Deep as the Marrow

  Vanduyne shook his head and pointed to an area of the local map that was mostly empty green. “There’s nothing there—not even a road.”

  “How do I get there. Search One?”

  “Well, we’ve got a road in sight, but it’s not on any of our maps. The only way you’ll get here is to have someone lead you, and I guess that’ll be us. Give us your present location and we’ll find you. You can follow us here.”

  “We’re lost. Search One.”

  Vanduyne was looking at the map again. “Tell him we’re somewhere south of 532 and west of 563.”

  “We copy,” the transceiver said. “Find a clearing and get ready to wave a shirt or something. We’ll be overhead soon.”

  “I think this is it,” Vanduyne said, still staring at the map. He seemed transformed, as if someone had hooked him up to a wire and was pumping juice into him. “I can feel it.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. Got to be a lot of red panel trucks out here.”

  Vanduyne shook his head. “We’ve only spotted three all day, and all of them were sitting out on the street. This is the first one tucked away deep in the woods. That’s Poppy’s truck. I know it. We’re going to find Katie.”

  “If I may quote you from earlier: From your lips to God’s ear.” He slapped his hand against the dashboard as he thought of something. “You know what we could use right now? A GPS unit. Damn! Why didn’t I think to bring one?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A global positioning system. It would tell us exactly where we are.”

  Vanduyne shrugged. “As long as we’ve got the helicopter to follow, we don’t need it.”

  Yeah, Bob thought, but I should have thought of it. Never even crossed my mind. But Vanduyne was right. The helicopter would get them there. Besides, no one could think of everything.

  11

  Snake pulled his Jeep off 563 in a tiny place called Jenkins. He attached the suction cup of the GPS antenna to his roof, then got back in and fired up his laptop. The GPS card was already snapped into the PCMCIA slot. The grid appeared. He tapped a few keys and waited for the program to pick up the signals from the satellites miles above, run a triangulation on them, and pinpoint his exact position on the earth.

  Snake loved this: Using the Department of Defense’s thirteen billion dollar satellite system to outmaneuver its fellow federal agencies.

  The laptop beeped softly as a blinking dot appeared in the center of the grid next to the coordinates.

  “Okay,” he said aloud. “There’s me. Now let’s see how far it is to this ‘object vehicle’.”

  Snake punched in the coordinates he’d copied from the copter conversation he’d monitored on his VHP transceiver. A few seconds later his dot jumped to the lower left of the screen as a blinking star appeared in the upper right. The readout said: 17.2 km—43 NE. Not far at all. About seven miles… as the crow flies.

  But out here, that might mean fifteen, twenty, thirty miles by road—if you could find the roads. His software had the capacity to link him up to a street map and lead him to his destination—but no software developer in the universe offered a package on the pinelands. Too bad his GPS program couldn’t download a satellite photo of the area.

  Maybe next year.

  But he had the next best thing: He’d scanned a sectional map of Central Jersey into his hard drive. He fixed his blinking dot on the town of Jenkins, entered the scale, and voila!—he was in business.

  Now he had to find a way to get his dot to that blinking star in the middle of nowhere before the feds. The ‘object vehicle’ might not be Poppy’s truck, but he couldn’t risk sitting here and doing nothing.

  He heard a deep rumble and glanced at the sky. Thunder. That storm was coming on fast. He threw the Jeep into gear and started moving. Not quite as good as having a helicopter to follow, but at least he’d know when he was heading in the right direction and when he wasn’t. And he’d be approaching the spot from the opposite direction. Maybe he was already closer than the feds. And who knew? Maybe the storm would help him get there first.

  As he drove he passed through an area of burned-out trees. Lightning? A careless camper? Whatever, it looked like there’d been a helluva fire here. All the trunks had been scorched coal black, the smaller branches seared right off. But the trees weren’t dead. Every trunk had little branchlets forcing their way through the charred crust of the bark and sprouting new bright-green needles. Can’t kill these damn things, he thought. Then he grinned. Maybe this is a good place for me. I like these pines. No matter what you do to them, they keep coming back. I’m just like your pines. Poppy. You can’t kill me, can’t stop me. I keep coming. And I’m coming for you, bitch.

