Mrs. Sigsby sat down at her desk to put that in motion, but the phone rang even as she reached for it. She listened briefly, then handed it to Stackhouse.

It was Andy Fellowes. He had been busy. There was a night-crew at Sturbridge, it seemed, and when Fellowes represented himself as an inventory manager for Downeast Freight, checking on a shipment of live lobsters that might have gone astray, the graveyard shift stationmaster was happy to help out. No, no live lobsters offloaded at Sturbridge. And yes, most of 4297 went on from there, only with a much more powerful engine pulling it. It became Train 9956, running south to Richmond, Wilmington, DuPray, Brunswick, Tampa, and finally Miami.

Stackhouse jotted all this down, then asked about the two towns he didn’t know.

“DuPray’s in South Carolina,” Fellowes told him. “Just a whistlestop—you know, six sticks and nine hicks—but it’s a connecting point for trains coming in from the west. They have a bunch of warehouses there. Probably why the town even exists. Brunswick’s in Georgia. It’s quite a bit bigger. I imagine they load in a fair amount of produce and seafood there.”

Stackhouse hung up and looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Let’s assume—”

“Assume,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “A word that makes an ass out of you and—”

“Stow it.”

No one else could have spoken to Mrs. Sigsby in such an abrupt way (not to mention so rudely), but no one else was allowed to call her by her first name, either. Stackhouse began to pace, his bald head gleaming under the lights. Sometimes she wondered if he really did wax it.

“What do we have in this facility?” he asked. “I’ll tell you. Forty or so employees in Front Half and another two dozen in Back Half, not counting Heckle and Jeckle. Because we keep our wagons in a tight circle. We have to, but that doesn’t help us tonight. There’s a phone in that drawer that would get us all kinds of high-powered help, but if we use it, our lives will change, and not for the better.”

“If we have to use that phone, we might not have lives,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

He ignored this. “We have stringers nationwide, a good information network that includes low-level cops and medical people, hotel employees, news reporters on small-town weeklies, and retirees who have lots of time to spend scanning Internet sites. We also have two extraction teams at our disposal and a Challenger aircraft that can get them to practically anywhere fast. And we have our brains, Julia, our brains. He’s a chess player, the caretakers used to see him out there playing with Wilholm all the time, but this is real-world chess, and that’s a game he’s never played before. So let’s assume.”

“All right.”

“We’ll get a stringer to check with the police in Sturbridge. Same story we floated in Presque Isle—our guy says he thinks he saw a kid who might have been Ellis. We better do the same check in Portland and Portsmouth, although I don’t believe for a minute he would have gotten off so soon. Sturbridge is much more likely, but I think our guy will draw a blank there, too.”

“Are you sure that’s not just wishful thinking?”

“Oh, I’m wishing my ass off. But if he’s thinking as well as running, it makes sense.”

“When Train 4297 became Train 9956, he stayed on. That’s your assumption.”

“Yes. 9956 stops in Richmond at approximately 2 AM. We need someone, preferably several someones, watching that train. Same with Wilmington, where it stops between 5 AM and 6. But you know what? I don’t think he’ll get off at either place.”

“You think he’s going to ride it to the end of the line.” Trevor, she thought, you keep climbing higher and higher on the assumption tree, and each branch is thinner than the last.

But what else was there, now that the kid was gone? If she had to use the Zero Phone, she would be told they should have been prepared for something like this. It was easy to say, but how could anyone have foreseen a twelve-year-old child desperate enough to saw off his own earlobe to get rid of the tracker? Or a housekeeper willing to aid and abet him? Next she would be told the Institute staff had gotten lazy and complacent . . . and what would she say to that?

“—the line.”

She came back to the here and now, and asked him to repeat.

“I said he won’t necessarily ride it to the end of the line. A kid as smart as this one will know we’d put people there, if we figured out the train part. I don’t think he’ll want to get off in any metro area, either. Especially not in Richmond, a strange city in the middle of the night. Wilmington’s possible—it’s smaller, and it’ll be daylight when 9956 gets there—but I’m leaning toward one of the whistlestops. I think either DuPray, South Carolina, or Brunswick, Georgia. Assuming he’s on that train at all.”

“He might not even know where it was going once it left Sturbridge. In which case he might ride it all the way.”

“If he’s in with a bunch of tagged freight, he knows.”

Mrs. Sigsby realized it had been years since she had been this afraid. Maybe she had never been this afraid. Were they assuming or just guessing? And if the latter, was it likely they could make this many good ones in a row? But it was all they had, so she nodded. “If he gets off at one of the smaller stops, we could send an extraction team to take him back. God, Trevor, that would be ideal.”

“Two teams. Opal and Ruby Red. Ruby’s the same team that brought him in. That would have a nice roundness, don’t you think?”

Mrs. Sigsby sighed. “I wish we could be positive he got on that train.”

“I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure, and that’ll have to do.” Stackhouse gave her a smile. “Get on the phone. Wake some people up. Start with Richmond. Nationwide we must pay these guys and gals what, a million a year? Let’s make some of them earn their money.”

Thirty minutes later, Mrs. Sigsby set the phone back into its cradle. “If he’s in Sturbridge, he must be hiding in a culvert or an abandoned house or something—the police don’t have him, there’d be something about it on their scanners if they did. We’ll have people in both Richmond and Wilmington with eyes on that train when it’s there, and they’ve got a good cover story.”

“I heard. Nicely done, Julia.”

She lifted a weary hand to acknowledge this. “Sighting earns a substantial bonus, and there will be an even more substantial bonus—more like a windfall—if our people should see a chance to grab the boy and take him to a safe house for pickup. Not likely in Richmond, both of our people there are just John Q. Citizens, but one of the guys in Wilmington is a cop. Pray that it happens there.”

“What about DuPray and Brunswick?”

“We’ll have two people watching in Brunswick, the pastor of a nearby Methodist church and his wife. Only one in DuPray, but the guy actually lives there. He owns the town’s only motel.”

20

Luke was in the immersion tank again. Zeke was holding him down, and the Stasi Lights were swirling in front of him. They were also inside his head, which was ten times worse. He was going to drown looking at them.

At first he thought the screaming he heard when he flailed his way back to consciousness was coming from him, and wondered how he could possibly make such an ungodly racket underwater. Then he remembered that he was in a boxcar, the boxcar was part of a moving train, and it was slowing down fast. The screeching was steel wheels on steel rails.

The colored dots remained for a moment or two, then faded. The boxcar was pitch black. He tried to stretch his cramped muscles and discovered he was hemmed in. Three or four of the outboard motor cartons had fallen over. He wanted to believe he’d done that thrashing around in his nightmare, but he thought he might have done it with his mind, while in the grip of those damned lights. Once upon a time the limit of his mind-power was pushing pizza pans off restaurant tables or fluttering the pages of a book, but times had changed. He had changed. Just how much he didn’t know, and didn’t want to.

The train slowed more and began rumbling over switching points. Luke was aware that he was in a fair amount of distress. His body wasn’t on red alert, not yet, but it had definitely reached Code Yellow. He was hungry, and that was bad, but his thirst made his empty belly seem minor in comparison. He remembered sliding down the riverbank to where the S.S. Pokey had been tethered, and how he had splashed the cold water over his face and scooped it into his mouth. He would give anything for a drink of that river water now. He ran his tongue over his lips, but it wasn’t much help; his tongue was also pretty dry.