The Nature of the Beast

by GM Ford

  “That’s it,” another voice said. “Any more magnification loses out to the window tinting.”

  “Then we’ll need another walk-by,” Jackson Craig said. “Going the other way this time. Driver’s side. Close up. Somebody taking the shortcut between the cars.”

  Five minutes and twelve seconds later, a portly figure in a bright red ski parka moved along the side of the vehicle. They watched in silence as the figure made his way to the far reaches of the parking lot, where an idling sedan waited.

  The technician seated at the far right of the video bank removed his head phones and handed them to Jackson Craig, who settled the cups over his ears before adjusting the microphone bar to the proper position.

  “What have we got?” he asked.

  A shriek of static followed by a disembodied voice. “Two big green plastic storage containers,” the voice said. “Igloo brand.” Before Craig could pose another question, the voice continued. “Maybe twenty-five gallons apiece. Three electrical wires running into each container. Red, white and yellow.”

  “Running from where?”

  “Somewhere in the front of the car.”

  “Safety seat for the boy?”

  “No sir. No safety seat. Keys are in the ignition. Parking ticket on the dashboard says the car came in this morning at three forty-three am.”

  “Getting closer,” Craig muttered to nobody in particular.

  “Excuse me sir,” the voice crackled in his ear.

  Craig cleared his throat, then thanked the officer for his efforts. He returned the head-phone apparatus to the techie and then turned to the airport security chief.

  “We’re going to need to evacuate the airport.”

  The security chief was named Douglas Barden. He was tall, dark and bald as an egg. His scalp was the first thing to redden when he was annoyed or embarrassed. Craig had first noticed the phenomenon when Barden informed him that security cameras at that end of the parking lot had been on the fritz for a couple of days. Supposedly, they were waiting for parts. So much for homeland security.

  Faced with the prospect of a complete shutdown, Barden’s administrative instinct was to wheedle, to offer alternatives, to suggest something, anything short of a full-scale evacuation. Instead, he looked out into the parking lot and the dozen or so people hurrying here and there through the arctic air and had a sudden spasm of lucidity. He gave Craig a nod of grudging agreement and began to hurry off.

  Craig stopped him. “Having managed that, we’re going to require the services of an ATF bomb squad,” Craig said. He pulled his phone from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “I’ll get the local PD to button up street level and then see to the bomb experts. You get air traffic stopped, the building emptied and then get me a list of every vehicle entering or leaving this parking lot between three and five this morning.”

  __

  He reached over and retrieved the plastic bag from the passenger seat. He held it up so he could keep his eyes on the road while perusing the contents. He swung it back and forth, allowing the light to play on the stained plastic. Back and forth. He had a thought and snapped out of it. Looked like fish sticks with lots of ketchup. Roly poly fish sticks. He’d eaten them as a child. Every Thursday. Mrs. Paul’s. He could see the blue and white box in his mind’s eye, taste the crunchy breading and the clean white fish.

  ‘Fish sticks, fish sticks roly poly fish sticks.’ He chanted the line several dozen times before returning the bag to its resting place. He checked the rear view mirror, squinted and then leaned as far forward as the seat belt would permit. Red lights to the rear, closing fast in the left lane.

  He pulled the Smith and Wesson forty caliber from the pocket of his jeans. Something at the bottom of the pocket fluttered to the floor of the car. He slid the gun into the storage area in the car door. He turned the gun’s handle toward the front of the car, making it easier to access with his right hand should he be asked to step out of the car with his hands in sight. He flicked the safety to ‘off’ and again raised his eyes to the mirror. Little red and blue explosions, coming fast. Red and blue, red and blue.

  A minute later he could make out the black sedan beneath the light bar. Another thirty seconds and his ears began to hear the scream of the engine as the cruiser approached from the rear like a Cruise missile.

