“Don’t do that. Don’t do that,” I said, as urgently as I could.

“Fuck you. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

He was gone.

I CALLED John. “I just got a phone call from James Carp. He’s there in Longstreet and he says he’s got Rachel. Have you seen her?”

“Rachel?” He was sputtering like I had. “Rachel? She just left here half an hour ago, walking down to the library.”

“I talked to a little girl, just for a moment. Sounded like Rachel. She said he got her on the way to the library, goddamnit, John, I think he got her, you gotta check.”

“Call you back,” he rasped, and he was gone.

I HAD passed Cleveland on I-80. As soon as John was off the phone, I turned around and headed back, my laptop propped against the steering wheel. I pulled up Microsoft’s Streets and Trips program. Cleveland International was on my side of the metro area, fortunately, and I was able to take I-480 right back in. As soon as I figured out where I was going, I called directory assistance and got phone numbers for four charter air services. I was probably sixteen hours from Longstreet by road, close to a thousand miles. But maybe I could get a plane into Greenville.

The first place I called at Cleveland International was basically an air ambulance service. The woman who answered the phone recommended another service, whose number I didn’t have, but who she said was most likely to have a plane free quickly.

I called, and got a man’s quiet voice. “Rogers Air Transport.”

“I need to get a plane to Greenville, Mississippi, in the next couple of hours,” I said, and my voice reflected it. “Do you have one, or do you know where I could get one?”

“What do you want, exactly?”

“To get down there as fast as I can. I’ve got a family emergency.”

“Well, uh, I can get you a Lear into Greenville, have you down there in a couple of hours or a little more. But, uh, it won’t be cheap.”

“How much?”

“Mm, I’d have to figure it.” There was a moment of silence, and I had the feeling that he was staring at the ceiling, rather than running an accounting program. He came back. “About forty-five hundred. That’s if I don’t have to hang around down there.” He sounded apologetic.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “I’m on the way to your place now. I’m maybe thirty or forty miles out. You won’t have to hang around, I’ll fly back commercial to pick up my car.”

“About payment, uh, we require-”

“You can have it any way you want it,” I said. “Cash, check, or credit card.”

“Cash would be fine.”

ROGERS Air Transport had its worldwide headquarters in a cream-colored metal pole barn that served as both hangar and office. I parked in front, dug my stash cash out of the trunk, got one bag with clothes and another that had all three laptops, and carried them around to the office, which smelled pleasantly of aviation gas and hot oil, and was empty.

“Hello?” I called. Nothing. A side door led out of the office, and I stuck my head out and saw a redheaded man walking toward me. He wore denim overalls and a train engineer’s hat, and was wiping his hands on a rag. “Mr. Kidd?” he asked cheerfully.

“Yes.”

“I’m Jim Rogers.” He stuck out a hand and I shook it. “We’re ready if you are.”

“My car’s outside.”

“It’ll be okay there until you can get back. I hope it’s nothing terrible down in Greenville.”

“It’s bad enough,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to avoid saying something. “My dad’s had a heart attack. They’re gonna try to fix things, but nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

“Aw, too bad,” he said. A woman came around the corner, mid-thirties with smile lines around her eyes, a good tan, a ponytail, and a flight suit.

“This is Marcia, our co-pilot,” Rogers said.

“I’m his old lady,” Marcia said. “You ready?”

Jim’s eyes sort of drifted-I had the feeling he wasn’t the most dynamic of executives, though he might have been a hell of a guy-and I said, “Oh, yeah, better give you this,” and handed him forty-five hundred from my stash cash. He took it and nodded, not asking the obvious question, which I answered anyway. “I was up here buying pottery,” I said. “Lucky for me, a lot of those places only take cash.”

“Lucky,” he agreed.

JIM ROGERS was a garrulous guy, and his wife smiled a lot and nodded at him. They took turns flying the plane, and Rogers talked us down to Greenville. Airplane stories, mostly-he’d been a bush pilot in Ontario for a few years. That was fine with me: I nodded and told him a couple of Ontario fly-fishing stories, and no real information was exchanged. I called John on his cell phone as we were passing near Louisville, and he told me that nobody could find Rachel.

“Sounds bad,” I said, without thinking. Jim and Marcia glanced at each other, misinterpreting it.

“Get your ass down here,” John said.

“I’ll be in Greenville in a little more than two hours,” I said.

When I rang off, Marcia said, “More trouble.”

“Pretty tense situation,” I said.

“Gotta pray for the best.”

John was waiting when we got there. He grabbed my bag with his good arm and started off to his car, while I shook hands with Jim and Marcia; I think they thought John was my faithful retainer, me being white, John being black, and all of us being in Greenville.

John and I were on our way to Longstreet by 3:30. John was as grim as I’d ever seen him. “He’s a crazy man,” he said. And, quietly nuts himself, “I’m gonna kill him.”

Chapter Nineteen

WE PULLED INTO LONGSTREET after six, still bright daylight, and brutally hot. People tended to stay off the streets with these temperatures, and the downtown strip had that cheap-science-fiction-movie vacancy, the emptiness that makes you think the residents are off having their brains eaten by aliens. Two yellow dogs, sitting in the awning shade in front of the Hardware Hank, were doing nothing but staying alive.

Marvel had been roaming the town in her car, methodically, street by street, looking for Rachel and for Carp’s red Corolla. She found neither. John called her when we were a mile out of town and she pulled into their short driveway just a few seconds ahead of us.

Marvel watched us park, and when I got out of the car she stepped over to me, looked up, and asked, “What’s going on, Kidd? What’d you do?”

“It’s all part of the same thing that got Bobby killed and John shot,” I said. “Bobby’s goddamn laptop turns out to be worth its weight in plutonium, and Carp’s crazy to get it.”

“Then give it to him,” she said. “Get Rachel back.”

“We’re gonna get Rachel,” John said from behind her. “We’re gonna get her, one way or another.”

Marvel almost got launched again, spinning around. “You, Mr. Shot-in-the-Arm bigshot spook secret agent-”

“Shut up,” he said, and walked into the house. Marvel’s mouth snapped shut, and a moment later tears started. I’d never seen John speak to her in anything like the tone, even without the words. She hurried after him and I stood in the yard with my bag full of computers, feeling like the world’s leading asshole for just being a part of it.

THEY didn’t take long to make up, and spent the next hour taking care of each other-which didn’t prevent some hard talk. “Call the cops,” Marvel was saying. “We’ve got four guys down there at the police station that we can count on. We get them going…”

But John was shaking his head. “Don’t you see? It’s all tangled together. We can’t tell anyone anything, or it unrolls. The next thing we know, we’ve got wall-to-wall feds in the front room. We can get her back, but we have to do it.”