Kevin ground his teeth. “You can’t explain it all away that easily.”
“I just did,” Tarnwell said with a wicked smile. “Very easy, wasn’t it? It’s exactly what I’ll tell anyone who asks if your girlfriend goes to the authorities with that notebook. What do I want? I want what I paid for. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Lobec spoke up. “And the videotape.”
Kevin tried to hide his surprised reaction, but it was too late. Lobec smiled.
Damn, Kevin thought. How did he know about that?
“Ah,” Tarnwell said. “So Michael wasn’t bluffing. Yes then. The videotape too.”
“And I suppose you’ll let me go free if she gives them to you.”
“Of course.”
“Bullshit.”
“Why shouldn’t I? Once I have Adamas, who do you think anyone will believe? A wealthy business man who is a pillar in the community, who has donated over a million dollars to charities and political causes around the state? Or a struggling student and his girlfriend who have recently had trouble with the police?”
Kevin walked over to the window and looked out at the lush green lawn. “And once you get the Adamas Blueprint, you’ll be satisfied?”
“The Adamas Blueprint? You mean the notebook?”
“That’s what Ward called it. He liked thinking up names for patents and new research methods. It got him more recognition in publications.”
“It sounds like Michael.”
“All you want is the blueprint?”
“It’s all I’ve wanted from the first day Michael contacted me. In a way, Michael was trying to cheat both of us. If I had known you were one of the coinventors, I wouldn’t have left you out of the deal. In fact, I’m willing to pay you the balance of what I was going to pay Michael. How does $5 million sound to you?”
Erica turned off the Chevy’s engine. She was stopped at the gas pump island of a Philips 66 truck stop just outside of Front Royal, Virginia, about an hour and a half west of Washington’s Beltway. She opened the door to the smell of diesel fuel and truck exhaust. The Philips 66’s parking lot was packed. It was 6:00 on Saturday night, and Erica wasn’t surprised at the congestion considering the heavy truck traffic she’d seen on I-81 for the past three hours.
When Kevin had been abducted, Erica immediately ran back to the lab and began gathering her belongings, including the notebook, videotape, and the diamond specimen, all the while terrified that Barnett and Kaplan would burst into the lab at any moment and kidnap her as well. The specimen had been difficult for her to dislodge without Kevin’s help, but after 10 minutes she worked it free. Then she ran to the truck, stopping only to pick up Ted Ishio’s cellular phone, the one Kevin had dropped during the chase.
On her way out of town, she hadn’t gone anywhere near Ted and Janice’s house, afraid that they would be waiting there for her. She headed west, away from the interstate, and then worked her way toward Roanoke over the back roads, getting lost several times on the twisting one-and-a-half-lane highways.
After filling up the enormous tank, Erica went into the convenience store and bought some coffee and a Hershey bar to tide her over until she got supper in Washington. She didn’t know when or even if the kidnappers would try to contact her. She had called her apartment several times during the drive, hoping they had left a message for her on the answering machine, but all that was on it were four messages: a call from one of her friends, one from the hospital asking when she’d be in again, and two marketing calls. If she didn’t hear from them by Sunday night, she had to conclude that they were torturing information out of Kevin. But she had no idea where to find him or who it was that had abducted him, leaving her with only one option. Given the situation, there was no alternative but to go to Congressman Sutter on her own and get his help in trying to find Kevin.
As she walked back to the truck, Erica heard a faint but distinctive sound, a periodic high-pitched bleat. She looked around to see if it came from someone else’s vehicle, but it grew louder as she approached the Chevy. It was the ringing of a cellular phone.
As she got into the truck, the phone bleated again. It couldn’t be Murray Hamilton’s phone; they’d turned it off after the first time one of his business clients had called. Which meant it was Ted’s cellular phone, the one Kevin had used to call her from the Virginia Tech parking lot. Erica tried not to get excited. It could very well be one of Ted’s friends calling.
She waited through another ring, hesitant to pick it up. But the ringing was insistent. She flipped open the phone and clicked the TALK button to answer it.
“Hello?” she said.
“Erica Jensen,” said an unmistakable Texas drawl, “I’m so glad we were able to contact you this way.”
“Who is this?”
“As you might guess, I’m sort of reluctant to give my name out over the phone. I believe we both have something the other wants.”
“What have you done with Kevin?”
“Why, I haven’t done anything. He’s right here. Would you like to speak with him?”
“Put him on.”
“I will, but you didn’t say please.”
After a slight pause, she heard Kevin’s voice, and she almost cried. “Erica? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I got out before they came back.”
“I know. Don’t worry about me, and don’t deal with them. Stick to our plan…”
She heard a scuffle on the other end of the line. Then the Texan was back on the phone.
“That’s too bad. I thought we convinced Kevin of our good intentions. I even offered him $5 million for what my former friend Michael Ward called the Adamas Blueprint. You know what he did? He tried to spit in my face.”
“Good.”
“You two are a pair, aren’t you? Well, it doesn’t matter. Erica, do you want Kevin to live?”
Erica’s breath caught in her throat.
“I said do you want Kevin to live?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll have to come to an agreement. Murray Hamilton’s truck should get you to Washington, which will be much more convenient for us. I will have the two men you met earlier take Kevin and meet you behind a warehouse on the Potomac. The address is…”
“No. I haven’t done this before, but I’m not stupid. It has to be someplace public.”
A second’s pause. “All right. Where?”
Erica had lived in Washington during a summer job after her sophomore year in college. She worked downtown, but hadn’t had a car at the time. Instead, she avoided the traffic and the crush of the Metro by biking in each day from her apartment in Arlington, Virginia through the Mall. On her route she had crossed one of the busiest bridges in the Washington area, the Arlington Memorial Bridge, directly across from the Lincoln Memorial. It was almost always busy, especially during rush hour, and the moment she thought of the bridge, she got the inkling of a plan.
“The middle of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, north side. The only ones I want to see there are Kevin and the two I’ve already met. If I see an army of guys out there, I’ll leave and send a copy of Adamas to every newspaper in the country.”
Another pause, probably to discuss the risks of the location. “All right, Erica. The Arlington Memorial bridge tomorrow at noon.”
“It has to be Monday morning,” she said, trying to stall for time.
“Monday? Schedule is important to me, Erica.” Her nerves grated every time the Texan said her name.
“If you want the notebook, you’ll have to wait.” She looked at the backpack with the notebook in it. “I can’t get to where it’s hidden until tomorrow night.”
A sigh. “Seven AM Monday morning. Oh, and there’s something else I want you to bring. A particular videotape that you found. You’ll have access to that as well, I assume?”
“Yes,” Erica said, reluctantly. Although it didn’t show much, it
