He had blood on his arm. The tattoos were smeared. He sat on the porch, letting his heart slow from Krupa to oompah, wishing to hell he had a cigarette, before deciding he would have to take a turn about the yard, around the house, just to make sure.
By that time, he saw vans and more people up by the edge of the clearing.
The farm was no longer quiet.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying,’ Charlene told the tall blond man. It was past noon. Her eyes were puffy. They had made love and slept a little and then talked into the morning. Now they were having breakfast in a Coco’s restaurant. ‘I just can’t be that cynical. I need hope. Even when I know what I’m doing and think about where my husband is, I still want to be a Christian.’
The blond man glanced at his skinned knuckles. They had already scabbed over. He had told Charlene that he had barked them while changing a tire. In fact, he had slipped in a ditch after shooting an Arizona patrol officer.
The waitress brought another glass of orange juice. Charlene drank the second glass with equal speed—three quick gulps—sniffed, and looked around the Coco’s: Scotchgarded print fabric on the booth seats, scarred oak table top, one knife magnetically stuck to a fork beside a plate smeared with yolk and bacon grease. Outside, bleached by the sun, El Centro, California: warehouses and auto repair businesses and trucks roaring by. The blond man was in his late forties, thin, run-down. He had put on sunglasses after leaving the Day’s Inn to hide his eyes—one green, one blue.
‘You’re so quiet,’ Charlene told him.
‘Sorry. I’ve probably said too much already.’
Charlene had driven the green Ford van from Highway 10, where she had picked him up by the side of the road, to El Centro, stopping at a Day’s Inn. They had both taken
rooms. She had met him in the lobby after midnight and asked what his name was and he had told her it was Jim Thorpe. Charlene had been needy. Even after she had fallen asleep, Jim Thorpe had stayed awake. He looked as if he had not slept for weeks.
Charlene looked through the low window beside the booth, out to the dry lawn and the street beyond. ‘I’m ready to believe in Jesus, just give myself up to something that I know is totally good,’ Charlene said. ‘I mean, I can see Jesus so clearly and he is beautiful and compassionate and he has a lovely smile—just like yours.’ She looked at him with real longing. ‘I do not know why men have to act so tough. You certainly don’t need to be bitter…I mean, you’re an attractive older guy. You can travel the whole world, no responsibilities…’ She stopped, confused, and looked at the table.
Charlene’s husband had gone to West Point. After 10-4, he had signed up for infantry, taking the idiot sticks, the emblem of crossed rifles, over more plum army opportunities. Charlene had wanted him to stay home and be a husband and a father. He had enlisted for a second tour to kill ragheads and stay with his buddies. His name was Jason. She had shown Jim Thorpe a picture. Her guy was upright, young, strong, bullnecked, laser-eyed. He wondered what Jason was seeing right now.
‘I think about him being God knows where because the
damned army
won’t tell the families anything and I wonder, what is Jesus really up to? What is He thinking, making all of us suffer? But I can’t blame Jesus. It’s us, isn’t it?’ Charlene tapped the juice glass on the table. Made it do a little dance. Made as if to smile bravely, but too late. Women liked confessing to him. It was the one thing that they gave him that he would have gladly dispensed with.
But hadn’t he confessed to her—just a little, and started her flow? Opened up about his innermost opinions?
If she only knew the half of it.
‘I know you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘But being so hopeless…I can’t feel that way. It’s just the way the world treats us. We’re being tested.’
His nerves were starting to jangle. He needed to move on or the grief would slam back and he’d find the brick wall that he had built between him and his lost faces crumbling. ‘Then maybe it’s all taken care of in the end,’ he offered.
Charlene’s eyes filled with tears.
‘It is so wrong to have to wait for my husband, and feel…so
hungry
to have a man. Just a man to hug me, wrap his arms around me. I have never been desperate, not like this. Never. And my boy needs a father. I need
his
father.’ Her face hardened. ‘I have never done this before.’
Yes, you have,
he thought.
‘When is it all going to come right again?’ she asked.
‘Soon,’ Jim Thorpe said. He wrapped one hand around her fingers on the juice glass and gave them a gentle squeeze.
Charlene frowned at him,
don’t tease
. ‘I just want my husband home. I want to feel normal, be right with my kids and my family.’
‘Of course.’ He stood beside the booth and opened his wallet. ‘Breakfast is on me.’
‘No,’ Charlene said primly. ‘We’re not poor.’ She laid a twenty next to his. Then she put down another ten and gave him back the twenty he had put down. Bravely, she said, ‘Your money’s no good here.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure, Mr. Jim Thorpe. Or is it James?’
