Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

I followed, keeping well back thanks to the little blip on the GPS screen. While they were waiting for Julio, I’d had plenty of time to press a bug under the fender. Ain’t technology great?

But not so great when the people you’re following change cars, and leave your clever blip standing at the same point until the transmitter’s battery runs down. Which was what I thought was happening when they went five miles and pulled into a coffeehouse.

But I lucked out. The two goons did take their equipment from the trunk and got into a second car, but my shiny black target pulled immediately out of the parking lot, signaled for a right, and in two minutes was on the freeway north.

After two hours, we’d left the freeway far behind, traffic on the smaller road was so thin I didn’t dare come closer than half a mile, and it looked like the guy was planning to drive up the backside of Nevada without even a coffee break. I, on the other hand, was yawning fit to break my jaw, my bladder had gone past uncomfortable to the brink of needing attention, and the pink blip on my screen had hypnotized me into stupidity.

I only noticed it had stopped moving when I was already too close to do anything but barrel on by.

The driver—still wearing both the jacket and tie—was just getting back into the car after unlocking a gate at the side of the road. He glanced at me, seeing only a dusty car whose bored driver was rubbing his eye. In the rearview mirror I saw him pull ahead into the side road, then get out to go back and close the gate. My foot didn’t move on the pedal until he had disappeared around a curve, at which time I swerved to the side and killed the engine.

I grabbed the knapsack from the seat and forced my stiff legs and screaming bladder up the nearby rise until the dust plume from the once-shiny car came into view. I kept a naked eye on it for a couple of minutes and then, when my hands were free and my bladder happy, I took a pair of binoculars from the knapsack. Just in time to see the car vanish behind some low hills.

This far from civilization, I did not expect to find a connection, and I was right. However, I wrote an e-mail on the laptop, hit send, then closed its lid and locked the thing in the trunk. If I failed to make it back, someone would eventually find it, and when it was fired up, Frank would learn where I had last been.

I pushed some things I thought I might need into the knapsack, then walked across the road in the direction of the black car.

FOR A DIRT ROAD IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, IT HAD A SURPRISING amount of traffic. By the time darkness fell, I had seen three vehicles go past: a white van, delivering some cartons and full grocery sacks, then leaving; a small red Jeep, driven at speed by a thin man with white hair; and an hour later, at dusk, the black car on its way out.

Their goal was a wide, single-story building made of poured concrete with a faded blue steel roof. The only windows were on either side of the front door, although when I circled the place, I found two other doors, one on the back and the other on the western side. All three doors were steel, and solid looking. I wouldn’t know if their locks were as good until I got my hands on them.

The two windows were covered from within, by slatted blinds on the left and curtains on the right. The blinds went dark about ten o’clock; the curtains snapped out of sight around half past eleven.

At one in the morning, I slipped out from the trees facing the western door. I couldn’t see any security cameras, and although the light over the door was on, a quick poke with a branch changed that.

It took me a while, even with my illegal-to-own, cutting-edge cracksman tool. When the lock finally gave, I vowed to write the guy who’d invented the thing a personal letter of thanks.

I took out my gun and moved forward. Before I was fully inside, I knew: there were SalaMen inside. The air was damp, and carried on it the stink of fear and suffering.

I let the door whisper shut and went in search of them. Went in search of—okay, damn it—of my people.

Hellbender isn’t a salamander that spends its life underground, so its eyes aren’t as sensitive as some. Still, I had no trouble making out the shapes of the hallway and the doors, some of which were standing open. And I wasn’t too surprised to find one leading to stairs, since I’d figured there might be as much of this building underground as there was above.

It wasn’t a new building, although sometime in the last year or so the walls got a coat of paint and the linoleum was scrubbed. I couldn’t tell what the place had been in a previous life—out here, it probably wasn’t anything legal.

It wasn’t now, either. That ad in WeWeb promised easy money, but what the SalaMen who answered it got wasn’t money, and there was nothing easy about it. My recent library crawl, hunting down Harry’s names, had given me some things they had in common beyond their genetic structure.

For one thing, an awful lot of them were strapped for cash. A couple had lost their jobs, others had mortgage problems or a divorce or kids to support (adopted kids, but still family). And as near as I could tell without going into Harry’s home computer, they’d all belonged to Harry’s WeWeb group. Every one of them was on WeWeb—which meant nothing in itself, most of the country was on WeWeb—but every one of Harry’s names had a page where portions were blocked from view.

If his sister was right, it would be tough to infiltrate the group. However, I had no doubt that a clever and patient person could come up with an ad targeting customers of a brand of lotion soothing to SalaMan skin, or supporters of certain political candidates, or any of a hundred other possible arrows and send them the ad.

And when the poor bastards responded to it, they’d ended up here.

A research facility.

At the bottom of a flight of metal stairs was a door. It was closed, although the stink that came around it made my eyes water. I took a deep breath and went through it.

Another long corridor, with steel doors on both sides. Every door had a small barred window in it. Eyes glistened from behind some of the bars.

I took care of the camera above the door, then eased forward to the first door and breathed, “Are there any guards down here?”

“Who . . . who are you?” A man’s voice, hesitant.

“Answer me!”

“Guards? No, but there’s a camer—”

“Where are the keys?”