The man’s eyes were visible, somewhat shaded by the hood. Windows of the soul, supposedly, though it’s hard to read eyes with no other features. Safe to assume they were cruel. Cruel pulp-fiction eyes under a hangman’s hood.
Would the long slender blade reach his heart if I thrust up under the sternum? That’s what the master sergeant claimed in Basic Training. Maybe I would play it safe and just cut his throat. Shoot him a few times first.
Kit didn’t have any blue underwear. White or nothing, usually nothing. She had been stripped and redressed.
An interesting word, “redress.” Could anything really pay us back for all this?
The phone by the bed rang, and I snatched it up. It was just the office, asking if I planned to stay another day. I said no, and assured her I’d be out by eleven.
“Where you headed?” she chirped. I told her Washington, DC.
“Gonna be a madhouse, Fourth of July coming up.”
I tried to laugh. “Guess I can handle it.”
She might wind up on page three of the Times herself. He seemed like such a nice boy. I saw that long box but didn’t think nothing of it.
That room in the photo could be a block away, or it could be almost anywhere with pine trees. Underneath the note I had copied from them, I did some calculation: They hit me over the head and took Kit around 11:00 last night, 2300. Almost twelve hours later, they sent me the photo.
If they were driving, they might have gone six or seven hundred miles. But they didn’t have to drive if they had access to civil aviation. I called the desk, and the woman said there was a landing strip two miles down the road. Yes, she had heard several planes take off tonight.
In that time, a plane could get them anywhere in the hemisphere. Someplace with a New York Times, but no other constraints.
I went out and opened the glove compartment and took out a cheap plastic wallet. Illinois driver’s license, library card, and Exxon and Visa credit cards for “Grant Harrison,” the names of two presidents. One gave us Black Friday and the other was a nonstop talker who died of pneumonia after a month in office. From eating cherries in cold milk, which I never believed. I wouldn’t have voted for either one of them.
Not much packing up to do. I put our bathroom gear back in her pink suitcase and the rifle back into its box. Went to the office and paid with a C-note, which caused the clerk to purse her lips. I knew there was something fishy when he didn’t use a credit card.
I asked whether I could use her desk computer for a minute, though, and she decided I was probably not that dangerous. She wanted to go off to the little girls’ room anyhow, she said; would I watch things?
Sure. The main thing I wanted to watch was the picture of Kit, bound and gagged. It took me a minute to transfer it to her machine. She didn’t have Photoshop or anything, but I was able to enlarge portions of the picture.
What I mainly wanted to study was a small wall calendar that was nailed to the paneling at the edge of the picture, next to the window.
It was a freebie calendar from an Ace Hardware; I recognized the logo but couldn’t read any of the lettering. Maybe the words under the logo were the name of the town.
I pushed the enlargement in and out. The first line looked like two words: four letter-blobs, an apostrophe, and another blob. Probably an “s.” Then six blobs. The first one narrower; might be an “i.”
The second line was five blobs, slightly larger. The name of a state? I called up a list of states, and there were only three with five letters: Texas, Maine, and Idaho.
A CIA genius or Jeopardy! winner might rattle it off instantly: a place name that was “somebody’s” “something,” in one of those three states. I Googled around and found a gazetteer that would search for place names with missing letters.
Texas and Idaho came up blank, but I scored on Maine: Swan’s Island. It was a little pinpoint in the ocean, south of Mount Desert Island. Population 350.
I wrote all of that, and the latitude and longitude, on the back of a postcard extolling the virtues of Traveler’s Rest.
It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. What were the chances that somebody who didn’t live on that little island would nail up a throwaway calendar from there?
I could hear a despised math professor from my freshman year sneering that the probability was non-zero. Which meant not bloody likely, but the only chance you have.
But wait. There was a retro phone with a rotary dial on the table. I selected it and enlarged it. Someone had carefully printed a number with clear block letters on the white circle in the center of the dial.
I scribbled that down and Googled “phone number” + “land line” + “find address.”
It gave me a service called FindFone. I was never so glad to have my Amex card number memorized. I typed it in and FindFone charged me ninety-seven cents to divulge 127 Ring Road, Swan’s Island, Maine.
The clerk came back and I thanked her and rushed back to the room.
Threw everything in the car and reviewed my options. I could go to an airport and take a chance; try to fly there on my illegal credit card. Airports are a little less forgiving than rustic taxicabs on that, though.
I drove for a couple of hours and then stopped to get a sandwich at a Pilot truck stop. Walked through the big convenience store, looking for inspiration, and possibly found it.
The car was parked behind a Dumpster, not visible from the shop. I got in and almost enjoyed the microwaved cheeseburger and an ice-cold Coors. Not my brand of choice, but there was nothing less American on offer.
I had bought three other items, cash, paying at a register that was not visible from outside: a sling for my left arm, masking tape, and a roll of aluminum foil. I wanted to reconstruct a vaguely remembered Science Fair project from junior high school.
One of the kids had a demonstration of the “Faraday Cage,” basically a box that blocked electromagnetic radiation. He’d built boxes of chicken wire, fine-mesh metal screen, and plain metal. The demonstration involved putting a cell phone into each cage and calling it from different distances.
I couldn’t remember what he had proved with it, but it gave me an obvious idea. Would a container made of aluminum foil block a radio signal?
Maybe you wouldn’t need a whole room with aluminum wallpaper. If I wrapped my hand in aluminum foil, would it block the transmitter buried in the flesh? If I wrapped the arm up past the elbow, would that keep radio waves from leaking out?
Wished I knew more science. The “open” end of the cylinder of foil would be full of muscle and bone. How well would radio waves travel in and out through that?
Car radios work, inside a “box” that’s mostly metal. But I vaguely remember something a teacher said in school about how they got around that. I was probably studying the back of Rosy Bender’s neck, and trying to imagine the rest of her skin, and somehow didn’t quite get what he was saying about radio waves.
Looked around and didn’t see any witnesses, and the car’s windows were tinted anyhow. I tore off a long sheet of foil and wrapped it around my left hand and arm, molding it up past the elbow. Having a right angle in the tunnel of foil might help; there wouldn’t be a straight line from the bug to the outside world.
Good thing I’d gotten a wide roll. It overlapped with plenty of room to spare. I wound masking tape around the whole thing generously, then managed to hide most of it inside the sling.