F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (45 page)

Very lost.

Bob hid his own unease and
frustration and tried to sound upbeat when he replied.

“Not true. We’ve
covered a lot of ground, spoken to a lot of Mulliners—”

“But the afternoon’s
half gone and we still haven’t got a clue to her whereabouts.”

“We know where she’s
not. We—”

“You said we’d find her
today. Bob. Be honest: Do you still believe that?”

Truthfully, the chances were
dwindling with each passing hour. But that didn’t mean it still
couldn’t happen.

“We’ve still got lots
of light left.” How was that for a nonanswer?

“I’m not so sure of
that,” Vanduyne said, craning his neck and pointing past Decker.
“See those clouds? They’re thunderheads. We’ve got a storm
coming. And it looks like a big one.” Bob glanced left at the massing
clouds that had indeed taken control of most of the western sky. They’d
started out white and billowy but turned dark and ominous after swallowing the
sun.

Yeah. A storm would be a problem.

“I’ll call Canney and
see how he’s doing,” Decker said. The FBI man had split off to
cover another area with a fellow FBI agent. “Maybe he’s
onto—”

Suddenly a staticky squawk filled
the car. “SSD, do you read? SSD, this is Search One.”

Bob grabbed the transceiver.
“Got you Search One. What’ve you got?”

“We’ve got a vehicle
similar to the object vehicle in sight below.” Since this was an open
channel, and God knew who else was listening, “object vehicle” was
the code they’d chosen for a red panel truck.

“Parked or on the
move?”

“It’s stationary. Parked
in a small clearing with four or five other vehicles… downhill from a
very strange looking house.”

“Great. Where are you?”

“Over deep woods about five
klicks southeast of Sooy’s Boot. At thirty-eight degrees, forty-six
minutes north, seventy-four degrees, thirty-three minutes west, to be exact.”

Bob glanced at Vanduyne who’d
been acting as navigator all day. “That any help?”

Vanduyne shook his head and pointed
to an area of the local map that was mostly empty green. “There’s
nothing there—not even a road.”

“How do I get there. Search
One?”

“Well, we’ve got a road
in sight, but it’s not on any of our maps. The only way you’ll get
here is to have someone lead you, and I guess that’ll be us. Give us your
present location and we’ll find you. You can follow us here.”

“We’re lost. Search
One.”

Vanduyne was looking at the map
again. “Tell him we’re somewhere south of 532 and west of
563.”

“We copy,” the
transceiver said. “Find a clearing and get ready to wave a shirt or
something. We’ll be overhead soon.”

“I think this is it,”
Vanduyne said, still staring at the map. He seemed transformed, as if someone
had hooked him up to a wire and was pumping juice into him. “I can feel
it.”

“Don’t get your hopes
up. Got to be a lot of red panel trucks out here.”

Vanduyne shook his head.
“We’ve only spotted three all day, and all of them were sitting out
on the street. This is the first one tucked away deep in the woods.
That’s Poppy’s truck. I know it. We’re going to find
Katie.”

“If I may quote you from
earlier: From your lips to God’s ear.” He slapped his hand against
the dashboard as he thought of something. “You know what we could use
right now? A GPS unit. Damn! Why didn’t I think to bring one?”

“What’s that?”

“A global positioning system.
It would tell us exactly where we are.”

Vanduyne shrugged. “As long
as we’ve got the helicopter to follow, we don’t need it.”

Yeah, Bob thought, but I should
have thought of it. Never even crossed my mind. But Vanduyne was right. The
helicopter would get them there. Besides, no one could think of everything.

Snake pulled his Jeep off 563 in a
tiny place called Jenkins. He attached the suction cup of the GPS antenna to
his roof, then got back in and fired up his laptop. The GPS card was already
snapped into the PCMCIA slot. The grid appeared. He tapped a few keys and
waited for the program to pick up the signals from the satellites miles above,
run a triangulation on them, and pinpoint his exact position on the earth.

Snake loved this: Using the
Department of Defense’s thirteen billion dollar satellite system to
outmaneuver its fellow federal agencies.

