me?”
Her smile got bigger. “Sure.” She picked up the ring, slid it onto her finger. It seemed to fit okay. She put her hand back down, picked up the menu. To Maria, who was grinning like a pack of happy baboons, Jen said, “So, what’s the special tonight?”
Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth she was so cool. “Miss Jen!” Maria said. She sounded horrified.
“I thought the wine was better than usual,” Jen said.
“Does this mean I’ll get a break on the cost of my lessons?” Kent asked, smiling.
“Only after the wedding,” she said.
Kent laughed. If he thought he was going to one-up her, he realized, he was wrong.
Jay walked through the grimy streets, the vile, choking miasma of coal smoke and fog so thick you couldn’t see half a block. He was following a short man wearing an opera cape and silk top hat. So far, he was getting nothing more than dogs-not-barking-in-the-night, and he could have used Conan Doyle’s master detective and his doctor sidekick to help out here.
Rachel Lewis had been a dead end. She was too good to leave obvious clues that he could find.
Carruth had spent hardly any time on the web; there were few net-trails to find, and most of those didn’t go anywhere useful.
Jay was about ready to pack it in, but he figured he might as well follow up this last line of inquiry.
The figure fading in and out of the reeking smog was headed somewhere, and he might as well see where.
It wasn’t a direction connected to Lewis, as far as Jay could see.
Ahead, the caped man paused, then turned into an alley.
Probably Jack the Ripper’s turf.
Jay followed, and was rewarded by seeing the fellow enter a low doorway with a fitful oil lamp mounted on the wall next to it.
Jay went in, and found himself in a pub of some low standing. Thieves, cutpurses, trulls, sailors, a hard- looking lot drinking bitters and gin.
Rachel Lewis wasn’t here. Even in disguise, he would have known her, he was sure. Ah, well. That would have been too much to hope for, he figured.
“End scenario.”
Jay leaned back in his chair, shucking gear a piece at a time. So what he had found in the killer London smog was nothing more than an address for a cabin that Carruth had rented a couple of times, way the hell out in Montana. No sign that Lewis had anything to do with that, and Carruth wasn’t going to be using the place again.
Jay voxaxed the cabin’s rental site. It took only a few seconds to find out that it had just been rented. Details of the renter were not available for public consumption, but, of course, Jay wasn’t the public. He hacked the website and found the name of the person renting the place:
“M. Lane.”
Jay frowned. Something about that rang a bell, what was it . . . ?
He scrolled down, found a handwritten signature on the rental agreement. It was pretty much an unreadable scrawl, looked like it said “Margie,” or maybe “Margaret,” or . . .
“Holy shit!” he said. He reached for the phone. He needed to talk to the rental agent, to find out if the person in the cabin was, indeed, a woman. And if so, what she looked like . . .
39
Thorn nodded. “Looks pretty good, Jay.”
They were in his office—Thorn, Jay, and Abe Kent. “What do you think, Abe?”
“I’ve looked at the aerials. There’s a shiny new OwlSat footprinting the place. Couple feet of snow on the ground, but it is approachable. Small team, a quad, that would work. We could mount up, be there this afternoon, hit it after dark.”
“ ‘We?’ ”
“I’m a lousy desk jockey,” Kent said. “This is what I do.”
Thorn smiled.
Jay said, “I want to go, too.”
Thorn regarded him. “I thought you didn’t want to risk field operations.”
“This one I do.” He paused. “This is personal, Boss. She suckered me. I want to see her face when she realizes she’s caught.”
Thorn nodded again. “Okay.”
“I need to mention there are some legal issues,” Kent said.
“Posse Comitatus,” Thorn said.
“Yes, sir.”
Jay blinked. “Posse who?”
“In the earlier days of the Republic, the civilians got worried that some sleazy politician might get himself elected and use the military to kick ass and take names,” Thorn said. “So Congress passed a law that forbade the use of the federal military, save the National Guard, from police activities here at home. The Posse Comitatus Act. General Kent is a Marine, as are his troops. They aren’t supposed to be traipsing about in the woods hunting people for civilian crimes.”
“Lewis isn’t a civilian, though. You pointed that out yourself earlier.”
“Even so. The FBI has jurisdiction, or the local police, not the Army. Certainly not the Marines.”
“So, does that mean we can’t go?”
Thorn grinned. “Oh, no. That just means we have to be very careful. We’re going.”
Kent nodded.
“You could get fired,” Jay said.
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Thorn said. “I think the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs would make a whole lot of things disappear if we deliver Captain Lewis to him. As long as there isn’t a big, smoking crater in the ground out there when you get done, I don’t think there will be any record that General Kent and his Marines ever set foot in Montana, except to do a little fly-fishing.”
Kent grinned at that.
Thorn stood, as did Jay and Kent. Thorn extended his hand to Kent. “Good luck, General.”
“Thank you, sir.” He turned to Jay. “Let’s go. We’ve got places to go and terrorists to catch.”
After they left, Thorn considered his course of action. He had places to go, too. He took a deep breath and let it escape slowly. Should he call Marissa?
