Fatal (19 page)

“Ooh. You mean you’ll take me to the Howard Johnson’s?” Karen said. “That’s the fanciest restaurant around here. No thanks. I think I’ll go for the steaks at your place. You need me to bring anything?”

“Well, I’ve got the steaks and some nice potatoes to go with them. I was thinking a salad, too. I think we’re good. A bottle of wine, maybe? Or I’ve got plenty of Rolling Rock out here. I seem to remember you’re partial to the Rock.”

“Rolling Rock is fine. I’m still just a country girl.”

“Good,” Beuhl said. “Don’t change that. When do you want to do this?”

“Let’s shoot for tomorrow night. The place has been busy the last couple of days. Lots of new faces in town for some reason. Lunchtime was a madhouse yesterday and dinner was even worse. I have to get some extra help in here if I’m going to take a night off. I’ll get Jenny Summer to come fill in, but I have to give her some notice. Does that work?”

“That’s fine. I can free up my schedule for you anytime. Say seven o’clock? We can eat and then sit out on the front porch and watch the stars or something.”

“Unless there’s a hole in the roof of that barn, you won’t be seeing any stars,” Karen said, and hung up the phone.

Beuhl spent the rest of the day and most of the night thinking about the possibilities.

*****

Luke Francis wasn’t taking any chances. He got the call from Barrow about the encounter on Highway 29 and there was no doubt in his mind that Cassie Reynold was making her way to Virginia. That fact made him both confident and uneasy at the same time. If he knew where she was going he could put men in place. She was moving steadily toward Clark County. That gave him an advantage. He called in more men, spread them out along the highway. Even the smaller side roads got some attention. What worried him was that they still had no idea where she was. A single girl on a highway should have been easy to pick up, but Cassie Reynold had vanished. Francis called in the head of security.

“I want a man on every corner of the compound,” he said. “Twenty-four hours a day. I want every vehicle that comes in the place inspected, even the regular deliveries. I want every name logged. Give the sentries radios and keep a man monitoring around the clock with check-ins every hour.”

“Are we expecting trouble?” The security chief was Arnold Cosby. He’d been assigned as head of security two years prior after being wounded overseas. He still walked with a limp, but he was a professional. He had been in Virginia two years with no problems. The job was a piece of cake. The arrival of Ronnie Gilmore, along with Luke Francis, upset his apple cart. “What are we looking for?”

“Anything out of the ordinary,” Francis said. “It’s just a precaution. I’ve gotten word that there may be an attempt at breaching our security. That can’t happen.”

Cosby thought for a minute. “I can’t put armed people out during the day. That would draw attention from the locals. I’ll get some guys in work clothes out along the fence line, like we’re doing some repairs or something. When it gets dark we’ll have the guys settle in for the night.”

“Good,” Francis said. “Tell them they’re to report anything out of the ordinary. Keep a response team ready too. If something does happen we want to shut it down quickly.”

Cosby left to get working on the plan. Francis was alone in his office. He opened his briefcase and began reading the folder on Cassie Reynold again. “Come on, girl,” he said to himself. “I’m ready for you.”

*****

Cassie wasn’t ready for anything but sleep. The trip through the wet woods had her worn out, and her full stomach made it hard to stay awake. The cab was warm, and after some small talk, Gene had fallen silent. Cassie nodded off for a while, only to come awake when Gene nudged her on the arm.

“There’s a bed in the back of the cab,” he said. “You might as well crawl back there and take a nap. We’ll be driving for the next four or five hours. I’ll wake you up when it’s time to stop.”

“Thanks,” Cassie said. There was a small curtain between the seats. Behind it was a small cabin, like the one on her father’s boat. A narrow bed lined the back wall. Gene kept a bookcase with a few paperbacks on one side. Opposite was a shelf with blankets. Cassie picked one off the top, curled up on the bed, the hum of the wheels and the rocking of the cab pulling her under. Exhausted, she was asleep again in minutes while the truck moved steadily north, heading toward Virginia.