The laptop beeped softly as a
blinking dot appeared in the center of the grid next to the coordinates.

“Okay,” he said aloud.
“There’s me. Now let’s see how far it is to this ‘object
vehicle’.”

Snake punched in the coordinates
he’d copied from the copter conversation he’d monitored on his VHP
transceiver. A few seconds later his dot jumped to the lower left of the screen
as a blinking star appeared in the upper right. The readout said: 17.2
km—43 NE. Not far at all. About seven miles… as the crow flies.

But out here, that might mean
fifteen, twenty, thirty miles by road—if you could find the roads. His
software had the capacity to link him up to a street map and lead him to his destination—but
no software developer in the universe offered a package on the pinelands. Too
bad his GPS program couldn’t download a satellite photo of the area.

Maybe next year.

But he had the next best thing:
He’d scanned a sectional map of Central Jersey into his hard drive. He
fixed his blinking dot on the town of Jenkins, entered the scale, and
voila!—he was in business.

Now he had to find a way to get his
dot to that blinking star in the middle of nowhere before the feds. The
‘object vehicle’ might not be Poppy’s truck, but he
couldn’t risk sitting here and doing nothing.

He heard a deep rumble and glanced
at the sky. Thunder. That storm was coming on fast. He threw the Jeep into gear
and started moving. Not quite as good as having a helicopter to follow, but at
least he’d know when he was heading in the right direction and when he
wasn’t. And he’d be approaching the spot from the opposite
direction. Maybe he was already closer than the feds. And who knew? Maybe the
storm would help him get there first.

As he drove he passed through an
area of burned-out trees. Lightning? A careless camper? Whatever, it looked
like there’d been a helluva fire here. All the trunks had been scorched
coal black, the smaller branches seared right off. But the trees weren’t
dead. Every trunk had little branchlets forcing their way through the charred
crust of the bark and sprouting new bright-green needles. Can’t kill
these damn things, he thought. Then he grinned. Maybe this is a good place for
me. I like these pines. No matter what you do to them, they keep coming back.
I’m just like your pines. Poppy. You can’t kill me, can’t
stop me. I keep coming. And I’m coming for you, bitch.

Dan Keane stared out his office
window, wondering why he hadn’t heard anything from Decker since this
morning. He checked his watch. A little after three already. Had anything
happened at that motel in Tuckerton? Should he call? Would that make him appear
too interested?

But how could you appear too
interested in something like this? Yes, he should call. He was useless here,
otherwise. Couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think about anything else.

But as he reached for the phone,
his intercom buzzed. That might be Decker now. He hit the button.

“Yes?”

“A restaurant just
called,” his secretary said.

“A restaurant?”

“Yes. Very rude. Said you
were supposed to call them about confirming a reservation. Il Gia-something.
They hung up before I could get the name straight.”

Dan stiffened. Salinas’s
place. Calling here? Oh, Lord. It could only be bad news.

“I know the place.”

“Want me to—?”

“No, thanks. I’ll take
care of it later. Hold my calls, Thelma. I’m going out for a short
walk.”

The heat on Sixth Street hit him as
soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk. Like summer. He peeled off his wool suit
coat and went searching for a phone.

Wild thoughts danced around him as
he walked. What could Salinas possibly have to tell him? What was so important
that he risked a call to the DEA offices?

He spotted a phone at the corner by
NASA and picked up his pace toward it. As he fished for a quarter, he made his
usual survey of the area to make sure no one was too close. Pretty clear. Not
even a pretzel cart this time. Just a bicycle messenger speeding along in his
direction. No problem there. Those guys could really move. He’d be past
before Dan finished dialing. He found the quarter and plunked it into the slot.
As he waited for it to register, he glanced around again. The bike messenger
was almost on top of him—racing helmet, dark sports glasses, skin-tight
bicycle pants and top, riding a slim French street bike. But he seemed to have
lost speed. As Dan watched, he pulled something metallic from his messenger
pouch. It was pointed at him before he recognized it as a silenced automatic.
He saw the tiny muzzle flashes light the dark hole of the silencer bore.

