DONNA STOOD AT THE FIELD ENTRANCE in the Rose Bowl Monday afternoon, her stomach bunched in knots, thinking that she’d gone over the edge on this one. Flat off a cliff.
She was a journalist, she kept reminding herself. She lived for stories like this one. The operative word there being lived. She wasn’t sure she was ready to die for a story like this—or any story, for that matter.
She’d chosen the Rose Bowl for two reasons. Actually three. One, she knew the head of maintenance, Bob Sardoni, who had agreed to let her use the huge stadium for this test of hers, seeing as how it wasn’t booked tonight. Which led to the second reason: the test, a loose term at best. Bill stood hidden in the announcer’s booth a hundred yards off, armed with the highest-power zoom lens the studio had. He’d fixed three long-range directional mikes to the nearby seats on three different sides, triangulated on her position. His receiver could supposedly pick up a whisper from anywhere within twenty feet of where she stood. From his one remote uplink Bill could feed the world with as much footage as she could bluff her way into. It was a state-of-the-art setup that Bill insisted was smoother than goat cheese.
And the third reason? The third reason was more of a hunch. Just in case this thing got big in a hurry.
The protests downtown had swelled to over three thousand marchers and they weren’t going away. They’d taken on a life of their own. The manhunt for Caleb had escalated as the hours slipped by, broadening to Nevada, Oregon, and Mexico. Well over a thousand officers were sweeping the huge region. The suggestion that Jason had almost assuredly ditched the white Bronco in favor of another vehicle only diluted resources further. It was nonstop coverage on all the stations now, and it had taken every professional trick she knew to keep her knowledge from spilling out. When it was all said and done, she might face legal action for allowing their mad search to continue while she knew the boy’s location, but it was something she would have to live with. For the country’s sake as well as hers, if Jason was right.
She glanced at her watch. Four-fifty. Crandal was due in ten minutes and Jason still wasn’t here. “Check. You read me, Bill? If you read, flash me.”
A white strobe ignited from behind the dimmed announcer’s glass at the other end of the field.
“Okay, remember, I want you to start filming the second Crandal arrives. Just film and send. Mitchell will decide whether or not to broadcast, but keep the shots clean. If this is good, we’ve got all the majors lined up to pick up the feed.”
The strobe flashed twice. “A-OK.”
One hundred two thousand seats sat empty, staring down at the green grass. Football uprights stood bare and alone at each end of the field. The lights were burning already, a favor for which she would pay dearly later. Behind her the north tunnel gaped to deep shadows. She was very much alone, and the thought made her swallow.
A door slammed and she spun around. Jason?!
“Jason! Thank God! You’re here!”
He strode out, grinning from ear to ear, with Leiah on one side, black hair lifting in the breeze, and Caleb trotting on the other side.
“I said I’d be here. Thank God you’re here.” He ushered both Leiah and Caleb by the shoulders and looked around the stadium. “You actually did it.”
“Believe me, it took some doing.” She glanced at her watch again. “We have about five minutes before Crandal shows, assuming he shows.”
“So he agreed.”
“I’m not sure he had a choice.” She pulled the rolled parchment from the pocket of her suit. “Here it is.” She handed it to Jason and motioned to a door under the bleachers. “I want you to wait behind that door, out of sight. And I want the boy to come out with the confession when I say. You’ll be able to watch us through the cracks.”
He glanced at the Amharic text and handed it to Caleb, who read it quickly.
“A bit theatrical, don’t you think?” That grin still hadn’t left his face, and Donna thought it a bit strange. There was a quality different about him. He wasn’t striking her as the kind of person who’d just spent a day on the bad end of a massive manhunt. His blue eyes moved quickly with strung nerves, but otherwise he seemed unusually calm.
“I put my career on the line in exchange for this show. I direct the show; that was the deal. Without Caleb, there’s no show; you know that.”
“We were followed here,” Jason said.
“You’re serious? By whom?” She looked around at the seats.
“Don’t know. Maybe just a hiker who saw the Bronco. I think we lost them on the freeway. You got the camera magic ready?”
