by P. J. Tracy
"Did you get anything.?" Gino asked him.
"Yeah, I found out why there's no record of the call. The guy who runs the whole network for Wisconsin Cellular just told me it was black magic. How's that make you feel? The people who run the system can't even explain why it works the way it does. Christ. He said if the conditions were perfect, there's a solar storm or sunspots or maybe goddamned Jupiter aligns with goddamned Mars, then sometimes a phone can snatch a tower's signal way beyond the normal range. And if the connection is short enough or distorted enough, it might not register in their software at all."
"I tried to tell you that," Roadrunner called from across the room.
"Yeah, well, this guy said it in English."
They all looked up when Magozzi started to raise his voice. He'd finally gotten through to Minneapolis SAC Paul Shafer, and now he was snapping out an exact quote of Grace's call. He'd memorized every word. He stood up and yelled down the aisle toward the front of the rig, asking how far they were from Beldon, totally forgetting they had an intercom, then he went back to the phone, listened for a second, then exploded: "Jesus Christ, Shafer, were you listening? She saiddead people, at least four of them, and they're right in the middle of it. . . . Fuck tracing the call; we already tried that, and if these guys can't do it, your guys sure as hell aren't going to be able to manage it. . . ." And then he shut up and just listened for a long time before replacing the receiver and looking helplessly at Gino. "You aren't going to fucking believe this."
Everybody in the office stopped what they were doing.
"Shafer's been rolling some people out of bed, pretty much laying his career on the line, calling in favors, and when that didn't work, making some threats. He says the Wisconsin Feds moved their undercover guys in when a few of the people they were watching made some unusual purchases. They think they might be making nerve gas."
Halloran's pencil froze on a pageful of scribbles. Roadrunner sat perfectly still, staring at lines of data scrolling by on the monitor, seeing nothing.
"How sure are they?" Gino asked, his voice tense, his words clipped.
"Shafer didn't know, but he called the agent in Beldon, gave him some background, told him about the call from Grace." He took a breath, upset by the mere mention of her name. "He'll fill us in on what they know when we get there."
Up front in the cab, Harley listened to the exchange on the intercom and pushed the accelerator to the floor.
Ten minutes later they drove into Beldon, flying past a speed-limit sign so fast that Bonar couldn't read it. The streets were dark and quiet, but the parking lot of the Missaqua County Sheriff's Office was lit up like one of those casinos in the middle of the prairie, crowded with dark, nondescript sedans. Magozzi suspected the inside of the cinder-block building was equally crowded with dark, nondescript suits. Harley rocked to a stop and within seconds, all of them exploded from the RV's front door like fizz from a punctured pop can.
Sheriff Ed Pitala was waiting for them outside the front entrance, a cigarette smoldering at the corner of his mouth. He looked lean and mean and nowhere near his sixty-plus years, and it wasn't a stretch to imagine him slamming a Federal agent up against a wall. But he was all smiles when he saw Halloran and Bonar.
"Mike Halloran, it's been too damn long. You missed the Association golf tournament.. . Jesus, Mike. You look like roadkill that isn't quite dead yet. What the hell is going on?"
Halloran grabbed his hand and kept shaking it the whole time he was talking, as if he'd forgotten to let go. "The women we're looking for are in big trouble, Ed, and we've got no time at all. Anything we should know before we go in there?"
Ed crushed his cigarette out in a flowerpot of dirt that was sprouting Marlboro filters. "Just a bunch of spooks running around chewing up my place and bossing me around for no reason they'll tell me. That phone call from your friend in Minneapolis shook 'em up some. It was chilly in there to begin with, but now I'm skating on a real thin patch of ice. But I'm still the head rooster. I got my people out looking for Doug Lee, and that's all I care about."
"Have you heard anything from the road?" Bonar asked.
"A couple deputies have called in. Nothing yet."
