, shadowless stage of blinding phosphorus.
"Down!" David roared, tackling me to the hardwood floor just as the double-glazed glass of the front windows shattered inward under a hail of suppressed submachine-gun fire.
Wood splintered from the doorframe. The framed photograph of my seven-year-old self exploded off the table in a cloud of paper confetti and silver shards.
Arthur didn't panic. He dropped flat onto his stomach, crawled to the heavy iron woodstove, and hooked his cane around a rusty iron chain set into the floorboards behind the brick hearth. He yanked it backward with a sharp, violent grunt.
A counterweighted trapdoor groaned open beneath the rug, revealing a steep wooden flume that smelled of icy mineral water and old timber rot.
"The gravity irrigation flume!" Arthur yelled over the deafening noise of automatic fire tearing through the roof shingles. "It dumps into the south canal three miles downstream near the hydro station! Go! Claire first, David behind her!"
"Arthur, you won't survive the slide with that hip!" David shouted, crawling toward us while firing three rapid shots through the broken lower sill of the window to keep the advancing figures pinned behind the stone well outside.
"I built this damn flume with my brother in fifty-eight!" the old man snapped, his eyes flashing with the fury of a wounded timber-wolf. "Get the girl into the chute, David, or I swear to God I will shoot you myself!"
David grabbed my hand, his grip crushing and desperate. "Claire, cross your arms over your chest! Don't let your elbows catch the timber braces! Keep your chin tucked!"
Before I could scream, before I could look back at the room where my mother had spent thirty silent, watching years, David pushed me into the mouth of the chute.
I fell into absolute blackness.
May you like
The cold was instantaneous and brutal. Glacial melt-water, channeled from the high snowpacks of the Cascades, caught my body in an unstoppable, roaring torrent. I was hurtling through the guts of the mountain at forty miles an hour, enclosed in an eight-foot wooden pipe lined with slippery river moss. The roar of the water obliterated all thought, all fear, all sound.
Behind me, through the darkness of the rushing tunnel, I saw the twin flashes of David’s muzzle fire, followed by the dull, subterranean thud of a heavy detonation above as Arthur Sterling brought the stone chimney down onto the floor of the cottage, sealing the mouth of the flume forever behind us.
