The Black Silent (31 page)

There came a moment that day where her shame at spying and her caution about Sam overcame her desire to talk and she quietly left with all her questions still inside her.

Safely inside the car, with the motor running, she thought she felt something in her besides her own anger at the Sanker injustice. It was dim, intermittent, and gasping to survive. It lived under the load of stark despair, but it seemed to her like a tiny ember in the dark of the night.

It was hope. At that moment back in February, and only for an instant, she had thought Sam might be worth another try. The thought left as quickly as it had come.

Haley glanced at her unwitting hosts again. She was running out of time. The police must have completed their search. It was now or never. Unbelievably, Mr. and Mrs.

Gentleman Farmer were in full swing, starting over. They were in a deep clench.

Apparently not everyone was bored with marriage.

Haley slipped out from the pantry as the woman commenced a deep kiss. Three steps and she was at the back door, slowly pulling it open. It creaked.

"Hey," the woman shouted. "Oh, my God," said the husband. Adrenaline shot through Haley. She stepped through the door and was out in the backyard, running with everything she had, watching desperately for the fence. Without thought she high jumped with her hand on a wooden post, the basic moves of her torso and legs left over from high-school track and field. Amazingly, she didn't rip her skin on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence. There was one cop car out on the road. Nobody behind her.

Fortunately, Frick's people had vanished. Unfortunately, they had probably moved toward the airport.

"How's the dog doing?" Frick asked the handler over the radio.

"He's running back and forth. I don't get it. In and out of a fire pit. Never seen anything like it. Darker than hell out here, except when the moon's out from behind a cloud."

"I hope it occurred to you that you're chasing a pro. He's making an ass of you and that dog. He's escaping."

"What should I do?"

"Don't try to follow a trail, just try to use the dog to intercept him along the beach and send cars along the roads in the nearby neighborhoods. Focus on intercepting him until you get a fresh scent."

"Roger that."

"The officers chasing after Haley Walther are calling," Delia announced.

Frick took the phone.

"Have you got her?" he asked.

"Not yet," his man answered.

"What's going on?"

"She was in a house. A couple was home. They didn't know she was there." He went on to explain.

"How long ago did she run?" Frick said.

"Five or ten minutes."

"Damn. She could go a long way," Frick said. "She's in decent shape. Figure a mile radius."

"Maybe the airport."

"Anderson's plane is down," Frick said. "Two men just checked it. Mechanic was there, but it's in pieces. Could be another plane, though, so scour the airport. We'll call in more men, cover the roads. There's a ton of houses in a two-mile circle."

"Roger. She can't have gone that far."

"Oh yeah? Just give her another ten minutes."

Frick knew that something needed to change.

He called McStott on the speaker phone.

"Anything new on your end?"

"Yeah, they found something of interest."

"Who they?" Frick said, annoyed at McStott's habit of starting in the middle of a thought.

"The men searching Lattimer Gibbons's house found some empty vials. The kind you would use for storing organ-ics in a freezer," McStott said. "It looked like stuff we found in Ben's lab. We think he packages whatever he's making with glycerol. That way he can keep it very cold without freezing and he can take out small portions at a time and he doesn't have a thawing problem."

"What's inside these new vials?" asked Frick.

"We're working on that. Probably organics. But frankly there is no way we'll find out quick from a tiny bit of residue. In fact, we need more than a tiny bit. Assuming there
is
residue."

"Well, if you've got it, can't you figure out what it is?"

"Not necessarily," said McStott.

"Call me when you have something." He hung up, disgusted, knowing that at any cost he had to find Ben, Haley, or Sarah.

A
lthough it had floats and was a seaplane, the old aircraft also had wheels built into the floats and therefore could land at a conventional airport for maintenance. Soon Haley would find out if Grant Landon had managed to get it back together right under Frick's nose.

It had taken another twenty minutes of reckless travel in the open, dodging police patrols and goons, to make her way to somewhere around the middle of the airport on the wrong side. Although she had run when she could, the route had been circuitous. She was sopping wet again, covered in various forms of ground scum and mold, and felt filthy and miserable.

