He craned his neck for a view of the horizon. Still no sign of dawn. He still had time. The plan was still alive.
One day, when all of this was over, Ryan was going to research how it was possible that in West Virginia hills only went up. On the way in on the night they were taken, the entire trip had seemed uphill, and now that he was going the opposite direction on foot, he knew damn well that it was all uphill.
As he crested his current slog, he saw a glimmer of hope. Somewhere in the distance-near or far, he couldn’t tell-a tiny light beckoned him. And unlike the lit-up house earlier, this light was far enough away from the compound to give him hope that the people who owned it weren’t complicit Nazis, but instead innocent Germans. You know, to keep the metaphor alive.
Still, he had to be careful. Everything was at stake here, including heartbeats and breathing. It behooved him to be careful. He slowed to an old-guy jog, and then to a walk.
Whatever the light was, it wasn’t a house this time. It was too small. Like, really small. And as he got closer, he noted that a splash of blue had invaded the white light.
He stopped. “Holy shit,” he said aloud. Was it even possible? Unless he was hallucinating, that blue spot was an image of a telephone.
Ryan didn’t have any coins in his pocket. “Oh, please,” he whispered. “Oh please, oh please, oh please.” He lifted the phone from its cradle.
Dial tone. Yes!
He pressed the receiver to his face and dialed 911. The line clicked with electronic noise, and five seconds later, he heard a voice on the other end.
“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office, Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?”
A flood of emotion erupted from deep within Ryan’s soul. This was his moment to be brave-to announce to the world that he was here to save his family-yet when the moment arrived, he dissolved into deep, choking sobs.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jonathan snatched up his receiver and brought it to his head. “Yeah.” At this hour-Jesus, one-thirty-seven-one syllable was the best he could muster.
“Verify your identity, please, sir,” a voice said from the other side.
“Excuse me?”
“Sir, I need you to verify your identity before I can continue.”
Jonathan shook his head to rattle the sleep from his synapses. “You called me. Who do you think it is?”
“Sir, we can play these games all night, but it’s a waste of time. I have orders to follow.” He sounded young.
“Who is this?” Jonathan pressed.
“Sir, it’s late for me, too, okay? Must we make this more difficult than necessary? I need to confirm your identity.”
Jonathan sat up in his bed and turned the switch on the nightstand lamp. “This is Jonathan Grave,” he said.
“Thank you. Next, I need your address and date of birth.”
Finally, this was beginning to make sense. He was about to receive intelligence data from someone who had no business giving it to him. He gave the caller both bits of information.
“Excellent,” the voice said. “Thank you. And can you verify that you are awake enough to comprehend the information I’m about to give you?”
Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Awake and alert.”
“Okay,” the young man said. “Because I’m about to deliver information that would send me to prison if it were ever revealed. There’s no way I’m going to say this twice, so it’s very important that you’re ready to copy the details.”
Fully awake now, Jonathan swung his feet to the floor and stood. With the phone pressed to his ear, he walked naked to his desk in the far corner, switched on that lamp and sat in his Aeron chair, pen hovering over paper. “I’m ready to copy,” he said, and then he pressed a button to record the call.
“I work for the National Security Agency,” the young voice said. “In violation of God knows how many laws, we picked up a recording from an American citizen to an American citizen. My boss said I needed to wake you up and relay the information. The only reason I can think of that he didn’t call you himself is that he didn’t want to be the designated jailee. Personally, sir, before I play you the tape, I need to reiterate that you’re a perfect stranger to me, and if I need to throw you under the bus to save my own ass, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”
Jonathan laughed. “Don’t hold back,” he said. “Tell me what you really think.”
“I am telling you what I really think,” he said. Clearly, his irony sensor had been paralyzed by NSA bureaucracy. “Apparently, you’re more important tonight than the entire Constitution, and way more important than my future. Stand by to copy.”
Jonathan heard a click and some mechanical noise. Then a voice:
“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office, Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?”
Next came a muffled sound he didn’t quite recognize until it huffed a little, like a struggling steam engine. The person on the other end of the phone was crying. “Th-this is Ryan Nasbe,” the voice said. “Me and my mom were kidnapped.”
The rest of the call lasted all of three minutes.
Gail and Venice sat at the teak table in the War Room, looking like rewarmed corpses. Jonathan hadn’t given them much time to respond to his call-in fact, the order was “Meet me at the War Room right by-God now.”
Gail seemed particularly unprepared. Yesterday’s mascara hung like shadows under her eyes, and whatever she’d tried to do with her hair had only made it worse.
Venice just looked tired. Jonathan wondered how she managed to do all that she did on a daily basis. Professionally, she was his administrative and investigative right hand, while on the personal side, she had an eleven-year-old son to wrangle and a high-strung seventy-something-year-old mother to control. Or maybe it was Mama who needed to be wrangled and Roman who needed to be controlled. Either way, she was forever shoving twenty-eight hours of activity into twenty-four-hour days.
“Do we really know where the Nasbes are now?” Gail asked, settling into her usual chair. “And where’s Boxers?”
“Big Guy will be here when he’s here. We can’t wait for him.” Boxers didn’t appreciate the charms of Fisherman’s Cove, preferring the District of Columbia’s ready access to bars and babes. Without traffic and with a heavy foot, he’d be here in an hour and a half.
“So where are they?” Venice pressed.
“Maddox County,” Jonathan said.
“Maddox County where?”
“Don’t know. A contact at the NSA called a half hour ago with an intercepted nine-one-one call to the Maddox County Sheriff’s Office. Beyond that-”
“Wait,” Gail said. “The NSA recorded a call from inside the U.S.?” She seemed appalled.
“Don’t start,” Jonathan warned. “I already had this discussion with Dudley Do-Right of the National Security Agency.” He held up a tiny flash drive onto which he’d copied the NSA call. “Venice, please work your magic and bring this up on the speaker system.”
Jonathan was an analog man trapped in a digital world. He loved high-tech toys and spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on the best and shiniest gadgets around, but if the toys didn’t guide him where he wanted to go or improve upon the flight path of a bullet, he wasn’t much interested in learning how they worked. Such was the case with the audiovisual technology of the War Room.
It took Venice less than a minute to bring up the audio. As an added touch, she also brought up a picture of the Nasbe family from happier times, all of them gathered around a Christmas tree and smiling out at them from the projection screen on the far wall.
“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office,” a voice said, “Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?” Her voice had the
