For Leo
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Epilogue
Also Available
Copyright
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE: WASHINGTON, D.C.
10:53 P.M. E.D.T.
BLIZZARD WARNING
A MAJOR WINTER STORM SYSTEM WILL MOVE THROUGH THE APPALACHIAN AND BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN VIRGINIA TONIGHT THROUGH MIDDAY TUESDAY … LIGHT SNOW WILL BECOME HEAVY … ACCOMPANIED BY POWERFUL WIND GUSTS OF 40—50 MILES PER HOUR TO CREATE BLIZZARD CONDITIONS … 18—24 INCHES EXPECTED AT ELEVATIONS ABOVE 2,000 FEET … ALONG WITH WHITEOUT AND NEAR-ZERO VISIBILITY....
A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING … ONLY TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY … WITH AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT … FOOD … AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE … UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES VENTURE OUTDOORS ON FOOT....
Snow.
It was the last thing Meg Falconer wanted to see.
She was lost in the woods. In the mountains. In the dark. Every limping step brought a fresh detonation of pain from her sprained ankle. Her one possession besides the clothes on her back was the pocket nail file she had used to saw through the ropes that had bound her to a chair.
Her thoughts turned to her three kidnappers. They were probably searching for her — two of them, anyway. So she was lost and hunted.
It was pitch-dark — was there such a thing as pitch-white? All she could see was the snow, blowing and swirling around her. She had tried to bed down for the night in a hollow under a fallen tree. But a toxic mixture of pain, cold, and fear had made sleep impossible. The snow had been the last straw. She had to put as much distance as possible between herself and her captors before the white coating on the forest floor created tracks for them to follow. She looked down. Her sneaker prints were unmistakable in the inch of powder that already covered the ground. If the kidnappers picked up her trail, she was doomed. With her twisted ankle, she couldn’t stay ahead of them for long.
She plodded through the trees, the furious racing of her mind every bit as turbulent as the roiling snow.
Come on, one foot in front of the other …
She’d been hooded when her captors had carried her to the cabin hideout. But the direction had definitely been up. Down, then, was the way to go. It wasn’t exactly a map, or even a compass, but it was the only point of reference she had.
When is this lousy snow going to stop?
Suddenly — without warning — the forest was gone!
She couldn’t see it; she felt it. The stronger wind, unblocked by trees; the absence of branches scratching at her skin.
I’m in the open!
Had she made it out of the woods and back to civilization? No — in civilization there would be lights. It was just as black as before. Only the dim disk of the moon glowed through the snowy overcast above.
She closed her eyes in a concerted effort to boost her night vision. It was only ten seconds, but it felt like forever — lids squeezed shut, counting patiently. When she opened them at last, she could see again. It was still dead dark, but she could distinguish the different textures of black on black.
She had not left the forest; it was still all around her. This was some kind of clearing — a stripe about thirty feet wide, cut straight through the woods.
A firebreak?
Maybe, but weren’t fires more of a problem out west, where it was drier? Her gaze fixed on a tall, vertical shadow in the center of the opening. She frowned. Why would they take the trouble to clear-cut a stripe through dense forest and then leave one tree standing right in the middle?
She squinted at the ramrod-straight trunk. It did not bend or taper and had no branches.
That’s not a tree; it’s a telephone pole!
That was the purpose of this clearing — to run power and phone lines through to the other side of the mountains.
When the plan came to her, it was already fully formed. It wasn’t actually her idea; its source was a book by her father.
In addition to his career as a criminologist, Dr. John Falconer was the author of a series of detective novels. In Murder in the Mojave, the hero, Mac Mulvey, has been stranded in the desert and left to die. Lost, snakebit, and parched beyond endurance, Mulvey stumbles across a line of electrical wires. With the nearest human being dozens of miles away, the intrepid detective finds a way to send out a distress call.
As Meg began to climb the pole, she couldn’t help reflecting that Mulvey didn’t have to do this in the dark. He had no trouble telling the harmless telephone cables from the deadly high-voltage lines that would electrocute her on contact.
The wood was wet from snow. She pressed the rubber soles of her sneakers against the pole to keep from sliding. The wind nipped harder — she was making progress, even though she couldn’t see the ground below.
That’s a good thing, she reminded herself. Meg didn’t like heights. She was grateful that the darkness made it impossible to look down.
All at once, a barrage of ice-cold needles assailed her face, as a monster gust threatened to tear her loose and fling her into the night. She pressed her body against the wood and hung on.
Just keep climbing …
When the cold cable touched her face, she cried out in shock and nearly jumped off the pole.
Calm down, she scolded herself. If it was live, you’d be dead already!
Struggling to control her gasping breath and the runaway pounding of her heart, Meg rallied her night vision once again. She could see the power lines, still a few feet above her. This was the telephone wire. Perfect.
In Murder in the Mojave, Mac Mulvey cuts the cable with a Swiss Army knife. But all Meg had was the nail file. Tightening her legs’ grip on the pole, she held on with her left arm and began sawing at the wire with her right.
