John Gilstrap - Threat warning

The rest of the call lasted all of three minutes.

Gail and Venice sat at the teak table in the War Room, looking like rewarmed corpses. Jonathan hadn’t given them much time to respond to his call-in fact, the order was “Meet me at the War Room right by-God now.”

Gail seemed particularly unprepared. Yesterday’s mascara hung like shadows under her eyes, and whatever she’d tried to do with her hair had only made it worse.

Venice just looked tired. Jonathan wondered how she managed to do all that she did on a daily basis. Professionally, she was his administrative and investigative right hand, while on the personal side, she had an eleven-year-old son to wrangle and a high-strung seventy-something-year-old mother to control. Or maybe it was Mama who needed to be wrangled and Roman who needed to be controlled. Either way, she was forever shoving twenty-eight hours of activity into twenty-four-hour days.

“Do we really know where the Nasbes are now?” Gail asked, settling into her usual chair. “And where’s Boxers?”

“Big Guy will be here when he’s here. We can’t wait for him.” Boxers didn’t appreciate the charms of Fisherman’s Cove, preferring the District of Columbia’s ready access to bars and babes. Without traffic and with a heavy foot, he’d be here in an hour and a half.

“So where are they?” Venice pressed.

“Maddox County,” Jonathan said.

“Maddox County where?”

“Don’t know. A contact at the NSA called a half hour ago with an intercepted nine-one-one call to the Maddox County Sheriff’s Office. Beyond that-”

“Wait,” Gail said. “The NSA recorded a call from inside the U.S.?” She seemed appalled.

“Don’t start,” Jonathan warned. “I already had this discussion with Dudley Do-Right of the National Security Agency.” He held up a tiny flash drive onto which he’d copied the NSA call. “Venice, please work your magic and bring this up on the speaker system.”

Jonathan was an analog man trapped in a digital world. He loved high-tech toys and spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on the best and shiniest gadgets around, but if the toys didn’t guide him where he wanted to go or improve upon the flight path of a bullet, he wasn’t much interested in learning how they worked. Such was the case with the audiovisual technology of the War Room.

It took Venice less than a minute to bring up the audio. As an added touch, she also brought up a picture of the Nasbe family from happier times, all of them gathered around a Christmas tree and smiling out at them from the projection screen on the far wall.

“Maddox County Sheriff’s Office,” a voice said, “Technician Phelps. What is your emergency?” Her voice had the practiced drone of an experienced dispatcher.

Knowing what was coming, Jonathan watched Gail as the young voice choked and identified himself as Ryan Nasbe. Just as he’d expected, her eyes reddened at the sound of stress in the boy’s voice.

“Th-this is Ryan Nasbe. Me and my mom were kidnapped.”

“ Who is this?” the dispatcher asked. Clearly, kidnappings didn’t happen on a regular basis in Maddox County.

“Ryan Nasbe. N-A-S-B-E. I live on Fort Bragg. Well, I used to, but now I live in Mt. Vernon, Virginia, with my Aunt Maggie.”

“You’re calling from Virginia?”

“No. I don’t think so, anyway. I think I’m in West Virginia. That’s the direction we drove after we were kidnapped.”

“Who kidnapped you?”

The kid’s patience evaporated. “How should I know? They’re terrorists.”

A pause. “Young man, if this is a prank, let me assure you that-”

“It’s not a prank!” Ryan yelled. “They kidnapped us in our car after they shot a bunch of people on a bridge. Then they drove us into the middle of nowhere. They’re keeping us in a house in the middle of some kind of camp. They’re lunatics, calling themselves brother this and sister that. They promised to kill us next week.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Two. Me and my mom.”

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s in Afghanistan, I think. He’s Special Forces in the Army.”

A sigh. “Your father is in Special Forces.” The dispatcher spoke disdainfully, clearly doubting his truthfulness.

“If you don’t believe me, you can call down to Fort Bragg and ask. Actually, they probably won’t answer you, but still, it’s true. What difference does any of this make? I need a cop and I need him now.”

“Where are you now?”

“I have no idea. Don’t you know? Don’t you have like caller ID or something?”

The operator fell silent, and the background filled with the sound of muffled voices and some shuffling papers.

The silence lasted long enough for Ryan Nasbe to say, “Are you still there?”

“You said your name is Ryan Nasbe, is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, Ryan, I have your address. You’re at a pay phone, is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I need you to stay exactly where you are. We’ll have someone there in a few minutes.”

“I can’t just wait here. Somebody might drive by and see me.”

“Then step off to the side of the road. Hide in the trees. Our car will turn on the emergency lights, so you’ll know it’s safe to come out. Can you do that for me?”

Ryan’s voice broke. “Yes, ma’am. Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“I’m really scared.”

“I know you are, Ryan. This will be over soon.”

“Please hurry.”

“We’ll get there as fast as we can.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “I’m going to hang up now.”

“Okay, sweetie. This will all be over very soon.”

The line went dead.

Gail’s features folded into a deep scowl. “That’s odd,” she said.

She had Jonathan’s attention.

“Why did she let him hang up like that? She should have kept him on the line, keeping him calm and just keeping track of him in general.”

“He said he was scared,” Jonathan said. “He’s going off to hide in the woods.”

“And that’s kind of odd, too. It would be one thing if the boy had suggested that on his own, and then he hung up on the dispatcher, but this was her idea.”

Jonathan didn’t get what she was driving at. “She wanted him to stay safe, out of sight.”

Gail shrugged. “Well, it’s just different than the way any dispatcher I’ve ever known would handle it.”

“I’ve got something weirder than that,” Venice announced. She’d been typing on her ubiquitous keyboard. “ICIS has nothing on it.”

Gail sat forward in her seat.

Jonathan said, “Isn’t it a little early? The phone call isn’t yet two hours old.”

“ICIS triggers when a call is dispatched,” Gail explained.

Venice closed the loop. “Which means that if there’s no tracking, the call was never put into the system.”

“Maybe instead of dispatching it,” Jonathan said, “the call taker just looked over her shoulder and told some deputy to go pick him up.”

“It’s not about dispatching, Dig,” Gail explained. “It’s about opening the file. Two hours into a missing persons case, there’d be something. There’d have to be.”

“Even for a case that happens in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia?”

Venice started to say yes-he could tell by her body language-but she stopped herself and held up a finger instead. She tapped her computer keys. “There it is,” she said. “Maddox County Sheriff’s Office. Let’s give them a call, shall we?”

Ryan didn’t just hide in the trees, he hid way back in the trees, far enough off the road that he was completely invisible. With all the leaves missing, that meant twenty or thirty yards off the parking lot.