Chase

by Linwood Barclay

  “Come on, people, I need something, anything!”

  Everyone continued clicking and tapping.

  “Why can we not get the tracker activated?” Daggert asked of everyone.

  A man raised his hand. “Working on that, sir.”

  “Watson?” Daggert said, moving to the man’s workstation.

  “Wilkins,” he said. “Trying to reboot remotely is presenting some problems. For a while there, when I thought I was almost about to lock on, I lost the signal. It was almost like the animal had gone into a steel cage or something.”

  “A steel cage?” Daggert said. “What do you mean, a steel cage? What kind of cage?”

  “Not a cage, necessarily. But some kind of enclosure with metal walls that inhibited the signal. I totally lost him, and now I’m having to try again from scratch.”

  “Well stop wasting time talking to me then, and do it!”

  “Yes, sir, of course. I was only—”

  From across the room, a woman removed her headset and shouted, “I’ve got something!”

  All eyes turned on her.

  “What is it?” Daggert demanded.

  “Some emergency chatter,” she said. “Someone made a call to nine-one-one.”

  Daggert knew The Institute’s sophisticated equipment could listen in on police, fire and ambulance transmissions. They could even intercept cell phone calls. They had instructed their surveillance program to listen for key words. Today, there was only one word they had their ears open for.

  Dog.

  “What was the call about?” Daggert demanded.

  “Hang on,” she said. “I’m pulling it up on my screen.”

  She tapped a few buttons until what looked like a small set of controls appeared on her screen. Across the bottom, buttons for play, stop, fast forward, reverse. “What you’re going to hear is an emergency operator, and a woman calling in.” She clicked on play.

  Squiggly lines, representing voices, began to move across the screen.

  OPERATOR: How may I direct your call?

  WOMAN: The dog isn’t breathing!

  OPERATOR: A dog, ma’am?

  WOMAN: (bringing her voice down to a whisper) The bus driver’s giving him mouth-to-mouth right now! I’ve never seen anything like it.

  OPERATOR: What is your location?

  WOMAN: The bus station.

  OPERATOR: Which bus station?

  WOMAN: Canfield!

  OPERATOR: And what exactly happened?

  WOMAN: This dog somehow got trapped in the place under the bus where the luggage goes? And when the driver opened it up, the dog looked like it was dead.

  OPERATOR: And the driver’s trying to revive him now?

  WOMAN: That’s right!

  OPERATOR: I’ll dispatch someone right away.

  The clip ended.

  Daggert said, “That would explain it. The steel cage. The dog was in that cargo hold.” He smiled. He entered a number into the cell phone already in his hand, put the phone to his ear.

  “Bailey?” he said. “Get Crawford and bring the car around.”

  The woman who’d intercepted the emergency call had her headset back on, and was waving her hand in the air. Daggert approached.

  “What?”

  “They’ve arrived on the scene,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “The dog’s gone.”

  Daggert’s teeth ground together. “Find me that bus driver.”

  “This is awesome!” Jeff said. “Unbelievable!”

  When Emily led him into the acres of woods between Flo’s Cabins and Shady Acres Resort, he really wasn’t expecting to see a train station. He thought she had to be telling him a crazy story.

  But there it was.

  Emily’s secret fort really was a train station. In the middle of the forest.

  It was missing, however, the single most important ingredient for any successful train station.

  Tracks.

  There were none. Not only that, there was no platform where the passengers would have waited. The building was propped up on concrete blocks, so you could see right under it.

  In addition to no tracks and no platform, there were no boxcars, no passenger cars, not one caboose and not a single engine.

  But of all the things that were not here, it was the absence of tracks that puzzled Jeff the most. There wasn’t even a straight pathway through the forest where tracks might have once been.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Emily said.

  The station was about twenty by forty feet, built of wood, and had small dormer windows poking out of the sloped, shingled roof. Hanging from below the eaves at one end was a sign that said CANFIELD, the name of the closest town.

  “Where did the tracks go?” Jeff asked.

  “There never were any.”

  “Why does somebody build a train station where there are no train tracks?”

  “They didn’t. It got moved here,” she said. She pointed to an opening in the trees. There was a road, little more than two ruts, heavily overgrown with grass. “They brought it in from the main road that way. The station used to be in town, but years ago they stopped passenger service and ripped up the tracks, so this rich guy bought it and had it moved into the woods here so he could make it into a cottage. But then he died, and the place has just sat here for years.”

  “Doesn’t anybody know about it?”

  Emily shook her head. “Nope. I mean, almost nobody. I found it when I was hiking. I asked my dad about it, and he told me about its history, but hardly anybody comes around here. It’s my own special place. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  Several concrete blocks had been arranged into three steps that led up to the main door. Emily gave it a strong push—it was sitting crooked in the frame, which made sense, since the whole building was listing slightly to one side on the blocks—then took one huge final step to get inside.

  Jeff followed her.

  “Wow,” he said. “This is very cool.”

  The old wooden benches where passengers sat and waited for their trains were still there. So were the ticket windows, and printed schedules on the walls. But the place was a mess! The wallpaper was peeling, there were holes in the walls, bulbs in the lamps shattered. Old, yellowed newspapers were scattered across the floor, and there were marks in the ceiling where rain had seeped through.

