Warrior (Freelancer Book 2) (24 page)

Rick could see the grin of pure pleasure return to his housemate's face. "But that was in the daytime. It was so much cooler at night!"

Rick reflected that his friends' addiction to explosives occasionally came in handy. He settled back into the seat and said, "Where's the CB? I need to reach Corey and get some local cops out here. As a responsible citizen, I definitely think there is a case of mass kidnapping going on. That and some child molestation, endangerment, and weapons charges."

"Open the glove compartment. I put the stereo and the CB in there so a thief would steal the piece of junk in the dash and leave the good equipment alone." Eps pointed forward where red and blue flashes reflected off trees not far away, "As for the cops, I'd say we don't have to worry about them showing up. Put your seatbelt on. We do need to worry about reaching the main road before they get here."

The morning sun was reaching down Ingomar Street when the housemates finally assembled in what Eps called "a council of war." All of them looked serious and, in Scotty's case, downright glum, but Kristee was almost beyond reason. She sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa, her hands continuously twisting and clenching in the thick material of her jeans.

Eve was sitting next to her with an arm around her shoulders. None of this had any effect on Kristee. Her face, always thin and a bit pinched, now looked like leather stretched over a stone carving.

Rick thought, "If Saint-Gaudens' sculpture in the old Rock Creek Cemetery is known simply as 'Grief,' Kristee would be 'Terror' or 'Fury’."

Corey came in the front door, looking as though he'd just had eight hours of sleep and a shower (although Rick knew that was far from the reality), gazed around the room and said, "Well, it looks as though all you meddling idiots made it back alive. Any injuries?"

Rick answered, "Not on our side."

Corey paused, then spoke carefully to Rick. "I would appreciate if you didn't expand on that statement. I'm desperately trying to keep my law license here."

Rick nodded, and Corey continued. "I hung around the Loudoun County Sheriff's office just long enough to confirm that the girls were taken to Social Services, based on the general mayhem at the scene combined with a hysterical phone call about child abuse that, to be honest, I'm rather proud of."

His voice suddenly took on the high, strident tones of an angry, frightened, rural housewife. "You gotta do somethin' about them girls! They're being kidnapped and raped by those bastards. I seen it!"

He coughed to clear his throat after the strain of that last sentence; when he spoke again, his voice was its normal smooth tenor. He nodded to Kristee. "They were still dithering—the authorities hate to break up even the most dysfunctional families. Then, your friend Annette Lewitinsky swept in and didn't allow anyone to have the slightest doubt of the proper course of action from that point on." He shook his head ruefully. "I'd hate to face her in a courtroom."

In a strained whisper, Kristee said, "Sage?"

All humor gone from his voice, the slim attorney said, "Kristee, I'm very, very, sorry but there was no mention of Sage at all. But there was only one fatality, a man named Vernon Crane, so please don't give up hope."

He turned back to the door. "And now, I'm sure that you are going to begin discussing something illegal or dangerous, probably both, so I'm going to go while I still have a chance of making those big salaries on K Street after I leave my, hopefully brief, period of public service."

The screen door slammed.

For a moment, there was silence.

"OK," Scotty began, "Let's gather the available facts and make a plan for further action. First, we voted Kristee and Sage into the house. That means that we will take reasonable—,"

"And unreasonable," Eps interrupted.

"—up to and beyond the point of completely fucking insane action," Steve finished.

Scotty nodded. "Precisely. We will make ALL efforts to get Sage back. The second fact is that from all available evidence—primarily the testimony of the late Crusader Flick—she has been taken to Montana where Stephen Cloyes and his minions—,"

"Thugs," Eps added.

"Brainwashed zombies," Steve finished.

"All of that and more," Scotty agreed. "Where Cloyes and his thuggish and brainwashed minions are apparently planning to engage Eve's people in some as-yet unknown but undoubtedly objectionable action to pressure them into signing the coal leases."

He reached over to the table beside him and picked up an inch-high stack of folded computer printouts. "Luckily, Sage and I got this cooking before she was taken, and the result came up overnight. We brought the lease contracts down to the most basic levels, so we could perform a true comparison and then ran them against other similar projects."

