F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (43 page)

He took a deep breath. All right.
Six or eight hours. Maybe that was time enough for Salinas to do something. His
fat ass was on the line too. What was the name of that motel… ?

Pulling on his jacket, he hurried
down to ground level and out onto Sixth Street. He’d already called
Salinas once today—to give him those phone numbers and frequencies
he’d demanded. Now he was calling again, but this time he wouldn’t
be Salinas’s fucking errand boy.

He chose a different phone from
last time—this one on Maryland Avenue—and scanned the area to make
sure no one was too close. All clear. Only a guy with a soft-pretzel cart
heading for the Mall.

He dropped the quarter, spoke to
someone, then hung up. As he waited for the return call, Dan glanced at the
sky. Another hot one. The pretzel guy was still down the block, fiddling with
his cart. Looked like one of the wheels had jammed. On a day like today
he’d set up shop near the Smithsonian and make out like a
bandit—and probably declare only a small portion of it.

The phone rang.

“Yes?” said
Salinas’s voice.

Dan jumped to the heart of his
message. He didn’t want to spend a second more than necessary on the line
with this toad.

“The woman’s been
located—the Adamston Motel in Tuckerton, New Jersey. They’re
watching her to see who she contacts. If you can do something, better do it
now. Your fate is in your own hands.” And then he hung up.

There. Done. My fate is in your
hands as well, Salinas. Do something, dammit!

And then he stopped. Listen to me.
I want Salinas to kill someone. And if he succeeds, he’ll probably kill
that little girl too. For what? To save my worthless ass. But I did start off
with the right intentions. I got involved for a good reason, a just cause. I
did it for the country, dammit. That should count for something. Maybe it did.
Somewhere. But it did nothing for the cold, sick weight sitting in his chest.

As Dan walked away, the pretzel man
started kicking at his jammed wheel. What a life when the worst thing you had
to deal with was a jammed wheel. For a moment, Dan wished they could trade
places. I’ll push the cart and let him swim this river of shit I’ve
got myself into.

“Was that an Esso sign we
just passed?” Bob Decker said as he drove toward Sooy’s Boot.

“Yeah,” said Canney
from the passenger seat. “It’s like we’ve hit a time
warp.”

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,” Canney said, holding up a pamphlet. “All about
the Pine Barrens. You know it’s as big as Yosemite Park? A million acres
of scrub pine. And we’re in one of its least populated
areas—averages only one person per eight square miles around here. And it
says here there’s places in the pinelands that no human eye has ever
seen. Can you imagine that?”

“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 Canney’s.

“He did?” Canney said.
He looked at Bob and nodded significantly.

Oh, shit. Bob thought. Oh, no.

Canney was peering through the
windshield as he spoke into the phone.

“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 Canney went through a series of
nods and uh-huhs, Bob silently cursed himself. He hadn’t believed it
could possibly be Dan Keane. If he had, he would have come up with better
disinformation—chosen a real motel and watched it in the hope that
whoever Keane was feeding would make a move and reveal themselves, Finally
Canney ended the call.

“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,” Canney said.

“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 Canney. “But discreetly… very
discreetly.” And while Canney called, Bob continued down the road to
Sooy’s Boot, almost hoping that Dan Keane had been forced into this
treachery by a threat to his family rather than a threat to his career.

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?

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 planning to do the
mummy thing with his head and the hooded sweatshirt. But this was better. This
would scare the shit out of those Jersey hillbillies. Scare Poppy too,
he’d bet. He’d let her get a good look at him before he blew her
away.

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.

“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.”

“But what’s
worse,” Gold said, “if they already know Keane is dirty, and can
prove it, how long before they bargain him into revealing who he’s been
talking to?”

“Not long,” Carlos
said. “Not long at all.” He’d already thought of that. In the
course of a single phone call, Señor Daniel Keane had dropped from
valuable asset to dangerous liability. Of course, what could Keane say beyond
the fact that he’d had conversations with Carlos Salinas? And he had no
proof that these alleged conversations ever took place.

But still, he was a liability. As
was MacLaglen. They were the only two people out there who could connect the
name Salinas with the kidnapping and the poisoning of the President. Carlos
Salinas liked to remove liabilities from his balance sheet. MacLaglen was
protected by his tape—but Keane…

“I must think on this,”
Carlos said. “Perhaps we will make one more call to Señor
Keane.”

“Yes, sir,” Decker
said, and held the cellular phone toward him. “It’s for you.”

John stared at the phone.
“Me?” Who’d be calling him out here, in middle of nowhere, in
Decker’s car?

“Yeah. An old friend.”

John took the phone. That could
only mean…

“Johnny. It’s
me.”

“Tom!”

“How are you, buddy?”

How the hell did he think? “I
don’t have Katie yet. But you know that.”

“Yeah, I do. But
they’re closing in. Won’t be long now. A couple of hours and
she’ll be safe home.”

“From your lips to
God’s ear.” John wanted to ask why the call, here, just this side
of noon, in the middle of nowhere. But he didn’t. He let it hang.

Tom cleared his throat.
“John… I’ll be leaving Bethesda in a few minutes.” Even
with the air conditioner running, the summerlike sun had kept the inside of the
car uncomfortably warm.

But now John felt a chill.

“What?”

“I’ve got to, Johnny.
I’ve got to show up at the drug summit tomorrow morning. If I don’t
the whole program will sputter to a halt.”

“But they’ve still got
Katie! You said—”

“She’s as good as back,
John. She—”

“But she’s not back!
We’re in the middle of the woods, Tom—the mother of all goddamn
woods! They could hide her here for days, weeks!”

“You know if I thought there
was the slightest danger to Katie I’d stay right here, but the plot, the
conspiracy, whatever you want to call it, is a bust. This woman who’s got
Katie obviously cares for her and—”

“And no doubt cares for her
own life too! The only thing we know for sure about this Poppy Mulliner is that
she was born in the Jersey sticks, has a criminal record, and was a party to
kidnapping my daughter. The rest is all talk. For all we know she could have
been stringing us along since day one, feeding us a line to help her work out a
deal with whoever she had a falling out with. One guy’s already dead. She
may be bargaining with Katie to save her own ass.”

“John—”

“If you suddenly appear in
public in perfect health, they’ll know they’ve lost. They’ll
do whatever they can to cut their losses, eliminate anything that connects them
to this plot. And Katie’s one of those connections.” He was so
afraid… little Katie in the hands of those soulless animals.
“Please, Tom. I’m begging you. Just one more day. You promised.”

“John…” A long
silence, then: “I’ve got to show up— on time, and in tip-top
shape. You know what they’ve been saying about me: that I’m kicking
my habit, that I’m in rehab, that I’ve had a breakdown… all
rational explanations for my irrational ideas.”