The Nature of the Beast (15 page)

“Anything from Arizona?” Craig asked.

Audrey shook her head. “Nothing useful. The Phoenix office says search parties have combed the area twice and come up empty. They’ll have another go at it in the morning.”

Once again, Craig closed his eyes and lapsed into silence. Audrey rechecked her notes for anything she might have forgotten.

“He took the car seat with him,” Craig muttered.

Audrey looked up. “Excuse me?”

“He took the damn car seat with him,” Jackson Craig repeated.

“Which tells us that, for the time being anyway, Michael’s probably okay.”

“Among other things,” Craig said.

Audrey caught his drift. “And you’re thinking that’s too much stuff to schlep very far. That he must have had another car nearby,” she ventured.

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” Jackson Craig said.

“You think the Bureau missed something with ground transportation?”

He considered the matter. “No. Probably not.”

“What then?”

“This one does whatever he has to do in order to survive.”

“How could he be any other way?” she asked. “Torn from his family…raised by Harry Joyce…”

Before Craig could reply, the rapid click of footsteps diverted their attention. They turned toward the empty terminal in time to see a security sergeant push his epaulets around the corner of the US Airways ticket booth and hurry toward them.

“You’re needed upstairs,” he said.

__

“
With tax, that
’
s thirteen seventy-nine,
”
she chirped. She had an old fashioned hair net covering her preposterous black hair and thick rubber-soled shoes that squeaked as she trudged to and fro over the worn linoleum floor. He wanted to kill her.

He smiled and reached for his pocket at the same instant his peripheral vision went on red alert. The overhead light in the car was on. Both doors on the passenger side of the car yawned like wagging tongues.

He wanted to sweep the damn cheeseburgers to the floor, to grind them under his boots as he sprinted away from the cash register and out into the parking lot.

Not wishing to call attention to himself, however, he kept the smile plastered on his face and made blah blah talk as she rang up the order, a task that seemed to take her forever. He wanted to scream at the old woman to
‘
pick it up, pick it up
’
but kept his mouth clamped shut as she slowly, laboriously made change from the ancient cash register drawer.
“
Eighteen, nineteen and twenty…
”
she counted.

Leaving the kid in the car had seemed a better alternative than bringing him inside. The kid had been asleep, or at least that
’
s how it had seemed at the time. He cursed himself for being fooled by a five year old as the old bitch counted pennies into his outstretched hand.
“
And twenty-one cents,
”
she finished.

He slid two singles across the scratched glass counter top, snatched the bag of burgers and hurried out through the two sets of doors.

The car was empty. Somehow or other, Michael had managed to wiggle himself out of his car-seat restraints. He must have climbed between the seats and figured out the supposedly child-proof door locks and then escaped through the passenger door. He threw the burger bag onto the passenger seat and looked around.

The boy was nowhere in sight.

28

The ATF robot was smaller than Audrey Williams had imagined. Something like three feet tall, a stainless steel box, rolling over the pavement on articulated rubber tracks, ‘the bot’ , as they called it, looked more industrial and less human than its Hollywood counterparts.

Audrey peeked to her right. The video console’s lower bank of screens was showing the world from the robot’s point of view. She was alternating between her binoculars and the robot’s ground level image, which, she couldn’t help thinking, must be pretty much the way Michael Browning saw the world.

The Browning family’s dark green SUV was three cars down on the right hand side of row Sixteen D. As the robot approached the vehicle, it swung wide, affording a straight shot at the rear of the car.

The image steadied. The robot seemed to be gathering itself before the tempest. The air crackled. The tension in the room was palpable.

“Let’s go,” Craig growled into his headset.

Audrey watched through her binoculars as the robot began to roll forward, slower now, raising one of its telescoping arms to reveal a thick black tube clutched in its…what was it?…hand didn’t seem right. Prosthesis? Claw? Pincher?

