Coming of Age (31 page)

Colin turned and ran, and a second later there was the clatter of a drawer's being wrenched open. He had barely reappeared in the doorway when Lisa, her patience finally breaking, teeked away the butcher knife he was carrying and brought it flashing across the room to her.

“Don't bother with your hands—just get free of the chair and get us all out of here,” Tirrell called, a note of urgency creeping into his voice.

Lisa nodded, too absorbed in her control of the knife to remember he couldn't see the gesture. A few seconds later she was floating gingerly free of the chair, taking care that her tied hands didn't catch anywhere. Turning, she shot toward the doorway where Colin was still standing, an astonished look on his face. “Wow!” he breathed—and yelped as Lisa teeked him into the air in front of her. Barely pausing at the doorway, she snatched Tirrell, chair and all, and made for the cabin door. A second later they were out in the bright midday sunshine, whipping between the trees as Lisa ignored Colin's yelps of alarm and excitement in an attempt to get distance as quickly as possible. Finally, about a kilometer away, Tirrell pronounced them safe and Lisa brought them down with a deep sigh of relief.

She had the detective's ropes untied, and he was working on hers, when the cabin blew up with a roar behind them.

There was very little left when they returned cautiously to the small clearing. Obeying Tirrell's instructions, Lisa waited with Colin among the trees as the detective walked around the blackened rubble, stamping out small fires and stopping every so often to examine something on the ground.

“Nothing worth salvaging,” he said when he returned. He seemed about to say something else but glanced at Colin and apparently changed his mind. “Lisa,” he said instead, “go up to the top of this tree and see if you can spot anyone.”

She was up and down in less than a minute. “No one,” she told Tirrell. “I don't see Tonio and the police you said he was bringing, either.”

“I wonder …” Putting a finger in his mouth, the detective gave a piercing whistle. “Tonio might have gone to ground instead of heading for help right away. If he did, that should bring him.” Dropping down on one knee, he smiled at Colin. “Didn't get a chance to ask you before, Colin, but how are you doing?”

“Fine,” the boy said with the grave politeness Lisa had often seen kids adopt in the presence of a hive authority.

“Have you been all right out here these past couple of months?”

“Uh-huh,” the boy nodded enthusiastically. “It's the best vacation I ever took. Why did the bad men take Matthew away?”

“Well …” Tirrell scooped the boy up and got to his feet. “I'm sure we'll get him back real soon. Until then, how would you like to visit a
real
police station? Hm?”

“Okay, I guess,” Colin shrugged. “I like the woods better.”

“You'll be able to come back to the woods again sometime,” the detective promised. “But for now we have to go.”

“We going to take him back to Barona?” Lisa asked.

“No choice,” Tirrell told her grimly. “We've got to raise the alarm and get on Martel's trail immediately, before he buries himself and Jarvis in some deep hole on the far side of the Tessellates.”

“But won't a lot of righthands in the sky alert him?”

“Maybe, if he sees them. But we have to risk it. All we know for sure is that they left here traveling southeast, and that direction could have changed drastically after he rejoined the main group.”

“Stan?”

The voice drifting down from the treetops made Lisa jump; but before she could locate its source Tirrell had whistled again, and with a crackle of conetree branches Tonio landed beside them.

“Boy, am I glad to see you,” he exclaimed, giving the detective an unashamed hug. “I heard the explosion and was trying to sneak back to see what happened. I thought maybe you'd been blown to bits.”

“Almost, but thanks to Lisa and Colin we got out before the timer ran down,” Tirrell told him. “We can now add an attempted murder charge to Martel's list when we nail him. You didn't happen to check out the direction his gang was headed, did you?”

“‘Fraid not—I was afraid to poke my head more than half a meter off the ground.” Tonio frowned as he glanced around. “Say, where's Jarvis? Didn't he get out with you?”

“No. The shoe, as they say, is on the other foot.” Tirrell waved southeast. “
He's
now been kidnapped by Martel.”

Tonio snorted. “Serves him right,” he said; but to Lisa his voice lacked real conviction. “I suppose we've got to get him out, though.”

