The snake buzzed louder, and she realized she had stopped breathing in anticipation of a strike.
She pulled the stick back, but it caught momentarily and pulled something off the ground. She jumped back then, throwing the stick off, certain that the damned snake was on it. She stepped back and to the left, but to her horror, another snake started up to her left, about five or six feet away. She froze again, not sure of what the hell to do.
Sherman was calling to her as the buzzing stopped.
“Karen! Stand still ‘ We’ve disturbed a nest!”
“I am standing still! There’re three of the damned things out here. I don’t know which way to go!”
He had no answer for that, and they both stood there for a minute, immobilized, listening carefully. They could hear nothing but the wind.
“Karen,” he said.
“What?”
“Did you throw your stick?”
“Yes.’ “Why?” She told him. He asked if what her stick had caught on could have been a wire. She thought about it. Something had caught her stick, but had it been heavy enough to be a snake? “It might have been a wire. I thought it was a snake.”
“Okay, hang on a minute.”
She could barely see him in the darkness, but he was probing again with his stick. After thirty seconds, the buzzing started, and he stabbed down hard with the stick and then pulled the tip straight up. There was a loud buzzing noise in front of Karen, and another one off to her left.
It actually sounded as if there might be even another one to Sherman’s right, down the hill about ten yards.
“Got it,” he said. “It is a damned wire. These ‘snakes’ are electronic devices.”
“Are you real, real sure of that?” she asked, embarrassed by the sound of her own voice.
“Come over here. I have it in my hand.”
She took a deep breath and stepped sideways toward him.
When she got up close, she could see the dark wire in his hand, as well as a small black object embedded in the wire that was putting out a really good rattlesnake noise. He jerked hard on the wire, and the others in the reptilian chorus let go for fifteen seconds before going silent.
Pretty damned effective,” he said. “The good news is that we know what it is. The bad news is what might be listening at the other end of this wire.”
“Where does it go?” she said. “Up there?” They looked up the hill.
Galantz was more likely to be at the end of that wire than at Jack’s trailer. She recalled seeing the glimpse of a fallemiown house up above the trailer she had talked to Jack. But if that’s where the wire went, they were way off course.
“That light,” she said. “That might have been Jack’s trailer. We might be closer to the top than we realized.” She told him about having seen what looked like a ruined house at the top of the hill.
“Jack’s trailer,” he asked, “did it took like two people were living there?”
“It didn’t look like a human lived there,” she said, and then regretted it immediately. “I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath. “Then we need to follow this wire,” he said, looking up the hill into the darkness. “And we’re going to be expected.”
Train was making progress with the tape, a millimeter at a time. The skin of his wrists was getting raw, and he could feel the tape getting warm as he. applied pressure. He was now convinced he was in some kind of basement or underground room-something about the temperature and musty smell of the air. But the tape was giving way, little by little.
He alternated pressing his hands out and then his feet, intent on restoring as much circulation as he could. He was wary about moving around or trying to see in the darkness, in case Galantz had another one of those blinding devices attached to a motion detector. He tried to think. Galantz would contact Karen or the admiral somehow and offer a trade. More than likely, he wanted to get the admiral in the room with his son, make sure the father knew that the son had been part of it, and then perhaps execute the son to finish his lethal head games on Sherman.
Galantz didn’t want Sherman dead. Quite the opposite: Galantz wanted destroyed, and then left alive to contemplate his And what would happen to Karen if she came with the admiral? And what was Galantz going to do with him, for that matter? He stopped pushing as a small wave of nausea swept through him, a fleeting vestige of the sedative. Galantz had been able to move with impunity throughout this whole business. Granted he had had years to prepare, all the fun in the world to plant devices and scout the ground.
Plus Jack’s help with some of the dog work. And tradecraft at the level of a sweeper. No wonder Mchale Johnson had been impressed, and FBI guys didn’t impress easily. He was also pretty sure that the FBI had decided to sit on the sidelines if the agency they loved to hate was showing its ass.
But why hadn’t the Fairfax police been more effective?
Mcnair should have been able to find Jack, so why wasn’t a SWAT team in these woods? The cops should have picked Jack up and squeezed him for information about Galantz: where his base of operations was, what was going down next. They must have known almost from the start that Walsh and Schmidt had been homicides.
You are seriously’in the dark, Bud, he thought. He stared out into the darkness. Well, duh, Sherlock. So push harder.
His left hand was getting looser.
They crept together to the edges of a shadowy clearing that revealed the remains of a house. Sherman had followed the wire up the hill, lifting it periodically to make sure where it was headed, provoking a battle line of rattlesnake noises all the way up. Karen followed thirty yards behind, a new stick in one hand and the .380 in the other. Sherman had insisted on the separation: if someone fired on him, she would have a chance to escape. When he stopped at the edge of the clearing around the house, she sank down on one knee behind a bush. With her eyes fully night-adapted, she could just see him up ahead in the darkness. He stood there, apparently waiting to see what happened next.
