Dead Watch (40 page)

“You’ve got to hold on to it, Jake,” Madison said, urgency in her voice. He thought,
Not bad
. “You’ve got to. All of this will have been pointless if that thing gets out there now. All you have to do is hold it until after the convention. Or even just before the convention, that would do it. Just hold on to it for a few weeks.”

“I’d like to. But I gotta find out what’s in it, sugar,” Jake said. “The cabin has everything I need—it’s got Internet access, got a computer, and nobody’s gonna find it. I talked to Billy and nobody’ll be there all week. For the rest of the month, for that matter.”

“When are you coming back? I might need you here.”

“I need you, too.” He kissed her, spent some time with it, then broke away, breathing hard again. “We gotta stop. I gotta get going.”

“Please try to hold on to it,” she said, an urgent, pleading tone in her voice. “If Landers gets knocked out now, they’ll give the job to Goodman in a flash. He’s the one they want. Landers won’t do them any good this year.”

“I will, I’ll hold on to it.” Sounding a little harassed now. “I’ll try to hold on. If there’s nothing in it that would push it out there right now, I’ll stick it in a safe-deposit box, somewhere that’s not obvious, and we’ll break it out in October.”

“Where are you going to be? Give me a phone number . . .”

“You can’t call from here, if there’s trouble, they could trace it back, they’d know you knew where I went.”

“Only for an emergency. I’d call you from outside.”

“All right. Got a pen? It’s 540-555-6475.”

“540-555-64 . . .”

“6475. Don’t use your cell phone, either. We don’t want any tracks that the feds can find later. For one thing, that might drag Billy into it, just for loaning me the place.”

“What if I have to call you, and you’re not there?”

“I’ll be there. Or I’ll be on my way back here. I’m gonna get up early and work on it all day; I won’t be going for a walk in the woods.”

In the doorway she kissed him a last time and whispered, “How was that?”

“Perfect.” Though he wasn’t sure about that: some of it sounded like dialogue from a bad novel.

He left her in the doorway, headed back down the walk, tapping along with his cane. He was twenty feet down the walk when he heard a woman’s voice calling, “Sir? Sir, I’m with the
New York Times
.”

He thought,
Damnit,
and turned back, scurried up the front steps to the house, rang the bell. Madison appeared at the door, puzzled, and Jake stepped inside, held her close, and whispered, “The
Times
still has the place staked out. I’ll give you a single ring when it’s clear.”

“Okay. I’ll start turning out lights.”

Back outside, the
Times
reporter was standing on the sidewalk, carefully outside the property line. As Jake came down the front walk, she called, “Sir, could you tell me who you are?”

“I do paperwork for Miz Bowe and the law firm. You’ll have to call Johnson Black, I’m sure you have his number.”

“If you . . .”

“Miss, if I said one more word, they’d fire my ass. Think of the guilt you’d feel.”

“I’d manage somehow,” she said, but she was smiling at him.

“Call Johnson Black.” He glanced back at the house. “Miz Bowe is going to bed. If you’re planning to stay all night, I hope your car has a heater.”

Inside the house, the lights were going out.

Jake cruised the neighborhood for half an hour before the
Times
reporter left. He saw her car pulling out of its parking space, followed the taillights until she turned left at the bottom of the hill, eased up to the stop sign, then far enough out into the street to make sure that she’d kept going. When she was out of sight, he touched the speed dial on his cell phone, let it ring once, then turned the car around. Madison came down the side of the house carrying her overnight bag.

“I hate doing this,” Jake said when she got in the car. “This is way more dangerous than stealing that laptop. Maybe we just oughta call the cops.”

“No. If it’s the wrong guy’s DNA in Madison, we’d never find him. And we’d look like morons for pointing the FBI at Goodman. We’d have no credibility left at all—and I don’t have that much now.”

“But hanging you out there . . .”

“I won’t be hanging out. Besides, the car’s a problem that you can’t solve without me.”

“If it weren’t for that . . .”

“Did you bring me the shotgun?”

“Yes.”

“Then drive.”

They got out of Washington in a hurry, stopped at a Wal-Mart and picked up a box of contractor cleanup bags, kitchen gloves, and four infrared game-spotter cameras. From there it was west and south on Interstates 66 and 81, stars out, listening to classic rock on satellite radio, lights sparkling above them on the mountains as they drove down the length of the Shenandoah. As they went past Staunton, Madison said, “We’re getting close?”

“Another half hour.”

They could see the lights of Lexington when they cut right into the mountains, good roads narrowing to twisting black-topped lanes. Jake stopped at a dark place, a hillside looming to their left in the starlight, a deep valley on the right. “This is the trailhead for the park,” he said. “It’s three miles across the hill down to Billy’s place. If they come in navigating with maps, I think it’s about 90 percent that they’ll leave their car here. It’s what I’d do. They’ve got a straight shot across the hill and they’d come down on top of us. If they’re good in the woods, nobody would ever see them.”

