“The trouble with these walkie-talkies,” Trevor said, “is that anybody who cares to can listen in on them. Anybody with a scanner or a similar unit, anyway. And we have to assume anybody who owns one of these things maybe took it out of the closet during the blackout. So I don’t want us discussing anything critical over the air. I had a little chat with Shannon, and she says we can use her house as a base. Get the local Taus together and make plans where we won’t be overheard. Are you cool with that?”
“If we’re at Shannon’s house, who stands guard back here?”
“Jenny and Rebecca want to come with us—they pretty much insisted on it—and I don’t think Het is much interested in your father or Mama Laura. Also … Shannon couldn’t say much over the air, but it sounds like she might already have an idea about what happened to Geddy.”
So we ended up taking two cars. Rebecca drove with Trevor, and I went with Jenny. Jenny sat in the backseat, mostly silent, staring out the window as the headlights swept the darkened streets of suburban Schuyler. Twice she checked her phone, but there was no signal.
As we turned a corner onto Shannon’s street she said, “They took Geddy because of me, right?”
“If Het took Geddy, it was for the purpose of protecting Aaron.”
“To keep me from talking about him.”
“Almost certainly. But there hasn’t been any actual threat.”
“Because of the blackout.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, if they mean it as a threat, it’s working. I’m not saying anything about Aaron until Geddy’s safe. And even then … this is like an object lesson, that I’m vulnerable. That I’ll always be vulnerable. I can go to Canada, I can go into hiding, but they can always get to Geddy or my mother, say, or Mama Laura—somebody who matters to me. They can hurt me no matter where I am, and they will.”
“Once Aaron’s exposed, they have nothing to gain by threatening you.”
“Unless they want to punish me for crossing them. Can you tell me they wouldn’t do a thing like that?”
“It’s not likely.”
“But it’s possible.”
I had no answer for that.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t want Aaron to get away with what he did to me and what he’s doing to other women. But not at the price of someone’s life.”
“No one’s been killed.”
“But Geddy’s already been kidnapped. And it’s Geddy—it’s Geddy, Adam! Geddy wilts if someone looks hard at him. Being taken captive? Physically coerced, maybe beat up, kicked around?”
“We don’t know that anything like that has happened.”
“But it might have.”
I didn’t say anything. Because she was right, of course. It might have.
Trevor made some kind of instant emotional connection with Shannon Handy. It was a Tau thing, but more: Trev had dedicated himself to protecting Taus, and Shannon had honed her own protective instincts (and other skills) during a tour of duty in Afghanistan many years ago. They looked like the ultimate mismatch—a middle-aged white woman who owned a consumer-electronics franchise next to a dark-skinned guy with Maori-style facial tattoos and the body of a bar bouncer—but they fell into earnest, focused conversation as soon as they were introduced.
They turned Shannon’s kitchen into a command-and-control center. I waited in the living room with Rebecca and Jenny and a couple of local Taus who had already been briefed on the situation: a young IT guy named Clarence, who nodded a cautious hello, and a forklift driver, Jolinda Smith, who lived outside of town and who had brought with her some crucial information.
“Soon as Shannon came to my door and asked me whether I’d seen anything unusual,” Jolinda said, “I knew what she was talking about.” Jolinda was a big woman, muscular, and she leaned forward in her chair, eyes intent. “Because not much traffic comes out my way. I live on Spindevil Road, up past the gravel pit, you know that area? Nothing much past my house but some old hobby farms, most of ’em run down or abandoned. I was on my porch this morning, smoking a little kush and waiting for the power to come back on—not that it did. So I was surprised to see a, like, convoy coming up Spindevil away from the highway. Because that’s not something you ordinarily see up there. Four black SUVs and a late-model sedan of some kind, all together, all moving at a serious clip.”
“Any idea where they were headed?”
“Nope. But Clarence here has an idea.”
Clarence was a twenty-something stringbean in chinos who sat up straight and cleared his throat before he spoke. “We’ve been keeping an eye on the local Het tranche since the troubles started. No troubles here, but be prepared, right? So we know who all the Hets in Schuyler are.”
“And who are they?”
“Harmless people for the most part. Very tranche-loyal, but they work in local businesses like everybody else, so you run into them now and then. None of them has criminal records, or at least nothing beyond an occasional DUI or traffic ticket…”
“You checked?”
He smiled. “We have contacts with the DMV, local and state police, the municipal registrar. I’ve been in some databases, yeah. And like I said, nothing criminal or suspicious.”
“But?”
“But one of the local Hets is a guy named Carson Dix. He’s a foreman at Schneider’s Dairy. He also buys distressed properties, fixes them up and flips them. A couple of months ago he bought a two-story farmhouse on its last legs, real isolated, more like a vacation property than anything you could actually farm, with a view of Killdeer Pond which I guess Dix thought would be a selling point. He hasn’t started the renovation yet. Point is, that property is Het-owned, it’s remote, and the only way to reach it is to drive straight past Jolinda’s house.”
“So we need to check it out.”
“That work has already commenced,” Clarence said. “We thought it would be too obvious to be doing drive-bys, so we have a guy on the far side of the pond with a pair of binoculars and one of Shannon’s walkie-talkies. He says the house is definitely occupied. Smoke from the chimney and lights in the windows. The vehicles Jolinda saw are parked in back, bunched up so they’re not visible from the road. One of them is a sedan that meets the description of the car your guy was driving. We can’t confirm that your guy is present, but that’s the obvious inference.”
Your guy. It was strange to hear him use those words to describe Geddy.
“So if that’s where he is, how do we get him out?”
Jolinda said, “I believe that’s what Shannon and your friend Trevor are trying to figure out right this minute.”
Their voices droned out from the kitchen, the words indistinguishable, an ebb and flow of urgent talk that went on for more than an hour. Then the scrape of kitchen chairs on linoleum. Shannon led the way when they came into the living room, looking tired but flushed with excitement. “Let us run our idea past you. But if we decide to do this, we need to act real soon. All right?”
She outlined the plan, with explanatory asides from Trevor, and she ticked off a list of things we would need: a disposable vehicle, gasoline, people in place both here in Schuyler and at the farmhouse on Spindevil. What she described sounded plausibly effective but unavoidably dangerous. “So the question we have to ask is, are we sure it’s better to do this than to let the situation just kind of evolve?”
“If it evolves,” I said, “it’s likely to evolve right out of our control. If we don’t get Geddy back they’ll take him somewhere better defended, someplace we can’t find.”
“So we act now?” Shannon asked. “Can we get a consensus on this? Because it’ll take time to put everything in place.”