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Back Stop at Nothing Save as PDF
Contents ( 98)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
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  10. 10
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  98. EPILOGUE

“I’m hurt. What is this? What happened? I’m stuck. Why am I stuck?” Reyland suddenly said.

It was a miracle that Reyland was still alive, let alone conscious, Gannon thought as he shook his head.

Gannon knelt and patted and then reached into Reyland’s bloody windbreaker pocket and removed the three thumb drives there.

He pursed his lips as he thought of what to do with them.

“What are you doing?” Reyland said as Gannon pulled off one of Reyland’s boots.

“It’s okay. Everything’s okay, big man. You just sit tight,” Gannon said as he peeled off Reyland’s sock and put the thumb drives into it and tied the sock up into a ball.

He was going to throw it back over the Chilean embassy fence. But as he jogged back across Wilton, he actually encountered one of the burly guards he had seen by the door. He was now standing out on the sidewalk on the corner.

“Here,” Gannon said as he untied the sock and poured the thumb drives into the startled guard’s hand.

“These belong to your guest,” he said. “Dr. Santos dropped them out the window. You should probably talk to him about that. Also, you should probably check on Mr. Messerly.”

“And you are?” the guard said with a Spanish accent.

“No one at all,” Gannon said as he started running back toward the destruction.

“Help,” Reyland said as Gannon got back to the idling Range Rover.

Gannon stopped and looked down at the deputy assistant director as he began making loud huffing and puffing sounds.

“There’s something stuck in me. Pleeeeeease! I can feel it,” Reyland said. “It’s between my ribs! It’s stuck. Stuck.”

Gannon peered at the shaft of blood-slicked metal sticking out of Reyland’s guts and suddenly smiled as he thought of what he had told his buddy Callum about going whale fishing.

How do you like that, he thought.

It looked just like a harpoon.

“You must help me,” Reyland said. “I have a family. My wife. I’ll give you anything.”

In the distance, Gannon could hear the first sirens approaching. He thought they would have that weak weee aw, weee aw Euro sound from the movies, but they sounded just like American ones.

“Sounds like you need a doctor, Reyland,” Gannon said as he got behind the Rover’s wheel. “Maybe Dr. Santos over at the embassy could help you out.”

Gannon slammed the door and zipped down the British luxury car’s window.

“But on second thought, probably not,” Gannon said as he slammed the gas into the floor.

EPILOGUE

When Gannon finally appeared out of the sliders onto the upper terrace, he was wearing a new pair of cargo shorts and a black T-shirt with a neon blue barracuda on it that he had bought at the airport.

It was coming on seven in the evening, and he was back in the Dominican Republic now at a gated vacation villa in the La Costa Brava neighborhood of Santo Domingo up in the hills high above the bay.