Vision Impossible

  Eddington sneered at me. “Do not attempt to lie to me, Ms. Carter. You knew all along. And then, when we were walking out, you said that if I didn’t pay you, you’d let Mr. Grinkov know!”

  My eyes bulged. “I never said that!” I was positive I’d never told him I wanted a bribe. My brain rifled through the memories from that night, and I remembered what I’d actually said. “I told you, William, that you needed to make reparations! Not give me money!”

  “Sounded like blackmail to me,” he insisted.

  I glanced at his shoe with the new lace. “So you came to the office and tried to kill me?”

  “No,” he said. “I came there to try to reason with you, cut you in for half of the fence, but then I saw you sleeping in that chair and thought it might be better to simply get you out of the way. I wanted to pummel you to death, but I’d left my walking stick in the car, and that would have been too messy anyway. Shoelaces are quite durable, and I nearly had you taken care of but you knocked me off my feet when you shoved that chair into me, and I hurt my knee even more, so I left hoping you would feel threatened by the assault and go away.

  “When that didn’t work, I thought I could find something out about you and use it against you instead. When Mr. Grinkov’s car nearly hit you, and he sent me on ahead to see if you were all right, I had the chance to finally strike you a good blow with my walking stick and I took your wallet. But I couldn’t find out anything about you or your supposed psychic abilities. It was like you never existed prior to coming into our lives.”

  I blinked rapidly again, trying to put the rest of the pieces together. At my feet Mandy was gripping my leg, sweating profusely and begging me to help her, which I completely ignored. “I knew you were likely working for someone else, but I wasn’t sure whom,” Eddington continued.

  Mandy had let go of my leg and was now clinging to Dutch, begging him to help her. He was trying to disentangle himself from her, but she wasn’t making it easy. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Maks approach with his hands raised. He got up next to me and addressed his butler. “What’s the plan now, William?”

  “Now?” Eddington asked, never taking his angry eyes off me.

  “Yes.”

  Eddington’s gaze shifted to his employer, but the air gun stayed trained on me. “Now I finish what I started at her office,” he said, and I knew in a heartbeat he was about to pull that trigger. I reacted instinctively, turning my body away from the gun at the same time that Maks shoved me hard to the floor. As I went down, I registered the click of the trigger along with a slight hiss.

  I fell to my knees, gasping for air, and wondering why I didn’t feel the prick of the dart. Behind me I became aware of a struggle, and I looked back to see Maks yanking the air gun out of his butler’s hands, then using it to slam him hard in the head.

  At the same time another struggle was taking place; Dutch was trying to disentangle his leg from Mandy’s grasp. I saw her desperately flail out and hit the back of his leg right at that spot that causes your legs to buckle. Dutch lurched forward, tripped on her body, and caught the edge of the table right in his left side. There was a slight crunch and all the air went out of him. He sank to the floor clutching his side in unbearable pain. “Dutch!” I screamed, scrambling to my knees and crawling toward him.

  But Mandy was too quick for me. In an instant her trembling fingers found his gun; yanking it from his belt, she gripped it tightly and got shakily to her feet. Then, she pointed it at his head and screamed, “Give me the fucking antidote!”

  A powerful anger came over me and I launched myself at her, slamming hard into her middle. We went sailing through the air. There was a pop, pop, pop sound and bullets riddled the plane.

  In the next instant the nose dipped and we began to descend very rapidly. Mandy flew out of my grasp, and the back of her neck hit the leg of a table. There was a terrible sound like bones breaking, and in the blink of an eye she lay still again, staring up at me with sightless eyes.

  I held on to a nearby seat as the plane continued to dip lower and lower, and I could feel my stomach flutter as the plane began to pick up speed. Someone leaped over my head, and I knew it was Maks. He made it to the cockpit and yanked open the door. I looked through the opening and saw blood spattered on the windshield.