It didn't matter.

On this side of the airport, away from the entrances, she felt relatively safe. The place seemed abandoned, but she worried about someone watching the perimeter. Using the drive-through gates for private pilots would probably result in her capture—even assuming she could make it to that side of the runway. She ducked behind a tree and watched for a few minutes, until she realized there was no way she could get the reassurance she was looking for. And she was out of time.

Even if she gained access to the airport, she'd have to cover a lot of open space to get to the rows of hangars. Frick's people seemed already to have finished an initial search of the airport, leaving no men behind. That, at least, was a comfort.

She had an idea. She dialed the mechanic's cell.

"How the hell are you?" Grant greeted her.

"Fine. Just harried. Too much out in the open. Wrong side of the airport."

"Down from the fire station or up?"

"Down. Maybe two or three hundred yards. Don't know for sure how far." Since Haley didn't commonly crawl around near the airport at night, it was hard to recognize landmarks.

"Be right there."

Once, she and Ben had picked wild blackberries near the fire station. There was a chain-link fence with barbed wire atop and she didn't know how she might get through it. No doubt Grant would have a solution, probably in the form of wire cutters. She didn't have long to think about it. In moments Grant's pickup came rolling down the taxiway, then went onto the grass on a large bench below the main runway, right in front of God and anybody else looking. It scared her.

"Down farther," she told him on the cell. "That's good."

After he had killed the engine and gotten out of the truck, she ran out across the road.

He carried a hefty pair of cutters and came quite a distance from the runway to the fence.

It took sixty seconds or so for him to cut enough chain-link fence to let her through.

Grant wore a graying mustache and hair to match, and plenty of crow's-feet around his eyes. He had a sandpaper voice and a temper, she knew, although he rarely showed it with her.

"Probably violated a bunch of federal laws when I cut an airport fence," he said.

"I won't tell, if you don't."

They climbed in the pickup and drove back toward the hangar. They were very much in the open and she decided it would undoubtedly be proof of God's existence if no one stopped them.

"They came and took some parts," Grant said. "I can't make Ben's plane fly now."

"Oh man. That's bad."

"You can fly a Lake amphibian, can't you?"

"Are you kidding?" Haley said. "Landing those is a trick if you've never done it and I have always flown whatever Ben owned. It would be a miracle if I didn't submarine the nose or drag the tail in."

"Will I go to jail if I fly you someplace?"

"If they think I'm really a criminal, you might."

"You're no damn criminal," Grant said. "Did Sam shoot Crew?"

"No. He didn't shoot Crew," said Haley. "Frick did. Sam wouldn't shoot anybody, except in self-defense."

"You sure about that?"

"I'm sure. And I was there."

"This will help save Ben for sure?"

"And me. Yes," Haley replied.

"That's good enough for me. Where do we pick up Sam?"

"Caution Point."

"Oh, my God," the older man gasped. "At night? With this wind? At least you don't ask for much."

"Is it possible?"

"There's a little indentation, kind of a bay just this side of the point. We could try there, and if we don't make it, we'll probably be dead and we won't have to worry about it. I'm old. Maybe you better let me try it by myself."

"No way are you leaving me," Haley said. "I'd be greatly in your debt if you'd fly. I'm pretty sure I'd crash at night. But I'm going if you're going."

"All right," he said. And that was the end of it.

Haley felt more than a little guilty. "You don't have to do this, you know."

"I prefer to think I'm lucky enough to pull it off." Grant winked. "I've got my skunk tail in my back pocket and everything. Even my copper bracelet. 'Sides, I gotta live long enough to try some of Ben's invention."

That shocked Haley. "What do you mean?"

"You know I been helping Ben?"

"No. What have you been doing? I need to know."

"Well, it's highly confidential and Ben trusts me. I just figured—"

"That I knew?" First Sarah, now Grant. Who else? Haley wondered. "Not a word. Is there anything you
can
tell me?"

