Special Agent Erwin Griffin—known as Griff to practically everyone—removed a pair of wire-rim sunglasses from his faded blue eyes and slipped them into his pocket. The snowdusted mountains to the east caught the last of the daylight like blunt rock fingers with flaming tips. The interior of the fire tower cabin was quiet, just a soft, stubborn whistle of wind through the boards and occasional creaks and groans, like a boat caught in a slow wash. Rising forty feet above the ridge, supported by a slender lattice of iron beams and cedar planks, the cabin peered over the listless crowns of the second-growth hemlocks and gave a good vantage on the valley to the east.
Griff had occupied the cabin for two days, tending a telescope, two pairs of high-powered binoculars, digital cameras, and a small computer. He wore jeans and a zipped-up navy blue windbreaker with ‘FBI’ printed in yellow on the back.
The windbreaker had a pinky-sized hole to the right of the ‘I’, just below his shoulder blade.
It had been a peaceful time, mostly alone, with a Port-a-Potty and an ice chest full of sandwiches and canned ice tea. Time to think. Time enough to wonder why he hadn’t worked for the Forest Service or become a hermit. It seemed all his life he had been chasing and catching. He had hundreds of felony arrests and convictions to his credit. He had helped lock up bad guys and sometimes judges and juries threw away the keys but it never seemed to do a damned bit of good. There were always more.
Tides of crime, sweeping in, sweeping out, always leaving the bodies behind. So many bodies.
Griff wiped his eyes and prepared to move things around in preparation for the coming darkness. At night all he had was a single red lantern mounted under the lookout’s north-facing window. It made him look like a submarine captain.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Cap Benson said, pushing up through the hatch with a whuff of steaming breath. Benson was with the Washington State Patrol, thirty-seven years old and a twelve-year veteran of their SWAT team. Griff had known Benson for ten years. Benson owned a mobile home on a two-acre lot twenty miles down the road. He had a slender, pretty wife who liked to wear aprons and bake bread, and a white scar crept down his neck—terminating, Griff knew, at an unnatural notch in his clavicle. He was in better shape than Griff, who was pretty fit for his age, and the whuff was just an expression.
They had last seen each other at a big drug lab bust in Thurston County the month before.
‘I’m going crazy up here,’ Griff deadpanned. He twitched an eyebrow, held a stick of Doublemint gum between his front teeth, pulled back his lips, and waggled it. ‘Hey, look,’ he said. ‘I’m FDR.’
‘You need a long black holder,’ Benson said, unfazed.
‘For gum?’ Griff fixed Benson with a squint. ‘That would be silly.’ He pulled the gum in and started chewing.
‘Any luck?’ Benson asked, walking toward the window that faced the valley.
‘Today, a couple of women. A few kids. No animals. It’s quiet. They’ve been burning trash in barrels.’
‘What about the Patriarch?’
‘Not a sign.’
‘Your Jewish law center guy should be here in a few minutes. He’s wearing snow pants. Looks like a cheechako.’
‘Maybe, but he knows everything there is to know about Chambers.’
‘You sure you don’t want to just hand this over to us?’
‘Thanks, Cap, but I guarantee you don’t want it.’
‘We’re awesome and eager, Griff.’
‘Right,’ Griff said. He called up the stabilized image on the computer screen and showed Benson what he had been looking at all day. Three and a half miles away, green spruces, loblolly pines and sapling cedars spotted the seventy acres around a big gray weather-battered farmhouse. Sixty yards to the east stood a large barn. Right now, the farm looked deserted. No visible cows or other livestock. No dogs.
‘Nice,’ Benson said. ‘Kind of place I might like to retire. I’d paint the house, though.’
It
was
a pretty place, a mile from the nearest road, serene and quiet on a chilly but clear April evening. Nothing like the Old Testament desert where sun-dazzled, long-bearded patriarchs stashed their wives and ruled their tribes. Though there
was
a fire on the mountain—the high snows looked as if they were burning.
Judgment light.
‘You sure it’s him?’ Benson asked.
‘We’ll have a positive ID soon enough,’ Griff said. ‘Pass me those binders, will you, Cap?’
Benson reached across to the small table and handed Griff three thick white binders filled with photographs. Griff laid them out under the binoculars and opened each one to a good photo or mug shot, for his next visitor. They could hear his footsteps on the narrow stairs.
