appearances. He reached in farther and put his fingers to her neck, looking for a pulse. She was alive.
She stirred at his touch, then flinched, her eyes wide with shock.
“Where are . . . ? Who . . . ?” she mouthed incoherently.
“Give me your hand,” Matt told her as he tucked the P14 under his belt. He helped her up and slung her arm over his shoulders.
“Come on,” he told Rydell. He half-carried Gracie as he cut past a gaggle of dumbstruck onlookers, down the steps to the waiting Navigator. He set her down in the backseat, got in behind the wheel with Rydell beside him, and powered away.
In the rearview mirror, Matt saw Gracie straighten up. She was slowly coming out of it. Her eyes swept across her surroundings before settling on Matt’s face.
“You okay?” he asked her.
She stared at him blankly. She looked like she had the mother of all hangovers. Then things must have come flooding back, as her face tightened up with a worried frown.
“Dalton,” Gracie blurted. “I’ve got to get Dalton out of there.”
“Who?”
Her hands were rummaging around, looking for something. “My phone. Where’s my phone? I have to call Dalton. It isn’t safe.” She turned to Matt. “I have to warn him.”
Matt looked down the street, saw a bank of phone booths, and pulled over. He helped Gracie out. “Where are we going? Where shall I tell him to go?” she asked.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Dalton. My cameraman. They’ll be going after him too.”
Matt tried to fill in the blanks. “Where is he?”
“At Darby’s mansion,” she said, her expression vague, as if she wasn’t exactly sure.
“The preacher?”
“Yes.” She concentrated hard. “No. Wait. I’m not sure.” She shook her head. “He went to the airport,” she added after a beat. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure of that. Either way, he’s on his cell.” She picked up the handset. “What’ll I tell him?”
Matt gave it a quick thought. “Just tell him to get somewhere safe. If he’s still out, tell him to stay away from the preacher’s place. We’ll call him back and tell him where to meet us.”
She started to dial, then paused and studied him curiously, her eyes still foggy, and asked, “Who the hell are you?”
“Just make the call,” he told her. “We’ll get to that later.”
Chapter 73
They were all scattered around the motel room, a motley crew of haggard escapees: Matt, Gracie, Dalton, and Rydell. A week earlier, apart from Gracie and Dalton, none of them had met. They hadn’t even come close. They had roamed completely separate spheres, lived disparate lives, had different ambitions and concerns. And then everything had changed, their lives had been upended, and here they were, crammed into the small room, wondering how to stay alive.
Dalton had joined them at the motel, arriving not long after they had. They’d spent the next couple of hours filling each other in on how they’d ended up in that room, each contributing his or her part of the story. The conversation had been urgent and intense as the different pieces had fallen into place, the string of troubling news only brightening up when Rydell had gotten through to the doctor treating Jabba back in Boston. The surgery had been successful. Jabba had lost a lot of blood, but he was stable, and his prognosis was cautiously optimistic.
“What do we do now?” Dalton asked. He still looked spooked, having only just found out that Finch had been murdered, and that the likely suspect was a monk they’d been palling around with.
“I keep thinking of Father Jerome,” Gracie remarked, shaking her head. “He knew something was wrong. I could see it in his face.” She turned to Rydell. “You don’t know what they’ve done to him?”
“I don’t know the grim details,” Rydell admitted. “I didn’t want to hear about it when they brought it up. They mentioned stuff. About using drugs. Electroshock therapy. Implanting memories and adjusting character. To make him more accepting of his new status, I guess.”
“Nice,” Dalton said with an uneasy wince.
“He said he heard voices. Up on the mountain. He thought God was talking to him,” Gracie mentioned.
Rydell nodded thoughtfully. “They would have used an LRAD on him. A long range acoustical device,” he speculated. He slid a glance at Matt. “Same thing they used on me at the hotel. It can also send sound accurately over long distances. Like a sniper rifle, only for noise—or voices,” he explained. “They were talking to him through it.”