She fought down the urge just to cut and run. If Galantz was up here, there was zero chance they were going to surprise him. Once they picked up that wire, someone had to know they were coming, or at least that Sherman was coming. He might not expect Karen, in which case she wanted to go to that trailer, on the chance that Train was down there, maybe disabled. She didn’t want to think about the other possibilities. Damn the stubborn man for going out on his own.
Sherman wag moving again, toward the front of the house.’Then he was climbing carefully up the zigzag step supports. She couldn’t make out much about the house, other than it had fallen in on itself. Sherman appeared to stop in front of what should have been the front door. She put the gun down on the ground near her right foot, turned her left forearm away from the top of the hill, and slipped her sleeve back to see what time it was. The fact that she had her face turned downhill saved her from the searing visual impulse of the retinal disrupter firing above her. Even so, her night adaptation vanished in a millisecond, and she could only gasp and sink down on her hands and knees while her brain reeled from the purple flash a hundred feet away.
Train gave one last pull, and his. left hand, minus all the hair on the back, came stickily out of the tape. He immediately stripped the tape off his right hand, and then, flexing his hands rapidly, worked them up to where he could grab the zipper on the bag with his thumbs and pull it down. He kept his eyes tightly closed in case there was another disrupter set up in this place. But so far, none of his struggles had set anything off. He shed the bag like a snakeskin,. then rolled over on his side to get the circulation going back in his legs and knees. The tape around his ankles proved to be a tougher proposition. Without a knife, he was forced to find the edge of the tape and start unwinding it.
He rolled up onto his hands and knees, experiencing a wave of dizziness as he did so. He reached out to see what he could touch. The room or wherever he was remained in darkness. He tried to stand up and almost fell over. The mical wasn’t
entirely gone. He could still feel the puncture wound on his left bicep. He sat down on the floor and began stretching and breathing. He ignored the total darkness. He was in a basement, or at least underground, at night presumably, although he had no idea how long he’d been out. He felt for his watch, but it was gone.
Of course-his watch had a light.
He waited for a few minutes for the dizziness to subside, then started crawling, until he ran into a wall. Stone wall, from the feel of it. He turned right and followed the wall, proceeding carefully when he ran into a big spiderweb. Visions of black widows in long-empty basements flitted across his mind, and he decided to turn around. He kept one hand on the wall as he reversed course, not wanting to lose his bearings any more than he had to in total darkness. He had crawled about three feet back toward where he’d started from, when he’heard that dusty inhalation, and then the metal voice came laughing out of the darkness.
Big man like you, afraid of a little bitty spider, is he?
Train froze in place. Galantz! He’d been in the room with him all along . ? Watching him get out of the bag? There was more metallic laughter.
Son of a bitch must have a nightvision device, Train thought.
That’s right. I’m wearing a night set. I’ve been admiring your physical discipline. Why don’t you just wait there, von Rensel? We have one more visitor, then. we can do what we came to do.
“What’s the game, Galantz?”
Endgame, I think. I’ve invited the object of my affection to come up here. Told him I’d let his boy go in return for some quality time with the father.
“And then you’ll kill the kid in front of his father? Finish what the Navy is doing to him?”
You have no idea, do you? Why the Navy is cutting him loose?
“They’re tired of getting black eyes in all the national.
papers. They’ve probably figured. out that you’re going to kill and tell.”
I certainly am But that’s not why they’re cutting him loose, von Rensel They’re cutting him loose so he can come to me. They’re counting on me to kill him.
Train moved sideways a little, trying to locate the metallic voice. But it seemed to be coming from all around him.
“Why kill him? I thought you wanted him alive. To savor his fate.”
You figured right, von Rensel I want him to live with this for a long, long time. But you need to find out why certain very senior officers in the Navy might actually want him dead. Then you’ll understand why he’s free to come here tonight. Now sit tight. Stop scaring my spiders. My time is unfortunately limited.
He sensed motion across the room from him, a stirring of the musty air, a brief thinning of the darkness diagonally to his right, and then what sounded like a trapdoor being dropped quietly into place. Train sank back down on his haunches, reaching out for thestone wall and then settling his back against it. So what the hell was Galantz talking about? What was this stuff about the admirals? He stared out into the darkness, massaging his wrists and ankles, and waited.
Down on the hillside, Karen could see literally nothing but a purple haze, whether her eyes were opened or closed. She crouched motionless in the grass for a few minutes. She was at the very least night-blind.
But she could hear. The words Help me bring him in, intoned in that mechanical, gasping voice, floated clearly down the hill. Galantz! She froze at the sound of that voice, then senled down onto her stomach in the wet grass behind a mound of vegetation, held her breath, and tried to control the shaking in her knees. The night air was oppressively warm. It was starting to rain, and she thought she heard the distant rumble of thunder. She felt around to find the .380.
Train tensed when he heard sounds above him. Someone moving around-no, two people moving. Another sound: a dragging sound, like a sack of some kind being pulled across the floor above, toward the area of the trapdoor. A rattling noise that sounded like boards being shoved aside, then the noises stopped. A clatter of boards and sticks from above and then, there: Something hit the floor over there and groaned. A man’s voice. Sherman? Was that Sherman?
The trapdoor closed audibly this time, a heavy wooden thump, and there were steps coming down, two sets of feet.
