Free the Second Horseman (2006) by Kyle Mills Page A

the phone w e g ave him?"
    "He had it when he ran."
    "Is it working?"
    "In theory it's water and impact proof."
    "It has a built-in GPS, yes? One that transmits even when the phone's turned off?"
    She nodded submissively. "No signal. Either it's not as tough as the specs say or he pulled the battery out."
    Scanlon walked behind his desk and dropped into his chair. "Clever boy."
    "Richard?"
    He looked up at her.
    "I . . . I'm so sorry. I know that --"
    He waved a hand dismissively. "Relax, Catherine. And sit down. There was no sure way to play this. If I'd assigned an entire SEAL team to watch him and he wanted to walk away, he would have figured something out. That's why we want him, right?"
    "But I should have --"
    Another wave of the hand. "Maybe we can make this work for us. Use it as a chance to prove a point. Or maybe not. I don't know. The bottom line is that this was never going to be an easy courtship."
    He turned his chair to fully face her as she finally sat down. "I assume he knows basically nothing. That he changed th e s ubject every time you tried to tell him why we broke him out of jail."
    "How did you know? Did you bug the --"
    He shook his head. "The less he knows, the less motivated he thinks we'll be to find him. How much money does he have?"
    "None. I mean, we didn't give him any."
    "IDs?"
    She shook her head. "He didn't give us time to make any."
    "Do we have a photo of him with the short hair and new glasses?"
    "No, but we can Photoshop the one we've got."
    Scanlon drummed his fingers on his desk. "I assume his prison escape hasn't gotten much press in Nevada."
    "None at all, really. It's more of a local story up north."
    "Okay. We're going to have to risk it. Quietly fax a photo of him to our friends in casino security. Tell them he's a suspected cheat and to contact me if they see him."
    "What about his accounts?"
    Scanlon leaned a little farther back in his chair and let out a long, slow breath. They'd done a great deal of research into Brandon Vale and found a number of his bank accounts spread out across the country under various aliases. The problem was that ther e w as no way to know if they'd found them all. Worse, they'd never turned up any documents relating to those aliases, making it likely that he had IDs stashed in places they couldn't track. Probably just buried in the woods along with a stack of hundreds. Someone like Brandon could be counted on to be well diversified in that area.
    "Drain them," he said finally. "Let's not make this easy for him."
    Edwin Hamdi watched the flashing light indicating that he had a call on the secure private line he'd had installed. It had been a precaution, really. Nothing more. Nothing he'd expected to ever use.
    "Hello, Richard," he said, when he finally picked up. Scanlon was the only person with the number and had been given instructions to use it only in the event of a dire emergency.
    "He's gone, Edwin. He jumped out of a moving car on the Strip."
    Hamdi's breath caught in his chest for a moment and he glanced up to confirm that his door was shut, despite already knowing that it was. "How could this happen? He's one man, wanted by the police! How could he get away from your people?"
    "It was quite a production, actually. You' d h ave been impressed."
    Hamdi's jaw clenched at the lack of gravity in Scanlon's tone.
    In the beginning, the only significant weakness in his plan was the overreliance and irreplaceability of Jamal Yusef in the Middle East -- a situation that couldn't be remedied and therefore had to be endured. Then Congress had suspended all new Homeland Security funding, leaving them without the resources to go forward. And now this.
    "What does he know?"
    "Nothing."
    "Don't you --," Hamdi shouted, but then caught himself and lowered his voice. "That seems very unlikely to me."
    "Relax, Edwin. I handpicked everyone involved in this and none of them know anything about you -- no one but me does. And Brandon's completely in the dark. All he