The black tube was an A6VT. Some sort of new age, wide angle shotgun shell, filled with plastic shot, designed to take out the SUV’s back window in a single, highly controlled blast while producing little or no collateral damage. Audrey was watching the video screens as the machine inched forward.

The robot was no more than ten feet from the rear of the vehicle now. The A6VT

appeared to have been raised to the proper level. Five feet now. She held her breath.

“Whoa,” Craig’s voice reached everyone in the room as surround sound. One version came directly from his mouth. A second arrived through their radio earpieces. While a third crackled over the computer sound systems.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Silence.

“Back up three feet,” he said.

The robot complied.

“What’s that,” Craig asked again.

“I don’t understand sir,” came the operator’s voice.

“Under the car,” Jackson Craig said. “What’s that under the subject vehicle?”

Audrey lowered her binoculars and stepped closer to the video screens. Craig was right. Something
was
under the car. An irregular patch of white. From this angle, it was difficult to see precisely what it might be. “Can you zoom in?” Craig asked.

The robot’s camera moved slowly forward, zooming and focusing at the same instant, until the entire screen was filled with the image.

“Looks like fur or something,” the operator said finally.

The operator’s conjecture was wasted, as Craig had already dropped his head-set onto the desk, picked up a hand-held radio and headed for the door at a lope. Audrey Williams trotted along in his wake.

No waiting for the painfully slow elevator. Tripping down three flights of stairs and out into the parking lot, zipping up as they hurried through the frigid winter air. Audrey found her gloves and jogged to his side. “Would you mind…” she began.

“He’s playing with us again,” Craig said. “Trying to get us to waste time.”

They were sliding between parked cars now, dodging mirrors and custom truck bumpers as they worked their way across the packed parking lot to row Sixteen D. Audrey had a thousand indignant questions, but the speed at which they were moving made watching for steel obstructions an absolute necessity, so she held her peace as they slalomed across the parking lot to section Sixteen D.

Craig lifted the radio to his lips. “You’re probably going to want to remove your robot from the immediate area,” he said.

“Repeat sir?” came the reply.

Craig repeated the suggestion and then turned toward Audrey. He pointed to a radio antennae rising from the far side of the lot. “You see that antennae?” he asked.

Audrey nodded. The low whine of the robot reached their ears.

“That’s the ATF command post. Wait for me over there,” Craig said.

“I thought I was your partner,” she said.

When he didn’t say anything, she asked, “Would Gilbert Fowles let you go in there, while he waited over in the command post? Would he?”

His eyes clouded over. “Different situations,” he said.

“What’s different?” She closed the distance between them. She stood chin to chin with him now, looking into his eyes. “Let’s go see what’s under that damn car.”

The ATF robot came rolling by, on his way down Sixteen D. With an array of tools clipped to its body, it looked like a moon rover and made a sound somewhat like an electric can opener. They watched in silence as the robot reached the end of the row, spun on its tracks and turned its digital eyes their way.

She inclined her head toward the car. “Come on,” she said. When he failed to move, she started off on her own. Jackson Craig immediately fell in beside her.

They walked the last fifty yards together, shoulder to shoulder, until they came abreast of the rear of the vehicle. They moved carefully as if trying not to disturb the air. For the briefest moment, as they stood motionless at the rear of the vehicle, Audrey wondered why she wasn’t afraid.

Jackson Craig went to one knee. Audrey followed suit. Her face was red from the cold, her cheeks abuzz with anticipation. She had the urge to hum but quelled it.Together they dropped all the way down to the pavement. Lying on their bellies, with the loose pebbles and bits of pulverized glass right beneath their noses, they peered up under the filthy undercarriage of the car.

The white patch could have been anything. A scrap of refuse sucked from the highway and wedged into the exhaust system. A gallon jug lying in the parking spot when the car was parked. From this angle, all things were possible…if it weren’t for the Band-Aid. The Band-Aid changed everything. What they were looking at was the top of someone’s bald head. A bald head with a Band-Aid on it.