Agent Knudsen intercepted them in the lobby, and, given the circumstances, he was surprisingly cordial. Magozzi figured him for one of the public relations front guys that the FBI used to smooth ruffled feathers while they ran interference. His expression remained neutral until Magozzi introduced Harley and Roadrunner.
"And this is Officer Davidson and Officer . . . Road."
Harley tried his hardest to look legit, but Roadrunner didn't even bother-it was hopeless for him.
"Undercover," Magozzi added quickly.
Knudsen still looked skeptical.
"Computer crimes," Harley said, and Knudsen nodded as if that explained everything.
Knudsen glanced at the sat phone clutched in Roadrunner's hand. "Did you have any luck reconnecting with your women?"
Magozzi shook his head. "No luck reconnecting, no luck tracing. You've got to give us something, Agent Knudsen. They're in the middle of this somehow, and we need every scrap of information you've got so we know where to start looking."
"That's already been negotiated. I'll give you what I can, although I don't think it will help. But you gentlemen need to understand something up front: This is our show. Paul Shafer and the Minneapolis Field Office have no jurisdiction, and we call the shots. Letting you in so you can find your missing agent is a personal favor, but if you interfere in any way with our operation, we'll pull you off the road, is that clear?"
Everyone nodded.
"As you already know, we've lost three agents, and we certainly don't want to see the Bureau lose another one, but we're talking about many more lives at stake here, and thatwill take priority."
And that was the sentence that brought it all home. Everyone was momentarily shocked into silence. Magozzi was thinking that just a few hours ago, he'd been pelting softballs at a circular target, trying to send Gino into a dunk tank, rubbing a stomach abused by more deep-fried food than he normally ate in a year. A few hours. Apparently, that was all it took for the world to tilt on its axis and send everything that made sense sliding off.
"Well, Christ, man, then give us something we can use."
Knudsen's eyes went over his head. "Sheriff Pitala? May we use your office?"
"Why the hell not? You'd use it anyway. But gee, thanks for asking."
Sheriff Ed Pitala was in his office even when he wasn't. The place was cluttered with dozens of family photos, most of them featuring big, dead fish on stringers.
Agent Knudsen helped himself to the desk and chair while the others stood. Harley and Roadrunner hung back by the door, Hallo-ran and Bonar kept a respectful distance, but Magozzi and particularly Gino were in-your-face close to the desk.
"As of this moment, you're an official part of an FBI operation, and you will remain in Missaqua County after this wraps up for debriefing." Knudsen looked at each of them. "All of you. Understood?"
"Understood," Magozzi said, and everyone nodded.
"All right. We've had a watch on a cell up here for over two years."
Halloran, who had some familiarity with Wisconsin's penchant for creating and attracting fringe groups, frowned. "What kind of a cell? White supremacists? Militia?"
Knudsen made a face. "That's the problem. They don't fit the standard profiles. They're farmers, business owners, working-class men, some of them decorated veterans, and no history on any of the men that attaches them to groups like that. No suspicious activity of any kind, except what attracted our attention in the first place."
"You found out they were making fucking nerve gas."
Knudsen's eyes twitched at Gino's interruption and his language. He found a photo of an obscenely whiskered fish on the wall and just stared at it. "We do not have any confirmation on that, and I will not discuss the details of our investigation. All you need to know is that somethi
ng they did rang a lot of bells in Washington recently, and we immediately sent in three men to try to infiltrate the group. Three days ago, those men called in their first success and gave us two things: next Friday's date and the letter E."
"What's the E mean?" Magozzi asked.
"Event." He paused a moment, let that sink in, then gave Sheriff Halloran a nod. "The next thing we knew, you had our agents on slabs down in Wausau."
Magozzi watched the man take a breath. It was the first visible break in his demeanor, and he wondered if Knudsen had known the murdered agents personally, if maybe they'd been friends.
"So," Knudsen continued, "we moved in fast, really fast. Within four hours, we had every agent we could get on the ground here. We had a few names of people our agents thought were key. We just finished executing warrants on the homes and businesses of all of them. If there was anything there in the first place, it's not there now. Neither are the men. We've got the county locked down tight, and we're watching every vehicle in and out."
