Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  He called, listened. The phone at the other end rang. And rang some more. Thinking he might have punched in a wrong number, Rob disconnected, and reentered it. More unanswered ringing. How could there be nobody at either place? He wasn’t the type who was quick to worry, but this did invite a bit of concern. All Rob could figure was that both Julia and his wife were out back with the dogs. For what reason, he didn’t know. He just hoped some sort of emergency hadn’t cropped up that required their combined attention.

  Rob pressed END, flipped the phone shut, and laid it on the passenger seat beside him. His hands at six and nine again, he gave his engine more gas despite the intensifying rain. The misplaced ledger had suddenly dropped down the ladder in priority, and indeed had almost entirely slipped out of his mind.

  He was too busy wondering what the hell was going on at home.

  Cynthia Howell was preparing the baby’s cereal when she happened to see the accordion folder on the kitchen phone stand.

  A box of Gerber’s Wheat with Apples and Bananas in one hand, a small pot of warmed up formula in the other, she stood staring at the folder with sudden distress. Hadn’t Rob been working on the payroll ledger before the ball game? She believed so. And if that folder contained what she thought it did . . .

  “Glumph owwp mooie!” Laurie blurted from her high-chair, slapping the food tray with a tiny palm.

  Cynthia turned to her, sniffling. Her head felt fat with congestion, and she only hoped the cold germs she’d been carrying around the past few days wouldn’t jump to Laurie.

  “When Daddy finds out what he left behind,” she said, “I’ve got an inkling he’s going to have pretty much the same comment.”

  “Blehhk!”

  “You bet.” Cynthia said. “That, too.”

  She checked the time on the wall clock and frowned. It was a few minutes past eight. Rob had told her he liked to do the payroll the first thing after he got to the hotel on Sundays, get it out of the way to make sure the checks weren’t late, and she was surprised he hadn’t given her a frantic call by now. But it could be something else had come up that took precedence. Or maybe she was being too quick with her conclusions. This might be a different folder than the one she’d seen him poring over last night. Or he could have removed the disk and printout from it before he started out this morning, transferring it to a different one for some reason.

  Cynthia poured the cereal into the bowl, added a little formula, and stirred them together.

  “Pleoww!” Laurie said.

  “I know, peapod. Breakfast’s coming. Just be patient with me another second.” Cynthia set the spoon down on a folded towel. The cereal was a tad too hot and really needed to sit anyway. “I’d better see what kind of upset to expect from Dad.”

  She went over to the phone stand, picked up the folder, hastily examined its contents, and felt her optimism of last resort evaporate all at once. The CD and printout were inside. Rob had, in fact, forgotten the payroll ledger here at home.

  Cynthia reached into a pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. She decided she’d better not postpone informing Rob of her unhappy discovery. The sooner he knew, the sooner he could start back for the folder, or figure out if there was some less inconvenient alternative. As far as she knew, though, he wouldn’t be able to get his work done without it.

  She read the Fairview’s phone number off the bulletin board above the stand, lifted the receiver . . . and to her mild surprise got no dial tone. She frowned, pushed down the disconnect button, released it, and again heard only dead silence in the earpiece.

  Perfect, Cynthia thought. Just perfect.

  She tapped the button a few more times without any better result, then noticed the keypad lights were out and inspected the phone wire to make sure Laurie hadn’t crawled under the stand and messed with it, pulling or loosening the plugs from their jacks. Everything looked to be in place.

  “Spo flig?” Laurie cooed behind her in a tone that genuinely sounded as if she understood the problem and wondered what they were going to do to solve it . . . although Cynthia had to admit her maternal pride tended to exaggerate the kid’s natural gifts from time to time.

  “Wish I knew,” she said stuffily, and considered a moment. A few minutes ago she’d heard Julia driving uphill to the center. After feeding Laurie she could take a walk over there, see whether the problem with the telephone was confined to the house. If it was affecting the entire property, and the business phone was down, too, then they would be able to report the trouble using Julia’s cell phone.

  Cynthia reached into her house robe for another tissue and blew her nose again. That sounded to her like a plan.

  She moved to the window. It was a dark and gloomy morning, and it occurred to her that she might have to get Laurie’s slicker out of the closet before they left the house. Also let the dogs in from the outdoor pen. Better find out if the rain had started yet.

  Even before Cynthia pushed aside the curtain she could hear patters of moisture against the glass. But now something else caught her interest downhill. Two PG&E vehicles were entering the drive. A utility van first and then a station wagon. She watched them approach slowly, the van heading up toward the rescue center, the wagon turning in toward her house.

  Cynthia glanced briefly over at the electric range on which she’d prepared Laurie’s formula. The indicator light for a hot burner pad was still on, telling her there had been no interruption in electrical power. Nevertheless, she had a hunch her questions about the phone outage were about to be answered.

  She stayed at the window long enough to watch the station wagon come to a halt and a uniformed worker get out. Then she started toward her front door, hefting Laurie off her seat along the way.

  The baby nestled against her shoulder, Cynthia opened the door just as the worker reached it, and was met by yet another of the young—albeit already eventful—day’s surprises.

