Taken ec-13

by Robert Crais

  “What couple of times?”

  “There’s never a straight line to the man. That’s how he stays safe. You got a couple of rides ’fore you get where you goin’.”

  Wander started the engine, and guided us back to the highway. Even with the bag over my head, I felt his eye on me, angry and glaring. His magic eye.

  I felt trapped in the bag, and easy to kill, and hoped Joe and Jon Stone were close.

  Joe Pike: the day Elvis Cole is taken

  30

  Joe Pike

  Pike watched Elvis Cole’s Corvette from a Shell station on the opposite side of the highway a quarter-mile from the Burger King. Jon Stone’s black Rover was on Cole’s side of the highway a quarter-mile beyond the Burger King. Whichever direction Cole left, either Pike or Stone would be on the correct side to keep him in sight.

  Stone’s voice came in Pike’s ear.

  “Movement.”

  They were on cell phones, each with a Bluetooth bud in his ear. They had satellite phones, but the regular cells were easier so long as they had a signal and military-grade GPS units.

  “No joy.”

  Meaning Pike didn’t see the vehicles. Stone had a better view, and was using binos.

  “Van’s backing out-”

  The dingy van crept into Pike’s sight line as Stone said it. Pike started the Jeep, and nosed toward the street.

  “Got’m. Cole on board?”

  “Affirm. Man, you gotta check the driver. This is one ugly fucker.”

  The van left the Burger King and turned onto the highway, heading away from Pike.

  Pike said, “Coming your way.”

  Pike gunned his Jeep out of the Shell station, and turned onto the highway at the first intersection. He lost sight of the van when he slowed for oncoming cars, but slalomed between traffic and quickly caught up.

  “Eight lengths back. I’m by a yellow eighteen-wheeler.”

  “Looking.”

  Pike was still settling into a groove when the van’s right-turn indicator flashed. They had gone less than a mile.

  “Blinker.”

  “Shit, I don’t have you.”

  “Las Palmas. West side.”

  “I’m looking.”

  Pike slowed to put distance between himself and the van. A horn blew behind him, then another, but Pike braked even harder, hanging back as the van turned onto a street between large, undeveloped lots. It stopped in plain sight of the highway.

  Pike left the highway, but turned in the opposite direction, watching the van in his sideview mirror. A hundred yards later he turned into a parking lot surrounding a home furnishings outlet.

  “They stopped at an empty lot.”

  “I see’m. They’re out of the van. Dude’s checking him. Shit, right out in the open.”

  “I’m north. Set up south.”

  “Rog. Doing it.”

  Pike knew the search wouldn’t take long and it didn’t. Cole and Wander climbed back into the van, and once more rolled south on the highway, then east, leaving the monied areas of Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert behind for the working-class neighborhoods of Indio.

  Pike and Stone changed positions frequently so Wander would not notice a single vehicle lingering in his mirror. Pike had fallen back when Jon Stone’s voice came in his ear.

  “Blinker.”

  Pike was seven lengths behind Stone’s Rover. Five sedans, two pickup trucks, and a biker on a chopped Harley were scattered between them. Stone’s left-turn indicator blinked on, and Stone spoke again.

  “Turning left at the Taco Bell.”

  “Yes.”

  “I gotta slow. Tighten up.”

  Pike nudged the Jeep closer.

  The van turned past the Taco Bell into a mixed area of small residential homes and light-business properties. This made following more difficult because there was less traffic, so Stone dropped farther back. Pike followed two blocks behind Stone, noting parallel streets on his GPS in case he had to maneuver.

  Stone said, “Blinker. He’s stopping. Three blocks up. I’m stopping, too.”

  Pike made an immediate right, jumped on the accelerator, and screamed left onto the parallel street, watching for kids and oncoming cars. Five blocks up, he jammed the brakes, turned left twice, and finished on the original street, slow-rolling in the opposite direction. The gray van sat in a driveway three houses ahead on his left, waiting as the garage opened.

  Pike said, “Yellow stucco on your right side. Address three-six-two.”

