Taylor stared up at her. “Should we go home now?”
“I don't know,” she answered honestly. “If that man hurt your dad, home isn't very safe.”
“Will they hurt us?”
“They might,” she said, “if they catch us.”
Taylor looked determined. “Then we can't let them catch us, Miss Angel.”
“Right,” she whispered back.
Crunching noises diminished as Waddell and his – partner? Keeper? -- moved off through the woods. Hardesty knew better than to take for granted that their departure meant safety.
“I think we need to stay here,” she told Taylor in a whisper. “We will be harder to catch after dark.” She considered their options. The branches overhead and around them offered concealment as well as shelter against the weather, but she still didn't want to risk even a small fire here.
“Okay,” the boy said. “Do we have anything to eat?”
She considered. “I have peanut butter crackers, and we have two MREs.”
“What's an MRE?”
She wrinkled up her nose. “A packaged meal, that soldiers get when they're traveling and can't stop to cook.”
“What's in it?”
“This one,” she squinted at the package, then gave up and used the red-LED light to read the label, “is chicken and noodles. It has coffee, fruit cocktail, gum, toilet paper, a spoon ... and its own heater. The other one is beans-and-weenies, with peaches and fruit drink.” She studied the package carefully. “I think there's enough here that we could split one now and one later.”
“Chicken and noodles first then,” Taylor said. “But you can have the coffee.”
She grinned. “Thanks. Oh, this is the good heater – you just pour in a little water and squeeze.”
He handed her his water bottle and sat up, leaning against the tree trunk, Indian-style.
She slipped the big pouch of noodles into the heater sack, and opened the fruit cocktail. A bar of freeze-dried pear/peach/apple pieces, with a few cherries, crunched in the packet. She frowned, then studied the directions and dripped a bit of water into that plastic bag as well, setting it next to the warming noodles.
“You should warm the water for your coffee, too,” Taylor whispered.
A branch cracked on the far side of the tree and both of them froze in place. Snuffling sounds followed, and Hardesty flattened out on the ground to peer around the trunk. What met her eye was a black nose above mobile lips – a deer, nibbling among the needles on the ground on the far side of the tree's canopy, no more than a dozen yards away in the lavender-tinted morning light. She shook her head at herself and crept back to touch Taylor's shoulder. “Peek around.”
He did, and came back grinning. “I need to take a picture of that.”
She shook her head. “I'm afraid the flash will scare the deer.” She didn't add that so bright a light might give away their hideout.
“If the deer got scared, would that help us get caught?”
“It might.”
“Oh.” He pushed the camera back into his fanny pack, looking saddened. Hardesty bit her lip.
“Can you turn the flash off?”
“Will the picture turn out?”
“Let's find out,” she answered in a whisper, and a moment later he bellied back down. She heard a quiet 'click' and the deer's head came up, but when no further threat appeared it merely resumed its progress, snuffling along the ground in search of edibles. Taylor, meanwhile, slowly and quietly sat up next to the tree and held out the camera, proudly pointing to the back screen, where a portrait of the doe could be plainly seen.
Hardesty gave him a broad grin and a thumbs-up, and he saved the photo before turning off the camera. She picked up the MRE pack and tore open the top. Taylor, meanwhile, unwrapped the spoon and poked her knee: he had found a fork in the packet as well.
She opened the fruit packet for him, and balanced her canteen cup on the rim of the tuna can from the first night. Under the cup, she set her tiny stove, lit with a match; in almost no time the water began to bubble, and she stirred in the coffee, sugar and creamer from the MRE. The stove burned itself out. She waited for the coffee to cool a bit, and watched Taylor munching on alternate bites of noodles and fruit cocktail.
“Do you have any more milk?” he asked.
She checked the packet in her fanny pack. “Some,” she said. “Here ...” she poured some cool water into the empty fruit packet and stirred in powdered milk with Taylor's spoon. While he drank, she finished the noodles with the plastic fork from the MRE.
“That wasn't bad,” he said. “What should we do now?”
“If we're going to travel after dark,” she answered in a whisper, “you should sleep, if you can.”
He thought about that. “What if we took turns? I could wake you up if that man comes back, or anybody else comes around.”
