Two Graves by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Read Free Book Online Page A

shoulder, several hundred feet in the air, another light slowly became visible: an approaching plane. It resolved into a set of running and warning lights. A minute later, a Learjet 60 hurtled past some twenty feet over Pendergast’s head, its reverse thrusters screaming as it prepared to land, the wake turbulence of the jet’s passing hurling up a violent cloud of dust.
    Pendergast took no notice.
    He had searched the body of the jogger, which had come to rest hidden in the tall grass at the end of the runway. Nothing. There had been a flurry of activity on the airfield triggered by his bashing down of the gate. The police had come, searched the area, impounded the Mercedes, and gone. They had found neither him nor the body.
    Now everything had returned to normal; all was quiet. He rose and, keeping well within the darkness of the grass, circled the airstrip to an ancient pay phone at the gas station on the airfield road, which—miraculously—worked. He put in a call to D’Agosta.
    “Where are you?” came the voice from New York.
    “Not important. Put out an APB on a Cessna 133 single-engineplane, call letters November-eight-seven-niner-foxtrot-Charlie. It was heading into Mexico with a flight plan for Cancun, but it will be forced to land within a—” he thought a moment—“two-hundred-mile radius of Fort Lauderdale, due to a slow leak in the fuel line.”
    “How do you know it has a leak?”
    “Because I introduced it. A hollow plastic tube, wedged into the fuel sump. There’s nothing they can do in the cockpit to reverse it.”
    “You’ve got to tell me what the hell’s going on—”
    “Call me back at this number when you get a hit.”
    “Wait, Pendergast, Jesus—”
    Pendergast hung up. He left the lighted area of the phone booth, retreating to the darkness of a vacant lot overgrown with palmettos. He lay down on the ground—the loss of blood had made him weaker—and there he waited.
    Thirty minutes later he heard the phone ring. He got up, made it to the booth, his head spinning. “Yes?”
    “We got a hit on that APB. The plane landed maybe ten minutes ago at a tiny strip outside Andalusia, Alabama. Tore up the landing gear, too.”
    “Go on.”
    “They must have called ahead, because a van was waiting. There was only one person on the field, a guy drinking coffee in the hangar. He saw a bunch of people bundle into the van, then they hauled ass, heading in the direction of the—” a pause—“Conecuh National Forest. Ditched the plane, left it right there on the runway.”
    “Did the onlooker get the plates of the van?”
    “Nah. It was dark.”
    “Alert the Alabama Highway Patrol. And put out an APB at all the border crossings—they’re headed into Mexico. I’ll call you later. My cellular phone is out of commission.”
    A reluctant pause. “You got it.”
    “Thank you.” Pendergast hung up.
    He sat perhaps another ten minutes, still motionless, in the humid darkness. Then he dialed another number.
    “Yo,” came the high, breathy voice of Mime, the reclusive hackerof questionable ethics whose only contact with the outside world was Pendergast himself.
    “Anything?”
    “Dunno. It’s not much. I was hoping to get more before I called you…” His high voice paused dramatically, teasingly.
    “I have no time for games, Mime.”
    “Right,” said Mime hastily. “I’ve been listening in on the electronic eavesdropping of our friends in Fort Meade—monitoring the monitors, you might say.” He chuckled. “And they
do
scrutinize domestic calls and e-mails, you know, despite protests to the contrary. I isolated a piece of cell phone chatter that I think is from this group you call
Der Bund
.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Impossible to be one hundred percent sure, my man. The transmissions are encrypted, and all I was able to figure out was that they’re in German. Cracked a few proper nouns here and there. According to the government’s triangulation of the cell signal,