Persuader

his kitchen table. But the Saab's carpets were old and loose. If I was the sort of person who hid a gun under a spare tire I might hide papers under a car's carpets. And I might be the sort of person who made notes and kept records.
    I rolled off the bed and stepped to the window. The afternoon had already happened. Full dark was on its way. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over. I went downstairs, thinking about the Saab. Beck was walking through the hallway. He was in a hurry. Preoccupied.
    He went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Listened to it for a second and then held it out to me.
    "The phones are all dead," he said.
    I put the receiver to my ear and listened. There was nothing there. No dial tone, no scratchy hiss from open circuits. Just dull inert silence, and the sound of blood rushing in my head. Like a seashell.
    "Go try yours," he said.
    I went back upstairs to Duke's room. The internal phone worked OK. Paulie answered on the third ring. I hung up on him. But the outside line was stone dead. I held the receiver like it would make a difference and Beck appeared in the doorway.
    "I can speak to the gate," I said.
    He nodded.
    "That's a completely separate circuit," he said. "We put it in ourselves. What about the outside line?"
    "Dead," I said.
    "Weird," he said.
    I put the receiver down. Glanced at the window.
    "Could be the weather," I said.
    "No," he said. He held up his cell phone. It was a tiny silver Nokia. "This is out too." He handed it to me. There was a tiny screen on the front. A bar chart on the right showed that the battery was fully charged. But the signal meter was all the way down. No service was displayed, big and black and obvious. I handed it back.
    "I need to use the bathroom," I said. "I'll be right down." I locked myself in. Pulled off my shoe. Opened the heel. Pressed power . The screen came up: No service. I turned it off and nailed it back in. Flushed the toilet for form's sake and sat there on the lid. I was no kind of a telecommunications expert. I knew phone lines came down, now and then. I knew cell phone technology was sometimes unreliable. But what were the chances that one location's land lines would fail at the exact same time its nearest cell tower went down? Pretty small, I guessed. Pretty damn small. So it had to be a deliberate outage. But who had requested it? Not the phone company. They wouldn't do disruptive maintenance at commuting time on a Friday. Early on a Sunday morning, maybe. And they wouldn't have the land lines down at the same time as the cell towers, anyway. They would stagger the two jobs, surely.
    So who had organized it? A heavy-duty government agency, maybe. Like the DEA, perhaps. Maybe the DEA was coming for the maid. Maybe its SWAT team was rolling up the harbor operation first and it didn't want Beck to know before it was ready to come on out to the house.
    But that was unlikely. The DEA would have more than one SWAT team available. It would go for simultaneous operations. And even if it didn't, it would be the easiest thing in the world to close the road between the house and the first turning. They could seal it forever. There was a twelve-mile stretch of unlimited opportunity. Beck was a sitting duck, phones or no phones.
    So who? Maybe Duffy, off the books. Duffy's status might just get her a major once-in-a-lifetime favor, one-on-one with a phone company manager. Especially a favor that was limited geographically. One minor land line spur. And one cell tower, probably somewhere out near I-95. It would give a thirty-mile dead spot for people to drive through, but she might have been able to swing it. Maybe. Especially if the favor was strictly limited in duration.
    Not open-ended. Four or five hours, say.
    And why would Duffy suddenly be afraid of phones for four or five hours? Only one possible answer. She was afraid for me.
    The bodyguards were loose.

CHAPTER 10
    Time. Distance divided by speed adjusted for direction equals time. Either I had enough, or I had none at all. I didn't know which it would be. The bodyguards had been held in the Massachusetts motel where we planned the original eight-second sting. Which was less than two hundred miles south. That much, I knew for sure. Those were facts. The rest was pure speculation. But I could put together some kind of a likely scenario. They had broken out of the motel and stolen a government Taurus. Then they had driven like hell for maybe an hour, breathless with panic. They had