"Lieutenant, have those vehicles checked, top to bottom," Messerling ordered into the phone. "And bring in the drivers."

He waited for an acknowledgment, then hung up. "They'll be here in an hour," he reported.

"Good," Cerreta said. "Let's just hope we can get something out of them."

"Don't worry," Messerling said tightly. "We will."

They had the drivers lined up beside the vans and had frisked them for weapons; and the cops were just readying their handcuffs when all eight men suddenly bolted.

It was, Keely would realize afterward, an exquisitely coordinated move. All he saw in the heat of the moment, though, was the sudden flurry of activity as each driver shrugged off the hands holding him, gut-punched anyone standing too close, and made a mad and clearly futile dash for the clump of trees beside the road.

"Hold your fire!" the lieutenant in charge shouted from the far end of the line. "Grab them!"

The cops were already on the move, surging after them like Coney Island breakers heading for the beach. Keely joined the rush, a small corner of his mind recognizing that the would-be escapees would be run to ground long before he could reach the party, but caught up nevertheless in the mass excitement.

"Where the hell do they think they're going?" Ross huffed from beside him.

"Who knows?" Keely said, wondering if the whole bunch had gone simultaneously insane. There couldn't be more than a couple dozen trees there—he could see straight through the clump to the snow fence and the rocky field behind it, for Pete's sake. Where did they think they were going to hide?

The drivers reached the first line of trees maybe five paces ahead of their pursuers, ducking and veering around the thick trunks like tight ends punching through a swarm of defenders. One of them ducked down, scooped up an armful of dead leaves, and half-turned to hurl them into the air behind him.

Reflexively, Keely winced back, his eyes flicking to the fluttering leaves just long enough to confirm there wasn't anything solid like a grenade or satchel charge flying through the air with them, then turned his attention back downward.

The drivers were gone.

He caught his breath, his feet still thudding across the loose dirt, his brain refusing to acknowledge what his eyes were telling him. In that single instant of inattention, without any fuss, bother, smoke, or mirrors, all eight men had vanished as if swallowed up by the earth itself.

The pack of cops in front of him obviously didn't believe it, either. They charged straight through into the miniature forest, guns ready, heads wagging this way and that as they searched for their quarry. Five seconds later, they ran out the other side, jogging to a confused halt. "What are you waiting for?" the lieutenant shouted, sounding as bewildered as everyone else looked. "Come on, they're there somewhere. Find them. Damn it all, find them!"

Fierenzo held the phone to his ear, the taste of stomach acid in his mouth. "All of them?" he asked.

"All of them," Powell gritted, his voice as angry and troubled and just plain scared as Fierenzo had ever heard it. "Eight grown men, vanished in a clump of trees a rabbit shouldn't have been able to hide in."

"What about the vans?"

"To hell with the vans," Powell snarled. "Up to now I've been willing to play along with this without anything stronger than your personal say-so. But this has gone way beyond partner loyalty."

Fierenzo winced. "Should you be saying this sort of—?"

"Don't worry, I'm in the stairwell," Powell growled. "But I'm serious. You going to tell me what's going on, or do I have to bail?"

Fierenzo gripped the phone tightly, his eyes darting to where Roger sat very still across the coffee shop table. "I can't," he said, keeping his voice steady. "Not yet. I gave my word."

"Something's about to happen to this city, Tommy," Powell reminded him tightly. "If you know anything—anything—you have a sworn duty to report it."

"I've reported as much as I can, Jon," Fierenzo said. "I'm still working on it at my end, just as you are at yours. Trust me a little longer, will you?"

He heard Powell take a deep breath. "We are both going to burn in hell," the other said at last. "All right, a little longer. But that's all. Those soldiers of yours are on their way, and we have no idea when or where or how they're going to hit the city."

"We'll find them," Fierenzo promised, wishing he had even a shred of hope that he could actually do so.

"We'd better," Powell said. "I'll talk to you later."

Fierenzo punched off the phone. "They got away?" Roger asked.

"Of course they got away," Fierenzo bit out. "The idiots let them park their vans right beside a clump of trees."

Roger made a face. "There wasn't anything you could have done."

"Of course there was," Fierenzo snapped back. "I knew what Greens can do. I could have warned them."

"You think they would have believed you?"

"That's irrelevant."

"Hardly," Roger said scornfully. "Lot of good you'd do anyone locked in the psych ward at Bellevue."

"Lot of good I'm doing right now," Fierenzo muttered.

"Melantha's alive and free," Roger reminded him. "That's a pretty fair amount of good right there."

"I suppose," Fierenzo conceded, mentally shaking away the cobwebs. Time to stop feeling sorry for himself and attack this thing logically. "Okay. They've switched vehicles, so we can't shadow them.

If they keep quiet even other Greens can't detect them, so putting Melantha's parents out as spotters won't help. What else have we got?"

"I don't know," Roger said, fiddling with a coffee stirrer. "You suppose the Grays have a way of spotting them at a distance?"

"I doubt it," Fierenzo said. "If they could, they should have nailed Melantha a lot sooner."

"It still wouldn't hurt to run it past Jonah," Roger pointed out, glancing surreptitiously around the coffee shop and lifting his left hand.

"Okay, but just ask him about Green detectors," Fierenzo warned. "Don't tell him why we need to know. Or what was in Caroline's message."

Roger frowned. "You're not going to tell them?"

"Not yet," Fierenzo said. "I don't want anyone else in the picture until we have a plan." But—

"No argument," Fierenzo said, glaring across the table. "I'm not in the mood."

Roger glared back, but nodded. "Fine," he said. Twitching his little finger, he lifted his hand to his cheek.

This was, Smith groused silently to himself as he drove slowly through the streets of Stony Hollow, turning out to be a truly rotten day.

He'd alerted Powell and Cerreta to the existence of the white vans, only to have the drivers of those vans somehow elude thirty cops and escape. He'd located Caroline Whittier, only to get run off the road and lose her. He'd called in the description of the red Ford pickup, including its plate number, only to be told that it hadn't been spotted since it disappeared from Smith's own sight over that hill.

On the other hand, he hadn't officially clocked in for work today down at the Two-Four, and even though Powell had assured him he would take care of it, he suspected his partner Hill would be claiming a big chunk of his hide when he did show his face at the station house again.

And now here he was, driving around in a slightly banged-up car through the modest towns scattered along the highway, looking for God only knew what. It would have been so much handier if the men in the vans had abandoned them somewhere near where they'd picked up their new rides; say, beside a car-rental agency or bus station. But they'd been smart enough not to leave behind any such obvious pointers.

But Caroline Whittier and the old woman she'd been riding with might not have been so clever. If they'd ditched their pickup somewhere around here, and if he could find it, maybe he could figure out what the whole bunch of them were now driving.