“Is there anybody else you can talk to?” she asked. “Any other flag officers?”
He laughed. “My contemporaries are all guys against whom I competed for the first star. Now we’re competitors for the second star. If that three-star in there has put the word out, nobody in this building is going to return my calls.”
The door to the outer office opened, and a yeoman stuck his head out.
“Sir? The admiral was-“
“Yeoman?” Sherman barked.
“Yes, sir?”
“Bring me a pair of scissors.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Looking baffled, the yeoman retreated back into the office.
“Where’s von Rensel?” Sherman asked. “He’s … he’s gone looking for Jack, I think. He was supposed to wait at his house until we got back or he heard from Mcnair.”
Sherman nodded. The yeoman returned with a pair of scissors. Karen could see the EA standing at his desk, trying to see what was going on out in the corridor. Sherman pulled out his wallet and extracted his ID card.
He took the scissors and cut the ID card into four pieces. He handed the pieces and the scissors over to the yeoman. “Give these to your boss.
Tell him I’ve gone to look for my son.”
“But,-sir, the admiral-“
“Tell him what I said, young man. Tell him Captain Sherman left with his lawyer.”
Train stopped short of the clearing containing the decrepit trailer and checked his watch: just past 1:00 P.m. He looked around. He was standing behind a large scraggly bush, which put him mostly in the shadows. There were no sounds coming from the trailer, and the woods both above and below the trailer were silent and strangely devoid of birds and insects.
He wondered briefly about all the talk of snakes.
Gutter stood by his left side, ears up, eyes alert. Train eased the Glock out of its waistband holster, checked the chamber, and then sent the dog forward to scout the place out. Gutter trotted into the clearing surrounding the trailer, stopped, and then put his nose down and began to cover the ground between the trailer and the plastic-covered hootch to the right, where Karen had said she first found Jack.
Train considered crouching down but then dismissed the idea. He was simply too big to hide behind anything much smaller than a house anyway.
The place felt abandoned. He had thought he had seen the dark silhouette of a fallen-in house up there among the trees near the top, and there were signs that there had once been a road or a driveway, now entirely overgrown, beyond the dead tree. Gutter disappeared behind the trailer and then reappeared a minute later on the far side.
Train considered his options. The dog would find anyone hiding outside the trailer, although not necessarily someone inside the trailer. Karen said the guy rode a motorbike, and there was no motorbike in sight. As the day warmed up, the aroma from all the trash around the trailer was becoming stronger, accompanied by the whine of flies. He could not imagine someone living like this, and yet he knew that there were lots of other trailers just like this in these parts. The dog came loping back to him, and Train, satisfied that no one was lying in wait ahead, decided to go check out the trailer itself He looked over at the huge dead tree lying across the road, then took Gutter back to it, instructing him to stay down underneath the trunk. Train was pretty sure he could handle Jack if he was in I that trailer, and while he would have preferred to keep Gutter with him, he wanted the Dobe between him and those two thugs down below.
He could always call him in if there was trouble. GUTTLVR flopped obediently onto his belly, giving Train a mildly resentful look.
Train patted him, reinforced the command, and then walked down the path lea . ding to the trailer, proceeding carefully, with the Glock in his right hand but held down by his side. He went straight up to the door, -knocked, and then stepped back, holding the gun behind his back. He kept looking around the clearing to make sure no one was moving, hoping that Gutter still had a view of the clearing. He knocked again and called out Jack’s name. Nothing moved inside the trailer. He knocked a third time, more forcefully, making the side of the trailer rattle. Then he tried the door handle and found the door unlocked.
He looked around again and then pushed the door in, hard enough that it banged all the way back to the wall. He called Jack’s name again and then listened carefully, but there were no sounds coming from the trailer. The gun pointed up now, he went into the trailer. He felt the floor sag beneath his feet as he took shallow breaths against the stink of rotting food and’filthy clothes. The interior looked a lot like the exterior, and the trailer had a definite sewage problem somewhere.
It felt empty. He checked out the other two rooms and bathroom, staying out of the tiny kitchen for fear of the mess he would find there. He looked around. The place was little more than an aluminum cave; all it needed was a pile of bones in one comer. But there was no one here.
He went back to the clearing and checked on Gutter, who was still on command, then focused on what looked like a ruined house a hundred yards or so up the hill from. the downed oak tree. It took ten minutes to push through all the undergrowth, and he was careful about where he put his feet.
It was only early afternoon, but already there were shadows forming under the trees. The house was a total wreck. Two enormous stone chimneys at either end were the only things vertical about it. It appeared to have . been a two-story woodframe house with porches running around three sides, but the second floor and the roof had long ago subsided into the Pound floor. The porches sagged and dropped like old spiderwebs. The steps were long gone, although the stone supports were still there. The ground-floor window frames were deformed and empty of glass and sash, and he thought he could see parts of the ground-floor ceiling sagging down into the front rooms. The front door was missing, leaving an asymmetric black hole facing the dying trees out front.
He walked around three sides of the house, but there were no signs of life or the detritus of vagrants. Huge old vines roped up the remains of the porches, and some had even gone inside. He was about to go back down the hill when a squirrel burst out practically from beneath his feet, giving him a good scare. The squirrel hightailed it up one of the old trees and Train watched it go damned near all the way to the top, which is when he saw the antenna. At first, it didn’t register. He moved closer to the tree, peering through the branches, and there it was, a radio antenna of some kind.
And a wire, cleverly concealed in the ragged bark of the tree, descended the tree and disappeared in the underbrush.
He rooted around the base of the tree, found it, saw which way it was pointed, and followed the route with his eyes until he found it again, disappearing under one of the porches. Well, well. Ruined, but not necessarily abandoned.
Still holding the Glock, he made his way around to the front steps.
Balancing himself, he climbed up the stone step supports and then tiptoed across the bare floor joists of what had been the front porch and approached the open doorway.
The old wood creaked ominously under his weight, but just inside the door, he hit pay dirt again: There was a piece of plywood resting over the open floor joists about six feet inside that doorway. He eased his way through the doorway and saw that both front rooms on either side were filled with the wreckage of the second floor. Heaps of plaster and broken boards pointing every which way were all piled onto the ground floor. But straight ahead, in what looked like a main hallway, there was more plywood, ending in a closed door that seemed to be surprisingly intact.
He listened carefully, but there were no sounds. No smell* of human habitation, no candy wrappers or beer cans. But that wire had to go somewhere. That wire was new. And this plywood was new. He stepped out onto the first sheet and it held, although broken plaster scrunched underneath as he took the next step. The hallway got darker as he moved across the plywood, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the frame of the front door, where the glare of the afternoon light outside etched every detail of the front porch. He was about six feet from the closed door when he looked up and saw something shiny above the door-something round and glinting, as if made of glass. A camera? Oh Lord, was that a video camera?