“It didn’t seem odd to you?”
“Tell me what you saw,” Quinn said.
Nate seemed to be lost in thought.
“What?” Quinn asked.
Instead of answering, Nate started walking along the edge of the hill, toward the fence.
“Wait,” Quinn said. “What did you see?”
“I might be wrong,” Nate said. “I want to get a closer look first. We should be able to approach it right up there.” He was pointing along a gully to the right.
As they neared the fence, the hum grew louder again. It was …
They came around the edge of a rock that looked like a gigantic T-bone steak, and found themselves only twenty feet away from the double fence.
The hum was loud enough now that Nate had to raise his voice above a whisper to be heard. “I was right,” he said.
Each fence was a series of thick wires strung horizontally from one post to the next with no more than six inches between them. The posts were made of some type of composite material and were placed every ten feet. The planners had taken the extra step of staggering the two fences so that their posts didn’t line up. And as for the sound, it was coming from the wires. Each crackled and hummed with electricity.
Quinn looked first left, then right. It was the same setup for as far as he could see.
“How the hell do we get through that?” Nate asked.
But Quinn said nothing. It was better than saying he had no idea.
CHAPTER 26
“We’ve got an alert on the old road.” The guard’s voice was clear, though a bit overamplified.
Tucker moved his handheld radio closer to his mouth. “Any visual?”
“No,” the guard replied. “Just the motion sensor.”
“Still going off?”
“It was a single notification. Just happened.”
The system didn’t use simple motion sensors like some people had in their homes or offices. These devices were more refined, weeding out most extraneous movement and only reporting on objects that were large enough to be human. Over the two months they had been deployed, there had only been one false alarm. Perhaps this was a second; Tucker wasn’t going to take any chances. The Dupuis woman had friends out there somewhere. Maybe they had decided to come for a visit.
“Send someone to check,” Tucker said. “But do not intercept yet. I want to know how many people are out there first.”
“Copy,” the guard said.
Tucker heard the guard relay his instructions, followed by a distant grunt of agreement.
“I’m sending a team out to you just in case you need some backup,” Tucker said. “Should be there in five minutes.”
“All right.”
“Report back the moment you know anything.”
Tucker didn’t wait for an acknowledgment before clipping the radio to his belt. He used Yellowhammer’s built-in PA system to order one of the other security teams to the main gate.
He reached for his desk phone, but stopped before picking it up. With the helicopters due to leave in just over eight hours, he knew Mr. Rose would still be in the lab overseeing the final preparations. The old man would not be happy to be disturbed. Better to find out if the alarm was real or not, and implement an appropriate response before filling his boss in, Tucker thought.
He still picked up the phone, but instead of Mr. Rose, he called his contact in Toronto — a guy named Donald Chang.
“You get anything from Montreal yet?” Tucker asked.
“Hold on,” Chang said. “Let me bring it up.”
Tucker could hear the clacking of a computer keyboard. Once it stopped, Chang came back on the line.
“There wasn’t really anything at the house,” Chang said. “Plenty of prints, but they mainly belonged to the family.”
“Mainly?” Tucker asked.
“The other ones check out as members of the Montreal Police Department. Which makes sense, of course. Unless you think the people you’re looking for might be cops.”
“I don’t,” Tucker said.
So the Dupuis house was clean. Tucker was only mildly disappointed. It had been a long shot at best.
“I did get a hit from the license plate on the car you were following, though,” Chang said.
“What kind of hit?” Tucker asked.
“Police found it in Brossard, on the other side of the St. Lawrence River.”
“You got prints from inside?” Tucker asked, hopeful.
“No. It was clean. But we did go ahead and check motels in the area. The car matched a description given by a man staying at a Comfort Inn that night. There were three people, actually. Two men and a woman. One of the men and the woman stayed together. The other had his own room. They left the next morning. No one knows exactly what time, they just left their keys in the rooms.”
“Did you get any names?” Tucker asked.
“The couple registered as Mitch and Sissy Booth. The other guy as Vince Salas. But they were phony. Home addresses didn’t check out.”
“How did they pay?”
“Same credit card for both rooms,” Chang said. “The name on it was Mitch Booth. It was good, but I back- checked. It’s the only time it’s ever been used.”
Prepared false IDs. No prints. A disposable car.
Professionals.
“What about security cameras? The motel had to have one.”
“You’re going to love this,” Chang said.
“What?”
“They had a jammer.”
Tucker said nothing.
“The camera in the motel office takes stills every ten seconds, low res. At the beginning of each day, they burn the previous twenty-four hours to disk. My guy got a look at the night the people you’re looking for checked in. But at the time they would have been in the office, the pictures were just digital crap.”
“So other than knowing where they stayed, you’ve got nothing?” Tucker said.
“Not exactly nothing,” Chang said. “There is another camera. Parking lot security. Whatever type of jammer they were using, it looks like it had to be within thirty feet or so of a camera for it to work.”
“So you got them on the parking lot camera?”
“Yes. It’s from a distance, and not very clear, but it’s something.”
“Send it to me.”
“Should be in your email now.”
“Thanks,” Tucker said, then hung up.
His laptop was in a shoulder bag next to his desk. He pulled it out and booted it up. Mr. Rose’s technicians had installed a wireless system that worked throughout the facility, so as soon as his desktop appeared, he activated his email. The message from Chang was there, complete with two attachments. He highlighted both and opened them.
The first showed a grainy nighttime shot of a parking lot. There were dozens of cars parked in neat rows.
