The Devils Teardrop Read Online Free PDF Page B

had bothered to comment on it.
    “You know how that happens?” Cage continued. “Something gets under your skin and you try not to think about it. But you can’t help it. I mean, it sounds like water.”
    It didn’t sound like water to Lukas. It sounded like cars and trucks.
    Where was the unsub? There’s 20 million bucks there for the taking and he’s not taking it.
    “Where the hell is he?” muttered another voice. It belonged to a somber man of about thirty, with a military hairstyle and bearing. Leonard Hardy was with the District of Columbia police and was part of the team because, even though the Bureau was handling the operation, it would look bad not to have a District cop on board. Lukas would normally have protested having non-Bureau personnel on her team but she knew Hardy casually from his assignments at the Bureau’s field office near City Hall and didn’t mind his presence—as long as he kept doing what he’d done so far: sitting quietly by himself and not bothering the grown-ups.
    “Why’s he late?” Hardy mused again, apparently not expecting an answer. His immaculate hands, with perfectly trimmed nails, continued to jot notes for his report to the District chief of police and the mayor.
    “Anything?” She turned her head, calling in a whisper to Tobe Geller, a curly-haired young agent also decked out in jeans and one of the same navy-blue, reversible windbreakers that Lukas wore.
    Geller, in his thirties too, had the intensely cheerful face of a boy who finds complete contentment in anyproduct filled with microchips. He scanned one of three portable video monitors in front of him. Then he typed on a laptop computer and read the screen. “Zip,” he responded. If there was any living thing larger than a raccoon for a hundred yards around the ransom bags Geller’s surveillance equipment would detect it.
    When the mayor had given the go-ahead to pay the extortion money, the cash had made a detour en route to the drop. Lukas and Geller had had Kennedy’s aide shepherd the money to an address on Ninth Street in the District—a small, unmarked garage that was up the street from FBI headquarters.
    There, Geller had repacked the ransom into two huge Burgess Security Systems KL-19 knapsacks, the canvas of which looked like regular cloth but was in fact impregnated with strands of oxidized copper—a high-efficiency antenna. The transmitter circuitry was in the nylon handles, and batteries were mounted in the plastic buttons on the bottom. The bag transmitted a Global Positioning System beacon cleaner than CBS’s main broadcast signal and couldn’t be shielded except by several inches of metal.
    Geller had also rewrapped forty bundles of hundred-dollar bills with wrappers of his own design—there were ultrathin transmitting wafers laminated inside them. Even if the perp transferred the cash from the canvas bag or it was split among accomplices Geller could still track down the money—up to a range of sixty miles.
    The bag had been placed in the field just where the note had instructed. All the agents had backed off. And the waiting began.
    Lukas knew her basic criminal behavior. Extortionists and kidnappers often get cold feet just before a ransompickup. But anyone willing to murder twenty-three people wasn’t going to balk now. She couldn’t understand why the perp hadn’t even approached the drop.
    She was sweating; the weather was oddly warm for the last day of the year and the air was sickly sweet. Like fall. Margaret Lukas hated autumn. She’d rather have been lying in the snow than waiting in this purgatory of a season.
    “Where are you?” she muttered. “Where?” She rocked slightly, feeling the pain of pressure on her hipbones. She was muscular but thin, with very little padding to protect her from the ground. She compulsively scanned the field once more though Geller’s complex sensors would have picked up the unsub long before her blue-gray eyes could spot him.
    “Hmm.” C.