“Hard to tell. For now, we’re listed among the missing. Which could mean nothing at all.”
“Huh?”
“Could be a cover story. You know, so we’ll let our guard down.”
“Yeah, well we ain’t, right?”
“I’m thinking we did, at least a little bit, by taking the truck.”
Tommy nodded, but his expression belied his incomprehension. “How so?”
“When they finally figure out who was on the boat — whoever “they” might be… from the bad guys to the good guys — they’re going to see that everybody’s cars are still in the lot but one.”
“So they’ll know you’re still alive.”
Dex shook his head. “Not at first. I could’ve gotten a ride to the wharf with one of the rest of you. But that’ll change as soon as they get a look in my garage.”
“Then what’ll they do?” Tommy had cleared the 6th Street Bridge and was angling onto Route 301.
“You know, I’m not sure,” said Dex. “The bad guys will figure I’m on the run, which is a reasonable assumption. But… with me not showing up and talking about what happened, the good guys might have me on their list as a possible perp.”
“Oh, man, you’ve got to be jokin’ me!”
“No, Tommy, that’s how they think.”
“Okay, but how do you think of this stuff?” Tommy whistled a tuneless burst.
“It just comes to me,” said Dex, but there was a part of him that wished it would not. Sometimes, he believed, being smart was more of a burden than he could handle.
Whoever had hit the Sea Dog wanted them out of the way. Why?
That depended on how much they knew about the 5001… or how much they wanted to know.
Either way, Dex had to stay one step ahead of everybody, and one of the best ways to do that was run a little interference and drop a few obstacles in their path.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“So what does all this mean?” said Entwhistle, who couldn’t hide his amusement.
Sinclair didn’t respond right away. It had been more than an hour since returning from the wreck. The two of them had just reviewed the situation reports and recommendations from their Ops Center.
Neither of which he liked very much. When he boiled it down and rendered off the fat, it came to this: he was off his leash and could run with the 5001 assignment in any direction. But he didn’t like the implications.
“I say, still with us, chappie?” Entwhistle tapped his pen on the desktop to get his attention.
“Sorry, just thinking things through.” Sinclair shared his evaluations of what they were up against.
Entwhistle grinned. “Personally, I prefer it like that. Less meddling from people who aren’t up to their elbows in the muck, that’s my ticket.”
“Glad to hear you’re so confident. I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
Sinclair leaned back in his chair, cracked his knuckles softly. “I think Operations is throwing in the towel on this one.”
“Why? How?” Entwhistle appeared surprised, as if he’d never considered Sinclair’s suggestion.
“Because somebody upstairs is thinking they’ve made a fatal error. They shouldn’t have jumped the dive boat like they did. Too presumptuous. And now all they have is an empty sub and their dicks in their hands.”
Entwhistle smiled. “Better than my dick, I always say.”
“Right, but do you see where I’m going with this?”
“Maybe, but why don’t you just tell me.”
Sinclair liked his exec, but he had a penchant for waffling that bugged him. “They’re cutting their losses. They don’t want to look any worse than they do. We get the job of cleaning up the latrine, don’t you see it? If we find anything worthwhile, everybody gets credit. If we don’t, it gets quietly forgotten as another false lead that never panned out.”
“You sure they’re not using this as a test — you know, to see what kind of stones we’ve got?”
Sinclair shrugged. “Does it matter? All I know is we’re on our own here. So the real question is do we pursue, or play cover-our-ass?”
Now it was Entwhistle’s turn to pause to consider his answer. After a few tugs on his mustache, he sat up straighter in his chair, placed his elbows evenly on the desktop. “Assuming the location of Station One Eleven could be extremely valuable, I say it’s worth pursuing.”
Sinclair nodded, picked up one of the reports, which listed the identities and backgrounds of the dive club members and the crew boat captain. “Intercepted police reports confirmed that the vehicles of Cheever, Schissel, Mellow, and Jordan had been found at the wharf,” he said. “Only one car missing, an ex-Navy diver. McCauley.”
Entwhistle shook his head. “Probably a fairly tough nut, eh what?”
“Probably. So we need to decide — why is his car missing from the lot? Either he’d ridden to the wharf with one of the others, and it had never been there in the first place, or somehow he survived the attack.”
“And came back to get his truck.” Entwhistle tapped the desktop with his pen. “Pretty plucky chap, if he did.”
“We’ll need to start digging.”
Entwhistle continued to speculate. “I mean, if the navy diver really did survive, and if he has any information he pulled out of the wreck, then—”
“That’s two very big ifs, don’t you think?”
“What else do we have to do? I don’t know about you, but routine assignments don’t excite me. And besides, if we do get lucky and pop the weasel, we get benefited at some point. That’s the way the Guild works, remember?”
Sinclair did indeed. Founded on the principles of responsibility and the integrity of the transaction, the Guild had survived by always rewarding hard work. “Okay, so I take it you want to go out and poke around.”
“You bet your arse… This is boring in here.”
Sinclair nodded. They would be able to delegate the data haven surveillance to other East Camden staff without much of a ripple. They would also have access to any Guild personnel below them on the food chain. Assistance from lower-level techs, information clerks, and even tactical people would not be questioned. “All right, we move on this. How many extra people did they give us?”
Entwhistle keyed up a screen, glanced down at the display. “Looks like three field specialists currently available out of Baltimore and D.C. — Wilson, Spruill, and Winter. Others as they come off assignments.”
Sinclair considered the list. Good people all, but Spruill was the most methodical. He might be the one they needed to do some digging. “Okay, I’m going to get them out there ahead of us — beat the bushes a little.”
Entwhistle gave him a thumbs-up. “Just give me the where-and-whens and I’ll get them moving.”
“What about you? Anything else you want to throw out there?”
Entwhistle leaned forward on the work desk, idly sheafed through the papers in the reports. “No ideas, really. Not yet, anyway. Anything I say is going to be rehashing…”
“Let me hear it anyway.”
Entwhistle exhaled slowly. “We wasted lots of hours mucking around that wreck. Now we need to make up the time. Whatever was on that sub got picked clean by our dive club friends. And let’s not forget the fissionable material, for Christ’s sake. They really fucked the monkey on that one, you know. No way to figure a bunch of amateurs would haul an atomic device out of there.”
Sinclair shook his head. “We know it wasn’t on their boat. The team swept it clean — nothing. They also scanned that whole quadrant in the bay — no radioactivity.”
“So where is it?”