The Caleb Collection Read online

  He pulled out his cell phone and sat on the edge of his seat with the door open. Roberts had called four times. He had the ringer off, of course. Nothing like a shrill beep to warn the world of an approaching thug. Take a seat, Roberts. I’m on the job, if you didn’t know. He punched in the ten-digit number.

  “Banks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where in the world have you been?”

  “Doing my job.”

  “We’re an hour out of LAX,” Roberts said. “There’s been a problem. What’s the status of the kid?” He sounded panicked.

  “Lighten up. I’ve got them pinned to the next half-mile of road.”

  “Any chance they’ll get away?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, listen to me. You take out all three; you got that? The price goes up to one million dollars if they’re dead by sunset.”

  Banks whistled softly. “So they’ve got you spooked good, huh?” Wasn’t surprising, really. At least half of all his hits ended up bringing more than initially promised due to complications. But he’d never pulled down a million dollars before. Not on one hit. He looked up the road. The afternoon was dead quiet.

  “What’s changed?” he asked.

  “The kid knows more than we thought he did. So do the others.”

  “One point two,” he said and wiped a trail of sweat from the bridge of his nose. There was a pause.

  “Okay, one point two. Just get it done.”

  Banks snapped the phone closed and tossed it onto the passenger’s seat. Good enough. They were offering double the six hundred thousand he’d agreed to yesterday. Whatever the kid knew, it was worth all the marbles. He checked his 9-mm Browning by habit, left the car half hidden in the side brush, and walked toward a trail that broke to the left twenty meters ahead.

  One point two million! His pulse spiked at the thought. Jiminy Cricket, I’d pop ’em for the fun of it. They got away, didn’t they? Nobody gets away.

  The fact that the trees kept heavy shade on the forest trails was his salvation, he thought. It had rained three days ago—he remembered that now— and the mud was still wet in spots. All he had to do was find a spot and see if it showed any tire marks. He’d tracked on less before. The cowboy trackers in them Louis L’Amour novels could supposedly follow a man on horseback for days based on bent grass blades alone. That was the biggest pile of . . .

  Banks pulled up and blinked. Shade covered the entrance to the logging trail. A soft layer of dark dirt was bared of grass at his feet. An eight-inch tire track ran right through the wet earth.

  The Bronco!

  Banks jerked his head up, immediately alert. This was it! They were down this trail. His heart thumped loudly in his ears. Yeah, baby!

  He ran back to the car, pulled out the rifle, and cut into the forest at an angle that would meet with the trail. The trees were mostly pines and their growth relatively sparse here. He followed the rise in the terrain, bent low and moving steadily. Somewhere to his right the trees broke for the trail. The Bronco would either be on the forest trail itself or in a clearing.

  Banks pulled up behind a pine at the hill’s crest and studied the trees. They ended thirty yards ahead. So there was a clearing! Sweat leaked steadily from his pores now. He ran the back of his hand across his upper forehead.

  He ran crouched low, squinting his eyes for the Bronco’s white paint between the trees. They’d be sitting ducks in a clearing. Pop! Pop! Pop! In the middle of nowhere. One point two.

  Banks stopped behind a tree ten feet from the edge of the clearing and saw two things in the same moment. The first was the cabin. It sat on the edge of the clearing, less than thirty yards away, overlooking another couple hundred yards of open meadow, and he thought to himself, Jiminy Cricket, they got themselves a cabin!

  The second thing he saw was the white Bronco tearing away from the cabin, down the meadow to the forest trail that emerged fifty yards to his right. Its engine growled through the mountain air.

  Banks stared unbelieving for a split second.

  Then he was on one knee with the rifle to his shoulder. White paint flashed in his glass, and he followed the car with a trained eye. If it hadn’t been for two trees that momentarily blocked his vision, he would have nailed the right tire then. One shot, Pop! and they would have been stranded for the picking.