A shaved tanned head crowned by a plain black yarmulke poked up through the hatch and swung a green army duffel bag onto the floor with a thump. ‘Ahoy there. Anybody home?’
‘Come on in, Jacob,’ Griff said. ‘Good to see you.’
The small, skinny man stood up from the step below the
hatch, climbed onto the cabin’s rough board floor and brushed his baggy black snow pants with one hand. He wore a sleeveless purple down vest over a spotless and pressed white business shirt. ‘Always good to hear from you, Agent Griffin,’ he said. ‘You have such interesting things to show me.’ He grinned at Benson, who nodded back, polite but noncommittal, a seasoned cop greeting an outsider who was not himself a cop.
The hatch creaked again, making them all jerk. Griff was not disposed to like whoever climbed up through that hatch, not now. Three was already a crowd. Worse still, this one was female: thin strong hands with chipped nails, hazel eyes, mussed auburn hair, high cheekbones, and a goddamned gray power suit.
‘Pardon me, gentlemen.’ The female stood up straight and wiry on the drafty wooden floor and pulled down her jacket. She wore black running shoes and white socks, her only concessions to the woods and the climb.
Griff scowled at Levine. Levine lifted his brows.
‘Apologies for interrupting,’ she said. Griff hadn’t seen this woman in over ten years and it took him a moment to go through his memory, age a face, and place her name.
Griff introduced them all. ‘Cap Benson, Washington State Patrol SWAT team, this is Jacob Levine from the Southern Poverty Law Center. And this is Special Agent Rebecca Rose. She investigates bioterror. That was what you were working on the last time we met.’
‘Still do,’ Rebecca said.
‘Pleasure,’ Benson said. They firmly shook hands, but all three men looked like boys whose tree-house club had been violated.
‘What brings you here, Rebecca?’ Griff asked.
‘Someone down in that valley has taken delivery of contraband biotech equipment. Fermenters, incubators, some driers.’
‘No shit,’ Griff said. ‘And…?’
‘Don’t mind me,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’m just an observer.’ She whistled at the array of binoculars and the telescope. ‘There must be two dozen guys loafing around at the trail head. What have you got down there?’
‘Ant farm,’ Griff said.
‘Sonofabitch,’ she said. ‘Can I see?’
‘Be my guest.’
Rebecca applied her eyes to the biggest pair of binoculars. ‘Your ant farm doesn’t have any ants,’ she murmured.
‘Just wait,’ Griff said.
The operation had begun a week ago, following a complaint about illegal fireworks. Intense white flashes like giant morning glories had bloomed in the middle of the night over the hills around the farm, letting loose echoing booms, two a night for three nights in a row, bright enough and loud enough to wake up the nearest neighbor—a sleepless old codger who lived with his Airedale four miles away.
Two days after the complaint had been filed, a Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy had driven down the long dirt road to the farm to investigate. He had found a hidden homestead with a concrete and wood-frame barn, one large old house, and a newer, smaller house at the rear, almost lost in the trees. A polite knock at the door of the main house had roused a gray-bearded, broad-shouldered, proud old man with brilliant green eyes. The old man had two middleaged women, slender and worn-looking, living with him in the big house. Six kids had come around from the back and stood in the yard, ranging in age from three to seventeen, all well-fed, conservatively dressed, and well-behaved. Respectful. The deputy had asked about fireworks and been met with puzzled denials and the offer of a hot cup of coffee and fresh sourdough biscuits. He had been invited into the house. The deputy had removed his Smoky hat and held it to one side, leaving his gun hand free. Taking it all in.
The bearded old man had asked one of the women to get coffee. They had waited in the living room, the deputy’s brown uniform wrinkle-free, his equipment and holster shiny black, shirt tucked tight over a young patrol car paunch: a good and reasonable defender of the peace, standing straight and a little awkward on the throw rug in the living room; the old man tall and erect in a loose white shirt and denims, dignified and relaxed. The house inside neat and spare, with handmade shelves and a big antique oak table. Red curtains on the windows. Yellow daffodils in a big vase on a mantel over the stone fireplace.
The old man had seemed amused by the idea that he might be setting off fireworks. People around here, he had told the deputy, tended to be a little dotty. ‘It’s the air. Too pure for some, not pure enough for others.’
