People started opening their doors and getting out of their cars. Boone rolled his window down. A guy walked by and Boone asked him what was going on.
“Power pole went down up ahead. I have a buddy closer to where it happened. Cops say it’ll be at least twenty minutes before they get it cleared up.”
“Why’s there so much traffic?”
“Commuters. No work in OBX unless you want to clean hotel rooms or sling hash in a restaurant. We work in Norfolk. Hour and a half on a good day each way. This isn’t a good day.”
“I guess not,” Boone said. “Is there a way around the jam?”
“You could cut through the residential area and get ahead of it, but it’d be a hassle. There are a lot of dead ends. I’m a local and I don’t know how to do it. Most of us just wait it out here, or turn around and find someplace to get coffee.”
It looked like a lot of people were choosing the coffee option by jockeying their cars out of line and turning around.
“Thanks for the info,” Boone said.
The man wandered off. Boone undid his seat belt.
“Where are you going?” Angela asked.
“I’m going to check some things out. I’ll be back soon. You two stay here.”
Croc squeezed between the seats and joined him outside on the road. I glanced at Angela. When I looked back, Boone and Croc were gone. I looked out to the front, back, and sides. There was no sign of them.
Angela was craning her neck looking for them too. “Where’d they go?”
I jumped out of the Audi. Angela joined me.
“There!” She was pointing up the road.
It was dark, but in the headlights we could just make out a guy and his dog walking up the empty left-hand lane. They were at least a hundred and fifty yards away, well beyond the crab truck and probably the Tahoe as well. An Olympic sprinter could not have covered that much distance in the seconds it had taken them to get where they were.
“Impossible,” Angela said.
“Poof,” I said.
“I’m serious, Q.”
“So am I.” I told her about Croc’s impossible move on the overpass.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“This is the first time we’ve been alone,” I said. “And you wouldn’t have believed me anyway.”
“Probably not,” Angela admitted.
Boone and Croc were now too far away for us to see.
“Where do you think they’re going?” I asked.
Angela didn’t answer. She had turned her attention to the truck, which was about seventy-five yards in front of us.
“I’m not sure which is weirder,” she said. “Boone and Croc teleporting, or whatever you want to call it, or knowing my mom and the president’s daughter are in the back of that truck.”
For me it wasn’t even close. Boone and Croc hands down.
But why had they only gone a hundred and fifty yards? If they could teleport, why not go directly to where they wanted to go? Maybe there was a limit to how far they could travel. Or maybe they had ended up exactly where they wanted to be before switching to walking mode. I wondered if he could teach me to …
“Then there’s that whole ageless thing,” Angela said, interrupting my busy mind. “That has to go on the weird list. What do you think of—”
Angela was interrupted by a man and a woman holding guns to our heads.
The man yanked our arms behind our backs, zipped flexcuffs around our wrists, and had us into the backseat of the Audi within seconds. No chance to run. No chance for Angela to kick him in the head. No chance to call for help. Not that anyone would have heard us. Two cars behind us and the one in front had bugged out for coffee, or to find a way around the jam.
“Search them,” the woman said. “If they resist, shoot them.”
We didn’t resist. The man tossed Angela’s backpack to the woman, then he proceeded to pull everything we had out of our pockets. Angela’s pockets were pretty easy. All she had was her cell phone. He showed it to the woman.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, taking it.
My pockets were a little more of a challenge for the man. I had six large pockets in my cargo pants. He pulled out four decks of cards, three lengths of rope, silk hankies, seven magic coins, flashlight, camera, sunglasses, baseball cap, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (paperback), a Leatherman tool, and a stack of “special” dollar bills.
“How about leaving me one deck of cards,” I said.
“How about if I break your neck?”
“Keep the cards,” I said.
He stuffed everything into a plastic bag, tossed it off into the dark, then climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. The woman returned, minus Angela’s pack and cell phone, and got into the passenger seat. She was tall. Her black hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail. It had to be the same woman John had run into in Wal-Mart. T3 he called her.
“Hot wired,” the man said, pointing at the wires dangling from the transmission.
The woman nodded, turned to us, and pointed her gun at Angela. “Where’s the old man?”
“You mean our grandfather?” Angela asked.
The woman cocked the pistol. “It would be best not to lie to me.”
“He’s walking his dog,” I said.
“We’ll continue this conversation in a few minutes. Someplace more private.”
“I think you’re mistaking us for someone else,” Angela said.
“I don’t make mistakes.” The woman turned to the man. “Get us out of here.”
The man fiddled with the dangling wires. The engine started.
Now would be a good time for Boone and Croc to reappear and scare the living daylights out of them. Or for John Masters to show up and shoot them.
But no one came.
The man backed the Audi out of the traffic, hung a U-turn, and took a side street to someplace more private.
Poof! We’re gone.
Blink
Boone stood at the roadblock with all the other bystanders and watched the road crew clear away the debris from the power pole. The highway was ten minutes from opening up. He called John as he started back and told him to track his cell signal.
