“No,” he said, and it was a pretty snap decision. “I’m good.” He sounded…mild. Not like he was aiming to cause a shitstorm, but not embarrassed about it either.
Humility and the capacity to see that what he’d done here was breathtakingly wrong would have been preferable, but I’d take quiet acceptance and be happy with it now, because it beat the hell out of him getting belligerent and throwing around threats. Besides, the fact that he’d shown some grace meant that now I could get on to making my eminently reasonable request for a fair exchange considering all the wonderful things I was about to go and do for Peter.
“All right, just one thing then, Peter,” I said, right before I sensed he was ready to hang up. “I’m going to go do this for you, but in return…I need something. And…really, it’s no big deal. I just need to show the Odessa PD, and you know, the other people out here—” the cops, the governor, whatever authority Peter most identified as his antagonist—guys with man-buns, maybe “—what a good guy you are.
“Peter,” I said, trying to build up to it, “can you let the kids go?”
The answer came back in a half second, flat and firm, devoid of emotion. “No.”
I drew a deep breath. It was a big ask, and I decided to explain. “Look, Peter…I get that, I do. But these are kids, man. They need diaper changes.” I heard no agreement, which I suspected was a tacit kind of agreement. “They need food, naps—you don’t want that kind of trouble, do you? Crying, whining kids? Because they’re gonna do that. We just want to make sure they’re safe, and that everything goes as easy as possible. You keep Elvira in there, and you’ll still be safe. We want this to end with everybody okay, right? But the kids…come on, Peter…you don’t need the kids. They’re going to be more trouble than good for you, don’t you think?”
Presenting it as a question was part of trying to change his thinking. I’d listed out the bad points, obviously, and glossed over the good—that cops were terrified of shooting into a building where there were kids, because the potential for disaster was enormous. No one wanted to take the chance for a stray round offing a kid, not even the hardest hardass.
Peter seemed to think about it, like he was weighing my points. “No,” he said again, still flat. “Get me that plane.”
And he hung up.
“Shit,” I said, taking a deep breath. I looked over at Angel, and her face was frozen. She’d heard. Maybe even suspected what I did. The Texas sun was still beating down on me, but it had nothing to do with the sudden sweat I found breaking out—on my lips, on my forehead, and everywhere from my scalp on down.
Peter was determined and not all that bright. He also had hostages, including three children, and a complete unwillingness to surrender even one of them.
This…was a formula set up for complete and total disaster.
17.
Sienna
Oh, man, did I have plans for my next nap. Big plans. Huge plans. Plans that defied the scope of the universe itself…
Okay, really, I just planned to make sure I dreamwalked to Reed or Zollers or Wexford or—hell, the list was starting to really mount up.
But also…I could have really used a nap.
Swimming across the Firth was not as easy an endeavor as it might have been had I attempted it at Edinburgh. There, the two banks were only a short distance apart, maybe a mile or two.
Here? Where I was now, the distance had to be ten, twelve miles. It wasn’t exactly marathon distance, or Cuba to the Florida Keys, but it was a long swim for a girl who typically didn’t get in the pool.
Also, cold. Still really, really cold. My nipples were practically cutting through the water for me on every stroke. Brrr.
I wished I’d removed my draggy, stolen clothes before I’d jumped in, but then I’d have been a shining beacon of white that could have been spotted from space, even as the day dragged to a close. I cursed the fact that Scotland was like Minnesota in its long days during summer. I bet the sunset wouldn’t even happen until close to nine o’clock, and that was probably hours off (I didn’t have a watch or phone—not that either would have survived the water). All I had before me was the swim.
The long, long swim.
Well, okay, not that long. I was probably halfway there, and I’d been going for a little over a half hour.
I’d lost sight of the bank behind me, but the bank ahead, I could see in the distance. My arms were weary and tired, and my legs were screaming and protesting my sorry efforts. They wanted to quit and let me sink, and I was tempted to let them. I was threading my way through the channel at an hour best suited to being anywhere else, where visibility was high and if a ship passed, I’d surely be seen.
On the other hand, if a ship passed and I could get aboard, I should probably do that, even if it went to Thailand or something, because frankly, my original strategy of retreat on a chartered plane and arm up, then come back at Rose with Suppressant and bullets had badly, badly failed.
And while I’d done a reasonable job of coming up with an alternate escape plan, I was kinda shit out of luck when it came to what to do next. This part of the plan that I was currently implementing was still all about the evasion, about getting the hell away. Unfortunately, once I had gotten the hell away—as far as I could, in this case—I was still going to be in Scotland.
Which was not nearly far enough from Rose for my taste. Not when my bag of goodies had gotten torched in the Cessna.
I put one arm in front of the other, churning my legs like a shark. I was cruising along at a good clip, probably looking a little like a jet ski as I buzzed through the water. I didn’t make an actual buzzing noise; it was probably more like a gurgling, from my efforts and the sound of me throwing my head to the sides to breathe as I sucked in hungry, greedy breaths on each stroke. Paddling like a junior wheelboat wasn’t exactly light on the oxygen consumption.
Plan. I needed one. Getting to the bank of the river was a start, but that didn’t get me out of Scotland.
So, what could I do?
Well, in order:
a) Evade on land. If I made it to the south bank, I would have increased the search radius so broadly that Rose’s helicopters would have a hard time tracking me. If I could avoid creating any other John Clifford-like entanglements—which was to say little bombs of info to shout out, “She was here!” in my wake once I landed—Rose would have no idea I’d reached the southern shore, or even that I’d gone for a swim at all. She’d just be sitting at a map table somewhere in her evil lair, wherever that was, and every hour that she didn’t have a bead on me, the circle that indicated her search radius would get wider and wider.
She’d have to assume I got my hands on a car too, or hitched a ride on the back of an unknowing truck. Boom. That’d carry me farther away. Not as far as if I could still fly, but far enough that she and her minions—I assumed Police Scotland was co-opted based on the amount of overhead helicopters I’d seen after me post-airfield—would struggle to cover all the ground as the radius got wider and wider.
b) My second option, which I dismissed almost out of hand, was to evade by going out to sea. Assuming I could maintain a bearing of due east without any reference point but perhaps the sun and stars, and could survive the freezing cold of the North Sea, in about five hundred miles I’d make landfall in Denmark. Optimistically, I could maybe make that in two or three days. With no sleep. In the freezing water. (Not actually freezing, it just felt like it.) So I’d wash up on the shores of Denmark half dead and probably collapse right there, assuming I didn’t drown on the way.