“We can’t be locked into this, though,” Madison said. “We’ve got to work out some options.”

“Yeah. They could leave their car along the road, but the problem is, it might attract attention. Might have a cop note the tag number. There’s really no other place to park, and if you put it back in the woods, then it might
really
attract attention; you’d be trespassing. This parking area, you see a car in there fairly often. We just have to take care that they don’t blindside us.”

“Or send in the Virginia State Police. We don’t want to shoot any policemen.”

“That’s a problem. But they won’t. They won’t want anybody to see the package until they get a look at it first. It’s gonna be Darrell and whoever was with him at Madison.”

“You’re too confident, Jake,” Madison said.

“I know how these guys think,” Jake said. “That’s how they’d do it. That’s how
I’d
do it.”

“What if they’re already there?”

Jake smiled: “Then we’re toast. But I don’t think they’d start shooting if they saw you. You’d be too hard to explain.”

The question of Darrell Goodman’s arrival was the one that bothered them most: they talked about it, off and on, all the way down to the cabin. If the bug in Madison’s house was monitored often, Jake thought, they’d come in at dawn. If it was monitored less frequently, they might not come until evening, or the next morning.

“If they’re not here by then, we’ll have to pull out,” Jake said. “Danzig will be going public with the package.”

From the parking area to the end of Billy’s driveway was a long loop of narrow blacktop. The driveway began with a nearly invisible indentation in the tree line. Fifty feet in, invisible from the road, was a locked gate and the beginning of a gravel track. “Billy’s is the only place back here,” Jake said. “We’re on his land now.”

“Dark,” Madison said. Then: “What if they have those night-vision things? Darrell was military, he probably could get National Guard equipment.”

“If they can’t see us in the daytime, they can’t see us at night. And if you keep yourself down, they won’t see us.” He got out and opened the gate with his key, drove the truck through, and locked the gate behind them.

The cabin was built on a wide spot of a crooked valley nestled in a series of steep, heavily forested hillsides. Just below the cabin, on the creek that cut the valley, Billy had excavated a three-acre pond and filled it with bass. The shallow, six-foot-wide creek trickled down over a rocky bottom, past the cabin, into the pond, over a concrete lip, and then down and out of the valley.

They came around the last turn in the gravel track, and the cabin glowed like a piece of amber in the headlights. A motion-sensing yard light flicked on. Jake parked, and feeling the hair rippling on the back of his neck, climbed the porch, unlocked the door, turned on the lights. Madison helped carry the gear bags inside.

Were they out there? Up the hill, arguing what to do about Madison? Hurried calls going out of the ridgetop? He didn’t think so, but it was a possibility.

The cabin was big enough to sleep eight, with two bedrooms, a bath, and storage on the upper level. The first floor had two more bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a great room, and a set of high windows that looked out over the pond. A large-scale geological-survey map of the property was framed and hung on the wall of the great room.

Jake took Madison to the map. “This is probably the same map they’d be looking at, if they pull it off the Internet.” He tapped a tightly bunched strip of contour lines south of the cabin. “Up here, we’ve got this really steep hillside—it’s virtually a bluff. It’s unlikely they’d come in over the bluff, because it’s just too steep, and there are springs all along the side of it, it’s pretty slippery in there. I don’t think they’d come in from the west, because they have to cross too much of the open valley, and the creek, and it’d add a couple of miles to the approach. They could come north, up the drive, park far enough up the driveway that you couldn’t see their car from the road. The thing is, they can’t be sure from this map that there aren’t any more cabins up here, or that we might not have a gate with an alarm.”

“We have an alarm on our gate at the farm . . .” She peered at the map. “So the best way is over the hill.”

He nodded. “From the east. From the parking lot I showed you. That’s right here.” He tapped the map again. “They leave their car at the trailhead, cross the hill in the dark, taking it slow, watch the cabin for a while, then come in at dawn and take me out. They dump the body in a hole somewhere, then exfiltrate during the day, taking it slow again. One of the guys moves my car, dumps it in Lexington. Nobody would ever know.”

“What if there are three or four of them?”

“That would be another problem,” he said. “But this would be murder, so there won’t be. They’ll try to keep it as tight as they can. Could be only one guy. A pro that they bring in for the job.”

“I’m worried that we’re overconfident,” Madison said.

“You keep saying that. But with this kind of deal, you do the intelligence and you make your play,” Jake said.

“I hope you’re not fantasizing that you’re back in Afghanistan.”