  12

  Dan Keane stared out his office window, wondering why he hadn’t heard anything from Decker since this morning. He checked his watch. A little after three already. Had anything happened at that motel in Tuckerton? Should he call? Would that make him appear too interested?

  But how could you appear too interested in something like this? Yes, he should call. He was useless here, otherwise. Couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think about anything else.

  But as he reached for the phone, his intercom buzzed. That might be Decker now. He hit the button.

  “Yes?”

  “A restaurant just called,” his secretary said.

  “A restaurant?”

  “Yes. Very rude. Said you were supposed to call them about confirming a reservation. Il Gia-something. They hung up before I could get the name straight.”

  Dan stiffened. Salinas’s place. Calling here? Oh, Lord. It could only be bad news.

  “I know the place.”

  “Want me to—?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll take care of it later. Hold my calls, Thelma. I’m going out for a short walk.”

  The heat on Sixth Street hit him as soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk. Like summer. He peeled off his wool suit coat and went searching for a phone.

  Wild thoughts danced around him as he walked. What could Salinas possibly have to tell him? What was so important that he risked a call to the DEA offices?

  He spotted a phone at the corner by NASA and picked up his pace toward it. As he fished for a quarter, he made his usual survey of the area to make sure no one was too close. Pretty clear. Not even a pretzel cart this time. Just a bicycle messenger speeding along in his direction. No problem there. Those guys could really move. He’d be past before Dan finished dialing. He found the quarter and plunked it into the slot. As he waited for it to register, he glanced around again. The bike messenger was almost on top of him—racing helmet, dark sports glasses, skin-tight bicycle pants and top, riding a slim French street bike. But he seemed to have lost speed. As Dan watched, he pulled something metallic from his messenger pouch. It was pointed at him before he recognized it as a silenced automatic. He saw the tiny muzzle flashes light the dark hole of the silencer bore.

  Before he could move, before he could scream, he felt the slugs hit him. No piercing pain—more like iron-fisted punches to his chest and abdomen, exploding through his back, lifting him off the ground and hurling him backward. He saw the intense blue of the sky for an instant, and then it, the street, the city, the world all dimmed and went away,

  13

  “Move, you son of a bitch! Move!” John Vanduyne felt as if his shoulder was about to pull out of the socket, but he wouldn’t back off.

  Lightning flashed as he dug his feet into the sand and leaned everything he had against the Roadmaster’s rear fender. The tire spun, kicking up sand that was picked up by the rising wind and swirled into his face. Damn rearwheel drives, anyway! Why the hell was anyone still making them?

  He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed harder. The car rocked forward, the tire rising halfway out of the hole it had dug for itself.

  “Keep going!” he shouted to Decker over the thunder and the whine of the engine. “We’re almost there!

  We’re—“ But then the car began to s
lip backward, and nothing he could do could keep it from sinking back into the sand.

  John leaned against the bumper and pounded his fist on the trunk. He wanted to scream.

  They’d been doing so well, making good time following the helicopter along the pair of sandy ruts that passed for a road out here when suddenly they’d rounded a corner and found a deer standing in their path. Decker’d slammed on the brakes, the deer bolted into the brush, and they hadn’t moved an inch since.

  And now it began to rain—huge drops splattering the car and his head and back. John looked at the gray, lowering sky and wondered how things could get worse. A slashing bolt of lightning gave him an answer of sorts, so he stumbled to the passenger door and dropped into the seat.

  Decker was on the hand-held transceiver. “All right, Special One. Safe home. And thanks.” John knew who he was talking to: the helicopter.

  “They’ve leaving?”

  Decker nodded. “Heading back to base. This weather’s getting too heavy for them.” John nodded silently. He’d been expecting that.

