John Sandford - Heat Lightning

“Thanks. I’ll leave a twenty for the gas, if that’s enough,” Virgil said.

“That’s good-just stick it back up there with the key.”

DAVENPORT ’S FRIEND lived in a rambling cedar-shake and stone house down a long single-lane road on a bluff above the St. Croix River. Virgil left the 4Runner in the driveway, walked around back, found the key, and carried three rods and his emergency tackle box down eighty steps to the beach and a dock. The boat had a dried-on foam line that suggested it hadn’t been out for a while. He stripped off the canvas cover, snapped it under the bungee cord on the dock, dropped the motor, and fired it up.

No problem. One minute later, he was a half mile down the river. Glanced at his watch: just three o’clock. He’d been up since five, but still, the day seemed like it was rolling on forever.

The high Wisconsin bluffs on the St. Croix are such a dark green that in bright afternoon sunlight, they seem almost black. Virgil puttered through the Narrows, then hooked around behind the sandbars in back. With the sun hot on his shoulder blades, he set up a drift, faced into the east bank of the river, started dropping a lure a hand span from the bank, yanking it back in a quick retrieve.

And he thought:

Give me an anomaly that I can hang my hat on. There’s got to be one back there somewhere. Something that can’t be easily explained…

He thought about Sinclair, and the two Vietnamese, Tai and Phem-but the fact was, Virgil had gone looking for clues at a place that dealt largely with veterans who’d had problems in Vietnam, where he’d encountered a man who’d spent his life dealing with Vietnam and the Vietnamese. What did he expect, Latvians?

They were persons of interest, but at least temporarily opaque.

He worked through the sequence from his first moments at Utecht’s death scene, through the drive out to look at Sanderson, to Wigge, to Bunton, to…

Bunton. The thing about Bunton was, how did they find him? How did they find him that quickly? He could understand that somebody might find Carl Knox. With sufficient insight into how public records and computers worked, it was simply a matter of pounding paper… or electrons, or whatever it was that lived inside of computers.

But Bunton was out in the woods. How did they even know that he was there? They probably got his name from Wigge or Utecht- Sanderson had been dead too quick to give up anything-but how did they come to Bunton’s mother’s house, which wasn’t even in the phone book?

HE HOOKED INTO a smallmouth, a fifteen-inch bronze-backed fish that fought like a junkyard dog against the small tackle. He lifted it out of the water, unhooked it, slipped it back in.

Hooked another, slipped it back.

Worked his way through the sandbars and shallows and into deeper water, threw a few bucktails, looking for a musky, saw nothing but black water. A cigarette-like boat powered past at sixty miles an hour, rocking him, rolling him.

He was a mile south of the Narrows, sitting behind the wheel of the boat, drifting, letting the sound of the river carry him along, when a small niggling thought crept into his head.

He tried to ignore it and failed. Looked at the sun: the sun was still high, fishing would get nothing but better as evening came on. Still…

Goddamnit.

One last cast, nothing-you never catch anything on the last cast-and he reeled in, fired up the motor, and was moving, and moving fast. The Narrows was a no-wake zone, with a half-dozen beached cruisers taking in the afternoon sun, and people screamed at him as he went through at forty-two miles an hour, which was all he could squeeze out of the Lund.

At the dock, he took care to tie up and cinch the cover down, but then he ran up the steps to the house, put the key and a twenty up in the rafters, hustled around the house to the truck.

And he stopped and looked at it.

The idea was goofy, but there was no driving it out of his head, and it made him sick. He walked away from the truck and called the BCA duty officer.

“I’ve got a question for you.”

FIVE O’CLOCK.

They worked silently through the truck in the BCA garage. One guy changed the oil and hummed to himself, while the other guy worked it over with a bunch of electronic gear, then snapped his fingers at Virgil and pointed outside.

“You got a microphone in there somewhere, and there’s a wire splice going up to your GPS antenna off your navigation screen-it’s probably broadcasting your location, like one of those LoJack things.”

“You can hear it broadcasting?” Virgil asked.

His heart was going like a trip-hammer, the anger surging into his throat. He’d given away Bunton. He’d been chumped.

“No, but it might be broadcasting on demand,” the tech said. “Or it might be broadcasting on a schedule, every half hour. That’s no problem with the new gear. Anyway, you definitely have a microphone in there. I could find it if you want me to, but it might let them know that we’re looking for it.”

“You think it’s a voice recorder?” Virgil asked.

“For sure. If it was just sending out the GPS, they wouldn’t need a microphone. What it probably is is a voice-activated microphone, hooked up to a digital recorder. Every little while, or maybe once an hour, it uploads whatever it’s recorded. They could do that with a cell-phone connection. Anything you said on a cell phone or a radio, they’d know about. They wouldn’t know what was coming from the other end, unless it was coming through a loudspeaker… but they’d hear you.”

“How big would the package be? The bug?” Virgil asked.

“Depends on the power supply. They either have to have a pretty good battery or they’ve tied into your twelve-volt system,” the tech said. “If they tied into the car, it could be pretty small. Maybe… twice the size of a cell phone.”

“Get a flashlight and see if you can spot it. They’d have to put it in pretty quick. I’d just like to see if it’s Motorola, or Ho Chi Minh Radio Works.”

The tech found the package after five minutes of looking; it was jammed under the front-left turn signal, taking power out of the lines coming into the light.

“No telling where it’s from,” the tech said when they were outside again. “But it’s sophisticated. You saw how small it was-that’s way smaller than our stuff, and our stuff is pretty good.”

“Could be Vietnamese?”

“Don’t have to go that far,” the tech said. “Could be CIA.”

THE CIA: Sinclair.

Or maybe not. Why the hell would the CIA go out to kill a bunch of old-timey vets and general dipshits?

Answer: The CIA wouldn’t. Virgil didn’t even believe that the CIA killed people, not in civilized countries, anyway. Maybe they hired mercenaries in the Middle East, but they really wouldn’t go around killing people on the streets… would they?

His fuckin’ truck.

Burned him.

HE WALKED THROUGH the mostly empty building to his temporary office, shut the door and lay down on the floor behind the desk, closed his eyes.

Sinclair…

He thought about Sinclair: about Sinclair making the phone call from the cold phone to Tai and Phem. Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he have a cold cell phone? You could buy them over the counter…

Christ.

Tai and Phem. Were they working with Sinclair, had Sinclair fingered him somehow? But he’d only talked to Sinclair once, for any amount of time. It’d take testicles the size of basketballs to hook that electronics package into Virgil’s truck, when it was parked almost outside the door. If Virgil had gotten up and walked out at some point, Sinclair wouldn’t have had time to get them out.

They had to do it some other time, but when?