  The Bronco lumbered over the crest and disappeared. Banks cursed and tore down the hill through the trees. He had one more chance before it became a chase. And he almost made it too.

  The white truck roared up the dirt road toward his hidden Monte Carlo. He pulled up in the trees twenty feet from the road and dropped to one knee for a shot.

  Now was when scopes were in the way. The Bronco roared by full throated, and Banks came very close to pulling the trigger, despite the trees that kept blurring his view.

  He swore, jumped to his feet, and ran for his car. They were a good three hundred yards ahead of him by the time he stowed the rifle in its back-seat case, fired the engine, and pulled around in pursuit.

  Easy, boy. This ain’t over, not by a long shot. It was personal now. A fury that made his eyes feel hot settled over him. Easy, boy.

  The options ran through his mind with accustomed precision. This ain’t over. Not by a long shot.

  The Bronco was losing him, and he removed his eyes from the potholes and drove straight ahead, ignoring the bucking ride. If he lost them now, there would be no options. His only hope was to follow them. They would stop. They had to stop somewhere. And when they did stop, he would dispense with the cute stuff and do this right. He didn’t care if it was in front of the police headquarters itself; they were dead.

  Banks suddenly slammed the wheel and roared.

  Then he took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and drifted into auto kill.

  37

  DONNA STOOD AT THE FIELD ENTRANCE in the Rose Bowl Monday afternoon, her stomach bunched in knots, thinking that she’d gone over the edge on this one. Flat off a cliff.

  She was a journalist, she kept reminding herself. She lived for stories like this one. The operative word there being lived. She wasn’t sure she was ready to die for a story like this—or any story, for that matter.

  She’d chosen the Rose Bowl for two reasons. Actually three. One, she knew the head of maintenance, Bob Sardoni, who had agreed to let her use the huge stadium for this test of hers, seeing as how it wasn’t booked tonight. Which led to the second reason: the test, a loose term at best. Bill stood hidden in the announcer’s booth a hundred yards off, armed with the highest-power zoom lens the studio had. He’d fixed three long-range directional mikes to the nearby seats on three different sides, triangulated on her position. His receiver could supposedly pick up a whisper from anywhere within twenty feet of where she stood. From his one remote uplink Bill could feed the world with as much footage as she could bluff her way into. It was a state-of-the-art setup that Bill insisted was smoother than goat cheese.

  And the third reason? The third reason was more of a hunch. Just in case this thing got big in a hurry.

  The protests downtown had swelled to over three thousand marchers and they weren’t going away. They’d taken on a life of their own. The manhunt for Caleb had escalated as the hours slipped by, broadening to Nevada, Oregon, and Mexico. Well over a thousand officers were sweeping the huge region. The suggestion that Jason had almost assuredly ditched the white Bronco in favor of another vehicle only diluted resources further. It was nonstop coverage on all the stations now, and it had taken every professional trick she knew to keep her knowledge from spilling out. When it was all said and done, she might face legal action for allowing their mad search to continue while she knew the boy’s location, but it was something she would have to live with. For the country’s sake as well as hers, if Jason was right.

  She glanced at her watch. Four-fifty. Crandal was due in ten minutes and Jason still wasn’t here. “Check. You read me, Bill? If you read, flash me.”

  A wh
ite strobe ignited from behind the dimmed announcer’s glass at the other end of the field.

  “Okay, remember, I want you to start filming the second Crandal arrives. Just film and send. Mitchell will decide whether or not to broadcast, but keep the shots clean. If this is good, we’ve got all the majors lined up to pick up the feed.”

  The strobe flashed twice. “A-OK.”

  One hundred two thousand seats sat empty, staring down at the green grass. Football uprights stood bare and alone at each end of the field. The lights were burning already, a favor for which she would pay dearly later. Behind her the north tunnel gaped to deep shadows. She was very much alone, and the thought made her swallow.

  A door slammed and she spun around. Jason?!

  “Jason! Thank God! You’re here!”