As the file cut into the plastic insulation, she wondered if the stress of the kidnapping had caused her to lose her mind. Why was she wasting precious time on a stunt from Dad’s cheesy novel? Mac Mulvey was a made-up detective, and this moment was very, very real.
Yet — crazy but true — Mac Mulvey’s tactics sometimes worked. His wild antics had saved her on more occasions than she cared to remember — especially back when she and her brother, Aiden, had been fugitives.
The file was already through the coating. She could feel it biting into the wire.
Her left leg was falling asleep. She shifted her position but didn’t dare risk losing her purchase on the pole. She blinked the ice crystals out of her eyes. Was it snowing harder?
Concentrate! she ordered herself.
The wire was tough, but she could feel the metallic filaments separating under the sawing action. At last, the cable broke in two.
She fought off the urge to cheer. This wasn’t over yet. In Murder in the Mojave, Mulvey didn’t just cut the telephone line; he used the severed ends to transmit a distress call in Morse code.
With the file, she carved away a few inches of insulation from each of the broken pieces, exposing the shiny wire inside. Then she began to tap the tips together, spelling out the code for SOS.
Dot-dot-dot … dash-dash-dash … dot-dot-dot …
She breathed a silent apology to anybody who might be trying to dial 911 along t
he line.
Like anybody else’s emergency is bigger than mine right now!
A thought nagged at her. Dad himself had admitted that the adventures of his detective hero had never been tested. She ought to feel like an idiot thirty feet up a pole in the middle of the night in a snowstorm.
Dot-dot-dot … dash-dash-dash … dot-dot-dot …
She prayed that Mac Mulvey had one more miracle left for her.
Aiden Falconer stared at the large order of chili nachos on the table in front of him. He had not eaten in forty hours of intense pressure and heart-stopping effort. Most draining of all was the minute-to-minute gut-twisting dread that had been his constant companion since Meg had been kidnapped a week before.
FBI agent Emmanuel Harris peered at him over a hot cup of coffee big enough to float a battleship inside. “The best thing about nachos — even a truck stop can’t ruin them.”
Aiden pushed the plate away. “I told you — I’m not hungry.”
But he was. Ravenous, in fact. Did that make him a horrible person, to be so keen on eating at a time like this? Was it disloyal to Meg to think nothing had ever smelled as delicious as these nachos?
“Doesn’t help your sister if you starve,” Harris said reasonably. He selected a jalapeño-laden chip and washed it down with a swig of coffee.
Aiden checked the clock over the counter: 11:35. They had been driving for at least a couple of hours. Three more would probably get them home.
Home. The thought should have cheered him. The embrace of his parents; a real night’s sleep in his own bed. But Aiden believed he was his sister’s only chance.
When I walk in the house, I’m giving up on her.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he mused aloud. “The kidnappers sent a message upping the ransom to three million. Why hasn’t anybody heard from them since then?”
The agent shrugged. “Could be lots of reasons.”
Aiden shook his head. “If this was really about ransom, they’d want to get their money and get lost. Something’s wrong. We shouldn’t be going back. We should be searching for Meg right now.”
Harris sighed. “We’ve been through this already. The trail is stone-cold.”
“You don’t even care,” Aiden said bitterly. “This isn’t your case anymore.”
Aiden had no love for Harris. But Harris’s replacement, Mike Sorenson, was a do-nothing agent who wouldn’t blow his nose without consulting the FBI manual first. Did a guy like that have a prayer of finding Meg?
Not unless her captors drop her on the doorstep and ring the bell....
Harris chugged the rest of his huge coffee in three titanic gulps. “Look — that wasn’t my decision. But if I were in Mike Sorenson’s chair right now, we’d still be going home. It’s best for you and it’s best for your sister. The last thing this investigation needs is two Falconers to rescue. Now, are you going to eat or what?”
Reluctantly, Aiden took a few bites. It couldn’t hurt to maintain his strength. The question loomed: Maintain his strength for what? More than once he’d considered ditching Harris and going after Meg on his own.
The last time I tried that, I almost got myself killed....
Besides, the agent was watching him like a hawk.
When Aiden followed Harris back to the Trailblazer, he knew he’d never make a break for it. That was the truly awful part of this.
I’m bailing out on Meg.
At no time — not even the day his parents were wrongly convicted of treason — had Aiden Falconer felt so utterly, hopelessly miserable.
Flurries danced around the SUV as it pulled back onto the highway — light snow, nothing like the blizzard that had been predicted for the mountains. To make an unpleasant trip even more so, Harris monitored the local police radio as they drove. Not that Aiden was in the mood to count down the top forty with Casey Kasem. But reports of snowplows, road sanders, slippery conditions, and power and phone outages only seemed to make his melancholy worse.
The telephone problems were in Alberta County, where Aiden and Harris had just come from.
“Ice on the wires?” queried the dispatcher.
