He roused himself and opened his eyes. “Not if I can help it. But goddammit, I’m trapped here. Eva, call Knutz. His number’s in my phone.” Eva moved to the closet where his personal effects had been stored.
“I don’t know what to tell him.”
“Let Amelia do the talking.” Looking at her, he said, “Tell him what you just told me. He’ll have Glenda tracked down. He’ll mobilize the local authorities and maybe, just maybe, they’ll intercept Dawson in time.”
“And if they don’t?” Amelia asked.
“Carl will probably give him the interview of his career. He’s done it before.”
Eva stopped dealing with the cell phone and looked at him with alarm. “Gary, no.”
Amelia, noting her reaction, said, “What? What about an interview?”
Ignoring his wife’s distress, Headly told her about the coup a Washington Post reporter had achieved. “The day after the interview ran, Carl released him along a rural road in West Virginia. With a bullet through his brain. He was awarded the Pulitzer posthumously.”
* * *
He was in the midst of his nightmare, laboriously clawing his way up the incline toward Hawkins, who was shouting at him from the crest, when he was startled awake by a heron that took flight out of the marsh with a noisy flapping of wings.
He’d been spared the horrible ending of his nightmare, but he was still shaky and leaking a cold sweat. He dried his face with his shirttail and took a sip from a bottle of water.
He was surprised he’d been able even to doze, and equally surprised that he was still alive. Had Carl or Jeremy come upon him, he could have been murdered in his sleep. Although he’d had about a two-hour nap, he didn’t feel rested. However, despite his fatigue, and the sun not being completely up, he was impatient to get under way.
He replaced the battery in his cell phone. That amounted to beaming his location to the authorities if they were looking for him, but he had to take that risk. He needed the phone to help him navigate.
He took only it and the water bottle with him when he left the car. A weapon would have been superfluous. Jeremy had missed Amelia because of Dawson’s quick action. The bullet he’d fired at Headly hadn’t been a head shot, and it had lost velocity due to the distance, preventing it from inflicting the damage it could have. But regardless of his bad luck yesterday, his marksmanship skills were renowned. A man foundering in a marsh would be easy pickins.
Dawson had decided to take a zigzagging route from this point, working his way up the trapezoidal-shaped parcel, which was much narrower at the base than at the top, which was farther inland. If he reached the northwest corner without finding anything and this turned out to be a wild-goose chase, he’d follow a diagonal line back to his starting point.
The water he’d stepped into last night never got any higher than his knees, but it soaked the legs of his jeans and filled his boots. He fought his way through areas of thick cordgrass and clumps of palmetto palms, with their leaves that were shaped like knife blades and which were just as sharp. The insects were aggressive and merciless. He didn’t want to think about the species of reptiles he might encounter.
He had estimated he could walk twenty acres in half an hour or less. But slogging through water and thrashing through the uncharitable plant life increased the effort and time required.
Fortunately, as the elevation rose, the soil became firmer and less brackish, and the marsh grasses gradually gave over to forest. Soon he was walking under tree branches that formed a tangled, dense canopy overhead, which kept the forest floor shady. Undergrowth flourished. Vines twisted up tree trunks. Lacy ferns formed patches of vibrant green. From every vantage point, the landscape looked like a diorama of shifting shadows, a wilderness of undisturbed camouflage.
Which is why he almost missed it.
Had it not been for a pair of redbirds that caught his attention as they streaked through the woods calling to each other and then lighting on the tilting television antenna attached to the edge of the roof, he might have gone right past without seeing it.
He stopped dead in his tracks and then quickly crouched behind a thicket of palmetto. He figured that if Carl or Jeremy had spied him or heard him, he would already be dead.
The structure was larger than what he would term a shack. More like a cabin. It squatted in a small clearing surrounded by trees. Tall grass and wild shrubbery grew right up to the exterior walls, which were constructed of raw lumber that had weathered to blend in with the dun tint of tree bark.
The low roof was completely covered with lichen and fallen tree branches, where vegetation had taken root in the naturally made compost. From the air, it would have blended in with the l
andscape. Not even from a helicopter, flying low, could it have been spotted.
He had come onto it from the front. There was a porch of sorts about a yard square, a door flanked by small windows, placed high. The window glass had been smeared with something to prevent it from reflecting light. No telephone or electrical lines were in evidence, but a generator, painted in camouflage, was tucked against one exterior wall and covered in vines.
Dawson thought wryly: this is the reward for a lifetime of crime? But then, one of Carl Wingert’s grievances had been the obsessive materialism of the American people. In this, at least, he practiced what he preached.
Dawson waited ten minutes by his watch before daring to move, then began a slow and silent approach. When he could go no farther without stepping out from the cover of the trees, he stopped to take several deep breaths.
Two people came to mind: Corporal Hawkins, the young soldier from North Dakota who was featured in his nightmare. And Amelia, the last woman he would kiss. The first woman he would love. If he didn’t live through this, he hoped that by some cosmic miracle they would both know that in his final moments he had acknowledged his unpaid debts to them.
He stepped from the relative safety of the trees and walked toward the cabin. No one called out a warning. No telltale shadows appeared at the foggy windows. He heard no rustling sounds, nothing to indicate that the dwelling was inhabited.
But as he was about to step onto the porch, he recalled something Headly had told him: We should have known it was booby-trapped. A snitch had told the FBI that Carl and Flora were hiding inside a house in southern Florida. A covert raid was planned and perfectly executed until a Special Ops agent stepped onto the wooden porch. He and the structure had been blown to smithereens. Three fellow agents had been critically wounded despite their protective gear.