Middle Of Nowhere

   Boldt pulled the car over into muddy gravel, less than two hundred yards from where Flek had phoned him. The moment his hands left the wheel, they grabbed for the vest in the backseat. He announced, "One vest, one field operative." LaMoia looked ready to object. "You'll stay here, monitor the Poulsbo channel, and keep with Gaynes at AirTyme." He fiddled with his own phone. "Mine is set to vibrate. You call if anything breaks. I call if I spot them."

   "And when you do?" LaMoia said optimistically.

   "I'll try to direct you in around back. Then we ad lib. If I can't get close, then I'll make myself a target and lure him to where you get a shot."

   "Oh, yeah. There's a brilliant plan. There's a good match: my nine-millimeter on him; his German scope on you."

   "We ad lib," Boldt repeated. "We're not going to know 'til we see the situation. Maybe there's an old farmhouse or something. Maybe we wait for backup."

   "You'll pardon my rank, Lieutenant, but you're full of shit at the moment. You're not making any sense."

   "My orders are for you to stay in the car," Boldt said.

   LaMoia objected, "Why? So you go get yourself killed by some worthless skel?"

   "Those are your orders."

"Bullshit!" LaMoia fired back.

   Boldt double-checked that all the phones came with similar services. "You've got call-waiting, don't you?"

   "Yeah," a disgruntled LaMoia answered.

   "So stay on the line with Gaynes and listen up for my in-coming call."

   "As ordered, sir!"

   Boldt said calmly, "You're injured, John. You're slow. And doubling up out there only doubles the noise we make. This is not heroics; it's what makes sense."

   "To you."

   "To me," Boldt said.

   Boldt checked the car's interior light before opening the door, making sure it would not light up as the door came open. He adjusted the vest as he stepped out into the rain—its woven plastic exterior would act as something of a raincoat. There would be no flashlight. He would allow his eyes to adjust and do his best in the dark. He walked slowly at first, unable to see more than a few feet in front of himself, his pace and stride increasing the longer he stayed out in the rain. He reached a muddy track to his right not far down the road, and stayed to the edge, where his sinking into the sloppy turf wouldn't show up in headlights, in case Flek was suddenly on his way out. He stooped low and felt the mud. The tire tracks seemed recent to him. Given the rain, they would have been beaten down in a matter of hours.

   He was less than a hundred yards down that track when he heard a car roar to life. With the sound bounc ing in the trees, it seemed to come from behind him, not from in front as expected. He crouched and reached for his weapon, only to realize that in his haste he'd strapped the vest in the way of his gun—an amateurish mistake that made him realize he had too much emotion working against him.

   When the car horn sounded out on the road, he realized it was his own car that he'd heard start, LaMoia behind the wheel. He ran for the open road.

"What the hell?" Boldt said, as he jumped into the passenger seat, dripping wet. LaMoia was just shy of being a qualified stock car racer. He was the best and fastest driver of all the detectives. Boldt's car took off like someone had switched engines in the past few minutes.

   "Turns out Osbourne had a couple guys working on a hunch—"

   "Gaynes told me as much," Boldt recalled.

   "The hunch had to do with a part of the reserved bandwidth that isn't used for the calls themselves, but, as I understand it, has to do with tower handshakes."

   "What's it mean, John?" Boldt asked impatiently, strapping himself in.

   LaMoia glided the car on all four tires through a left turn that had Boldt clutching to the dash. Both hands on the wheel, the driver said, "It means that the reason we see those little bars on our cell phones for signal strength is because the phone and the towers are constantly talking to each other—and here's the catch: whether or not we're currently making a call. As long as the phone is on, it's looking for the nearest tower and reporting to its own processor what kind of signal strength is available, which comes back out of the phone as those little bars. To do so, it sends its own ID every time—like a few thousand times a second!"

   "And Osbourne can see it's his phone," Boldt mumbled.

   "Both their phones, but, yes, that's right. He can see them real-time—no more fifteen-minute delays. They can't triangulate. They can't pinpoint them unless he makes a call—and we're back to a delay at that point. But they can watch movement, tower to tower, as the phones continue checking for the best handshake. And both those phones are currently moving, Sarge." He didn't take his grip from the wheel, but his index finger pointed straight ahead. "East. They've been moving east for the last ten minutes or so. The phones appear to be at rest at the moment."

   "Which means we're gaining on them," Boldt said.