Storm Front

fast. Make me some time, before you get on 83.”
    “I’ll try.”
    —
    V IRGIL CALLED D AVENPORT : “Things got worse. . . .”
    He recounted Jones’s story, and Davenport said, “I got a call from Jenkins. He says Case is not at her house, but her car is in the garage. Her next-door neighbors didn’t see her either last night or this morning. They’re still checking the neighborhood.”
    “Okay. We need to alert the sheriff’s departments south of Mankato, and any highway patrolmen down there. There’s something a little odd about the call to Jones—if they took her last night, why did they wait until ten o’clock in the morning to call him? I can think of a couple of possibilities.”
    “Like?”
    “Like they came from somewhere else, and have taken her somewhere else. Like if the Turks came back, but knew they couldn’t be seen, so they hid out. Up there in the Cities, down in Albert Lea or over in Rochester. Maybe even down in Iowa, to get across a state line. They’ve got Jones driving south with the stone, so I suspect that they’re not in the Cities.”
    “I’ll check again on the Turks,” Davenport said.
    “Do that. There’s also a possibility—maybe a better possibility than the Turks—that she was snatched by the first Yael. She disappeared so completely that I think she had to have help, and that help is likely male. The Mossad, if she’s really Mossad, has done some of that kidnapping stuff.”
    “All right. What are you going to do?”
    “Right now? I’m gonna talk to an Arab,” Virgil said.
    —
    H E GOT on the line to Awad. “Where are you?”
    “I am preparing for a training flight,” Awad said.
    “Good. I need an airplane ride. It’s important. I’ll pay. Can you do that?”
    “I have no commercial license, but I accept pay, how do you say it, under the chair.”
    “Table,” Virgil said. “Under the table. That’s good enough. I need to go
now
.”
    “I will have the plane in two minutes. If you called me ten minutes from now, I would be in the air already,” Awad said. “Is this a law enforcement matter?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tell me in one seconds.”
    “A woman’s been kidnapped.”
    “So I am helping to fight this crime?” Awad asked.
    “I guess,” Virgil said.
    “This is A-1 quality,” Awad said. And he did a perfect imitation of the
Cops
theme song, trilling, “Bad boys, bad boys . . .”
    “Ten minutes,” Virgil said. “If you have a pair of binoculars, that would be good.”
    —
    J ONES CALLED five minutes later, with Virgil halfway to the airport. “I’m coming into town, heading south. I’m driving a red Volvo station wagon. What should I do?”
    “Call me when you get to the intersection of 22 and 83,” Virgil said.
    “Where will you be?” Jones asked.
    “Close by—but out of sight,” Virgil said. “You take care. You getting killed won’t help Ellen one way or the other.”
    —
    V IRGIL PARKED out front of the flight service, got his pistol, a cased M16, and a pair of image-stabilized Canon binoculars from the truck, walked into the flight service. The man behind the desk flinched when he saw Virgil coming, but Virgil had his ID ready and called, “Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
    “What’s going on? Is there trouble?”
    “Where’s Awad?”
    “Raj? I always suspected—”
    “I’m riding with him,” Virgil said.
    The man looked relieved for a half-second, then said, “In our plane? Wait a minute—”
    “Don’t have a minute,” Virgil said. “We got a woman kidnapped.”
    “But—”
    “And no time to argue about it. Where is he?”
    He found Awad in the pilots’ lounge with al-Lubnani. Al-Lubnani had a pair of binoculars around his neck. Virgil looked from al-Lubnani to Awad to al-Lubnani, and the old man shrugged and said, “Two binoculars are better than one.”
    “You’re right,” Virgil said. “Let’s move.”
    Awad was dressed like a bush pilot, square-shouldered in a long-sleeved olive drab shirt with epaulets, jeans, and aviator sunglasses, like Virgil’s. He was flying a Cessna 182, a four-seater. Virgil got in the front with Awad, who passed him a pair of headphones, and handed another pair to al-Lubnani in the back. Al-Lubnani sat behind Awad, so he and Virgil could look out opposite sides of the plane.
    “Where do we go?” Awad asked.
    Virgil said, “We need to survey the intersection of Highway 22 and 83. If you don’t know it, I can point it out. We’re