  “Hey,” Decker said, “they hung on as long as they could—maybe longer than they should have. I hope they don’t have trouble getting back to Lakehurst.”

  “I know. It’s just—”

  The sky opened up then and the rain dropped in sheets.

  “Hang in there,” Decker said. “We’re close. The rain ought to thicken up the sand and help us get out of this hole. As soon as it stops, we’ll get moving again.”

  “But where? We’ll have to wait for the copter to—”

  “No. They gave me directions. There’s a smaller road that cuts off to the right about half a mile ahead of us here. We take that for about a mile or so and look for another trail off to the right. The truck’s in there.”

  The rain increased, bringing visibility down to zero. The pines disappeared. With the deafening tattoo on the car roof and the incessant roar of the thunder, they could have been sitting under Niagara Falls.

  The world constricted to John and Decker and the car.

  14

  Snake smiled as he clicked off his transceiver—he wouldn’t need that any more. He continued to inch through the rain. He wasn’t making much progress, but he was doing a thousand percent better than Vanduyne and his fed buddies. Mired in sand and no flyboys to lead them even if they got out. What a shame.

  Snake realized he might be in the exact same spot as those two if not for his Jeep’s four-wheel drive. He checked his laptop again and saw that he was closer than ever. The GPS program told him that the blinking star of his destination was somewhere about a klick and a half to his left.

  He shook his head in wonder at the irony of using all this high-tech equipment to search what had to be one of the low-tech capitals of the country. He peered through the rain. Had to go slow here, look for a road, a path, a deer trail, anything that led off to the left. Damn near dark as night outside. Hard enough to see under these conditions with both eyes, but when you had only one…

  And then he spotted something out his near side window and slammed on the brakes. He wiped away the condensation and peered through the downpour.

  Two ruts in the sand, leading leftward. Good thing his wrecked eye was on the right and the lightning had flashed at the right moment, otherwise he’d have gone right past it.

  Grinning, he backed up, then turned onto the path. Almost there. Poppy-bitch. Hope you’re enjoying your last hours on Earth.

  15

  “I’m scared,” Katie said, clinging to Poppy as the thunder shook the ground and the wind rattled the walls.

  “It’s okay, honey bunch,” Poppy said, sitting on the bedroll and rocking Katie back and forth. “The storm’ll be over soon.”

  “Scared o‘ storms, is she?” Lester Appleton said, licking his lips as he positioned a tin can under a leak. That made twelve containers scattered around his floor. “So’s most of the wimmins and kids. All probably hiding under their beds right now. Do it every time the thunder starts. That little girl’ll do well to get used to’em if she’s a-gonna stay. We get some real doozies out here.”

  She ain’t staying. Poppy wanted to say, but didn’t want to be rude. All the Appletons had been kind to them today. Some of them said they remembered her stopping by with her daddy when she was a kid, but maybe they were just imagining it. The main thing was the way they’d welcomed her and Katie, sharing their home and their food… even their dolls, so to speak. The Appleton ideas of what was clean and what was cooked, of what was edible and what tasted good were light-years from Poppy’s, but they meant well. What they had was hers.

  After all, she was kin…

  Lester had said they could sleep in his place for now. His place: a ten-by-fourteen space lit by two kerosene lamps—one on a crate that served as his dresser and the other hanging from the six-foot ceiling. The walls creaked and shuddered under the wind’s attack, which set the hanging lamp to swaying. And the moving light did funny tricks with Lester Appleton’s nose-gazing eye.

  Another crash of thunder and Katie tightened her grip on Poppy.

  “Hope them stills is all right,” he said, swigging from a ceramic jug. “Wish my back was better—I should be out there helpin‘.” He shook his head. “First that heeliocopter, now the storm. Bad omens. I feel it in my bones— somethin’ bad’s gonna happen.”

  The sight of the “heeliocopter” earlier had spurred her to run down to the clearing and pull the panel truck under some trees. That might have been like closing the barn door after the proverbial horse was gone, but she did it anyway.

