Ike had been pacing for an hour before the call from Charlie came through. Ruth thought if he didn’t soon sit down or leave the room she’d clonk him on the head with a rolling pin. She said so.
“I’d worry if I believed for one minute you knew what a rolling pin looked like.”
Ruth had a smart answer on the tip of her tongue when the phone rang. By the time Ike hung up she’d forgotten what she had started to say.
“So, what news from the genius? Has he found our killer?” she asked. She was not about to give up her enmity toward Charlie Garland just yet.
“The message we have been trying to track from the tower has some technical difficulties that only someone like Sam can unravel, it seems.”
“So?”
“So, Sam and her NSA-borrowed software will be arriving tomorrow and she will set up shop here with us. She will have to unscramble the messages to isolate the ones we are after. Then, if we are lucky, we can somehow locate the position of the receiver.”
“I see. I take it the honeymoon is over then? No more romping about in our underwear or other clothes-optional activities?”
“We still have tonight, but right now, I am going stir crazy. How about a walk?”
“A walk? You are not stir crazy. You are just plain crazy. You want to wander around in this area and risk someone sees you and all hell breaks loose? Ike, I’ve been there, done that. You stay put. Look, I’ll even entertain one of those activities we just discussed.” She reached for a button.
“A drive, then. Bewigged and wearing big sunglasses like tourists, and oddly mismatched clothes. Let’s just drive around. Maybe we’ll see someone or something. Ruth, I have been officially dead for about a week and have done nothing to get to the bottom of this. If I don’t at least try, I will save the bad guys the bother and shoot myself. Sitting and waiting for someone else to solve my problem, well that just isn’t me.”
“How about lying down, clothes optional?”
“Tempting as your offer is…Come on, kid, help me out here. Grab your wig, Mrs. Gottlieb, we’re going to look for properties. That’s our cover, let’s work it. Who knows, we might even find a secluded spot in the woods or hills where you can finish the suntan you began before somebody blew up our house.”
“In my red hair wig?”
“Why not? Is that a problem?”
“Parts of me won’t match.”
***
Ike had the car running and sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel when Ruth finally exited the cabin.
“Sorry, in my hurry I started to put the thing on backward. I don’t work as Cousin Itt.”
“What?”
“It’s a reference to a TV show you wouldn’t know anything about. Where to, Sherlock?”
“Charlie said that Karl’s agents believed the transmission is beamed roughly north by northwest. I have drawn it out on this map. He says it is a low-wattage broadcast, which means that during the daytime it will carry maybe ten or fifteen miles before the power will dissipate. That’s a best estimate. I figure it will also spread in a rough triangular way, so, assuming the focus is pretty tight at fifteen miles, it would be fifteen miles across at the point where the power is weakening. That’s this area here.” He pointed at the map on which he’d marked out a triangle with a base and a height of fifteen miles.
“That’s a lot of acreage, Ike. If I remember my geometry correctly the area of a triangle is, base times height. That means we have two hundred and twenty-five square miles to cover. How do you plan to do that?”
“You were a history major, right? So, math and you didn’t get along?”
“What?”
“The formula is one half the base times the height, so that means we are looking at and area of about half that. Whoever said we never use math? Keep Geometry in the basic high school curriculum, is what I say. Now, look at the map. This is all relatively open space. There are only three roads large enough to warrant a blue line. Off from them are a variety of what must be dirt or private roads. We will cruise the main, marked roads and see what we can see.”
“And then?”
“Then, we look for something out of place, something that doesn’t belong.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. An array of antennae, an armored personnel-carrier parked in the front yard, Ronald McDonald noshing at a Burger King. Anything that seems a little or a lot off—unusual.”
“This is Idaho, Ike. Unusual is the norm.”
“Nevertheless, we look and then we wait for Sam to arrive and provide more specificity to the hunt. But this way, we may have a better idea where to go when she does.”
“Roger that. That’s what they say, right? Roger that? Who is Roger? Or is it the euphemism the Brits use in mixed company when they mean the F word?”
“Radio talk. Roger used to mean ‘I understand.’ So an operator responding to directions or something would say, ‘Roger.’ ‘Wilco’ meant will comply. Then they would say either ‘Over,’ which meant they were finished speaking, or ‘Out’ if they were signing off.”
“Fascinating. The things you’ve stuffed into your brain over the years, Ike. So not the Brit meaning?”
“No, but it certainly has possibilities.”
“Roger that.”
They drove for an hour toward the tower, moving south and east along a county road. Periodically they passed an entrance to a ranch or estate and occasionally a cluster of large and recently constructed houses—McMansions, Ike called them—the mark of an entrepreneurial response to the celebrity chic attached to the area. They turned about a half mile short of the tower and were headed back, northwest, along a different secondary road when Ike pulled to the side and stopped.
“Why are you stopping? If this is about me taking in the sun, forget it. It is too cold in the first palace and there is no way I am joining a herd of…whatever they are…grazing in the field.”
“Angus, and no that is not why I stopped. Did you notice the sign at the entrance to one of the ranches back about a half mile?”
“Which one? Ike, we’ve passed dozens of them.”
“Yeah, I know, but this one didn’t seem right.”
“How, not right?”
“Well most of the entrances are pretty much the same. Fence and an entrance, some elaborate, some not so much, but almost all had tall upright posts with a crossbeam and the name of the ranch burned into or painted on it. Most of them were at least twelve feet, some a few feet higher. That is the clearance you need to safely accommodate the height of most trucks and a trailer behind a big rig.”
“And?”
“The one I’m talking about had to be at least two to three feet higher, maybe more. Why would they do that?”
“Too lazy to saw off the uprights? Bragging? Little man has big uprights? I don’t know, Ike. What’s the difference?”
“I’m not sure. It’s just one of those unexpected, out of place things I talked about. Not extraordinary, but a little off, that’s all. Also, did you see the name on the crossbeam?”
“I gave up noticing those when I saw ‘Dunrovin’ and then ‘KT’ and the word ‘Dor’ with a bar over it. Cute but clearly not working ranches.”
“The one I’m talking about read ‘New’ and had a big star next to it. I don’t know why, but it triggered something in my memory. I can’t figure out what.”
“New Star Ranch? Probably a movie actor who just had his first hit or maybe an Oscar nomination. We could look it up.”
“You’re probably right, but why did it stir something in my memory bank? I don’t follow movie actors born after nineteen fifty-five.”
“Your loss. Moving on.”
Ike stepped on the accelerator. “We’ll go back and take a picture of it first. Then we can stop for lunch somewhere.”
“In this wasteland? I didn’t see any place to eat unless you plan on shooting one of those Anguses and frying us up some steaks. I’m all for it if you can get it done in the next half hour.”
“I ain’t rustling no cattle today, pardner. They hang varmits like that in these here parts. Besides, the GPS shows a restaurant about two miles this way.”
“Roger that. Speaking of Rogers, were you trying to be Roy or Ginger just now? You need to work on your delivery.”
“Gabby Hayes.”
“Who? That’s right, no stars born after fifty-five or did you say thirty-five? Honestly, Ike, join us in this century. So, lunch from the chuck wagon it is. Do you think they serve Kosher, Gottlieb?”
“Pictures, then we chow down. Is anguses even a word?”
“You want me to work out the declension for the cows? Anga, Angus, Angi, Angae….”