“Not likely,” came the reply from the telephone lineman. “The connection kept cutting in and out over a period of ten minutes or so.”
“Probably just the wind,” the dispatcher suggested.
“Not any wind I ever heard of,” the lineman told him. “It was fast and regular, like a person playing with the wires. Definitely not random.”
The dispatcher sounded bewildered. “You think we’ve got a Good Samaritan — some clown trying to fix the wire?”
“No way,” said the lineman. “We’ve pinpointed the break. It’s in a mountain pass. There’s nobody up there — not in this weather.”
“Then what could it be?”
Aiden thought his heart might burst through his rib cage. “SOS!”
Startled, Harris struggled to keep his eyes on the road. “What are you talking about?”
“The phone interruption!” Aiden explained breathlessly. “SOS in Morse code! It’s Meg!”
In a squeal of tires on wet pavement, the Trailblazer pulled over and rolled to a stop on the soft shoulder. Harris wheeled around to his young passenger. “Convince me.”
“It’s from one of my father’s books. Mac Mulvey cuts a telephone wire so he can tap out SOS in Morse code. We used stuff from the books a million times when we were fugitives. She’s alive! She must have gotten away from her kidnappers and now she’s calling for help!”
Harris looked him straight in the eye. “This is the truth, right? You’re not jerking me around?”
“If she’s free to send that SOS,” Aiden said breathlessly, “that means she’s lost in the mountains with a blizzard on the way!”
The Trailblazer screeched across four lanes of traffic in a highly illegal U-turn.
Meg ran through the worsening storm, following the clear-cut zone around the telephone wires. The decision to jog had nothing to do with speed. The only way to forget the pain in her ankle was to keep it hurting.
The effort also helped her stay warm. Warmer, anyway. Her sneakers were soaked. Her feet felt as if they’d been dipped in a liquid nitrogen bath. She was losing the battle of brushing snow off her clothes.
It had been at least a couple of hours since she’d sent out her Mac Mulvey distress call. She’d made it down one mountain and partway up the opposite slope. Icy buildup frosted her hair and accumulated on her eyebrows. Meltwater trickled down from her neckline, frigid against her bare skin.
She kept moving, as if trying to outrun the paralyzing cold. These power lines had to lead somewhere eventually — to a town, a city, even a transformer station with a night watchman. All she needed was a place to get warm and a telephone to call the police.
The wind was howling, bringing with it a solid wall of snow. It was so loud that she didn’t hear the sound of the engine until it was almost upon her. When the vehicle crested the rise, the headlight was like a supernova — so blindingly bright that it nearly knocked her over. Even more intense was the realization that came with it.
The phone company! They got my SOS!
She scrambled toward the beam, slipping and sliding, waving her arms to attract the driver’s attention.
“Over here!”
She could see the ATV now — some sort of three-wheeler, like a tricked-out tricycle. Its huge tires kicked up snow and mud as it roared down on her.
“Thank you!” Meg shouted, rushing to meet it. There was an unreality to the notion that her ordeal was so suddenly over. The kidnapping, the nightmare —
The ATV jounced to the left, momentarily freeing Meg’s eyes from the headlight’s brilliance. For a split second, she got a good look at the vehicle’s riders. In that electric instant, two things became devastatingly clear to her:
1. This was not the telephone company responding to her SOS, and
2. Her captors had found her once again.
The kidnap
per she called Spidey was at the handlebars. Tiger’s arms were wrapped around his midsection. Tiger was calling to her. What was the woman saying?
“Come with us if you want to live …”
Meg didn’t stick around for the rest. She was already sprinting for the cover of the trees, the storm forgotten. In a spray of dirty slush, the big tires spun, and the ATV lurched after her.
She hit the forest running, threading her way through the trunks, hurdling roots. Her speed impressed her— until she realized why she was having so much success navigating the treacherous terrain —
I can see where I’m going!
And that meant …
She risked a backward glance. The ATV was plowing through the woods, its compact three-wheel design allowing it to slip between trees, crunching underbrush and bouncing over rocks. The headlight illuminated the silvery scene, glittering with snowflakes. Spidey and Tiger crouched in the saddle, bent low to avoid the clawing of branches. They couldn’t drive very fast in such awkward quarters. But it wouldn’t take much to out-run Meg — frozen, exhausted, and favoring a sprained ankle.
If I can get away from the light, they won’t be able to see me!
Planting her good leg, she turned sharply, hustling out of the headlight’s spill. The plan succeeded too well. She got only three strides in the blackness before a tree limb struck her forehead and down she went. Dazed, she scrambled up just as the beam fixed on her again.
“Margaret!” came Tiger’s shout. “You’ll never make it alone!”
Meg staggered away, head and ankle throbbing. Maybe not, she thought grimly. But anything’s better than going back with you.
She picked her way through the trees, squeezing through gaps too narrow for the ATV. Somehow, Spidey managed to detour around the obstacles and stay on her tail.