Sweepers (32 page)

She gave up on the paperwork and got up to turn off the lights. She had told Train she would be in the office to morrow, where they were going to have to make some important decisions. She realized as she locked up downstairs that she was only beginning to appreciate the box Galantz had fashioned for the admiral.

WEDNESDAY Eady the next morning, Karen called into the office and left a message that she would be late but that she was coming in. She had actually overslept, courtesy of the secure feeling of having that big Dobe in the house. She checked her voice mail. There was one message, from Sally, who had not been able to feed the horses this morning because she had to take her father to the doctor’s office. She asked if Karen could please feed them.

Karen groaned. Murphy’s Law, she thought. She deleted the message and looked at her watch. It was almost 8:30.

The horses would be standing indignantly by their gates, an hour overdue for feeding. Okay, get the horses fed and turned out, then come back in, change into uniform, grab a cup of coffee, and jump into traffic to get down to the Pentagon. Wait, better call Train and tell him she’d be late. She punched in the office number, but it came up busy. Now what?

What had happened to the office voice mail? Then she remembered Harry.

She’d have to get Harry into the house before letting the Dobe out, or they might fight.

She groaned out loud. Arranging both dogs was too hard.

She told Gutter to stay, patting him on the head, then slipped out the front door. Harry whimpered at her from under a porch chair, but he did not join her. She could hear Gutter complaining as she walked down off the front porch and headed for the barn. She was amazed at how quiet it was as she headed into the hedge passage. If she stood still, she could almost hear the sweep of the Potomac River through the woods beyond the big pasture. Even the hedge passage which on Monday night hadposed such a terror for her: looked entirely benign in the April sunshine, its crocus borders smiling at each other across the bricks. Duchess whinnied from the barn enclosure. “Oh, all right,” she said out loud, and walked down toward the barn and her starving charges.

Train went to the athletic club early, then arrived in the office at about 8:15. He opened up his LAN mail to retrieve the full text of the database report on Jack Sherman. He grabbed a cup of coffee while the report was downloading into his computer, and he asked the yeoman if he had any messages. The yeoman told him the voice mail was down but that there had been no calls for him. “Oh, and Commander Lawrence will be coming in this morning, but late,” the yeoman said.

Train went back to his cubicle, wondering how late was late. They had two immediate problems to work. whether or not to tell the cops about Jack, and finding out why the warning from the DNI had been shortstopped, and by whom.

The first item would provoke an argument. He was leaning toward full disclosure, having had too many bad experiences in multiparty investigations wherein information was held back for political or bureaucratic reasons. Karen, in her zeal to protect Admiral Sherman, would not agree, but it was going to be tough getting around the matter of what Jack Sherman had said about working for his father. That didn’t make any sense at all, unless they had missed the whole point of what was going on. The warning that Galantz might be a sweeper, they would have to take up with the JAG himself.

Karen opened up the feed room, found three feed bowls, and measured out three rations. It had been so long that she had to consult the feed board to see what they were getting these days.

“It has been a while, girls,” she said to her three interested observers, who were clustered in the comers of their paddocks near the barn, watching her through the feed room’s door and occasionally pinning their ears and making threatening faces at one another. She finished the rations, then carried the flum bowls out to the feeding buckets, which were hung on the fences. She watched with satisfaction as everybody piled into their buckets, feet stamping and with in occasional white eye peeled over the rim of their buckets to stare at one another, just in case.

Karen watched for a minute, then went down the aisle to the door of the hay room. Most of the hay was stored in square bales on the second floor of the barn. One room on the ground floor had been designed as the hay service room, with a trapdoor between the upper floor and the ground floor so that hay could be dropped down into the service room periodically. She unlatched the door and stepped into the semidarkness.

There were ten bales stacked on the concrete floor. The trapdoor in the ceiling was closed, as it should be. She cut the strings on one bede and carried out six pats of hay to a waiting garden cart. She rolled the cart back down the aisle to the area of the feed buckets, then gave each horse two solid pats of hay on the ground near their buckets.

