“A tunic? You mean a robe.”
“It's the tunic Caleb was wearing when I took him from the monastery. Take it home with you and look through all of the hems. If I'm right, you'll find something in one of the hems.”
“What am I looking for? I gotta be honest, Jason. This seems a bitâ”
“I don't know. Something that shouldn't be there. A note maybe.”
“I take it you haven't actually seen this note or whatever.”
“No. But it's there. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how I know. But there's a worldwide exclusive in this. Don't tell me that doesn't get you going.”
“And if there is something to all of this, how do I contact you?”
“I'll call you in the morning. Before sunrise. It's safer for me that way. We'll decide what to do then.”
“A tunic, huh?”
“A tunic.”
“Okay, Jason. You're on. And if it turns out your magic tunic is a sham, you turn yourself in to me anyway?”
“Don't push it, Donna. We have a deal?”
“We have a deal.”
Jason hung up and left the Texaco station. Mission accomplished. He was half a mile from the station before he let out his howl of victory. “Yeow! Thank you, Father!” He pumped his fist.
It was indeed a good day to be alive.
Day 37
R
OBERTS STARED AT
C
RANDAL
across the white linen in the private dining room. A basket of English muffins sat untouched with the rest of their brunch. An hour ago he'd been a man thoroughly smug, unable to hide the glow that reddened his cheeks. Now he was having difficulty with a purple that flushed those same cheeks.
He slammed his huge fist on the table and Roberts blinked. “I'm not about to let a little piece of trash from Africa influence me! Do you hear me? I don't care what he says he has. Bury them!”
“We've been trying to bury them for four weeks now,” Roberts said softly. Heat tickled the back of his neck. “But you don't just take out a shovel and start throwing it on the world's favorite little boy when you're running for president. We've had to move with caution. Either way this was unanticipated. It implicates you directly.”
“And you actually believe I would consider flying all the way to California because some idiotic reporter says she has something I may want to see?”
The heat spread over Roberts's head. “Sir, you'll have to excuse me for being blunt here, but you're not thinking clearly.” He sat back.
“Let me put this in perspective. Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to a headline in the
New York Times
that reads
Baby Killer!
And imagine the story going something like this: Ten years ago Charles Crandal, then director of the NSA and an ardent collector of obscure artifacts, stumbled across compelling information putting the Ark of the Covenant in one of northern Ethiopia's Orthodox monasteries. So what does the man who may be our next president do? Does he take a private trip to Africa to interview priests and ferret out the precise location of the elusive artifact like any sane man might do? No, he goes in with guns blazing, slaughtering priests and pillaging the monasteries in a sweeping search for an artifact he must have.”
Crandal's face whitened. “Don't be a fool! The Ark's not simply an artifact! It's a relic that could shift world power! And I didn't go in there like some gunslinger. Over a year of preparation went into that mission. It was nearly perfect!”
“I'm just telling you what they'll write. You may not think of it as gun-slinging, but they will. They'll make Charles Manson look like a nursemaid next to you.”
“They'll never have the chance!” A fleck of spittle rested on Crandal's lip and he made no move to remove it. He was losing himself to this.
Roberts lifted an eyebrow. “Worse still, you rerouted arms to Colonel Ambozia in exchange for his invasion to find your relic. They'll call it treason.”
“You know as well as I do that the country was already at war. One that we publicly supported.”
“No, it had just
finished
a war. But your plan extended that war with this invasion. And after learning that Ambozia's rogue army was unsuccessful in finding your Ark, despite pillaging eight churches and killing over a thousand civilians, you demanded he push farther south if he wanted his arms. Well, they did push farther south. They didn't find an ark, but they did manage to kill another two thousand civilians.”
Crandal breathed deeply and sat back. “You're telling me what I already know.”
“But what you
don't
know is what I was just told. One of the civilians they killed was a nurse. A Caucasian nurse. An American nurse. An American nurse who happened to be the mother of a son she'd had with a local.”
