Ryan took off at a jog, a thousand-meter pace, as if he were back on the track team-fast enough to outrun just about anyone if they were going for the distance, but about half the speed of the sprint he was capable of for a short spurt. The cold air filled his lungs and dried him out, making him want to cough, but he knew better than that. No sudden noises.
At least the road was paved. If he’d been on gravel, there’d be way more noise, and if he’d been on dirt, he’d have had to worry about the irregularities of surface, and of an ankle twist or a knee jam. As it was, he could run like this for hours.
It turned out that he only had to go about ten minutes. At first, he thought the specks in the distance were headlights, triggering another flash of panic; but as he slowed and got closer, he realized that he was seeing the glow of light from inside a building. Closer still, and he saw that the building was a house. A big one, atop a long hill.
Hope bloomed. His mind conjured an image of a family gathered around the television, watching one of the late-night comedy shows. Wouldn’t they be surprised as all get out when he showed up at their door and told them his story? He wondered if they had any idea of all that was going on at the compound down the road. It would have been like the Germans who lived down the street from the concentration camps. Surprises like that were the ones that no one wanted.
Except the Germans knew. Most of them, anyway, and the rest were in denial. Isn’t that what he saw on Band of Brothers? Absolutely. The American commanders made the townspeople go down to the camp and bury the dead.
Suppose these people knew? They’d have to know, wouldn’t they?
He stopped dead in the middle of the road. All those terrorists had to live somewhere, didn’t they? True, Ryan had barely seen the compound within the fence, but not everyone could live inside there, could they? He couldn’t risk it.
But he couldn’t stay here in the middle of the road, either. He had to do something.
He retreated back to the wood line on the right-hand side of the road-the side opposite the lit-up house-and he slowed his approach to a cautious tiptoe. From this distance, in the dark, the house looked exactly like Hollywood’s version of a mansion, complete with tall pillars out front.
This felt wrong to him. He decided it was not the place to seek help.
He stayed off the road until the lights from the house were no longer visible, and then he dared to start running again on the road. He went a long way, and it took him a long time. He didn’t know how far or how long, but from the sting of his legs and the heave of his lungs, he figured it had to be the equivalent of a 5K race. That meant three-point-one miles, or, to the rest of the world, a long way.
How was it possible to run three miles anywhere and not see anything? Even in Fayetteville-which was close to the capital of nowhere-he’d have passed a house or two on a run this long. He supposed it was possible, given the darkness of the night, that he’d passed the very kind of house he was looking for-empty with the lights off-but how could he know?
He craned his neck for a view of the horizon. Still no sign of dawn. He still had time. The plan was still alive.
One day, when all of this was over, Ryan was going to research how it was possible that in West Virginia hills only went up. On the way in on the night they were taken, the entire trip had seemed uphill, and now that he was going the opposite direction on foot, he knew damn well that it was all uphill.
As he crested his current slog, he saw a glimmer of hope. Somewhere in the distance-near or far, he couldn’t tell-a tiny light beckoned him. And unlike the lit-up house earlier, this light was far enough away from the compound to give him hope that the people who owned it weren’t complicit Nazis, but instead innocent Germans. You know, to keep the metaphor alive.
Still, he had to be careful. Everything was at stake here, including heartbeats and breathing. It behooved him to be careful. He slowed to an old-guy jog, and then to a walk.
Whatever the light was, it wasn’t a house this time. It was too small. Like, really small. And as he got closer, he noted that a splash of blue had invaded the white light.
He stopped. “Holy shit,” he said aloud. Was it even possible? Unless he was hallucinating, that blue spot was an image of a telephone.
Ryan didn’t have any coins in his pocket. “Oh, please,” he whispered. “Oh please, oh please, oh please.” He lifted the phone from its cradle.
Dial tone. Yes!
He pressed the receiver to his face and dialed 911. The line clicked with electronic noise, and five seconds later, he heard a voice on the other end.
“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office, Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?”
A flood of emotion erupted from deep within Ryan’s soul. This was his moment to be brave-to announce to the world that he was here to save his family-yet when the moment arrived, he dissolved into deep, choking sobs.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jonathan snatched up his receiver and brought it to his head. “Yeah.” At this hour-Jesus, one-thirty-seven-one syllable was the best he could muster.
“Verify your identity, please, sir,” a voice said from the other side.
“Excuse me?”
“Sir, I need you to verify your identity before I can continue.”
Jonathan shook his head to rattle the sleep from his synapses. “You called me. Who do you think it is?”
“Sir, we can play these games all night, but it’s a waste of time. I have orders to follow.” He sounded young.
“Who is this?” Jonathan pressed.
“Sir, it’s late for me, too, okay? Must we make this more difficult than necessary? I need to confirm your identity.”
Jonathan sat up in his bed and turned the switch on the nightstand lamp. “This is Jonathan Grave,” he said.
“Thank you. Next, I need your address and date of birth.”
Finally, this was beginning to make sense. He was about to receive intelligence data from someone who had no business giving it to him. He gave the caller both bits of information.
