But that wasn’t the Appletons’ fault.
Another hundred yards uphill and they came to a large clearing hazed with blue-white woodsmoke, and sprawled in its center… the house.
Poppy stopped and stared as it all came back to her.
The house… the crazy Appleton house.
It looked like it might have started out as like a oneroom shack. Then somebody must have added a shed to one end, and then maybe an extra room to the other, then an extension on to the shed, and so on… and so on…
That was because as the Appleton kids grew up, they didn’t move away, they just like added a section for themselves. Poppy guessed that if the Appletons had been some rich and respectable clan like the Kennedys, this sort of thing would be called a compound.
But this was no compound—this was a… sprawl. A sprawl with lots of galvanized pipe acting as chimneys, and all those chimneys smoking. The place looked like they’d built it out of whatever scrap material they could find with little or no thought to matching it with what they’d used before. No section looked like it was any kin to any of the other sections nuzzling up against it. Corrugated metal nailed to marine plywood abutting particle board and cedar shakes. Roofs of genuine shingles, vinyl siding, sheet metal, or old rugs and linoleum tacked over wooden slats.
The hide of a deer was tacked to one wall; and over to the right, three dead rabbits hung head down from a clothesline. She turned Katie slightly so she wouldn’t see them and ask what had happened to Bambi and Peter Cottontail.
The Appletons had lived here as long as anyone could remember. All of them. Nobody left, and nobody new was allowed in. And that meant that with no outsiders to choose from, you had to like pair off with somebody who was a pretty damn close relation. Which was why a lot of the Appletons tended to be soft in the head and look the way they did.
“Company, everybody!” Lester shouted. “Companeeee!” And then they started coming out. The men in dirty shirts and jeans or work pants, the women in stained housedresses, hardly any shoes on anyone, and the bare feet as tough as shoe leather and just as brown. Some folks with no hair and misshapen skulls, some heads too big, some way too small, some with pure white skin and hair and pink eyes, some looking pretty normal at first glance, but a second look telling you that not all the circuits were making contact inside. And the kids… some of them were running in endless circles while others sat and rocked… and rocked… and others just stared.
Poppy felt Katie’s arms tighten around her neck in a fearful strangle-hold.
“I want to go h-home,” she whimpered. “I want my Daddy.” And deep in her breaking heart Poppy knew that had to be. Katie couldn’t stay here—couldn’t stay anywhere with Poppy. Maybe it had been all the fear and stress and near panic, maybe it had been the heat, but for a crazy time yesterday she’d really thought she could keep Katie. Now she knew that was impossible. Too many people were looking for them. She wanted what was best for Katie, and a life on the run wasn’t it.
“I know you do, honey bunch. And I’ll see that you get back to him. As soon as it’s safe.” They’d stay here today—just today, but not overnight. No way overnight. Maybe Uncle Luke could go back to Sooy’s Boot and find the feds… make sure they were real feds, and help her like cut a deal.
Yeah. That could work. She’d saved Katie’s life—two, maybe three times—and took good care of her. Why couldn’t she get a suspended sentence and like some sort of protective custody in return?
Hell, even a short jolt in a federal joint would be better than moving in with the Appletons.
2
Dan Keane had barely seated himself behind his desk when Decker called.
Please let this be good news, he thought, knowing that good news for him would be quite different than for Decker.
Dan so desperately wanted this nightmare over. Another call had come from Salinas last night, telling him about a tape that Poppy Mulliner had, a tape that would topple the entire house of cards. And then he was demanding phone numbers and call frequencies, and when Dan asked why, he was told not to worry about it, just do as he was told.
“Just do as you’re told…” Carlos Salinas speaking that way to him! Giving Dan Keane orders. Just two days ago that would have been unthinkable!
“We found Poppy Mulliner,” Decker said.
“Alive?” Dan’s heart and lungs suspended operations while he waited for an answer.
Please say dead.
“Very much alive.”
He almost sobbed as his heart and lungs kicked back into action in triple time. Oh God oh shit oh Christ!
“Is she talking?”
“I said we found her—we don’t have her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s in a motel in a town called Tuckerton—the Adamston Motel. She’s got the little girl with her. We could pick her up now, but since they both seem pretty safe and healthy, we decided to wait and see what she does. We’ve got her phone tapped. Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll call one of her accomplices. We’ll give her the day. If nothing shakes out by tonight—or it looks like she’s moving out—we’ll pick her up.”
Dan’s mind screamed: It’s over! They’ve got the woman, they’ll get the tape. What do I do now?
“Dan?” Dan cleared his throat and managed to keep his voice calm.
“Great work. Has she called anyone yet?”
“Nope. But it’s still early.”
“That it is. Keep me informed, will you?”
“Want to come up here and be on the scene?”
“I’d love to. Bob.” That was the last place he wanted to be right now. “But you guys are doing such a great job, I’d feel redundant. I’ll hold the fort here. By the way, any word on how the patient’s doing?” Dan had tried every avenue he knew to ferret out details on Winston’s condition, but it was as if a wall had been erected around the presidential suite at Bethesda, and only one message filtered through: “The President’s fine. Nothing but routine tests that should be finished soon.” Which told him nothing. Winston could be sick as a dog right now and the message would be the same.
