He was still rattled. Once everything seemed to be okay, his dad had gone off to Alaska, to help collect the man supposedly responsible for what had happened at the boomerang tournament. Tyrone, Nadine, and his mother were at the motel, miles away from the park, and the madness had stopped, but he couldn’t forget it. It was like some kind of nightmare. He had wanted to kill people, and if he’d had a weapon — a knife or a gun or a stick — he would have killed somebody. And the thing was, it would have felt just great to do it, too.
He sipped at the soft drink. Life had been easier when he’d been into computers. He sat at home, jacked into the web, lived his life in VR. Once he’d discovered girls and boomerangs, things had gotten a lot more complex. Nothing risked, nothing gained — but nothing lost, either. But the thought of going back to where he’d been before, a web-head with butt calluses from sitting in a chair? That just didn’t resonate. Data interruptus, Jimmy-Joe would say.
The tournament had been canceled after all the crazy stuff. He’d never even gotten a chance to compete. Given all the other crap, winning or losing a contest like that meant zed, but even so, he wondered how he would have done.
“Hey, Ty.”
He looked up to see Nadine standing there. “Hey,” he said.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, neither.”
They stood silently for a few seconds. “You want a Coke?”
“I’ll just have a sip of yours, if that’s okay.”
“Sure.” He passed her the plastic bottle and watched her sip from it.
She handed the bottle back to him. “You think it’s true?” she said. “That somebody did it on purpose?”
“My dad thinks so, and he knows about stuff like this, so, yeah, I think so.”
“Why? Why would somebody do a thing like that? Zap people and make them go crazy? Make people hurt each other?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t think of any reason good enough.”
“I didn’t like how it made me feel,” she said. “I was so angry. I wanted to hurt people. I didn’t care about them at all. I was watching the vids on the news. They showed a Catholic school somewhere. Some nuns beat a janitor to a pulp. How could that be? Something that could make nuns do that, that’s really scary.”
He could see she was on the edge of tears, really upset. “Yeah. Scares me, too. But it’s okay. My dad is going to get the guy. It’ll be all right.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. I do.”
She gave him a little smile, and he felt better himself. He took another sip from the Coke. He hoped his dad would kick the guy’s ass.
Howard was still peeved. The marshals were supposed to meet him at the airport, but his plane had been delayed an hour coming out of SeaTac, and they hadn’t waited for him. He hated being late, but there had been no help for it. He couldn’t really bitch about it officially; Net Force didn’t have any jurisdiction in the matter per se, even though they had gotten the warrants and the marshals would be delivering Morrison to HQ in Quantico. And as the commander of Net Force’s military arm, he shouldn’t be out in the field on this kind of errand anyhow, no job for a general, but it pissed him off being left behind just the same. It was no more than professional courtesy — he’d have waited for them.
Howard rented a car and burned the speed limits trying to catch up, but by the time he got to Gakona, he still hadn’t seen any sign of the marshals. He couldn’t believe he had gotten ahead of them, so they must have already reached the HAARP compound. Probably had already collected Morrison and were on the way back. Well, if they passed him going the other way, he’d spot them, there wasn’t that much traffic. He’d seen only a few cars and trucks in the last hour of travel, and nobody in the last fifteen minutes. Of course, it was almost two in the morning, and in the middle of the great northwest woods, too, not exactly the Harbor Freeway in downtown L.A.
The narrow road he was on ran parallel to a tall chainlink fence topped with razor wire and hung with government warning signs. HAARP would be on the other side of the fence, somewhere past the thick forest of evergreens.
The call of nature that had been nagging at him for miles finally couldn’t be denied any longer. If he didn’t stop and take a whiz, he was going to drown.
He pulled the car over, shut off the engine, and killed the headlamps. He waited for a moment for his night vision to clear, then stepped out of the car.
He watered the plants nearest the shoulder, felt a lot better, and zipped up.
It was really dark out here, nothing offering relief save for a clear sky thick with glittery stars and the glowing face of his watch. It was cool, but not cold, and the scent of evergreen, car exhaust, and even urine blended into a not-unpleasant odor. It was also quiet, save for a few mosquitoes buzzing about. There was something very relaxing about being out in the middle of nowhere, nobody else around.
From the last road sign he’d seen, he judged that he was almost to the compound’s gate. He started back toward the car when he saw a bright flash of light over the treetops, almost like distant heat lightning, a brief strobe against the night. What was that?
But the light was gone, and once again the fierce darkness claimed the night. And that was odd, because this close, he expected some kind of glow from the HAARP compound bleeding into the sky. He had been on night patrols in the outback where you could see the light from a campfire or a propane lantern for miles. They must keep some lights on, right?
Almost immediately after the light faded, he heard three shots, a stacatto pap! pap! pap! followed by two more that resonated with a louder, sharper crack! crack! The shots echoed, and it was hard to pinpoint the direction, but it sounded as if they were to his right and behind him. Inside the fence, and not too far off. There was no question in Howard’s mind that the reports came from weapons, and they sounded like handguns. Two shooters, close together, using different calibers. The second of them, he was almost certain, was a.357 Magnum, a round with which he was very familiar, having fired tens of thousands of them himself. Two shooters firing at the same target? Or at each other?
Almost reflexively, he reached down to where the new revolver rode back of his right hip, to touch the gun’s butt and reassure himself it was still there.
It could have been a lot of things — spotlighters doing some illegal hunting, drunks blasting at beer bottles, maybe even a couple of campers attacked in their tent by a bear and cutting loose at it — but knowing there were U.S. Marshals serving an arrest warrant on a man suspected of involvement in multiple deaths, Howard had to consider that maybe something had gone wrong with the operation. And what would campers or hunters be doing inside the fence?
He pulled the door open and slid back into the rental car, started the engine, and hit the light switch. The entrance gate was ahead of him, and that was the way to get into the compound, but he spun the wheel and the car into a one-eighty and headed back the way he had come. When guns go off, that’s where you find the action.
It was half a mile away when things got tricky. Because it was so dark and he was moving and watching the fence to his left, and because the black SUV was parked off to the right in the trees, he almost missed it. A glint of light off the windshield — the SUV was facing the road at a right angle — was what he caught, and a fast glance didn’t give him much more. He took his foot off the gas pedal, but managed to keep from hitting the brakes, so his tail-lights didn’t flare. He kept going, considering his options.