  The houses along the street all sported light-colored composite roofs over stucco, with attic vents on the gables, two-car attached garages, and weathered chain-link fences. Most of the houses showed trees and some kind of vegetation, but the yellow’s yard was parched sand and rocks.

  Stone rolled forward as Pike crept past the house. The garage door was open, but a large green SUV filled the garage, leaving no room for the van. Pike glimpsed Cole climbing from the passenger side as he passed.

  “Garage open. They’re getting out.”

  “Got’m. Wander and Elvis. They are in the garage. The door’s coming down. Stand by-”

  Pike turned right at the first cross street, and made a fast K-turn. He stopped short of the intersection with a view of the house. Stone would have done the same at the next cross street.

  Pike’s view allowed him to see the garage door, the front door, two front windows, and two side windows. The windows were closed, and the shades were down. All the shades in every window, none showing even an inch or two gap at the bottom.

  Pike rolled down his window, and recalled the Masai hunters he knew in Africa. He wondered if they could hear the house speaking. He stared at the house, and listened.

  Pike was in position for less than five minutes when the garage door jerked into motion.

  “Jon.”

  “Yep.”

  The door was still climbing when Wander ducked under and returned to the van.

  Stone said, “You see that fuckin’ eye?”

  “See Elvis?”

  “Just the geep.”

  The door rumbled down.

  “Was anyone in the garage?”

  “Negative. Just the geep.”

  Wander backed out of the drive and departed past Pike, leaving the way he arrived.

  Stone said, “What the fuck?”

  They waited. One minute. Two minutes.

  “You think they have hostages in there?”

  Pike didn’t answer.

  “Think al-Diri’s in there?”

  “Shh.”

  Three minutes after Wander departed, the garage door jerked to life again, and once more climbed its rails. When the door was open, a dark green Ford Explorer carefully backed out. The windows were so dark they looked black.

  Stone said, “Field trip. What do we do now, follow or stay?”

  The garage door closed. The garage was now empty, but this didn’t mean the house was empty.

  The Explorer backed to the street, then departed past Jon.

  Pike said, “See anyone?”

  “No, man. Not through that glass. You think he’s in there?”

  Elvis.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Say again, what do we do?”

  Pike stared at the house. There was no way to know if Elvis was inside or gone.

  “Take the Explorer. I’ll sit on the house.”

  “On it.”

  Pike watched the house, and strained to hear voices no one could hear.

  31

  Jon Stone

  The Explorer dropped south out of Indio down through Coachella and into the desert. It stayed in the right-hand lane, never varied its speed from the normal flow of traffic, and did nothing out of the ordinary. Jon found this suspicious.

  Stone dropped so far back he cruised along with the Zeiss binos between his legs. Every few minutes he took a quick peek to make sure the Explorer was where it was supposed to be, and, yep, there it was.

  They pas
sed Thermal, California, which has the coolest name ever for a desert town, and Jon thought they might be rolling all the way down to Mexico, but not far past the Thermal airport, the Explorer turned east.

  Jon tightened it up easy enough, his big black Rover having a supercharged mill, and followed the Explorer along the top of the Salton Sea into a small residential neighborhood surrounded by farms. He called Pike.

  “Looks like we’re going to another house. I’m in a little town called Mecca, at the north end of the Salton.”

  Pike didn’t respond, which was pretty much like Pike.

  “You get any movement up there?”

  “No.”

  “The geep come back?”

  “No.”

  No. One word answers. Typical Joe Pike non-conversation.

  “Okay. I’ll keep you advised.”

  “Jon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I three-sixtied the house.”

  This meant Pike had circled the house, checking it out. Jon knew this also meant Pike was worried. Pike was the best recon man Stone had ever known, but circling a house surrounded by nothing but sand and dirt was asking to be seen. Pike would know this, too, and understood the risk.

  “The shades aren’t just pulled. They’re tacked in place. The house is locked down.”

  “You hear anything?”

  “No.”

