The Spy Is Cast (29 page)

Germain grabbed my arm
and heaved me to my feet. I clutched my head with my free hand and
tried to squint one eye open while he dragged me to our
motorcycles. I managed to sling a leg over the bike before slumping
on the seat, trying to force my eyes to focus. Germain stood
alongside to balance me and I gritted, “Gotta get Hellhound,”
through clenched teeth.

“I’ll get him,” he
promised.

A few too-long seconds
later, I finally regained enough vision and equilibrium to sit up
straight, and Germain dashed for his bike while I fired up the
Honda and pulled a hard U-turn. I rolled on the power with a
trembling hand, and a few seconds later the throaty whine of the
Yamaha rushed up behind me. Germain pulled abreast and gestured
decisively to me, then forward. I nodded.

He’d get Hellhound.
I’d run for the campground. He cut the throttle and peeled off into
the ditch while I rode on as fast as I dared in the dark,
adrenaline surging.

Glancing fearfully
behind me, I spied no sign of pursuit. When I arrived at Beaver
Flats, I idled quietly through the sleeping campground, clamping
down on the urge to ride the twisting path at top speed. Kane stood
up from the chair beside the RV as I pulled up. He strode quickly
over as I cut the engine.

“Where’s Hellhound?”
he demanded. “You weren’t supposed to travel without an
escort.”

“We got busted,” I
told him tremulously. “They’ve got a camera on the highway.” His
head jerked up, scanning the quiet campground.

“I don’t think I was
followed,” I added. I tried to make my voice steady, but it
quavered with my uncontrollable shivering. “I don’t know if Arnie
got out. Carl went to get him. They should be behind me. I
hope.”

“Goddammit!” Kane
swore softly but with great feeling.

“What do we do
now?”

“We wait.” I could see
the tension in his shadowy figure.

“How long?” I
demanded.

“Twenty minutes. If
they’re not back by then, we move. Keeping you and that key safe is
still our top priority.” He held up a hand as I opened my mouth to
argue. “They’ll make it,” he said firmly. “Tell me what
happened.”

“I went into the
network from our spot by the side of the road. There was a man in
the security sim, watching. They’ve expanded the perimeter of the
security system. They’ve got cameras at the gatehouse, on our spot
on the road, distributed through the trees, and I’m pretty sure
there’s one on the first surveillance point you were using. I don’t
know if they’ve gone as far as the second one or not. As soon as I
saw us come up on monitor, I beat it out of the network and we
ran.”

Kane blew out a
breath. “Lucky the security sim was up, or we’d never have known.
They could have picked you off at their leisure.”

“They might have
gotten Hellhound and Germain anyway,” I said tightly. I wrapped my
arms around my body as the shivering stepped up a notch.

A faint sound caught
my ear and I flung my head up. The sound swelled into a distant
rumble, and I muttered, “Oh, please, oh, please,” under my breath.
Kane and I stood motionless as the engine noise grew louder and
then softened as if its rider was idling at low speed. A few
seconds later, two headlights appeared, and Kane and I both let out
an audible breath.

Germain and Hellhound
cut their engines and swung off their bikes. I resisted the urge to
run over and hug both of them. They walked over, and I hugged them
both anyway.

“Any pursuit?” Kane
demanded, and Germain shook his head.

“No sign.”

“Good. Let’s move the
bikes out of sight behind the RV,” Kane said, his voice deep with
relief. “I don’t want them in plain view, but we need to be mobile
just in case.”

We relocated the
motorcycles and trooped into the RV. I looked around at the
strained, tired faces.

“Food,” I said
decisively, and they laughed as I started to scrounge in the
cupboards.

A few minutes later,
we all crammed onto the dinette benches with our meals. I
appreciated the tight fit while I basked in Kane’s body heat beside
me, my shivering gradually dissipating.

“Now what?” I asked as
we finished eating.

“Damage control,” Kane
said decisively. “Hellhound, things are getting too hot around
here. It’s time for you to pull out. You can head back to Calgary
tomorrow morning.”

Hellhound straightened
in indignation. “What the hell? What about Aydan? She’s a
civilian.”

Kane sighed. “Yes, but
she’s the only one who can do what we need done. Believe me, if I
had any choice at all, she’d be far, far away from here.”