She rolled the cart back down the aisle, past all the empty stalls.

Sally kept a trim and clean barn, she thought. All the tools were hung up neatly, and the cabinets with vet supplies and tack-cleaning stores were a closed. She was lucky to have her, and only too happy to do the feeding chores from time to dw if that’s what it took to keep Sally. She opened the hay service room to put the cart inside, and suddenly there was a black-gloved fist in her face, a snapping sound, and a very bright Purple flash that seemed to make her eyes ring and her’brain stall, and then, without so much as a squeak, she was falling backward into a fathomless black canyon.

By nine o’clock, Train decided to call Karen’s house, but there was no answer. Maybe she was stuck in traffic. He asked the yeoman for the number for her car phone, but the yeoman did not have it. He sat at his desk and scanned the database report again, his mind uneasy. He called her again at 9:15, and then he realized that calling was a waste of time. Something told him to go out there. But that would be dumb if she was on the way in. They’d simply pass each other out on the road.

He got up and paced around the office, making the yeoman nervous. He asked two of the other officers in IR if they had the number for Karen’s car phone, but they looked at him as if he was slightly nuts, although they were polite about it. He went back to his cubicle and thought about going to see Carpenter. No, he decided, not without Karen.

Then he remembered the athletic club. Would she have gone there before coming into the office? Knowing he was waiting? Maybe she would if she was still mad at him. Women!

He got the POAC phone number and asked for them to page her. They obliged, but there was -no reply. But that didn’t mean anything if she was in the pool or out for a run. He looked at his watch. Going on ten.

Damn it!

Karen surfaced in total darkness, surrounded by a strong smell of rubber. Slowly, she realized that it wasn’t really darkness, but that her eyes were blindfolded. It felt as if there was cloth or bandage material pressed against her eyelids, and a strap or tape of some kind wrapped around her head to hold the bandages in place. There was even something in her ears, something that felt like a cotton or Styrofoam plug. She tried to move but couldn’t. She was on her back, her feet and hands bound, probably by tape, from the feel of it. There was even a patch of tape over her mouth, with a small hole cut in the area around her lips. She could breathe through her nose, and partially through her mouth.

She tried to gather her wits. What the hell had happened?

That bright purple light, and something else. The fist, the black fist.

No, a black leather glove. She had a clear image of the glove, a man’s glove with something in it. He had not hit her.. She felt no pain, no sensation of having been drugged. Just that purple-red flash, as if someone had popped an incredibly intense flashcube in her face, and then she had blacked out. She tried to move again, but there was nowhere to go. In fact, she could not move much at all.

With the first flare of claustrophobia, she realized she was in a bag of some kind-a rubber body-length bag. Oh my God, a body bag. She was trussed up in a body bag. She had never even seen a body bag, except on television, yet instinctively she knew what it was.

She tried to move again, tried to roll over on her side.

But there was something on top of the bag-something heavy, rigid, but not hard-edged. And not just on top. There were heavy objects all around the bag, on top, along the sides, and even underneath. She could feel, rather than hear, a scratchy sensation on the rubber fabric of the bag when she moved. She realized that she was breathing heavily now, and she could feel a mist of condensation hovering around the skin of her face.

But there was another smell, something different from the rubber. ‘ Slow down, slow down, she thought. Control. Get control.

Where had this started? In the hay service room. Hay. Bales of hay.

That’s what was on top of her-bales of hay, fifty pounds each. Heavy, although not crushing. She was buried in the haystack. But probably not down in the service room; there had been only ten bales down there. In the hayloft up above, then. Whoever had done this had carried her upstairs into the hayloft, where there were four hundred bales of hay.

And-what? Stashed her?

She fought a rising panic as she grappled with her situation. She tried again to move, to wriggle out of the bindings, but then she realized that each twist and turn was settling the hay bales tighter on top of her. Heavier now, much heavier. The smell of rubber was very strong.

Air.