  “Top a’ the mornin’, laddies and lassies,” Julia said, amusing herself with an atrocious cartoon leprechaun’s accent. “Shall ye all do your morning toilet, mayhap have yourselves a wee bit of a workout afterward?”

  Thirty pairs of keen, curious dog eyes looked at her from gated stalls to the left and right. Before she’d let herself get too settled in at the shop, Julia had decided to step out the back door to the kennels and let the rescues into their exercise yard, knowing they wouldn’t budge once it started to rain. Greys were as obsessive about keeping their living areas clean as they were balky about getting wet, and she didn’t want them bursting at the seams if the bad weather were to arrive and persist throughout the day.

  Julia looked down at Viv, who was already out of her stall beside her.

  “You gonna help me open these gates for your buds?” she asked with enthusiasm, dropping the cruddy Irish.

  Viv wagged her tail, lowered her forequarters into the play position, and then turned over on her back, rolling about with her long front legs upstretched and her lips pulled into a distinctive greyhound smile.

  Julia watched her for a bemused moment, then bent and rubbed her stomach.

  “Why do I get the feeling nobody in this joint’s got the slightest clue what I’m talking about?” she said.

  Over his car radio, the word Rob Howell had heard the WKGO 810 traffic reporter use was ponding. As in, “Drivers should expect some localized ‘ponding’ in sections of the Santa Cruz Mountains, especially along eighty-four near the Highway Thirty-Five turnoff, where we’ve seen periods of heavy rain over the last hour.”

  In fact flooding would have been a truer description. By the time Rob reached the exit leading onto 35—his usual southbound shortcut—the rain was coming down in buckets and had so completely inundated the ramp beyond that he half expected to see a guy with a grizzled white beard, leather sandals, and a diverse menagerie of critters around him hammering together a wooden ark at the roadside.

  Rob checked his rearview, saw there was nobody behind him, then pressed firmly on his ABS brake pe
dal and swung toward the gravel shoulder. The Camaro’s wheels splashed through water several inches deep, their mud guards creating a choppy little wake as he came to an abrupt halt a couple of seconds before he would have made his turn into the exit.

  His face tightening into a frown, Rob sat behind the wheel and listened to the steady tattoo of the rain against his car’s exterior. From the look of things, the ramp had been washed out by a serious drainage overflow. He supposed it might be worth chancing the turn anyway, but knew he’d be stuck if the backup of water extended out onto the highway. It would be far safer to remain on 84 and take it straight to the Pescadero Creek Road junction—a slower, dippier route, but one the guy in the WKGO weather chopper had mentioned was clear of delays.

  The latter it would be, then.

  Rob released a long exhale and reached for the cell phone on the passenger seat, wanting to try Cynth again before he got back on the roadway. It had been a while since his last attempt at calling her, and he figured she ought to be within earshot of a phone by now.

  But the unanswered rings from both his house and the rescue center did nothing to relax Rob’s expression. It just seemed strange . . . Cynth and Julia had to be around somewhere. Could the weather have caused an interruption in telephone service? He didn’t think it was that severe, at least in terms of the wind being strong enough to blow down lines, or snap any tree limbs that might get caught in them. But you never knew. You really couldn’t predict where squalls would kick up when unstable weather systems passed over the mountain peaks and ridges. Lousy as conditions were around him, they could be much worse farther on.

  Rob chucked his cellular onto the seat again, returned to the blacktop, and within minutes had persuaded himself he’d gone overboard with his concern. There were a bunch of likely explanations for Cynth not answering, including the one that had just occurred to him. If service had been knocked out, she might be altogether unaware of the problem.

  He could just see her wrangling Laurie into eating breakfast about three feet from their kitchen phone, nothing further from her busy mind than the idea that her memory-deficient husband and provider was on his way home right now, and having conniptions trying to get through to her.

  “Hi . . . aren’t you—?”

  “Barry Hughes.” Anton produced an effortless smile for the Howell woman, tapping the forged power company name tag on his chest. “I stopped by here last week on my day off—”

  “To inquire about adopting a grey, sure,” Cynthia said. “You asked if the shop was open, and went to get some information from Julia. I remember you’d mentioned that you were a lineman.”

  Anton nodded. He stood facing her from the doorstep, his heavy work gloves stuffed into a back pocket of his coveralls. It had started to shower, the rain sizzling on the ground around him, sliding down over the smooth yellow surface of his hard hat.

  “Wish I could say I’ve had a chance to make an appointment to look at the dogs, but life’s been all work lately,” he said, and paused. “The reason I’m here is to tell you we’re doing some maintenance on the cables—”

  “Bfow!” Laurie interrupted with a big, gummy grin, reaching a tiny hand out toward him.

  Anton chuckled, took it lightly in his own.

  “That’s exactly right, doll,” he said, and then looked back up at the baby’s mother. “Anyway, I wanted to let you know your current might be down for a little while. Five, ten minutes at most. There’ve been some brownouts in the area . . . nothing major, just some spotty fluctuations . . . and we’re trying to trace the source of the problem.”

  “Oh.” Cynthia gave him a questioning look. “I noticed the van heading up toward our kennels.”