“Yeah—and we're going to have to call in some help to find them.”

“Maybe they just went back to the temple site,” Lisa suggested.

Tirrell shook his head. “No. It's clear that most of his kids aren't in on this with him, and that makes the temple site too public a place to keep Jarvis. Besides, he left under the impression that Tonio was already on his way with reinforcements, so he wouldn't go anywhere that Tonio knew about. However—” He paused, a thoughtful frown beginning to crease his face. “He
doesn't
know we're on to what the temple site really is—and he'll need to have a refinery somewhere where he can separate out his gold.”

“You think he might go there?” Tonio asked.

“It's worth checking on. Lisa, we're going to need more of your help, I'm afraid. We're going to fly over to Plat City and drop Colin off at the police station there. Then we'll get some detailed maps of the region and I'll want you to show us exactly where the dump site is. With luck, Tonio and I may be able to find Martel's refinery on our own and determine whether or not he's there.”

“What if he is?” Lisa objected. “He'll probably have kids on guard, and if he catches you, you'll be in the same situation we just got out of.”

Strangely enough, Tirrell smiled. “Not really,” he said. “I think I know how to even the odds a little. Let's get going—we can talk more on the way.”

T
HE DUMP SITE WAS
in a grassy valley three or four kilometers from the temple site, an unexceptional place with a handful of trees, a narrow yet surprisingly gentle river, and two or three barren hills poking through the scrubweed. It was only as Lisa guided them to one of the latter that Tirrell could see it was in actuality an immense pile of broken stone.

“They dug all this stuff out of that mountain?” Tonio asked, eyeing the rocks with obvious amazement.

“This isn't half of what they've actually mined,” Tirrell told him. “Loose rock always looks bigger than the hole it came out of.” Sliding his backpack onto the ground, the detective found a relatively flat slab at the edge of the pile and unfolded the small-scale survey map he'd obtained from the Plat City police. “They've probably been quietly hauling the stuff away, most likely during weekdays when all the kids are at work. Probably leaving this much here on purpose so no one'll realize any of it's missing.”

Fiddling with one of the smaller stones, Tonio flew over to land at his side. “You figured out where we are?”

“I think so.” Tirrell was actually somewhat more certain than that, having followed their course on the map all the way from Plat City. “We're on the southern edge of the De Sable Plateau, next to the main branch of the Rashoni River. Flows generally south, then goes southwest down the far side of the mountains and off my map.”

“Is that why the water's moving so slowly?” Lisa asked. “Because we're on a flat area?”

“Basically. The size and number of tributaries and the channel dimensions are important, too, but you basically can't have anything this slow in mountains except on a plateau.”

“Makes it nice and easy to anchor their boat while they load up, doesn't it?” Tonio commented. He teeked his stone hard into the side of the heap, causing a minor rock slide. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let's head on down and find him.”

Tirrell was already folding up his map when something in his righthand's voice—overconfìdence?—made him pause.
Let's head on down and find him.
It was a perfectly reasonable and obvious statement … but this was
Martel
they were dealing with, and Martel had stayed free this long precisely because he worked hard at avoiding the obvious. Still, shipping the ore via water was the simplest and cheapest method available. Why bother teeking the stuff to the riverside if all he wanted was to leave a false clue before carting it away overland again?

Unless …

Unfolding the map again, Tirrell studied it closely. Yes … yes; it
was
possible. And right or wrong, it wouldn't take long to check out.

“Stan?” Tonio asked impatiently. “We going or not?”

“We're going,” the detective answered slowly. “But we're going to start by heading upstream. The current's slow enough that even a heavy boat shouldn't have any trouble fighting it, at least for a few kilometers.”

“You think he's set up a refinery way up here in the mountains?” Lisa asked, looking puzzled. “Wouldn't that have been the hard way to do it?”

“No, to both questions,” Tirrell told her, taking one last look at the map before folding it to show only the region immediately upriver of them. “What I'm thinking might be crazy, or it might be brilliant—and I won't know which until we check it out on the actual terrain.”

