Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Well,” she said, looking at it, “it is beautiful.” She decided she’d think about it.

As he walked away to join his wives, Red looked back: well, well, well, wasn’t that just a smile on the face of dour Ms. Amy?

Someone touched his arm.

“Mr. Bama?”

“Yes, what is it, Ralph?”

“Telephone.”

“Ralph, I’m with my family now. It can wait.”

“Mr. Bama, it’s Washington. They say it’s urgent.”

I don’t suppose nobody’s hunting us now,” said Bob. “Let’s get some goddamned breakfast.”

They pulled over at a Denny’s on 271 just south of Fort Smith and went in. It was about eleven now. All the ejected shells had been picked up, the Mini-14 had been dumped in a deep and remote part of the black Arkansas River and they were an hour north of the Ouachitas. The bodies would be found when they would be found: maybe in days, maybe in months, maybe in years.

Russ was going on sheer adrenaline. He was out of the shock and numbness, which had been replaced by a burst of manic energy.

“I feel great!” he proclaimed. “Denny’s! God, I never thought I’d ever be so glad to see a place in my life! I could eat a horse.”

They ordered two big, solid breakfasts and reduced them to crumbs and grease slick. For Russ, life after a night as tense and dramatic as the one he’d just survived seemed especially poignant with meaning and sensation.

He turned to Bob.

“Twice you saved my life. You stopped us from getting sniped; you hit Peck in the head. Unbelievable shooting! My God, I thought my father was a good shot. That was unbelievable!”

“Shhh,” said Bob. “Just relax. You’ve still got a gallon of adrenaline in you. In an hour, it’ll dump and you’ll feel like shit. We got to get you some sleep. And get them abrasions fixed. Russ, just for the hell of it, let me tell you this: you did good. Okay? Lots of people would have lost their heads out there. You did real good. Your old man would be proud of you, okay?”

Russ said nothing.

“Well, anyway,” said Bob. “Next move? Before your adrenaline dumps, and you whack out on me, give me the next move.”

“You’re the genius.”

“Okay,” said Bob, “we beat the man again. We got to find the man now and bring the fight to him.”

“Who’s the man?”

“Hell if I know. I know he’s there. I just don’t know who the hell he is. Any idea?”

“No. The only people who could tell us are turning to fertilizer in the forest. We have nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Best bet,” said Russ. “Go back to Fort Smith. We have a few days when he thinks we’re out of it, when he thinks he’s won. We go back to the paper: I can get in and spend a day in the morgue. I can investigate the Fort Smith of 1955, where all this began. Maybe somehow I can—”

But Bob wasn’t really listening.

“What’s going on?” Russ wanted to know.

“We do have a prisoner,” said Bob.

He held up Duane Peck’s flip phone.

“And I think I know how to make him talk,” he added.

They found what they needed in the Central Mall, off Rogers Avenue, a dark cathedral to consumerism. One of the hushed devotional niches in the long corridor was dedicated to cellular phones, pagers, faxes and other new-age information technology. They entered and in a second Bob had selected the wannest and palest of the young men there to chat with, soon snaring him in fatherly power and sheer Marine Corps sergeant charisma.

“Now, see, here’s our problem,” said Bob. “We were hunting in the woods, and we come across this here phone. Now I’m thinking, some important man needs this phone. I’d sure like to know how to return it to him. You have any ideas there, young man?”

The boy took the phone and examined it: a Motorola NC-50, the very latest and most expensive thing.

“Have you tried autodial?” asked the young man.

“No, and I haven’t tried that redial either. Now, if I tapped that redial button, wouldn’t that connect me with his last phone call?”

“It would,” said the young man. “Why don’t you just call and see what you get?”

“Hmmm,” said Bob, “that would work, wouldn’t it? Let me ask you another thing. You been working around phones long?”

“Ah, a couple of years,” said the boy. “I’m sort of into phones. Very interesting stuff.”

“Know what?” said Bob, squinting up his eyes as if he’d just come up with a hell of an idea. “Bet if I hit redial and you listened to them tones as the number played out, you could read them for us, couldn’t you? You know the numerical values of the tones, right?”

The boy looked a little uncomfortable.

“I think that’s against the law,” he said.

“Is it?” said Bob. “Damn, I didn’t realize that.”

“It’s just to return the phone, right?” said the boy.

“Yes, indeed. We definitely want to return the phone to its rightful owner.”

The boy took the phone, held it close to his ear and pushed Redial.

The phone issued a bleat of beep music, a chatter of robot tones. Before the call could connect, he broke it off.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s an 800 number. Let me try again and concentrate on the last seven numbers.”

He hit it again.

“I get 045-1643. Let me try it again.”

The beeps poured out.

“That’s it. 1-800-045-1643.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Ah—nothing. I never heard of an 045 exchange. I never heard of an exchange beginning with a zero. It’s not from around here. I never heard of that exchange.”

“Do you have a CD phone disk?” asked Russ.

The boy nodded his head, really into it by now.

“Let’s see what we get,” he said.

This took a bit of time, but in a minute or so, at a computer terminal the young man had a phone-finder running on CD-ROM and quickly learned that the 045 exchange was wholly unlisted anywhere in the United States.

“What would that mean?” said Bob.

“Well, these disks have a lot of unlisted numbers on them, but ever since deregulation, private exchanges, private companies, private information networks have sprung up all over the place, only lightly monitored by the FCC. My guess is this is somebody’s most private line, not immediately accessible to the public or maybe even to the government. It’s just a very, very private number. I still say: just call it.”

“Well, for now, we don’t want to do that. Listen, thanks so much.”

“Sure, not a problem.”

They left the mall.

“It was too much to hope,” said Russ. “He wouldn’t have been so sloppy as to leave something at risk that would point the finger straight at him.”

“Damn,” said Bob. “What else do we know about this bird?”

“Well, he must be rich, powerful and connected. If he was able to get Jed Posey paroled, if he was able to put together a team of hotshots, if he was able to get Jack Preece on the job, he’s got a lot of clout. He—he has an airplane!”

Russ wasn’t sure where that popped out of; it just issued from his deep subconscious.

“He has an airplane,” said Bob. “Presumably from around here. Now, if he’s in the air the day of the big shootout, didn’t he file a flight plan?”

“Yes, he’d have to.”

“That’s a public document, isn’t it?”

“Uh, I think,” said Russ.

“Now, whyn’t we go out to the airport and see if there’s someway we can get into the FAA records for that day. Maybe on that flight plan, he’s got to list a phone number. Maybe it’s this one or close to it?”

“Goddamn,” said Russ.

“Goddamn yourself, Russ. He has an airplane. You’re a goddamned genius.”