“Well, I ain’t goin’
back and leavin’ ya short-handed out here. Ya got somebody to take
my place?”

“No.” Kane scrubbed
his hands tiredly over his face. “But it’s too dangerous to send
you in blind, and I can’t tell you what you need to know.”

“Wouldn’t be the first
time I went into danger blind, Cap,” Hellhound said quietly.

Kane’s face looked old
as he met Hellhound’s gaze. “I know.”

I suppressed a shudder
at the ghosts behind their eyes. I knew they’d both seen combat in
Yugoslavia. I’d done a bit of reading about the Medak Pocket
firefight.

Germain broke the
short silence. “We could still use him at base camp. It’d be a
little safer than active surveillance.”

“I can do that,”
Hellhound said immediately.

Kane hesitated. I knew
he’d want to keep his old friend as far from danger as possible,
but it was clear he needed the manpower.

“We’ll see what
happens in the morning,” he said finally. “Our surveillance plans
may be completely out the window if they’ve expanded their
perimeter. We don’t even know if Aydan can get close enough now.
Dammit.”

He turned to me. “Did
you get a chance to check anything else?”

His eyes flicked
almost imperceptibly in Hellhound’s direction, and I responded
carefully. “Yes, I checked. Nothing new tonight.”

“Did you get any idea
of where the cameras were placed?”

“Where’s the site
plan?” I asked.

Germain dragged it out
and spread it over the table again. We all hunched over it.

“It was pretty hard to
identify trees in the dark,” I said slowly. “But I was surprised at
what I could see. They must have had the apertures cranked wide
open. Or maybe it was night vision. What would that look like?”

Hellhound shrugged and
handed me the binoculars. “See for yourself.”

I poked my head out
the door of the RV and peered through the lenses. “Yep, that’s
definitely what they’re using.”

“Crap,” Germain said.
“I was hoping we could still go back and scope things out while it
was dark.”

I shook my head. “We
were wearing black clothes in the dark, and we showed up no problem
on the monitor.”

Kane’s head snapped
up. “Were you identifiable?”

“Um…” I thought back,
trying to remember the quick glimpse I’d had before I fled. “No. We
were both wearing our helmets.”

“What about the
bikes?” Kane demanded. “Would they have gotten license
numbers?”

“I didn’t see the
bikes in the view.”

“Small mercies.”

“Yeah.” I bent over
the plans. “Okay. There’s definitely a camera here.” I pinpointed
the location that had shown the gatehouse. “And here.” I added a
dot for the view of our stopping place beside the highway.

I jerked up as a
thought hit me. “Shit! I bet they saw Hellhound and me earlier. It
was daylight, and we had our helmets off then.”

Kane hissed forcefully
through his teeth. “Dammit! Where exactly did you stop? Is there
any chance they could have missed seeing you?”

“We stopped right
beside the road,” I said slowly. “The camera angle might not have
caught us. We parked the bikes in about the same place, and we just
went down the side of the ditch a few feet. We weren’t over by the
fence line where Carl and I were tonight.”

Luckily. I suppressed
a shudder when I thought about how I’d tried to convince Arnie to
take that walk in the woods. That would have been bad. I glanced at
him and read the same thought on his face. Dumb civilians. Real
spies would never have gotten distracted like that.

“No point in worrying
about it,” Kane said grimly. “Too late now.”

I dragged my attention
back to the map. “There’s probably another camera here.” I marked
the first surveillance clearing. “I’m not positive it was the same
clearing, but there was that funny-looking twisted tree on the one
side, so I think it was.”

“What funny-looking
twisted tree?” Germain demanded.

I shook my head and
grinned at him. “City boy.”

“All right, country
girl. Tell us where the rest of the cameras are,” he
challenged.

I grimaced. “I’m not
that good. There were at least four other cameras out in the woods.
Maybe more. I ran as soon as I saw us come up on the monitors. No
funny-looking trees in any of the views. But at least one of them
is on the guards’ route. I saw a guard and dog walking
underneath.”

Kane traced an arc on
the drawing, connecting the dots I’d drawn. “Okay, let’s suppose
for the sake of argument that they’ve created a roughly circular
perimeter.”

