Notes: The chapter title comes from John Denver's unforgettable ode to WV, "Take Me Home, Country Roads," also called "Country Roads," and probably the only song about WV to ever make it onto the charts. Anywho, these are my favorite lines: All my memories gathered 'round her/Miner's lady, stranger to blue water. It's purty, ain't it? :)
"Berto! Berto, wake up, please!" a voice said somewhere far above him, and yet it was near enough to drive spikes of pain into his head with every syllable. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut more tightly, trying to block it out, trying to drop back into the darkness where, if he remembered correctly, his head didn't hurt quite so much.
"Berto! Please! Come on, come on - we're in big trouble!"
He groaned again and got out, "Baje su volumen," before his brain caught up with his tongue and realized that the voice was speaking ingles, not español. He was fairly sure that he recognized that voice. Who -?
He cautiously opened one eye and, finding that it didn't increase the pain in his head, opened the other one. His vision was skewed, and it took a second to process that it was because his glasses were crooked. Also, he was lying on the floor. Also, the floor was moving. Jolting, more accurately. That fit with what he could see of his immediate surroundings: he was in the back of a pickup truck with a hard shell over its bed. Cardboard boxes were stacked to the roof all around him, reducing the available floor space to a few cramped square feet.
"Berto, oh thank God," the voice said, with unhidden relief. There was movement behind him and then a face swung into his peripherial vision, and everything snapped back together in a rush of memory that did absolutely nothing to make his headache go away.
Fayetteville. The trade show. Carlie. The restaurant. Lance. The sedative -
"Carlie," he said. His tongue felt two sizes too big for his mouth, and dry as paper besides. He swallowed a few times, which helped a little, then asked, "Where are we?"
"A truck," she answered, swinging in and out of his field of vision as the truck jolted along. "They put us in here about thirty minutes ago, I think. I was only just waking up myself."
Berto struggled to something approximating a sitting position. It was actually more uncomfortable than lying down, what with the jolting and the boxes and all, and it left him with the realization that his hands were tied behind his back - too tightly; they'd gone all but numb - but at least he could see Carlie better. "Are you okay?"
She nodded in the near-dark of the truck. Somewhere, somehow, she'd picked up a large, swollen purple bruise on her jaw, and it looked like it hurt her to talk. Other than that, and the fact that her hands were also tied behind her back, she appeared to be unharmed. She still had on her hi-I'm-a-tourist baseball cap, which reassured him for some reason. "I'm fine. They just knocked me out the old-fashioned way."
He had several questions to ask and they were all of equal importance, making it difficult to prioritize, especially with his headache. After a moment he gave up and went with the one that should be easiest to answer. "Do you know what time it is?"
"No," she said, glancing at the small, grimy windows in the truck shell, which had been completely obscured by a coat of white paint. No light was filtering in from outside. "It's dark outside, I know that."
"I should have a watch," he said, raising his bound hands slightly. He prayed hard and fast that he did have a watch, that Lance and his henchmen hadn't removed it, that Lance's arrogance would win out over his caution.
If he had a watch, he had a way for Max and Kat to track him. If he had a watch, they had a way to get out of here alive. If he had a watch, he would go to Mass every Sunday from now on and really, really mean it when he said his Ave Maria.
Carlie leaned over to peer behind him, taking a very long time to do something so simple. Finally, she said, "You do."
Berto closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. "Can you - There's a button on the side, a red one. Hold it down for three seconds."
"Okay," she said, but the agreement was dubious at best. "I'll have to turn around and somehow... This could take a minute. Hang on."
It took something like four minutes of Carlie's fingers fumbling around his numb wrist, during which time the truck came to an absolute stop twice and voices shouted over the engine noise. Each time Berto experienced a fresh wave of desperation and kicked himself all over again. Nevermind the doctorate; only an idiot would have tried to confront a terrorist with no backup, and only an idiot would have allowed that terrorist to take him hostage. Again. And this time he didn't have an entire spy agency looking for him. He didn't have anyone looking for him.
What had Carlie said? "That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard." He decided that he needed to listen to her advice more often.
"Ta-da!" she finally exclaimed in a stage whisper. "So... what did I just do?"