“All I hear is that he’s doing fine. How about you?”
“Same thing. I hope that’s true.”
“We’re all praying for him,” Decker said.
Not all of us, Dan thought as he hung up. He dropped his head into his trembling hands and squeezed his eyes shut.
Only a matter of six or eight hours—maybe less—before Decker got that tape. He wanted to run, but where? He had no place to go. He had to stick this out.
He took a deep breath. All right. Six or eight hours. Maybe that was time enough for Salinas to do something. His fat ass was on the line too. What was the name of that motel… ?
Pulling on his jacket, he hurried down to ground level and out onto Sixth Street. He’d already called Salinas once today—to give him those phone numbers and frequencies he’d demanded. Now he was calling again, but this time he wouldn’t be Salinas’s fucking errand boy.
He chose a different phone from last time—this one on Maryland Avenue—and scanned the area to make sure no one was too close. All clear. Only a guy with a soft-pretzel cart heading for the Mall.
He dropped the quarter, spoke to someone, then hung up. As he waited for the return call, Dan glanced at the sky. Another hot one. The pretzel guy was still down the block, fiddling with his cart. Looked like one of the wheels had jammed. On a day like today he’d set up shop near the Smithsonian and make out like a bandit—and probably declare only a small portion of it.
The phone rang.
“Yes?” said Salinas’s voice.
Dan jumped to the heart of his message. He didn’t want to spend a second more than necessary on the line with this toad.
“The woman’s been located—the Adamston Motel in Tuckerton, New Jersey. They’re watching her to see who she contacts. If you can do something, better do it now. Your fate is in your own hands.” And then he hung up.
There.
Done. My fate is in your hands as well, Salinas. Do something, dammit!
And then he stopped. Listen to me. I want Salinas to kill someone. And if he succeeds, he’ll probably kill that little girl too. For what? To save my worthless ass. But I did start off with the right intentions. I got involved for a good reason, a just cause. I did it for the country, dammit. That should count for something. Maybe it did. Somewhere. But it did nothing for the cold, sick weight sitting in his chest.
As Dan walked away, the pretzel man started kicking at his jammed wheel. What a life when the worst thing you had to deal with was a jammed wheel. For a moment, Dan wished they could trade places. I’ll push the cart and let him swim this river of shit I’ve got myself into.
3
“Was that an Esso sign we just passed?” Bob Decker said as he drove toward Sooy’s Boot.
“Yeah,” said Canney from the passenger seat. “It’s like we’ve hit a time warp.”
Some kind of warp, Decker thought. A Pine Barrens town seemed to consist of a gas pump, a canoe rental place, and half a dozen plywood boxes on cement slabs that they called homes. Here they were on a county road with no shoulder and only an occasional isolated house, usually with a sign offering decoys for sale. A graveyard tended to have half a dozen headstones and no more. He saw lots of signs for rod and gun clubs, hunting clubs, even a muzzle-loaders club. He got the feeling there might be more guns per capita here than anywhere else in the country.
Bob glanced in the rearview mirror at Vanduyne in the big rear seat of the rented Buick Roadmaster. He’d said little since they’d picked him up for breakfast an hour ago. He looked terrible—pale face, sunken eyes, sloppy shaving job, wrinkled clothes.
“I picked this up by the registration desk,” Canney said, holding up a pamphlet. “All about the Pine Barrens. You know it’s as big as Yosemite Park? A million acres of scrub pine. And we’re in one of its least populated areas—averages only one person per eight square miles around here. And it says here there’s places in the pinelands that no human eye has ever seen. Can you imagine that?”
“Seems hopeless,” Vanduyne said from the back, finally showing signs of life.
“That’s why we need those helicopters,” Bob said.
“You think they’ll help?”
“They can cover a helluva lot more ground than we can. They’ll start their search pattern from Sooy’s Boot and move outward. They’ll call in anything that looks remotely like a red panel truck, and we’ll check it out from the ground. We’ll—”
A cell phone chirped. Decker checked to see if it was his but it turned out to be Canney’s.
“He did?” Canney said. He looked at Bob and nodded significantly.
Oh, shit. Bob thought. Oh, no.
Canney was peering through the windshield as he spoke into the phone.
“Wait. Let me get to a pay phone and—” He glanced out at the woods and shook his head.
“What am I—crazy? All right. Give me the barest details and no names. This is a cell phone, remember.”
As Canney went through a series of nods and uh-huhs, Bob silently cursed himself. He hadn’t believed it could possibly be Dan Keane. If he had, he would have come up with better disinformation—chosen a real motel and watched it in the hope that whoever Keane was feeding would make a move and reveal themselves, Finally Canney ended the call.
“All right,” Bob said, knowing what was coming. “Give it to me.”
“It’s him, all right. We have these vendor carts rigged with minicams and parabolic mikes. One of them got within a hundred feet of him at a pay phone. That was close enough. We don’t know who he called but we know he mentioned Tuckerton and the Adamston Motel.”
“Aw, no.” Bob felt sick. Dan Keane… what on earth could have possessed him? “There’s got to be an explanation.”