“Excellent,” the voice said. “Thank you. And can you verify that you are awake enough to comprehend the information I’m about to give you?”
Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Awake and alert.”
“Okay,” the young man said. “Because I’m about to deliver information that would send me to prison if it were ever revealed. There’s no way I’m going to say this twice, so it’s very important that you’re ready to copy the details.”
Fully awake now, Jonathan swung his feet to the floor and stood. With the phone pressed to his ear, he walked naked to his desk in the far corner, switched on that lamp and sat in his Aeron chair, pen hovering over paper. “I’m ready to copy,” he said, and then he pressed a button to record the call.
“I work for the National Security Agency,” the young voice said. “In violation of God knows how many laws, we picked up a recording from an American citizen to an American citizen. My boss said I needed to wake you up and relay the information. The only reason I can think of that he didn’t call you himself is that he didn’t want to be the designated jailee. Personally, sir, before I play you the tape, I need to reiterate that you’re a perfect stranger to me, and if I need to throw you under the bus to save my own ass, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”
Jonathan laughed. “Don’t hold back,” he said. “Tell me what you really think.”
“I am telling you what I really think,” he said. Clearly, his irony sensor had been paralyzed by NSA bureaucracy. “Apparently, you’re more important tonight than the entire Constitution, and way more important than my future. Stand by to copy.”
Jonathan heard a click and some mechanical noise. Then a voice:
“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office, Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?”
Next came a muffled sound he didn’t quite recognize until it huffed a little, like a struggling steam engine. The person on the other end of the phone was crying. “Th-this is Ryan Nasbe,”
the voice said. “Me and my mom were kidnapped.”
The rest of the call lasted all of three minutes.
Gail and Venice sat at the teak table in the War Room, looking like rewarmed corpses. Jonathan hadn’t given them much time to respond to his call-in fact, the order was “Meet me at the War Room right by-God now.”
Gail seemed particularly unprepared. Yesterday’s mascara hung like shadows under her eyes, and whatever she’d tried to do with her hair had only made it worse.
Venice just looked tired. Jonathan wondered how she managed to do all that she did on a daily basis. Professionally, she was his administrative and investigative right hand, while on the personal side, she had an eleven-year-old son to wrangle and a high-strung seventy-something-year-old mother to control. Or maybe it was Mama who needed to be wrangled and Roman who needed to be controlled. Either way, she was forever shoving twenty-eight hours of activity into twenty-four-hour days.
“Do we really know where the Nasbes are now?” Gail asked, settling into her usual chair. “And where’s Boxers?”
“Big Guy will be here when he’s here. We can’t wait for him.” Boxers didn’t appreciate the charms of Fisherman’s Cove, preferring the District of Columbia’s ready access to bars and babes. Without traffic and with a heavy foot, he’d be here in an hour and a half.
“So where are they?” Venice pressed.
“Maddox County,” Jonathan said.
“Maddox County where?”
“Don’t know. A contact at the NSA called a half hour ago with an intercepted nine-one-one call to the Maddox County Sheriff’s Office. Beyond that-”
“Wait,” Gail said. “The NSA recorded a call from inside the U.S.?” She seemed appalled.
“Don’t start,” Jonathan warned. “I already had this discussion with Dudley Do-Right of the National Security Agency.” He held up a tiny flash drive onto which he’d copied the NSA call. “Venice, please work your magic and bring this up on the speaker system.”
Jonathan was an analog man trapped in a digital world. He loved high-tech toys and spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on the best and shiniest gadgets around, but if the toys didn’t guide him where he wanted to go or improve upon the flight path of a bullet, he wasn’t much interested in learning how they worked. Such was the case with the audiovisual technology of the War Room.
It took Venice less than a minute to bring up the audio. As an added touch, she also brought up a picture of the Nasbe family from happier times, all of them gathered around a Christmas tree and smiling out at them from the projection screen on the far wall.
“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office,” a voice said, “Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?” Her voice had the practiced drone of an experienced dispatcher.
Knowing what was coming, Jonathan watched Gail as the young voice choked and identified himself as Ryan Nasbe. Just as he’d expected, her eyes reddened at the sound of stress in the boy’s voice.
“Th-this is Ryan Nasbe. Me and my mom were kidnapped.”
“ Who is this?” the dispatcher asked. Clearly, kidnappings didn’t happen on a regular basis in Maddox County.
“Ryan Nasbe. N-A-S-B-E. I live on Fort Bragg. Well, I used to, but now I live in Mt. Vernon, Virginia, with my Aunt Maggie.”
“You’re calling from Virginia?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyway. I think I’m in West Virginia. That’s the direction we drove after we were kidnapped.”
“Who kidnapped you?”
The kid’s patience evaporated. “How should I know? They’re terrorists.”
A pause. “Young man, if this is a prank, let me assure you that-”
“It’s not a prank!” Ryan yelled. “They kidnapped us in our car after they shot a bunch of people on a bridge. Then they drove us into the middle of nowhere. They’re keeping us in a house in the middle of some kind of camp. They’re lunatics, calling themselves brother this and sister that. They promised to kill us next week.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Two. Me and my mom.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s in Afghanistan, I think. He’s Special Forces in the Army.”