Crandal blinked. “Caleb?!”
Roberts nodded. “Caleb. It gets worse. It was an EPLF captain under Ambozia who took Caleb's mother's head off with his sword while she huddled over her infant son. The captain stood there and watched the baby scream, but instead of taking its life, he swept it up and fled, suddenly horrified by the carnage his soldiers had left behind them. You'll never guess where he took the child.”
“Don't patronize me, Roberts. What are you driving at?”
“I'm preparing you for tomorrow's headline, remember?”
“This is all nonsense!”
“Not anymore it's not. The captain took the boy to an isolated monastery called Debra Damarro and left him at the front gate.”
“This is idiotic! How would anybody know any of this?”
“Well, that's precisely the problem.” Roberts felt a small surge of power over the man, and it actually gave him goose bumps. “Our EPLF captain was a good Orthodox Christian, you see. And his religion was getting the better of him. Which is why he wrote out a confession begging for absolution and then left the note with the child as a sort of penance. Donna claims that she has the note.”
Crandal sat very still for a few moments. When he spoke, his words came with a slight tremor. “A note? Anybody could have written a note.”
“That's what I told her. But this note came from the boy's tunic. It was sewed into the hem by his father. It's written on parchment and in Amharic. She had it translated this morning and says the scholar who examined it is quite certain that it is authentic.”
“What examiner?”
“Don't worry. He'll be dead by nightfall. But the note is a problem, Charles.”
Charles?
He was feeling unusually bold, wasn't he?
Sweat peppered the candidate's face. He looked as if he might be coming down with a case of food poisoning.
“We can't allow that note to surface,” Roberts said. “Even if you think you can hold on to your lead once the media starts screaming about the baby killer, there's the issue of treason.”
Crandal stood abruptly and slammed both fists on the table. A glass toppled over the edge and shattered noisily. “This is hogwash! It's ancient history!”
Roberts stood with him, allowing his anger to rise. “It's the truth! And whether you like it or not, it's going to come out. Our only option is to meet with her.”
“Kill her! Kill them all!”
“By five o'clock tonight? Banks will get the kid and the other two, but you don't just walk up to Donna Blair of NBC and pop a slug in her head. If we're not there by five, she goes public. If we are, we at least have some time to reason with her. Give us another evening, and I think we have a better than even chance of making them all dead. But not cooperating now would be a fatal mistake. We have to show good faith.”
Crandal balled his hands into fists and turned from the table, steaming like a bull. His jaw flexed with the grinding of his teeth. “I swear, Roberts, if this goes bad, I'll crucify you.”
“Actually, I think it's you they're trying to crucify. I may be your only way out. You should keep that in mind. We've got six hours to get to L.A. We should leave.”
Crandal walked away from the table, unable to hide a tremble in his hands. He walked up to the wall and smashed both palms against the green-leafed wallpaper. The entire room shook. It was the first time Roberts had seen the man hit a wall.
The night hunt had gone badly.
For starters Banks had eased his Monte Carlo down the road for less than two miles before coming to the conclusion that he was passing terrain that would have allowed Jason's four-wheel drive to leave the road in a dozen spots, given the right motivation. And that motivation clearly existed.
He had painstakingly covered the first three miles of the seven-mile stretch before deciding to park for the night and resume his hunt at first light. He pulled the sedan out of sight and slipped into a light sleep.
Problem was, first light came at four-thirty, and it wasn't the sun blaring through his windshield; it was two headlights.
A lone driver roared by in the Bronco. Again? Jason was going back out by himself. Banks nearly followed the man before deciding that this actually worked to his advantage. The sport utility would return. And now Jason had inadvertently narrowed his location to the direction from which the Bronco had come.
The vehicle roared back by forty minutes later, and this time Banks followed with his lights out. He made it another mile before the dust had settled enough for him to lose certainty that the Bronco had passed. But that put them in this last three miles of the road.