Up front, Gene kept the eighteen-wheeler moving along. It was a familiar route. He drove the roundabout between his home in Florida and the shipyards in Norfolk, Virginia, sometimes two or three times a week. He hauled equipment, or sometimes frozen goods. Whatever needed hauling he was happy for the work. The girl sleeping in his cab had him thinking. She passed herself off as a hitchhiker headed to Virginia to see her father. The talk in the diner between the two state troopers had been about an accident on 29. One of the drivers was missing. Then this girl shows up with a story about her car breaking down.

She seemed harmless enough though, and if she was in a fix, it was no business of his. Sometimes things happened to people, even good people. He had been young once himself. So when he saw the roadblock two miles before Interstate 10 he didn’t think much of it. He eased the rig to a stop at the flashing lights, waiting patiently for the traffic ahead to move through the gap. Two police cars were positioned along the road, blocking traffic to the north. Ahead of him, a family in a station wagon pulled away. He put the truck in gear, pulling into the block where a young trooper held up his hand.

“Morning,” Gene said, when he got the window down.

The trooper nodded. “Morning. Where you headed?”

“Norfolk,” Gene said. “I got my paperwork right here.”

“Don’t need it,” the young officer said. “We’re looking for somebody. There was a traffic accident down near Pensacola last night, and one of the drivers ran off. A hit and run kind of thing. You see anybody hitching a ride or walking along the highway between here and there?”

“None I can remember. I rolled out of Pensacola pretty early, right about dawn. Haven’t seen a lot of traffic and I don’t remember any hitchhikers along the way. What’s the fella look like?”

“We don’t know if it a male, sir. We’ve been told it might be a young girl. The truck was reported stolen in Louisiana and it turned up here. We’re looking for anyone walking or maybe thumbing a ride out of the area.”

Gene shook his head. “Nope. I would have probably noticed somebody along this stretch. There’s not much between here and Pensacola.”

The trooper nodded and waved him on. Gene put the truck back in gear and pulled away, building speed as he shifted. Behind him, the flashing lights faded away. In the back, Cassie waited five minutes before sticking her head out.

“Thanks,” she said, and took the passenger’s seat. “Why did you do that?”

Gene shrugged. “You don’t look like you’re any kind of particular threat to me. How old are you?”

“I’m eighteen,” Cassie said. “My birthday was a few months ago.”

“I thought so. You mind telling me exactly why they’re looking for you? Did you steal that truck?”

“Not exactly. I kind of borrowed it from someone in my family. I have to get to Virginia. The guy I got in the wreck with, he didn’t want me to get there and he tried to run me off the road.”

Gene took a few moments to mull that one over. “Okay, I’m not nosey. Here’s the deal. We pick up I-10 a few miles from here. Then we’ll take 65 until we hit 85. That’ll get us into Virginia. Where’s your dad live?”

“Clark County,” Cassie said without thinking. Why she gave that answer she didn’t know, but it felt right. Maybe it was something she picked up from the man standing in the driveway. Maybe Ronnie was sending her a message somehow. All she knew was the words were out of her mouth.

“We’ll figure out the best spot to drop you off. I’ll get you as close as I can, but this load’s gotta be in Virginia tomorrow morning, so I can’t get too far off track. We got about two hours before we stop to eat. Then we’ll roll until I get too tired to drive. We’ll make Virginia by morning though.”

“Thank you,” Cassie said. “For everything. I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”

Gene guffawed. “Shoot, you ain’t no trouble. I’ve been married thirty years. Believe me, you ain’t no trouble.”

*****

By midnight, Ronnie was ready. He rose from his bed, making his way to the conference room set up for his session. The table and chairs were gone, replaced by an armless couch. Wesling was already there, along with a guard Ronnie didn’t recognize. There was a seat for Wesling. The guard stood in the corner and watched with a bored expression on his face. Wesling was ready to go.

“You’re familiar with the facilities?” she asked immediately.

