Storm Front

by John Sandford

  Virgil walked her through the whole story, and at the end, was ninety-nine percent certain that he’d made the right call on Zahavi.

  When Virgil pressed her to identify the woman as Yael-1, or Tal, she couldn’t—no names had ever been used—but she thought that yes, they may have been Israeli.

  “Why?” Virgil asked.

  “For breakfast . . . I had toast, cream cheese, and lots of vegetables and fruit. I went to Israel three times with Dad, and that’s what Israelis mostly eat for breakfast.”

  There were a few details: a minivan, the first floor of a motel, but not a very good motel—the rooms had a stale odor about them, as if they permitted smoking, and were poorly cleaned. The rooms were not particularly soundproof, because she’d heard cars going by on gravel, and once, somebody calling to somebody else, but she hadn’t heard anyone in an adjacent room.

  In the morning, when she was released, she tried to keep track of where she was being taken, and thought she’d been driven only fifteen minutes or so—the motel was not far away.

  “You think the motel parking lot was gravel, rather than paved?”

  She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. And when I think about it, I think we might have been in an end room.”

  Virgil continued pulling details out, and Donny, the detective, said, “I can think of two places she might have been. There might be more, but I’d bet it’s one of those two.”

  “Can you send some guys around?”

  “You bet.”

  He left, and Virgil patted Ellen on the leg and said, “I gotta ask you—can you talk to the media?”

  “I . . . Do I have to?”

  “We need to communicate with your father,” Virgil said. “There’s no better way. We’ve now had three people shot and a kidnapping. This is seriously ugly.”

  Virgil pushed her on the subject of who’d taken her father out of the hospital, and why. She was adamant: she had nothing to do with it, and didn’t know who might have done it.

  “I think, probably, it was Ma Nobles,” Virgil said. “To tell you the truth, Ellen, I suspected that you probably briefed her on the whole thing.”

  “We did talk about the stone,” Ellen admitted. “I might’ve . . . She seems . . .”

  “What?”

  “She seemed interested that the sale price on the stone might be, you know, a couple million dollars.”

  “So you talked about that?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “You knew that Ma had a little bit of a questionable history?”

  Ellen said, “Well . . . she seemed nice enough. I mean, you introduced her to me.”

  Virgil winced: “I was trying to give her something legitimate to do.”

  “Well . . . that really didn’t work out very well,” Ellen said. “Do you think she’d know where Dad is?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Your old man is pretty good at hiding out, for a preacher.”

  —

  ELLEN DIDN’T want to stay at the hospital. When the doctor said she could go, Virgil drove her to the Rochester Law Enforcement Center to make a complete statement. While she was doing that, he drove over to the Downtown Hilton, talked to the manager and reserved a space for the press conference, called Davenport and told him what he was going to do, and then began calling TV stations.

  He was at the Hilton when Hall, the detective, called and said they’d found the motel. “It’s a mom-’n’-pop called Foudray’s out where 54 crosses I-90. Jack Golden’s out there.”

  “Are you done with Ellen?”

  “Not quite. You need her?”

  “Yeah, at the Hilton at eleven o’clock.”

  “We’ll be done by then,” Donny said. “I’ll bring her over.”

  Virgil drove to the motel, a single-story building with a fifty-yard strip of small rooms fronting on Highway 52. The parking lot was brown gravel, and Jack Golden was looking at the end room, and talking to a shaky, unshaven old man who wore a long-sleeved turquoise cowboy shirt and jeans. Golden and Virgil shook hands, and Golden introduced the old man as Bud Anderson.

  “Just saw one man, tall fellow, had a beard and long hair,” Anderson said. “He looked kinda foreign, but he spoke English pretty good. Didn’t sound foreign.”

  “There was a woman with him?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah, I saw a woman getting out of that van, one time. Skinny-looking. They had two rooms rented, the tall guy come in and asked for the two end rooms, because they needed some quiet, so, no skin off my butt. I put them down here.”

  Golden said, “The guy wrote down a tag number when he checked in. No such number. Signed in as Richard Johnson. Paid cash. Never used the room phone.”

  “They’re long gone,” Virgil said. “I don’t even know if it’s worth calling in the crime scene.”

  “Might find some fibers from that sack or something,” Golden said. “But there’s a bottle of 409 in the bathroom that doesn’t belong to the motel. I suspect everything’s been wiped.”

  “Of course it’s wiped,” Virgil said. “They’re spies. Of course they wiped it.”

  Golden said, “Spies. I haven’t actually dealt with spies before.”

  “They’re all around us,” Anderson said. “Spies.” Then he looked up at the already hazy sky: “Gonna be another hot one,” he said.

  17

  Virgil took a call from Hall, at the Law Enforcement Center: “We’ve got a small problem here. Case has decided to cancel your TV show.”

  “What?”

  “She says she spent two days in a gunnysack, and she looks like it, and she’s not going on TV looking like she does.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes,” Virgil said.

  —

  THE FIVE MINUTES eventually cost him four hundred dollars at Macy’s, but he did give her credit for haste: she had no purse, ID, or credit cards, and promised to pay him back. She settled for a couple of cosmetic products and a green summer dress, on sale, and a pair of low heels; and at the last minute went for some underwear, hair spray, and a comb.