  “It’s in pretty bad shape,” Emily conceded. “The animals have gotten into it over the years. Birds have made nests, and—”

  “Holy crap!” Jeff shouted.

  Something had run over his foot.

  “It’s just a squirrel,” Emily said. “You’re a real outdoors person, aren’t you?”

  Jeff turned red with embarrassment. “I just didn’t see it.”

  “And you kind of have to watch your step, because the floor is rotting in places. Like, when we go to the second floor, watch the steps. Some of them are pretty weak.”

  She led him up a narrow stairwell, pointing along the way. “Don’t step on that one, or that one.”

  Jeff was careful to follow in her exact footsteps.

  The upstairs was only a fraction of the size of the first floor. The wall, following the rooflines, angled down, so a person could only stand upright in the middle of the room. There was still plenty of ripped wallpaper and stains in the ceiling, but there was one new thing, too. A big, cushy beanbag chair in the middle of the room. On the floor next to it, a stack of books and magazines and a deck of playing cards.

  “This is my special place,” Emily said. “Where I come to get away.”

  “Get away from what?”

  Emily sighed. Jeff was clearly exhausting her. “Don’t you ever just want to go someplace where no one can find you? So you can think, or read, or just do absolutely nothing?”

  “I guess,” he said. “Living with Aunt Flo, I feel that way every single day.”

  “Right!” she said. “This is that place for me.” She plopped herself down into the beanbag. “This
is my spot.”

  “I’ll be careful not to sit there,” he said.

  “We could look for another chair, and that could be yours.”

  Jeff liked that idea. “Okay.”

  He reached into his pocket for his cell phone to see what time it was. “I really, really have to get back. Aunt Flo is going to be looking for me.”

  “Well, she’d never find you here,” Emily said.

  He grinned. He liked the idea of a place where Aunt Flo couldn’t find him. He just wished there was a place he could go and find his parents.

  Yablonsky was reading the Canfield Examiner and having a cup of coffee in the bus company’s kitchen area when a woman poked her head in and said, “Gus, there’s some people here to see you.”

  The driver put down the paper. “TV people?”

  He figured that video one of his passengers posted of him saving the dog’s life would eventually draw the attention of the media. He wasn’t hoping for it. Just expecting it. He didn’t want any attention for breathing life into that mutt. His only regret was that the dog hadn’t hung around so that he could try to locate its owner.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “They don’t look like TV people, but—”

  Three people pushed past her and entered the room, the lead person flanked by another man and woman. Everyone dressed in black. The men were in suits, and woman in black slacks, blouse and jacket.

  “You Gus Yablonsky?” the man in the middle asked.

  Gus took another sip of his coffee. “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Daggert,” he said.

  “And these two?”

  The woman said, “I’m Bailey.” She pointed a thumb at the other man. “This is Crawford.”

  “Mr. Daggert, Ms. Bailey, Mr. Crawford—I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I am, as you surmised, Gus Yablonsky.”

  “We want to know about the dog.”

  Gus tipped his head to one side, sized up his visitors. “Where are the cameras? Aren’t you from the TV station?”

  “We’re not from the TV station,” Daggert said. “We want to know your involvement with the dog.”

  “Involvement?”

  “You enabled its escape.”

  “Escape?” Gus shook his head and stood up. “Look, Mr. Daggert, I found the mutt in the cargo hold. He was nearly dead. I got him breathing again and he took off. End of story.”

  Daggert’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you hold onto him?”

  “I wanted to. But he got away.”

  “Did someone take him from you?”

  Gus blinked. “Huh?”

  “Was it all worked out ahead of time?” Daggert asked. “Did you tell someone you’d be bringing the dog to the station? Was someone waiting for you and the dog to arrive?”

  Gus said, again, “Huh?”

  “Are you really this stupid, Mr. Yablonsky, or is someone paying you to act dumb?”

  “Mister, have you been smoking something funny? Because you’re not making any sense at all.”

  Daggert gave a nod to Bailey and Crawford. They closed in on Yablonsky, grabbed him under the arms, dragged him across the room and pinned him against the wall.

  Bailey produced a device in her free hand. Not a gun, but something with what looked like pincers on the end. She pressed a button, and a bolt of electricity crackled between the two points. A stun gun.

  “Close the door, Crawford,” Daggert said.

  “Whoa!” said Gus. “Hang on!”

  Daggert approached, his face an inch away from the bus driver’s. “I’m going to ask you again. Who are you working for? If I don’t believe you, Bailey here will turn you into a light bulb. Now, who do you work for?”

  “The Simpson Bus Company! I’ve worked here twenty-three years!”

  Daggert pursed his lips, nodded at the woman. She released her grip on Yablonsky, hit a button on the weapon, and touched it to the man’s stomach. It made a sound like a bug wandering into a zapper.

  “Aggghhhh!” he shouted.

  The man slid down the wall and crumpled onto the floor.

  “One more time,” Daggert said. “Who do you really work for?”

  “I’m telling you the truth! The Simpson Bus Company!”