  He rolled down his window and hugged the right shoulder. ‘Fish sticks, fish sticks, roly poly fish sticks.’ His hand crept toward the forty. He pulled it back and threw a death grip on the steering wheel. A siren whooped. Once. Twice.

  The inside of his head rang like a bell. ‘Watch out! Watch out! Pull over! Pull over!’ Clank. Clank. Clank.

  The unmarked cruiser roared by in the left lane at a million miles an hour, bound for some other emergency, somewhere down the road. He watched the cruiser pull away until it was nothing more than flashing bits of red and blue out at the other end of the horizon. Over the rainbow maybe.

  He took several deep breaths before lifting the Smith and Wesson from the door pocket. He used a knee to steer as he thumbed the safety back to ‘on’ and slipped the revolver under his shirt. In the backseat, the boy squirmed but did not wake. He refocused on the road and depressed the accelerator.

  ‘Fish sticks, fish sticks, roly poly fish sticks.’ He plucked the plastic bag from the passenger seat, held it up for a final inspection and then tossed it out the window.

  26

  At first, Becky thought it was a mirage, one of those desert induced hallucinations where you made up an entire oasis, palm trees and all, like in those old French Foreign Legion movies. She used her knuckles to brush the hair from her face and then tried to clear her vision. When she could still make them out, she figured they must be real, two men on horseback, a pair of white cowboy hats bouncing along side by side, maybe four hundred yards from where she sat. Before she could fully process the possibilities, another flash of movement caught her attention. She rubbed her eyes and refocused. A black dog trotted out in front of the riders, stopping every so often to sniff the air before resuming his rambling gait across the valley floor.

  The riders kept moving. The dog, however, stopped and turned her way. She waved and croaked again. The dog cocked its head and stared in her direction. He began to move, stiff-legged and hesitant at first, before breaking into a full trot.

  Sobs of relief gushed from her chest as the dog picked up speed, galloping in her direction now. By the time the beast had covered half the distance, she could make out his long ears and the bright pink of his lolling tongue. She waved her arms with all of her remaining might.

  And then, for no apparent reason, the dog stopped. Just stopped and stood there looking around. He was a football field away, standing still, panting, sniffing the air. She wanted to call out but couldn’t muster the strength. The dog turned and began to trot back out into the desert, back toward the riders, loping now, then running hard again, gaining speed with every stride as he disappeared from view.

  Becky willed herself to her feet. She began to limp forward, thinking she’d follow the dog and the riders. If they kept going in that direction then that must be the way out. If they turned around, she’d be right there waiting for them. While the notion was sound, the body was not.

  She tried to concentrate on her steps, one foot in front of the other like when she was working her way to the valley floor, but found herself unable to focus either her vision or her mind. She stumbled and fell.

  When she opened her eyes, a man was standing over her with a rifle.

  27

  “Nothing,” Audrey said, snapping her phone closed as they hurried across the terminal floor. “The Bureau’s finished checking ground transportation. They say our guy didn’t leave the airport in any form of public transportation.” Audrey checked her notes. “Busses accounted for three families with children, all of whom checked out as legitimate. We’ve got fourteen children across the way in the hanger, and none of whom is Michael Browning.”

  Crai
g wasn’t surprised. “Public transportation isn’t really an option for this fellow is it?” he said. “Too risky for a man with a hostage in tow.”

  “Bureau’s still working the cabs,” Audrey said. “As of forty minutes ago, they’ve been unable to locate two drivers who logged passengers in from the airport last night.”

  Craig slowed and then stopped walking altogether. He looked around, seemingly lost in thought. The only human beings in sight were half a dozen security personnel, two with dogs, all doing the same thing they were, making certain the building was empty. Jackson Craig rubbed his temples.

  “As I recall NSA had a team on the way to that Florida address.”

  “She’d been gone a full day by the time the team arrived.”

  “She?”

