Devlin sat up.“Here we go.”
Lucas got on a handset and said, “We’ve got Lange and Regio.”
“We see them. We’ll wait for Cattaneo.”
The three were walking out of Behan’s condo. Lucas and Devlin were two blocks away, watching.
“Want to go after them?” Devlin asked.
Lucas considered it, then got back on the handset to the FBI agents in a second car, who were two blocks on the other side of the condo. “Let them go. Track them on the slates.”
“You sure, boss man?” the surveillance agent asked.
“Yes. Give them at least five minutes before you pull out. If anyone is watching their backs, that’ll be enough of an interval. We’ll pick them up later.”
Devlin was typing on an iPad, noting the time and character of the surveillance for a later formal report, along with Lucas’s decision not to try a close tail.
Lucas was looking at an iPad-type device that showed Regio’s Lexus on one screen, and Cattaneo’s on another. “I think they’re all headed back to their apartments. We’ll pick them up at Virgil’s place in... two hours.”
Devlin made a note on his draft of the day’s activities.
Rae was startingto freak, pacing around the apartment. “I could do a joint for real,” she said.
Virgil was working out the various tethers for the scuba gear. He would keep the lift and cargo bags rolled and tied to his backplate until he needed them; that was simple enough. Less simple would be attaching tethers once the cargo bags were full of dope canisters, and he was towing the bags while trying to control the DPV, which would be on a different set of tethers. If he had trouble untanglingthings, working with flashlights in pitch blackness a hundred and fifty feet down, then he had serious trouble.
So he was carefully packing the tethers, as though he were packing a parachute, taking his time with it. To Rae, he said, “If it’d help, go for it. More authenticity for the goon squad.”
“Ah, it wouldn’t help,” she said. Then, after a minute, “What’s it like down there, in the night? When you get way down?”
Virgil sat back on his heels, the tethers still in his hands. “Way down isn’t much different than being fifteen feet down, after dark, except for getting narced,” Virgil said. “It’s like instrument flying through clouds in a plane. You have instruments, you believe them, even if your mind tells you they’re wrong. I’ll stay on the surface after I jump off the boat and navigate over to the GPS spot they give me. When I’m there, I’ll go straight down. Coming back, I’ll have to go through a decompression regime. I’ll be dragging lift bags, and moving slow, coming back up to the pickup spot at an angle, to decompress. I’ll be looking at my dive computer the whole way. It’ll tell me how deep I need to stay, each step, to decompress.”
“The thought scares the heck out of me,” Rae said. “I’ve jumped out of airplanes, but I wouldn’t do this...”
“It’s actually kind of restful when you get used to it. Peaceful.”
“Yeah. Like being dead.” Rae looked at her watch. “Two o’clock. You almost done there?”
“Iamdone. All I’m missing is the information they’ll give us on the boat.” He stood up and looked at the litter of gear on the floor. “Let’s bag it. I need that nap.”
Virgil got an hour. He got up and they dressed, Rae in a long-sleeved black cotton top, black jeans, a little loose down the legs,and Salomon trail runners. She pulled an elastic ankle support over her right ankle, and slipped a nine-millimeter Sig 938 under the elastic band and jumped up and down a few times to make sure it was secure.
“Doesn’t even feel like much,” she said. “Not gonna be a fast-draw, though.”
“Don’t bump into anything and make a clank sound,” Virgil said.
Lange and Regioshowed up early, wearing head-to-toe nylon sailing pants and shirts, and helped carry the gear down to a different vehicle, a Suburban. After they’d loaded the scuba equipment, Virgil climbed into the backseat and said, “New wheels, huh? I’d like to get me one of these. Travel all over the country, you could sleep in the back, you know, at the Walmarts, never have to pay a motel bill...”
“You bring us enough of that stuff up, you won’t have to worry about paying for motels,” Regio said over his shoulder.
Rae: “That’s what I’m talking about. Hot showers, big TV, king-sized bed.”
Lange: “Mini-bar...”
“Oh, yeah.”
Lucas and Devlinwatched them loading the Suburban, and Devlin said, “Man, I hope they don’t do anything tricky. Wonder why they changed cars? Christ, without the tracker... They could spot us if they start dragging us through the back streets.”
“Might be something simple—all that scuba gear plus four people. Maybe the Lexus is a little tight.”
