“But, Rolly,” Emma said, “in the statement you gave to police, in all of your statements, no one saw a second car at the scene, or on the highway.”
“That’s just it,” Rolly said. “The deputy asked me if I saw any cars at the scene or on the highway, and I didn’t. But I saw this car just before we came to yours.”
“Where was this?” Mave asked him.
“At the junction. Mom, you had leaned over to look at the gas gauge and tell Dad how he shoulda stopped in Big Cloud. I just looked east and it was way out there. I couldn’t tell you the make. It could’ve been white. This car was way off by the T-stop near Fox Junction, way off kicking up dust on that dirt road. It was moving real fast.”
Less than an hour later at the Big Cloud County Sheriff’s Office, Reed Cobb’s head snapped up from the glossy pages of a hunting magazine. Some fool was spanking the hell out of that bell at the front counter. Cobb’s utility belt squeaked as he got up and went to straighten them out.
“Emma? What the-?”
“There was a second car,” she said.
“What?”
“There was a second car fleeing the crash! Rolly Quiggly saw it. I just came from the Quiggly ranch.”
“Hold on-”
“This means someone saved Tyler! My baby’s alive!”
Emma’s commotion drew other deputies and clerks to the counter.
“Emma, you should be home resting.” Cobb gave a little nod to the others.
“No! You should get your people out there looking for that damn car!”
“Emma, you’re upsetting yourself.” Cobb exchanged glances with the other staff members. “We’re going to get you home. John and Heather are going to make sure you get home safely.”
“No!”
“We can take of care your car later.”
The deputies, John Holcomb and Heather MacPhee, approached Emma. She knew them a little from school fund-raisers down at the Big Cloud fair grounds. Holcomb was a part-time rodeo clown who operated a dunk tank and MacPhee sold home-baked pies and tarts. Her apple pie was very good. The deputies each took one of Emma’s upper arms.
“No,” Emma said. “Stop! What are you doing?”
“Take it easy now, Emma.” Holcomb’s grip was firm.
“My baby’s alive! Help me find him!”
“Emma, you have to stop this kind of talk,” Cobb said. “It’s not doing you any good.”
“No!” Emma struggled. “Why are you doing this? Help me find my son!”
20
Dog Lake, Ontario, Canada
After landing in Ottawa, Robert Lancer drove southwest for nearly two hours before turning his rental car onto Burnt Hills Road.
The side road led to secluded parts of cottage country, where Foster Winfield, the CIA’s former chief scientist, was living out his last days. Upon crossing a wooden bridge over a waterway, the pavement became a dirt road winding through sweet-smelling forests. Gravel popped against the undercarriage and dust clouds rose in his rearview mirror, pulling Lancer back to Said Salelee’s claim of a looming attack.
Marty Weller’s team was following Salelee’s information. Tanzanian police and U.S. agents were searching for other Avenging Lions for questioning, to determine who was behind the operation.
Was Salelee’s information valid or, like most raw data, unverifiable?
They had to be vigilant.
As I should’ve been with Jen and Becky.
As Lancer drove, he remembered the events of a decade ago.
Seeing his wife and daughter off at the airport for their trip to Egypt.
Becky, who was attending school in New York, had received a scholarship to study Egyptian art in Cairo for a year. Jen, who had worked in Cairo when she was a cultural attache with the State Department, was going to help her set up. Back then, he was with FBI Counterterrorism.
Watching their plane lift off that night in the rain, Lancer had felt a drop of concern ripple through him because of threats against the West by 37MNF, a new militant faction in Egypt. U.S. analysis said the group was poorly organized and poorly funded with little means to carry out an action.
That analysis was dead wrong and the life Lancer knew ended the moment his section chief called him into his office and told him to sit down.
Jen and Becky were on a tour bus near the pyramids on Cairo’s outskirts when 37MNF extremists hijacked it to the desert where they murdered all forty-two tourists, the driver and tour guide.
Egyptian police later tracked down the militants and shot them.
Lancer blamed himself.
While the analysis was not his, it reflected the work he did, and it had concluded that 37MNF did not constitute a valid threat.
Not a threat?
Then why did my wife and daughter come home in boxes?
Their deaths haunted him and led him to doubt what he did for a living and to doubt everything he had ever believed in.
After Lancer took bereavement leave, September 11 happened, and in the aftermath he used his rage to forge a new purpose. He was deployed to the National Anti-Threat Center where, in the years that followed, he buried himself in his work.
Now, as he drove, Lancer glimpsed his folder with Winfield’s file on the passenger seat.
Foster Winfield was born in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a chemist and his mother was a math professor. Winfield was a gifted scientist. He’d been a professor at MIT before working with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He then left DARPA for the CIA to head some of its top-secret research.
Lancer left the dirt road for a grass-and-rock stretch that twisted down to the lakeshore and an A-frame cottage.
Winfield cut a solitary figure standing on the deck watching Lancer approach. The old man was wearing a rumpled bucket hat, khaki pants and a faded denim shirt with a pocket protector from which pens peeked out. He stood a few inches above Lancer’s six feet and had a firm handshake.
“Thanks for coming, Bob. Coffee?”
While they waited for the coffee to brew, Lancer noticed a golden retriever on the floor.
“That’s Tug, the neighbor’s dog. He comes by every day.”
Lancer’s gaze went to Winfield’s desk: a laptop hooked up to the satellite dish outside, a phone, files, a framed photo of Winfield’s wife, who’d died years earlier. They had no children.
It underscored a void familiar to Lancer.
The two men took their coffee out to the deck, where they sat in Adirondack chairs and Winfield talked about his terminal condition while he stroked the dog.
“I take medication-there’s no discomfort. They gave me six months, five months ago,” Winfield said. “It’s come full circle for me. My parents had a cottage here. Some of the happiest days of my life were the summers I spent here as a boy.”
Winfield gazed out at the tranquil lake.
“Forgive me, you’re not here to listen to an old man reminisce.”
“It’s all right, Foster.”
“As you know, DARPA was created in the late 1950s, after the Russians launched Sputnik. I came aboard many years later, after they’d headhunted me at MIT.”
