Chase

by Linwood Barclay

  They know I am in this area.

  “Holy crap,” Jeff said.

  Emily said, “Okay, I found the GPS thingamabob, and I’ve turned it off. It didn’t look like it was working, but now it’s not going to come back on. And there’s this thing called ‘video link’ that’s kind of flashing on and off like it’s trying to work.”

  Jeff leaned in close to Chipper, nose to nose. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, looking into his eyes. “We’re going to protect you.”

  Chipper wasn’t so sure, but he did not want to tell them that. At that moment, he felt his right eye do something. He knew, immediately, what was happening. He wanted to close his eye, to close off the view, but his internal workings wouldn’t allow it. But he was pretty sure Emily could do it if she just clicked the right things.

  To Jeff, the eye seemed to twinkle. There was a spark, and then it was gone. He stepped back and looked again at the screen to see what Emily was up to.

  “Okay,” Emily said, “I just killed the video link. Now there’s something here labelled ‘base connect.’ Let me just see…”

  Turn off!

  “Chipper says turn that off,” Jeff said.

  “I can see the screen, Jeff.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.”

  “I think all the things that connect him to anybody else have been disengaged,” Emily said.

  Jeff breathed a sigh of relief. “I want to try to do something here,” Emily said. “I can’t haul a laptop everywhere, but we want to know what he’s saying. I think I can configure this so what he says will show up on my phone, and I won’t need a wire.”

  Great idea!

  “And I’ve got a phone back at the camp, too,” Jeff said. “Can we set up mine, too?”

  Emily nodded. “I think so.”

  “What I figure I should do,” Jeff said, “is get that trash out of the truck, go back and come up with some kind of story for my aunt, then get my phone and get back here.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Emily said.

  To Chipper, he said, “I guess you heard all that. So I’ll be back as soon as I can. But I have a question for you.”

  Chipper looked at the boy expectantly.

  “If these white coat guys who are looking for you—if they find you, and they find you with me and Emily, will we be in a lot of trouble?”

  Chipper took a moment.

  Not for long.

  The big, black shiny SUV with deeply tinted windows came tearing up the gravel road that led into the dumpsite. It looked more like something that would be used for chauffeuring celebrities or government officials, not hauling bags of broken eggshells and dirty diapers and coffee grounds.

  And, in fact, it was not hauling anything like that.

  The SUV came to a stop, stirring up dust, and the driver’s door opened. Daggert got out. Even with the sunglasses on, he made a visor of his hand to scan his surroundings.

  He was looking for movement. Maybe a tail sticking up from behind a bag of trash.

  Daggert wasn’t about to get his own hands dirty. Or his beautifully polished black shoes, for that matter. So he looked into the SUV and shouted, “Let’s go!”

  He had no problem sending Bailey and Crawford to traipse through the garbage looking for that dog. For now, this was still the best lead he had. Watkins or Wilkins or whatever his name was had detected the dog in this area, and there’d been no new information since to lead Daggert anywhere else.

  Bailey and Crawford got out of the vehicle and approached their boss. “Yes?” said Crawford.

  Daggert pointed directly at the heaps of smelly, disgusting garbage. “Start looking.”

  “In there?” Bailey asked.

  Daggert gave her a look that did not invite further objection. His two assistants reluctantly waded into the garbage, tiptoeing, even though they were wearing shoes, as if that would somehow protect them.

  Daggert stood by the SUV, driver door open, his cell phone resting on the top of the dash by the steering wheel. After five minutes he called out, “Anything?”

  Bailey’s blond head appeared from behind a mountain of trash. She looked like she might throw up. “A rat just tried to run up my pant leg,” she said.

  Crawford, about forty feet away, stepping delicately around green bags that had been ripped open by seagulls, turned Daggert’s way and shouted, “I don’t see any dog around here at all.”

  “It’s a big dump,” Daggert said. “If he’s here, and has seen us, he might be hiding. Start looking under some of that stuff.”

  Bailey and Crawford stared at Daggert with a mix of disgust and disbelief. When they’d signed on to do the kind of nasty work that secret organizations demanded, they hadn’t imagined they’d have to pick through stinky, gooey, disgusting garbage.

  Daggert heard a vehicle approach and turned around.

  A pickup truck was coming down the dirt road that led in from the gravel one. The truck was, not surprisingly, loaded down with trash cans. It drove up close to the pit, spun around, then backed up to it, all about twenty feet away from the black SUV. Daggert noticed some writing on the door.

  Flo’s Cabins.

  The driver’s door of the truck opened and a kid got out. Didn’t look old enough to drive, Daggert thought.

  The kid glanced over at Daggert briefly. Daggert had to admit to himself that he must have looked out of place. The boy hopped into the cargo bed and began upending the cans to let the trash spill out. When he spotted the well-dressed Bailey and Crawford wandering through the mounds of garbage, he did a double take.

  Daggert could remember back to when he was a kid himself. He and his friends would go to a local dump to shoot rats. Sometimes they’d even find the odd treasure. Stuff that was perfectly good that people didn’t need any more and couldn’t be bothered to try to sell. A bicycle one time, a boxful of old Playboy magazines another.

