Furious

27

Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile slammed down the phone. “General Tordon and Colonel Hancock just walked in the front gate at Nuu House.”

Heads popped up as his team came out of their computers. Eyes were bleary and exhaustion thick. “Have they been interrogated?” Rick asked.

“Not yet,” Foile answered. “And I doubt we’ll get two words out of them. Still, that they’ve come in out of the cold tells us something. Two are in. Three are still out there. How did the two get in, and can we trace them back to the three? Drop your old data tracks. Get the feed from Nuu House.”

“I’ve got it,” Mahomet said. “They walked in from Fifty-fourth Avenue.”

“Backtrack them. I don’t care what you have to use. Bank or traffic video, gas stations. Any video we can get, look for them.”

“Doing it,” came from all three.

“Rick, I want you to get yourself over to Nuu House. Talk to those guys.”

“I thought you said they wouldn’t talk, sir.”

“But they need to know we’re onto them. Maybe you can rattle one.”

“Rattle General Trouble?” Leslie said, her eyes still on the feed running fast across her computer screen.

“I don’t have high hopes,” Foile admitted, “but there is always a chance. Even the best make a mistake. Maybe just one, but if we don’t force it, these folks aren’t going to give it up for free. Rick, do your best. Lives may depend on it.”

“Understood, sir. I’m on my way.”

Foile went to stand behind his other two agents. Security film flashed by almost too fast for the human eye to process. The computer checked each figure, applying its own search parameters. The two men were very distinctive. Between the computer and the human eye, they would catch them.

“Got them,” Leslie said. “Two men, ramrod backs, coming out of that restaurant.” There they were. No disguise. No effort to hide. The general even spotted the traffic camera and looked right into it.

“How long were they in there?”

“I don’t know.” Leslie sped up the take from a traffic camera, covering the stoplight . . . and just incidentally covering the street in front of the restaurant. An hour of film went by before a car stopped in front of the place and two tall, straight-backed men got out of it. A shorter woman unfolded herself from the backseat of the small two-door, gave the general a quick peck on the cheek, and settled into the driver’s seat. The two men waved as she drove off.

“Can you make that license plate?”

“No, sir. It’s screened.”

“Track her. Track that make of car and the screened plates.”

For the next hour, they tracked the small coupe as it wound its way through side streets. Whoever was driving that car knew how to evade surveillance. They’d find her, then lose her, then find her again only to lose her as she turned down a street lined with middle-to-low-income housing with no cameras.

A thirty-minute drive took them over an hour to reconstruct.

“Damn, that woman is good,” Foile mumbled under his breath, and hated himself for the admiration he was feeling for the ones he was hunting.

“Is that your princess?” he asked Leslie.

“I should hope not,” the young woman agent said, grinning. “If Kris has any sense about her, she’s back at their lair, enjoying a whole lot of Jack.”

Foile pinned her with a frown. The agent didn’t even look back at him.

“Well, wouldn’t you hope that, sir? You haven’t become a completely old married man, have you?”

Foile allowed a “harrumph,” to that.

“No, that’s Kris’s best friend, Penny. She’s shorter than Kris, and she was trained in intelligence and security. Her dad was a cop, too. We’re trying to track one of our own. You ought to be glad we’re doing as well as we’re doing. Think of what you’d be doing if that was you out there.”

“I am, and I would,” Foile admitted. “However, we have an arrest warrant for the leader of this gang. A warrant I intend to serve. Find me your princess, Leslie.”

“We’ve got her going on the freeway. She’s headed west,” Mahomet crowed.

“Toward the mountains?” Foile shot back.

“Toward the mountains or some place short of there,” Leslie pointed out

“Get me a list of all the motels with multiday rentals using cash,” Foile quickly said to his boss. She got on her comm-link.

“Also, get me a drone flight over the mountains. I want to know every lodge, lean-to, and campfire that’s lit up in those hills.”

His boss came out of her commlink. “We’ll need a military drone for that.”

“So?”

“They’re not supposed to be used in civilian police matters. Are you calling this a terrorist threat? Terrorism wasn’t mentioned on our arrest warrant, was it?”

She knew very well it wasn’t.

“Either you call, or I call the Prime Minister and tell him if he wants us to find his daughter before anyone gets killed, we need someone to order up a training flight over those mountains and get the results of that infrared feed to us. Which way is it going to be?”

Usually a subordinate doesn’t task his boss. But usually the subordinate isn’t the one called into the Prime Minister’s office and given the assignment. Foile eyed his boss. Just how much did she want to be in charge of this operation?

Would she really want to have her name on this op when the fecal matter hit the fan? This use of Bureau resources by the Prime Minister for his family issues was bad and getting worse. When the media got hold of this . . . and they always did . . . there would be hell to pay.

Whose name would be at the top of the devil’s bill?

“I’ll call the Prime Minister’s office,” his boss said after a lengthy sigh.

The woman had balls; that was one reason Foile liked working for her. They were all likely going down on this one. The boss knew it, and she wasn’t shirking her place at the head of the line.

Foile turned back to his team. “Track that car. See how far you can catch pictures of it going into the mountains. Then get some sleep. We’re going to be here for a long time. You better catnap when you can.”

“Sir, I hope you take a bit of your own medicine,” Leslie said. “You get awful grouchy when you’re tired.”