The Longest Winter (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

M
y heart beat faster than ever before. Three knocks in response to mine. I knew it was her, but I had to be certain. I had a habit of coming home at the end of the day and knocking out a rhythm on the door. It was always the same, the theme from
The Andy Griffith Show
. I rapped it out on the door, stopping part way - knocked hard enough that my knuckles hurt. I put my ear to the door and in less than a second heard the rest knocked in response.

It was her.

“It’s me, Kat,” I yelled. I waited but heard no response. I didn’t think she’d be able to hear me.

I heard Luc yell then saw him running toward us. He stopped at the edge of the slope.

“Did you find her?”

“We’ve got an old bunker but it’s sealed shut. Someone’s inside.”

“Is it her?”

I nodded. “I think we’re going to need help getting this open. Can you call it in? Stay off the radios though.”

Luc knew what I meant. He nodded and took out his cell phone to dial dispatch. I grabbed the shovel and Chen and I went back to digging. The door was hinged to open out, so we had to get all of the dirt out of the way before we could open it. We worked furiously, blisters forming within minutes as we dug into the dirt and rocks.

The shovel hit steel again and I brushed the dirt aside to reveal a wheel-type handle. The door wasn’t large, only about as wide as a standard front door on a house, but it was old and rusted. The wheel was placed in the middle of the door and it reminded me of a bank vault. I cleared the dirt and tried to turn the handle. It didn’t budge. I looked at where the handle met the door and saw it had been welded together.

Kat was going to have to wait a little while longer.

By the time the cavalry arrived Chen and I had finished clearing the dirt around the door. I had gone hoarse trying to yell loud enough so that Kat could hear me. All I wanted was for her to know we were trying. The fact that I wasn’t able to hear a response led me to believe she couldn’t hear me either.

Chen and I stood back as a man armed with a cutting torch stepped up to the door. The tool was hooked to a tank of gasoline, not propane as I was used to.

“Gas?”

“Oui,” he said. “Oxy-petrol.”

I knew enough about the tools to know that it was the pure oxygen that allowed the high heat needed to cut the steel. The fuel though, that wasn’t something I knew about.

“If just cut here,” he said, pointing to the welds around the wheel, “acetylene or propane okay. But here, is too thick. Petrol is faster.” He was pointing right at the door itself. They were planning on cutting straight through the door if need be, a door thicker than the man’s accent.

He went to work trying to cut through the shoddy welding that Crawford had done. I watched as he heated the metal until it glowed red then triggered the oxygen causing it to react with the metal. As it continued to heat up, the metal began to turn to liquid and it flowed away from the torch. Some fell to the sand where it sizzled and cooled.

It seemed like an eternity as I watched the metal fall and the torch work its way around the wheel. When he finally returned to where he started he shut the torch off, flipped his visor up and looked back at me.

“Need to wait.
Très chaud.
”

I nodded and folded my arms. The metal still glowed hot and I stared at it as if I could cool it down through sheer force of will.

We waited long enough for the metal to cool to the touch and then I took hold of the wheel and started to crank it. It was tight and wouldn’t budge. Chen and the welder both weaseled in and took hold of the wheel at different points. I gave a three count and we turned hard enough for it to come loose. It turned easy after that, creaking as it went. I felt the steel bolts in the door retreat into place as the wheel came to a stop.

I had never been so excited in my life, but also so terrified. Kat was just on the other side of the door and all I had to do was open it. It had been almost a year, long day after long day, and now the end was more than in sight - it was right in front of me. Part of me didn’t want to open the door. It was the part that feared that this was just another one of Crawford’s elaborate schemes and that the person inside wouldn’t be Kat.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I pulled hard, feeling the door strain against its age until it relented and swung open to rest against the hillside. There was only faint light inside, hardly enough to see by. I took out my flashlight and turned it on, sweeping it across the bunker. A woman cowered in the far corner hiding her face.

“Kat,” I said. “It’s me.”

