He stood there for three or four minutes, and suddenly Brad himself appeared, far down the ridge, coming out of the woods and striding along toward the house. His walking stick moved in a jaunty but purposeful manner, and even from here Howard could tell, in the way Brad moved and held himself, that he was pleased, he thought things were going well.
Howard had marked the spot where Brad had emerged from the woods, and now he moved in that direction himself, going a few steps down the far side of the ridge first so as to be out of Brad’s sight. He moved briskly along, his route generally downhill, and when he reached the spot he turned right and entered the woods.
It was cooler in here, and damper, and a bit darker. There was also more of a muffled feeling, as though sound wouldn’t travel as well. Howard moved more slowly, looking all around, and doing his best to keep going in a straight line. One of the things he did remember from his boyhood was how easy it was, in the woods, to wind up walking in a circle.
He traveled for ten minutes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and suddenly emerged onto another meadow. He moved out across it, and came to a narrow dirt road that crossed his path from left to right.
This would be the perimeter road, marking the edge of Brad’s property. Howard looked both ways along it, and saw nothing. But then he sniffed, catching an odor that didn’t blend with his memories of Thanksgiving and hayrides and childhood expeditions in the woods: automobile exhaust.
He looked down at the dirt road, not expecting to be able to read tire tracks any more readily than footprints, but saw something better; a smudge of black on the weeds between the dirt ruts. He hunkered down and touched the black, and it was still damp.
They’d been here. An automobile of some kind had been here. It had been stopped long enough for oil to have dripped down onto the weeds from the engine. And then it had gone.
Howard straightened, still smelling the faint acrid stink of automobile exhaust, looking at the black smudge on his fingertip. Everything around him was very silent.
ii
The blue coachman was an excellent restaurant, and therefore did a brisk weekend trade. Downstairs was very public, with the tables close enough together for no conversation to be truly private, but upstairs was a darker, quieter room, with thick-cushioned high-backed booths, and it was one of these Howard had specified in making the reservation, knowing they would be able to talk in complete privacy there.
Robert had not yet arrived when Howard and Evelyn got there. They sat facing one another in the booth, ordered a round of drinks, and ate rolls while waiting. Howard didn’t feel much like small talk and apparently Evelyn agreed, so they sat there together in a comforting silence.
Robert and their drinks reached the table at the same time. He ordered Jack Daniels on the rocks, sat down beside Evelyn, and when the waitress left he said to Howard, “From what you said on the phone, I got the idea there’ve been developments.”
“Small ones,” Howard said. “I’m sorry if I tantalized you with that call, but I thought I shouldn’t say too much over a pay phone.”
“No, I understand,” Robert said.
Evelyn said, “I hate it that we can’t call you from the house.”
“But we can’t,” Howard said. “We don’t know who’s on the extensions.”
Evelyn nodded. “I know that.”
“Tell me what’s happened,” Robert said.
So Howard told him about Evelyn seeing the Chinese last night, and about his own walk in the woods this afternoon. When he was done, Robert said, “That seems almost too simple. He walks from the house to that dirt road, they drive up in a car, there’s a conversation, they give him passports, and that’s it. You’d think somebody would see them at it. It shouldn’t be that easy.”
Howard said, “Why not? It’s isolated out there, no one ever uses that road—” he caught a quick glance between Robert and Evelyn, but ignored it for the moment “—and nobody else lives anywhere near there.”
“They have to have a base somewhere,” Robert said. “They can’t just drive around in cars and lurk in the woods all the time, they have to have a base of operations. And they have to be able to go to and from it. How are they doing that? How can they operate in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, a group of who knows how many Chinese, traveling back and forth between their base and Bradford’s estate, and nobody notice them? Look, I’m only one man, and I’m Caucasian at that, but I couldn’t take a chance on staying in Eustace because I’d be wondered about. How are these Chinese doing it?”
“I don’t know yet,” Howard said. “That’s one of the questions we’ll have to answer. Here comes the waitress.”
They were silent as the waitress arrived with Robert’s Jack Daniels and three menus. After she left, Evelyn said, “What I want to know is why that man was waiting beside the road at three o’clock in the morning. What did he want there? He wasn’t planning to meet Bradford, not there and not at that time of night.”
Robert said, “Surveillance, I suppose.”
Evelyn looked bewildered, but the instant Robert said the word Howard knew he was right. “Of course!” he said. “Robert, you’ve got it.”
“I don’t understand,” Evelyn said.
Robert told her, “They’re keeping an eye on the house, that’s what it means, and you probably showed up for a change of shift.”
Evelyn said, “But why? They know he’s there.”
Howard said, “But they’ll want to know if anybody else is onto what’s going on, if Brad’s plans have been discovered by anybody who wants to stop them. So they keep an eye on the house and watch who comes and goes. You can bet they asked Brad today who I am and what I’m doing there.”
“They’ve got a fish on the line,” Robert said, “and they don’t want to lose it.”
“We can’t beat them,” Evelyn said. Howard looked at her in surprise, and her expression was stricken. “We just can’t,” she said. “They’re professionals at this, they know what they’re doing, they know things we can’t even guess at. But we’re just making it up as we go along, hoping for the best, not really knowing what we’re doing.”
“That’s our only choice,” Howard said. “There’s nothing else for us to do, you know that.”
“But we can’t win,” Evelyn said.
Robert said, “It isn’t quite that bad. We do have some advantages, you know. They’re strangers here, and we aren’t, and that has to count for something. And your family has its own professionals, in a lot of different fields. We aren’t completely helpless.”
“Plus,” Howard said, “we know about them, and they don’t know about us. That’s the big advantage.”
“Then what are we going to do?” she asked, as though there wasn’t any possible answer.
Robert told her, “The first thing we have to do is find their base. We’ve got to be able to keep an eye on them, just as they’re keeping an eye on us.”
Howard said, “That means Robert and me in the woods for the next few days.”
Evelyn frowned at both of them. “But what if they find you there?”
“That’s not the way we want it to work,” Robert said.
“But what if it does?”
“If it does,” Howard told her, “we’re in trouble. If we just sit around and do nothing, we’re in worse trouble. Evelyn, don’t turn defeatist on us now.”
“I’m sorry. It just sometimes seems like such an impossible thing to do.”
“Then it will take a little longer,” Howard said. Seeing the waitress heading their way again, he reached for his menu and said, “Now let’s eat. I for one am starving.”