about two inches wide, which meant you could fit about
three hundred of them in a square yard. Which meant you
could fit nearly a million and a half of them in an acre. Which
meant you could hide 150 billion of them inside Fort Bird’s
perimeter wire. Which meant that looking for one would be
like looking for a single anthrax spore in Yankee Stadium. I did
the calculation while I showered and dressed in the pre-dawn
darkness.
Then I sat on my bed and waited for some light in the sky.
No point in going out there and missing the one-in-150-billion
chance because it was too dark to see properly. But as I sat I
started to figure we could narrow the odds by being intelligent
about where exactly we looked. The guy with the yogurt
obviously made it back from A to B. We knew where A was. A
was where Carbone had been killed. And there was a limited
choice of places for B. B was either a random hole in the
perimeter wire or somewhere among the main post buildings.
So if we were smart, we could cut the billions to millions, and
find the thing in a hundred years instead of a thousand.
178
Unless it was already licked clean inside some starving
raccoon’s den.
I met Summer in the MP motor pool. She was bright and full
of energy but we didn’t talk. There was nothing to say, except
that the task we had set for ourselves was impossible. And I
guessed neither of us wanted to confirm that out loud. So we
didn’t speak. We just picked a Humvee at random and headed
out. I drove, for a change, the same three-minute journey I had
driven thirty-some hours before.
According to the Humvee’s trip meter we travelled exactly a
mile and a half and according to its compass we travelled south
and west, and then we arrived at the crime scene. There were
still tatters of MP tape on some of the trees. We parked ten
yards off the track and got out. I climbed up on the hood and
sat on the roof above the windshield. Gazed west and north,
and then turned around and gazed east and south. The air was
cold. There was a breeze. The landscape was brown and dead
and immense. The dawn sun was weak and pale.
‘Which way did he go?’ I called.
‘North and east,’ Summer called back.
She sounded pretty sure about it.
‘Why?’ I called.
She climbed up on the hood and sat next to me.
‘He had a vehicle,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because we didn’t find one left out here, and I doubt if they
walked.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if they’d walked, it would have happened closer to
where they started. This is at least a thirty-minute walk from anywhere. I don’t see the bad guy concealing a tyre iron or a
crowbar for thirty solid minutes, not walking side by side.
Under a coat, it would make him move like a robot. Carbone
would have twigged. So they drove. In the bad guy’s vehicle. He
had the weapon under a jacket or something on the back seat.
Maybe.the knife and the yogurt too.’
‘Where did they start?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Only thing that matters to us now is where
the bad guy went afterwards. And if he was in a vehicle, he
179
didn’t drive outward towards the wire. We can assume there are
no vehicle-size holes in it. Man-size maybe, or deer-size, but
nothing big enough to drive a truck or a car through.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘So he headed back to the post. He can’t have gone anywhere
else. Can’t just drive a vehicle into the middle of nowhere. He
drove back along the track and parked his vehicle and went
about his business.’
I nodded. Looked at the western horizon ahead of me. Turned
and looked north and east, back along the track. Back towards
the post. A mile and a half of track. I pictured the aerodynamics
of an empty yogurt container. Lightweight plastic, cup-shaped, a torn foil closure flapping like an air brake. I pictured throwing
one, hard. It would sail and stall in the air. It would travel ten