Beyond belief (18 page)

“Where is he?”

“I don't know. I came as soon as I heard.”

Tears ran down her face. “You have to find him, Mr. Bailey. What the hell are you doing here, when my Jesse's out there somewhere?”

“We'll find him. What exactly happened?”

“I don't know. I was listening to the minister speak, and there was a strange smell, kind of like when you turn on your heater the first time in the winter. Then the woman beside me fell off her chair. The next thing I knew, I was lying here on the parking lot.” Her lips trembled. “Without Jesse.”

Joe nodded. It was pretty much as he'd heard it described by Lieutenant Gerald when he got the call.

“Dammit, the police were supposed to
protect
him,” Latisha shouted.

“We did our best.” Detective Howe walked over to them and motioned toward the covered corpse. “Maybe you'd like to discuss it with the officer. He's not quite cold yet.”

“I'm sorry about that, but what are you going to do to find my boy?”

“The entire state will be looking for him,” Joe said.

“Oh, great,” Howe said as he looked past Latisha at someone coming toward them. “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water …”

“Ms. Randall, be careful what you say to these men,” Stewart Dunning said.

Joe winced. The day was getting grimmer by the minute.

“What's
he
doing here?” Howe asked.

“Making our lives miserable,” Joe said. “He's Jesse Randall's attorney.”

Dunning put a comforting arm around Latisha. “I came as soon as I heard.”

She shrugged him off. “Please, Mr. Dunning, I have enough to deal with right now.”

“I should be here when you talk to the police.”

“Your client has been kidnapped,” Howe said. “Do you really think you're helping him by impeding our investigation?”

Dunning flashed him a tight-lipped smile. “I assume you fine people will bring him back, and when that happens, your investigation into Robert Nelson's murder will continue as before.”

“It's continuing now,” Joe said.

“Of course. Then you can appreciate my vigilance.”

A police photographer pulled back the tarp and exposed the slain officer's corpse. Dunning tried to turn Latisha away, but she wouldn't budge. She stared at the officer's lifeless face.

She spoke in a whisper. “I didn't even know his name, but I know that he was a nice man. He came into the house to use the bathroom. He told me he had two little boys.”

Howe nodded. “Twins.”

She closed her eyes. “Why … ?”

Dunning once again put his arm around her and spoke to Joe and Howe. “What happened to that officer is a tragedy, but perhaps it could have been avoided if your department had assigned more officers to protect the boy.”

Joe was incredulous. “You're saying it's the
department's
fault that he's dead?”

“Maybe. And some may also hold your department responsible for Jesse's abduction.”

Howe leapt toward Dunning, ready to grab him by the throat, but Joe held him back. “That man died trying to protect Jesse!”

Before Dunning could respond, four unmarked
Ford Explorers roared into the parking lot and stopped at the police line. Every cop on the scene knew what it meant.

The feds were involved.

Although technically the FBI had jurisdiction only on kidnapping cases in which the victim was taken across state lines, the bureau had a habit of horning in on high-profile abductions. The mere possibility of a border crossing was enough to involve the feds whenever they wanted a piece of the action.

“Hooray,” Howe muttered as he shook free of Joe's grip. “The cavalry has arrived.”

The first man out of the first vehicle was Raymond Fisher, a forty-five-year-old agent with whom Joe had once worked to break up an interstate telemarketing scam. Fisher's grim face and authoritative manner alienated him from most cops and probably even from his fellow FBI agents, but Joe liked him.

“Relax, guys,” Fisher said in his gruff monotone. “We're just here to screw up your investigation and complicate an already confusing situation. You don't mind, do you?”

There was no smile, no glint in his eye, nothing to suggest that he was joking. That was Fisher.

“Agent Fisher, this is Latisha Randall, the kidnap victim's mother,” Joe said.

Fisher shook her hand. “My apologies. I didn't mean to be glib. We're here to get your son back.”

Latisha nodded.

“If you'll step to the last vehicle, there's someone there who will draw a sample of your blood.”

“My blood?”

“Whatever knocked you out is still in your blood-stream.
If we can determine what it is, it might help us trace the abductors. We'll be testing everyone who was affected.”