“Well, let's do it then,” Tonio said. “Don't worry, Lisa,” he added to the other preteen. “He gets these brilliant hunches all the time. You just have to learn to put up with them.”

Tirrell smiled, and a small tight place in his stomach relaxed for the first time in hours. The resurgence of Tonio's sense of humor was a good sign, an indication that the righthand was finally catching up with the emotional shocks and stresses that had been pummeling him all day. To capture Martel at the cost of damage to Tonio's personality was not a trade he would've liked having to make. “So skip the noise and give me a lift,” he said, scooping up his backpack with one hand and holding out the other. “You can explain to Lisa on the way that my hunches usually come out right.”

They found it a bare kilometer upriver—not the refinery, but the clue that Tirrell, despite his outward confidence, had only half expected to find.

“What are they?” Lisa asked as they hovered over the grooves cut into the narrow band of moist ground separating the riverbank from the harder rock beyond.

“Tread marks,” Tirrell told her. “Almost certainly those of a heavy amphibious vehicle.”

“This doesn't make any sense,” Tonio complained, squinting in the direction the tread marks pointed. “There's nothing but rock over there. No trees, no possibility of a decent cave—how's he going to hide a refinery out in the open?”

“Let's go see, shall we?” Tirrell said.

“But they'll
see
us,” Lisa objected, looking around nervously.

“Don't worry; Martel's still kilometers away,” Tirrell assured her. “Let's go—you'll understand in about a hundred meters.”

The two preteens exchanged glances. Then Tonio shrugged and they were airborne again, flying low. The ground swelled up into a low rise, and they topped it to find—

Another river.

“Are you going to tell us,” Tonio demanded as they landed, “that Martel carts his rocks up one river and across dry land just to ship 'em down
another
river? Why?”

“I am indeed,” Tirrell nodded. “And the
why
is twofold: first, because this river—a tributary of the Nordau, according to the map—winds up going down the other side of the mountains, which means that at the cost of relatively little trouble he's managed to point any pursuers in exactly the wrong direction. And secondly—”

“Stan!” Lisa exclaimed suddenly. “There's an old metal refinery where the river leaves the mountains!”

Tirrell nodded. “Right. It hasn't been used in probably twenty years or more—not since the mines southeast of Plat City were played out—but it wouldn't take much to get one of the crushers and a cyanidation tank or two back in operation. I'll lay ten to one odds that's where he's holding Jarvis.”

“Yeah—with thirty or forty kids to help him,” Tonio muttered.

“No, he doesn't have nearly that many,” Tirrell told him. “Remember back to the cabin. Even though he left the temple site with fifteen kids and picked up reinforcements on the way, he hit us with only eight or nine—and recall that Weylin wasn't among them. I suspect that those eight or nine have been trusted with the full story of what Martel's planning with Jarvis and are cooperating less on blind faith than on the more tangible promise of sharing in whatever wealth and power Martel hopes to get. Kids like Weylin who have even a scrap of faith left in them would have done fine at beating the woods for Jarvis, but Martel would have had to cut them out of anything past that. They're probably still hunting through the woods east of Rand right now.”

“But Weylin was willing to attack a policeman for him,” Lisa pointed out. “He had to be pretty loyal to do that.”

“Breaking laws in the name of religion and seeing your leader break them are two very different things; and that's an even stronger indication that Martel's not taking any chances at all with his group. So he's probably only got those same eight or nine kids with him. The other side of that, of course, is that trying to talk them into mutinying would be essentially useless. We're just going to have to hit them hard and fast, without any call for surrender to alert them.”

“That doesn't sound very … pleasant,” Lisa said hesitantly.

“It probably won't be,” Tirrell acknowledged. “But with luck you won't have to be there. We're going to head down to the refinery first of all and try to confirm that Martel's there. If we can, Tonio and I will put the place under surveillance while you sneak away and whistle us up some backup forces. Probably from Nordau; it'll be faster than going back to Plat City.” He glanced up at the midafternoon sun, already perilously close to the highest mountain peaks. “And we'd better get moving—I want to get things rolling as soon as possible.”