A metallic clank.
Hide your eyes, von Rensel, said the machine voice. Train did as ordered, afraid of another disrupter blast. But instead, there was the noise of a small engine starting, over to his left, and then the room was filled with a pulsing red light, a red strobe light, coming from some device set up on the steps. It actually wasn’t very bright, but compared to the absolute darkness, it was initially almost blinding, and he uncovered his eyes only slowly. But at least he could seesort of. It was as if his eyes were taking pictures with a red flash unit.
The basement was rectangular and, for the most part, empty. Roughly fifty or sixty feet long and about thirty wide. Stone walls, an empty expanse of hard-packed. dirt floor. At his end, he recognized the remains of an enormous coal-burning furnace, its large insulated ducts reaching up through a mass of cobwebs into the house above. The grate door to the furnace had been removed, and what looked like the controls of a portable generator glinted in the furnace’s combustion chamber.
Extension cords ran the length of the basement to the other end,, where there appeared to be a cot with a single mattress, a table, and a folding chair. There was a PC sitting on the table, and three racks of other electronic equipment next to the table. There was a tangle of wiring on the floor.
He shielded his eyes against the strobe light, trying to adapt his eyes.
It was like watching a jilm through an antique projector, flashes of darkness punctuated by flashes of the scene in the basement. On, off.
On, off-about two times per second. Train shook his head, trying to clear his vision. The strobe effect was really disorienting, like watching the dancers in a discotheque, where disembodied faces flashed in and out of view, each time their expressions and attitudes slightly altered. Only everything down here was blood-red, not white. Red made sense, if Galantz had a nightvision device on.
The ceiling was made up of large, heavily cobwebbed wooden joists that sagged ominously into the basement in places. Near the bottom of the steps was one recognizable figure: Jack, in T-shirt and jeans, leaning insolently against the wall, his eyes hooded in the red strobe light, his arms folded across his chest. Not drunk this time, but casually alert, his eyes two black circles in the pulsing red light, his studied pose that of a street thug waiting for a knife fight to begin. On the steps was the silhouette of a man, barely visible because he was standing very close to the strobe source. Bigger than Jack, heftier, thicker. Galantz. Train couldn’t get a focus on the face because of the strobe light, which was placed conveniently just to one side of Galantz’s head. There was just the silhouette, standing there, arms h “ging down, holding what looked like a bulky automatic pistol in his right hand. The left arm, which ended -in a glinting metallic device of some kind, was held casually across the figure’s hips. But no face. Only the shape of the man’s head, distorted somewhat by something he was wearing. The nightvision device, Train thought.
And there was Sherman, crumpled on the floor near the bottom of the steps. Train put up an arm to shield his face from the disturbing pulsing of the strobe. He had thought Sherman was unconscious, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his -right side, his hands up to his face, covering his eyes.
Know that feeling, Train thought. Bet he was out there in the dark, irises wide open, when Galantz popped his little flash toy. Sherman groaned again and tried to sit up. Train could see Jack staring down at his father’s helpless figure, and the expression on his face was not a pretty one. They should be watching Sherman, waiting for him to comet of it.
This bastard was a master of light, Train thought. Galantz had a gun, and Jack might have one, too. And somewhere was the disrupter, ready to disable anyone in the room who didn’t see it coming.
Sherman groaned again, and this time he managed to si
t up. He dropped his hands from his face, then slapped them back up there again when the strobe light hit him.
Where’s your girlfriend, Sherman? Galantz asked. Train tried to see Galantz’s throat, but there was only shadow.
The combination of the synthetic voice and the’s y gnu sing red light created a phantasmagorical image. And who was he talking about, Elizabeth Walsh or Karen?
The admiral did not reply. Galantz instructed Jack to go outside, see if Sherman had come alone. Jack moved immediately and wordlessly up the steps, heaved open the trapdoor, and closed it behind him. It was evident from the sounds that the trapdoor was hidden under a pile of wreckage on the ground floor.
“She’s not my girlfriend, you bastard,” Sherman said.
“You murdered my girlfriend.”
Now that you mention it, yes, I did Let me tell you about it while we’re waiting for Jackie boy to come back, okay?
After five minutes, just when she was about to get up and try to move downhill, Karen thought she heard something, something or someone moving carefully through the grass up by the house. Then the noises stopped, somewhere uphill of her position. It was hard to tell, as the patter of the first large raindrops began to mask the woods noises. She clutched the .380 and tried to remember if she had chambered it. Yes, she had.
But this one had a safety. She felt along both sides of the gun until she found the small latch down on the left side of the slide. Because if someone was coming down here to get her, he was going to get shot at a lot. She realized she was breathing too fast, and she put a clamp on it.
She tested her eyes on a hand held up in front of her face, but all she could see was a purple silhouette.
The poor admiral, that thing must have dropped him like a stone. She waited, putting all her mental energy into listening very carefully.
Then she heard the sounds again,. definitely footsteps, someone working slowly, carefully, across the hill above her now, one, two, three steps, soft crunching sounds in the grass, punctuated by intervils of silence.
Sweepers Page 43