Lane did not trust anybody's telephones now. If there was an informer inside the FBI, there could be another inside the White House. He showed up at the west gate a couple of minutes before four, and it took the Secret Service fifteen minutes to verify who he was, wake the president, and escort him inside.
When Lane was shown into the Oval Office a White House steward was pouring coffee for President Reasoner, who looked tired, but fit and alert. His anger had been replaced with determination. The bastards might be pounding at the gates, but the fort would hold if the president had anything to do with it.
“Good morning, Mr. President.”
“Good morning, Bill,” the president said. The steward left. “You wouldn't be here at this hour unless you had some news, and you weren't willing to trust anyone to give it to me.”
“Yes, sir. We think that we know where Helmut Speyer is located. It's a farmhouse about twenty miles west of Baltimore.”
“Thank God,” the president said. “Now we're finally getting somewhere.” He reached for the phone.
“If we send the police or the military up there Speyer will react by releasing the virus,” Lane said.
The president hesitated. “If he finds out what's happening in time. We have some pretty good people.”
“He'll have security measures all over the place. It'd be very tough to take him by surprise.”
“Very well. How do you suggest that we proceed?”
“First of all, we need some accurate intelligence. How many people he has with him. Where the two tanks are physically located, and how tight the guard is. Maybe they're booby-trapped. We just don't know.”
“Go on,” the president said. He wasn't happy.
“Speyer knows that we're looking for him; he'd be a fool to think otherwise. But to this point he doesn't know how close we are. I want to go up there and make a quick pass. Depending on what I find out we'll decide if we send the troops in, or if I go back and make a surgical hit.”
President Reasoner looked down for a long moment, organizing his thoughts. When he looked up, he seemed even more resolved than he had a moment earlier. “If you fail or if you're delayed for some reason, we'll have no other choice but to make a strike. A very strong strike.”
“I understand, sir. But the advantage is on our side this time. Speyer doesn't know that we're coming, and we have a day and a half.”
“Then I won't keep you,” the president said. “God speed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Lane said. At the door he hesitated and turned back. “Are you planning on paying the ransom if this doesn't work?”
The president shook his head, a hard look in his eyes. “Not a chance in hell.”
Gloria was still sitting at the kitchen table when Speyer came down around 6:00 A.M. just before dawn. They sky to the east was becoming pale, and in the dim light she looked sickly. She'd been drinking but she wasn't drunk. Speyer gave her a disgusted look then went and put on the coffee.
“How long have you been down here?”
“I don't know, a few hours,” she said. “What are you doing up so early?”
He took down two cups and got out the cream and sweetener. Now that they were this close he was tense and mellow at the same time. His nerves were jumping all over the place, which made it impossible to sit still, let alone sleep. Yet he was at peace, like General Rommel before a desert battle, sure of his coming victory. “There'll be plenty of time to sleep later. Right now I have too much on my mind.”
“I'm frightened.”
He chuckled. “Of what? If anything goes bad you'll be in the clear. You're just an innocent victim.”
“I'm frightened of you.”
“That's an acceptable fear,” he said indifferently. “Live with it.”
“Thomas agrees with me,” she blurted.
Speyer gave her a hard look, then glanced at the telephone. “Is that what you did down here by yourself in the middle of the night? Get drunk and then make telephone calls? Disturb our friends when they were sleeping?”
“Just Thomas. He's not the enemy.”
“Are you the enemy, Gloria?” he asked, his tone deceptively mild.
She shook her head, then flinched as he came to her. “I don't know what's going to happen.”
“We're going to become very rich, my dear. Rich beyond even your wildest dreams.” He took her by the shoulders and began to squeeze very hard. “What did you and the general chat about?”
She tried to squirm out of his grip, but he was far too strong for her. “You're hurting me, Helmut.”
“Yes, I am. What did you tell him?”
“That you were about to do something crazy. Get us all arrested or killed.”
“What else?” Speyer kept up the pressure, and he could see the pain and fear in his wife's eyes. It excited him.
“Nothing.”
Speyer squeezed harder. If need be, he decided, he would break both her collarbones. That pain would be a reminder to her for a long time of exactly who was in charge. She whimpered. “I told him about Germany, and then about the sinking of the ship.”
“What did he say?”