  When Daggert thought the kid had been scoping out his associates for a few seconds too long, he called over to him and said, “You got a problem?”

  The boy’s head turned. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, you got a problem?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “I just…I was just looking at those people. Are they with you?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll mind my own business.” The boy went back to emptying trash barrels.

  “Good idea,” Daggert said. “You even old enough to drive?”

  The kid banged the can on the edge of the tailgate in a bid to free some stubborn trash stuck to the bottom. He turned to Daggert and said, “I guess. I mean, I drove here.”

  “Oh, so you’re a smartass. You got a driver’s license?”

  The kid held the man’s gaze. “No, sir, I do not. I’m just trying to help my aunt run her business as best I can. If you want to arrest me, you won’t be hurting me. You’ll be hurting her.”

  “I’m not going to arrest you. Do I look like a cop to you?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Cops around here have big SUVs like this?” Daggert tucked his thumbs under his lapels. “They dress like this?”

  “I guess not.”

  Bailey, unaware that her boss was in the middle of a conversation, shouted, “Still no dog!”

  “Same here!” said Crawford.

  The boy blinked a couple of times. He swallowed, hard, and then asked, “You lose your dog?”

  “Yeah,” Daggert said slowly. “You seen a dog on the loose around here?”

  The boy shook his head from side to side quickly. “No,” he said immediately.

  “What, you’ve never seen a single dog running around here?” Daggert said. “Would seem to me that a dog running around a place like this would be a pretty common occurrence.”

  “I thought you meant, like, lately,” the boy said. “I haven’t seen any dog running around here lately.” He paused, then added, “My aunt hates dogs. She won’t let me have one.”

  “She sounds like
a nice lady,” Daggert said. He nodded at the words stenciled on the truck door. “So, Flo is your aunt?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said.

  Daggert focused on the truck a moment longer. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” the boy replied.

  “On the side of your truck. Looks like blood.”

  The boy craned his neck over the side. “Oh, yeah. Uh, I think some raccoons got into a fight in the truck the other night and one of them got hurt pretty bad.”

  “Huh,” said Daggert.

  The kid had one can left to go. He tossed an empty one back towards the cab window, grabbed the last can and hurriedly balanced it on the top of the tailgate and tipped. Even before all the trash had slid out, he put the can back into position, jumped out of the bed, and got back behind the wheel.

  He didn’t look at Daggert as he turned the ignition and drove away.

  “Stupid kid,” Daggert said under his breath.

  Bailey and Crawford trudged back to the SUV. Bailey said, “Check with them again, see if they’ve got another fix on the dog. He’s not in there. And even if he is, he’s hid himself so well we’ll never find him. At least not without help from the office. They’ve got to try and reconnect again.” She looked down at her feet. “And I’d just like to say, I have ruined a three-hundred-dollar pair of shoes.”

  “I’m gonna have to burn my suit,” Crawford said.

  “Ah, that’s sad,” Daggert said. “Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with Bailey. We’re not getting anywhere here. Let me make a call and—”

  His hand was six inches from the phone when it started to buzz. Daggert snatched it off the dash and put it to his ear.

  “I was just going to get in touch. We need you to—”

  “Daggert, shut up.”

  It was the voice of Madam Director. Daggert shut up.

  “We may have something,” she said. “I’m going to send you a picture. It’s not a very good one, but I want you to look at it anyway.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I’m sending it to your car screen,” she said.

  “One second,” Daggert said. He got behind the wheel and tapped a couple of buttons, bringing to life a tablet-size screen embedded in the dash. “Ready.”

  Madam Director could be heard talking to someone else. “He’s ready. Send it.”

  Daggert kept his eyes on the screen. Suddenly, an image appeared.

  “What the…?” said Daggert. “It’s an eye. Why are you sending me a picture of an eye?”

  “Take a closer look,” Madam Director said.

  “Okay, it’s more than just an eye. There’s an ear and part of a nose and an eyebrow. So it’s not just an eye, it’s part of a face. Where did this come from?”

  “From the dog,” Madam Director said.

  Daggert immediately understood. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got a picture of somebody looking into the dog’s face. How is that supposed to help me? I can’t see any surroundings, anything that would tell me where this was taken.”

  “I can tell you when it was taken. It was in the last hour.”

  “I can’t tell for sure,” Daggert said, “but it doesn’t look like an adult. That looks like a kid.”

  “I agree,” Madam Director said. “I think it looks like a boy.”

  “Yeah, I think maybe—”

  Daggert stopped himself in mid-sentence. He studied the image more closely.

  “Daggert, are you there?”

  He kept staring at the screen, even reached out and touched it with the tips of his fingers.

  “Daggert!”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to see if Flo has any cabins available to rent.”

  “What are you talking about? Who’s Flo? Why do you want to rent a—”

  But Daggert had already ended the call.

  Emily was attempting to establish a link between Chipper and her phone so that the laptop would no longer be needed when having conversations. Chipper watched her intently, wagging his tail encouragingly. He wondered whether she was going to figure this out. She was very smart, no doubt about it, and if she were older, she had the brains to work at The Institute. They could use more nice people like her, he thought.

