"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 3 - The Maze in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

was placed or the first local London number the entire conversation would be
untraceable even if they had been sitting in that office during the call.
More interesting was the fact that the tape was continuous record and play at
only four second intervals, but it removed almost all background noise and was
just slightly off-speed in a more or less random way so that the voice itself
sounded normal but wouldn't voice print correctly and would sound just slightly
off.
Well, he had expected that to be a dead end. More interesting was the envelope
that arrived in the afternoon mail. It bore a local postmark two days old-the
good old post office had taken two days to deliver it perhaps two miles-and was
essentially clean of fingerprints and whatever. The message was typewritten but
he didn't have to run any checks to see if he could find its origins. The very
slight impression problem, particularly with the lower case "a," was very
familiar. The bastards had typed it on his own machine, in his office, while
they were still ransacking the place.
It said, "If you want to see your son again, then on Tuesday next, at eight in
the evening, enter the Labyrinth at your substation, then proceed past the main
switch and down line towards Headquarters. Be alone and unarmed and destroy this
note and tell the Company nothing. Any sign of security or an electronic
security scan and we will send your boy back to you in very tiny pieces. Believe
us when we say that. We promise that if you play fair, we will, too. We have a
proposition for you."
An offer I can't refuse, Sam thought with a dry chuckle. Well, they were giving
him more than enough time. Brandy might not be perfect but she should be up and
around by Tuesday, and his own string would be played out here by then.
Certainly Markham would have a tail on him, but he knew he could shake a tail
and create a plausible reason for going down line. That wasn't a real problem.
The real problem was that he now had a deadline.
On Friday, they found the vans, abandoned, near Ashville, North Carolina. They
had underestimated the Company's resources, though, and their own relative
invisibility. They were using rented and leased vehicles still, although with a
different credit card on a different company. They had done a good cover job,
but they hadn't created additional fake driver's licenses and they had to show
licensing information on at least one to get the new ones. The jerks should have
had a third party buy a couple of used busses, which would have made the job
slower and tougher, but they didn't.
Most important in the rental information was that none of the vehicles had snow
tires. Now, this was the South, all right, but Ashville was high in the Smokies
and the only way out that didn't mean mountains and snow and ice for sure was
east. On Saturday, Company helicopters spotted them in spite of several
precautions they'd taken. Somewhere along the road they'd given the three big
vans a spray paint job, changing them from their original colors into black, but
three black vans moving in a virtual convoy stood out pretty well. When they all
stopped at a motel outside of Wilmington, North Carolina, agents were ready, and
Sam's phone rang.
"It's them," Bill Markham told him. "No question. We've even seen your boy.
You'll never know how many people and how much time and money went into this.
I'm sending the chopper for you now. We don't dare do anything until well after
dark anyway, so we're just setting up and reconnoitering the place. I assume you
want in on this."