The Nowhere Man by Gregg Hurwitz

Author:Gregg Hurwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

39

To the Brink

Snow flurried even under the canopy of pines. Evan worked a switchback beneath the trees of the southern slope, sticking to a furrow cut into the mountainside to keep his head low. He had a hitch in his step, and his ribs ached; all that fighting had taken a toll.

He didn’t know the south sniper’s position, so he paused again, snapping the night-vision goggles down over his eyes and peering across the crest. The NVGs cast everything in a green glow.

He swept his gaze up the hillside, caught a set of eyes glinting back at him.

He reeled away, banging against a boulder before realizing that the eyes belonged to a white-tailed deer. It stared dolefully at him across the night before bounding off with a twitch of its legs.

Evan crouched by the boulder, catching his breath and reaching back for the wilderness skills he’d learned as a young man. The three keys to survival: shelter, fire, water. He’d been taught how to pick a spot—high ground, cleared space—and to frame out a hut, shingling leaves over branches. But the current situation wouldn’t allow for that yet. There would be only sporadic rest stops until he was out of the valley and across the range.

He was running on increasingly numb legs. Any stop could kill him. And yet if he got too cold, his body would lock up and he’d die of exposure. Which meant he had to balance himself on the razor’s edge, running himself to the brink of freezing before pausing to reheat over a fire.

To the brink but not an inch further.

He drove on up the slope.

* * *

René surveyed the wreckage of the spa, his jaw tensing until he could feel knots at the corners. David stood behind him, an ice pack pressed against his pretty face where it had struck the pebble-studded bench inside the mist room.

One of René’s men struggled to fish Calaca’s corpse from the pool; another mopped blood from the tile. Manny was downstairs safing the lab, and René had dispatched Dex with the remaining three guards to follow Evan’s tracks. The snow proved helpful, the footsteps clearly marked. A radioed update had informed René that Evan had backtracked a few times to obscure his trail but hadn’t had enough time to pull it off convincingly.

Dex was good with footprints.

René rubbed his eyes until they burned.

David removed the ice pack and pressed gingerly at the bruise coming up on his forehead. “Guy was like a typhoon,” he said. “It was pretty insane.”

René opened his bloodshot eyes. His thumb and forefinger held dust from the foundation he’d dabbed over the spider veins on his nose earlier. The look he gave David must have held everything he was feeling, because David recoiled from it, blanching. Fear had stripped away the kid’s seen-it-all veneer; he looked his age, not a day older.

David cleared his throat. “I’ll be upstairs.”

René said, “You’ll be right here until Manny gets back.”

For once David offered no pithy retort.

As if on cue, the elevator doors opened and Manny emerged.

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