“Pleaseâ”
“What did the general tell you?”
“That I wasn't to worry. He has faith in you and I should, too.”
Speyer smiled, released his iron-hard grip on her shoulders, then reached down and kissed her on the cheek. “Good advice, sweetheart.”
She pushed him away, then rubbed her shoulders. There would be bruises by this afternoon. She hated that almost worse than the pain. “You're a bastard,” she said.
“Yes, I am. But I'm the bastard who's in charge. Never forget it.”
Â
Â
The sun was up by the time they passed through the tiny town of West Friendship and took the country road to the west. The morning was quiet, only the occasional tractor or farm truck on the road. Lane drove the Land Rover, Frannie rode shotgun, and Hughes sat in back with his wireless laptop. They came to the anonymous-looking driveway with the fire number 46-144 that had shown up after the phone intercept, and Lane pulled over to the side of the road a half mile beyond it.
“Not exactly a hotbed of activity this morning,” Hughes said. He was connected with the main computer back at The Room. No further phone calls had been made since they left Washington.
Lane looked at the driveway reflected in the rearview mirror for a long time. In passing he'd not spotted any of Speyer's guards, but that didn't bother him. Driving up to the Kalispell compound he'd not spotted any of the lookouts either. They were professional, and had been well hidden. He expected nothing less of them here.
What was bothersome, however, was the driveway itself. No one had come that way for a long time. The gravel was overgrown with grass. Undisturbed grass. Not flattened by the passage of a single vehicle anytime recently.
“What is it?” Frances asked.
“We may be on a wild goose chase,” Lane said. “Are we sure that this is the right location?”
Hughes brought it up on his computer. “Forty-six, one forty-four. Unless someone switched signs, this is the place.”
Frances suddenly realized what her husband was getting at. She turned and looked back down the road. “The driveway hasn't been used lately. Maybe there's another way in.”
“Not according to the map,” Hughes said. “And we didn't see anything on the satellite shots.” He held the laptop up so that they could see the image on the screen. It was a topographic map of the immediate area west of the town and south of the Interstate. There was no other way into that piece of property.
“Write a message for the president,” Lane said to Hughes. “He knows that we're out here this morning. Tell him that we're in trouble and we need help right now.” He put the Land Rover in gear, made a U-turn on the narrow road and headed back to the driveway. “But don't send it until it's necessary.”
“Already on it,” Hughes said.
Lane and Frances exchanged a glance. She took out her pistol,
checked the load, and set her purse aside. She grinned. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
Â
Lane laid his own gun on the seat beside his leg as he slowed down and turned onto the driveway. In the time since they stopped and turned around, no other traffic had come by. The morning continued to be lovely; a warm, gentle breeze came from the south, carrying the noise of insects and birds and maybe the very distant noise of a farm tractor. The countryside was rolling hills and patches of dense woods punctuated by the occasional farm field under cultivation, or fields left for grass.
“All set to send,” Hughes said. “Are you sure that barging in like this is such a good idea?”
“We're a couple of investors being shown a piece of property by a friendly real estate saleswoman,” Lane said. “What could be more natural?”
“Unless Herr Speyer and his merry band happen to be in residence,” Frances pointed out. “They would certainly be surprised to see me again. But that's nothing compared to how they would react seeing you back from the dead.”
“In that case, Tommy sends the SOS while I turn around and you start shooting at the bad guys.”
Frannie's window was open. She checked the safety catch on her pistol and gave her husband a wicked grin. “Peachy,” she said. “Maybe the inestimable Gloria Speyer will also be there. Bridge indeed.”
Â
The unused driveway cut through the woods for a few hundred yards where it followed the bottom of a low hill before coming out over the top. The two grass fields nestled between the hills were just as they had seen them in the satellite photographs. But the satellite shots had been taken at high angles and hadn't given a very clear indication of the elevations. Seeing them now in person Lane could see that, because of the sharp slope of both fields, it would take a hell of a pilot to land or take off from there.
There was a house, however, and a large barn plus some other outbuildings, the set-up nearly perfect for what Speyer was trying to pull off. But there was no sign of his troops or that this place was occupied.
Lane stopped at the crest of the hill, still within the dense woods.
“Let's take a look before we drive down there,” he said. He got out of the car and Hughes handed him a pair of powerful Steiner military spec binoculars.
