He nearly collided with the planted strip before it became barely visible through the fog. Following it along the side away from the walkway, he slipped quietly through the suspended mist. After passing around the curved edge of the flower garden, he became aware of a veiled glow ahead, apparently a light at the boat landing.
When he reached the dock, he made a quick appraisal of the two boats. The large cabin cruiser was obviously out of his league. The small outboard offered no problems. There was a key-operated starter, a throttle, a steering wheel and a light switch. Among the many tricks he had mastered as an FBI agent was hot-wiring ignitions. With deft moves under the twilight glow from the light mounted on a pole overhead, he bypassed the lock. The starter made a grinding noise as it began to crank the engine. Nothing happened. Was the gas tank empty, he wondered? Then the engine coughed, caught, and began a staccato roar that echoed through the mist.
He switched on the light, a high-intensity beam mounted on the bow, cast off the line securing the boat to the dock and shoved the throttle open wide. The boat surged forward into the fog-shrouded lake. It was literally a blind gamble. He held the wheel steady, though, counting on that to take him straight across to the other side.
It was nearly eleven. Lori looked at the clock with a gathering sense of doom. Something had gone wrong. Badly wrong. She sipped at a glass of iced tea. Her third. The cold liquid only heightened the chill she felt. Walt Brackin sat on the sofa across from her, reading the newspaper beneath a lamp. Chloe was curled up beside him, her face darkened by a troubled frown as she watched Lori.
After they had waited all evening for it to happen, when the phone finally rang, the sound was almost shattering. Chloe jumped as if she had touched a live wire and grabbed the instrument that sat on a table beside the sofa.
"Hello?" she said.
As Lori listened, her friend almost shouted. "Burke?"
After a moment, she added, "Lori's sitting right here about to have a stroke. Just a second." She held out the phone.
"Are you all right?" Lori's voice echoed her distress.
"It's a long, painful tale. To keep it short, I was hijacked."
"You were what?"
"The guy providing the money sent a private jet to pick me up, supposedly to fly me somewhere to meet him. After we took off, they jumped me and used a knockout drug. I woke up in a big mansion on a lake, which I've learned is in a bedroom county just outside Nashville."
"Tennessee?"
"You got it."
He briefly sketched out how he had escaped. After beaching the boat on the other side of what he now knew was Old Hickory Lake, he had walked to the nearest road and hitched a ride into Hendersonville, a suburban town on the northeastern edge of Nashville. He had stopped at a discount store and bought some presentable clothes. Now he was calling from an outdoor pay phone adjacent to an all-night market. Whenever a car approached, he would turn his head away, just in case it might be one of his former captors.
"Is your arm doing okay?" Lori asked.
"It's fine," he said. "I hope you've got good news. What was Judge Marshall's reaction?"
"Sorry. I haven't been able to talk to him yet."
"What's the problem?"
"He was out of town, due to get back tonight. Do you have the pictures?"
"That's another disaster story. Somebody broke into Aerial Photomap, stole every damned print. Negatives, too. I don't know if it was laid on after I talked to Mr. Money Bags, or if they learned about the photos some other way."
"I can't believe this," Lori said. "That man had helped Dad all these years, and now he's involved in this Jabberwock business. Do you think he had anything to do with sending those men into Hong Kong?"
"I don't know. The guy sure suckered me."
The old fire and determination returned to her voice. "This business has gone far enough. I'm calling Judge Marshall the minute I get home. I'll wager Hawk Elliott's people haven't come up with a tenth of what we know." She hesitated as she heard Walt's voice, then turned to see him across the room holding an extension phone. "Hold on a second," she said, "I think Walt has something for you.”
She listened as the doctor began talking.
"Hi, Burke. Just wanted to tell you something I finally figured out."
"Oh, what's that?"
"The guy who nabbed you on Oyster Island, I realized who he is."
"Really? How'd you manage that?"
"Since tennis is out for awhile, I've been catching up on my reading. I saw a story in the Sunday paper about the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra coming to the Kennedy Center."
"Yeah, I know," said Burke. "Lori had invited me to the concert."
"It mentioned that a young virtuoso cellist who was with the orchestra on their last U.S. tour wouldn't be along. She died in a building collapse in Moscow something over a year ago. She had been engaged to an American writer named Gary Overmyer, a Special Forces hero in Vietnam. I remembered reading a story about it just after she was killed."
"You're not going to tell me that was him? Overmyer?"
"One and the same. Did you notice the tattoo on his left arm? When I got to thinking about it, I realized it was the Special Forces' insignia. And I knew why he looked vaguely familiar. His face and hair have changed a bit, but the tattoo cinched it. And I remembered the voice. They brought him in to speak to us when I was in training at Fort Bragg. Talked about infiltration. One of my instructors knew him in Nam. Told us about the tattoo and some of his exploits. Said he was a deadly shot with any kind of weapon."
Walt said the lean, hard-muscled figure with the predatory eyes was one of the "legends" the Special Forces not infrequently spawned during Vietnam, sometimes picked up by the press and ballooned into the popular myth that gave the Green Berets their public mystique. Occasionally, reality would match the myth. This had occurred in the case of former Captain Gary Overmyer.
"Are you sure about this?" Burke asked.
"Absolutely. I should have recognized him the other night, but I wasn't operating on full power at the time."
"Anything else you remember about him?"
"Well, the scuttlebutt was that he had left the Army after a few months in a psychiatric ward. Bad case of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder."
"That's interesting. Any idea where he lives?"
"The newspaper story called him a writer from Memphis."
"You're a good man, Walter," Burke said with enthusiasm.
By the time he hung up the phone, Burke had a plan. First priority was to get out of Nashville undetected. With the airport likely watched, he would check the bus schedules, then find a taxi to take him somewhere west of town where he could catch a bus to Memphis. That would bypass the bus station, another probable spot for surveillance. In the morning, he would visit a Memphis newspaper library to learn whatever else was available on Gary Overmyer. Then he would fly to New Orleans to retrieve his car and briefcase. Lori promised to leave word with Walt Brackin on what she had accomplished with the Director of Central Intelligence. Burke was to check the doctor's office during the day.
Switching on a table lamp in her living room as soon as she arrived home, Lori dropped into the easy chair beside the table and lifted the phone. Since she was contacting the CIA, it made no difference that they were tapping into her calls. She dialed Judge Marshall's private home number. There was no answer. This late at night, it probably meant he was still out of town. Of course, there could be an emergency, in which case he would be in his office at Langley. She tried there, only to find the call answered by a night watch officer. She thought she recognized the voice of one of her classmates at "The Farm."