  “Forty to fifty-five. Dark hair. Dark clothes. Too much eye make-up. Overweight. Used the name Christine King on the lease. Paid in cash and in advance. References checked out from top to bottom.” He anticipated Craig’s question. “Forensics has already processed the apartment. We should have the results later today. They’re also working up a composite image with the building’s super.”

  “Anything from Arizona?” Craig asked.

  Audrey shook her head. “Nothing useful. The Phoenix office says search parties have combed the area twice and come up empty. They’ll have another go at it in the morning.”

  Once again, Craig closed his eyes and lapsed into silence. Audrey rechecked her notes for anything she might have forgotten.

  “He took the car seat with him,” Craig muttered.

  Audrey looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “He took the damn car seat with him,” Jackson Craig repeated.

  “Which tells us that, for the time being anyway, Michael’s probably okay.”

  “Among other things,” Craig said.

  Audrey caught his drift. “And you’re thinking that’s too much stuff to schlep very far. That he must have had another car nearby,” she ventured.

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” Jackson Craig said.

  “You think the Bureau missed something with ground transportation?”

  He considered the matter. “No. Probably not.”

  “What then?”

  “This one does whatever he has to do in order to survive.”

  “How could he be any other way?” she asked. “Torn from his family…raised by Harry Joyce…”

  Before Craig could reply, the rapid click of footsteps diverted their attention. They turned toward the empty terminal in time to see a security sergeant push his epaulets around the corner of the US Airways ticket booth and hurry toward them.

  “You’re needed upstairs,” he said.

  __

  “With tax, that’s thirteen seventy-nine,” she chirped. She had an old fashioned hair net covering her preposterous black hair and thick rubber-soled shoes that squeaked as she trudged to and fro over the worn linoleum floor. He wanted to kill her.

  He smiled and reached for his pocket at the same instant his peripheral vision went on red alert. The overhead light in the car was on. Both doors on the passenger side of the car yawned like wagging tongues.

  He wanted to sweep the damn cheeseburgers to the floor, to grind them under his boots as he sprinted away from the cash register and out into the parking lot.

  Not wishing to call attention to himself, however, he kept the smile plastered on his face and made blah blah talk as she rang up the order, a task that seemed to take her forever. He wanted to scream at the old woman to ‘pick it up, pick it up’ but kept his mouth clamped shut as she slowly, laboriously made change from the ancient cash register drawer. “Eighteen, nineteen and twenty…” she counted.

  Leaving the kid in the car had seemed a better alternative than bringing him inside. The kid had been asleep, or at least that’s how it had seemed at the time. He cursed himself for being fooled by a five year old as the old bitch counted pennies into his outstretched hand. “And twenty-one cents,” she finished.

  He slid two singles across the scratched glass counter top, snatched the bag of burgers and hurried out through the two sets of doors.

  The car was empty. Somehow or other, Michael had managed to wiggle himself out of his car-seat restraints. He must have climbed between the seats and figured out the supposedly child-proof door locks and then escaped through the passenger door. He threw the burger bag onto the passenger seat and looked around.

  The boy was nowhere in sight.

  28

  The ATF robot was smaller than Audrey Williams had imagined. Something like three feet tall, a stainless steel box, rolling over the pavement on articulated rubber tracks, ‘the bot’ , as they called it, looked more industrial and less human than its Hollywood counterparts.

  Audrey peeked to her right. The video console’s lower bank of screens was showing the world from the robot’s point of view. She was alternating between her binoculars and the robot’s ground level image, which, she couldn’t help thinking, must be pretty much the way Michael Browning saw the world.

  The Browning family’s dark green SUV was three cars down on the right hand side of row Sixteen D. As the robot approached the vehicle, it swung wide, affording a straight shot at the rear of the car.

  The image steadied. The robot seemed to be gathering itself before the tempest. The air crackled. The tension in the room was palpable.

  “Let’s go,” Craig growled into his headset.