Ronnie nodded, taking his place on the couch. The couch back was elevated, keeping his head up. It made him think of a psychiatrist’s office. He thought that strangely appropriate since he seemed to be surrounded by people whose grip on things was off kilter. He thought of Cassie and wondered where she was. He pictured her on the road, or driving a car, or riding a bus, a kind of unstoppable force barreling toward Virginia. Sometimes he could feel her, like a blast of charged air before a storm. Francis didn’t know it yet but that storm was getting closer. He shook off the thought. Wesling was talking again.

“We just need a location if you can give it to us. We have another photograph of Vit. It’s more recent than the other one you’ve seen. Is there anything else you need?”

“I need you to be quiet. I need to get out of here. I need to see Cassie. I need us to be left alone. Can you help me with that?”

Wesling shook her head. “I tried talking to Luke Francis. He seems determined to keep you. You might want to know that he hasn’t been able to find that girlfriend of yours. She must be pretty resourceful.”

Ronnie smiled. “You hang around here and you’ll find out. Let’s get started.” He closed his eyes. The process of viewing was a matter of relaxation first. Ronnie made a conscious effort to slow his breathing, counting slowly in his head. His pulse slowed. Hooked up to an electroencephalograph a doctor would have seen a flattening of brain waves, smoothing out until they became low rippling lines on the screen. His pulse wavered, then dropped, then dropped again. Ronnie slipped away.

Lights. Small distinct sparkles. The rush, a fast shot down the tube, no up, no down, only forward. Break away break away break away break away, headlong faster and faster still moving still still still … and a whooshing rush into light explosion back into the world. Mountains off in the distance, barely discernible peaks lying flat against the horizon. There. A flat low building set into the center of a grassy plain. A single ribbon of road. Blackness. The absolute stillness, and Vit, bent over a table in an office. A plate glass window behind him, diagrams on the table. Vit followed the lines on paper with his finger. He looked up as if startled. Scanned the room. Then went to the door and looked up and down the hall outside.

Ronnie moved toward the table. The diagram was meaningless, a series of circles bisected by straight lines, with handwritten notations connected. He moved to the window. It looked out on a factory floor with a high ceiling inset by a series of windows. Racks with heavy chains ran over successive rows of roller-covered steel braces. The room was empty except for a group of men surrounding a metal frame inlaid with wires, thousands of wires. They were securing some type of rounded pieces of a greyish material in the middle of it, assembling a puzzle of sorts.

Vit yelled some type of question down to the men in Russian. They shook their heads and Vit returned to the room, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his brow. He returned to his diagram. Ronnie stepped over to the window on the outside wall, gazing out on to what could have been the plains of Kansas. The view ran out for miles, flat and unobstructed. Directly beneath him he could see the parking lot. It was filled with containers. Omsk. This had to be Omsk.

Vit finished with the papers, rolling them up and stashing them into a rack against the far wall. He went out the door. Ronnie followed. He had what he wanted. He could already feel himself getting weaker. The walls and floor wavered, then fixed themselves again. Vit crossed to a set of stairs, descended, and joined the men on the floor. They nodded as he pointed something out, returning to work. Ronnie was as light as air. The ceiling opened and he passed through, gathering speed. Lights, camera, action, he thought, and almost laughed out loud as he woke up on the couch in the conference room with Wesling bending over him and his heart pounding so hard he thought it might blow out of his chest.

“Oh my God,” Wesling said. “Are you okay? Can you talk?” She turned to the guard. “Get the doctor in here. Get him now.” She turned back to Ronnie. “Just lie there. Don’t get up.”

Ronnie fought for breath. His heart kept up its frantic rattling and his head felt like it was going to explode. The room wavered around him. Wesling’s face floated around in front of his eyes. He heard shouting down the hall. Ronnie caught one good breath, then another. His pulse began to settle. Wesling was still standing over him when the doctor came in and strapped a band around his arm.

Three minutes later, it was all over. Ronnie was able to sit up on the couch, weak and drained but steady enough to speak. Wesling sat next to him, her arm around his shoulder.