She puffed out her chest, "I've been beating him all afternoon."
Scotty turned a bit so Sage couldn't see his face and gave Rousseau a quick wink. "Yep, she has been clobbering me."
Turning and pointing at the young girl, he said in a stern tone, "But our agreement was that we could play Spacewar until the documents arrived, and then it's cardpunching for you."
Sage's face fell briefly and then her smile returned. "Cardpunching is OK." She pointed back at the computer tech. "You're going to have to get the RIM drive to work, and my mom said you aren't allowed to use bad words like last time." She stuck out her tongue.
"OK, I can see that you have a serious labor detail going here." Rousseau laughed. "I'm going to get out before she puts me to work, and I'd like to avoid the Feebs." He turned and headed for the car, "I've had hot-and-cold-running FBI agents following me for the past month. They finally got bored and took a day off, so I grabbed this stuff from the cache and ran it over while I had the chance."
With a stuttering growl, the Ford engine came to life, and, as soon as Scotty pulled up the door, the car swung out and backed into the street. Rousseau waved at Scotty, shot a forefinger and thumb pistol at Sage, and drove down the narrow street.
Scotty looked at the front porch and raised his eyebrows. Rick, who was sitting on a rocking chair observing the street, gave him an "OK" sign. Scotty and Sage went back in, closing the garage door and bolting the heavy door to the computer room.
They could hear Rick's boots on the floor above and, in a moment, they heard his knock. Sage ran up the steps to trip the catches that opened the metal-clad door. They gave each other intentionally goofy "black power" fists and then she led him downstairs.
"How's Gidget today?" Rick asked. "I'm still not sure exactly what you're doing."
Scotty started to answer, but Sage interrupted. "It's so cool. We're going to take all these documents and transfer all the information to cards. Well, as soon as Scotty and Eps figure out a system to…trick?"
She looked at Scotty who said, "Track."
"Right. A system to track everything."
"Just the money figures from the contracts," Scotty said.
Sage barely paused in her explanation. "Right. And then we'll punch in the cards, transfer all the…" She paused and then said very slowly and carefully,"…the input data…"
Scotty nodded approval, and she smiled and rushed on, "…onto the tape reels, and then we'll create a…ooh, I can never remember this one."
Scotty prompted, "a multi-dimensional matrix."
"Right, a moldy-dimensional mattress and then we can see where all the money went as easy as pie," she finished triumphantly.
Rick had no idea what either of them was talking about, but he tried to look as if all this were perfectly clear. "Cool. Is there anything I can do to help?"
Scotty shook his head, but Sage said, "No. Steve said you weren't allowed to help after you looped the processor last week."
Scotty turned to the computer's keyboard so Rick couldn't see his face but his shoulders appeared to be shaking. Rick said, "That seems reasonable. I'll be upstairs if you need anything."
Sage ran around him and started up the stairs. "I need a snack before I start punching cards. You can pour the juice."
CHAPTER 35
June 6, 1973, Ingomar Street NW, Washington, DC
"I couldn't tell if he saw me or not."
Eve had just gotten home and was taking off her work clothes. Rick was resting on pillows against the headboard and putting about half his attention to listening to her talk about her day.
No, less than half.
Most of his attention was concentrated on Eve herself.
"He might have missed me," she continued. "I was sitting in back of the deli, eating one of their sandwiches."
"The ones with four inches of pastrami?"
She smiled as she unbuttoned her white linen shirt and carefully put it on a hanger. "Yeah, you liked those, didn't you?"
"Almost worth spending the day reading about toothpaste." Rick responded. "Not quite. But almost."
"Why?" Eve asked. "You aren't interested in finding the meaning of a word?"
"Reading studies of toothpaste advertising for eight hours is more than should be expected of anyone. By six hours, I'd completely forgotten what we were looking for."
She took off her pantyhose, balled them up, and threw them at the bureau with distaste. "God, I hate these things! They make me hot, and they itch!" She threw herself on the bed beside Rick. "You'll see, when women take over, all these instruments of torture will be outlawed."
