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3
“Was that an Esso sign we just passed?” Bob Decker said as he drove toward Sooy’s Boot.
“Yeah,” said Ca
Some kind of warp, Decker thought. A Pine Barrens town seemed to consist of a gas pump, a canoe rental place, and half a dozen plywood boxes on cement slabs that they called homes. Here they were on a county road with no shoulder and only an occasional isolated house, usually with a sign offering decoys for sale. A graveyard tended to have half a dozen headstones and no more. He saw lots of signs for rod and gun clubs, hunting clubs, even a muzzle-loaders club. He got the feeling there might be more guns per capita here than anywhere else in the country.
Bob glanced in the rearview mirror at Vanduyne in the big rear seat of the rented Buick Roadmaster. He’d said little since they’d picked him up for breakfast an hour ago. He looked terrible—pale face, sunken eyes, sloppy shaving job, wrinkled clothes.
“I picked this up by the registration desk,” Ca
“Seems hopeless,” Vanduyne said from the back, finally showing signs of life.
“That’s why we need those helicopters,” Bob said.
“You think they’ll help?”
“They can cover a helluva lot more ground than we can. They’ll start their search pattern from Sooy’s Boot and move outward. They’ll call in anything that looks remotely like a red panel truck, and we’ll check it out from the ground. We’ll—”
A cell phone chirped. Decker checked to see if it was his but it turned out to be Ca
“He did?” Ca
Oh, shit. Bob thought. Oh, no.
Ca
“Wait. Let me get to a pay phone and—” He glanced out at the woods and shook his head.
“What am I—crazy? All right. Give me the barest details and no names. This is a cell phone, remember.”
As Ca
“All right,” Bob said, knowing what was coming. “Give it to me.”
“It’s him, all right. We have these vendor carts rigged with minicams and parabolic mikes. One of them got within a hundred feet of him at a pay phone. That was close enough. We don’t know who he called but we know he mentioned Tuckerton and the Adamston Motel.”
“Aw, no.” Bob felt sick. Dan Keane… what on earth could have possessed him? “There’s got to be an explanation.”
“What’s wrong?” Vanduyne said.
“Nothing,” Ca
“Might as well tell him,” Bob said. “We found our leak.”
Vanduyne was leaning forward now. “Son of a bitch! Who is he?”
“That’s not for publication.”
“I’ve got a right to know! I’d have Katie back by now if it wasn’t for him. The bastard almost had her killed!”
“And you almost killed the President!” Bob said, flaring.
“They had my daughter.”
“And how do you know they don’t have this man’s wife? Or one of his grandkids?”
Vanduyne leaned back again, slowly. “If they do, then my heart goes out to him. There’s nothing… absolutely nothing worse than having the life of someone you love hinge on your doing something vile.”
“Have your people check that out,” Bob told Ca
And yet—the prospect of all those billions in appropriations being diverted from your agency to another… who knew what that could do to a man?
4
Snake finished reprogramming the third cell phone and stretched.
All set.
His head and eye still hurt, but not so bad this morning. He was a long way from feeling good, but the dizziness seemed to have receded, and the pills were managing the pain better.
He went to the bathroom to check himself out. After going on his electronics shopping spree last night, he’d removed all his bandages except the eye patch, and had slept that way. Turned out to have been a good move. His scalp lacerations had dried out; some crusting remained around the sutures, but in general they looked pretty clean.
He peeled off the eye patch and studied himself in the mirror. Pretty fucking frightening. With his half-shaven head, the crisscrossing stitches, and his ruined right eye, he looked like the Terminator after a bad day.
And he liked it.
Not that he wanted to look like this for the rest of his life, but it just might come in handy today.
He’d been pla
He buttoned up a denim shirt. Over his right eye he gently fitted the black eye patch he’d bought last night. And over that he slipped a pair of superdark sunglasses.
Humming the riff from “Bad to the Bone,” he began to gather his equipment.
Time to hit the road.
5
“That is impossible,” Carlos Salinas said. “It must be a new motel that is not listed yet.”
“I’m telling you the place doesn’t exist!” Alien Gold was flushed and sweaty as he stood on the far side of Carlos’s desk, the phone in his hand. “I’ve called information and there’s no listing—new or old—for an Adamston Motel in Tuckerton or anywhere else in Ocean County, or in any of the counties around it. I even called the Tuckerton town hall and they’ve never heard of the Adamston Hotel. You know what this means, don’t you?”
Carlos knew exactly what it meant. “Mierda!”
“Right. Deep mierda! They’re onto us!”
“Perhaps,” Carlos said, keeping cool on the outside and trying to stay equally cool inside. Now was not the time to panic. Not yet. “And perhaps not. It means for certain that they are onto Senor Keane. This false information may be a lure to trick us into revealing ourselves.”
“I say we get out of here,” Gold said, breathing like he had just run up half a dozen flights of stairs. “Pack up shop and git!”
Carlos was tempted. His survival instincts urged him to run, but his paisa upbringing held him back. Do you flee your burning house if there is a chance you can put out the fire? Of course not. He had worked too long and hard to reach his present position. He would not abandon it so quickly.
“Not quite so fast. Alien. We are in no danger.”
“The hell we aren’t!”
“Think a moment. They do not know who we are, otherwise they would not have tried so clumsy a trick. This was not meant to lure us into the open—we would naturally check on the exact location of this motel before doing anything. No, my young friend, the more I think about it, the more I am sure that this was set up to confirm their suspicions about Señor Keane.”
Gold did not seem soothed by this. “Okay, so we’re not in the fire yet. But we’re still in the frying pan. If they suspect Keane, it means we can’t trust anything we get from him.”
“That is obvious. We will accept no further calls from him.”