  One of the bullets had hit the pilot. Maks pulled up on the wheel and the throttle and the plane stopped its rapid descent. Something bumped into me and I looked down to see that Eddington’s unconscious body was sliding forward down the aisle. I shoved him away from me and prayed that Maks could stop the plummeting plane.

  Still we seemed to be going down, down, down, and Eddington slid closer and closer to the front, but finally the plane leveled off and I immediately moved over to my fiancé, who was struggling to take in air. “Dutch!” I cried, smoothing back his hair. “How bad is it?”

  “My . . . ribs . . . ,” he gasped, his face ashen.

  Mandy had broken his weakened ribs. “Maks!” I shouted. “We have to land!”

  Maks didn’t reply right away, and when I turned my head to look toward the cockpit, I could see him struggling to get the dead pilot out of the seat. “I’ll be right back!” I promised Dutch, and moved to the front of the plane, stepping over Eddington, who was lodged against one of the front seats.

  When I got to the cockpit, I helped Maks with the pilot, who’d taken a bullet to the head. We finally managed to maneuver him out of the cockpit and Maks jumped into the pilot seat to assess the situation. “Do you know how to fly the plane?” I asked.

  “Somewhat,” he said, his answer vague and not especially reassuring. I watched him play with some of the knobs and it was only then that I realized one of the bullets had ripped into the control panel. “We’re losing altitude,” he said, pulling up on the nose while watching a gauge. The plane did not seem to want to lift any higher than it was going.

  “Can you land it?”

  Maks looked down at the terrain. Dusk was falling, but we still had enough light to make out the ground below. I squinted through the window and saw only trees and rocks. “No, I can’t land it in this,” he said. “And we’ll never make it to Victoria.”

  I looked at him and could feel all the blood drain from my face. “The plane’s going to crash?”

  Maks stared hard at me. “Yes.”

  I felt my lower lip tremble and my eyes mist over with tears. After all those close calls in the past several days, this was how it would end?

  Maks reached over to squeeze my shoulder. “We’ll have to jump,” he said.

  I shook my head. Was he crazy? “Out of a moving plane?”

  Maks flipped a switch on the control panel, then got up without answering me. I followed him as he hurried past all the bodies to the back. There he opened a locker and pulled out what looked at first like a pair of backpacks and a harness with large clips by the shoulder straps. “Here,” he said, handing me the harness. “Put this on and make sure the straps are secure.”

  He then moved over to Dutch and bent low to talk to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Dutch nodded and with great effort he managed to push himself to a sitting position. Maks then placed one of the backpacks on Dutch and helped him strap in.

  It finally dawned on my beleaguered brain that Maks intended to parachute out of the plane. “I can’t!” I cried.

  I’m not especially afraid of heights, but hurtling myself out of a plane at ten thousand feet was on my list of things I’d be happy to never try, thank you very much.

  Maks didn’t even look up. “There’s no other choice, Abigail,” he said, working Dutch’s left arm through a strap. “This plane is going to crash. You either come with me, or you die.”

  Dutch looked up at Maks. “I can take her,” he said. “I’ve got some jump experience.”

  Maks clipped the final buckle and shook his head. “If you black out, Rivers, you and she are both dead.”

  My jaw fell open. But before I even had a chan
ce to speak, Dutch poked Maks in the torso. “You’re the one who might black out, Grinkov,” he said gruffly. “I saw you take that dart in the chest.”

  My eyes flew to Maks’s shirt. There was a small smudge of blood just below his collar, and then I realized the man was pale and sweating. “I can make it until I have to pull the cord,” Maks insisted.

  “So can I,” Dutch countered, but I knew better.

  “I’ll go with him,” I told Dutch, knowing my added weight on his harness would only cause my fiancé unbearable pain, and if Maks blacked out, then I could still pull the cord, or at least I hoped I could.

  Dutch tried to hold himself straight, but he was in too much pain and he kept doubling over. In that moment it was decided and I nodded to Maks. “I’m going with you,” I said firmly.

