Worried that the flashlight beam, seen from outside, would look
suspicious to anyone pulling into the rest area, Drew Oslett quickly
examined the two cadavers in the cramped dining nook. Because the
spilled blood was thoroughly dry and caked hard, he knew the man and
woman had been dead more than just a few hours. However, although rigor
mortis was still present in both bodies, they were no longer entirely
stiff, the rigor evidently had peaked and had begun to fade, as it
usually did between eighteen and thirty-six hours after death.
The bodies had not begun to decompose noticeably as yet. The only bad
smell came from their open mouths–the sour gases produced by the
rotting food in their stomachs.
“Best guesstimate–they’ve been dead since sometime yesterday
afternoon,” he told Clocker.
The Road King had been sitting in the rest area for more than
twenty-four hours, so at least one Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer must
have seen it on two separate shifts. State law surely forbade using
rest areas as campsites. No electrical connections, water supplies, or
sewage-tank pump-outs were provided, which created a potential for
health problems. Sometimes cops might be lenient with retirees afraid
of driving in weather as inclement as the storm that had assaulted
Oklahoma yesterday, the American Association of Retired People
bumpersticker on the back of the motorhome might have gained these
people some dispensation. But not even a sympathetic cop would let them
park two nights. At any moment, a patrol car might pull into the rest
area and a knock might come at the door.
Averse to complicating their already serious problems by killing a
highway patrolman, Oslett turned away from the dead couple and hastily
proceeded with the search of the motorhome. He was no longer cautious
out of fear that Alfie, dysfunctional and disobedient, would put a
bullet in his head. Alfie was long gone from here.
He found the discarded shoes on the kitchen counter. With a large
serrated knife, Alfie had sawed at one of the heels until he had exposed
the electronic circuitry and the attendant chain of tiny batteries.
Staring at the Rockports and the pile of rubber shavings, Oslett was
chilled by a premonition of disaster. “He never knew about the shoes.
Why would he get it in his head to cut them open?”
“Well, he knows what he knows,” Clocker said.
Oslett interpreted Clocker’s statement to mean that part of Alfie’s
training included state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and
techniques. Consequently, though he was not told that he was “tagged,”
he knew that a microminiature transponder could be made small enough to
fit in the heel of a shoe and, upon receipt of a remote microwave
activating signal, could draw sufficient power from a series of watch
batteries to transmit a trackable signal for at least seven two edge of
surveillance to his own situation and reach the logical conclusion that
his controllers had made prudent provisions for locating and following
him in the event he went renegade, even if they had been thoroughly
convinced rebellion was not possible.
Oslett dreaded reporting the bad news to the home office in New York.
The organization didn’t kill the bearer of bad tidings, especially not
if his surname happened to be Oslett. However, as Alfie’s primary
handler, he knew that some of the blame would stick to him even though
the operative’s rebellion was not his fault to any degree whatsoever.
The error must be in Alfie’s fundamental conditioning, damn it, not in
his handling.
Leaving Clocker in the kitchen to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors,
Oslett quickly inspected the rest of the motorhome.
He found nothing else of interest except a pile of discarded clothes on
the floor of the main bedroom at the back of the vehicle.
In the beam of the flashlight, he needed to disturb the garments only
slightly with the toe of his shoe to see that they were what Alfie had
been wearing when he had boarded the plane for Kansas City on Saturday
morning.
Oslett returned to the kitchen, where Clocker waited in the dark.
He turned the flashlight on the dead pensioners one last time.
“What a mess. Damn it, this didn’t have to happen.”
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