A sigh. “Your father is in Special Forces.” The dispatcher spoke disdainfully, clearly doubting his truthfulness.
“If you don’t believe me, you can call down to Fort Bragg and ask. Actually, they probably won’t answer you, but still, it’s true. What difference does any of this make? I need a cop and I need him now.”
“Where are you now?”
“I have no idea. Don’t you know? Don’t you have like caller ID or something?”
The operator fell silent, and the background filled with the sound of muffled voices and some shuffling papers.
The silence lasted long enough for Ryan Nasbe to say, “Are you still there?”
“You said your name is Ryan Nasbe, is that correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, Ryan, I have your address. You’re at a pay phone, is that right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I need you to stay exactly where you are. We’ll have someone there in a few minutes.”
“I can’t just wait here. Somebody might drive by and see me.”
“Then step off to the side of the road. Hide in the trees. Our car will turn on the emergency lights, so you’ll know it’s safe to come out. Can you do that for me?”
Ryan’s voice broke. “Yes, ma’am. Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“I’m really scared.”
“I know you are, Ryan. This will be over soon.”
“Please hurry.”
“We’ll get there as fast as we can.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I’m going to hang up now.”
“Okay, sweetie. This will all be over very soon.”
The line went dead.
Gail’s features folded into a deep scowl. “That’s odd,” she said.
She had Jonathan’s attention.
“Why did she let him hang up like that? She should have kept him on the line, keeping him calm and just keeping track of him in general.”
“He said he was scared,” Jonathan said. “He’s going off to hide in the woods.”
“And that’s kind of odd, too. It would be one thing if the boy had suggested that on his own, and then he hung up on the dispatcher, but this was her idea.”
Jonathan didn’t get what she was driving at. “She wanted him to stay safe, out of sight.”
Gail shrugged. “Well, it’s just different than the way any dispatcher I’ve ever known would handle it.”
“I’ve got something weirder than that,” Venice announced. She’d been typing on her ubiquitous keyboard. “ICIS has nothing on it.”
Gail sat forward in her seat.
Jonathan said, “Isn’t it a little early? The phone call isn’t yet two hours old.”
“ICIS triggers when a call is dispatched,” Gail explained.
Venice closed the loop. “Which means that if there’s no tracking, the call was never put into the system.”
“Maybe instead of dispatching it,” Jonathan said, “the call taker just looked over her shoulder and told some deputy to go pick him up.”
“It’s not about dispatching, Dig,” Gail explained. “It’s about opening the file. Two hours into a missing persons case, there’d be something. There’d have to be.”
“Even for a case that happens in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia?”
Venice started to say yes-he could tell by her body language-but she stopped herself and held up a finger instead. She tapped her computer keys. “There it is,” she said. “Maddox County Sheriff’s Office. Let’s give them a call, shall we?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ryan didn’t just hide in the trees, he hid way back in the trees, far enough off the road that he was completely invisible. With all the leaves missing, that meant twenty or thirty yards off the parking l
ot.
Now that he wasn’t moving, the nighttime noises seemed louder to him, but because his ordeal was about to end, they seemed less frightening. Fear, he realized, had the same effect on you as heavy exercise. It was exhausting. Hope-which he guessed was the right word for the opposite of fear-brought lightness. It felt good to rescue someone you loved.
He was surprised how quickly the police car got there. The guy must have either been around the corner or driven a million miles an hour. Ryan saw him first as approaching headlights. It could have been anyone, and that twisty feeling returned to his gut. But when the blue light bar painted the night, he nearly cheered out loud.
He started to run out of his hiding place, but just as he was rising, he thought better of it. This was a time to be very, very careful.
Let’s see what the cop does.
After the light bar came on, and the vehicle stopped, Ryan saw the interior light come on, and then a guy in regular clothes stepped out of the driver’s door and stood. It was hard to tell at this distance, but he looked big as he stepped around the front of the vehicle, shielding his eyes from his own lights. When the lights were behind him-when he was looking in Ryan’s general direction-he stopped and planted his fists on his hips, like the Jolly Green Giant in a suit.
“Ryan Nasbe?” he whisper-yelled. “Are you here?”
That was it. The man knew his name and he drove a police car. That was all Ryan needed. He rose to his full height and held up his hand, as if being called on in class. “Right here,” he said. He spoke in his normal voice, but in the silence of the night, it sounded more like a shout.
The cop’s gaze came closer, but he still didn’t see. “You can come out now, son.”
Noise didn’t matter anymore. Ryan allowed his feet to drag through the dried leaves, and he didn’t cringe a bit when his foot broke a stick. It was difficult to fight the desire to run, but he worried that it would look, you know, too babyish.
“Are you Ryan?” the cop asked. He spoke in regular tones, too, and absent the whisper, his voice sounded like one that should do movie trailers. It had that deep, gravelly quality.
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