“You’re being shot as we speak. If we pull this off, our faces will be simulcast on all the major networks. They’ve guaranteed open feeds. Five minutes with live footage of Caleb, and I promise the world will tune in. Nothing like this has been done, but then the world has never been so interested in one person before, at least in our day. The audience could top at two hundred million people, so put on your best smile.” She looked down at the boy. “Does Caleb still have his power?”
Jason grinned wide. “I guess. More or less.”
Donna looked at Leiah, who stood quiet, surprisingly at ease. There was something very different about her. A glow to her cheeks. Something else Donna couldn’t place. New makeup or hair, maybe.
“You should go. If we have a show, it starts in three minutes.”
“Thank you, Donna,” Jason said. He reached forward and touched her shoulder as if he were her father or something. “Thank you for believing.”
“You just make sure we turn some heads,” she said with a grin.
“If they could see what I’ve seen, I guarantee you their heads would be spinning,” he said.
They turned and walked toward a side entrance that led under the seats. They were already stepping past the door when it dawned on her what was different about Leiah. It was her skin!
Her scars were gone!
The flight had been an impossible ordeal. They were both in crisis-management overdrive, but there was very little to manage. Crandal had climbed back into his professional skin and begun his methodical consideration of alternatives and contingencies, almost as though they were discussing a third party rather than him. For a few minutes there, flying at thirty thousand feet above it all, Roberts actually enjoyed himself. Their exchange came like the old days, when they faced each day with the absolute persuasion that the only thing that might tamper with their invincibility was a lapse in reason. Stupidity in the vernacular.
But today, reason wasn’t offering any solutions, and as the flight droned on, their conversation became more sporadic. As long as there existed a piece of paper from Ethiopia bearing the confession of a captain fingering Crandal as the mastermind behind a plan that resulted in the knowing slaughter of thousands, there were no contingencies that offered relief. They could twist arms; they could pull in favors; they could deny until they were blue in the face. But if the confession surfaced it would be the end, at the very least the political end. How a captain under Colonel Ambozia had come into the details of the operation in the first place was another matter. Ambozia had to be silenced; that much was now evident. They should have done it long ago.
And they should have killed the kid day one.
They should have, but they hadn’t, and now they had to kill them all in the next twelve hours. Crandal insisted it with a trembling jowl.
They’d left the entourage in D.C. under the understanding that they were flying to L.A. for a private policy meeting and would be back in the morning. Roberts had rented the Grand Am and wheeled it up to the back entrance of the large stadium.
“I talk,” Crandal said, patting his face with a napkin. “Our only purpose here is to get the document. This is strictly political. She owes us a favor; we call in that favor and promise her the world, that’s all. Your only purpose in there is to make sure we’re isolated.”
“She agreed to come clean,” Roberts said. “I walk around her first. If there’s an electronic device within twenty feet of her, I’ll know. You get my signal to back off, then you back off.”
“We can’t leave without the confession.”
“We won’t.”
They exchanged a glance and Crandal nodded. They stepped from the car, straightened their jackets, and walked toward the back door.
Banks had lost them at the intersection of the 5 and the 210 freeways, courtesy of some lamebrain idiot in an old Cadillac who insisted on sitting in the on-ramp merge lane with her turn signal blinking, waiting for traffic to clear—an absurd expectation during the rush hour. No amount of his furious cursing or honking budged her. He’d finally taken to the grass and roared by her, but by then the white Bronco was gone.
They were heading east. He assumed Pasadena—Jason’s home.
Banks had driven to Hollister Drive, parked down the street, and searched the house. But the Bronco wasn’t there. He returned to his car with nerves wound tight enough to set off a quiver in his bones. He couldn’t remember feeling as agitated.
Waiting he could handle. But waiting with images of a white Bronco cruising down the road to Tijuana while he sat here, dead in the water, was enough to turn him bald.
Then again, he had no choice. He couldn’t just take off for Mexico without knowing it was their destination. He flipped his police scanner on and closed his eyes. If anybody was going to find the Bronco, it would be the police. And if they did, he was there—police or no police.