Rick nodded solemnly. "I couldn't agree more."
"What do you know? You won't even wear a tie."
She snuggled closer to him and demanded, "Ooh, scratch my back, please."
Beginning a thorough back scratch at the top of her shoulders, Rick said, "Hey what do you want? I bought a shirt with a collar, didn't I?"
Her voice was muffled by the pillow. "Sure. From the Goodwill store."
"It's the best place to get classic styling." He changed the subject but continued to run his fingernails over her back, "So, did he see you or not?"
"Who?" Eve said dreamily. "Oh. Gary." "Right."
She turned her head toward him. "I really don't know. He was yelling at a bunch of kids who were panhandling outside that weird computer place with the painted-over windows when I came out, and I kept my head turned the other way until I was across the street and back inside the Federal Trade Commission."
"But you’re sure it was Gary, right?"
"I remember him from college. I never liked him, but he was around Kristee all the time, so I had to spend quite a bit of time with him." She shook her head and ended up face down in the pillow again. "No, it was Gary."
"But you didn't see him after that?"
"I don't think so," Eve said, "I was in the Reading Room for another couple of hours, and, frankly, the torture of reading complaint letters about mail order almost drove everything else right out of my head; but I did watch for him on the way back to the firm or on the bus heading home. Didn't see him."
Rick bent over, lifted the heavy braid, and began to kiss the back of her neck. In between kisses, he mumbled, "It's probably OK. Nothing we can do about it now, anyway."
Eve rolled over and put her arms around him, and all conversation ended.
It wasn't until much later that Rick remembered Kristee's husband.
He was alone, sitting and smoking on the second floor porch in the late summer twilight. He felt relaxed. They'd made love and then napped entwined and cooled by the breeze coming in the open windows.
After that, everyone sat down for an excellent dinner. It had been Kristee's turn, and she'd cooked a massive lasagna with chorizo sausage and seafood.
Sage was playing catch with a bunch of the neighborhood kids in the narrow street. With the parked cars and the thick trees providing shade, Rick wondered at how parts of Washington could feel so much like the suburbs when they were only a few miles from the center of the city.
Rick heard a scream of tires.
He looked over, puzzled that a car was coming fast the wrong way on the one-way street in reverse. It took him a crucial extra second to recognize the Firebird from the rear, and then he was running for the stairs.
He slammed through the front door and down the steep steps to the sidewalk. The Pontiac was already accelerating forward, tires smoking. Kristee was running right behind the bumper, screaming Sage's name and repeating, "Damn you Gary! God damn you, Gary!"
The car sped out of her reach, but Kristee—with Rick close behind—kept running to the end of the block. Then she collapsed, sobbing and cursing. Without a bike, Rick knew he could never catch the muscle car, already vanished around two turns and headed for Wisconsin Avenue.
He felt helpless and clumsy as he stood over the weeping young woman. Eve ran up and knelt next to her friend, squeezing her in a fierce embrace. She looked up at
Rick, a question in her eyes.
"Yeah, we're going to get her back," he said. "No fucking doubt about it."
Suddenly, he heard the car's tires braking hard and then the slam of what he knew was a gunshot. He ran up the street and around the corner; but, by the time he turned into Harrison Street, the Firebird's rear lights were turning left onto Wisconsin. Under the yellow streetlights, he could see a body in the street.
As he ran up, he felt relief; it was clearly an adult and not a child.
Not Sage.
Suddenly Rick felt as if one of his nightmares had turned real. Gary was lying in a growing puddle of blood with most of the back of his head gone, replaced by a gaping red gash. Rick could see the horrible white contours of bone and brain, the things inside a person that no one should see.
A scream behind him and Kristee whipped past, slipped in the blood, and continued to scream as she fell next to the body, cradling the head.
"Oh, Gary, Gary. You asshole. Oh, Gary." She screamed in a mixture of anger and terrible grief. "You stupid stupid asshole."