  On the way back to the Hilton, Virgil said, “Tell me what you think about the kidnappers. Was it the woman I introduced to you? Do you think they’re still around? How organized were they? What’d they talk about? Did they give you any idea of where they were from?”

  She said that the female kidnapper was the one in charge. She was tough, and seemed organized, but a little overcooked. Ellen wasn’t sure that it was Tal Zahavi, but thought it might be. “That same kind of executive attitude—if you won’t do it, I will.”

  The man, on the other hand, lived in a state of panic: “He seemed more frightened than I was. Looking back, I don’t think they ever planned to hurt me. The guy . . . he kept asking me if I had to go to the bathroom or needed a glass of water. He was an American, I think, but he used Yiddish slang a couple of times. I think he might have been an American Jew that they called on for help.”

  She had no idea of where either of them was from. Whenever the man began to ramble, the woman shut him up, and Ellen had the feeling that she was being pointed at—as in, “Shut up or she’ll hear you.”

  The two kidnappers wound up watching a lot of TV, and the woman would go outside to make phone calls. At some point, they contacted her father, and then moved her back to the van and drove around for a while, apparently to exchange her for the stone, but the trade fell through when they saw an airplane tracking her father.

  “That was me,” Virgil said. “If I hadn’t been up there, you might’ve gotten loose a day sooner.”

  “No way for you to know that,” Ellen said, patting him on the shoulder. “I don’t know how you would have seen them, either—they were hiding in cornfields when Dad went by. They were looking for cars or planes following him, and they saw the plane.”

  Th
at evening, after the failure to make the trade, they’d seen Virgil on television, and they’d panicked.

  “The woman was raving, she kept saying, ‘What is this? What is this fool doing to me?’ Then the man would say, ‘Looks to me like he’s fucking you, right there on TV.’”

  “Then it must have been Tal Zahavi,” Virgil said.

  “Well . . . yeah, I guess it must have been.”

  They decided to release her near dawn, because the woman told the man that was when the fewest police officers would be around. When they’d kidnapped her, she’d been wearing a light gardening jacket, with her cell phone in her pocket. They took it away from her, but returned it when they left her in the ditch.

  “That was nice,” Virgil said.

  “Not so much nice, as scared,” Ellen said. “At that point, they didn’t want anything to happen to me. They wanted me to call the police to come get me. The way they were talking, I’m pretty sure that they’re not around anymore. The guy was saying he was going home, and the woman wasn’t arguing with him. I don’t know for sure if she took off, but I think he did.”

  —

  AT THE HILTON, Virgil bullshitted the manager into giving them a free room for a couple hours, and left Ellen there to clean up.

  When she emerged, fifteen minutes before the scheduled press conference, she smiled weakly and said, “At least I feel semi-human again.”

  “You look terrific,” Virgil said. She did look okay, although behind the new clothes and makeup, her eyes looked haggard. If it had been Zahavi who’d done the kidnapping, and Virgil was virtually certain that it was, she owed Ellen something serious, because she’d taken away something serious: the sense that there’s a safety and privacy in life, and that bad crazy things happen to other people.

  He was inclined to give her a lecture about her father, and about any help she might be giving him, but after glancing at her, decided to let it go.

  “You’re going to get a lot of attention now,” he said, as they started down in the elevator. “You will be doing everyone a great favor if you read your old man the riot act.”

  “I’m sure he’s still focused on Mother,” she said. “If he’s still alive.”

  “That’s a question we’ll have to deal with—that I want to deal with in the press conference,” Virgil said. “You have to make him call me. Or call you.”

  —

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE was stacked with reporters. The kidnapping, and the stone, were the big story in the state, and for several states around, and it was beginning to get attention from the national cable channels like CNN and Fox. Both Sewickey and Bauer had been on early morning shows, Virgil had been told, and they had more on their schedule.

  The press conference was being held in a meeting room, but they and a couple of Rochester detectives, including Hall, hid out in a conference room until it was time to go out. When it was time, the three cops led Ellen through the meeting room and around to the front, where a podium had been set up. Virgil counted seven cameras, and saw Ruffe Ignace, a Star-Tribune reporter, and sometime friend, taking up two chairs in the front row; not because he needed two chairs, but because he was a two-chair kind of guy, and he didn’t like being touched, as he put it, by TV scum.

  Virgil opened the press conference by saying that Ellen Case had been released early that morning, and that the kidnappers had fled, and were being sought by both local police and the FBI. He told them that the kidnappers had attempted to exchange Ellen for the Solomon stone.

  He recounted her early-morning phone call, and his call to the Rochester police, and then turned the press conference over to Hall, who told about Rochester cops finding Ms. Case in the Kwik Trip store, about her trip to the hospital, her physical condition, and about the discovery of the motel where she’d been kept.

  Hall introduced Ellen to the cameras, and she related how the kidnappers had taken her, how they’d kept her in the motel room, and then how they’d abandoned her on the side of the road.