“You first,” she answered.
He shook his head. “Not sleepy.”
Second-grader, she reminded herself forcibly. He's done really well the last couple of days, too. But he's just a kid. Worried about his dad, probably, too. Not that he isn't right to be ...
“Do you want to try to go back now?”
“What else could we do?”
She didn't even have to think this through. “Go on, where I was headed.”
“Where's that?”
“Away from Colonel Robertson, and that man, and all the men with them,” she answered.
“What about my Dad?”
She looked at him for a long time before she shook her head. “I don't know.”
“If we go back, will we be able to help him?”
“It's just you and me, Taylor. If we go on, maybe ... maybe we can get more help for your Dad, and for us.”
He thought it over. “I think we should go on, and send help to Dad as soon as we find any.”
Second-grader? Smart kid, Hardesty thought. “Then that's what we'll do.”
Taylor nodded, and began packing up. Hardesty couldn't help a little smile as she watched him for a few seconds; then she finished her coffee and fell in with the work of striking their makeshift camp as quickly as possible. In a few minutes they were ready to go. Taylor stepped to the gap in the branches where they'd come in, the night before, and then dropped to his hands and knees before he peered out.
Hardesty wondered what he'd seen that made him want to stay so low, but said nothing and eased up next to him, duck-walking. Outside, birds and bugs and a squirrel or two went on about their noisy morning affairs. Somewhat reassured, Hardesty touched the boy's shoulder. He looked at her; she put a finger to her lips and cupped her other hand behind her ear, and he nodded. Some little time went by, and then she caught him by the waist of his shorts and pulled him back as the sounds of birds and squirrels suddenly ceased. The footsteps she'd heard approached, passed, faded; a glance out, taken with great care, showed her the retreating back of the man whose rifle now hung down her back by its sling. One more thing I didn't need going wrong.
Taylor leaned very close. “I think one of us needs to look around from up in the tree.”
Hardesty nodded. “Can you go up quietly?”
“I think so,” he said. “You can't, can you?”
“No,” she admitted. “Never learned how.”
He raised both eyebrows at her then nodded. “It's not really easy, especially at the bottom.” He turned away, circling the tree completely before wrapping his arms and legs around the trunk and shinnying upward, not fast but quietly. The first branches left the trunk a little more than three feet above Hardesty's outreached finger-tips; the boy barely stood as high as her triceps. She cringed when she heard the zipper of his fanny-pack opening a minute or so later, surprised at how loud and carrying the sound seemed.
“Uh, oh,” she heard him say softly; then he began climbing down, making not much more noise than a hastily-descending squirrel. “Miss Angel, there are an awful lot of people out in the woods. If we go out there, we'll run right into some of them.”
“That's not good,” she whispered.
A moment later the bellow of a shotgun sent them both to the ground, hugging the trunk of the tree as tightly as they could. What seemed like dozens of running feet converged – not on their hiding place, but in the direction the man from whom she'd taken the rifle had gone.
“Get down! Down on your knees! Hands in the air!”
Hardesty sucked in a breath and looked at Taylor. “Do you think they're all there?”
“They won't stay long,” he said. “He might remember seeing us.”
“We should go now,” she said. Taylor nodded, and a moment later they were hurrying, as quietly as possible, down to the creek.
“Upstream,” she whispered urgently, “the banks are deeper and we'll be harder to see.”
“Okay,” Taylor said.
She never knew how long they kept going, as fast as they could without making extra noise; eventually they confronted a triple-tubed culvert through which they could not pass. The road above it, a narrow blacktop, sported half a dozen vehicles – everything from cami ATVs to black Suburbans. Hardesty bit her lip and pulled Taylor back against the bank, hoping they had not been seen; nearly a minute passed before she realized, from the ambient noise of crickets, frogs, and birds, that if anyone had remained with the vehicles they had remained in a vehicle.
She looked at the culverts again. No way either she or Taylor could fit through the corrugated pipes; these had an outside diameter of ten inches or so, maximum.
“The keys are in that three-wheeler,” Taylor whispered.
“What if there's somebody watching?”
“What if there's not? Besides,” he added, “you've got that rifle.”
