Your Blood in the Air

 257.

CHAPTER NINE

Of the 525,600 minutes in a year, I find it incredible that so much depends on the final 30. If you want to consider an explosively dramatic climax to the arc of the annual narrative, this might be it. Harlan raced to extract The Queen from the clinic, delivering her to our waiting command center and, along with Julie and Mina had her dialed in, set up, and entering numbers with exactly one-half hour remaining on the imposed deadline. Although both Mutt and I agreed on the chances of the threat's consummation to be 'about fifty-fifty', in our line of work that meant we take every precaution and assume the worst - until proven wrong. Even with the rapidly accumulating evidence supporting our current hypothesis, the possibility remains intact that the basket in which we have placed all our eggs, could belong to someone else.

Harlan and Julie review the procedure with The Queen. With our new tracking technologies all we need is thirty seconds of connectivity to establish a location. Once that has been extrapolated, our local team, Drysdale, Davis, Saunders, Mustang and myself will spring into action. Should this be an off-site, long distance operation, Mutt has at his command the entire grid of FBI field operations standing by. All we need is that critical thirty seconds of clear cellular contact.

We decide to skip the call to her paid informant inside the SuperMax facility and go straight to the number we obtained from the kidnappers, having matched it with the number used in the initial extortion call. We are anticipating it will be Cyrus. If my hunch is correct he is somewhere in the immediate area. As one of my favorite country songs, the tale of a bounty hunter on the trail of a cattle rustling cold-blooded killer poetically put it, 'I can smell your blood in the air.'

She taps the ten digit number and waits…and waits, the line eventually going to a default voice-mail inbox. In her earbud I quickly tell her to leave an 'impassioned' message.

"Cy, its Violet. I don't have a lot of time, please, PLEASE call me back at this number as soon as you get the message. We have a code six. Ciao."

The moment I hear the termination click I demand explanation, "What the fuck is a code six?"

"Its a mayday code we used to use to signal extreme urgency, as in cops at the door and flush the stash," she says.

"Julie?"

"Truth, no spikes," Julie replies letting our polygraph use, included in the wire-tapping software, slip from the bag.

The Queen immediately enters a verbal defense on her behalf over our non-disclosure of the poly function suddenly realizing what the chest strap was really for, when the phone rings with three successive beeps and a bop. "Alright here we go, break a leg and keep him for thirty," I say breaking the huddle.

"Cy?"

"Where the fuck are you?"

Mustang, Drysdale and I scramble towards the SUV.