The deputy had drunk one cup of good strong coffee poured by one of the tired women from an iron pot. Two kids, a boy and a girl, both about nine, had sat quietly side by side in a big rocking chair near the fireplace.
To be polite, the deputy had eaten a sourdough biscuit slathered with homemade jam and fresh sweet butter. He had found it very tasty.
The woman and the kids had let the old man do all the talking. The deputy was welcome to come back any time. His presence made everyone feel protected, watched over. ‘The Lord God provides for those who heed the necessity of strong arms,’ the old man had said.
The deputy had paid his respects and returned to his car. He could not begin to figure why a stern but hospitable old man with a Biblical grip on his large family would be lobbing starburst fireworks in the early morning darkness.
But something had stuck up in the deputy’s memory like a log rising in a smooth river. Back at the office, he had looked up the NCIS and NCIC files on one Robert Cavitt Chambers, AKA Bob Cavitt, AKA Charles Roberts. Chambers
had last been seen in Texas in 1995. A computer artist at FBI headquarters had updated an ATM security photo taken that year to show Chambers in his sprightly eighties.
The aging trick had worked.
The deputy had recognized the biblical old man at the farmhouse.
‘We lost track of Chambers years ago,’ Levine said. There was only one folding chair in the fire tower. He did not want to occupy the one chair, not with Cap Benson watching him like a hawk. Levine smiled, showing large, even teeth, lightly speckled. He had been raised in Texas on naturally fluoridated water and his teeth were colored like turkey eggs, but strong. ‘You sure this is him?’
‘Positive ID from the deputy,’ Benson said.
‘Too good to be true,’ Levine said. ‘But if it is true, we could be in a world of trouble.’
‘Why is that?’ Benson asked.
‘Who do you think we have down there?’ Levine asked. Now it was Levine’s turn to give Benson a look, and slowly shift that look to Griff, then to Rebecca. At that moment, Levine owned the fire tower.
‘Bank robber. Abortion clinic bomber,’ Benson said.
‘Ah.’ Levine pressed his lips together. ‘That’s all?’
‘That’s enough for me,’ Benson said. Griff let Levine have his fun.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to underestimate him. If it
is
him. Because the Patriarch has lived a life of almost uninterrupted criminal activity since 1962. Before that, he was an altar boy for St. Jude’s in Philadelphia, a predominantly Irish parish. In the seventies, he committed at least five bank robberies in Oklahoma and Arizona. One arrest and trial led to a hung jury. The Oklahoma County prosecutor’s office refused to try Chambers again. I quote the DA, “We will always have some trailer-trash slattern with damp
panties sitting in the jury box. Just get him the hell out of my state.”’
They all looked to see if Levine had offended Rebecca. He hadn’t. Levine continued.
‘Chambers moved to Ireland in 1979. He became an expert in IED—improvised explosive devices. His specialty was nasty booby traps. Don’t hold me to it, but he may have been the guy who actually set the charge in Margaret Thatcher’s toilet in a Brighton hotel in 1986. He returned to the United States later that year, when things got too hot in the UK, but he couldn’t stay out of trouble. In 1988, Nevada State Police caught him at the tail end of a barroom brawl, drunk out of his mind, with a broken pool cue in one hand and a perforated buddy bleeding out on the floor. Chambers was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison in 1989. Sometime the next year, he broke from his Irish roots, swore off drink, and converted from Catholicism to the Aryan Church of Christ Militant. White supremacists.’
‘I am aware of that,’ Benson said.
‘In 1992, his conviction got thrown out on appeal. Turned out an FBI technician didn’t conduct the tests he said he did. Chambers was released in 1993. After that, from 1995 to 1999, he robbed banks from Oklahoma to Alabama. They called him the Proud Poppa because he was assisted by two pre-adolescent males whom he referred to as “my strong and righteous sons.” He then organized the bombing of three Planned Parenthood Clinics in Boston and Baltimore in 1999, resulting in two deaths and six injuries. He’s been on the Post Office hit parade for the last twenty years.’
‘All because of an FBI screw-up?’ Benson asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ Griff said.
‘If that really is his family down there,’ Levine said, ‘and he thinks we’re on to him, he’s going to fight like a cornered bobcat. He will not go back to prison. How are you going to handle this?’
‘We’re still working on that,’ Griff said.
Levine looked doubtful and took his turn peeking through the big binoculars. ‘Well, looky here. Ants.’