  Audrey watched through her binoculars as the robot began to roll forward, slower now, raising one of its telescoping arms to reveal a thick black tube clutched in its…what was it?…hand didn’t seem right. Prosthesis? Claw? Pincher?

  The black tube was an A6VT. Some sort of new age, wide angle shotgun shell, filled with plastic shot, designed to take out the SUV’s back window in a single, highly controlled blast while producing little or no collateral damage. Audrey was watching the video screens as the machine inched forward.

  The robot was no more than ten feet from the rear of the vehicle now. The A6VT

  appeared to have been raised to the proper level. Five feet now. She held her breath.

  “Whoa,” Craig’s voice reached everyone in the room as surround sound. One version came directly from his mouth. A second arrived through their radio earpieces. While a third crackled over the computer sound systems.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  Silence.

  “Back up three feet,” he said.

  The robot complied.

  “What’s that,” Craig asked again.

  “I don’t understand sir,” came the operator’s voice.

  “Under the car,” Jackson Craig said. “What’s that under the subject vehicle?”

  Audrey lowered her binoculars and stepped closer to the video screens. Craig was right. Something was under the car. An irregular patch of white. From this angle, it was difficult to see precisely what it might be. “Can you zoom in?” Craig asked.

  The robot’s camera moved slowly forward, zooming and focusing at the same instant, until the entire screen was filled with the image.

  “Looks like fur or something,” the operator said finally.

  The operator’s conjecture was wasted, as Craig had already dropped his head-set onto the desk, picked up a hand-held radio and headed for the door at a lope. Audrey Williams trotted along in his wake.

  No waiting for the painfully slow elevator. Tripping down three flights of stairs and out into the parking lot, zipping up as they hurried through the frigid winter air. Audrey found her gloves and jogged to his side. “Would you mind…” she began.

  “He’s playing with us again,” Craig said. “Trying to get us to waste time.”

  They were sliding between parked cars now, dodging mirrors and custom truck bumpers as they worked their way across the packed parking lot to row Sixteen D. Audrey had a thousand indignant questions, but the speed at which they were moving made watching for steel obstructions an absolute necessity, so she held
her peace as they slalomed across the parking lot to section Sixteen D.

  Craig lifted the radio to his lips. “You’re probably going to want to remove your robot from the immediate area,” he said.

  “Repeat sir?” came the reply.

  Craig repeated the suggestion and then turned toward Audrey. He pointed to a radio antennae rising from the far side of the lot. “You see that antennae?” he asked.

  Audrey nodded. The low whine of the robot reached their ears.

  “That’s the ATF command post. Wait for me over there,” Craig said.

  “I thought I was your partner,” she said.

  When he didn’t say anything, she asked, “Would Gilbert Fowles let you go in there, while he waited over in the command post? Would he?”

  His eyes clouded over. “Different situations,” he said.

  “What’s different?” She closed the distance between them. She stood chin to chin with him now, looking into his eyes. “Let’s go see what’s under that damn car.”

  The ATF robot came rolling by, on his way down Sixteen D. With an array of tools clipped to its body, it looked like a moon rover and made a sound somewhat like an electric can opener. They watched in silence as the robot reached the end of the row, spun on its tracks and turned its digital eyes their way.

  She inclined her head toward the car. “Come on,” she said. When he failed to move, she started off on her own. Jackson Craig immediately fell in beside her.

  They walked the last fifty yards together, shoulder to shoulder, until they came abreast of the rear of the vehicle. They moved carefully as if trying not to disturb the air. For the briefest moment, as they stood motionless at the rear of the vehicle, Audrey wondered why she wasn’t afraid.

  Jackson Craig went to one knee. Audrey followed suit. Her face was red from the cold, her cheeks abuzz with anticipation. She had the urge to hum but quelled it.Together they dropped all the way down to the pavement. Lying on their bellies, with the loose pebbles and bits of pulverized glass right beneath their noses, they peered up under the filthy undercarriage of the car.