"Sometimes we fly people in and out to Orcas. The same people."

"How many people?"

"A lot of people."

"Ten, twenty?"

"More," Grant said. "But there's a dozen that they call project leaders. I see them the most often. But I don't know what they're doing, I swear."

She looked at him sharply.

"Well, I got the idea that it has to do with living a long time."

"What do you know, Grant?"

"There's this manifesto thing."

"A manifesto?"

"They whispered about it once," he said, "and I asked Ben, and he got all stern with me and told me to forget it forever. So I can truthfully say that I don't know where or what.

Now I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me with a little self-respect and not ask me any more."

It just keeps growing.

Rachael sat on the bridge of the Coast Guard Marine Protector-Class, eighty-seven-foot coastal patrol boat called the
Orca.
It was stationed in Bellingham and next to her sat a disbelieving officer by the name of Lieutenant Lew Stutz. He was a lieutenant and apparently it was unusual to get someone of any officer-grade rank on a holiday night at the Bellingham Unit, but this boat had an officer-grade skipper. He had a bit of Kirk Douglas about him and the fresh-faced look of youth. Rachael guessed he had big ambitions, and screwing this up wouldn't help. Her father was a successful local businessman and Rachael well understood life's food chain.

They had tied her uncle's boat in Fidalgo Bay, and she had seen in the young officer the possibility of reaching someone who mattered in the federal government, an opportunity that might not otherwise exist on a holiday weekend in the small town of Anacortes.

Using all her persuasive power, she had talked her way onto his boat for what she hoped would be a productive dialogue. Standard operating procedure would be to turn her over to police authorities at the dock, but she had forestalled that and had been talking and waiting for almost an hour.

"These men say you tried to run them down," Stutz said.

"They were following me," Rachael said. "They shot a flare pistol at me. I told you what I was doing. Doesn't it stand to reason someone might attempt to intercept me?"

An enlisted man came onto the bridge with a few papers and handed them to the officer.

For at least a minute Stutz studied the papers.

"The one thing you have going for you," he finally said, "is that two of the three men have criminal records. The odds are a little slim that two ex-felons were going with a third man for a boat ride after dark on a fall evening. However, the state police are very clear that your friends over on San Juan are wanted in a murder investigation. They have eyewitnesses to the shooting of two deputy sheriffs. We have a boat theft. Resisting arrest. And the gruesome murder of one Detective Ranken. The list goes on."

"Garth Frick is not a regular deputy."

"You're right, he's a sergeant. And an ex-detective in the big city."

"He's a criminal," she said quickly. "He's the witness, and
he
did the shooting in any gruesome deaths."

"It's not that simple," said Stutz. "The undersheriff is in the hospital alive and he figures he was shot by this stranger who has a driver's license in the name of Robert Chase and calls himself Sam."

"I know the undersheriff and he's a good man," Rachael said. "But Frick's tricked him."

She crossed her arms, knowing that she was signaling an end to her cooperation.

Hopefully, this would convince him to listen. "I want to see a state police officer or someone from the attorney general's office."

"I'd advise that you get a lawyer."

"I have no time for a lawyer. My friends will be killed."

"By whom?"

"By Frick! You're not listening to what I'm saying. Look, read this." Rachael held out the FBI memo. "Call Special Agent Ernie Sanders."

"I already read it and tried the agent. It's the middle of the night back there and, not surprisingly, he doesn't answer." The lieutenant shook his head, obviously unsure of how he should proceed—probably because he was obviously intrigued by both her and her story. "It's not an arrest record. It's a report." Stutz paused as if thinking.

"Think about this," she said. "If I'm telling you anything like the truth, if the fountain of youth is real, if there is a conspiracy, it could be the biggest thing in your career. On the other hand, if I'm a nut or just wrong, it will only be mildly embarrassing and it certainly won't follow you in your file."

"You're saying the upside to believing you could be tremendous, whereas the downside isn't that bad."