The house stood out in sharp detail in the glasses. Some of the upstairs windows were broken out, and he spotted dozens of bullet holes in the wood beams of the front porch. Hunters, probably, with nothing better to do than shoot up posts. A NO TRESPASSING sign on the front door was half shot away, too. The barn and other buildings were in the same condition, or maybe even a little worse.
“Nobody home,” Lane said.
“What do you want to do?” Frances asked.
“We've come this far, we have to check it out.”
“With care, William,” Hughes warned. “This could be a blind. And there is a lot at stake.”
Â
Sergeant Erwin Meitner was on west perimeter duty when he spotted sunlight glinting off something metal in the woods above the house across the creek. He turned his head toward his lapel mike. “Base, three, I have a possible contact west of my sector. Six hundred meters.”
“What do you have?” Sergeant Baumann came back.
“Something on the driveway in the woods above the Hansen house,” Meitner radioed. “Stand by.” He raised his binoculars in time to see a Range Rover emerge from the woods and start down the driveway to the abandoned farmhouse. A RE/MAX REALTY sign was on the passenger door. “It's an SUV, real estate agent. Two people. A man driving, a woman in the passenger seat. Maybe a third person in the back.”
“Are there any other vehicles?”
“No.”
“Keep an eye on them. I'm on my way down.”
Â
Lane pulled up in front of the farmhouse. It looked in even worse shape close up than it did in the binoculars. A section of the roof had collapsed, and the entire building looked as if it was about to collapse in on itself.
The nearby barn was a wreck, too, as were the other buildings. It had probably been thirty or forty years since anybody had lived here.
“Not exactly a retirement palace,” Frances said.
“Speyer may be desperate, but not this desperate,” Lane told them. “He and his people aren't here.” Lane sat back in his seat and
stared at the house. They were missing something. Speyer might be a megalomaniac, but he wasn't stupid. He'd been well trained by his Russian masters, and had the Soviet Union not fallen apart, and the Berlin Wall not come down, Speyer would have risen very high in the Stasi. The place was significant.
Hughes was doing something on his laptop. He grunted in satisfaction. “Okay, this is the right location,” he said. “Nobody has tampered with the signs and this is definitely where the telephone call originated.”
“Could it have been a cell phone?”
“Land line,” Hughes said.
“There are no phone lines coming to the house. They would have led along the driveway.”
“Maybe they're buried underground,” Frances suggested.
“Not out here, and not thirty or forty years ago.”
“This is the right spot, William,” Hughes said. “The phone call this morning originated from right here.”
“Then we'd better take a closer lookâ” Lane said, when Hughes's computer chirped.
“Hold on,” Hughes said. His fingers raced over the keyboard. “It's an incoming call from Thomas Mann. Encrypted.”
“Incoming here?”
Hughes looked up and nodded. “Right here, William. Thomas Mann is having a conversation with someone in this house at this moment.”
“Stay here. If there's any trouble beep the horn.” He and Frances got out and, guns in hand, went into the house, holding up in the entry hall.
Stairs were to the left, living room to the right, dining room and kitchen farther back. The place was deserted, there was no doubt of it, yet the computer was telling them that Thomas Mann was talking to someone here and now.
Lane motioned for Frannie to cover him as he went back and eased open the door to the cellar. Light came from two broken-out windows. The stairs were gone, and the basement floor was under at least a half-foot of water.
They quickly checked the rest of the ground floor, leapfrogging from room to room; first Lane in the lead and then Frances.
Finding nothing, they took the stairs to the second floor as quickly and as quietly as possible. In a back bedroom Lane pulled up short.
An electronic unit, about half the size of a VCR, was wired to a six-inch dish pointed out a broken window. Several green lights flickered on the front panel.
“Damn,” Lane said, pushing Frances back out into the corridor and out of any sight line through the window.
“What is it?” she demanded.
“They're across the creek. Tommy was right, this place is being used as a blind.” He holstered his gun at the small of his back and hustled her back downstairs. “That was a microwave relay for telephone calls.”
“They know we're here.”
“Unless they stationed someone on this side of the house they wouldn't have gotten a clear look at our faces. They might think that we're doing nothing but looking at a piece of property for sale.”