Chapter 48

Driving back to the main highway was simple. Getting turned around so we could drive back to the main highway wasn't.

The packed dirt road we'd driven down was pretty narrow. It hadn't been designed for large vehicles, and I have no idea how, when it was in active use, they'd handled things if two cars or trucks or whatever met, because they sure couldn't get by each other without running off into the loose sand. And if the rear drive wheels hit that sand you weren't getting back out without help.

That wouldn't have been a catastrophe if it had happened to us; we could always walk the mile back and wait for a passing car to flag down. But that was a worst-case scenario I wanted very much to avoid. If somebody cared about the gate I'd destroyed there conceivably could have been charges of vandalism, trespassing, etc. More important, we'd be asked pretty insistently what we'd wanted down there, and we were a bit past the age where we could get away with the teenie-bopper excuse of looking for a place to go parking.

Ultimately I managed the turnaround by backing and filling more times than I could count, inches at a time. Cam got out to guide me right to the edges of the packed area, and even so I twice put one front wheel off it into the soft stuff. But after a good ten minutes of this we'd reversed direction, and since I no longer needed the cover of darkness I used my headlights to stay carefully on the hardpan. When we got back to the gate I saw that I'd pretty much destroyed it, only shards were hanging from the uprights. I just shrugged, drove on through and we headed back into the city.

Either Brown and Smith had failed to put out alerts for us or we were just lucky, because we got all the way back to the hotel without being stopped; its profile stood out clearly and I simply pointed us that way. I drove back into the garage, got another parking ticket, and put the car back in the same spot. Prudently I tucked the key under the driver's visor and left it unlocked; I didn't think it was likely to be stolen from there, and even if it were it wouldn't be a tragedy.

On the way back Cam and I talked a little about what we'd tell the DHS guys. They'd know by now that we'd gone out, so it seemed a good idea to have a story. The simplest thing was to say we'd just decided to take a late-night stroll around. OK, it was a little strained; who spends hours wandering around an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night? But we could (sort of) explain it as walking off after-show tension, they couldn't disprove it, and there was certainly nothing illegal about it. As for the missing cat, well, he'd been a stray I'd picked up, he wasn't responding well to domesticity with the other two, so we'd taken him with us and let him go somewhere during our walk. Again, lame but not disprovable and not illegal.

I badly underestimated how seriously Brown and Smith and their bosses were taking this, but in the end it all worked out pretty much as we'd hoped.

We were both pretty crapped out as we got out of the car, but we still made the effort to walk back out of the garage and around to the front entrance; why advertise that we'd had access to a car? Anyhow we'd have to change elevators in the lobby, since going back the way we'd left wouldn't be possible with the stairwell doors no longer fixed.

This time Brown and Smith apparently weren't so concerned about moving in public; we'd got only about ten feet inside the lobby when we found ourselves surrounded by several men. None of them had guns drawn, but neither were they trying to be subtle about it. Two grabbed Cam's arms, two more took mine, and we were patted down for weapons right there.

"We're going upstairs now, Volker," Brown told me as he walked up to me. He flashed me a warrant; given that it was barely breaking daylight outside somebody'd been busy. "But we're too late now, aren't we?"

I said nothing, and about seven of them took us over to the penthouse elevator. We rode up in silence. When we got there I used my key to open the door, and we all went in. Almost immediately Brown noticed his gun lying on the couch where I'd tossed it; without comment he went over and retrieved it.

They found, of course, nothing but Porgy and Bess, who weren't happy about the crowd. When Smith picked up Porgy for a closer look he got a nasty scratch on the back of his hand and dropped the cat hurriedly.