Behind the last truck, an agent was already setting up a small table and a medical kit.

Latisha walked toward the table, closely followed by Dunning.

Fisher turned to Joe. “Has the church been sealed off? “

Howe stepped forward. “It's happening now. And we have guys checking the observation room vents for the knockout gas.”

“I doubt you'll find anything. Any idea how many were involved?”

“Three, we think,” Howe said. “One pilot to fly the helicopter, one sniper to pick off the officer and provide cover, one guy to make the grab. There may be a fourth involved, but we're not sure how.”

This was news to Joe. “A fourth? What do you mean?”

“The people in the church saw a man running down the aisle with his gun drawn. He was in here for the entire service. Then a witness from an apartment building saw who we think is the same man on the roof. She said that this Rambo wanna-be shot one of the guys as they were making their escape in the chopper, then hitched a ride himself.”

Joe glanced at the roof. “Who would do that?”

Fisher shrugged. “I guess it's too much to hope that it was one of your guys.”

Before anyone could reply, a young uniformed officer approached with a walkie-talkie. “Gentlemen, I think you'll want to hear this.”

*   *   *   

HVKJ100A.

The helicopter license number was seared into Lyles's memory even though he knew it was probably bogus. But for now the chopper was the only real lead he had.

He rubbed his bruised and bloodied arms as he drove down the gravel road in Jonesboro, a small town just a few miles south of the Atlanta airport.

Please, please, please let the old man still live here.

A light up ahead. Could it be … ?

Yes. The old man's house.
Somebody
still lived there.

He stopped the car. He'd stolen the gold Camry just outside the Coca-Cola building; he didn't dare go back to his van, which was parked two blocks from the church. The entire neighborhood would be overrun with cops by now.

He reached into his pocket and felt the ivory squares.

Focus.
Direct your energy.

He had failed. He had failed Jesse.

No regrets.

That was the key. No regrets. The past did not exist. All that mattered was the present and the future that he could create. A future in which Jesse Randall would lead mankind from an age of pettiness and ignorance.

He cut the engine and looked at the white one-story house ahead. He'd been there only one other time, several years before.

He climbed out of the car and walked up the road. Loose gravel crunched beneath his feet, shattering the night's silence. He stopped as he heard a different sound. Metal against metal.

“Lester, don't shoot,” he said. “It's me. Lyles.”

Silence.

“I know it's you, Lester. Who else would be snapping in a nine-millimeter clip on some dirt road in the middle of East Bumblefuck?”

A man rose from behind a tall clump of weeds.
“Eleven
millimeter. You're slipping. I heard you were in town.”

“You're the third person who's told me that. Heard from who? It's not like I called a press conference.”

Lester Post stepped forward and holstered his automatic. He wore a black jumpsuit similar to one that an auto mechanic might wear, and his scraggly gray-white beard waved in the chilly breeze. “What do you need, Lyles?”

Lyles stepped forward, but Lester suddenly took a guarded stance. Not unreasonable, Lyles thought. The guy was used to dealing with some pretty tough customers.

Lyles had met him over ten years before, when they had been part of a team sent in by a fringe animal rights group to hunt poachers on the African plateau. Lester had long since retired from the life of a mercenary, but he was now a major military supplies broker, outfitting militia groups and private security forces with weapons, vehicles, tents, and anything else a soldier of fortune could possibly
need. If Lyles ever wanted to equip a small army, he knew Lester would be one of the top suppliers on his list.

“I need to locate a chopper,” Lyles said. “I know it was in Atlanta earlier tonight. Can you help?”

“Is this gonna be one of those freebie ‘do it for me for old times’ sake’ kind of deals, or do you have some cash to throw my way?”

“Cash. Lots of it.”

“Good answer.”

Lyles followed Lester inside his house, which was surprisingly well decorated for a man in his profession. Things were different downstairs, however; the basement was stocked with enough firepower to equip several platoons. Hundreds of rifles and handguns hung on brown pegboards that covered every inch of the walls. A long wooden workbench centered the area, where several more firearms rested in various stages of assembly. The place reeked of oil and gunpowder.