Second-grader, my sweet aunt Fanny, Hardesty thought. “You watch too much TV.”
He grinned, waggling his fingers. A minute later she had crawled up the bank, fifty yards downstream from the parked vehicles, the rifle ready to hand. Taylor crawled with her, crouching low, studying the vehicles through his binoculars. They had little real cover, except distance and scattered brush; but the angle of the creek bed had brought them up where they wouldn't be expected.
“I don't see anybody,” Taylor murmured.
Hardesty reached for the glasses and the boy relinquished them. She scanned the vehicles with professional quickness, practiced attention. “You're right.”
Boneheads. Two dozen quick strides and she had Taylor in front of her on the atv; then she thought of something else. “Wait.”
He looked a question at her, but Hardesty had already started moving; she drove the Phillips-screwdriver from her multi-tool through the sidewalls of two tires on each vehicle, one after another, ending up at the Suburban in case it had an alarm.
“Oooh, nice,” he said. “MacGyver would be proud of you.”
“MacGyver is an amateur,” she answered in a low voice, but the shine in his eyes made her feel better. “Let's get out of here.” She cranked open the throttle and turned on the key, and within seconds they were flying down the blacktop, headed north.
The ATV ran out of fuel almost an hour later, but they could see the water tower of a town. Hardesty pushed the vehicle into the trees off to the side of the road and then continued walking, with Taylor holding her hand, a few feet inside the treeline.
Town swarmed with uniforms, some police, some military; watching from twenty feet up in a craggy evergreen, Taylor counted seven different colors, and couldn't count all the windbreakers with variations of “SWAT,” “POLICE,” or some federal agency lettered across the back.
“There's a lot of cops,” he said as he climbed back out of the tree. “Soldiers, too, and I think the Marines. What do we do?”
Hardesty sighed. She didn't know who, if anybody, among all that mob she could trust; but none of them would want to hurt a second-grader – before she could finish the thought, Taylor let out a yell.
“DAD!” He took off running toward a knot of people; Hardesty perforce took off running after him.
“Taylor?”
“Dad!” Boy struck parent like a missile striking a target; Hardesty oofed in sympathy with the back-driven father as the Vice President, a sturdy, graying man with a football player's build and a face filled with ecstasy, scooped up the child and swung him around in a hug that, by rights, should have turned him into about twenty kilos of crunchy peanut butter. “How did you get here?”
“Miss Angel brought me, Dad,” Taylor said.
“Miss Hardesty?” Vice President Jason Bidwell said, looking up from his son's face. By then she'd reached the knot of people – grim-faced guardians, mostly, she recognized now – gathering around the pair.
“She was really somethin', Dad,” Taylor said.
“Where did you get that?” A woman in an FBI-emblazoned jacket reached for the rifle slung down Hardesty's back, but by then she'd gotten her breathing under control again.
“A poacher,” Taylor said.
Hardesty eased away from the grasping hands; the rifle flowed from its sling into her steady port-arms stance almost as an organic movement of its own. “Off a man in the woods. He was dressed as a hunter, but it isn't deer season here.”
“When?”
“Late yesterday afternoon.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don't know for sure,” Hardesty said. “I suspect he's either with Colonel Robertson or on his way there. I think Robertson's security found the man I took this rifle from in the woods this morning.”
The woman went pale. She pulled a cell phone from her pocket, pushed a speed-dial number, and began to speak rapidly as she hurried away from Hardesty. “This is Regent Six. Regent Four has been captured. Repeat, Regent Four has been captured ...”
“Miss Hardesty,” the Vice President said quietly. “Are you all right?”
“I think we are now, sir,” Hardesty answered. “And yourself?”
“Taylor's here,” Bidwell answered, forcefully. “I'm much better now.”
“Mr. President ...” a man in a black suit, white shirt, crew cut, dark glasses and deadly-serious expression approached them, moving purposefully. “I need you to come with me right now. There's been an incident in the White House ...”
Hardesty felt her employer's grip change from congratulatory to commanding.
“Come on, Miss Hardesty,” he said. “We need you.”
“In that case, sir, I think you'd better call me Angela ...”