  But if she was going to figure out how to talk with him using her phone, she needed to hurry up. Who knew how much time they had before the White Coats found him?

  As Emily struggled with the laptop, words suddenly appeared on the screen.

  Need help?

  Emily looked at Chipper, and said, “Seriously? You know how to synch a phone to your little computer brain?”

  I know lots of things. Ask me anything.

  Emily blinked. “You gotta be kidding me. What are you? A flea-bitten Siri?”

  I do not have fleas.

  “Okay, sorry, didn’t mean to offend you,” Emily said. “All right, what’s the capital of Rhode Island?”

  Providence.

  “Hmm,” Emily said. “Maybe that was too easy. Let me think. Okay, I got it. Here’s a great trivia question. What do you call this?” She touched her finger to the small indentation under her nose and above the middle of her upper lip.

  Philtrum.

  Emily stared at Chipper. “You’re freaking me out.”

  Need help?

  “Back to that, are we?”

  Just asking.

  “Fine, how do I do this?”

  Go into Settings and click on Synching Auxiliary Device.

  “Okay, I’m there. Now what?”

  Chipper led her through several steps. Finally, holding her phone and looking at the screen, she said, “I think I’ve got it. Say something.”

  I like to chase squirrels.

  “Yes!” she said, grinning as the words appeared on the phone. “It works!” But her grin quickly faded. “So I get this working and you just want to talk about squirrels?”

  No. I have other things on my mind. But it is true that I like to chase squirrels. Are there squirrels in these woods?

  “Yes,” Emily said matter-of-factly. “There are a lot of squirrels in these woods. There are hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They’re all over the place.”

  Okay.

  “Do you think that’s the most important thing we have to deal with right now?” Emily asked.

  No.

  Emily shook her head. “This is like something out of a science fiction movie. Mixing up a dog and a computer. I mean, why would anyone even do that? What’s the point? It must have cost millions to do what they did to you. Why? So you can open your own can of dog food?”

  I would have been sent on missions.

  “Missions? What do you mean, missions?”

  To see things. Hear things. No one notices a dog.

  “So, like, you’re a spy? A dog spy?”

  I get information. Does that make me a spy?

  “I think so. I mean, how could a dog actually do what a spy does?”

  I watch and record. I was going to be sent to foreign countries. Everything I saw and heard would be sent back.

  “Who would you send it back to?” Emily said.

  The White Coats. At The Institute.

  “Yeah, right, okay. And they’re part of the government?”

  It took several seconds before Chipper came up with an answer, which turned out to be very short.

  I do not know. I think I smell a raccoon on the roof!

  “Focus, okay?” Emily was shaking her head. “Why are you on the run?”

  I was a failure.

  “What do you mean, a failure?”

  I like being a dog more than I like being a computer. I want to stop being a computer. I want to just be a dog.

  Emily said, “Really? I would think, if you’re a half-dog, half-computer thingie, you have all these kinds of powers other dogs don’t have. I think that would be cool. You’re, like, a million times smarter than the
other dogs. But here’s the part I can’t get my head around. You seem to have feelings. Like, when the stuff you say comes up on the screen, it sounds like you care about stuff.”

  I do have feelings. All dogs have feelings.

  “Well, sure, I guess,” Emily said. “But yours seem more…I don’t know how to explain it. They seem more kind of grown up.”

  Chipper had nothing to say for a couple of minutes, so Emily continued with her technical efforts. There was something that was very much on his mind, even more than the prospect of getting out of the station and looking for animals. Finally, he asked a question.

  Is Jeff a good friend?

  Emily shrugged. “I haven’t really known him very long. But he seems okay. Why do you ask?”

  Chipper did not answer. He was still thinking.

  “What’s the deal?” Emily asked. “Are you rebooting or something? Why do you want to know if he’s my friend?”

  I have things to tell him.

  “What?”

  Things that may upset him.

  “But you don’t even know him.”

  I know things about him. I knew I had to find him. I knew he would be kind to me.

  “Okay, this is completely nuts. I mean, it’s crazy enough, some robot dog that works for the government, but when you broke out you decided you had to find Jeff? Some kid who runs a fishing camp with his aunt? That’s, like, pretty ridiculous.”

  There are other things I need you to do.

  “Like what? You mean, in your settings?”

  Yes. I need more control over my defensive and logistical operations.

  “Your who? I mean, your what?”

  Chipper explained what he needed her to do. Emily searched through the various settings and made what changes she could.

  “I hope that’ll do it,” Emily said. “What the heck is a ‘decibel distraction mode’?”

  Something I might need. I have never used it before.

  “Well, whatever it is, I think it’s set to go. So, anyway, what’s all this stuff you have to tell Jeff?”

  He needs to know that

  Chipper stopped mid-sentence.

  There was the sound of an engine, and seconds later, a big bang from down below. Someone had burst through the door to the train station and was bounding up the stairs.

  Screaming: “They’ve found us! We have to get out of here!”