“Did he say how long he’d be gone?”
The woman said, “Can I ask what this is in reference to?”
Stone clicked off and sat back.
“Anything wrong?” Annabelle asked.
“I don’t think so. Caleb just went off to get some lunch.”
Stone’s phone rang. He recognized the number on the screen. “It’s Caleb.” He put the phone up to his ear. “Caleb, where are you?”
Stone stiffened. A minute later he put the phone down.
“What’s up?” Annabelle asked. “What did Caleb say?”
“It wasn’t Caleb. It was the people who are holding Caleb.”
“What!”
“He’s been kidnapped.”
“My God, what do they want? And why are they calling you?”
“They got the number from Milton. They want to meet to discuss things. Any sign of the police, they kill him.”
“What do they mean they want to meet?”
“They want you, me, Milton and Reuben to come.”
“So they can kill us?”
“Yes, so they can kill us. But if we don’t go, they’ll kill Caleb.”
“How do we know he’s not already dead?”
“At ten o’clock tonight they said they’d call and let him talk to us. That’s when they’ll tell us where and when the meeting is.”
Annabelle drummed her fingers on the worn steering wheel. “So what do we do?”
Stone studied the Capitol dome in the distance. “You play poker?”
“I don’t like to gamble,” she answered with a straight face.
“Well, Caleb’s their full house. So we need at least that or better to be able to play this hand. And I know where to get the cards we need.” However, Stone knew that his plan would test the limits of friendship to the max. Yet he had no choice. He punched in the number, which he knew by heart.
“Alex, this is Oliver. I need your help. Badly.”
Alex Ford sat forward in his chair at the Secret Service’s Washington Field Office.
“What’s going on, Oliver?”
“It’s a long story, but you need to hear it all.”
When Stone finished, Ford sat back and let out a long breath. “Damn.”
“Can you help us?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I’ve got a plan.”
“I hope you do. It sounds like we don’t have much time to pull this together.”
Albert Trent left Capitol Hill that evening and drove home. Leaving Route 7, he followed the meandering back roads to his isolated neighborhood. He slowed as he approached the last turn before his driveway. A pickup truck had run off the road and hit something. An ambulance and a utility truck were there along with a police car. A uniformed cop was standing in the middle of the road. Trent drove cautiously ahead until the policeman stepped forward with his hand up. Trent rolled down his window and the cop leaned in.
“I’m going to have to ask you to turn around, sir. That truck skidded off the road and hit an aboveground natural gas pressure regulator and caused a major surge in the pipes. Damn lucky he didn’t blow himself and the neighborhood sky-high.”
“But I live right around the bend. And I don’t have gas in my house.”
“Okay, I’ll need to see some ID with your address on it.”
Trent dug into his jacket pocket and handed the officer his driver’s license. The cop hit it with his flashlight and then handed it back.
“All right, Mr. Trent.”
“How soon will they fix it?”
“That’s a question for the gas company. Oh, one more thing.”
He reached his other hand in the window and sprayed something from a small canister directly into Trent’s face. The man coughed once and slumped over in his seat.
On cue, out of the ambulance stepped Stone, Milton and Reuben. With the cop’s help Reuben lifted Trent out of the car and into another car that pulled forward, Annabelle at the wheel. Alex Ford emerged from the ambulance and handed Stone a leather canvas knapsack. “You need me to show you how to use it again?”
