The Puzzle
I felt I could have spent a lot more time relieving my body of last night’s dinner, but I didn’t have time for a meltdown, not now, not while Hope was in danger. I needed to warn her, to hear her voice, to know she was safe.
I went back to Ron’s backpack and dug quickly, throwing out punctured packages of dehydrated food and clothing until I found what I was looking for. The black housing was covered with Mountain House dehydrated lasagna powder, but the phone looked undamaged. I blew off the meaty tomato smell and examined the phone, pressing hard on the on button, praying for a signal. The lights began to flicker, and I slowly let out my breath, my prayer turning to one of thanks as I dialed our home phone number. No answer. It was early though. Probably no reason to worry. Hope was likely taking Jin out for a walk, maybe having some donuts with Permelia and making a sticky mess.
I hung up and dialed Hope’s cell.
After four rings, the line connected. I didn’t wait for Hope to say hello before I started talking.
“It’s Matt,” I said. “Listen to me. You need to call Zack right away and get out of town. There’s a group of men coming for you and Jin. I don’t know what they want, other than to take you. They’ve already made a grab for Peng and me. We are both fine for the time being. Call Zack now, and then get over to his house. When you get there, call me back.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. I was out of breath and probably sounded like a crazy person. It was a lot for Hope to take in all at once.
“Is that you, Knight?” a voice that sounded vaguely familiar said. “Unfortunately I don’t think Zack is going to be able to help right now. He bumped his head, and he’s napping. Maybe I can take a message.”
I felt like a bag of wet cement had been dumped down my throat. “Dempsey?” I asked. “What have you done with Hope?”
“You’re supposed to be tied up and heading for a box canyon,” Dempsey said, ignoring my question. “Not making phone calls.”
“I’ve never been good at doing what I was supposed to do. You know that. Now tell me what you’ve done with my wife.”
“Huh,” Dempsey said. “If you’re on the phone, that means . . .”
“Dempsey.”
“Oh, right. Your wife. She’s napping now too. But don’t worry, no bumps on the head for her. Just a little chloroform. She should be waking soon.”
I wanted to scream, to find a rock and smash the voice coming through the phone. I was too late. Dempsey had Hope. He had Jin. He and his mercenaries had taken my whole family. And there was nothing I could do about it.
At least not yet. Not until I could find where they were.
“What’re you doing?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be off charging insane dictators boatloads of money to take care of their problems, not kidnapping innocent people.”
“Are you innocent, Knight? The people paying me don’t think so. And they happen to be offering me insane amounts of money to bring you to them.”
“The only people who think I’m not innocent are terrorists. And what has any of this got to do with my family?”
Dempsey paused, then said, “I’m not sure. But my clients were insistent on that part.”
I tried to force down the panic rising in my chest. I was too late to warn Hope, but I still needed to save her. Somebody from my past had paid a group of professionals to take my family hostage. But why was Dempsey involved?
“Listen, if this is about revenge, if it’s about me getting you kicked out of school or breaking your nose—”
“You can stop right there,” Dempsey said. “Getting kicked out of the agency was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve seen what kind of house you can afford, and that’s with a wife who’s paid pretty well as a nurse. I could buy your entire neighborhood. I could buy an island if I wanted to. And the nose gives me credibility in circles where meanness matters. My old face would never have done that. If you think about it, I should probably be paying you for what you did to me. Instead, it looks like you’ll be paying me.”
“I’ll make sure I tell Becca,” I said. “She’ll be very proud of you.”
Dempsey didn’t say anything, but I could almost feel the coldness coming through the phone. Finally he spoke. “Someday, you’re going to have to tell me how you survived so long undercover. I thought for sure your mouth would have gotten you killed by now.”
I was starting to get under Dempsey’s skin. I’d always been good at that. He’d come from an influential family, had gone to the best schools, had been a member of the highest social circles. He’d acted like he was above the rest of us, and in reality, he probably was. But I’d always been able to find ways to get him to lose his composure. “Becca really liked you, you know? You shouldn’t have done that to her.”
“Really?” he replied. “You think she’d enjoy playing a mercenary’s wife?”
“If Becca had been your wife, you wouldn’t be a hired gun. You’d be something better.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Knight. I am who I am. I always have been, and I always will be. I enjoy the game too much to give it up. You should thank me as much for hitting Becca as I thank you for giving me this crooked nose. I saved her from being with me.”
