Magozzi and Halloran were standing outside, staring at the empty air where the women they'd come to save had just raced by them as if they weren't there. It wasn't quite the reunion either man had pictured. Harley, Roadrunner, Bonar, and Gino were already following the women into the RV while the two big, tough guys trailed behind, just a little off-balance. They could hear Grace yelling the second they came through the door.
"What's the matter with this goddamned thing! It won't connect!" She was pounding one hand on the console, banging numbers uselessly with the other. No one in that room had ever seen Grace that out of control. It was Roadrunner who gently took her blood-smeared hands in his and said quietly, "Let me do it, Grace. Who do you want to call?"
"The FBI, Roadrunner," Annie said quietly. "We need them right now."
Roadrunner had Agent Knudsen on the line within ten seconds, and then all the men listened as Grace began to talk very fast. Before she finished, a hundred emotions had crossed every face in the room. Harley grabbed three bottles of water from the office fridge and handed them to women who had been through more than he could imagine-more than he'd certainly heard, because Grace was condensing everything. He came to Annie last.
She stood there in her tattered, manure-covered dress with her chaotic hair and filthy face and said, "What took you so long?" She took the opened bottle, drank from it, then reached out and patted his cheek. Harley had to look down at the Boor, because that was the nicest thing she'd ever done to him.
He saw her feet-one bare, the other in a purple high-top. "Jesus, Annie. You look like friggin' Cinderella."
Agent Knudsen had been in his car when Grace had called, only a few miles from the fire that had troubled him ever since he got the first call in Sheriff Pitala's office. Maybe Magozzi had been right: Coincidencewas the connection.
Knudsen made a dozen calls in the ten minutes it took to get to the machine shed. By the time he arrived, an astounding-looking collection of people were running from a big RV toward the shed, led by three women who looked as though they'd been to hell and back, and a dog that looked like he'd gone with them.
Knudsen joined them at the door. There was no time for introductions, but a tall, black-haired woman nodded to him brusquely, as if she fully expected he would know who she was. The woman on the phone, he decided.
"Don't touch one thing in there," she commanded them all, then opened the door and led them all to a computer against the far wall. "Just read."
The men crowded in a circle around the screen as she started to explain what was on the monitor. Every face looked ashen and ghastly under the fluorescent lights-Knudsen's most of all, and, surprisingly, Bonar's.
Agent Knudsen bolted from the building without explanation. The rest of them continued to stare at the screen, at the ominous row of trucks, at the block of plastique sitting placidly next to the computer.
An irritated Gino shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to make sense of what he'd just read on the monitor. "I don't get all the numbers. Or the stupid names. 'Schrader-off-line, Ambros-target acquired.' What the hell does that mean? I don't get any of it."
"Schrader, Ambros, Ritter," Bonar recited in a flat voice. "They're missing one-Linde-but that doesn't count for much. Germans. Those were the men who discovered sarin in the thirties. They named the trucks after them."
Every face turned toward him.
"Sarin?" Magozzi whispered.
Bonar pushed his lips out and nodded. "One of the first-generation nerve gases."
"Jesus Christ, the Feebs got it right," Gino said, looking over at the trucks, then back at the blinking numbers on the monitor: 03:14:17... 16 . .. 15 ...
THEY FOUND Agent Knudsen pacing a furrow in the long grass near his car, phone clutched in one white-knuckled hand that swung back and forth as he walked. Sharon hung back a little-the agent's car was a little too close to Doug Lee's patrol- and Halloran stayed with her.
"We've got to get rid of that bomb so we can get into the computer," Grace was telling Knudsen. "Those trucks in there all have remote computer units. The one inside that building is the host, and obviously it already sent out the detonation command. There's got to be an abort in there somewhere."
Knudsen gestured with his phone. "Nearest bomb squad is in Green Bay. We'll get them on a chopper, along with some computer experts."
"How long?" Magozzi asked.
"Two hours. At least."
Grace checked her watch and moved her head impatiently. "Not fast enough. There's less than three hours until those trucks blow."
Knudsen shot her a furious look, as if she were the enemy. Why the hell was the woman wearing riding boots? Damn things had to be hotter than hell. And that big ugly mutt glued to her leg looked like he wanted to rip his throat out. "You think I don't know that? I'm waiting for a callback from Bill Turner. He's the best bomb man in the country, but he's in D.C, and we're having trouble locating him. It's Sunday morning. He's probably in some goddamned church somewhere."
Magozzi looked at the agent who looked both twenty years younger and a thousand years older than he had ten minutes ago, a little surprised by his choice of adjectives. He was starting to sound more like a person and less like FBI, and that was not necessarily a good sign. "Even if you find this guy in the next few seconds, what's he going to be able to do from D.C?"
"He can walk me through deactivation."
"You've done this before?"
Knudsen narrowed his eyes at Grace. She sounded like an interrogator. "No. But we've run out of options. We don't even know where the targets are, those two trucks are already on-site. . . ."
"And filled with sarin," Bonar said matter-of-factly, and Knudsen jerked his head to glare at him.
"You want to tell me how you know which nerve gas it is?"
Bonar opened his hands. "The names they gave the trucks, of course."
Knudsen closed his eyes. Too many people knew too many things these days. The information age was killing them.
"What about all the other information on the screen in there?" Gino asked. "A bunch of those numbers keep changing. Maybe that's latitude or some of that shit that tells where the trucks are."
Knudsen shook his head. "The trucks aren't moving anymore, according to that computer. Besides, I know what those tables are. I've seen them before. They estimate initial dispersal distances based on a lot of factors, like wind speed, direction, humidity . . ."
"Hey." Roadrunner turned to Harley. "We could plug those numbers into that stat program and link up with the National Weather Service. What are the chances that any two locations in this country are having exactly the same fluctuations in weather conditions at exactly the same time?"
"Sounds good, but it'll take a while."
Knudsen was frowning at the two of them, then his face cleared. "Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Kingsford County undercover computer crimes, right?"
Grace and Annie looked sideways at their partners.
"Right," Harley said.
"It was a good thought, but even if we found those trucks in the next ten minutes, chances are they're in an urban area and we won't be able to get them to a safe disarmament location in time."
"So we're right back where we started," Grace said. "We have to get into that computer and find the abort."
"Looks that way . . ." Knudsen's phone rang, and he jammed it up to his ear so hard that Gino thought it was a miracle it didn't go all the way through his head. "Knudsen!" he shouted, listened for ten seconds, then threw the phone down on the ground. "Apparently, Bill Turner took a goddamned fucking Sunday drive in the country with his family."