She looked around, trying to figure out how to move quietly with her legs bent sideways like that, and saw the three strands that went around the right-hand bedpost. Shit. So much for that idea.
She closed her eyes. Okay, she thought, so make the call. Do what this bitch says. Hell, Kreiss might not even answer the page. She opened her eyes, suddenly afraid. He’d better answer the page, she thought. She wondered where he was.
Kreiss was sitting in the parking lot of a fast-food joint three blocks from the Beltway interchange with U.S. Route 1. He was munching on a lukewarm, well-oiled three-dollar heart attack when he heard the pager chirping in the duffel bag behind his seat. He put the grease burger down and turned around to get at the pager. He’d forgotten he had it. The number in the window made him sit right up, though: It had been his own unlisted office number when he was at the Agency. Now who the hell was sending this little summons? He didn’t have to write the number down, so he simply cleared the pager, which beeped at him gratefully. There was a phone booth at the edge of the parking lot, but there were two very fat teenaged girls hanging on it, so he went back to his gourmet extravaganza. He had been through all the truck stops and terminals on the northern Virginia side and was now working up the nerve to cross the Wilson Bridge, Washington’s monument to uncivil engineering. He had planned to wait another half hour for rush hour to subside somewhat and to make sure no big semis had fallen through the bridge deck today.
The girls finally left the phone booth in gales of laughter, multiple chins jiggling in unison. He started to get out but then hesitated. It was just after 6:00 on a Monday evening. The pager had belonged to Janet Carter, which meant it was Bureau equipment. Now someone had called it and left a northern Virginia phone number on it that no one in the Bureau should have had access to. Ergo, this wasn’t a Bureau summons.
He turned on the cabin light and examined the pager for signs of a second antenna, something that might transmit his location when he had acknowledged the message. Then it occurred to him that this might be about Lynn. Hell with it, he thought.
He got out and went over to the phone booth, which reeked of chewing gum and cheap perfume when he cracked open the door. He dialed the number. It rang four times before being picked up, and, to his surprise, it was Janet Carter.
“Is this about Lynn?” he asked.
“I have a message for you,” Janet said in a wooden voice.
“From whom?”
“The message is as follows: Tenebrae factae sunt.”
“What—” he said, but the connection had been broken. And then the message penetrated. Almost in slow motion, he put the handset back on the hook and backed out of the booth. He walked back to the van, got in, and started it up. Hamburger forgotten, he drove out of the parking lot, turned left when he came to Route 1, and headed south, away from the Beltway.
Well, well, well, he thought. Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen.
Misty’s coming. That was the nickname she’d been given, in memory of the psychotic woman character who kept calling Clint Eastwood to play “Misty” for her in that movie. The message was her trademark. It was supposed to spook him, and in a way, it did. Misty was in her fifties, looked forty the last time he had seen her, and had been the preeminent stalker in the stable, bar none. Kreiss had concluded a long time ago that Misty had a Terminator personality. She was either sitting up there on her shelf, like some neighborhood black hole, absorbing light, motion, sound, everything that was going on around her, with those disturbing black eyes staring into infinity with perfect indifference, or she was on the move, morphing through keyholes or running down cars, a human Velociraptor, leading with her teeth. She tracked like a damned adult mamba, moving fast through the bush on a molecular prey trail, its head and upper body occasionally coming up and off the ground, testing the air with its tongue, looking, eager to deliver a fatal strike, hunting because it liked to.
He had trained under her supervision for two years before getting his first operational assignment, so there was nothing that he knew that she didn’t also know. Well, maybe a couple of things, he thought hopefully.
But realistically, he was now, officially and irrevocably—put it on the evening news, folks—in deep shit. He would have to abandon
immediately his pursuit of Browne McGarand and look to his own defenses.
Maybe head out to Dulles and get on the evening flight to Zanzibar, or, better yet, lower Patagonia. That would be about the right distance.
Except he’d probably just be finishing the evening meal when she appeared out of the cockpit. The only chance he had was if Misty was going solo and had not brought along a cast of thousands. Given the history, she might well be solo. Misty was a sport.
He drove down Route 1 for twenty minutes until he came to the entrance to Fort Belvoir, where he turned in. Belvoir was an open post, the home of the Army Corps of Engineers School, so there were no gates or guards. But it was still a military reservation, and it seemed safer to stop there than out on the street. He drove around the cam puslike facility for a few minutes before parking the van in front of the main post exchange complex. He shut the van down and closed his eyes, commanding his brain to organize and think about his situation.
Misty was coming. She’d used Janet Carter as her messenger, which meant that Janet was having a bad evening. Daniella Morganavicz was her real name. Her parents had supposedly emigrated from Serbia, and she had clearly inherited the ruthless faculties of that bloody-minded tribe.
Somebody at Langley must be really worried if Misty had been put in play.
Then the pager went off again.
He looked down at the little device and thought about throwing it out the window. The first page had been the warning; was this one Misty making a tracking call? He looked at the number in the window. It was the Roanoke area code and a number he didn’t recognize. Carter again?
He had rented a cell phone with the van, but wanted to save using that for when he was certain someone was hunting him. How certain do you want it? he thought, remembering the warning. He looked around for a phone booth and finally saw a bank of them by the exchange entrance. He looked at the number again and then turned the pager off without acknowledging the call. He got out, threw the pager into a concrete flower planter, and walked over to the bank of pay phones. He dialed the number, entered his credit-card number, and waited. The credit card would tie him to this place, but he hadn’t really begun to run and hide yet, so that shouldn’t matter. Emphasis on the shouldn’t. It was Carter who answered.
“Sorry about being rude,” she said.
“That goddamned woman was here. Do you know whom I mean?”
“Oh yes,” he said.
“Tallish? Black eyes? Absorbs ambient light?”
“That’s the one. Said you would understand that message to mean she was coming for you.”
“Clear as a bell. Why are you calling me?”
“I’m on a pay phone. My phone is being tapped, I think. I called because I need to talk to you, first about your daughter, and second about what’s going on.”
He felt a clang of alarm when she mentioned Lynn.
“What about Lynn?”
“She’s awake. I was there when she came around. I think she’s going to be fine—no apparent mental damage. We talked. She told me what happened out there at the arsenal. The other two kids apparently got caught in some kind of traps and were drowned by a flash flood.”
“Yes, I found leg traps.”
“Well, she also told me some stuff about the guy I think you’re hunting.
It involves a bomb, and I think I know what it is. I—” “Hold on a minute, Carter. I’m not hunting anyone.”
There was a moment’s hesitation.
“I think you are, or at least you were,” she said.
“I think you were hunting one Browne McGarand, because he kidnapped Lynn. I also think you did something to his grandson, Jared.”
She stopped talking, but he decided to remain silent.
