listen to it, but feel free to interrupt anytime, ’cause I’ll keep the phone right at my ear, okay?’’
I took my portable out of the recharger that sat on top of the microwave, and called in.
‘‘Go ahead, Three.’’
‘‘Contact Fairmont, Minnesota, ten-thirty-three, tell them Nancy Mitchell is at the Travel King, at the pay phone, and to get officers there immediately.’’
‘‘Ten-four…’’
‘‘Do it on teletype. No radio. You got that?’’
‘‘Ten-four, Three.’’
‘‘There,’’ I said to Nancy. ‘‘Just stay put.’’
I could hear her take a deep breath. ‘‘Yeah. Yeah, I’ll, all right, yeah, I’ll stay here…’’
She talked to herself like that for about forty-five seconds. Then I heard sirens in the background.
‘‘They’re coming now,’’ she said.
‘‘Stay on the line,’’ I said, ‘‘and have one of them talk to me.’’
I picked up my walkie-talkie and called the office. I had them make immediate radio contact with Fairmont PD and get me the name of the responding officer. They did, just as he came on the phone.
‘‘Who is this?’’ he asked.
‘‘This is Deputy Houseman in Nation County, Iowa. Who is this?’’
He told me. It matched.
So by 0800 on that bright Tuesday morning, I was up, wired, worried, and getting hungry. I had coffee and started frozen fat-free waffles in the toaster, while the office contacted Hester, George, and Volont.
Just as the waffles came up out of the toaster, blackened but at least hot, the phone rang. I figured it was either Hester or Volont.
‘‘Hello.’’
‘‘You’re so predictable.’’ It was Gabriel.
‘‘I can’t be original this early,’’ I said.
‘‘I’ll bet you’re old and fat too,’’ he said.
Well, nothing hurts like the truth, but I’m hard to bait before noon. ‘‘You’ve been peeking,’’ I said.
There was a pause, for about two beats. ‘‘Let’s not waste time in banter,’’ he said.
‘‘Fine.’’
‘‘Find a way to be happy with those idiots you’ve already got.’’
‘‘Like who?’’
‘‘You know who. Wittman. Borcherding. Stritch. They’re the ones you want, really, and they will satisfy the public and the Zionists.’’
‘‘What about the rest of the people in the woods? The ones who really did the killing?’’ I thought that was a fair question, given the circumstances.
‘‘You never want to meet them,’’ he said. ‘‘Believe me.’’
‘‘I’m gonna have to, I’m afraid.’’
He sighed heavily. ‘‘No, don’t do that. Just make the evidence fit the others. You can do that. Your kind can always find a way.’’
‘‘Sorry,’’ I said. ‘‘You’ve got the wrong man for that stuff.’’
He sighed again. ‘‘I know you can’t possibly have a trace on your phone,’’ he said, ‘‘and I want you to know that when I say this conversation is getting boring, it really is.’’
‘‘Want to tell me why you sent Borcherding to snuff Stritch?’’ I asked.
‘‘That’s need to know,’’ he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.
‘‘I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t that e-mail I sent you,’’ I said.
‘‘You can’t reach me by e-mail,’’ he said. He thought he was calling my bluff.
‘‘I can when I call myself Nola, and relay through Bravo6.’’
Dead silence.
‘‘Just so you know,’’ I said, ‘‘I’ve done two other things you will probably hate.’’
‘‘Oh?’’ Very cold. Brittle, almost.
‘‘If we chat again, I might tell you what they are. But you should really do a background check on us lowly folks. You might be surprised. Goodbye.’’ I was the one who hung up the phone this time. I was sweating, and my waffles were cold. And I was really going to have to think about this one. I had him off balance, but… well, really, what else could I have done? I knew I hadn’t done any ‘‘two other things.’’ But knowing that I’d done one ‘‘thing,’’ he’d be looking over his shoulder for a little while at least. The same principle he used on his hostages. I hoped it worked as well as he seemed to think it did.
I had just gotten my pathetic reheated waffles out of the microwave when the phone rang. Hester. I dumped my waffles out, and told her what had happened. She was, well, a little less than overjoyed. But she was glad to hear that Fairmont PD had Nancy. I told her I was going to eat breakfast and then mosey up to the office. I called the office, and told them that if anybody bothered me in the next forty-five minutes, I’d come up and kill them as soon as I ate my breakfast. I asked about Lamar. He’d called in at 0545. Good. He really was getting better. I put my last four waffles in, and tried again. It worked. I don’t even really like waffles.
I debated for about one second whether or not to send Sue up to her mother’s house, just to get her away from an easy locate by Gabriel. She and I left the house together.
I got to the office at 0922. By 0924 I knew that George and Volont would be there in an hour, Hester in about forty-five minutes, and Nancy in two hours. Nancy was being escorted by three Iowa state troopers from the Minnesota border on down. Nothing is perfect, but she certainly wouldn’t be an easy hit.
When Hester arrived, I told her about the entire morning, including my comment about sending the e-mail. We agreed to tell George at some point, but not Volont.
When Volont arrived, the first thing he did was tell me that there was going to be a wiretap on my home phone. I couldn’t argue with that. With instant ability to trace. Except for cellular telephone traffic, which would take a while, if it worked at all. I said we might as well forget the trace, but Volont insisted. He said that assumptions about what an adversary will do will cause you to make silly little errors that might cost you a lot. Like I said, I was beginning to like him.
‘‘Frankly, Houseman,’’ he said, ‘‘I’m very surprised that he called you. It’s not like him.’’
‘‘Oh?’’
‘‘You must be getting close to something, even if you don’t realize it.’’
‘‘Thanks a hell of a lot,’’ I said.
‘‘No, no, really, that’s something we all do,’’ he apologized. ‘‘The important thing is to realize when you must have known it, and then you’ll know what it was.’’
Intelligence work does some of that to you. Counterintelligence, on the other hand, does a lot of that to you. I’d been told that in a school run by a real expert, and it had always stuck.
‘‘You work a lot of counterintelligence cases, don’t you,’’ I said.
‘‘Houseman, your perception stuns me.’’ He grinned. ‘‘You really did pay attention in that little school of ours, didn’t you?’’
The school had been run on a federal grant. ‘‘Sure did,’’ I said. He’d obviously looked up my file. Thorough. I wondered if he’d come across the motto of the counterintelligence agent who’d taught the class: ‘‘Sometimes you gets the Bear. Sometimes the Bear gets you.’’
Counterintelligence is the most dangerous thing you can do, because, almost by definition, you really can’t thoroughly know the mind of your target. I’d found that out very clearly with the e-mail to Gabriel. My intention had been that he contact Herman, thereby giving us a conduit we could trace. He turned around and tried to get Herman shut off forever, and just happened to use our only conduit in the process. I’d have to write to my old instructor. Sometimes the Bear, it seemed, got somebody else entirely. You had to get to know the Bear, and the one who knew him best was Volont.
Volont was still talking, mostly to George and Hester. ‘‘I think that’s typical of him,’’ he said.
‘‘What?’’ I asked. ‘‘I was thinking of something else…’’
‘‘To tell you to charge the others in the cases.’’
‘‘Oh, yeah.’’ I looked at him for a second. ‘‘You know,’’ I said, ‘‘it occurs to me that, aside from Rumsford, Gabriel hadn’t actually committed a crime in my jurisdiction. Or in Iowa, for that matter.’’
