“Yes.’ “Why?” She told him. He asked if what her stick had caught on could have been a wire. She thought about it. Something had caught her stick, but had it been heavy enough to be a snake? “It might have been a wire. I thought it was a snake.”
“Okay, hang on a minute.”
She could barely see him in the darkness, but he was probing again with his stick. After thirty seconds, the buzzing started, and he stabbed down hard with the stick and then pulled the tip straight up. There was a loud buzzing noise in front of Karen, and another one off to her left.
It actually sounded as if there might be even another one to Sherman’s right, down the hill about ten yards.
“Got it,” he said. “It is a damned wire. These ‘snakes’ are electronic devices.”
“Are you real, real sure of that?” she asked, embarrassed by the sound of her own voice.
“Come over here. I have it in my hand.”
She took a deep breath and stepped sideways toward him.
When she got up close, she could see the dark wire in his hand, as well as a small black object embedded in the wire that was putting out a really good rattlesnake noise. He jerked hard on the wire, and the others in the reptilian chorus let go for fifteen seconds before going silent.
Pretty damned effective,” he said. “The good news is that we know what it is. The bad news is what might be listening at the other end of this wire.”
“Where does it go?” she said. “Up there?” They looked up the hill.
Galantz was more likely to be at the end of that wire than at Jack’s trailer. She recalled seeing the glimpse of a fallemiown house up above the trailer she had talked to Jack. But if that’s where the wire went, they were way off course.
“That light,” she said. “That might have been Jack’s trailer. We might be closer to the top than we realized.” She told him about having seen what looked like a ruined house at the top of the hill.
“Jack’s trailer,” he asked, “did it took like two people were living there?”
“It didn’t look like a human lived there,” she said, and then regretted it immediately. “I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath. “Then we need to follow this wire,” he said, looking up the hill into the darkness. “And we’re going to be expected.”
Train was making progress with the tape, a millimeter at a time. The skin of his wrists was getting raw, and he could feel the tape getting warm as he. applied pressure. He was now convinced he was in some kind of basement or underground room-something about the temperature and musty smell of the air. But the tape was giving way, little by little.
He alternated pressing his hands out and then his feet, intent on restoring as much circulation as he could. He was wary about moving around or trying to see in the darkness, in case Galantz had another one of those blinding devices attached to a motion detector. He tried to think. Galantz would contact Karen or the admiral somehow and offer a trade. More than likely, he wanted to get the admiral in the room with his son, make sure the father knew that the son had been part of it, and then perhaps execute the son to finish his lethal head games on Sherman.
Galantz didn’t want Sherman dead. Quite the opposite: Galantz wanted destroyed, and then left alive to contemplate his And what would happen to Karen if she came with the admiral? And what was Galantz going to do with him, for that matter? He stopped pushing as a small wave of nausea swept through him, a fleeting vestige of the sedative. Galantz had been able to move with impunity throughout this whole business. Granted he had had years to prepare, all the fun in the world to plant devices and scout the ground.
Plus Jack’s help with some of the dog work. And tradecraft at the level of a sweeper. No wonder Mchale Johnson had been impressed, and FBI guys didn’t impress easily. He was also pretty sure that the FBI had decided to sit on the sidelines if the agency they loved to hate was showing its ass.
But why hadn’t the Fairfax police been more effective?
Mcnair should have been able to find Jack, so why wasn’t a SWAT team in these woods? The cops should have picked Jack up and squeezed him for information about Galantz: where his base of operations was, what was going down next. They must have known almost from the start that Walsh and Schmidt had been homicides.
You are seriously’in the dark, Bud, he thought. He stared out into the darkness. Well, duh, Sherlock. So push harder.
His left hand was getting looser.
They crept together to the edges of a shadowy clearing that revealed the remains of a house. Sherman had followed the wire up the hill, lifting it periodically to make sure where it was headed, provoking a battle line of rattlesnake noises all the way up. Karen followed thirty yards behind, a new stick in one hand and the .380 in the other. Sherman had insisted on the separation: if someone fired on him, she would have a chance to escape. When he stopped at the edge of the clearing around the house, she sank down on one knee behind a bush. With her eyes fully night-adapted, she could just see him up ahead in the darkness. He stood there, apparently waiting to see what happened next.
She fought down the urge just to cut and run. If Galantz was up here, there was zero chance they were going to surprise him. Once they picked up that wire, someone had to know they were coming, or at least that Sherman was coming. He might not expect Karen, in which case she wanted to go to that trailer, on the chance that Train was down there, maybe disabled. She didn’t want to think about the other possibilities. Damn the stubborn man for going out on his own.
Sherman wag moving again, toward the front of the house.’Then he was climbing carefully up the zigzag step supports. She couldn’t make out much about the house, other than it had fallen in on itself. Sherman appeared to stop in front of what should have been the front door. She put the gun down on the ground near her right foot, turned her left forearm away from the top of the hill, and slipped her sleeve back to see what time it was. The fact that she had her face turned downhill saved her from the searing visual impulse of the retinal disrupter firing above her. Even so, her night adaptation vanished in a millisecond, and she could only gasp and sink down on her hands and knees while her brain reeled from the purple flash a hundred feet away.
Train gave one last pull, and his. left hand, minus all the hair on the back, came stickily out of the tape. He immediately stripped the tape off his right hand, and then, flexing his hands rapidly, worked them up to where he could grab the zipper on the bag with his thumbs and pull it down. He kept his eyes tightly closed in case there was another disrupter set up in this place. But so far, none of his struggles had set anything off. He shed the bag like a snakeskin,. then rolled over on his side to get the circulation going back in his legs and knees. The tape around his ankles proved to be a tougher proposition. Without a knife, he was forced to find the edge of the tape and start unwinding it.
He rolled up onto his hands and knees, experiencing a wave of dizziness as he did so. He reached out to see what he could touch. The room or wherever he was remained in darkness. He tried to stand up and almost fell over. The mical wasn’t entirely gone. He could still feel the puncture wound on his left bicep. He sat down on the floor and began stretching and breathing. He ignored the total darkness. He was in a basement, or at least underground, at night presumably, although he had no idea how long he’d been out. He felt for his watch, but it was gone.
Of course-his watch had a light.
He waited for a few minutes for the dizziness to subside, then started crawling, until he ran into a wall. Stone wall, from the feel of it. He turned right and followed the wall, proceeding carefully when he ran into a big spiderweb. Visions of black widows in long-empty basements flitted across his mind, and he decided to turn around. He kept one hand on the wall as he reversed course, not wanting to lose his bearings any more than he had to in total darkness. He had crawled about three feet back toward where he’d started from, when he’heard that dusty inhalation, and then the metal voice came laughing out of the darkness.
Big man like you, afraid of a little bitty spider, is he?
Train froze in place. Galantz! He’d been in the room with him all along . ? Watching him get out of the bag? There was more metallic laughter.
Son of a bitch must have a nightvision device, Train thought.
That’s right. I’m wearing a night set. I’ve been admiring your physical discipline. Why don’t you just wait there, von Rensel? We have one more visitor, then. we can do what we came to do.
“What’s the game, Galantz?”
Endgame, I think. I’ve invited the object of my affection to come up here. Told him I’d let his boy go in return
