Part 5 The World’s Greatest Detectives #4
At that moment, on their video screens, they saw the robot cart’s lid pop open . . .
. . . everyone tensed . . .
. . . only to see a jack-in-the-box head on a coil come springing out of it.
Hanging from its neck was a handwritten sign:
WRONG.
Hooper swore.
‘Damn it, he’s at Sleepy Hollow.’
The Hudson River swept by beneath our chopper as we sped north along the path of the waterway.
The sky was still a hard grey. Snowflakes whipped by outside.
At first, both sides of the broad river were covered in a pale urban sprawl: New Jersey on the left, New York on the right.
But after we passed the George Washington Bridge, the sprawl quickly gave way to forested hills and valleys.
Then a squat red-and-white lighthouse came into view on the right-hand shore of the river: the Sleepy Hollow Light.
By the time we reached it, it was getting on 1:45 p.m.
We sped around the lighthouse and over the town of Sleepy Hollow, heading inland toward some tree-covered hills that contained its cemetery.
SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY
A minute later, our chopper was hovering above the cemetery.
‘Where do you want me to put her down?’ Bill asked.
On the way, Garrett, Xiao and I had consulted some online maps of the graveyard.
Andrew Carnegie’s grave was roughly in the middle, while the Chrysler mausoleum was at the far northern end of the property.
The cemetery was maybe a mile long, with several tree-covered hills and a small river—the Pocantico—that ran up most of its eastern border.
A section of new graves lay across the Pocantico River and was accessed by a classic wooden ‘covered’ bridge, like the one from the headless horseman legend. (Seriously.)
Seen from above, the place looked like a deserted mix of trees, winding paths, many small headstones and a few dozen larger marble mausoleums, with every bare patch of ground in between them covered by snow.
Light snow continued to fall.
Garrett pointed. ‘Put us down there, where those four paths intersect near the Carnegie grave.’
Our helicopter touched down at exactly 1:50 p.m.
No sooner was it down than Garrett’s cell phone rang.
unknown caller.
Garrett put it on speaker.
‘Very good,’ the voice said. ‘You made it. I was worried my riddle was too hard or that you might have stupidly gone to the cathedral.’
‘What now?’ Garrett demanded.
‘One of you—I don’t care who—will bring the QuantumSpeed-7 chip to the covered bridge at the river, give it to my courier and then leave. The rest of you can find Mr King, who I can assure you, is here in the cemetery. Tick-tock, tick-tock. You really should hurry.’
Click.
The call ended.
Garrett was still holding the QuantumSpeed-7 chip.
‘Here.’ He offered it to Xiao. ‘You take it to the bridge and do the drop with whoever his “courier” is. We’ll look for King.’
Xiao reached out for the chip.
‘I should hold on to that,’ Audrey said, reaching forward and taking the chip. ‘I’ll do the drop at the bridge with Xiao. Then the FBI can take the blame if something goes wrong.’
‘Fine by me,’ Xiao said.
‘As long as somebody takes it and goes,’ Garrett said urgently.
‘Be careful, Audrey,’ I said.
She drew her Glock. ‘You, too.’
Beside her, Xiao drew his gun.
Then they jumped out of the chopper and raced eastward down the hill, into the trees.
‘As for us,’ Garrett said, hefting his silver pistol. ‘We’re looking for a new grave.’
‘Bill, stay with the chopper,’ I said. ‘Given what’s happened already today, they might try to steal it while we’re out searching.’
‘Will do.’
And with that, Garrett and I leapt out of the helicopter and sprinted into the cemetery, running through the light falling snow, searching for a freshly dug grave.
We found it at 1:57 p.m.
Garrett and I crested a low hill not far from the Carnegie grave and almost ran right over a young woman kneeling in a flowerbed.
She had long red hair and wore denim overalls and a green hoodie. A gardener of some kind.
When she saw our guns, her eyes sprang wide.
‘Miss, you work here?’ Merritt Garrett asked.
‘Uh, yeah . . .’
‘Any newly dug graves between us and the Chrysler mausoleum?’
‘I was gonna ask the boss about that.’ She pointed northward. ‘There’s a new one just past those bushes. I don’t know who authorised it to be dug—’
We bolted that way, shoving through some shrubbery.
And saw it.
A single newly dug grave.
The ground around it was covered in a couple of days’ worth of snow, but the grave barely had any snow on it at all.
Its dirt mound was dark and fresh.
We fell to our knees and started digging with our bare hands.
After half a minute of this, Garrett suddenly stood up and called to the gardener who was now watching us—with concern—from the bushes. ‘Miss? Do you have any shovels we can use?’
She had one hanging from her utility belt, a small gardening spade.
‘Just this,’ she said dumbly.
Garrett dashed over to her, took it, returned to our grave and started using the little shovel to fling dirt away more efficiently. It was better than his bare hands.
A few feet down, he struck something.