Before he could move, before he
could scream, he felt the slugs hit him. No piercing pain—more like
iron-fisted punches to his chest and abdomen, exploding through his back,
lifting him off the ground and hurling him backward. He saw the intense blue of
the sky for an instant, and then it, the street, the city, the world all dimmed
and went away,

“Move, you son of a bitch!
Move!” John Vanduyne felt as if his shoulder was about to pull out of the
socket, but he wouldn’t back off.

Lightning flashed as he dug his
feet into the sand and leaned everything he had against the Roadmaster’s
rear fender. The tire spun, kicking up sand that was picked up by the rising
wind and swirled into his face. Damn rearwheel drives, anyway! Why the hell was
anyone still making them?

He squeezed his eyes shut and
pushed harder. The car rocked forward, the tire rising halfway out of the hole
it had dug for itself.

“Keep going!” he
shouted to Decker over the thunder and the whine of the engine.
“We’re almost there!

We’re—“ But then
the car began to slip backward, and nothing he could do could keep it from
sinking back into the sand.

John leaned against the bumper and
pounded his fist on the trunk. He wanted to scream.

They’d been doing so well,
making good time following the helicopter along the pair of sandy ruts that
passed for a road out here when suddenly they’d rounded a corner and
found a deer standing in their path. Decker’d slammed on the brakes, the
deer bolted into the brush, and they hadn’t moved an inch since.

And now it began to rain—huge
drops splattering the car and his head and back. John looked at the gray,
lowering sky and wondered how things could get worse. A slashing bolt of lightning
gave him an answer of sorts, so he stumbled to the passenger door and dropped
into the seat.

Decker was on the hand-held
transceiver. “All right, Special One. Safe home. And thanks.” John
knew who he was talking to: the helicopter.

“They’ve
leaving?”

Decker nodded. “Heading back
to base. This weather’s getting too heavy for them.” John nodded
silently. He’d been expecting that.

“Hey,” Decker said,
“they hung on as long as they could—maybe longer than they should
have. I hope they don’t have trouble getting back to Lakehurst.”

“I know. It’s
just—”

The sky opened up then and the rain
dropped in sheets.

“Hang in there,” Decker
said. “We’re close. The rain ought to thicken up the sand and help
us get out of this hole. As soon as it stops, we’ll get moving again.”

“But where? We’ll have
to wait for the copter to—”

“No. They gave me directions.
There’s a smaller road that cuts off to the right about half a mile ahead
of us here. We take that for about a mile or so and look for another trail off
to the right. The truck’s in there.”

The rain increased, bringing
visibility down to zero. The pines disappeared. With the deafening tattoo on
the car roof and the incessant roar of the thunder, they could have been
sitting under Niagara Falls.

The world constricted to John and
Decker and the car.

Snake smiled as he clicked off his
transceiver—he wouldn’t need that any more. He continued to inch
through the rain. He wasn’t making much progress, but he was doing a
thousand percent better than Vanduyne and his fed buddies. Mired in sand and no
flyboys to lead them even if they got out. What a shame.

Snake realized he might be in the
exact same spot as those two if not for his Jeep’s four-wheel drive. He
checked his laptop again and saw that he was closer than ever. The GPS program
told him that the blinking star of his destination was somewhere about a klick
and a half to his left.

He shook his head in wonder at the
irony of using all this high-tech equipment to search what had to be one of the
low-tech capitals of the country. He peered through the rain. Had to go slow
here, look for a road, a path, a deer trail, anything that led off to the left.
Damn near dark as night outside. Hard enough to see under these conditions with
both eyes, but when you had only one…

And then he spotted something out
his near side window and slammed on the brakes. He wiped away the condensation
and peered through the downpour.

Two ruts in the sand, leading
leftward. Good thing his wrecked eye was on the right and the lightning had
flashed at the right moment, otherwise he’d have gone right past it.

Grinning, he backed up, then turned
onto the path. Almost there. Poppy-bitch. Hope you’re enjoying your last
hours on Earth.