  “AC running?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to go in, I’ll come back. We’ll bust that fucker wide open.”

  “No. Stay on the Explorer.”

  “Rog.”

  Stone dropped farther back when the Explorer’s blinker came on. He had to be even more careful now in the confined residential streets. His eighty-thousand-dollar Rover stood out in the shabby area like a gleaming black diamond, not that this bothered him. It was another challenge, and Stone loved challenges. They made life interesting.

  He checked his GPS, and saw the surrounding neighborhood laid out in a rectangular grid. Easy-peasy.

  Three blocks ahead, the Explorer turned right. Stone gave it two heartbeats to let them disappear, then pulled a hard right and stood on the supercharged mill. The Rover bucked like an F18 catapulting off a carrier. When he reached the first cross street, Stone jumped on the brakes, nosed forward, and saw the Explorer crossing the parallel intersection three blocks away.

  Stone leapfrogged the Explorer another three blocks, but the Explorer didn’t appear at the fourth intersection. Jon banked left to the Explorer’s street, then left again, then smiled.

  “Dead man, you bitch.”

  Right side, four houses away, the Explorer nosed into an open garage. Another vehicle was in the garage, but Jon couldn’t tell the make or model. He waited until the garage door closed, then cruised past the house.

  The Explorer disappeared into a faded pink house with a red composition roof. Stone drove past, turned around, then backed into a spot across the street and three houses down. He parked between a Dodge pickup and a Toyota Cruiser, hoping the truck and the SUV would help the Rover blend in.

  Jon studied the house, and paid particular attention to the windows. The shades were down and tight as at the Indio house, and no sound or sign of movement came from the property. The attic vents under the gables were framed to look like small doors, and one was ajar as if it was off its hinges. Unlike the earlier house with its barren yard, this house had two ragged oaks in the front yard, a broken line of cedars along the side, a white basketball backboard mounted on the roof above the garage. The backboard was peeling and the net was long gone.

  Stone was wondering how long it had been since someone sank a ball through the hoop when the garage door jerked to life, revealing the dark green Explorer and a black Escalade. Jon slumped behind the wheel.

  The Escalade backed out and drove away directly in front of the Rover. Jon glimpsed the driver and saw a shape in the passenger seat, but the passenger was only a shadow.

  Stone was torn between following the Escalade and staying with the Explorer, but decided to stay. You danced with the girl you brought to the party.

  Stone crawled into the back seat and unzipped a green nylon duffel. He dug through it until he found a hard plastic Pelican case, and considered its contents.

  Jon’s security work often required him to use various bugs and monitoring devices to acquire intelligence. Jon was thinking about taking a look inside the house. He would do this by drilling a hole two-point-five millimeters in diameter through the wall, and inserting a camera and microphone on a wire the size of a #2 pencil lead.

  Jon was deciding which drill bit to use when the garage door once more opened, and he closed the case.

  Jon was watching the Explorer back out of the garage when he noticed the clutter people accumulate in their garages was missing. No boxes, bicycles, lawn equipment, or Christmas decorations crowded the walls or hung from the rafters. Jon dialed back through his memory file, and realized the garage at the Indio house was also free of clutter.

  The Explorer led him north past the Thermal airport into Coachella. Jon thought they were returning to the Indio house, but they turned west through La Quinta and Indian Wells, then south into the desert.

  Jon checked his GPS, and saw the highway would track away from the desert communities and into the deep nowhere of the Anza-Borrego Desert, west of the Salton Sea. Traffic thinned, so he dropped farther back until he needed the binos to see the Explorer. They held fast to a steady seventy miles per hour for almost twenty minutes before their brake lights flared. Jon immediately slowed, and glanced at the GPS, expecting to see a road, but saw nothing. He changed from the map to a satellite view, and zoomed the image until he saw a thin filament angled away from the highway. This would be an unpaved county or ranch road.

  The Explorer turned off the highway, and immediately kicked up a plume of dust Jon saw without the binos.

  He said, “Shit.”