"Oh, yeah?" Harley challenged him. "Well, we just drove in here in a rig big enough to carry a hundred if we packed them in, and we didn't have any trouble."
Knudsen gave him a nasty smile. "You've had two cars on you since you crossed the line."
Gino's brows went up to impressed height, a place they'd never been when the FBI was involved.
Magozzi said, "So something's going down, and you've got until Friday to stop it."
"It might be worse than that. We suspect the call from our agents was intercepted-that's what got them killed-so they could have dismantled the entire operation and moved it somewhere else .., or,worst-case scenario, maybe they moved up the schedule and we don't have until Friday anymore."
Magozzi felt his stomach drop. "You have a target?"
"No."
Gino was dumbfounded. "Jesus Christ, these people are going to hit something and you don't even know what?"
"Correct."
Magozzi felt like he was swimming through Jell-O. "We need the names of the men you identified and the sites you raided."
Knudsen shrugged. "You can get them from the man out at the front desk, but if you ask me, it's a waste of time. Agents are still crawling all over every site, and for miles in every direction, and we haven't turned up anything. Listen. We appreciate your concern over your missing people, and we're impressed with what you've put together so far. So impressed, in fact, that we're going to have a long talk with you all later about how you managed to do that. But we can't see any kind of a possible connection between your missing people and our operation. Just a freak coincidence."
"The coincidence is the connection," Magozzi said.
"Whatever. At any rate, we're willing to give you the run of the roads in the county, as long as you keep watch for a few things we're looking for and report back immediately if you see them."
"So what are we looking for?"
"Milk trucks."
Knudsen stayed in Sheriff Pitala's office to make some calls while the others went out to the lobby. Harley strutted up to the suit at the front desk to collect the names and raid sites that Knudsen had promised.
Halloran signaled Sheriff Pitala with a jerk of his head, and the rest of them went outside.
Halloran was face-to-face with Sheriff Pitala, but both men had their hands in their pockets and were looking down at the ground.
"That little twerp in there ask you to do anything for him?" Pitala asked.
"Yep."
"He told you to look for something, right?"
"Right."
Pitala nodded, looking off into the night. "Yeah, well, he told us to look for something, too. That was the only way he'd let my people out on the road to find Doug Lee. Wonder if it was the same thing."
"Milk trucks," Magozzi said, and Sheriff Pitala smiled and pulled out a Marlboro.
"Thank God. Didn't know how long I'd be able to keep that one under my hat."
Harley burst out the door and thrust a sheet of paper at Magozzi.
Magozzi glanced at the sheet, then passed the paper to Roadrunner. "Three names, three places of business, three houses. Maybe you can do some computer magic with these the Feds can't, but to tell you the truth, I think it's pretty much a dead end."
"No shit," Gino said. "The Feds are all over those sites already. No reason for us to travel down that road. So once again, we get a piece of the puzzle, and we aren't any farther ahead. We still don't have a clue where to start looking."
Magozzi turned to Sheriff Pitala. "You have your people covering the whole county, looking for Deputy Lee?"
"I've got thirty-five people out there, including a couple of secretaries." He raised his eyes to Magozzi. "It's a small department. That's damn near my whole roster. Most of them are concentrated in Doug's patrol area-that was the northern sector tonight. Five hundred square miles."
"Jesus," Gino murmured. "You could have a thousand men out there who'd still miss him if he was standing behind a tree."
"Yep."
Halloran was looking out at the cars in the lot, rubbing the underside of his lip the way he always did when he was thinking hard. "On the phone, you said you tried to radio Lee when the Feds first pulled your patrols."
Sheriff Pitala nodded. "Tried to. Couldn't reach him, but didn't worry about it. Figured he was on his way home anyhow."
"But you said you thought he was probably in a dead radio zone, that's why you couldn't reach him."
