Persuader

eyes on the ramp. Nobody came up it. I could hear light traffic out on the highway. It was close by and fairly loud, but the way it was all behind the trees made me feel private and isolated. I counted off seventy-two seconds, which represents a mile at fifty miles an hour. Nobody came up the ramp. And nobody follows at a distance of more than a mile. So I ran straight over to where Duffy and Eliot were waiting for me. He was in casual clothes and looked a little uneasy in them. She was in worn jeans and the same battered leather jacket I had seen before. She looked spectacular in them. Neither of them wasted any time on greetings, which I guess I was happy about.
    "Where are you headed?" Eliot asked.
    "New London, Connecticut," I said.
    "What's in the truck?"
    "I don't know."
    "No tail," Duffy said, like a statement, not a question.
    "Might be electronic," I said.
    "Where would it be?"
    "In the back, if they've got any sense. Did you get the soldering iron?"
    "Not yet," she said. "It's on its way. Why do we need it?"
    "There's a lead seal," I said. "We need to be able to remake it." She glanced at the ramp, anxious. "Hard thing to get ahold of at short notice."
    "Let's check the parts we can get to," Eliot said. "While we're waiting." We jogged back to the blue truck. I got down on the ground and took a look at the underside. It was all caked in ancient gray mud and streaked with leaking oil and fluid.
    "It won't be here," I said. "They'd need a chisel to get close to the metal." Eliot found it inside the cab about fifteen seconds after he started looking. It was stuck to the foam on the bottom of the passenger's seat with a little dot of hook-and-loop fastener.
    It was a tiny bare metal can a little bigger than a quarter and about half an inch thick. It trailed a thin eight-inch wire that was presumably the transmitting antenna. Eliot closed the whole thing into his fist and backed out of the cab fast and stared at the mouth of the ramp.
    "What?" Duffy asked.
    "This is weird," he said. "Thing like this has a hearing-aid battery, nothing more. Low power, short range. Can't be picked up beyond about two miles. So where's the guy tracking it?" The mouth of the ramp was empty. I had been the last guy up it. We stood there with our eyes watering in the cold wind, staring at nothing. Traffic hissed by behind the trees, but nothing came up the ramp.
    "How long have you been here now?" Eliot asked.
    "About four minutes," I said. "Maybe five."
    "Makes no sense," he said. "That puts the guy maybe four or five miles behind you. And he can't hear this thing from four or five miles."
    "Maybe there's no guy," I said. "Maybe they trust me."
    "So why put this thing in there?"
    "Maybe they didn't. Maybe it's been in there for years. Maybe they forgot all about it."
    "Too many maybes," he said.
    Duffy spun right and stared at the trees.
    "They could have stopped on the highway shoulder," she said. "You know, exactly level with where we are now." Eliot and I spun to our right and stared, too. It made good sense. It was no kind of clever surveillance technique to pull into a rest stop and park right next to your target.
    "Let's take a look," I said.
    There was a narrow strip of neat grass and then an equally narrow area where the highway people had tamed the edge of the woods with planted shrubs and bark chips.
    Then there were just trees. The highway had mown them down to the east and the rest area had leveled them to the west but in between was a forty-foot thicket that could have been growing there since the dawn of time. It was hard work getting through it. There were vines and scratchy brambles and low branches. But it was April. Getting through in July or August might have been impossible.
    We stopped just before the trees petered out into lower growth. Beyond that was the flat grassy highway shoulder. We eased forward as far as we dared and craned left and right.
    There was nobody parked there. The shoulder was clear as far as we could see in both directions. Traffic was very light. Whole five-second intervals went by with no vehicles in view at all. Eliot shrugged like he didn't understand it and we turned around and forced our way back.
    "Makes no sense," he said again.
    "They're short of manpower," I said.
    "No, they're on Route One," Duffy said. "They must be. It runs parallel with I-95 the whole way down the coast. From Portland, way down south. It's probably less than two miles away most of the time." We turned east