Rick thought, "The guy must have finally remembered he was a father and not just a follower. It could have been Kristee or Sage, but someone had gotten through to the man who had been buried under all the conditioning. He'd tried to stop the kidnap and paid the price."
He reached down and pulled the sobbing woman to her feet. "Leave him. The cops will be here in a minute. We need to think about Sage. Come on."
He felt Eve on Kristee's other side, and they both half-pushed, half-carried the incoherent woman in a stumbling run down the block. When they were turning the corner to Ingomar, he heard the sirens coming up Reno Road.
CHAPTER 36
June 8, 1973, Warrenton, Virginia
Two nights later, Rick sat in a grassy field just outside the town of Warrenton. He had already checked and re-checked all the components of the hang glider now sitting limply at an angle to his rear. All the rods and wires had been spray-painted a matte black with rustproofing primer and the oncered nylon wing had been blackened with a chemical solution that Eps swore wouldn't weaken the fabric or lower the lift-to-weight ratio.
Rick sincerely hoped his roommates had gotten that right. Enough other untried technology was being used tonight.
There was a new moon, but he could just see the starlight reflecting off the varnished wings of Scott's tiny Fly Baby airplane. Fifty feet of nylon rope ran from the back of the single-seat aircraft to a quick-release clip clamped to the balance point of the hang glider's king post above the wing. A string led down from the clip's release lever through the hole that allowed the king post to pierce the hang glider's wing. A hefty lead fishing weight on the end kept it hanging straight and would, hopefully, prevent it from being blown backward too far for Rick to reach it.
The idea was for the Fly Baby with Scotty at the controls to tow the hang glider up and above the Children's Crusade compound. Once there, Rick would pull the release and fly into the compound, land, unhook, and head for the Big House to find and recover Sage. Rick thought that it was less than a perfect plan, but attempting to crash the front gate had been ruled out by a combination of half-inch cable woven into the chain link gate and some impressive firepower in the hands of the guards.
The next night, Rick had tried going over the back fence where Kristee had made her escape only to be forced back as well. As soon as he reached the top of the fence, electric lights blazed along its length activated by a motion sensor, and he had to drop back into the shrubbery and evade a considerable amount of rifle fire from what appeared to be Crusaders perched on hunter stands up in the trees.
Along with a heavyweight flashlight and a roll of duct tape bungeed to the crossbar, Rick had his Zippo in one pocket of his jeans and a short steel rod threaded through heavy washers and securely bolted with self-locking nuts in the other.
There had been a brief discussion of whether he should carry a pistol or even a rifle, but he had nixed the idea on the grounds that either choice was too heavy for the already-stressed flight characteristics of the hang glider. The real reason was that he simply didn't want to kill any more people, but he kept that to himself, safely locked inside with those whose mutilated faces haunted him every night.
As a compromise, Kristee was tucked behind a fallen tree on the small hill that sat just outside the Crusaders’ property line to the south. This morning, Mrs. Lewitinsky had listened calmly to her story, given her a long hug, and taken her into the bedroom where Kristee had picked out a hunting rifle from the late Mr. Lewitinsky's collection.
They'd consulted a topographic map of the surrounding area, picked out a location, and then she had taken Kristee out to a field far from any neighbors where they worked together to zero the scope for the approximate distance. When they returned to the house, the older woman had handed Kristee a set of keys for the gates on her property and most of her neighbors', kissed her on the forehead, and promised to leave a light on at the back door.
Steve was working at the NSA listening post in West Virginia and simultaneously monitoring almost all the radio and telephone traffic in Northern Virginia.
Irritated and unwilling, Corey Gravelin was sitting in a car just down the street from the local police station. His job was to call in a report of a disturbance at the compound or bail people out, depending on how things went.
Rick had been concerned that, when attacked, the cult would simply grab Sage and disappear, but Eps had assured him that wouldn't happen. When pressed for details, he'd grinned broadly and said, "Once again, you really don't want to know."
