Top Ten (29 page)

Or in a body bag.

“Is there anything new there, Grace?” the SAC asked. “Anything that can help you?”

Ariel rubbed a hand over her head, her fingers wrapping round the tight tail her hair was pulled into at her collar. “I haven’t had much of a look, sir.”

“Well look and look good. DeVane is out of your man’s sights now. Out of the picture. But he still needs to be stopped. The son of a bitch is going to get the chair if I have anything to say about it.”

The connection hissed loudly and clicked off. Purposely or not, Ariel could not tell. She brought the phone away from her ear and looked at it for a long moment before handing it back to Woodson. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” he assured her as he pocketed the phone. “You know about DeVane.”

She nodded and stepped around Jack Hale’s body to the desk. “I know.”

“Won’t be a secret much longer, I’d wager,” Woodson said, shaking his head after a moment and taking his phone in hand again. “I guess I should call Tallahassee. Not that DeVane’s still at that airfield, but I’m sure everywhere he’s been in the recent past is going to have its share of Bureau feet trampling upon it.”

Ariel nodded and nudged the mouse on Jack Hale’s desk with her knuckle. Static crackled on the screen’s surface and an image grew from the gray darkness. It was what she’d thought. What the SAC had explained should be there. Bureau tags at the top of the window, technical information about some Russian device. All things that probably should have scared the crap out of her, but which at this moment could not, because for the second time that day she was standing where the monster had stood, near the dead form of one she knew, and right then there was no room for fear because the fire that had been fanned from a smolder at 1251 West Lemontree as she stared at Jaworski’s dead and painted face was now whipped to an inferno.

She wanted her madman in the worst way. In the I-shot-him-even-though-he-was-surrendering kind of way. In a way she hadn’t known since that night in the lot of the Proper Peach Motel, when she’d wanted the lie that Mills DeVane was to her then so bad, so very, very bad.

Without warning she made a fist and thumped it hard on Hale’s desk, and Woodson looked to her as he conversed with someone in Florida.

Smart, Ariel found herself thinking as she stared at the desk near where Jack Hale’s notepad lay. A little pink sticky note was pasted to it with a notation that evidence had been removed. It bore the Atlanta SAC’s initials. That was where Jack Hale had put his final words. Words made final by her very smart madman. Her madman that didn’t make mistakes.

But...

Her eyes tracked off the small pad of paper.

But if he was so smart, why is he so dumb here?

She straightened where she stood, her fist unclenching, the rising throb in it forgotten for the moment. Overshadowed by an inconsistency. A glaring inconsistency.

Why would he leave Jack Hale’s note?

DeVane was his prey. Number five on his punch card. He wanted him a way maybe as powerful as Ariel’s wish to put a bullet in his insane brain. So why leave that note that might lead him to DeVane. Why leave it for others to find. Others who might get to DeVane first.

Ariel’s fast reasoning presented just two possibilities. One, Michaelangelo now knew just who Mills DeVane was, that he was not truly one who belonged on the ten most wanted list, and for that reason he was no longer deserving of attention. Yes, that was possibility number one. And possibility number two...

Possibility number two was that he
wanted
that note to be found. He wanted half the FBI heading off for North Dakota. He wanted all of them, her included, to be as far away from here as possible because...

...because maybe Mills DeVane wasn’t going to North Dakota.

Ariel came fast out of her introspective consideration of what she knew and turned to Woodson just as the phone was sliding back into his pocket. “Woodsy, I need to know everything that’s been found here so far. And I’m not talking about fingerprints.”

“Found?” Woodson sniffed a humorless laugh. “What you see is what you get. One body, one computer on, one notepad less a note.” He glanced down at Jack Hale. “One pen.”

Ariel shook her head, knowing that could not be it. There had to be something more here, she thought, one finger tapping absently on the desk. After a moment she picked the notepad up and asked Woodson, “Was there anything else in that note?”

He shook his head, knowing that the SAC had filled her in. “North Dakota, nuke, and Hoag. Isn’t that more than enough to make a nightmare.”

Again she shook her head, looking down at the pad. There had to be something else. Something else here.

Or not here, the thought came to her as she saw it. Or, more appropriately, saw remnants of it. “Woodsy, there are indentations on this pad.”

He leaned close and tipped his head back to get a good gander through his bifocals. “There was a note on top of that page, Ariel.”