“What’s wrong?” Vanduyne said.
“Nothing,” Canney said.
“Might as well tell him,” Bob said. “We found our leak.”
Vanduyne was leaning forward now. “Son of a bitch! Who is he?”
“That’s not for publication.”
“I’ve got a right to know! I’d have Katie back by now if it wasn’t for him. The bastard almost had her killed!”
“And you almost killed the President!” Bob said, flaring.
“They had my daughter.”
“And how do you know they don’t have this man’s wife? Or one of his grandkids?”
Vanduyne leaned back again, slowly. “If they do, then my heart goes out to him. There’s nothing… absolutely nothing worse than having the life of someone you love hinge on your doing something vile.”
“Have your people check that out,” Bob told Canney. “But discreetly… very discreetly.” And while Canney called, Bob continued down the road to Sooy’s Boot, almost hoping that Dan Keane had been forced into this treachery by a threat to his family rather than a threat to his career.
And yet—the prospect of all those billions in appropriations being diverted from your agency to another… who knew what that could do to a man?
4
Snake finished reprogramming the third cell phone and stretched.
All set.
His head and eye still hurt, but not so bad this morning. He was a long way from feeling good, but the dizziness seemed to have receded, and the pills were managing the pain better.
He went to the bathroom to check himself out. After going on his electronics shopping spree last night, he’d removed all his bandages except the eye patch, and had slept that way. Turned out to have been a good move. His scalp lacerations had dried out; some crusting remained around the sutures, but in general they looked pretty clean.
He peeled off the eye patch and studied himself in the mirror. Pretty fucking frightening. With his half-shaven head, the crisscrossing stitches, and his ruined right eye, he looked like the Terminator after a bad day.
And he liked it.
Not that he wanted to look like this for the rest of his life, but it just might come in handy today.
He’d been planning to do the mummy thing with his head and the hooded sweatshirt. But this was better. This would scare the shit out of those Jersey hillbillies. Scare Poppy too, he’d bet. He’d let her get a good look at him before he blew her away.
He buttoned up a denim shirt. Over his right eye he gently fitted the black eye patch he’d bought last night. And over that he slipped a pair of superdark sunglasses.
Humming the riff from “Bad to the Bone,” he began to gather his equipment.
Time to hit the road.
5
“That is impossible,” Carlos Salinas said. “It must be a new motel that is not listed yet.”
“I’m telling you the place doesn’t exist!” Alien Gold was flushed and sweaty as he stood on the far side of Carlos’s desk, the phone in his hand. “I’ve called information and there’s no listing—new or old—for an Adamston Motel in Tuckerton or anywhere else in Ocean County, or in any of the counties around it. I even called the Tuckerton town hall and they’ve never heard of the Adamston Hotel. You know what this means, don’t you?”
Carlos knew exactly what it meant. “Mierda!”
“Right. Deep mierda! They’re onto us!”
“Perhaps,” Carlos said, keeping cool on the outside and trying to stay equally cool inside. Now was not the time to panic. Not yet. “And perhaps not. It means for certain that they are onto Senor Keane. This false information may be a lure to trick us into revealing ourselves.”
“I say we get out of here,” Gold said, breathing like he had just run up half a dozen flights of stairs. “Pack up shop and git!”
Carlos was tempted. His survival instincts urged him to run, but his paisa upbringing held him back. Do you flee your burning house if there is a chance you can put out the fire? Of course not. He had worked too long and hard to reach his present position. He would not abandon it so quickly.
“Not quite so fast. Alien. We are in no
danger.”
“The hell we aren’t!”
“Think a moment. They do not know who we are, otherwise they would not have tried so clumsy a trick. This was not meant to lure us into the open—we would naturally check on the exact location of this motel before doing anything. No, my young friend, the more I think about it, the more I am sure that this was set up to confirm their suspicions about Señor Keane.”
Gold did not seem soothed by this. “Okay, so we’re not in the fire yet. But we’re still in the frying pan. If they suspect Keane, it means we can’t trust anything we get from him.”
“That is obvious. We will accept no further calls from him.”
“But what’s worse,” Gold said, “if they already know Keane is dirty, and can prove it, how long before they bargain him into revealing who he’s been talking to?”
“Not long,” Carlos said. “Not long at all.” He’d already thought of that. In the course of a single phone call, Señor Daniel Keane had dropped from valuable asset to dangerous liability. Of course, what could Keane say beyond the fact that he’d had conversations with Carlos Salinas? And he had no proof that these alleged conversations ever took place.
But still, he was a liability. As was MacLaglen. They were the only two people out there who could connect the name Salinas with the kidnapping and the poisoning of the President. Carlos Salinas liked to remove liabilities from his balance sheet. MacLaglen was protected by his tape—but Keane…
“I must think on this,” Carlos said. “Perhaps we will make one more call to Señor Keane.”
6
“Yes, sir,” Decker said, and held the cellular phone toward him. “It’s for you.”
John stared at the phone. “Me?” Who’d be calling him out here, in middle of nowhere, in Decker’s car?
“Yeah. An old friend.”
John took the phone. That could only mean…
“Johnny. It’s me.”
“Tom!”