  He nodded. “Your lines look okay, but the couplings are pretty old. That’d be on the poles and outside your house and kennels. We’re replacing them as a precaution as we go along . . . before things really go bfow.”

  Cynthia gave him a crooked smile.

  “I think you might be too late,” she said. “Don’t know whether it’s related to any trouble with the electricity, but my telephone seems to be out of commission.”

  Anton looked appropriately unprepared.

  “Oh.” He frowned a little. “Are you sure?”

  Cynthia nodded.

  “I’ve been trying to make a call,” she said. “No dial tone.”

  Anton stood there by the door another moment, looking thoughtful. The raindrops continued to dribble off his hard hat.

  “Suppose we could have loosened a contact by accident,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll be something our crew can straighten out right away . . . you’ve already checked your inside connections, right?”

  Cynthia nodded again.

  “Just before you buzzed me,” she said.

  Anton put on another smile.

  “With a baby in the house, I sort of figured it’d be your first reaction. Kids always getting into things and all,” he said. “If you don’t mind, though, I’d like to give it a quick check for myself. Otherwise it becomes an issue with the phone company techs in case we nicked a cable and have to contact them.”

  Cynthia adjusted Laurie against her shoulder. “Do what you have to,” she said, and moved aside to let him in. “It’ll get you out of the rain for a few minutes, anyway.”

  Anton stepped through the doorway, wiped his boots on the mat, let her guide him to the kitchen, and held the receiver to his ear as she stepped back to give him some room.

  “Nothing,” he said, and made a small show of examining the jacks. “It’s out for sure.”

  She shrugged.

  “I was just about to feed the baby, walk up to the center, and ask my husband’s assistant—”

  “Julia . . .”

  “Right, I almost forgot, you met her the other day,” Cynthia said. “Anyway, she has a cell phone, and I’m going to need to make an important call.”

  Anton abruptly hung up the phone and turned to her.

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” he said.

  His tone flatly declarative.

  No expression on his face now.

  Cynthia stood there in baffled silence, looking as if she was certain she had misheard him.

  “Excuse m—?”

  “I said you can’t do that,” Anton broke in, and then flicked his right hand into the utility pouch on his belt and produced the weapon he had chosen for the job. A Sig P232 .380 ACP. White stainless-steel frame, blued barrel. Powerful, accurate, and easily concealed.

  Her eyes wide, her lips a wide circle of confusion and fear, Cynthia stared as he raised the pistol, stared uncomprehendingly at the terrible black hole in the center of the gun barrel. She instinctively pulled Laurie close, arms wrapped around her, backing away until she came up short against something hard. The table, a chair, a counter, Cynthia wasn’t sure what in her fear and incomprehension.

  That gun. That great black hole pointing at her. Aimed at her from across the kitchen.

  “No,” she said. Clasping the baby tightly against her chest. Laurie crying now, sensing her terror. “Whoever you are . . . no.”

  Anton cocked the hammer of his pistol, a sound that sent a physical jolt through Cynthia.

  She held her daughter close.

  “No,” she repeated in a breathless moan, waves of desperate panic sucking the air from her lungs. “Please . . . take anything you want from me . . . please, please . . . just don’t hurt the baby . . . I’m begging you don’t hurt my baby—”

  Anton leveled his gun at the spot where the screeching infant was clenched in her mother’s protective embrace, the small body against her chest, their hearts pressed together, beating together.

  “It won’t hurt,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

  Kuhl heard the dogs start to bark moments before Anton radioed him from the house.

  “Phone lines are down,” Anton confirmed. “Everything’s cleaned out in here.” A pause. “The robin has a cellular.”

  Pulled to a
halt in front of the rescue center, Kuhl listened to him over the van’s radio and then had Ciras contact the two men posing as utility workers back on the road. They had strung a chain across the foot of the drive to bar access. The signs hung from its temporary posts—one facing the eastbound lane, one facing west—advised visitors approaching the center that it was closed for the day due to emergency electrical repairs. Anyone who attempted to disregard the warnings and somehow tried to enter the drive would be verbally redirected by the men or, if required, stopped by more extreme means.

  Kuhl stared out at the rescue center for perhaps thirty seconds, rain beading his windshield, drumming on the roof of the van with increasing rapidity. The silver Honda Passport belonging to Julia Gordian was the only other vehicle in the dirt parking lot. Inside the center’s front door were two signs, one of particular interest to him.

  Customized in the shape of a greyhound, the sign on the upper portion of its glass pane read:

  WELCOME TO THE IN THE MONEY STORE

  A smaller changeable message board below it read:

  BACK IN 15 MINUTES

  It was the latter that held Kuhl’s eye.

  He regarded it silently as the penned dogs downhill continued their raucous barking. He had expected his target to be inside the shop. The operation, then, would have been a fast and uncomplicated piece of work—his team entering as utility men, catching her off guard. Instead, they had found her sign on the door. And yet she must be on the premises even now. If not in some backroom of the shop, then certainly on the grounds. Her vehicle was here. She had not been seen leaving the drive on foot. And he doubted some unknown exit from the property existed . . . where could it lead? There was little but woodland for miles in every direction.