He actually made a sick kind of sense. Becca had been one of my best friends when I was going through agency training. She’d ended up marrying Robbie, my other best friend, who was also in training, but there was a time when the three of us were just buddies. Through us, she met Dempsey, and he wasted no time asking her out. Both Robbie and I were jealous, but at the time, we were too caught up in our friendship to do anything about it. Dempsey and Becca went out a few times, and I could tell she was actually starting to like him.
Then Dempsey took Becca to one of his family’s parties. His father was a senator and something of a socialite in Washington. Apparently Dempsey had a few too many drinks at the party, and things went south. Becca came home with a welt across her face, and I went after Dempsey. Luckily Robbie was out of town. I didn’t find Dempsey that night, but he made the mistake of showing up for school the next day. I had him down and his face a bloody mess before Zack could pull me off of him. When I told Zack what Dempsey had done, I thought he might finish the job I’d started. Instead, he had Dempsey kicked out of school. Dempsey’s family had pull, but Zack’s pull was stronger. There was no way he would let an abuser remain with the agency.
Dempsey left in a rage and then disappeared for a while. A few years later his name began to pop up in Central American skirmishes, and it wasn’t long before he gained a reputation as one of the most dangerous and effective mercenaries in the world. And now this man had my family.
“You don’t have to do this, Dempsey. You already admitted that you have more money than you can possibly spend. We’re talking about kidnapping a little girl. What would your mother and father think?”
Once again I thought I could feel a coldness through the phone. “My father was a womanizer who drove my mother to take the pills that eventually killed her. I don’t think they’ve got any room to judge me.”
I’d managed to get under Dempsey’s skin again, but I was still no closer to finding out where he was keeping Hope and Jin.
“You should be worried more about your family than mine,” he said. “The client demands delivery by the end of the week. I lose money if any one of you is not breathing. I don’t like losing money, so I suggest you cooperate. For the time being, it looks like we’re on the same side. You want your family alive, and so do I. So don’t mess this up, Knight.”
“Who’s the client?”
Dempsey laughed. “You know I can’t tell you that. I have a reputation to protect.”
“You know they are going to kill us,” I said. “Even though you may not play games of revenge, you know others do. Most of the people I have offended in my life are terrorists. They kill children all the time and justify it with their ideology. They’re not smart enough to think through the morality of their actions. Are these really the people you want to work for? You may be a mercenary, but you’re not a monster. You know what will happen when you deliver us to them—they’re going to take my little girl and kill her in front of me. You talk about reputation? Is that what you want to be known for?”
“What happens after I deliver the package is none of my business.” His words were ice, completely devoid of emotion. “I do my job, and then I get paid. I don’t associate with my clients. I use them. I use them for their money. I don’t really care what class of people they are. At the same time, once you are in their hands, I don’t care if you find a way to escape. If these people are as dumb as you say they are, and if you’re as smart as you pretend to be, you should have no problem wriggling out of their grasp as soon as I’m gone. So if you want to give your family any kind of a chance, I suggest you cooperate with me and my men.”
“One of your men tried to shoot me in the back,” I said.
“Yes, I heard. Although he’s not technically one of mine. I had to farm out the mountain portion of this job. It’s hard to find quality subcontractors these days. Not only did they almost lose me my money by killing you, but they also somehow got mixed up on identities. Apparently, they think they have you in custody, along with your son. They think the man who killed their associate is some sort of Delta assassin who is going to pick them off one by one like Rambo. It’s quite comical. But you know what the really funny part is?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“They are so worried about the Delta assassin that they’ve called in an extermination team to take care of him. So think about this. You have about twenty-four hours before some very nasty men will be fast-rappelling out of helicopters, doing their best to find and shoot you. And all over a simple misunderstanding.”
My stomach dropped. Once they knew who I was, once Dempsey told them I was still loose, they would call off the assassination team. This was good for me but not so good for Ron. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out his real identity. The last person they would want around in a hostage situation would be a Delta operative. Maybe if I gave myself up, maybe if they had the real object of their mission within their grasp, just maybe they would let him go. But even as I thought about it, I knew what they would do. Once they knew who he was, Ron was a dead man.
“Don’t worry about your friend,” Dempsey said as if reading my thoughts. “If you give yourself up, I can guarantee his safety.”
He was lying, and he probably knew I knew, but then again, he was always lying.
“But I think I’m going to make this interesting,” Dempsey continued. “I think this little situation can actually be turned to my favor. I’ve decided not to tell anyone about your little subterfuge. Consider this a puzzle. A problem to solve. As I remember, you were adequate at solving puzzles in school.”
