“What for?” asked Oliver.
“Leeches. Best to get ‘em off quick before they get burrowed in too deep.”
McBride sighed heavily. “Mosquitos, leeches … better not be a dopehead.”
They were met by Scanlon, who helped each one climb up the muddy bank then waited with a patient grin as each one examined himself. Oliver won the overall leech count with thirteen, but McBride drew collective shivers as he plucked a fat one from what Nester delicately called “the giblets.”
They huddled around Scanlon who said, “Shack’s about fifty yards to the east. We’ll walk the first forty, then crawl the last ten. Haven’t seen anybody yet, but there’s light coming from one of the windows and we heard footsteps inside. Once we get into position, there’s no talking unless you’re mouth-to-ear. If you need something, double click on your transmit button; I’ll come to you. Questions?”
There were none.
Scanlon led them inland on a winding, overgrown trail, his flashlight beam pointed at his feet. As he had with the green chemlight, McBride kept his eyes fixed on the floating red circle as it skimmed over the ground.
After a few minutes, Scanlon halted then dropped to his belly, waited for the others to do the same, then started crawling. The rocks bit into McBride’s forearms. A mosquito buzzed into his nose. On impulse he snorted it out, then mouthed “sorry” at Scanlon’s backward glance.
Joe saw the trees thinning, and through them a faint pinprick of light. Scanlon crawled left off the trail and they followed. After another ten yards they came to a small clearing of foliage, a natural cave in the underbrush. Scanlon’s communication man sat in the center, his face pressed to a rubber hood attached to a monitor the size of a paperback book. McBride could see faint blue light seeping from around the hood’s edges.
Scanlon gathered them in a tight circle. “The shack’s about twenty yards out,” he said, pointing. “I’ve got one of my snipers trying to get a peek in the window.”
“What’s he looking at?” Nester asked, nodding toward the comm-tech.
“Something new we’re trying out. Our night vision scopes are tied to the monitors.”
“Bluetooth?” Oliver asked.
“Yep, working out pretty good, too.”
McBride had read about Bluetooth in Popular Mechanics a few months earlier. Though still in its infancy and far ahead of the hardware it was intended to support, Bluetooth was the generic name for truly wireless networking. Running on a personal area network — or piconet — of coordinated radio signals that change frequency up to sixteen hundred times per second, Bluetooth was able to link devices that had once been incompatible: cell phones to computers; computers to printers; sniper scopes to monitors.
Instead of having to string cable and worry about maintaining line-of-sight infrared connections between his lookouts, Scanlon could place them exactly where he needed them and let Bluetooth worry about synchronizing communications. With a single monitor he could see exactly what his snipers had in their crosshairs. Moreover, he could transmit to his snipers images from fiberscope cameras planted around the scene, giving them a multiple-angled view of the target.
Scanlon pressed a palm against his headset, listened for a few moments, then whispered, “Roger, stand by.” Then to the others: “He’s in place and transmitting.”
McBride watched the comm-tech. The man cupped his hands around the monitor hood, then turned and nodded to Scanlon, who took the monitor. After ten seconds Scanlon pulled his face away; his eyes shone in the blue glow. “Two subjects,” he whispered. “One looks like our boy. The other is … well … Joe, why don’t you take a look? Maybe you’ll know better.”
McBride wriggled forward and pressed his face to the hood. The rubber was warm and slick with sweat. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the display. What McBride had thought was blue light was actually the washed-out green of the sniper’s night-vision scope. The image swam into focus. Every few seconds, it pulsed slightly — the sniper’s heartbeat, Joe realized.
Through the shack’s window he could see the torso and head of a man sitting against the far wall, his arms wrapped around his knees. It was Hekuran Selmani. A semiautomatic pistol dangled from his right hand. Beside him was a red-and-white cooler, in the corner a five-gallon plastic pail. Food, water, and latrine, McBride guessed.
A few feet away was another figure — a woman, Joe assumed, seeing the lace hem of her nightgown. She lay on her side, a black hood covering her head. She stirred slightly and the nightgown shifted, displaying her calf.
“Can you have your guy zoom in?” McBride whispered to Scanlon. “Right ankle.”
“Stand by.”
A few seconds passed as Scanlon relayed the message, then the picture shimmered slightly before refocusing on the woman’s lower leg. McBride squinted, looking … There. A crescent moon-shaped scar on the knob of her ankle. He was about to pull his face away when his eye caught something else.
“Scan up to her neck,” he ordered.
The sniper made the adjustment and the picture skimmed up her body. McBride studied it for a few seconds more, then pulled his face off the hood. He blinked his eyes clear.
“It’s her,” he whispered. “The first night I asked Mr. Root for distinguishing marks. Three years ago she twisted her ankle in the garden and tore a tendon; they had to do surgery. This woman’s got the right scar.”
Oliver and Scanlon exchanged relieved glances. “Thank God,” Oliver said.
“Not so quick,” McBride replied. “There’s a wire around her neck.”
“What?” Oliver said. “Like a garrote?”
“Like an electrical wire. I couldn’t see all of it, but it leads over toward Selmani.”
“Goddammit,” Scanlon said.
“I don’t get it,” said Nester. “What’s going on?”
McBride said, “He’s got her wired up to something. And whatever it is, I’m willing to bet there’s a button attached to it.”
15
Tanner knew staying in one place for long was a risk, but he judged it safer than traveling during the day, so he and Cahil lounged about their room at the Mainotel and waited for nightfall.
Using a butterfly bandage, Bear had managed to close the cut on Tanner’s cheekbone, but the bruise and swelling had nearly closed his eye. If the police were looking for someone with a similar injury, only darkness could give him adequate disguise.
Though the unanswered questions about Susanna’s involvement with Litzman weighed on Tanner’s mind, there were more immediate issues to consider — namely, the murder of Jim Gunston. Though an assumption on his part, he had little doubt Litzman’s men from the Black Boar were responsible. The question was, How? How did they know where to find Gunston? Incapacitated at the Black Boar, they couldn’t have followed them to the Hotel du Louvre. They must have already been aware of Gunston’s presence in St. Malo. If so, did they also know who and what he was? Again, how?
There were two possible answers, neither of which he found comforting: Either the magenta-haired teenager from the TGV — if in fact she was anything more than a drifting panhandler — had followed Gunston, or Susanna had burned her own controller. Of these two, Tanner desperately wanted to believe it was the former, but that still wouldn’t explain how Litzman had been tipped to Gunston in the first place. No, the original tip had to have come from Susanna. Had she in fact gone native? Through either choice or a break with reality, had she allied herself with Litzman? Or was it coercion? Imagining Susanna as Litzman’s puppet left a dull ache in Tanner’s chest. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shut off his imagination. Stay focused, Briggs, he commanded himself.