“Damn it,” Craig said, pushing himself upright. He pulled the radio from his coat pocket. “I need a forensics team post-haste,” he said.

ATF came crackling over the frequency. “We’re going to need to clear the area first sir,” the voice said.

“There’s no frigging bomb,” Craig said. “Get me a forensics team.”

“I can’t risk personnel until we clear the area,” the electronic voice insisted.

Craig wasn’t prepared to argue. He strode quickly to the driver’s side and reached for the door handle. Audrey took in a great gulp of air and held it. Craig looked over at her for a moment. Their eyes locked. He gave her a tight-lipped smile. “Perhaps you’d like to…” he began.

She returned the smile and shook her head.

From behind them, a bullhorn began to bellow. “Don’t touch the car sir. For your own safety, please clear the area. Whatever you do sir, don’t touch the vehicle.”

He grabbed the handle and pulled the car door open. Audrey waited for the bright white flash of the fuse, followed by the great whoosh of air rushing to feed the explosion in the nano-second before the energy burst reversed itself and blew both of them to carrion. Nothing happened. Audrey exhaled and looked around. Sixty yards away, the little red light said the robot was filming his little circuits out.

The rear window began to inch downward with a groan. Another excruciating moment passed before the window stopped moving and Jackson Craig appeared at the back of the vehicle holding the car’s key pad in one hand and a colorful bouquet of wires in the other. Red, white and yellow. Two intertwined bundles, each about three feet long. He found his hand radio and held the wires high above his head.

“Wires to nowhere,” he said into the mouthpiece. “False alarm.”

Apparently, the other end of the conversation was still holding its collective breath. Audrey watched Jackson Craig drop the wires onto the roof of the car. He used his thumb to push a button. A snick of the lock set the cold air to moving around Audrey’s head, pulling her back to the present.

Craig didn’t hesitate; he swung the rear gate open, revealing the pair of army green storage containers. In a single deft movement, he grabbed a plastic container in each hand, jerked it out from behind the rear seat, and set it on the pavement behind the vehicle. He pried off one lid and then the other before kicking the containers over on their sides, exposing the empty interiors to the robot’s digital cameras.

“Empty,” he said into the radio. “There’s no damn bomb. Now I need a medical team and a forensics team. Right now. Let’s go.”

The bullhorn crackled. “On the way sir.”

A minute passed before the slap of running feet began to sound a bit like the beginnings of timid applause.

__

The sky was the color of steel wool; the air hung dense with water. To the north, across the narrow valley, a jagged range of foothills hovered. While the soaring stone flanks held the rough Canadian wind at bay, they also put the sun to bed early on winter days such as this. Seemed like it went from morning to evening in about as much time as it took to eat an egg salad sandwich.

He swept his eyes in a slow semi-circle. The browned-out grass and stunted bushes had begun to undulate in the freshening breeze. The tops of the stringy oaks danced as the leading edge of the storm began to sweep across the valley floor. A quick gust of wind tore by, pushing his hair down across one eye like some old time movie vamp. He pushed it back.

He locked the car and took a careful circuit of the cafe. Only things hiding in the overgrown lot were a couple of stripped out cars, dozens of discarded tires and enough old grease to oil the skids of hell.

Back at the car, he looked around again and asked himself :
‘
Which way would I go if I were a kid?
’
He leaned back against the car. East and west the land was empty and unused. At least a mile of mesquite and sage grass rolled out of view in each direction.
“
Too scary,
”
he decided.

Huge droplets of icy rain began to fall. Semi-frozen snow-cones bouncing off the car with a series of sharp metallic sounds. Ping, pong, pung.

“
I
’
d cross the highway
”
, he finally decided.
“
Over there is a whole new world, different from this one. Probably better than this one. I
’
d try to get myself into that thick grove of trees running along the base of the hills and I
’
d hide there.
”