Jack L. Chalker by The Moreau Factor

Author:The Moreau Factor [Factor, The Moreau]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-02-15T01:12:36.618000+00:00

It was almost four a.m. before Phil Strichter from the Washington Bureau arrived in a company car, but I was pretty depressed by then. Oh, they'd gotten to the helicopter fine, and everybody was okay, and after some refitting at a private field near Leonardtown it would be up and running again, maybe in just a couple of days. These days you just popped out the rotor, popped in a new one, and tested it.

Adam, of course, had called in the cops, who knew full well who I was and what the situation was before they ever got there. In fact, Rawls was pissed off I'd identified myself so completely, even though he could understand my nerves. They were hoping that Kelly would lie about me in front of them and give them probable cause to arrest the whole batch. That was why the trooper backup had been called in, and there were other units, both local and state, nearby just in case things got ugly.

Well, what the hell, I was an amateur, although I was learning fast in this business.

Maybe too fast. Maybe I was learning that while I always knew there could be a price to pay for this level of work, it never really occurred to me that it might be paid by somebody else.

On the phone, Adam would only say that it wasn't more than a couple of minutes after I had my own comm link torn from me that Karen was heard to give a soft groan, moan, or exclamation—even after I heard the recordings I had to admit I had no better words—and then her link went dead as well. Unlike mine, her audio link had gone dead at that same moment; after the exclamation there was nothing but static. Even killing her wouldn't have turned it off, but a lucky blow to the midsection might have, or it might have been deactivated with a high magnetic field by somebody who just assumed it was a good thing to do when you caught an intruder. Either way, the operative word was caught.

County police put a small boat out on the river, watching the ship and even monitored it with an infrared camera, but nobody jumped into the river and swam away. Nobody jumped into the river at all, not that night.

Damn it! No woman should ever come near me again! I said to myself over and over. First Kate Marshall, now Karen Reedy.

The fact was, Kate's loss wasn't that big a deal, but Karen . . . Karen was something else. I had grown really fond of the little tiger. She was good at all facets of the job, and if she was a little too nerveless in the field, well, she'd still delivered one hell of a set of visuals before they'd gotten her. By six that morning the initial story was on the nets and in the paper, along with some stills from the goggle cameras that showed both the coloration and the unmistakable face of the missing Dr.

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