  He strode out, grinning from ear to ear, with Leiah on one side, black hair lifting in the breeze, and Caleb trotting on the other side.

  “I said I’d be here. Thank God you’re here.” He ushered both Leiah and Caleb by the shoulders and looked around the stadium. “You actually did it.”

  “Believe me, it took some doing.” She glanced at her watch again. “We have about five minutes before Crandal shows, assuming he shows.”

  “So he agreed.”

  “I’m not sure he had a choice.” She pulled the rolled parchment from the pocket of her suit. “Here it is.” She handed it to Jason and motioned to a door under the bleachers. “I want you to wait behind that door, out of sight. And I want the boy to come out with the confession when I say. You’ll be able to watch us through the cracks.”

  He glanced at the Amharic text and handed it to Caleb, who read it quickly.

  “A bit theatrical, don’t you think?” That grin still hadn’t left his face, and Donna thought it a bit strange. There was a quality different about him. He wasn’t striking her as the kind of person who’d just spent a day on the bad end of a massive manhunt. His blue eyes moved quickly with strung nerves, but otherwise he seemed unusually calm.

  “I put my career on the line in exchange for this show. I direct the show; that was the deal. Without Caleb, there’s no show; you know that.”

  “We were followed here,” Jason said.

  “You’re serious? By whom?” She looked around at the seats.

  “Don’t know. Maybe just a hiker who saw the Bronco. I think we lost them on the freeway. You got the camera magic ready?”

  “You’re being shot as we speak. If we pull this off, our faces will be simulcast on all the major networks. They’ve guaranteed open feeds. Five minutes with live footage of Caleb, and I promise the world will tune in. Nothing like this has been done, but then the world has never been so interested in one person before, at least in our day. The audience could top at two hundred million people, so put on your best smile.” She looked down at the boy. “Does Caleb still have his power?”

  Jason grinned wide. “I guess. More or less.”

  Donna looked at Leiah, who stood quiet, surprisingly at ease. There was something very different about her. A glow to her cheeks. Something else Donna couldn’t place. New makeup or hair, maybe.

  “You should go. If we have a show, it starts in three minutes.”

  “Thank you, Donna,” Jason said. He reached forward and touched her shoulder as if he were her father or something. “Thank you for believing.”

  “You just make sure we turn some heads,” she said with a grin.

  “If they could see what I’ve seen, I guarantee you their heads would be spinning,” he said.

  They turned and walked toward a side entrance that led under the seats. They were already stepping past the door when it dawned on her what was different about Leiah. It was her skin!

  Her scars were gone!

  The flight had been an impossible ordeal. They were both in crisis-management overdrive, but there was very little to manage. Crandal had climbed back into his professional skin and begun his methodical consideration of alternatives and contingencies, almost as though they were discussing a third party rather than him. For a few minutes there, flying at thirty thousand feet above it all, Roberts actually enjoyed himself. Their exchange came like the old days, when they faced each day with the absolute persuasion that the only thing that might tamper with their invincibility was a lapse in reason. Stupidity in the vernacular.

  But today, reason wasn’t offering any solutions, and as the flight droned on, their conversation became more sporadic. As long as there existed a piece of paper from Ethiopia bearing the confession of a captain fingering Crandal as the mastermind behind a plan that resulted in the knowing slaughter of thousands, there were no contingencies that offered relief. They could twist arms; they could pull in favors; they could deny until they were blue in the face. But if the confession surfaced it would be the end, at the very least the political end. How a captain under Colonel Ambozia had come into the details of the operation in the first place was another matter. Ambozia had to be silenced; that much was now evident. They should have done it long ago.

  And they should have killed the kid day one.

  They should have, but they hadn’t, and now they had to kill them all in the next twelve hours. Crandal insisted it with a trembling jowl.

  They’d left the entourage in D.C. under the understanding that they were flying to L.A. for a private policy meeting and would be back in the morning. Roberts had rented the Grand Am and wheeled it up to the back entrance of the large stadium.

