Crawford parked the cruiser in front of Denny's, then coded himself out with dispatch. He made sure the bulky Motorola portable PDA was tucked into its little holster on his belt, then climbed out of the car. He took a few seconds to stretch, then trudged through the soft, deepening snow and stepped inside the restaurant. The place was almost empty except for a couple way in the back and two or three more customers hunched at the counter like regulars at a neighborhood bar. Workers coming off shift; maybe the driver of the Sunoco truck. Who knew? Most of the locals were at the hockey game-a game he could take or leave.
A bored-looking waitress came around with a menu, but he ordered from memory what he had every night on this shift: country-fried steak and eggs with hash browns and coffee. There was a copy of the New Hampshire Gazette on the bench seat of the booth he was in and he browsed through it until the big plate with his dinner came.
The waitress put it down in front of him, and for a while he read while he ate. Halfway through an editorial on setting a Robin Hood tax on the banks he stopped eating and put his fork down. Coming down Crooked Pond he'd seen a car with rental plates and a JFK Hertz license holder going in the opposite direction. He even remembered the number: ABC 2345, like a kid had chosen it. Why would somebody renting a car at JFK come to northern New Hampshire on a day like this? There were a hundred legitimate reasons, of course, but his cop sense was twitching and his appetite was gone. He took out his PDA, typed in a Code Five wants-and-warrants request and got an answer back almost instantly.
"Son of a bitch," he whispered.
"Pardon?"
Crawford looked up. The waitress was standing there with a pot of coffee in her hand. He dropped ten bucks on the table. He looked at the PDA screen, took a deep breath and switched the machine off. "I gotta run," he said. Who'da thought, a goddamned Red Ball in Winter Falls, New Hampshire. He put the PDA back into its little holster and stood, his meal forgotten. He headed out of the almost-empty restaurant at a run.
They drove down Sugar Hill Road on the outskirts of Winter Falls with Holliday behind the wheel. They'd spent most of the day searching for some evidence of Tritt, but had come up empty. What they had seen was a town crammed with Secret Service. Holliday had even seen what appeared to be National Guardsmen here and there, which he thought might be a little extreme. He headed the rental car toward South Main Street and the highway out of town. Kessler had been wrong; there was no threat here.
"I can't believe the press swallowed that whole Jihad al-Salibiyya thing. Don't they have investigative reporters anymore?" he mumbled in frustration.
"It's all blogs and opinion these days." Peggy shrugged, shivering in the seat beside him. The car's heater had died long ago. "The Internet bled newspapers dry and real journalism dried up with it. The news cycle is all about razzmatazz, not story. An autistic kid getting found in a swamp or a guy hiding under the pulpit of his church, surviving a hurricane, outrates the outbreak of a foreign war or a disaster somewhere else killing tens of thousands. Live outside the United States like I have and you start to realize what a bunch of navel-gazers we are." Beside Peggy, Holliday suddenly tensed. "What's the matter?"
"I think that's a cop car behind us."
"Maybe it's nothing. There are cops everywhere in this town tonight." Suddenly the cop car's flasher came on and his siren whooped once.
"He wants us to stop."
"Can we outrun him?"
"In a Ford Escort?"
"We've got ID."
"Let's hope Pyx did his job right," said Holliday. He pulled over and stopped. Behind him the police car did the same. Nothing moved; no cop climbed out of the cruiser.
"What's he doing?" Peggy asked.
"Something's wrong."
"FREEZE!" said a bullhorn voice out of the snow-white darkness.
And then all the lights in the world came on.
35
"I'm getting too old for all this," Holliday said with a sigh. He and Peggy were sitting handcuffed on opposite sides of a metal desk in an interrogation room not much larger than a toilet cubicle. It smelled that way, too, pine disinfectant not quite masking the tang of old urine, passed gas and drunkards' vomit.
It appeared that Winter Falls liked its interrogations straight and to the point. There was a retro video camera with a built-in mike looming down from a bracket in the corner and a piece of one-way glass that was so old the aluminum film was wearing off and you could see a ghostly image of what passed for the Winter Falls PD squad room.
The scene on the road leading into town had been like something out of a Bruce Willis movie. Cops of all shapes and sizes pouring out of cars and vans, some in uniform, some plainclothes, and some very definitely Feds of one kind or another. At one point they were standing handcuffed, freezing in the falling snow, while Homeland Security, the New Hampshire State Police and the FBI argued over jurisdiction.
Finally a cop in a dress uniform appeared, bundled them into a Winter Falls cruiser and gave everyone at the scene the hairy eyeball before he whisked them off to the station. It was a show of very large and very brass cojones, and no matter what the interrogation room smelled like, he found himself if not liking, at least respecting the grizzle-haired cop. Holliday was willing to bet that there was either the Marine Corps or the Rangers in the man's background.
"Now what?" Peggy asked.
"We get quizzed by the locals and then passed up through the chain of command until we get to the big guys. Either that or we get sent to Gitmo."
"I thought it would be closed by now."
"Hard to keep a good idea down," said Holliday.
"You know anyone who can get us out of this?"
"I know lots of people." Holliday shrugged. "I just don't know which side anyone is on anymore." He looked around the room. "We'll just have to wait it out, I guess."
"I've never been in jail before. Don't we get a lawyer or something?"
"We're way past lawyers, kiddo. We are now deep in the swamp of National Security."
The cop in the dress uniform appeared, minus his brass-buttoned jacket. He shut the door behind him and sat down in the only other chair in the room.
"Comfy?" asked the policeman. He looked irritated.
"Peachy," replied Holliday.
"Which one of you can tell me why I'm not sitting with the President of the United States, watching a hockey game and having my picture taken?"
"Because something terrible is about to happen to your town if you don't get really busy right now," Holliday said bluntly.
"Is that right?" the cop said.
"That's right."
"Explain."
"A man I know named Max Kessler, who has been an adviser to every president all the way back to the first Bush, said your town was the likely target for a major domestic terrorist attack, which is actually a front for an eventual takeover of the presidency and the country itself by Kate Sinclair; her son, the vice president; and Army Chief of Staff General Angus Scott Matoon, all of whom are members of a semisecret religious organization known as Rex Deus. They were also behind the assassination of the Pope by an American triggerman."
"You've got to be kidding me," said the cop. "That's a Dan Brown novel. Tom Clancy on steroids."
"Not even a little bit," said Holliday. "It's very real. All of it."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"No," said Holliday. "Which doesn't change the fact that it's true. Lots of people didn't believe Paul Revere, either."