He had taken up the search again at six, with full light, and he'd run into his first logging trail at eight. The good news was that he was certain that the Bronco hid somewhere in these last two miles of road. The bad news was that the only way to search logging trails was to leave the main road and risk missing a fleeing Bronco.
He decided he would have to accept that risk. He searched the logging trails by foot, keeping the road within earshot. The first trail ended within a hundred yards, and he returned without incident. The second trail was longer, but he came to a large muddy patch under heavy growth that was clearly undisturbed. No vehicle had passed this way. Strike two.
The search proved much slower than he'd anticipated. But slowly he eliminated road. By three o'clock he was down to the last half-mile and his pulse was feeling it. They were probably camped where the road ended.
He pulled out his cell phone and sat on the edge of his seat with the door open. Roberts had called four times. He had the ringer off, of course. Nothing like a shrill beep to warn the world of an approaching thug.
Take a seat, Roberts. I'm on the job, if you didn't know.
He punched in the ten-digit number.
“Banks?”
“Yeah.”
“Where in the world have you been?”
“Doing my job.”
“We're an hour out of LAX,” Roberts said. “There's been a problem. What's the status of the kid?” He sounded panicked.
“Lighten up. I've got them pinned to the next half-mile of road.”
“Any chance they'll get away?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, listen to me. You take out all three; you got that? The price goes up to one million dollars if they're dead by sunset.”
Banks whistled softly. “So they've got you spooked good, huh?” Wasn't surprising, really. At least half of all his hits ended up bringing more than initially promised due to complications. But he'd never pulled down a million dollars before. Not on one hit. He looked up the road. The afternoon was dead quiet.
“What's changed?” he asked.
“The kid knows more than we thought he did. So do the others.”
“One point two,” he said and wiped a trail of sweat from the bridge of his nose. There was a pause.
“Okay, one point two. Just get it done.”
Banks snapped the phone closed and tossed it onto the passenger's seat. Good enough. They were offering double the six hundred thousand he'd agreed to yesterday. Whatever the kid knew, it was worth all the marbles. He checked his 9-mm Browning by habit, left the car half hidden in the side brush, and walked toward a trail that broke to the left twenty meters ahead.
One point two million! His pulse spiked at the thought.
Jiminy Cricket, I'd pop 'em for the fun of it. They got away, didn't they? Nobody gets away.
The fact that the trees kept heavy shade on the forest trails was his salvation, he thought. It had rained three days agoâhe remembered that nowâ and the mud was still wet in spots. All he had to do was find a spot and see if it showed any tire marks. He'd tracked on less before. The cowboy trackers in them Louis L'Amour novels could supposedly follow a man on horseback for days based on bent grass blades alone. That was the biggest pile of . . .
Banks pulled up and blinked. Shade covered the entrance to the logging trail. A soft layer of dark dirt was bared of grass at his feet. An eight-inch tire track ran right through the wet earth.
The Bronco!
Banks jerked his head up, immediately alert. This was it! They were down this trail. His heart thumped loudly in his ears. Yeah, baby!
He ran back to the car, pulled out the rifle, and cut into the forest at an angle that would meet with the trail. The trees were mostly pines and their growth relatively sparse here. He followed the rise in the terrain, bent low and moving steadily. Somewhere to his right the trees broke for the trail. The Bronco would either be on the forest trail itself or in a clearing.
Banks pulled up behind a pine at the hill's crest and studied the trees. They ended thirty yards ahead. So there was a clearing! Sweat leaked steadily from his pores now. He ran the back of his hand across his upper forehead.
He ran crouched low, squinting his eyes for the Bronco's white paint between the trees. They'd be sitting ducks in a clearing.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
In the middle of nowhere. One point two.
Banks stopped behind a tree ten feet from the edge of the clearing and saw two things in the same moment. The first was the cabin. It sat on the edge of the clearing, less than thirty yards away, overlooking another couple hundred yards of open meadow, and he thought to himself,
Jiminy Cricket, they got themselves a cabin!