  “I talk,” Crandal said, patting his face with a napkin. “Our only purpose here is to get the document. This is strictly political. She owes us a favor; we call in that favor and promise her the world, that’s all. Your only purpose in there is to make sure we’re isolated.”

  “She agreed to come clean,” Roberts said. “I walk around her first. If there’s an electronic device within twenty feet of her, I’ll know. You get my signal to back off, then you back off.”

  “We can’t leave without the confession.”

  “We won’t.”

  They exchanged a glance and Crandal nodded. They stepped from the car, straightened their jackets, and walked toward the back door.

  Banks had lost them at the intersection of the 5 and the 210 freeways, courtesy of some lamebrain idiot in an old Cadillac who insisted on sitting in the on-ramp merge lane with her turn signal blinking, waiting for traffic to clear—an absurd expectation during the rush hour. No amount of his furious cursing or honking budged her. He’d finally taken to the grass and roared by her, but by then the white Bronco was gone.

  They were heading east. He assumed Pasadena—Jason’s home.

  Banks had driven to Hollister Drive, parked down the street, and searched the house. But the Bronco wasn’t there. He returned to his car with nerves wound tight enough to set off a quiver in his bones. He couldn’t remember feeling as agitated.

  Waiting he could handle. But waiting with images of a white Bronco cruising down the road to Tijuana while he sat here, dead in the water, was enough to turn him bald.

  Then again, he had no choice. He couldn’t just take off for Mexico without knowing it was their destination. He flipped his police scanner on and closed his eyes. If anybody was going to find the Bronco, it would be the police. And if they did, he was there—police or no police.

  38

  THEY WALKED OUT OF A SIDE DOOR at three minutes past the hour, and Donna felt a chill rip up her spine. Roberts led, dressed in simple black. Crandal’s huge bulk followed, dressed in double-breasted black. The latter smiled. The former did not, but then she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Roberts smile.

  Donna watched them come and nonchalantly dried her palms on her skirt in a smoothing motion. She cracked a let’s-do-an-interview smile and extended her hand. It seemed appropriate. Roberts ignored her and walked to her left. Then around and to her right.

  “What’s the matter, Roberts? You think I have a shotgun under my skirt?” She forced a laugh and Crandal joined her.

  “You
know these grunts,” he said, dismissing Roberts with a wave of his hand. “They think there’s a sniper hiding behind every tree.” His voice came low, dripping with authority. She’d forgotten how imposing the man could be. He stretched his hand out. “Good to see you again, Donna.”

  He looked around the stadium, and Roberts stood behind him with his arms behind his back. The security man scanned the rows of seats, but for the moment he seemed satisfied.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Crandal. Or should I call you Mr. President?”

  He smiled, patently. “Well, it looks like I’ve earned the confidence of the American people. They want a change and I’m going to give it to them. The people’s will is preeminent in this country, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “To the detriment of some, unfortunately. I’m sure my opponent isn’t so interested in the will of the people right now.” He was smooth. Goodness he was smooth.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “And how about you, Donna? How do you feel about interfering with the will of the people?”

  “I just have a few questions, sir. That’s all.”

  “Please.”

  She took a breath and let it out slowly.

  “I told you on the phone that I had a confession from a man who claims that you orchestrated an invasion of Ethiopia. Is it true?”

  “Of course not. I can tell you that in my former duties as the director of the National Security Administration, I was involved in many covert operations in this country’s national interest, but an invasion of Ethiopia was not one of them.”

  “How would you suggest that this document came into being?”

  “Donna, let’s be reasonable. You’re too intelligent for this. We’re about to change the world, my dear. This country needs a strong leader willing to cross ideological lines for the sake of progress. The American people want me to be that man. Surely you aren’t suggesting that a rumor from some forgotten corner of the world should be allowed to stand in the way of that.”