She looked up then covered her eyes. I pointed the light at my feet and walked toward her. She started to cry and when I reached her she threw her arms around my legs. I knelt down and put my hand on her head, feeling her greasy and matted hair. She looked up at me, tears cutting paths through the dirt on her face, and broke down.

She sobbed loudly as the tears flowed. I held her close to me, my hand tracing circles on her back as I tried to convince her everything was okay. I could feel her rib cage as I rubbed her back, feel the nothingness she had wasted away to. Nothing could have prepared me for this. No matter how much I had thought of finding her, even somewhere like this, all the things I had thought of to say were gone. All I could do was hold her tight, never let her go and tell her I was here.

“I never stopped looking,” I said. “I never stopped.” I started to cry, tears streaming down my face, as I sat with her, her face buried in my shoulder soaking my jacket.

“I knew you’d come. He said you wouldn’t, he said you’d be dead.” She had to stop to catch her breath. Kat looked up at me, fear and pain in her eyes and I felt like in that moment I saw everything. “Are the kids here? I need to see them.”

“They’re in Warsaw with your parents. We’ll get them on the next flight.”

She nodded. “This is real, right Lincoln? I’ve dreamed about this so many times.”

“It’s real,” I said, taking her head in my hands. I stared into her eyes. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe. I love you.”

“I love you too. And I’ve missed you so much. You and the kids, you were here with me. You kept me safe. I talked to you every day, every day, and sometimes you talked back.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. I looked around at the bunker and felt the hairs on my arms standing on end. “Can we get out of here?”

She nodded and I helped her to her feet. When I turned around I noticed something I hadn’t seen when I came in. On the wall beside the door was a light with a series of red numbers. It was counting down.

“What is that?” I was panicking. I hadn’t even considered that he had set traps. Kat had been my only focus.

“You’re early,” Kat said. “More than, more than two and a half years early.”

I looked at the clock and noticed it was counting down not only the hours, minutes and seconds but the days as well. There were still about nine hundred to go.

“What do you mean?”

“He told me in three and a half years the door would open and I would be saved.”

My heart started to slow. The countdown was for her, not for a bomb or anything of the sort.

“The door was welded shut, Kat.”

“He said he made sure, made sure, that someone would find me. I thought I’d be here that long. Three and a half years, just like in Revelation.”

“Wait. Three and a half years? He wanted to save you,” I said. “To protect you from the apocalypse he thought he was going to bring about.
‘The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.’
”

“Revelation 12:6,” Kat said. “At least I’m not pregnant.” She started to smile, but it was like she couldn’t find the strength to finish it.

I had studied the Book of Revelation since we first identified Crawford’s plan and then even more after Kat’s abduction. I knew it almost by heart. The beginning of the twelfth chapter speaks of a pregnant woman and a dragon that came from the sky. Just as the dragon was about to devour her newborn son, God took the boy and the woman was taken to a place where she could be protected.

“It seems he took some liberties in his translation.”

I could tell there was something Kat wanted to ask, but couldn’t quite say it. I knew her well, knew her disdain for death and murder.

“I killed him, Kat.”

She nodded. “I figured he wouldn’t let it happen any other way.”

“He had a bomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I didn’t have a choice.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“I wanted him alive, Kat. I wanted him alive so I could torture him until he told me where you were. When he died, I thought I had lost you forever.”

She knew there was nothing she could say so she just held me tight. I shone the flashlight toward the door and noticed stacks and stacks of boxes and cases of bottled water.

“He really expected you to be down here that long, didn’t he?”

Kat nodded. “He told me how much I could have each day without running out. I didn’t trust him so I cut it down, cut it down to give me more time. He said he built this for him, he wanted to survive the apocalypse he was bringing. But then he said he wasn’t supposed to survive. There’s food and water, carbon dioxide scrubbers… he said he could have lived down here, down here for years.”

“I don’t know how you had the strength for this.”

She didn’t speak; she just took my hand and started walking toward the door. I handed Kat my sunglasses. She put them on and then we stepped through the door into the blinding sunlight.

Flash bulbs began to go off and a loud clamor of voices shouted at the same time.