"Activated a tracking signal." He twisted around again in the confined space of the truck bed and faced her with what he hoped was a confident and resolute expression. "Now my friends can find us."
Or their decaying bodies.
He felt better regardless.
"No offense, but I don't know if McGrath and Ryan can take our 'hosts' either," Carlie said, tossing her head back in an evident attempt to get a strand of hair out of her face. "The jerks who tossed me in here were packing major firepower. Not hillbilly shotguns - I mean, Kalishnakov rifles and top-of-the-line pulse-laser guns and stuff."
Berto looked at her askance.
She shrugged and said, "I'm Ethan Raptor's manager," as though that was supposed to explain everything, which it probably did.
"Josh and Kat can handle a lot more than you might think," he told her, and didn't have to feign his confidence this time. He believed in his hermano and teammate, believed because he'd seen them in action and knew what they could do.
"I sure hope so." Carlie gave up on the hair with an impatient huff and leaned back against the boxes. "What about that Max guy, the one who rescued Ethan? He hangs out with your team - I've seen him at other competitions."
"Max... comes and goes," Berto said, hedging, grateful for the poor light. Jeremy McGrath might have gotten onto the insider short list through similar circumstances, but Berto wasn't willing to jeopardize Josh's secret ID now unless he had no other choice. It was bad enough that Carlie could link Max back to Team Steel, even with all of their precautions. "I don't know if he's available for a rescue mission right now."
Carlie made a noncommital noise and slumped a little, ducking her head down so that Berto couldn't see her face below the bill of the baseball cap. "We're going to die, aren't we?"
Berto wanted to say, "No, my crazy spy friends are going to save us," or even, "I think I can talk Lance out of it," but at the last moment his will to paint a rosy picture evaporated. He sighed and confessed, "Probably."
"It's okay," she said, voice small and wavering but still somehow holding a glimmer of humor. "I hear a lot of first dates suck."
So it was a date. And it was indeed sucking thus far... but it was a date. Berto cleared his throat and managed a weak, "Ah, yeah. I guess."
The truck saved him from further response by hitting a particularly mammoth bump in the road, if they were even on a road. One of the boxes at the top of the stacks slipped sideways, was caught by gravity, and toppled over. The top had been taped shut, but the seam split when it hit the truck bed and the contents came tumbling out, sliding down the bed to rest at Berto's feet. Six good-sized packages of chunky off-white putty, wrapped tight in clear plastic, and an equal number of small electronic devices with blank LED dispplays and two tiny lights.
Green light, red light, plastic explosive.
Berto said something under his breath that had absolutely nothing to do with hailing Mary.
"Oh no," Carlie said. "That's -"
"How Lance is going to spend his night," Berto cut in, talking over her. "He and his militia buddies -"
He stopped and she finished the sentence with a soft, horrified, "Are going to blow up the bridge. My God. All those people..."
They stared at each other for a long moment, united both by increased fear and renewed sense of purpose. The continued lives of two hundred and fifty thousand innocent people were entirely dependent on them. So what if they were team managers and not professional spies?
They were just going to have to make do.
"Carlie," Berto said, "I think I have a plan, but you might have to run for it."
He expected her to refuse, and in fact she opened her mouth with every visible intention to do so, but before she could get a word out the truck came to a final lurching halt. The engine cut off, a door squealed open on rusty hinges, then slammed shut, and footsteps and low voices began to congregate around the back of the truck.
Berto sat up straighter and wished his glasses weren't crooked and his hands weren't numb.
The whitewashed rear window suddenly lifted up, and the tailgate came down with a metallic bang. It sounded rather like a gunshot - not the best of omens. Standing around outside were at least six militiamen, and all of them were armed, Lance Breamer included. None of them looked like they wanted to undo their captives' restraints, apologize politely for the inconvenience, and invite them over for a very late tea.
"Everybody out," Lance ordered, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the encompassing darkness. A faint roar of traffic drifted down from the only available source of light: Cars driving across the hulking black span of the New River Gorge Bridge.
"Where are we?" Carlie asked, doing her best to climb out of the truck unaided. Berto was less enthusiastic about following orders, but didn't think he had much choice.
"Where else, little lady?" Lance grinned, teeth flashing white in the black shadows. "End of the road."