She tipped the pad at different angles to Jack Hale’s desk lamp, seeing faint, impressed lines in the thin paper, but was unable to make them out. After a futile few seconds she put the pad back on the desk and snatched a pencil from a Bureau mug next to the monitor that had gone dark again.

“That’s evidence, Ariel!” Woodson protested when he saw her bend close to the desk and start rubbing soft strokes of graphite upon the top sheet of the pad, dusting it like one might a fingerprint, giving the high spots shading and leaving the low spots to stand out like pale shadows.

Pale shadows that were the true last words of Jack Hale. Words that Ariel could read with amazing clarity now. Words that wrapped her heart with a sudden, sick chill.

“Shit...”

“What is it?” Woodson asked, but his query came too late. Ariel was already moving away from him, stepping right over Jack Hale’s body on her way to the door.

*   *   *

“Time,” Gareth Dean Hoag said finally as the first hint of mist began to settle on Crutch Field’s tarmac. “It’s time you boys get going.”

Mills crawled from under the Piper’s wing where he’d sat for near four hours and stood just as Lionel stepped from the open passenger door of the Wagoneer.

Gareth smiled at them both from the open cabin door of the Piper. He came down the pair of steps saying, “Chop chop, number five, we’re sorry for the inconvenience but your flight is now cleared for takeoff. Thank you for flying I’m Filthy Rich airlines.” He hopped onto the dampening tarmac just as Nita reached him from the Wagoneer. “Now go get my money.”

Mills came toward him. “You’re not going?”

“You have something against Lionel?”

Mills did, but shook his head. “I thought since you went with me to the Key you’d be making this last hop.”

Gareth grabbed Nita and dragged her to him. “Nah. Me and my sweetness is gonna have some lovin’ to celebrate. You can dig that, number five, can’t you?”

Nita kissed him and pressed herself close. Obscenely close.

“Sure, Gareth. Sure.”

Behind him Lionel nodded and smiled. The gun tucked in the small of his back already had the safety off.

“I can dig it.”

“I knew that you could,” Gareth said, and turned toward Nita, his tongue out of his mouth before their lips even met.

Mills jumped when Lionel put his hand on his back. “Ready, flyboy?”

“Ready as ever,” Mills said, and went first into the Piper with Lionel right behind him.

*   *   *

Out front of Jack Hale’s house Ariel trotted up to the agent who’d brought her from the airport. “How well do you know the city?”

The young agent, barely four weeks out of Quantico, shrugged nervously at the amped-up agent’s question. “Not well.”

Ariel turned fast and surveyed the scene, fixing on the nearest uniformed Atlanta PD officer. She covered the distance to him in a few fast breaths. “The Motel Niagra. Where is it?”

The officer, twenty years Ariel’s senior at the least, gave her a quick once over. When he hesitated, she tapped the shield clipped to her belt just to remind him she was on the team.

“West of Centennial Park,” the officer finally said.

“How far from here,” Ariel pressed. “In time.”

“Twenty minutes in good traffic. Forty in bad.”

Shit!
He could have gotten there and been gone an hour already, Ariel thought as she turned and stalked away from the bearer of bad news. She could still go there, of course, but what would she find? Nothing. Likely just that.

“Dammit,” she swore softly, her hand fisted around the note, squeezing down on it hard. She hated this. Hated
chasing
the monster. Hated following the trail of bodies left in his wake. She needed to not do that anymore. She needed to get ahead of him. But how?

She stopped halfway between the hardly helpful officer and the mostly helpless rookie who’d been given gofer duty that night. Stopped and stood in the street and released the note from her fist, opening it and reading Jack Hale’s last written words again. ‘Father’ ‘Motel Niagra’. She blinked hard at what that surely meant, and wondered what that which was penned beneath it meant. ‘Sugarpine’ ‘South of Atlanta’ ‘Pike County’.

All right. She tried to calm herself and think. Think. She’d been in Atlanta. Assigned there in the not so distant past. And though she didn’t know every flophouse in the area, Motel Niagra among them, she did know the area, and there was no city, town, or burb south of the city in Pike County named Sugarpine. That she knew.

But it felt nowhere close to good to know the negative. She needed some affirmative knowledge. Just what the hell did Sugarpine, capital ‘S’, mean. Where was it? What was—

—
hate
—

Yes.

—
hate
—

She’d heard of Sugarpine before.

—
hate my hair
—

It was coming.

—
and
...

Coming

—
and
...