Chen yelled over the din. “I tried to hold them back, Link. I don’t know how they found out. Someone must have used the radios.” He looked at Kat and smiled. “Good to see you again,” he said. Always the master of the understatement.

“You too,” Kat said. “Thank you.” She turned her face away from the cameras.

There had to be at least two-dozen reporters and cameramen gathered around us yelling questions and taking pictures. The police radios were not encrypted and the press loved to listen in to find out what was happening.

One reporter came right up to us, the camera in my face and the microphone in Kat’s. I shoved the cameraman back and reached for the microphone but Kat was one step ahead of me. She took it from the reporter’s hand and swung it back at him, cracking him across the nose. He reeled back in pain and shouted something in French that I’m pretty sure involved him wanting us arrested.

“Well done,” I said.

She tried to smile again. In that moment, her cracked lips were more beautiful than anything I could remember. “He had it coming.”

The rest of the crowd stepped back after that while the Frenchman on the ground held his bloodied nose and cursed in words I fully understood.

“We need to get on the phone to your parents and the kids,” I said. “I don’t want them finding out through the news, even if it does show mommy kicking ass.”

* * *

It was a short-lived reunion as I had expected it to be. The moment I got Kat away from the press we were ushered into a waiting ambulance. There was barely enough room for me to sit in the back while they hooked Kat up to a variety of machines, checked her blood pressure, inspected her eyes, ears and mouth and did all manner of tests. She sat there wrapped in a warm blanket with a half-smile on her face, even as the paramedics poked and prodded.

We didn’t talk much during the ride, it was the silence filled with almost a year’s worth of thoughts we’d been dying to get out but couldn’t find the words for. Words didn’t matter anyway. We were on benches on either side of the ambulance, me sitting and her lying down, holding hands across the gap in the middle. For months that gap had been countries wide, but now, with Kat only an arm’s length away it almost felt greater.

The paramedics kept working as I held her hand and stared into her eyes. Tears fell in unison and I wanted so much to reach across the divide and take her in my arms, but I would’ve also been hugging an older male paramedic. He was kneeling in front of Kat between the benches putting an IV into her frail arm.

She looked so different now, the time had changed her so much. It wasn’t just the physical changes, there was something in her eyes I couldn’t place, something that was neither strong nor weak, broken nor intact. She had been through so much, and the toll it had taken was something I couldn’t even begin to estimate.

Her body had suffered, that much I could see. Her skin was dry and thin, loosely covering the protruding bones and tendons. She had lost a lot of weight, far too much, and was visibly dehydrated. I could feel the ligaments in the back of her hand as I held it in mine. Her hair was greasy and matted at the back, the result of sleeping on it and not being able to brush it out in the morning. What wasn’t matted had lost its shine, an ashen brown compared to the lustrous hair she’d had before.

I looked at her hand and noticed how naked it seemed. It took me a moment to remember that she didn’t have her rings anymore. I rubbed the back of her ring finger and she tried to pull away.

“He took them, Lincoln. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I found them,” I said.

“Really?” Her eyes sparkled. I wasn’t prepared for her reaction. I knew she’d be happy, but it was more than I’d expected. She must have really been missing the rings. I could understand that though; it would have been weird not having them for so long. They could have lent her some comfort if he hadn’t taken them – a symbol of what she was waiting for.

“Yeah, they’re safe but it’s a long story… and it might be a bit before we can get them back. They’re in evidence right now.”

“Where were they? In his apartment.”

I didn’t want to get into it and upset her. I wasn’t even sure she’d want them back once she found out where they’d been. “Yeah,” I said. “He’d hidden them well.”

“I wonder why he took them.”

I just shrugged and went back to rubbing her hand.

When the paramedics were satisfied Kat asked me for my phone. I knew what she wanted to do, and I was behind it one hundred percent, I just wished we could have done it in person rather than over the phone. Time was of the essence and even fifteen minutes had been too long.

I could hear Agnes through the phone. She was exclaiming loudly in Polish, praising God and asking Kat if she was okay. They had already seen the news; it only took minutes before international media had picked up the story.