  And then the storm had hit and all the able-bodied men—the overly attentive Levon among them, thank you very much—and some of the women had run off to make sure the stills didn’t get damaged and the fires didn’t get too wet. Applejack was their major asset. They sold it for cash and bartered it for goods.

  Poppy wondered how her Uncle Luke was faring with the feds. He’d said he was going to try and make a deal for her. What was taking him so long?

  16

  Carlos Salinas took the photo of Nixon from the wall and tossed it into his valise, then looked around the room. Nothing remained that he couldn’t part with, nothing that couldn’t be replaced with a simple telephone call.

  As for records, Alien Gold kept all sensitive information on the office computer—verbally coded and digitally encrypted. He’d copied the pertinent data onto a Zip Drive disk and erased the hard drive. That done, Carlos had Llosa fire a few 9mm rounds into the drive—just to be sure.

  “All set?” Gold asked, popping into the room for the third time in as many minutes.

  Carlos nodded. Too bad, he thought. Leaving the United States and this wonderful setup. But if decriminalization went through, he’d be out of business soon, anyway. He regretted leaving Maria behind, but that was only temporary. He’d send for her later.

  Llosa was waiting by the back door. Carlos nodded to him as he approached. Llosa stepped outside, then jumped back in.

  Carlos skidded to a halt. “What is it?”

  “A car! In the alley!”

  “Oh, no!” Gold whimpered. “Oh, God! Oh, please, no!”

  “Silence!” Carlos hissed as his heart began to thump. He turned back to Llosa. “Is anyone there?”

  “I did not see anyone.”

  “Look again.” Llosa opened the door a crack and peeked through.

  He shook his head. “I see no one.”

  “It could be nothing,” Carlos said.

  “But it’s blocking our way.” Carlos thought of his waiting Gulfstream, fully fueled and ready to go. If he could just get into the air…

  He turned to Gold. “Call a tow truck. Have someone come and move it. Pronto!” Gold nodded. His smile was sickly. “Right. No way I’m going near that car.”

  In the single heartbeat it took Gold to reach for the phone, Carlos heard a roar, felt the floor tremble, saw the door shatter as an onrushing ball of orange flame swallowed Llosa and engulfe
d Carlos, but not before a million wooden daggers from the door ripped the silk suit and most of the flesh from his body.

  17

  When Snake reached the clearing, he saw four or five pickups but no panel truck. He began to curse and pound on his steering wheel in red-hazed fury.

  The nearer he’d gotten to this place, to this blinking star on his GPS map, the greater his anticipation of finding Poppy, getting his hands on her, hurting her like she’d hurt him. He needed that as much as he needed the tape, and the need had grown until he felt ready to burst.

  But she wasn’t here! She must have run off after seeing the copter overhead. Still cursing, he began angling the Jeep to turn around, and that was when he spotted it, hidden behind one of the pickups at the very edge of the clearing.

  Snake leapt from the Jeep and ran through the deluge to the truck. Yes! This was it. This was Poppy’s. But where was she? He moved along the perimeter of the clearing… had to be a way out of here.

  And then he found it. A break in the underbrush. Using lightning flashes to guide him. Snake pulled the Cobra from his belt and started up the path, a path to the “strange-looking house” the copter pilot had mentioned.

  He headed for one of the few lit windows.

  18

  John had tuned the car radio to an all-news station, hoping for word of when the storm would break. Instead, he found himself listening to Heather Brent.

  “Let me bore you with some more statistics. Federal, state, and local police made well over a million drug related arrests last year. Seventy percent of those were for possession—not sale or manufacture, simple possession. But they’re not even scratching the surface. Six and a half million people used cocaine last year. Twelve percent of Americans admit—admit—to illegal drug use. How many do not admit to it? If we pursue the stated goals of the war on drugs, we should be trying to jail all those tens of millions of Americans. Do we really want to do that? Wouldn’t the resources and countless man- and womanhours that went into last year’s million-plus drug arrests be better directed toward muggers, rapists, murderers, wife beaters, and child abusers?”