Eve looked up. "How did you get those?"

"Called up the Colstrip City Clarion and told the city editor we were representing Japanese investors," Scotty responded, "all of which is irrelevant. What is important is that the new leases will remove the topsoil from virtually the entire Northern Cheyenne Reservation, build a hundred power plants there, and the tribe will get paid only an average of seventeen cents a ton."

He paused to check a figure in the mass of paper. "In a market where local gravel is bringing in eighteen cents a ton."

Eve's face clouded over with rage. Rick said, "We are not going to allow that to happen. We've gone too far and lost too much to let these bastards win."

He turned to his housemates. "OK. I've only got the VW and, while it's a lovely piece of machinery, it's not fast."

Without a word, Eps shot from his seat, and ran out the front door. At Rick's quizzical look, Steve said, "We've got transportation worked out. You'll see when Eps gets back."

He turned to Scotty. "I can't leave the NSA. I'll do communications over-watch. I think Rick would be the natural choice to take my place at the wheel, and you two can stay on navigation and countermeasures?" The quiet engineer nodded.

Steve looked at Kristee. "Do you have enough cartridges and cleaning supplies for your dad's hunting rifles?"

Kristee maintained her desperate concentration on things no one else could see, but she nodded agreement.

"Great." Steve looked at Eve. "Can you get off work?"

"I think a better question is whether I should take off at all," Eve replied. "We know there’s a connection between the Children's Crusade and Marsden Angle in general and between my boss and Stephen Cloyes in particular." She reached over and squeezed Rick's knee. "I would follow you into any battle, and you know that, right?"

Rick nodded.

"Well, I think my place in this battle is here, in the camp of the enemy."

Steve summed up. "So, you and I are going to stay here to monitor the situation, Eps and Scotty will handle transportation and logistics, and Kristee and Rick are the front-line troops. Does that make sense?"

For a moment, everyone was silent, considering other options. Then they all nodded agreement.

A two-tone horn sounded from the street.

When Rick reached the front porch, he saw a long, rounded motorhome painted deep blue with a 1960s style white stripe. Eps was in the driver's seat, grinning like a fool.

Behind him, Steve chuckled. "He does love that beast, doesn't he?"

"That's cool, but it can't go very fast."

Steve sounded a bit hurt. "Do you seriously still think all we do is sit around dark rooms and play with computers? Dude, you are looking at Gussie, the current record-holder in the Cannonball Baker Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The Motorhome Class, of course."

Rick looked at his smiling friend, "The Cannonball what?"

"A completely unsanctioned competition–which I trust you realize is decidedly different from an 'illegal' race–in which contestants compete to drive from the Red Ball Garage on 37th Street in New York City to the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach in California in the shortest time. OK, sure, Dan Gurney was fastest in his little Ferrari, but we were the only team with fresh-cooked food and clean sheets for our off-duty naps."

He sounded wistful. "We still hold the class record of 35 hours and change. We would have done better, but Scotty had to pull open the engine hatch and adjust the timing while we were driving. That dropped the average speed down to just under 90 miles per hour."

He slapped Rick on the shoulder. "Our calculations predict a run to Montana in less than 21 hours. You'll be in Lame Deer before the sun comes up tomorrow."

In fact, the sun was well above the horizon in the motorhome's rear window when they crossed the Tongue River and entered the reservation.

Rick was behind the wheel as he had been for most of the trip. The driver's license that proved he was James Putnam had been put to good use when they'd been pulled over by a local police car in Galesburg, Illinois, and by two Iowa State Patrol cruisers as they slowed to 50 miles per hour going through Davenport.

The rest of the way had been smooth. Terrifying, perhaps, but smooth.

The Travco could go well over ninety miles per hour on its own so long as the road was in good shape. At that speed, a suspension designed for comfort rather than speed meant that every breeze or crack in the pavement would send the rig wallowing, and only constant attention kept it from piling into a ditch.

It was even more frightening when they located a Monfort Foods truck heading back to Greeley, Colorado, and drafted behind him. With bigger engines and a promise from the company that all tickets would be repaid, Monfort drivers nailed the accelerator to the floor, always drove in the passing lane, and had Benzedrine as their co-pilot. Only two or three feet from the brightly painted Monfort Foods sign, Gussie topped one hundred miles per hour several times with the windblast slamming behind the truck so hard that the radio antenna would be bent forward instead of back.