Lester walked to the back corner, where a monitor was surrounded by an array of loose computer components. He pushed a button on one of the circuit boards, and the monitor's screen flickered. “It's a mess,” he said. “But every time I put everything all nice and neat in a case, I have to open it up to upgrade something. Technology's just moving too fast.”

“I'm just glad you're here to keep up. I have a license number for the chopper, but it's probably fake.”

“Give it to me. We'll see.”

Lyles gave him the number, then waited a few minutes while Lester established a link to a database
of aircraft licenses. Lester entered the number, and after a few moments the reply came back:
LICENSE
#

NOT FOUND.

It didn't faze him at all. “Make and model?”

“Aerodyne Banshee. Mid-eighties model, maybe fourteen hundred series.”

Lester rolled his chair to a shelf loaded with spiral notebooks. He selected one and began flying through the pages, glancing at hand-drawn sketches and chicken scrawls. Finally he found what he was looking for.

“The Banshee's rear rotor coupling is notorious for wearing out,” Lester said. “And only Aerodyne makes ‘em. For warranty purposes, the company keeps a good database of the parts they sell. If the password hasn't been changed, I can probably find out if that coupling has been shipped anywhere around here.”

“How long will that take?”

Lester didn't reply as his fingers raced over the keyboard. After a few minutes he turned the monitor's screen in Lyles's direction.

“What is it?”

Lester smiled. “About four months ago that part was shipped to a mechanic who works out of the Charlie Brown airport in De Kalb County.”

“Does it say who the chopper belonged to?”

“Nah, just the mechanic's name. A guy named Toby Cooper.”

“You're a genius, Lester.”

The Aerodyne Banshee 1490 helicopter stood in the middle of an open field, surrounded by a perimeter
of police tape and work lights. Many of the police officers, FBI agents, and news crews from the church had quickly relocated to this new scene after the call came in. Several motorists had witnessed the chopper landing only a few hundred yards from the I-20 freeway, and they had flooded the 911 lines with reports of a helicopter in distress. It was now apparent, however, that there was nothing wrong with it, and that this was a carefully chosen rendezvous spot for Jesse's abductors to transfer to a less conspicuous mode of transportation.

“There are reports of a black Jeep entering the roadway shortly after the helicopter landed,” Howe said as he joined Joe and Agent Fisher near the chopper's front windshield.

Fisher nodded. “I'm sure it's already been abandoned, probably within five miles of here. They knew the helicopter would attract a lot of attention, so they drove the Jeep to another location, probably some back road, and made the switch to a vehicle that would take them to the holding location.”

Howe jammed his hands into his pockets. “I like the way you FBI guys talk like you're so sure how everything happened, like you were there.”

Fisher shrugged. “I just play the odds.” He turned to Joe, obviously weary of Howe's attitude. “You know Jesse Randall, right?”

Joe nodded. “Yes. We've spent some time together in the past week or so.”

“So, is he a fraud, or what?”

“In my opinion, yes, but I still haven't been able to discover his techniques. I wasn't able to supervise any kind of formal experiment.”

“Okay, has he ever demonstrated any ability, genuine or not, to transmit telepathic messages?”

Joe smiled. “I'm afraid not. I don't think we're going to be receiving any messages from him.”

“Gotta cover all the bases. Tell me this: Do you think his tricks could actually help him in his situation?”

Joe watched the fingerprint team converge on the cockpit. “That's hard to say, but he's very bright and he has an amazing ability to adapt to any situation.”

“Let's hope he can adapt to this one.”

Cold.

Dark.

Jesse's head hurt, and his mouth was dry. Was this another dream?

He couldn't see anything. Where was he? He was lying on what felt like a big pillow. He pulled himself up onto his hands and knees.

His stomach hurt in a way he'd never felt before. Oh, no …

He vomited.

He was still for a few moments, afraid that any movement would make him throw up again.

How had he gotten there?

“Mama?” he called out. “Mama?”

Nothing.

He crawled across the floor. It was padded. All of it. What kind of place was this? “Mama?”