  Daggert looked deeply into the man’s eyes. “You know what? I think I believe you.”

  “It’s true! It’s true!”

  “Do you know where the dog went?”

  “He just ran away! Well, he came back just for a second.”

  “He came back? Why?”

  “To lick me,” Gus said.

  “To lick you?”

  “He wanted to thank me.”

  Daggert considered that bit of information for a moment. “Interesting,” he said. “Did the dog try to communicate with you in any other way?”

  “Communicate?”

  Daggert sighed impatiently. “Yes, communicate. Do you not understand me?”

  “Like I said, he licked me. Is that communicating?”

  “Nothing else?”

  Now it was Gus who was becoming exasperated. “Like what?”

  Daggert shrugged. “A series of eye blinks or tapping of paws, for example? Did he show you his port so that you could link with him? Did the dog in any way attempt to speak to you?”

  Gus, eyes wide with disbelief, said, “Seriously, what have you been smoking?”

  Daggert let out a long breath. “He knows nothing,” he said to Bailey and Crawford. To Bailey, he said, “Give it to him one more time, but set it to amnesia.”

  Before Bailey zapped him again, she said, “You’re gonna lose an hour, you’ll never know we were even here. You’ll have one hell of a headache, but at least you’ll be alive.”

  “Who are you people?” Gus Yablonsky asked. “Who do you work for? Who asks if a dog has communicated with them?”

  Bailey smiled before she touched the stun gun to the bus driver’s arm. His eyes rolled up into his head and he slid down to the floor.

  When he’d first escaped The Institute, all Chipper had worried about was getting away. But now that he was many miles away, and off that bus—Oh, that wonderful driver!—the dog could assess his next step with more deliberation.

  That meant getting his bearings.

  He had made it to Canfield, which was good. Not only was it the only place he wanted to go to, he felt it was the place he had to go. Once he’d fled the bus station, gotten outside the small town of Canfield and into the shelter of a wooded area, Chipper stopped. He needed to rest and give his lungs a chance to recover from being filled with exhaust.

  It didn’t matter how much technology the White Coats had built into him, Chipper still needed good old air to survive.

  He settled into the leafy, forest floor, resting his head on his paws. Almost immediately, he spotted a squirrel running down one tree, across the ground, and up another.

  Chipper could not be bothered to give chase. That’s how tired he was.

  But the squirrel sighting reminded Chipper that it had been a long time since he’d had anything to eat. Or drink. A squirrel might make a tasty snack, but he wasn’t sure he had the strength or the speed to catch one.

  Chipper’s long jaw widened in a yawn. He eased his body onto its side into a pile of leaves and allowed himself to go to sleep.

  And sleep he did. Right through the night.

  He woke twice to almost total darkness. Not the kind of pitch-black darkness he’d experienced in the bus luggage compartment, where he couldn’t see anything at all. This darkness was filled with gentle light. The star-filled night sky allowed him to take in his surroundings. He heard crickets, the scurrying of mice, an owl’s hoot.

  The sounds did not frighten Chipper. They comforted him. They were more reassuring than the sounds of The Institute. The laboured breathing of his fellow captives. The soft whir of the air conditioning. The tap-tap-tapping of computer keyboards.

  It was neither sunlight nor sounds that woke him the next day.
<
br />   It was the smell of something delicious.

  Chipper opened his eyes, consulted his implanted clock. It was 11:09 a.m. He put his snout into the air, tracked the direction from which the smell had come.

  East.

  With some effort, he stood. He still did not feel right. Wobbly. That exhaust had really done a number on him.

  But he was hungry. He put one paw in front of the other and followed the scent. It led him out of the woods to the back yards of a string of houses in a subdivision outside Canfield. Chipper saw swing sets and sandboxes and gardens. One yard, with a pool, was fenced off. The folks in the house next to it had a small plastic one, about four feet wide, that held barely a foot of water. Only a low hedge separated their garden from the woods.

  A great place to get a drink.

  But that yard offered something even better.

  A barbecue. The lid was open, and Chipper could see something on the grill, sizzling.

  A man emerged from a sliding glass door and walked over to the grill and flipped over whatever was on it. Then he went back into the house.

  That was when Chipper made his move.

  Swiftly, he emerged from the woods and vaulted the hedge. The first thing he had to do was quench his thirst, and the kiddie pool was like the biggest dog bowl in the world. Chipper dropped his snout into it and furiously lapped up water.

  His plan had been to check out the barbecue next, but when he heard the glass door slide open, he crouched low behind the pool. The man was back with an empty plate in his hand. With a set of tongs, he took three hot dogs from the grill and put them on the plate.

  He put the plate on the shelf next to the barbecue, went back into the house and shouted, “Where are the buns?”

  Chipper went into action.

  He came out from his hiding spot behind the pool, rose up on his hind legs, turned his snout sideways and snatched two of the three wieners from the plate. He dropped back down to all fours and ran.

  The door opened again.

  “Hey! Hey! Come back here!”

  Chipper did not go back.

  The wieners were delicious. Chipper was thinking they might just be the most delicious things he had ever eaten.