  Jon let the gap between them widen. He wasn’t worried about losing the Explorer because its dust trail was so obvious, but following it would be a problem. If he could see the Explorer, the Explorer could see him.

  When he reached the turn, he pulled off the highway, and compared the receding dust trail with the image on his GPS. The few unpaved roads showed as thin gray lines that ran for miles before intersecting another thin line. The Explorer was now on a road that angled away from the highway and would soon join another road that paralleled the highway for miles. This second road then crossed a third road that swept back to the highway. Jon smiled when he saw this, kicked the Rover back onto the highway, and pressed hard on the gas.

  Four-point-six miles later, at one hundred nine miles per hour, Jon turned off the highway onto the third road, far ahead of the Explorer. The dust was well behind him, and angling away. Jon checked his GPS again, and trailed after them slowly. He followed them into the desert for two-point-three miles until their plume vanished, which meant they had stopped.

  Jon stopped the Rover, and searched the tip of the fading plume with his binos until he spotted a glint in the wavery heat. He returned to the nylon bag for a 60x Zeiss spotting scope mounted to a small tripod. The Zeiss had proven ideal for locating shitbirds on the rocky slopes of Afghanistan. He set it on the Rover’s hood, adjusted the focus, and saw the Explorer.

  It was parked on a rise near what appeared to be a low stone wall. Two small figures carried something large into the brush. A few moments later, they returned to the Explorer, and carried another large thing away. Jon got a cold feeling one of these things might be Elvis Cole’s body.

  They made two more trips beyond the walls, then climbed into the Explorer, and left. Jon was torn between following the Explorer or checking for Cole, but there was really only one decision.

  Jon watched until their dust plume faded, then adjusted the Rover’s suspension for uneven terrain and made his way across the desert. He stopped sixty yards from the crumbling walls, got out with his M4, and offed the safety. His sca
lp prickled like ants were under his skin, and jacked him into full-on combat mode, ready to bust out thirty rounds of 5.56.

  Jon picked his way through the brush until he found the Explorer’s tracks, then followed footprints past the wall to a low wash. Jon knew what he would find even before he reached the erosion cut at the edge of the wash. The angry buzz of fat desert flies and meat-eating hornets told him. The stink of rotten shrimp and organ meat told him the rest.

  The bodies had been dumped into the cut atop each other in a jumble of plastic-wrapped flesh. White powder was liberally sprinkled over the bodies, but did little to help the smell or discourage the flies. They swirled in an angry cloud, and crawled beneath the plastic.

  Jon counted eight, then decided there were nine bodies, both men and women, but could not see them well enough through the plastic to know if Elvis Cole was among them.

  Jon slung the M4, photographed the bodies with his iPhone, then returned to his Rover. He pulled off his sunglasses, rubbed his face, and shouted at the horizon.

  “They’re people, you bastards. Jesus Christ on a jumpstick, they are fuckin’ PEOPLE!”

  He stared toward the cut, stowed the M4, then took off his shirt and tied it over his nose and mouth to keep out the flies.

  Jon returned to the cut, and climbed down among the dead. He peeled back the plastic, looking for Elvis Cole.

  He knew Pike would ask.

  32

  Joe Pike

  Wander had not returned, and neither had the Explorer. Young moms and dads passed with kids strapped into car seats, and three boys rumbled past on skateboards. Pike wondered if Cole was inside with Ghazi al-Diri, and if everything was going according to plan.

  A woman wearing black utility pants and a black tank top came out of the house next door with a large German shepherd. She had broad shoulders for a small woman, and fit arms, and looked like a commando in all the black, but she didn’t look happy.

  The woman and dog walked past the Jeep like they had done this same walk a thousand times and it held nothing new. The dog pulled at the leash, and the woman told it to stop. She seemed angry, but Pike thought she probably wasn’t. They had walked together a thousand times, and each time the dog pulled, the woman complained, and her arms and face showed the strain. Pike wondered why she didn’t change the pattern. Change one element, and everything changes. All she had to do was talk to the dog.