end of the line.” Trevor, she thought, you keep climbing higher and higher on the assumption tree, and each branch is thinner than the last.
But what else was there, now that the kid was gone? If she had to use the Zero Phone, she would be told they should have been prepared for something like this. It was easy to say, but how could anyone have foreseen a twelve-year-old child desperate enough to saw off his own earlobe to get rid of the tracker? Or a housekeeper willing to aid and abet him? Next she would be told the Institute staff had gotten lazy and complacent . . . and what would she say to that?
“—the line.”
She came back to the here and now, and asked him to repeat.
“I said he won’t necessarily ride it to the end of the line. A kid as smart as this one will know we’d put people there, if we figured out the train part. I don’t think he’ll want to get off in any metro area, either. Especially not in Richmond, a strange city in the middle of the night. Wilmington’s possible—it’s smaller, and it’ll be daylight when 9956 gets there—but I’m leaning toward one of the whistlestops. I think either DuPray, South Carolina, or Brunswick, Georgia. Assuming he’s on that train at all.”
“He might not even know where it was going once it left Sturbridge. In which case he might ride it all the way.”
“If he’s in with a bunch of tagged freight, he knows.”
Mrs. Sigsby realized it had been years since she had been this afraid. Maybe she had never been this afraid. Were they assuming or just guessing? And if the latter, was it likely they could make this many good ones in a row? But it was all they had, so she nodded. “If he gets off at one of the smaller stops, we could send an extraction team to take him back. God, Trevor, that would be ideal.”
“Two teams. Opal and Ruby Red. Ruby’s the same team that brought him in. That would have a nice roundness, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Sigsby sighed. “I wish we could be positive he got on that train.”
“I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure, and that’ll have to do.” Stackhouse gave her a smile. “Get on the phone. Wake some people up. Start with Richmond. Nationwide we must pay these guys and gals what, a million a year? Let’s make some of them earn their money.”
Thirty minutes later, Mrs. Sigsby set the phone back into its cradle. “If he’s in Sturbridge, he must be hiding in a culvert or an abandoned house or something—the police don’t have him, there’d be something about it on their scanners if they did. We’ll have people in both Richmond and Wilmington with eyes on that train when it’s there, and they’ve got a good cover story.”
“I heard. Nicely done, Julia.”
She lifted a weary hand to acknowledge this. “Sighting earns a substantial bonus, and there will be an even more substantial bonus—more like a windfall—if our people should see a chance to grab the boy and take him to a safe house for pickup. Not likely in Richmond, both of our people there are just John Q. Citizens, but one of the guys in Wilmington is a cop. Pray that it happens there.”
“What about DuPray and Brunswick?”
“We’ll have two people watching in Brunswick, the pastor of a nearby Methodist church and his wife. Only one in DuPray, but the guy actually lives there. He owns the town’s only motel.”
20
Luke was in the immersion tank again. Zeke was holding him down, and the Stasi Lights were swirling in front of him. They were also inside his head, which was ten times worse. He was going to drown looking at them.
At first he thought the screaming he heard when he flailed his way back to consciousness was coming from him, and wondered how he could possibly make such an ungodly racket underwater. Then he remembered that he was in a boxcar, the boxcar was part of a moving train, and it was slowing down fast. The screeching was steel wheels on steel rails.
The colored dots remained for a moment or two, then faded. The boxcar was pitch black. He tried to stretch his cramped muscles and discovered he was hemmed in. Three or four of the outboard motor cartons had fallen over. He wanted to believe he’d done that thrashing around in his nightmare, but he thought he might have