  He then got Dutch over to the door, and propping him upright, he gave his last set of instructions. “We’re at ten thousand feet and descending,” he said, holding up a gauge strapped to the parachute for Dutch to see. “You’ll have about three minutes of free fall before you’ll need to pull the cord. The force of the chute will probably cause further injury to your ribs, but you’ve got no other choice. If you’re still conscious when you land, remain close to your chute. We’ll do our best to find you.”

  Dutch was working to take in air. He coughed and some blood appeared on his lower lip. In an instant I remembered the homing device tucked into my bra, and I reached inside my dress and pulled it out, hurrying toward him to give it to my fiancé so the cavalry could find him. “Here!” I cried, rushing forward.

  But before I could reach him, Grinkov had worked the door free, yanked Dutch forward, and pushed him by the shoulders through it.

  I screamed and flew to the side of the door, but Maks stopped me and took me by both arms. “He’ll live!” he snapped, his tone demanding that I get ahold of myself. “Now buckle up so that I can clip you in before we drop too low!”

  I edged a little back from the door, scared to be so close to it. With shaking fingers, while the wind whipped in from the open door, I hurried into the harness. It was more complicated than I thought, but I finally figured it out and secured the last strap “Abigail!” Grinkov shouted. “We must go now!”

  I turned toward him and began to edge my way to the door, trembling in fear. I was breathing so hard that little stars were staring to cloud my vision, and I just prayed that I wouldn’t pass out before I reached Grinkov. In that moment where I reached out my hand to him, I remembered Intuit, and knew I couldn’t leave it behind. Looking frantically about the plane, I spotted it near Eddington and held up a hand to Maks. “I have to get Intuit!” I shouted.

  “Leave it!” he yelled, but I couldn’t.

  I reached it in four steps and hurried back toward him while shoving it into the large pocket of my oversized coat. Just as I was about to take Maks’s hand, his expression changed and I paused.

  The word, What? formed in my mind but I never got it out. In the very next instant I was hit hard from behind as someone tackled me about the waist. My feet left the ground and I shut my eyes, bracing for impact as we vaulted forward. But it never came.

  Instead, the sound of the air rushing by me like a freight train coupled with the most agonized scream I’d ever heard in my life forced me to open my eyes.

  Without fully comprehending what was happening, I saw the rocky terrain dotted with trees right underneath me coming closer and closer with each passing second. Someone was gripping my waist as if his life depended on it—which was incredibly ironic considering we were both plummeting to our deaths.

  Looking down at my waist, I realized it was Eddington, screaming so loud it hurt. I was far too terrified to scream—in fact, I was far too terrified to do even the basic things, like breathe.

  “Pull the cord!” he screamed. And he began to claw at my harness like a crazed tiger.

  “I’m not wearing a parachute, you ass!” I shouted back at him, hitting him on the head several times until he understood.

  He stared at me with such stunned amazement that I almost felt bad for him. And then as I watched with an almost surreal detachment, Eddington’s eyes rolled up, he gasped, and he let go of me in either some sort of seizure, heart attack, or dead faint. He didn’t drop away from me as much as he just moved off to the side a few yards.

  Oddly, my thoughts in those seconds of free fall were all about the irony. I was about to die and all anyone would remember was that the butler did it.

  Instinctively I spread my arms and legs out like you see skydivers do. My rate of descent seemed to slow just a bit, because Eddington’s limp body moved down and away from me much more rapidly then. I watched the ground come up closer and closer and my mind began to race. I was falling to the rocky terrain without a parachute. There was no way I could survive. This was literally my worst nightmare, and I had a moment of clarity where I realized that my dream wasn’t about my wedding to Dutch at all. It was a prophetic warning of this exact moment in time.

  In my hand I still clutched the homing device, which I thought was rather silly given the situation. Somewhere below I saw a white mushroom of movement. Dutch’s chute had opened. My heart broke then and there. He’d live and I wouldn’t and we’d never get married. I’d never grow old with him. We’d never finish building our house together. I wouldn’t see Cat, or my nephews, or Candice, or Brice, or Dave, or Milo, or our puppies, or any of the souls I loved in this world, ever again.

