Okay, here we are, under Beach Movies, there are several, hmm…ah. I think I found it!”
A few seconds passed while Jay read to himself.
“Jay?”
“Sorry, boss.”
The flatscreen’s vox said,
“Stop,” Michaels said.
Jay paused the recitation. “What?”
Howard beat him to it. He said, “George Harris Zeigler.”
Jay nodded. “Oh, yeah. The Zee-ster.”
“The recently departed Zee-ster,” Michaels said.
Jay said, “This was, um, seven years ago. Before he hit it big. He’d have been about, what? Twenty-four or — five then. Thing is, where he’s gone, I don’t think he’d be telling us anything useful.”
“This is too much of a coincidence. This dope dealer is pulling our chain. We need to talk to the other actors.”
“You gonna turn it over to the regular feebs?”
Michaels took a deep breath and let it out. “No. I think maybe we ought to go check this out ourselves.”
“Not in our charter,” Howard said.
“The current waters are very murky,” Michaels said. “Given the capabilities of the DEA and NSA, I’m not altogether sure just who we can trust. Sure, the FBI are our guys, and they love us — in theory, anyway — but we can’t cover any leaks on their part. We don’t want to be behind the eight ball on this, do we?”
“No need to convince me, Commander,” Howard said, smiling. “I’m going senile from boredom in my office. The drug raid was the most interesting thing that’s happened in three months. I’m game.”
“Me, too,” Jay said.
“I thought after your last adventure in the field you’d want to avoid it,” Michaels said.
“I was alone then,” Jay said, “and dealing with a militant gun dealer. With the general here and you, I’d feel secure enough to interview a drop-dead gorgeous movie star. Did you see Mae Jean in
“I must have missed that one,” Michaels said.
“Me, too,” Howard said.
“I’m telling you, she’s got lungs could raise the dead, aurally and, um, visually. One of the great on-screen screamers of all time, right up there with Jamie Lee. And did I mention she was drop-dead gorgeous?”
“I thought you had a pretty intense relationship going, Jay?”
“That’s true, boss, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna do anything. I can look, can’t I?”
Howard and Michaels grinned at each other.
Howard went back and collected his staff car, then headed for home. He didn’t want to take the time to return the rifle right now, but it would be safe enough at his home; safer, in fact, than in the general access parking lot at Quantico. Since they weren’t going to drop everything and rush over to La-La Land in the next few minutes, he’d have time to pack a bag and tell Nadine good-bye. They’d be flying commercial — Commander Michaels did not want to attract any attention by cranking up one of the Net Force jets — and they’d be flying incognito, on open- ended agency tickets, so they wouldn’t have to put any names on a passenger list until just before boarding, and those would be cover noms anyhow.
Given that he’d just been out to the left coast, it might not be as big a thrill for him as it was for Jay Gridley; still, it would get him out and moving, and at this point, anything was better than spending another day doing make-work.
He headed out toward the freeway and the drive back to the city.
Normally, the drive was a straight run up I-95 and into the District, loop around the belt and to the north end of town where he lived.
But after a couple of miles, he spotted what he thought was a tail.
A lot of people drove this stretch of road, and there were scores of cars and trucks heading in the same direction, so there was no way to be sure, but he first saw the car as he changed lanes to pass. A little way farther, when he pulled back over into the right lane, the car did likewise.
Big deal. This was hardly conclusive evidence. But he had been through the standard Net Force surveillance course as part of his in-processing, and something one of the sub-rosa guys from the FBI who’d taught the class had said always stuck with him:
Maybe he was overly cautious, but as a professional military man, Howard had learned long ago that being prepared was not the same as being paranoid. And like the instructor had said, checking it out was easy enough.
There was a little state road running northeast to Manassas not far ahead, and Howard eased over into the exit lane. If the car behind him — looked like a white Neon — kept going, he’d catch the next on-ramp and head on home.
Six cars back, the Neon reached the off-ramp and exited a couple hundred yards behind him.
That didn’t prove anything for certain. Two or three times, he remembered the FBI guy saying, it could still easily be a coincidence.
And there were several simple ways, Howard remembered, to be sure.
He tooled along on the state road, which was narrow but scenic, heading away from the suburbs toward the more rural country. There was an intersection ahead, and apparently the Occoquan Reservoir was to the left.
He went maybe a quarter of a mile, didn’t see the white Neon turn behind him.
So, okay, he was paranoid. He’d find a place to turn around and go home. He was relieved.
There was a little gas station minimart a half mile or so ahead, and Howard pulled in there, stopped, and went inside. He used the bathroom, bought a pack of Corn Nuts and a can of root beer, and headed back to his car. If anybody had been following him, he’d had an excuse to stop. The idea was, the surveillance guy had told them, not to let the people following you know you knew they were there. Better the tail you know than one you don’t.
He kept going the way he’d been going, figuring to loop back around to a main road or the freeway eventually.
Five hundred yards out of the minimart, he caught sight of the white Neon in his rearview mirror. The car was a ways back, maybe half a mile, but he was pretty sure it was the same vehicle.
Hmm. He was pretty convinced, but a few more tests should make it interesting.
Howard made a series of turns as he came to little branching streets, right, left, right, right, driving several miles until he was on a nice little country road — and thoroughly lost. He was going to need to use the GPS to find his way out of here. He had no idea where he was.
Eventually he found himself on another road that led, so the sign said, to the Civil War battlefield of Manassas. The two big battles there had been originally named, he recalled, for the little river that went through the area, Bull Run.
Several times, the Neon disappeared from sight, sometimes for as long as two or three minutes, and it seemed to Howard that the guy tailing him had an uncanny ability to guess the right way to turn.
Then it dawned on him that there might be some kind of bug on his vehicle, and all the guy had to do was follow the signal.
Damn, he should have thought of that sooner.
But after half a dozen random turns, there was no doubt in his mind that the Neon was shadowing him. Now,
