Two Graves

+ Fifty-Three Hours

PENDERGAST SAT ON A STEEL STANCHION AT THE END OF Pettermar Airport’s runway 29-R. The night was dark and starless, and the only illumination came from the parallel lines of runway lights that led off toward the horizon. The fall from the plane had reopened his gunshot wound. He had managed to stem the flow of blood and done his best to rinse the foul mud away. It would need closer medical attention and antibiotic treatment, but right now he had more important things to do.

Over his shoulder, several hundred feet in the air, another light slowly became visible: an approaching plane. It resolved into a set of running and warning lights. A minute later, a Learjet 60 hurtled past some twenty feet over Pendergast’s head, its reverse thrusters screaming as it prepared to land, the wake turbulence of the jet’s passing hurling up a violent cloud of dust.

Pendergast took no notice.

He had searched the body of the jogger, which had come to rest hidden in the tall grass at the end of the runway. Nothing. There had been a flurry of activity on the airfield triggered by his bashing down of the gate. The police had come, searched the area, impounded the Mercedes, and gone. They had found neither him nor the body.

Now everything had returned to normal; all was quiet. He rose and, keeping well within the darkness of the grass, circled the airstrip to an ancient pay phone at the gas station on the airfield road, which—miraculously—worked. He put in a call to D’Agosta.

“Where are you?” came the voice from New York.

“Not important. Put out an APB on a Cessna 133 single-engine plane, call letters November-eight-seven-niner-foxtrot-Charlie. It was heading into Mexico with a flight plan for Cancun, but it will be forced to land within a—” he thought a moment—“two-hundred-mile radius of Fort Lauderdale, due to a slow leak in the fuel line.”

“How do you know it has a leak?”

“Because I introduced it. A hollow plastic tube, wedged into the fuel sump. There’s nothing they can do in the cockpit to reverse it.”

“You’ve got to tell me what the hell’s going on—”

“Call me back at this number when you get a hit.”

“Wait, Pendergast, Jesus—”

Pendergast hung up. He left the lighted area of the phone booth, retreating to the darkness of a vacant lot overgrown with palmettos. He lay down on the ground—the loss of blood had made him weaker—and there he waited.

Thirty minutes later he heard the phone ring. He got up, made it to the booth, his head spinning. “Yes?”

“We got a hit on that APB. The plane landed maybe ten minutes ago at a tiny strip outside Andalusia, Alabama. Tore up the landing gear, too.”

“Go on.”

“They must have called ahead, because a van was waiting. There was only one person on the field, a guy drinking coffee in the hangar. He saw a bunch of people bundle into the van, then they hauled ass, heading in the direction of the—” a pause—“Conecuh National Forest. Ditched the plane, left it right there on the runway.”

“Did the onlooker get the plates of the van?”

“Nah. It was dark.”

“Alert the Alabama Highway Patrol. And put out an APB at all the border crossings—they’re headed into Mexico. I’ll call you later. My cellular phone is out of commission.”

A reluctant pause. “You got it.”

“Thank you.” Pendergast hung up.

He sat perhaps another ten minutes, still motionless, in the humid darkness. Then he dialed another number.

“Yo,” came the high, breathy voice of Mime, the reclusive hacker of questionable ethics whose only contact with the outside world was Pendergast himself.

“Anything?”

“Dunno. It’s not much. I was hoping to get more before I called you…” His high voice paused dramatically, teasingly.

“I have no time for games, Mime.”

“Right,” said Mime hastily. “I’ve been listening in on the electronic eavesdropping of our friends in Fort Meade—monitoring the monitors, you might say.” He chuckled. “And they do scrutinize domestic calls and e-mails, you know, despite protests to the contrary. I isolated a piece of cell phone chatter that I think is from this group you call Der Bund.”

“Are you sure?”

“Impossible to be one hundred percent sure, my man. The transmissions are encrypted, and all I was able to figure out was that they’re in German. Cracked a few proper nouns here and there. According to the government’s triangulation of the cell signal, it’s been moving fast across central and northwestern Florida.”

“How fast?”

“Plane-fast.”

“When?”

“Seventy minutes ago.”

“That must be the plane that just landed in Alabama. What else?”

“Nothing except for a brief unencrypted burst in Spanish. That burst mentioned a place: Cananea.”

“Cananea,” Pendergast whispered. “Where is that?”

“A town in Sonora, Mexico… in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles south of the border.”

“Sketch me a picture of the town.”

“My research indicates it has a population of thirty thou. It was once a huge mining center—copper—and it was the site of a bloody strike that helped launch the Mexican Revolution. Now it hosts a couple of maquiladora factories on the north side and that’s about it.”

“Geographic situation?”

“There’s a river that starts in Cananea and flows north over the border into Arizona. Called the San Pedro. One of the few north-flowing rivers on the continent. It’s a major route for smuggling drugs and illegals. Except that the surrounding desert is brutal. That’s where a lot of those would-be immigrants die. The border along there is apparently remote as hell, just a barbed-wire fence—but it’s got sensors and patrols up the wazoo. Plus a tethered blimp that can see a cigarette on the ground in the dark.”

Pendergast cradled the phone. It made sense. Deprived of their plane, and anticipating the APB border alerts, Helen’s captors would have had to find a clandestine way to cross the border into Mexico. The Rio San Pedro corridor south to Cananea was as good as any.

That would be his last chance to intercept them.

He left the telephone booth—staggered, his head still spinning—and found himself forced to sit down abruptly in the dirt. He was weak, he was exhausted, he was losing blood, and he had not slept or taken nourishment in more than two days. But this sudden weakness went beyond the physical. His mind, his entire being, was wounded.

He forced himself to examine his shattered psychological state. What he now felt for Helen—whether or not he still loved her—he did not know. He had believed her dead for twelve years. He had reconciled himself to that. And now she was alive. All he knew for certain was that if he had not insisted on seeing her again, if he had not bungled their assignation so badly, Helen would still be safe. He had to reverse that failure. He had to rescue her from Der Bund—not only for her preservation, but for his own. Otherwise…

He did not let himself think about the otherwise. Instead—summoning every last reserve of strength—he rose to his feet. He had to get to Cananea, one way or another.

He limped toward the parking lot of the airfield, bathed in sodium lights. A single car was parked there: an old tan Eldorado. No doubt owned by the airport administrator.

It appeared the man would be doing him another favor.