And there was: Lucas checked his bag, collected his tickets, and while he was waiting in the gate at the airport, he got a call back from Forte: “We don’t know that phone. Either doesn’t have a GPSor the GPS is turned off. It’s almost certainly a burner, and it’s used only rarely, a couple times a month. We’ve got a list of numbers that the owner’s called and we can tell you that the outgoing calls have been made from Orlando Fashion Square. He probably lives around there, and he’s probably calling out from the mall in case somebody comes looking for him. Like us. Hard to spot him in a place where two thousand people are on their phones, all at once.”
“Where did Campbell’s call go?”
“Can’t tell you precisely, but generally, through a cell tower in the same general area of Orlando. We’ll e-mail you a map. We’ve talked to the Orlando FBI. When you get there, they’ll launch a plane with a Stingray unit and when you call Stiner’s phone, they should be able to spot it.”
“We gotta get the FBI involved?” Lucas asked.
“If we want the Stingray. We don’t have our own in Orlando. You got a problem with them?” Forte asked.
“Sometimes I prefer to be a little more informal than they are...”
“Huh. Well, what do you want to do?”
Lucas thought a moment, then said, “Let’s go with the Stingray, but tell them I don’t need any help on the ground.”
“Okay. Stiner has two federal warrants on him, by the way, both for interstate flight,” Forte said. “You’re good there, but I got to tell you, the underlying warrants aren’t worth much. One for assault in Nashville—a street fight—and another for a bus theft...”
“He stole a bus?”
“Yeah, in Montgomery. He used it as a getaway vehicle after his own car broke down after a burglary. They found it in Tennessee somewhere. He’d sold it to a bunch of hippies for cash. The guyseems to run across a state line every time somebody comes looking for him. Which technically makes it federal, every time.”
“Does he shoot people?” Lucas asked.
“He’s carried a gun, but there’s no evidence that he in particular has ever shot anyone.”
“Okay. I gotta go, they’re calling the plane. How about this guy named ‘Sturgill’? The thinker?”
“Nothing so far, but we’re working it. There’s more Sturgills out there than you’d think.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “If I get Stiner, I’ll push him on a better name.”
“Good hunting, man.”
—
THE FLIGHTwas an hour and a half of white-knuckled terror, though the crazy old lady in the adjacent seat seemed to enjoy it thoroughly, drinking coffee, gazing out the window at the landscape while never quitting her knitting, apparently unaware of the fact that they were thirty-five thousand feet up in the air in a mechanical deviceover which they had no personal control.The flight attendant, a motherly woman, stopped twice to ask Lucas if he was feeling okay, and he’d nodded, “Just fine,” thinking,for somebody about to be torn to bits in a plane crash.
Then Lucas was on the ground in Orlando, in a Jeep Compass, the best Hertz could do on a busy day with no reservation—the Hertz agent told him it was International Food and Wine Festival at Disney World that week.
Before he left the airport, he checked his e-mail on the iPad,found a note from the FBI agent-in-charge, who said Forte had sent him an e-mail summary of what Lucas was doing. Lucas sent a note back with his phone number and told the AIC that he was on the ground and rolling. He pulled up a map of east Orlando and went that way.
The Jeep would eventually drive him crazy, he thought, as he headed north. The thing was rattling like a Brazilian maraca, tracking like an aluminum fishing boat. The steering wheel wasn’t adjustable and threatened to crush Lucas’s chest even without an accident.
He was sitting at a stoplight when the AIC called: “We’re putting a plane in the air. Do you have a nav system in your car?”
“I’ve got an iPad with Google Maps.”
“Good enough. Find the Orlando executive airport and get over, say, a half mile east of it and give us a call,” the agent said. “We’ll place the call to Stiner from here, make a pitch for a Visa card, and vector you in to wherever the phone is.”
“Got it.”
Lucas worked his way north, following his progress on the iPad, and when he was east of the airport, spotted a high school parking lot and pulled into the driveway. He called the feds, and the AIC took the call and said, “Sit right there. We’ll try to sell him that Visa card.”
As he was talking, a security guard appeared from between the cars farther down the lot, heading toward Lucas in a fast walk. Lucas said, “Hang on a second, I’ve got a high school security guard who’s going to try to roust me.”
The security guard came up and asked, “You got a problem?”
Lucas hung his ID out the window and said, “Yeah. I’m a federalmarshal and I’m on a call to the FBI. I might need some directions from you, so go stand on the other side of the road. I’ll wave you back over in a minute.”
