"Let's go," it said.
"Just the one guy up behind the rocks," John said at last, taking another scan around the stretch of arroyo bottom beneath them. There was no danger of a flash flood at this season, and the hardy weeds that colonized the sand of the seasonal riverbed were dead and brown.
Dieter didn't look very concerned. "I'd expect at least one," he said.
Moving with surprising grace for a man so large, he pushed himself backward to where he wouldn't stand out on the horizon, then stood and walked down the steep side of the hill. John looked over his shoulder at von Rossbach with a slightly annoyed glance, took one last look through the binoculars at the gunrunners, then followed him.
"Well, I don't like it," he said.
"I'm not crazy about it myself," Dieter said. "But it's not unreasonable. They don't know us, and I might have gotten their name and my friend's name from a dozen different places and just put them together in a lucky guess."
John shoved the binoculars back in their case. "So we're just gonna walk in there knowing there's a guy with a gun on us?"
Dieter lowered his sunglasses and looked at him over the top. "I thought maybe you could get into a good position yourself and hold a gun on their guy."
"Now you're talkin'," John said with a grin, visibly relieved.
The Terminator pulled behind a stand of shrubby growth and stopped the pickup.
Maria, her eyes streaming from the stench as much as from fear, pulled her hands away from her face and looked around.
"This isn't it," she said. "It's about a mile that way." Her voice was high-pitched and shaking. The man beside her turned his head to look at her and nodded once.
Deep inside the black of his sunglasses she thought she saw a glint of red light and she sobbed convulsively.
It glanced at the crude map the woman had drawn, then briefly accessed a military satellite and confirmed its accuracy. The gully was considerably less than a mile away, but humans were notoriously inaccurate.
The Terminator got out of the truck.
Maria whimpered and cowered in her seat. She wanted to throw open the door and run, but feared that he might shoot her, and that fear paralyzed her. In her mind she saw Mike lying on the cracked tarmac of the parking lot. She thought he was dead, but she couldn't be sure, and her impulse had been to give him a chance by luring this man away. But now she was here, alone. Oh God, what am I going to do?
She jumped with a gasp and turned toward the sound when he opened the toolbox in the back of the truck. "Oh, no," she whispered, her mouth dry and her throat tight with tears.
This was it, the end. He was going to kill her. Maria fully expected him to slam the lid on the toolbox and stand there with a rifle in his hands. Instead, the truck rocked as he jumped down and footsteps crunched around to her side of the car.
She didn't turn, but sat panting and light-headed, her mind filling with headlines about innocent middle-aged women murdered for no reason and left in the desert for the coyotes to eat.
It opened the door and grasped the woman's clothing, pulling her stumbling from her seat. Then it shoved her toward the back of the truck. "Get up," it said.
Maria scrambled to obey, lifting her leg as high as she could and grabbing the frame with clumsy fingers. She was simply too short and too frightened to manage it and began to sob frantically. "I can't," she said at last, hanging her head. "I just can't."
The Terminator confirmed her analysis. It picked her up under the arms, lifting her as if she were a five-year-old, and deposited her, kneeling, on the truck bed.
Then it followed her up. It moved to the toolbox. "Get in," it said.
Marie froze, staring up at him, then glancing at the large silver box he wanted her to enter. "No," she whispered. "Please, no. If you let me go I promise not to tell anyone, I swear! Please let me go, please."
It relayed a quick report to Alissa, then asked tor permission to terminate this human.
Alissa relayed his position and the position of the gully to the team in the Blackhawk, then considered its request.
*No,* she said at last. *Perhaps afterward, but not now. She might prove useful.
Lock her up and get into position, the others are on their way.*
"Get in," it said to Maria.
Maria saw the long silver box as a coffin, but decided that being alive in a coffin was better than being dead in a ditch, so she reluctantly put her foot over the edge, then knelt, looking appealingly up at the strange and horrible man. As she leaned forward he slammed the lid, whacking her painfully on her head and back.
At her cry of pain he said, "Keep quiet and live."
She knelt silently for a few minutes, panting in terror. He didn't move and she pictured him standing there, waiting for her to give him an excuse to kill her. It seemed as though the air was already almost gone; she wanted to beat on the lid and beg to be let out. But then he'd kill her.
Biting her lip, she told herself that she was imagining that she was smothering.
Then she heard him thread a lock through the staple and snap it shut.
Maria couldn't help it; she began to weep in earnest, pleading with him, even as she felt him leap down from the truck, making the bed shake, and heard his footsteps move away.
"Don't leave me!" she screamed.
Instantly the truck rocked as the Terminator climbed back onto it. It struck the lid with something and she felt the metal give, the sudden inward bump digging into her back.
"Be quiet!" it said.
Maria held her breath and after a moment the man went away. She squirmed around so as to be as comfortable as possible. She didn't think she was ever going to see her family again.
Letting out her breath in a sob, she began to pray.
The two Sector agents looked at each other. There was absolutely nothing in von Rossbach's files to indicate that he would do this sort of thing. Why he would kidnap and brutalize a fat, middle-aged woman, they couldn't imagine, yet they'd seen it with their own eyes. Agent McGill checked in with the project pilot, asking how to proceed.
"When you're certain no one else is nearby or watching, let the poor woman out.
Then bring her here for debriefing."
"Roger that," McGill said. He went back to scanning the area.
Dieter pulled into the gully just before seven-thirty, parking next to the gunrunner's pickup. He almost laughed at the relieved expressions on the faces of Bridges and Hardy. Then, instinctively, he wondered why they were so relieved.
Maybe they were just desperate for cash, but then again, maybe John was correct and they were planning something dirty. Though why they would before the money came into it was beyond him.
"Where ya'll been, buddy," Waylon asked with a grin. "Thought you was gonna be here at seven."
Dieter took off his sunglasses and looked at him in surprise. "You said seven-thirty." He lifted his hands and shrugged. "It's seven-thirty."
"Told ja," Luke said, and nudged his partner.
Waylon glared at him, then turned to Dieter with a smile. "Anyways, you're here.
C'mon see what we've got." He led von Rossbach over to the trunk of his car, lifted up a false bottom, and unzipped a protective covering. "Dust gets into everything here if you're not careful," Waylon said with a smile. "You're welcome to try out any of these you like."
Dieter was impressed at the change in Waylon, from good ol' boy to professional salesman, as well as relieved. That folksy charm got old fast. He was also impressed by the variety and quality of the goods offered, even though he'd known that Doc wouldn't steer him wrong. Still, some of this stuff was brand-