Knowing his housemate's penchant for explosives, Rick decided he didn't.
He was startled out of his thoughts when Eve appeared at his side. "Scotty's ready. Are you all set?"
"I'm as ready as possible, considering."
"Good." Eve gave him a passionate kiss, placed her forehead against his, and whispered, "You'd better come out of this alive or I'll come in and kill you myself." She spun and ran off into the darkness.
Rick stood up and lifted the glider into its takeoff position, slightly nose-down to avoid any premature lift. Ahead he could hear the sputter as the 65-horsepower Piper Cub engine came to life. Its rough sound smoothed out quickly as it warmed, and Scotty released the choke.
There was a double flash from the darkness ahead, and Rick reached down, took the flashlight, and signaled back. The tiny plane was never designed for night flights, so it didn't have running lights or an electrical system. Scotty would be flying through the moonless night with only streetlights and a handheld compass for reference. Rick reflected that there wasn't anyone else he'd trust to get him there safely.
Eve, who was the traffic control for their makeshift airport, appeared in front of him; face lit by a flashlight, and gave him the up-down hand thumb signal that meant, "Go? No go?" When he responded with a steady thumbs up, she dashed back into the darkness. Moments later, Rick heard the sound of the airplane engine increase; and, when the sound had built to a throaty growl, he had a second to note the rope straightening in front of him, and then he was running full out across the grass.
Everything was off-kilter. The pull of the rope was all wrong with his weight on the ground instead of suspended from the king post. He had to use the considerable strength in his arms to keep the wing from pitching forward and plowing into the ground.
When he simply couldn't run any faster, he leapt into the air, flopped forward into a prone position, and simultaneously pulled back on the control bar.
Now the pull from the towrope was right on his center of gravity. The wing dipped down until he could feel the tops of the grass blades against his hands and the toes of his boots. It was low, but it was flying.
It might have just been his imagination, but he felt the little airplane in front of him straining for speed. Slowly, painfully slowly, it began to rise.
Suddenly, his wing was buffeting violently. With intense concentration, he forced it into a slight lift. Af
ter a couple of minutes that felt like years, the buffeting stopped as he rose above the turbulent air being thrown back by the airplane's propeller. He concentrated on staying in a narrow safe zone between the prop wash below him and going so high that the towrope would begin to catch on the front apex of his kite.
For a time, his mind was entirely focused on maintaining this delicate balance. When he achieved enough control to consider anything but his hands on the control bar, he looked down.
They had gained an amazing, almost frightening, amount of altitude. He could pick out the lights of Virginia highway 334 far below and thought with gratitude that Scotty had nailed their primary navigation beacon. Ahead, the airplane was only a slightly darker bit of sky. The sound of the engine was a steady purr.
Ahead, he saw the spotlights on the orange roof of the roadside Stuckey's that was their final point of reference. Their carefully calculated plan was to make a 30-degree turn to the south directly over the combination candy store and lunch counter and then fly for a steady count of 180 seconds. At this mark, he'd release from the tow cord and bank right and down while Scotty would simultaneously bank to the left and up. Scotty had said "with reasonable luck," they would avoid a mid-air collision.
He counted "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" as they flew away from the highway's lights and into a featureless darkness. Concentrating on keeping the control bar steady with his left hand and the count going at the same time, he reached out with his right hand and—after a few seconds of desperate searching—found the lead weight on the end of the release cord.
He slowly pulled his right hand back to the bar, thinking how all this coordination took patting your head while rubbing your stomach to a whole other level. It might have been a nice thing to practice at least once.
After 180 careful "Mississippis," he pulled gently and then with increasing power on the release cord. Finally, he gave it a hard jerk and felt the snap as the catch released. Without the air speed provided by the towline, he almost instantly went into a low power stall; but he slammed the control bar back against his thighs; and, with a shudder as the rear of the wing almost lost lift, he pulled into a swooping dive that gave him the airspeed to stay aloft.
Warrior (Freelancer Book 2) Page 22