“I’m already tracking it,” John said. “You just walked up to the head of the traffic jam. How long before we start moving?”
“Shouldn’t be too long, but that’s the least of our problems.”
“What’s up?”
“Just let me know when I’m even with the Tahoe.”
“A white Chevy Tahoe shouldn’t be too hard to see for yourself,” John said. “Even in the dark.”
“Humor me,” Boone said. “Is Angela’s cell signal stationary?”
“Yep. It’s exactly where it was when you went for your walk. There was a little glitch with your signal. It kind of shot ahead for a moment, then settled down.”
“Yeah, it does that,” Boone said, thinking that he needed to be more careful with his signal. “I guess I need to get a better phone. Let me know about the Tahoe.”
Seven minutes later John let him know.
There wasn’t a white Chevy Tahoe within two hundred feet in either direction from where Boone was standing. The closest vehicle to him was a red truck. Boone walked over to talk to the driver. A middle-aged man drinking coffee from a thermos cup lowered the window.
Boone squatted down so they could talk face-to-face. “Did you see a white SUV in line?”
“Yeah. There was one parked right in front of me. A gal got out of it and asked what was going on. Tall. Pretty. Squatted down like you. Told her about the power pole. She got back in and they did a U-turn.” He pointed to a side street. “Looking for a way around I guess.”
“How long ago?” Boone ran his hand under the door frame.
“Twenty minutes. Maybe a bit longer.”
“How many were in the car?” Boone found what he was looking for.
“I don’t know. Looked like four of them. Ar
e you a cop?” The man laughed. “Well … an ex-cop?”
Boone smiled. “No. They’re friends of mine. I walked up here to say hello and was surprised they were gone. I better get back to my car before the traffic starts moving.”
He walked away, flipping the switch on the device he had found under the man’s door frame. His cell phone buzzed.
“The Tahoe just went off-line,” John said.
“The Tahoe isn’t here,” Boone said. “They found the tracker and stuck it on another car.”
“When?”
“Half hour ago or so, so they’re not too far away. But they’re onto us. And that’s a big problem. Hang on … X-Ray is calling in.”
“I’ve taken a look at the Wal-Mart video,” X-Ray said. “We’ve got four really bad guys … Correction. Three really bad guys and one really bad girl. Like Masters thought, they are definitely a team. They’ve been all over the world blowing things up and killing people for a variety of terrorist groups. The woman has more aliases than I have fingers and toes, and if you connect the dots, there’s a good chance that she not only knows the Leopard, but they’ve worked together. Masters was also right about who’s in charge. It’s T3 all the way. I ran a program on their micro-expressions. The three tough guys are actually afraid of her.”
“Keep data mining and let me know what else you come up with.”
Boone bent down and gave Croc a scratch on the head. “Time to move, partner.” He looked around to see if anyone was watching, then blinked himself back to the Audi.
When they materialized, Croc started growling, but there was nothing to growl at. The Audi wasn’t there.
Boone swore.
Croc walked over to Angela’s phone, picked it up, dropped it next to Boone’s cowboy boots, then trotted away again.
Boone picked up the phone and put it in his pocket.
I shouldn’t have left them alone. Mistake.
His cell phone buzzed. It was John.
“Your tracking signal had that weird glitch again.”
“We have bigger problems. The Audi’s gone and so are the kids.”
Boone heard John’s car fire up. “I’ll be right there.”
Less than a minute later, John’s black SUV came roaring up the left lane and screeched to a stop next to him. He got out.
“A lot of cars have turned around and driven by me,” he said. “But the Audi wasn’t one of them.”
“Then they took a side road,” Boone said. “There were several of them in front and behind them.”
“What do you want to do?”
What Boone wanted to do was call in J.R.’s SEAL team and tell them to take out every terrorist within a hundred miles, but he knew from long experience that wasn’t the answer. Not yet anyway. T3 and her crew were told to take Q and Angela. He didn’t think they would have acted on their own. And there was a decent chance that they had waited until he went for his little walk. He wondered if they had seen him blink. That’s what he had always called it because of the speed at which it happened. He doubted they had seen it. If they had, they probably would have waited for him to come back. He looked down the road at the truck. He wished he could blink himself inside and talk to Malak, but it didn’t work that way. He could blink himself anywhere, but not through solid matter. If he was inside something and wanted to leave, he had to use an opening like everyone else.
“We’ll stick with the truck,” Boone said. “For the time being anyway. I don’t think they’ll hurt Angela and Q until they know exactly what’s going on. They’re running security on the truck and they’re not going to stray too far from it. And when Malak sees they have Q and Angela, she’s certainly not going to let anything happen to them.”
“Those kids must be scared out of their minds,” John said.
“I wouldn’t count on it. After what they’ve been through the past couple weeks, they don’t scare too easily. They know what’s at stake here.”
“This your dog?” John asked.
Boone looked down. Croc was sitting at his feet with five playing cards in his mouth. “Yeah,” he said. Boone took the cards from him and fanned them out. It was the ace through the ten of hearts.