‘Is it wood?’ I asked. ‘Like a coffin?’
‘No . . .’ he said slowly. ‘It’s soft. Like a—’
We exchanged looks, dug some more . . .
. . . to reveal the body of a dead man.
He was mid-30s with a muscled neck, short hair and two ragged bullet holes in his forehead.
‘Who is this?’ Garrett asked.
‘I’m guessing it’s King’s bodyguard . . .’ I said. ‘This has to be the place.’
We hauled the bodyguard’s corpse out of the grave, jumped back in, and redoubled our digging efforts.
About thirty seconds later, Garrett’s shovel hit something hard, something made of wood. A coffin—
—suddenly, gunshots.
Three of them.
Pistol shots.
From down the hill to the east, from the bridge.
‘Audrey . . .’ I breathed, spinning.
Two more pistol shots rang out.
Then louder gunshots.
Deeper, puncture-like whumps.
The sound of a 7.62mm gun.
I leapt out of the grave and raised my borrowed pistol.
‘You keep digging and open that coffin,’ I said. ‘I gotta go help Audrey.’
‘Wait—’ Garrett began.
But I was already running as fast as I could toward the bridge.
I bounded through the snowy graveyard, hurdling headstones, sweeping around mausoleums.
I hustled down a snow-slicked hill, ducking under tree branches before rounding a bend and, in the falling snow, I beheld the covered bridge.
It was maybe eighty feet long, box-shaped, with a triangular wooden roof and X-shaped struts on its flanks. It was shrouded by a canopy of the tall trees that arched over the icy river at the bottom of the hill.
I could see Audrey and Xiao crouched in darkness in the middle of the bridge, huddled against the wooden struts on its right-hand side.
Well, Xiao was crouched.
Audrey lay on her back, while he was bent over her, pressing down on her torso with one hand—CPR? Or maybe putting pressure on a wound?—at the same time as he fired at something at the far end of the bridge . . .
. . . the large black Spiderhawk military drone that had been at the penthouse earlier.
Now it was here, silhouetted in the square of dim light at the far end of the bridge, firing its 7.62mm cannons at them.
The military drone’s gunfire literally shredded the struts of the old bridge.
Xiao took cover behind his wooden upright.
I never stopped running as I reached him, firing hard at the drone with my compact Smith & Wesson.
Blam!-blam!-blam!-blam!
I must have hit it in a critical spot, because for a moment the big black drone wobbled awkwardly in the air.
Now standing over Xiao and Audrey, I kept firing, hitting the drone repeatedly near its rotor blades.
Xiao joined in.
Impact sparks flashed all over the drone.
It lurched again as more of our shots hit its rotors and suddenly it dropped to the ground.
No sooner had it touched the ground than some evacuation protocol must have initiated inside it, for then it took to the air, whirled and fled away into the darkness.
Xiao kept firing at it long after it was gone.
I slid to my knees beside Audrey and yanked open her FBI windbreaker.
Blood oozed from her stomach, creating an expanding red stain in the fabric of her white shirt.
Her face was pale. She breathed in ragged gasps.
Her eyelids fluttered, trying to stay open.
‘Audrey! Audrey! Can you hear me!’ I shouted.
‘Just . . . got shot . . .’ she whispered huskily.
Xiao said, ‘That thing came out of nowhere and shot her. I was trying to stop the bleed—’
I couldn’t tell for sure how badly wounded she was, but it looked severe.
On the ground beside her, I glimpsed a Post-It note with writing on it:
PLACE THE CHIP ON THE DRONE
AND THEN STEP BACK
Instructions. But they didn’t matter to me now.
‘We gotta get her to a hospital—’ I said.
Suddenly, I heard a woman’s scream.
It had come from up the hill, from behind us, from back at the grave where I’d left Merritt Garrett and the gardener.
Then I heard gunshots ring out from up there.
Lots of gunshots.
Things were happening too fast and in too many places.
‘Xiao,’ I said. ‘Stay here with Audrey. Call 911 and keep pressure on that wound. Do not let her lose consciousness.’
‘But—’
‘Xiao, it took me thirty-eight years to get a girlfriend, let alone one as awesome as Audrey! I’m not gonna lose her now! Keep her conscious till the paramedics arrive!’
I bolted off the bridge, leading with my gun.
I pounded back up the snow-covered hill as more gunshots rang out.
Then I came over the hill and around the mausoleums and beheld an extraordinary sight.
I saw Garrett . . .
. . . crouching hip-deep in the open grave, blood dripping from a bullet wound to his left arm, with his gun raised . . .
. . . exchanging fire with a huge man in a black tracksuit about twenty feet away from him, at the edge of the nearby tree line . . .
. . . with two figures already lying motionless in the snow at the big tracksuited man’s feet, each in a pool of blood . . .
. . . then Garrett loosed two final desperate shots that slammed into Tracksuit Man’s chest and he fell, dead.