“And you hate putting in at fields like Sugarpine,” Ariel said softly, but aloud. “It’s an airfield. An airfield.”

She ran to the gofer agent. “Is there a map book in this car?”

He looked at her strangely and nodded. “In the pocket behind the seat.”

She opened the back door and got it, then held out her hand to the young agent. “Give me the keys.”

“I signed the car out.”

The look she gave him in response was more convincing than any words could be, and he fished the keys from his pocket and dropped them in her open palm.

She was doing fifty by the time she blew the stop sign at the end of Jack Hale’s block.

Thirty Two

Upstairs, Downstairs

Five thousand feet over the south of Georgia, Mills DeVane was running about a million options through his head right then and none of them seemed very good at all. Not worth a damn, actually.

The big man sat next to him, belted into the right seat like a good passenger. Like any good passenger packing heat, that was. Mills could see no weapon, but it was certain there was one on the big man’s person. Lionel Price without a gun was like rice without white. It just didn’t work that way.

But the gun Mills knew his passenger had was just punctuation of the obvious. Lionel outweighed Mills by at least fifty pounds, and had six, maybe seven inches on him. Forearms like lodgepole. Biceps like pythons. Gun or not, it didn’t seem likely Mills could take him in a physical confrontation. Not likely at all.

Gareth? Maybe. But then Gareth would have been armed, as well. Armed and able and willing, as he’d proven on Clarion Key. So if Gareth had been the one to make this hop, this final flight, Mills wondered if the possibilities would have been any better.

Again, likely not. Maybe even less so than with Lionel. The brain factor made him think that. Take away the weapons and the big man had size, but Gareth had smarts. Not phi beta kappa smarts, but an intuitive sense. The ability to know when something was not...copasetic. Lionel? He’d think you put ‘copasetic’ on a cut.

But what was the point in running either
im
possibility over and over again in his head as he drew nearer and nearer the place he would not be able to land? The place at which he
had
to land?

Had to land.

Dammit, Mills thought, his fingers flexing hard on the yoke. He
had
to get down there. Down to Sugarpine. Down to Jack Hale and hopefully a good many colleagues with guns would be waiting. But how?

Get down there!
a voice inside him screamed. If only it had screamed the ‘how’ as well. You couldn’t just command a plane to get on the ground. This wasn’t some in flight emergency where getting down was the
only
thing a pilot could...could...

Mills’s grip on the yoke eased. Relaxed as tension became possibility. Relaxed as he realized how lucky he was that it was Lionel Price sitting next to him and not Gareth Dean Hoag. Because Gareth, aside from some street smarts, had one other thing on Lionel—he was a pilot. A rusty, part-time flyboy at best, but that was enough. Enough that he would never have fallen for what Mills was about to do.

“Shit!”

Lionel instinctively grabbed for the armrests as Mills swore loudly and the Piper bucked hard to the right.

“Damn! Damn!”

Lionel’s eyes bugged, doubling in size, and he looked frantically at the instrument panel, searching for what he did not know, then finally he locked his wide eyed stare on Mills who seemed to be fighting the yoke, his feet working the rudder pedal furiously beneath the console. “What is it, man?! What is it?!”

“Shut up!” Mills shouted, surprised not at all right then that the big man did just that, because if there was one truism that spanned time and nations, it was that no one, absolutely
no one
, wanted to die in a plane crash. And pestering the pilot in a moment of ‘obvious’ trouble could not be considered a wise course of action for one who did not want to plow into wet Georgia earth at a hundred and ninety knots.

Of course, one man’s ‘obvious’ trouble was a more learned man’s mere manipulation of a Piper Navajo Chieftain’s control surfaces. Hell, what Mills was doing was little more than what some Hollywood stuntman might do behind the wheel of an out of control car, jerking the wheel back and forth in rapid swings to make the car
seem
and
look
and
feel
out of control. It was an illusion, the same kind of illusion Mills DeVane was employing, only he had more controls to work—rudder, elevators, ailerons—and therefore could generate a whole heck of a lot of motion. Particularly in the three dimensions he had to work with. A stunt driver could take his ride left and right and forward and maybe toss in some sway and body roll. Mills could do all that, and was, but was also taking the Piper through an unsteady series of up and down motions, as if it were riding some monstrous wave. That and the quarter and half rolls, both left and right, and that healthy fear of die in a head-on with mother earth, and Lionel Price was, at the moment, being a very, very good boy, albeit one who seemed just about ready to wet himself.