“Royal flush, huh. Winning hand. We’ll see.”
John was staring at him and Croc.
“The cards belong to Q,” Boone said by way of explanation. He could see from John’s expression that it wasn’t good enough.
“His name’s Croc,” he said. “He’s a little quirky.”
His phone buzzed. It was the president.
“I’m tracking Q and Angela’s signals and it doesn’t appear they’re with you,” J.R. said.
The Seamaster watches. He’d forgotten they were wearing them. The terrorists hadn’t taken everything. Boone had his Seamaster in the coach. He didn’t want the president tracking his every move, but he was obviously tracking his cell phone signal. How else would he know that Angela and Q weren’t with him? He wondered what he had thought of the blink.
“That’s right,” Boone said. “They’re not with us at the moment. Don’t have time to give you more details than that. Can you transfer their signals over to John’s rig? I’m riding with him.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. Is everything okay, Boone?”
“Better now. You know how things go at this stage of the game. Everything’s fluid. Talk to you soon.” He looked at John. The traffic had started to move. “Let’s go.”
John climbed into the driver’s seat. Boone walked around the SUV and squatted down so John couldn’t see him. He reached into his pocket and came out with the tracking device he’d taken from the red truck.
“Go find them,” he whispered into Croc’s ear. “Stick this back on the Tahoe. And don’t worry about Angela and Q seeing you blink. They’re onto us. But the terrorists aren’t. It would be best if they didn’t catch that trick.”
Croc gently took the tracking device into his mouth and vanished.
Boone climbed in next to John. J.R. had been right. The years had been kind to John Masters. He looked alert and very fit. “It’s good to see you again, John.”
“You too.” John gave him a curious look. “You haven’t changed.”
“Oh, I’m a lot older than the last time we met, and I’m feeling it right now, but thanks.”
“We have two new blips on the screen.”
“That would be Q and Angela. They’re both wearing Seamasters.”
John looked at his watch. “He can track us with these things?”
Boone nodded. “He likes to know where his friends are.”
“Where’s your dog?” John asked as he started to crawl forward with the other cars.
“He’s around,” Boone said. “He’ll find us down the road. He always does.”
T3
We pulled up behind a white Chevy Tahoe with two guys standing next to it. I wondered if there was a bomb inside.
T3 looked at us from the front seat. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “And when I get back, you better have the right answers.”
She and the driver got out to talk to the two other terrorists.
“Did they take your watch?” Angela asked.
“I’m not sure. My hands are asleep.”
“Let me see.”
I turned around so she could see my wrists.
“It’s there,” she said.
Hers was there too.
“At least the president will be able to find our bodies,” I said.
“I don’t think they’re going to kill us,” Angela said. “At least not yet. Let me handle the questioning.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a better liar than you.”
She had me there. She was a better liar than me, but I was improving.
“You should have seen me lying to my dad,” I said. “It would have blown you away.”
“I’m sure,” Angela said. “Any chance you can get out of your cuffs?”
“I’m working on it.” r />
I had flexed my wrists when he ratcheted them down. There was some play in them, but not enough to get my hands free. Yet. The trick was to take your time and not fight the cuffs. If you start yanking and struggling, your wrists swell and the cuffs get tighter. And getting out of them was only half the problem. I’d still have to figure out a way to get Angela out of hers. Without something to cut them with, that wasn’t going to be easy.
“Another thing,” Angela said. “We need to act more afraid.”
“I don’t know about you,” I said. “But I am terrified.”
“I am too,” she said. “But we’re not acting terrified.”
“You want me to start shivering, or pee my pants?”
“No, but I think we need to start acting like two kids who have no idea why they’ve been abducted and are afraid they might be murdered.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard since we don’t know why they’ve taken us, and T3 seems more than willing to kill us.”
“You know what I mean,” Angela said.
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. But I’d skip the ‘Boone is our grandfather’ story. That’s not working.” I looked out the window. T3 and the driver were on their way back to us. “Get ready to act scared.”
T3 opened the back door on my side and pointed her gun at me. I smashed myself up against Angela as if that would somehow save me from a bullet.
“Let’s start again,” T3 said. “And this time I hope you get it right because if you don’t, one of you is going to die right here, right now. Who are you?”
“My name is Angela Tucker,” Angela said, her voice quaking and her lips trembling. She looked pretty scared to me. “This is my stepbrother, Quest Munoz.”
I wanted to correct her over the Quest thing, but that probably wasn’t what someone who was ready to pee his pants would say.
“Finally we have a little truth,” T3 said. “But we already knew what your names were. We also know who your parents are and that you were at their concert last night in the White House.”
This was information, or intel as Boone would call it, that anyone who could read could get off the Internet. It didn’t mean there was another mole in the White House feeding them information.
“What I want to know is, who is Tyrone Boone? Why is he following us? Who else is with him? Why did he put a tracking device on our car when we were inside the store?”