Scotty and Eps had taken turns on the dual CB radios set into the passenger side of the Travco. One of the radios was always scratching out the chitchat of truckers on Channel 19, and the other continuously scanned through the other channels. There was a real radio scanner seeking out internal police bands which had to be reset every hour or so as they passed into a new jurisdiction. Finally, the mobile radiotelephone mounted on the center console would ring from time to time as Steve made coded reports on his intercepts of local telephone and radio traffic.

Eve called when she got home from the law firm. Scotty put her on speaker, and they listened intently. She had managed to slip a harmless mixture of dried
Cephaelis ipecacuanha
root and buckthorn into the morning coffee she brought to Suzie, Tommy Franklin's secretary. After half an hour of vomiting and diarrhea, Suzie was helped from the Ladies Room to a cab, white-faced and shaking. Eve said her conscience demanded she send her a truly massive Get Well gift of chocolates and fruit when all this was over.

The result, however, was that Eve ended up at Suzie's desk all afternoon, answering phones and typing letters. Like most of the attorneys, Tommy had a silent receiver installed on his secretary's phone so she could listen in on his calls, take notes, and save him the trouble of having to tell her about it later. He had a switch on his desk phone that would cut off the extra receiver, but Eve had heard Suzie complain enough about long calls to his mistress that she figured he'd forget to use it.

Luckily, Tommy followed his usual practice, and Eve caught a couple of critical phone calls. One was from the Chairman of Excacoal complaining about the Northern Cheyenne breaking their lease agreements. Tommy reassured him that it was "all taken care of."

Later, an operator asked if they would accept a collect call from Nebraska, and Tommy immediately shouted for her to accept it. It was difficult for Eve to understand the caller in Nebraska through the static of the long-distance lines. On the other hand, Tommy's voice was clear, and Eve heard him order the man who she was sure was Cloyes to ensure that the traditional tribal chiefs would be unable to continue in office. Like any lawyer, Tommy was circumspect, but Eve picked out Cloyes referring to it as similar to the infamous Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam.

They both agreed that, without the chiefs, there was enough support for development among the younger men—and particularly those of mixed parentage—that the leases would easily survive the vote.

Eve said there had been more, but she heard Tommy's feet hitting the floor and knew he was standing up. She'd slipped the round earphone back on its hook and was typing diligently when she heard Tommy open the door a moment later. She'd spun around and asked if he needed anything, but he just shook his head and closed the door.

The conversation ended abruptly as red lights sprayed the darkness behind the motor home, and Rick had to switch off the phone, pull over, and give yet another policeman James Putnam's driver's license. Scotty and Eps conferred and declared it was time for countermeasures.

They spotted one of the blue signs with the leaning pine tree that indicated a roadside rest area was ahead, and Rick pulled the motorhome into the curving gravel drive until it was out of sight. After 15 minutes of furious activity, the blue and white Travco was roughly covered with a coat of Pepto-Bismol pink. As they packed the portable air-compressor back into its storage compartment, Rick wondered how they would ever get the paint off.

"Paint?" laughed Eps. "That's real Pepto-Bismol. You can't beat the 'coating action' and it's guaranteed to wash off in the next rain."

Right behind the driver's seat were a long sofa and a foldout kitchen table. Whoever wasn't on radio watch would be going over everything from Triple A TripTiks to detailed topographical maps, trying to find a way around a police speed trap or a shortcut that would shave a few precious seconds off their time.

All had taken at least one break and slept in one of the beds for a few hours. Eps was usually busy at the small workspace and bench in the rear, mixing various powders and attaching fuses and impact triggers.

Kristee was unable to help with the driving: she simply couldn't concentrate enough on her driving to prevent them from slowing down. Instead, she stripped, cleaned, rebuilt, and checked her father's Winchester model 70 and his pump-action shotgun over and over on the workbench.

When her compulsive preparation finally ended, she sat for hours in one of the rear bucket seats, rigid with tension and staring through the windshield as the road rolled into the headlights.