I was more than adequate. I was great at it. There was nobody better than I was—nobody, that is, except Dempsey. He was the puzzle master. The more challenging the task, the more impossible the situation, the better Dempsey was at finding a solution.
“Here’s the situation. I have your wife and daughter, and you have no way of knowing where they are being held. Even if you manage to capture one of my subcontractors and torture them to get them to talk, it won’t matter. They don’t know my location. They are waiting for instructions from me once they leave the mountains. Add to that the fact that they are holding your son, a group of innocent boys, and a Scout leader under an armed guard, and they are moving to a secure location where no one can approach within a hundred yards without being seen. If you try to get to them, you’ll probably get yourself or at least one of the boys killed.
“But that’s not all. Within twenty-four hours, an extermination team will be descending with the sole purpose of taking out a Delta operative. They happen to think that operative is you. Which means that in less than twenty-four hours, you will have trained assassins trying to kill you. So your puzzle is this: how do you turn yourself in to my men in the next twenty-four hours without having them shoot you or some of your boys? Seems like a challenge worthy of your wits.”
I always hated these types of story problems in training. But if I had learned one thing from them, it was that there was always more than one solution. As my mind began to work its way through the maze, running down path after insidious path only to meet with dead ends, jumping over walls in the hopes of seeing the problem from a new angle, seeking for the actions that would help me save my family, I finally found myself at the edge of a cliff with the obvious solution staring at me from the abyss. I knew what I had to do, and it was the opposite of what Dempsey had said. I didn’t need to find a way to not get shot. I needed to get them to kill me. If Dempsey didn’t have me, there was no way he was getting paid.
Dempsey’s voice sounded as if he was in my head, his words casual like an afterthought. “Oh, one more thing,” he said. “If you come to the conclusion that the solution to your problem is to shoot the hostage or let the extermination team take you out of the equation to save your family, I would seriously reconsider. If you die, I will still deliver your family to my client. True, he will probably not pay full price, but my guess is that he will still give me something. And even a portion of this bounty is a lot of money.”
I slumped to the ground. I would gladly give my life for my family, but even that was not going to save them. Suddenly I ached to be with Hope, to hold her in my arms, to push her mountain of hair from out of my face and feel the warmth of her cheek next to mine.
“I want to talk to my wife,” I said. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“I want to talk to Hope.”
Dempsey sighed. “Very well. I’ll have one of my men wake her up. I’ll call you in five minutes. Don’t tie up the line trying to call the authorities. I have a lot of contacts. If you call someone from the agency or law enforcement, I will know about it. And if the line is tied up when I call back, you might just miss a chance to speak with your lovely wife. In the meantime, I suggest you come to grips with the fact that the best chance you have at saving your family will be to deliver yourself to my men. Like you say, the client may be rich, but they are probably not very smart. With them, you might even have a chance to escape; with me, your only chance is to cooperate.”
Before I could say anything else, Dempsey hung up. His last words had sounded almost sincere, as if he really wouldn’t mind if we escaped after he delivered us. But sincerity from Dempsey was as dependable as promises from a politician.
I pulled the map out of the pack and examined it. Dempsey had given me at least a little information. I could guess where the mercenaries were holed up with the boys—a box canyon on the end of a narrow pass. A place where it would be nearly impossible to get to them without being seen. There was only one place in the vicinity that fit the description, and it wasn’t far. I thought for a moment about how I might approach the box canyon and give myself up before being shot. But the thought quickly left me.
I wasn’t going to the box canyon, and I wasn’t going to give myself up. I wasn’t going to wait around for the extermination team to come after me either. Hope was in trouble. I didn’t know where she was, and I didn’t know how I was going to find her, but I was going to try. Ron was with the boys, and at least for now, the mercenaries thought he was me, and they thought the threat was coming from the outside. Ron would figure something out, and Dempsey’s little game would backfire.
I was getting out of these mountains.
I put the map back in the pack and hoisted it onto my shoulders. When Dempsey called, I would make him think I was torn, that I was still trying to find a solution. But I was done sitting and thinking. There was only one path through this maze that made any sense to me, and that path led to Hope. The highway wasn’t that far away. If I could get to the city, I would pick up her trail. Somehow I would find her.
I began to jog—away from Ron, away from the boys, away from Peng. I said a silent prayer asking God to forgive me for leaving them, asking Him to lead me to Hope.