"That's right. We've got a few of those in the hollows where we don't have enough repeaters around, and some more near the high tension lines. . , oh, shit. Goddamnit.Goddammit."
"It might not mean anything."
"Maybe not, but it's a connection I should have made. Stay put. I'll be right back."
Gino nudged Bonar with an elbow. "That was a nice call your boss made."
Bonar beamed like a proud parent. "That boy shines under pressure. Always did."
Inside of a minute, Sheriff Pitala was back with a copy of a county map with all the dead zones marked; another two minutes, and he was inside, sharing the information with Knudsen, begging to contact the few people he had on the road who had radios in their personal cars. Knudsen wouldn't let him.
Pitala went over to a side desk and sat by the phone to wait for check-in calls on the landline, his head in his hands. By the time the first call came in, the RV was long gone.
GRACE, SHARON, and Annie had been stunned into immobility by the startling cell-phone call. They'd heard a fragment of a single shouted word that Grace and Annie had been absolutely certain was Roadrunner calling Grace's name, and then nothing but static. Grace had talked into the phone anyway, words tumbling over one another, and then the cell had abruptly gone dark.
They tried everything they could think of to get the phone to work again, to recapture that fragile connection, not knowing if anything that Grace had said went through.
"It's not the signal," Grace finally said. "The phone's dead. It's a miracle it ever connected after being in the water that long."
Annie was glaring at the useless phone in frustration. "I didn't even know you had that thing with you."
"I always have it with me."
Sharon sagged against the corner of the barn, devastated to have been so close to salvation, only to have it snatched away. "Stupid.Stupid," she hissed bitterly. "We finally find a place high enough and open enough to catch a signal, and we don't have a goddamned phone because we were so stupid that we left them where those guys could find them."
Grace took Sharon's arm and shook it a little. "We don't have one second to think of things like that. We've wasted too much time already. We have to hurry."
They backtracked the same way they had come: into the cornfield at the side of the farmhouse, between the rows, green leaves rustling at their hurried passage, down onto their hands and knees when they broke out of the corn into the tall grass of the field that abutted the road.
This used to be fun, Annie thought as sh
e crept ahead on all fours. When you're a child, dropping to your hands and knees and scrabbling through the grass was something you did for the sheer joy of it. But once you reached a certain age, the posture implied degradation, submission-"he was brought to his knees," "she came crawling back on her hands and knees"-even the language recognized that somewhere between age five and ten, crawling ceased to be fun and became humiliating.
Grace paused at the edge of the field while the others came alongside. They all dropped to their stomachs and peered through the last fringe of tall grass before the land sloped gently down into the ditch, then up onto the road.
To their left, the asphalt climbed the small rise that kept them out of sight of the roadblock; to their right, it rolled gently down into the deeper blackness of Four Corners.
Grace held her breath, listening, watching, caution pressing on her back and tapping her on the shoulder. Crossing the road was the only time they would be totally exposed. She clenched her jaw and concentrated on the evidence of all her senses.
Nothing. No sound, no lights, no sign of life.
She nudged the other two, then held up a forefinger. One at a time. They'd cross one at a time, just in case all the soldiers hadn't gone to the perimeter, just in case they'd left an odd one here and there to keep watch, just in case anything.
Annie and Sharon nodded understanding, then watched with wide eyes as Grace slipped down into the ditch, up the other side, hesitated, then darted across the road and disappeared into the ditch on the other side.
Sharon caught a deep breath, then followed; Annie went a few seconds later.
On their bellies once more, single file, they wriggled like the disconnected segments of a crippled worm back toward the deserted town.
The ditch seemed like an old friend now, its banks rising as if to shelter them from the road. Annie made a face as they slipped into the rank water puddling around slimy grass stems, and it occurred to her that she had to go to the bathroom. Bad. It seemed preposterous. You shouldn't have to go to the bathroom when you're busy running for your life and the lives of a thousand other people. Certainly Superman never had this problem.