  The finality of that was the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life, and that totality pushed the abject terror right out of the way. With a heart full of regret and sadness, I turned the cap on the homing device. They’d likely find it near my body, and it would give them a reference point to find Dutch in time to save his life. It struck me that my last gift to him could be his rescue. So after twisting the cap, I tucked the pen back inside my coat. And then, something else hit me.

  No . . . I mean literally hit me. “I’ve got you!” someone shouted in my ear.

  I tried to twist around. “Maks!”

  “Hold still!” he commanded. “And try to reach your arms back and wrap them around my waist!”

  I did as he said, extending both my arms back, clutching his waist while he worked to clip us together. “I can’t get it!” he yelled, and I could sense the urgency in his voice.

  I could see Dutch’s chute floating gently on the air. We came level to it, and I tried to see if he was still conscious, but it was impossible to tell. Then we passed him and continued to plummet. “Dammit!” Grinkov swore again, trying in vain to clip our harnesses together.

  The altitude gauge on his chute was right next to me. I could see that it read eighteen hundred feet, well below where he’d told Dutch to pull his cord. I knew we were running out of room and I couldn’t let both of us die. I made a decision then and there to take my chances and I let go of Maks with one arm, twisting out of his grasp while turning to face his surprised eyes. I then wrapped my legs around his waist and, before he could even react, I pulled his cord. I had just enough time to curl my fingers through his shoulder straps and brace myself before we were violently whipped upward. I was yanked so hard I thought my neck would snap.

  I felt Maks’s trembling form clutch me with all his waning strength just at the moment I knew I was about to drop away from him again, and somehow we managed to weather the intense force of the chute opening and we began to float downward.

  “Don’t let go!” he commanded.

  I laid my head on his chest, breathing hard and struggling to hold my grip. My legs were shaking with effort along with my arms, and it felt like forever until we came to within a few dozen meters of the ground. “I . . . can’t . . . hold . . . on!” I told him, my grip loosening.

  “You’ve got to!” he yelled. “Abigail, we’re almost there! You must hold on!”

  My legs gave way five seconds later, and I began to slip down his body. “Hold on!” he shouted again, trying to clutch my jacket with one hand
while steering the chute.

  I put every single bit of effort into those final horribly long seconds. I didn’t look down—I just closed my eyes, gripping him with everything I had as I tried to count to fifty.

  I got to nineteen and couldn’t hold one second longer. In the next instant, I was once again in free fall.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I hit the ground hard, and I do mean hard. As braced as I thought I was for impact, I was not prepared for that.

  So much happened in that instant that it’s hard to explain what I felt first. There was the bone-jarring slam of my body against the rocky terrain, which knocked all the breath right out of me, followed instantly by a lightning bolt of pain in my left shoulder that traveled all the way down my spine and radiated outward like a shock wave through my limbs.

  An instant after that, my head felt like it’d just been hit with a baseball bat and then the world went dark.

  When I came to, I was unbelievably dizzy and completely disoriented. I couldn’t move a muscle either, but so much hurt that I didn’t really want to. There was also a noise I couldn’t quite figure out . . . a sort of thump, thump, thump.

  Voices could be heard over this and none of them were ones I recognized. Numbers were being tossed around and terms I couldn’t understand. It was like my brain couldn’t decide what to overload on—pain or information.

  “Stop!” I whispered, unable to do more than that.

  “Patient is conscious!” someone said. “What’s her name again?”

  “Abigail,” said a voice I did recognize. It was Maks.

  “Abigail, can you hear me?” said the first man.

  My eyes fluttered. “Dutch?” I croaked. Behind my lids, tears flooded my eyes. If this was the kind of shape I was in, what could have possibly happened to my fiancé?

  “If you can understand me, Abigail, please squeeze my hand.”