  “I think my father will either see this, or hear this, and Dad, I’m pleading with you, give it up. You’re hurting people now. I can promise you, I’ll never be the same. This whole thing is so crazy. Call Virgil, or call me—I still have my phone. Come in. Please, please, come in.”

  She began to tear up, to choke up, at the end of her statement. There were a lot of questions, which she answered, as best she could, and when the reporters began to repeat the questions, Virgil tried to end the conference.

  Failed for a few minutes: a TV guy asked, “Is there any indication that this stone itself may be influencing the way Reverend Jones is thinking? Tag Bauer, the well-known archaeologist, says that these artifacts can be extremely psychically powerful and that Reverend Jones may no longer be in control of his own actions. That he may somehow be possessed by it.”

  Ignace slapped a hand to his forehead with an audible whap.

  Virgil said, “Ah . . . we think Reverend Jones is quite ill. We do think that he’s in control, however.”

  Another reporter asked, “When you briefly had custody of the stone . . . did you notice any unusual effects from it? Did it glow, was it warmer than it should have been? Did the writing seem unusual in any way? Professor Sewickey said that with artifacts of great power, the writing sometimes changes.”

  Ignace turned in his seat and said, “It’s a rock, you fuckin’ moron,” loud enough to be picked up by the microphones.

  Virgil said, “No, I didn’t notice anything like that. I’ve got to end this now, because we’ve got a lot of work to do. To reiterate, we need Reverend Jones to call us—either me, or his daughter.”

  He stepped back and one of the TV cameramen, a large man in a Sturgis T-shirt, said to Ignace, “You fuck up my tape one more time, and I’ll pull your little fuckin’ head off like a radish out of—”

  He didn’t get to finish it, because Ignace—not a tall man, but thick—dropped his notebook and went straight for his throat and the two of them tumbled through a rank of folding chairs amid screaming TV women and fast-moving cameramen still running their machines. The cameraman was on the bottom, and while he was much larger, Virgil saw Ignace land a really terrific right hand to the eye, and then another one, just before the Rochester cops got there and separated them.

  Ignace, who as a child had fought in the 152-pound class in the Philadelphia Golden Gloves, gave Virgil a thumbs-up, and Virgil got Ellen and they went out the back door.

  —

  VIRGIL PLANNED to take Ellen to her home in the Cities, partly because it was the right thing to do, and partly because it would give him a lot of time to work on her head, on the chance that she’d tell him where her father was. They’d just started on the way when the day-watch duty officer called and said, “You wanted to know where that iPhone is?”

  “Very much.”

  “It’s at a McDonald’s at the southeast corner of 14 and 169,” he said. “We just got through the rigmarole with Apple, and we picked it up right away.”

  “On the way,” Virgil said.

  Ellen, who was sitting beside him, said, “I want to be there when you pick him up. He needs to go to the hospital now, and we need to get this stele out of our hair.”

  “Right,” Virgil said. “And maybe he won’t shoot me if you’re there.”

  When they got to the McDonald’s, there was no Jones to be found. The duty officer, however, said that he could see the phone location flashing on his computer screen. Virgil found the assistant manager, and asked him to dump the single external trash can. The assistant manager wasn’t happy about it, but he did it, and after a couple of minutes of probing, Virgil came up with the phone.

  “So he was here,” he said to Ellen.

  “He had a fondness for junk food, and after he got sick, he saw no reason not to eat it,” she said.

  “I have a friend who says he hopes that
when he gets old, he contracts some painless but fatal disease, so he can get in a couple of years of smoking before he dies. He quit smoking for his health, but still wants them,” Virgil said. “Makes sense to me.”

  —

  THEY WERE halfway back to Ellen’s place when Jones called, on Virgil’s phone.

  “I’d give up the stone in a minute in exchange for Ellen—but since I don’t have to now, I won’t,” he said. “It’ll all be over by tomorrow night, and I’ll turn myself in.”

  “They’re going to kill you,” Virgil said, “unless you shoot first and kill somebody else. Is the stone worth killing somebody for? Or dying for?”

  “Of course not—and that’s not what’s going to happen. This Tal woman . . . Did you figure out that it was her?”

  “Yeah, we think so,” Virgil said. “We think she might be looking for you.”

  “I think she might have been tracking me through that cell phone I had,” Jones said. “I threw it in a trash can at a McDonald’s. You don’t have to bother looking for it.”

  “Are you at the hideout now?” Virgil asked.

  “No, no, right now I’m out driving around, in case you can track this call. As soon as I’m done, I’ll pop the battery out and go hide where you can’t find me.”

  “Man, you gotta—”

  “I don’t gotta do anything, except die,” Jones said. “Is Ellen still with you? Could I talk to her?”

  “Hang on.”

  Virgil gave Ellen the phone, and Ellen shouted at him for a minute or so, and called him an asshole, and asked him where his principles were, and then told him she loved him and they hung up.

  “I want you back in the Twin Cities, and I’m going to send somebody to your house to make sure you stay there, and that your old man isn’t hiding out there. I want you somewhere safe.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” she said.

  When they got to Ellen’s house, Virgil pulled the tracker off her car. She was miffed: “You’ve been tracking me like some kind of criminal?”