He lightly marked in
the completion of the circle. We stared glumly at the result. The
building site nestled in one quadrant of the circle. If the cameras
followed the line Kane had drawn, we wouldn’t be able to get close
enough to come within range of the network.

“Damn.”

“I second the motion,”
I agreed. Then I paused and leaned forward, looking at the map
again. “Hold on.”

“What?” Kane
snapped.

“I don’t know much
about security camera systems. If you were going to install them,
would you generally create a perimeter that you’d monitor
thoroughly, and then not bother with much inside the
perimeter?”

“Generally, yes,” Kane
agreed.

“I wonder what the
creek looks like when it comes through here.” I traced the line of
the creek on the site map where it intersected Kane’s rough circle.
“Because this is high land. Remember how the valley dropped off
when we came around the corner of the driveway on Saturday?”

“Right,” Kane said
slowly. “So it might be in a deep cut.”

“That’s what I’m
thinking. I wonder if they’ve got a camera trained on the cut. Is
there any way to detect the cameras?”

“Not without physical
surveillance,” Germain said.

“Shit.” I leaned over
the map again and traced a second circle around the building site,
intersecting our old surveillance spot by the road and the dot that
I’d marked the previous day where I’d accessed the network the
first time.

“What’s that?”
Hellhound asked.

“My usable range.
Roughly. I need to be in this vicinity in order to… do what I need
to do.” I marked the tiny sliver where the arc intersected the
creek. “I might be able to get access from here.”

“But it’s inside the
camera perimeter. Theoretically,” Germain objected. “If they did
actually create a circular perimeter.”

I sighed. “Yeah.”

I woke the next
morning to the quiet rumble of voices from the main part of the RV.
The bedroom was bright, and I rolled rapidly out of bed when I
realized it was nine A.M. I threw on jeans and a T-shirt and
emerged blinking into the sunny dining area.

Germain, Hellhound,
and Terry Wheeler sat at the table, drinking coffee and conversing
in low tones. Wheeler wore the navy-blue security uniform of
Harchman’s guards, and his blond good looks reminded me
uncomfortably of the man in the sim.

Germain glanced up as
I entered. “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he kidded me.

“God, I can’t remember
the last time I slept until nine o’clock,” I groaned. “I feel like
shit. I don’t know how you guys deal with the irregular hours. Hi,
Terry, nice to see you again,” I added, stifling a yawn.

“Hi, Aydan, good to
see you, too. The hours take some getting used to,” Wheeler agreed
sympathetically.

I glanced around.
“Where’s Kane?”

Germain and Hellhound
exchanged a look.

“What?” I
demanded.

“He’s scouting the new
camera perimeter over at Harchman’s,” Germain said reluctantly,
while Hellhound glowered. Germain held up a restraining hand at the
sight of my expression. “I tried to convince him to let me do it,
but he said he wanted to have at least one team member Harchman
couldn’t identify, just in case. And yes, that’s a good strategy,”
he added, forestalling my protest.

“How long has he been
gone?”

“Only an hour. He’s
already checked in once. His next check-in will be at 9:30.”

I swallowed my fear
and made my voice level. “Okay. I’m going to take a shower, if
nobody needs the bathroom for a while.”

“Go ahead.”

I shut myself into the
tiny room and awkwardly washed my hair in the inadequate shower. By
the time I came out, Kane was sitting at the table holding a
steaming mug. Everyone looked much happier. The tension released
from my shoulders, too, and I beamed at them in relief.

“Good news,” Kane
greeted me. “It looks like there’s a gap in their perimeter right
at the creek, as you’d guessed.”

“Excellent,” I agreed.
“Now the question is whether it gives me a usable access point or
not.”

He nodded. “That’s our
next step. Wheeler, what can you tell us about the security
detail?”

Wheeler frowned. “I’m
not getting as much information as I’d hoped. I haven’t overheard
anything unusual between the men who are staffed through the
security company. I think they’re all just ordinary rent-a-cops.
There’s another group of security personnel that spends most of
their time around the building site. They’re not staffed through
the security company, so they must be directly on Harchman’s
payroll. I’ve tried to gather some information there, but no luck
yet. They don’t mingle.”