Kittridge again. “We can go now, Mr. Kittridge.”
Kittridge glanced at Pastor Don, who was trying not to laugh.
“Okay, Danny,” Kittridge said. “Let’s turn this thing around and find a way out of here.”
12
They’d lost him. How the good Christ had they lost him?
Last they knew, Grey had been driving into Denver. He’d dropped off the screen at that point—the Denver network was a mess—but a day later they’d picked up his signature from a Verizon tower in Aurora. Guilder had asked for another drone to sweep the area, but they’d found nothing; and if Grey had gotten off the interstates, as now seemed likely, and headed into the sparsely populated eastern half of the state, he could travel for miles without leaving a mark.
And no sign at all of the girl. For all intents and purposes, she’d been swallowed by the continent.
With little to do but wait for news from Nelson, Guilder had plenty of time to ponder Grey’s file, including the psychiatric workup from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He wondered what Richards had been thinking, hiring men like this. Human disposables—although that was, Guilder supposed, the point; like the original twelve test subjects, Babcock and Sosa and Morrison and all the creepy rest, the sweeps were no one anybody was ever going to miss.
To wit: Lawrence Alden Grey, born 1970, McAllen, Texas. Mother a homemaker, father a mechanic, both deceased. The father had served three tours in Vietnam as an Army medic, honorably discharged with a bronze star and a purple heart, but it had done the guy in anyway. He’d shot himself in the cab of his truck, leaving Grey, just six years old, to find him. A series of common-law stepfathers followed, one drunk after another by the looks of it, a history of abuse, etc.; by the time Grey was eighteen, he was on his own, working as a roughneck in the oil fields near Odessa, then on rigs in the Gulf. He’d never married, though that was no big shocker; his psychiatric profile was a bag of problems, everything from OCD to depression to traumatic disassociation. In the shrink’s opinion, the guy was basically heterosexual, but with so many hang-ups it didn’t even figure; the boys had been Grey’s way of reliving his own childhood abuse, which his conscious mind had repressed. He’d been arrested twice, the first time for exposure, which he’d pled down to a misdemeanor, the second for aggravated sexual assault. Basically, he’d touched the kid—not exactly a hanging offense, but nothing nice, either. With the first conviction on his sheet the judge had sentenced him to the max, eighteen to twenty-four years, but nobody did the full bid anymore, and he’d been paroled after ninety-seven months.
After that, there wasn’t much of a story. He’d moved back to Dallas, done little bits of work but nothing steady, met with his PO every two weeks to pee in a cup and swear eight ways to Sunday he hadn’t set foot within a hundred yards of a playground or school. His court-ordered regimen of anti-androgens was standard, as was a fresh psychiatric evaluation every six months. By all accounts, Lawrence Grey was a model citizen, at least as far as a chemically neutered child molester could be.
None of which did anything to tell Guilder how the man had survived. Somehow he’d escaped the Chalet; somehow he’d managed to avoid getting himself killed since then. It simply made no sense.
Nelson’s new plan was to retraffic all the cell towers in Kansas and Nebraska, shutting down both states for a period of two hours and trying to isolate the signal from Grey’s chip. Under usual circumstances, this would have required a federal court order, a pile of paperwork ten miles high, and a month’s lead time, but Nelson had used a back channel at Homeland, which had agreed to issue a special executive order under Article 67 of the Domestic Security Act—more commonly known in the intelligence community as the “Do Whatever the Fuck You Want” Act. The chip in Grey’s neck was a low-wattage transmitter at 1432 megahertz; once everything else was cleared out, and assuming Grey passed within a few miles of a tower, they could triangulate his position and retarget a satellite to get a picture.
The shutdown was scheduled for eight A.M. Guilder had come in at six to find Nelson typing away at his terminal. A buzz of music was leaking from the earbuds stuffed in the sides of his