How was she going to get air to breathe, stuffed in this damned bag? By going slowly, breathing a lot slower than she was now. He hadn’t meant to suffocate her, or else there would not be airholes in the tape over her mouth and nose.

So the bag must have an airhole in it. Or the zipper had been left open around her face. Pay attention. Feel. Yes. The scratchy ends of hay straws against her face. An aroma of last year’s grass just underneath the rubber smell. The feel of a zipper up against her chin.

She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling her lids pull against the gauze.

Focus. Concentrate. Breathe, but control it.

Slower. Force your body to relax, stop fighting, settle into a reduced state. Squeeze the picture of where you are out of your mind. Focus on surviving until the next thing comes along. He had stashed her here. Had to mean he was coming back.

Train would come-when she didn’t show up at the Pentagon. Absolutely. He would come running. Could be coming right now, depending on how long she’d been out. Her eyes hurt, even though they were bound shut. She could still see that purple-red flash. She concentrated on her breathing.

Train would find the dog, and then he would come looking.

Hell, the dog could probably track her down here to the barn. Maybe even find her here in the hayloft. The trick was to listen for signs of a search. Maybe he would call the cops right from the Pentagon. Somebody would find her. Had to find her. Before whoever did this came back. So keep your wits about you; be ready to make noise when you hear someone in the barn.

Except there was cotton in her ears, and tape over the cotton. You’renot going to hear anything!

Despite all her efforts at selfcontrol, she lunged against the bag and then swallowed hard, fighting again to -get her heaving chest and wildly racing heartbeat under control as the weight on her breasts shifted, increased again, ever so slightly. Stop it. Stop it! One thing at a time. Stabilize. Control. Breathe-once, and then hold it. Again, and hold it.

Concentrate on feeling the presence of someone in the barn.

Train was coming. Breathe, and hold it.

By 10:30, Train said to hell with it. He made a diskette copy of the database report to take home and then cleared his screen. He told the yeoman that he was going out to Commander Lawrence’s house to see why she hadn’t shown up for work. The yeoman, curious, asked if he should alert the EA. Train said no, not until he called back in. It could be just a simple niisconnection. He left the number of his car phone with the yeoman in case Karen showed up, with instructions to call him at once. , It was almost 11:30 when he pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the house. The first thing he saw was Harry coming down the front walk, head down, as if the old dog were apologizing for something.

The second thing he saw and heard was Gutter jumping up on the inside of the front door. Uh-oh, he thought. He headed for the house and let himself in. Gutter was all over him, frantically trying to tell him something. Train called Karen’s name, then did a fast recon of the house. Her uniform was laid out on the bed, but the house was empty. He stepped outside onto the front porch and called her name again-twice. No responses Gutter wanted to go; he was dancing around in a circle and whimpering at him.

“Okay, dog, go find her!” he ordered, and the dog took off down the path between those big hedges, toward the barn.

He stopped to think. When you find a fire, first call the fire department; then do something. He went back inside the living room and picked up the phone to dial 911. He identified himself as a federal agent, gave his name and badge number, Karen’s address, and requested the assistance of a Fairfax County patrol car to secure the scene of a possible abduction. Then he went outside and headed down toward the barn.

The dog was running up and down the aisleway when he got there, and he called her name again, but there was no reply. Gutter couldn’t seem to fix any one spot. She must have come down here to see the horses or something, he thought. But then what? Had she been kidnapped? The dog sniffing hard at a doorway. Train looked at the door wished he had a gun. The Glock was in his car. “That’s’t carrying,” Johnson had said.

Got that right. He thought about going back for it, but then he reached for the door handle. It was unlocked. He snatched it open. A hay room.

Nothing in it but eight or nine bales of hay. Gutter went in and circled the room, then came right back out, obviously defeated. He ran up and down the aisleway again, then back outside. Train looked around the hay room again, but that’s all it was: a hay room. He closed the door and followed the dog back outside. Sure as hell, she’s been kidnapped, he thought.