“Where are you taking me now?”
“We’re going to get you a warm bed in a house with nice people.”
Graham stopped, took a step backward. “I don’t know anybody here,” he said.
Deputy Price smiled. “I know plenty of nice people,” he said. “Trust me.”
Graham felt a flash of panic. Trust me. He couldn’t imagine anything that he could less afford to do. He couldn’t trust anyone. Everything about the past two days had proven beyond any doubt that no one was worthy of his trust.
He sensed movement behind him, and he turned to see that Peggy had stepped out into the hallway. Whatever about her had pretended to be nice before was all gone. All he saw on her face was anger as she glared past Graham and through Deputy Price.
“Listen to me, Barney Fife,” she said. “I think it’s time to place a call to your chief. You are way, way over your head right now.”
“Been there before,” Price said.
Graham made his decision. No matter what the other options were, all of them had to be better than sticking with Peggy.
“Think of the boy,” Peggy said. “You’re just going to make it all more difficult for him.”
Graham saw something flash behind Deputy Price’s eyes. She’d just pissed him off. “Just what are you suggesting?” he asked. “Are you threatening this young man?”
Graham took a step closer to the deputy.
Peggy walked toward them. A stroll, really — unhurried and deliberate. Graham pivoted around Deputy Price, keeping the man’s body between him and the dragon lady.
She stopped when she was just a foot away from the deputy and she glared. Graham could feel the reflected heat of it, but Deputy Price seemed unbothered.
After a few seconds, Peggy walked on down the hall and disappeared out the door on the far end.
Graham’s heart raced, and he found himself trembling. “Who is she?”
Deputy Price patted him between his shoulder blades. “She’s nobody,” he said. “Just a lady who thinks she’s way more important than she really is.” He gave Graham a nudge. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you that comfortable bed I promised you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Scorpion, Mother Hen.”
Jonathan keyed the mike on his portable radio. “Go ahead.” They were only two hours into their three-hour drive. He sat in the shotgun seat as always, and he turned the volume up so that Boxers could listen in.
“ICIS is beginning to light up about our friends,” she said. “Graham is going to be transferred to a foster home in the next half hour, forty-five minutes.”
“Do you have specifics?” Jonathan asked. If they could get a name and an address, they could lie in wait and grab the boy as he arrived at the foster home. Typically, that was the simplest kind of snatch, when the parties thought they were beyond any danger.
Venice relayed the name of the foster family — Markham, in Lambertville — and the address.
Jonathan wrote it down on the pad that always resided in the pouch pocket on his right thigh. “And the girl? Jolaine?”
“That’s a little more interesting,” Venice said. “She’s scheduled to be transferred from her current location in the adult detention center in Lambertville to a federal facility in Chicago.”
Jonathan exchanged confused glances with Boxers. “Any word yet on the specifics of the charges?”
“That’s a negative,” Venice said. “But it gets better. On a whim, I decided to call the federal facility in Chicago. They don’t know anything about the transfer.”
Jonathan scowled. “You just called them?” he asked. “An inquiry out of the blue is going to get a don’t-know response nine times out of ten.”
“I told them I was calling on behalf of Andrew Barron, an AUSA from Chicago.”
Jonathan recognized the acronym for an assistant United States attorney, a federal prosecutor. “And you think they bought it?”
Venice did not respond to the question. Of course they bought it. Venice had a telephone voice that was unlike any other that Jonathan had ever heard. It pissed her off when he called it her phone-sex voice. Fact was, she could talk anyone into believing anything over the phone.
“Okay,” Jonathan said, breaking the silence. “What should we conclude from them not knowing about the transfer?”
“I think we have to assume that the transfer isn’t real,” she said. “I think we have to assume that the bad guys are going to take her when she’s in the car.”
Jonathan recoiled in his seat. That was a hell of a leap.
“I have a hard time connecting those dots,” Boxers said. Because Jonathan hadn’t yet pressed the mike button, his comment did not go out over the air, but Scorpion could not have agreed more.
“Help me with logic,” Jonathan said on the encrypted channel.
“I assume we’re hunting for ducks,” Venice said.
Jonathan laughed. In that one sentence, she’d spoken paragraphs. If a creature looked like a duck and walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was unreasonable to conclude that it was a penguin in disguise.
He got her point. Someone was after Jolaine with the intention of doing her harm. She was in custody on a nonspecific charge that now involved a transfer that no one know about.
“I got it,” Jonathan said. “When does the transfer happen?”
“That’s unclear,” Venice said. “The best I can estimate is when they get their stuff in order enough to make it happen.”
“Tell you what,” Jonathan said. “Get your new buddy Maryanne on the phone and patch her into this conversation. Let’s get her take on this.”
Hesitation. “You know I object, right?” Venice said.
“Duly noted. The way I look at it, there’s no harm talking. Surely she’s as dialed into ICIS as you are.”
“You know that begs a different question,” Venice said. “It’s counterproductive for anybody on her side of the equation to know that we are even aware that ICIS exists, let alone that we have access to it.” Access to ICIS was among Venice’s early victories as a brilliant tickler of electrons.
“Then we won’t mention it,” Jonathan said. “Get back to us when you have the patch ready.” He didn’t want to discuss this anymore.
“We’ve got ourselves a dilemma, Boss,” Boxers said. “It’s entirely possible we’re going to have two transfer events happening at the same time.”
Actually, it was close to a certainty, Jonathan thought. The question was, on which event should they focus their intervention?
“The kid is the one with the information,” Boxers said, reading his mind.
Jonathan nodded. Graham was for sure the primary target in terms of national security. He was the one with the photographic memory, and, presumably, the arming codes that so many people were willing to kill to obtain.
“Jolaine’s the one who’ll be most under guard,” Jonathan said. “And the guards will likely be cops. We’re not in the business of endangering cops.”
“But apparently the kid is stable,” Boxers said. “At least he’s being taken to a place of safety.”
“Unless he’s not,” Jonathan said. “If the enemy — whoever they are — is coming at Jolaine, doesn’t it make sense that they’ll come at the boy, too? Why go for her and not for him?”
“Agreed,” Boxers said. “But we need to choose, and our single best opportunity to get Jolaine back will be while she’s in a vehicle being transported between points A and B. Once she’s ensconced in another secure facility, we won’t have many options. You worry about tangling with law enforcement personnel, well, that would be one hell of a fight.”