She swung back and turned into a gently curving driveway. She found a space in the packed parking lot and spotted a uniformed guard walking a German shepherd. She didn’t like the way the dog tugged toward their car, so she called from her window.
“Excuse me! This is Sirocco Trucking, right?”
He approached with the dog and stopped a dozen feet away. His dark blue uniform housed a running back’s build that had yet to go to seed. His baseball cap with its Septimus Security logo, his big aviator sunglasses, and his thick mustache didn’t leave much of his face visible, but what Hari could see looked surprised.
“You’re looking for Sirocco? Well, I guess you found it.”
She guessed they didn’t get many drop-ins.
“Great. Where’s the office?”
“The office…the office is around the corner but no one’s there.”
“Out to lunch?”
“No one’s ever there. Can I help you?”
Damn. They’d been assuming they could at least get inside the building.
“We’d like to rent a truck.”
“They don’t rent trucks.”
During this scintillating repartee, another guard in identical garb with an identical dog rounded a corner and stopped to watch.
What is this? Hari thought. Do we somehow look threatening?
“I mean,” she said, “we’d like to arrange to ship some things.”
“All their trucks are spoken for.”
“All of them?”
“Every one.”
He sounded coached.
“Do you think we might have a look at them?”
“That’s not an option, ma’am.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “Is there someone I can speak—?”
“The office is empty and I’m afraid you can’t park here.”
Hari gave him a hard stare. He stared back through his shades.
And that was all she wrote. Hari could see she wasn’t going to win here, so she backed out of her space and headed down the drive.
“That went well,” Donny said. “What now?”
“Notice anything?” she said as they hit the industrial park’s common boulevard.
“Besides guys patrolling the grounds of a trucking company with dogs? I mean, seriously—German shepherds? Whoever heard of that? It tells me they’re majorly paranoid about someone glomming onto whatever it is they’re up to. And as for little boy blue back there, he wasn’t giving anything away. I mean, nada.”
“All good points. But I’m more interested in the parking lot.”
A pause, then, “Full. Lots of cars.” Another pause as he rubbed his stubble. “They could belong to drivers arriving to take a haul somewhere.”
“Exactly. The question is: Have they already left, or are they gathering to leave together?”
Donny grinned. “A convoy? Seems unlikely, but only one way to find out. I see a stake-out in our future. Let’s get some food first. We need to stock up on munchies. I saw a strip mall back by the highway with some fast-food joints.”
Hari knew where he meant and headed there.
“Speaking of fast food,” she said, “did you hear how McDonald’s bought the Wendy’s logo and won’t let them use it? So pretty soon, unless you already know where your Wendy’s is, you won’t be able to find one.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Yep.”
A long pause, then a sigh, then, “Y’know, one day that mouth of yours could get you killed.”
“I know. Can’t wait.”
At the mall Hari picked up two large coffees—both for her—at an espresso bar while Donny bought these box lunches from Taco Bell that contained enormous amounts of food. Then they found a parking spot in the lot of the FedEx depot across the boulevard with a view of the Sirocco driveway.
“Do you ever drink anything that doesn’t contain caffeine?” Donny said just before cramming a soft taco into his face.
“Only when forced by circumstance. You don’t want to know me when I run low.”
The wait turned out to be shorter than Hari had anticipated. In fact she’d expected to be watching trucks returning from a haul. But at 1:22 one tractor-trailer after another started pulling out and heading for the freeway. Half of the trailers were rectangular freight semis, while the rest were tankers.
Hari counted ten rigs in all. When it looked like no more were joining the parade, she pulled out and followed.
“Odd time for a convoy, don’t you think?” Donny said. “I mean, if you’re not keen on drawing attention, an afternoon truck convoy is not the way to go.”
“Makes even less sense when you consider the level of security they have around the building. I’d give anything for a look inside one of those trailers. Just a peek. Then we can head back.”
Maybe they’d all pull into a rest stop and she could sneak up on one.
“What about those tankers? They could be filled with anything—gasoline, water, chemicals, slime, anything.”
“‘Slime’?”
“Yeah. Green goop. I’m guessing you never watched Nick.”
“Who’s he?”
“It’s a cable channel. Nickelodeon.”
As Donny launched into an explanation she only half heard, Hari followed the convoy to 787 North where it rolled to Troy, then crossed the Hudson onto Route 2 East.
“Where the hell are we going?” she said.
The car came equipped with its own wi-fi hotspot and Donny had his tablet fired up and running.
“If we stay on Two here, it’ll bring us into the Taconic Mountains.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
“Not bad—forty-five minutes or so to the Massachusetts border.”
“And then what?”
“Lots of mountains.”
Great. Hari hadn’t planned on any of this. She’d expected a few hours’ worth of nosing around to yield what they wanted—the nature of the cargo. That, in turn, would lead them to the reason for the Septimus stock sell off.
Route 2 soon started calling itself Taconic Trail, and seemed to be running perpetually uphill. Which meant slow going in the lower gears for the big rigs. They passed the Massachusetts line and kept on trucking.
“How much longer?” Hari groaned.
“Well, since I don’t know the destination, I can’t very well—”
“Rhetorical! Rhetorical!”
A couple of miles into Massachusetts the trucks took a left off Route 2 onto a narrow side road. A sign with an arrow read Norum Hill.
“I think we just learned their destination,” Donny said. “Norum Hill.”
Hari turned and followed them up the mountain road. “How do you know they’re not going to keep on rolling?”
“Because according to the map, this