He smiled.
‘Such a lovely smile,’ she said. Her eyes turned quick and efficient, darting around the tables, squinting through the bright windows. ‘You leave first.’ Even in El Centro she was worried that people who knew her might see her with another man.
‘Thanks for breakfast,’ he said.
‘Thanks for having a patient ear,’ she said.
As he walked out into the glare she passed him in a tidy hurry. No one could have guessed what they had been doing on thin hotel sheets just a few hours before. He admired that sort of efficiency. Women were good at such things.
He was not. The bricks were falling. There was no mental wall thick enough to block what he had lost. He stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, waiting, shivering despite the heat. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Tommy. Tommy did not need to know about the patrolman. His selfimportant partner was tippy at the best of times. That was how Tommy described himself: tippy, but enthusiastic—when he wasn’t Dipsy-Down, as he called it.
Unpredictable—but for the moment, still essential.
The tall man watched Charlene pull the green Ford van out of the Coco’s parking lot. She rolled down the window and looked both ways but deliberately did not see him as she drove by.
Five minutes later, Tommy roared up in his battered, creamcolored El Camino. He reached over and pulled the door lock with fat dexterous fingers. He was small and skinny but for his face and his fingers; these belonged to a larger man. The effect was grotesque but Tommy no longer seemed to care how people reacted.
‘No luggage?’ he asked, his plump face showing an early flush of dismay. ‘No truck. No printers. God, Sam, what happened?’
Sam opened the door and climbed in, sitting on the ripped seat. ‘Let’s drive,’ he said.
‘What happened to the big truck?’
‘There’s been a change in our strategy,’ Sam said.
‘Sam, I don’t like being
disappointed
,’ Tommy fluted. ‘We need those printers. I can’t do everything we want without those printers. I don’t like
failure
.’
Sam was dangerously close to chucking it all. ‘To the winery, Jeeves,’ he said with a flourish.
‘You’re in
fine spirits
. You got laid last night, didn’t you, Sam? That’s why you’re trying to be funny.’ Sometimes, Tommy’s bursts of intuition made him seem psychic—hard to get used to in such a man-child.
‘We’re okay, really. We’ll be fine. We’ll get more printers.’
‘Before you got here and got laid, something went wrong. Don’t tell me,’ Tommy insisted, his face clouded like a baby about to burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Really, I don’t. I couldn’t take it.’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Sam said.
‘Did you leave fingerprints?’ Tommy asked.
Sam raised his right hand. His fingers were shiny with clear silicone caulk.
‘There’s something else,’ Tommy said, his tiny eyes shifting and wild. ‘I turned on the radio. I heard it on the way to pick you up.’ He pushed the radio knob. The big news was the death of the bank robber and abortion clinic bomber called the Patriarch and the ongoing search of his farm hideaway in Washington state. ‘Is that our guy?’ Tommy asked. ‘Sam, is that our guy? Is that our second factory?’
Sam did not have a quick story to soothe Tommy—or himself. He stared at the radio, then out the window.
Tommy said, ‘Oh my. Oh my. Sam, oh my.’
‘All right, Tommy. Pull over and I’ll drive for a while.’
Tommy’s nose was dripping and he was shaking badly. He had entered the land of Dipsy-Down and it was all he could do to stop the car without getting them both killed.
Griff stripped off his shirt and body armor and handed it to the FBI evidence team. They whisked it to their van to offload the data and video contained in the vest. All of the police vehicles, at Griff’s request, stayed on the edge of the clearing, about a hundred yards from the house and the barn.
He walked back toward the house with Rebecca Rose at his side. They stared at the barn. Griff’s nostrils flexed and his upper lip twitched as if he were about to sneeze. The breeze was cool against his naked upper torso. He slipped an Underarmor T-shirt over his head. Jacob Levine joined them and handed Griff his own purple vest. Griff declined. Even chilly, he refused to go that far.
‘Becky,’ he said, ‘Chambers kept looking at the barn.’
‘Yeah,’ Rebecca said.
‘I think you might want to get back with the others.’
‘I will if you will,’ Rebecca said.
‘Don’t be an asshole,’ Griff said. ‘I’ve done this kind of stuff for decades.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘I’ll need to see what’s in the house and the barn ASAP. Then we’ll know what to do next.’
Levine held his ground, too. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked them.
‘Heard about what?’
‘The bus never made it to town. It stopped and the families loaded into three cars. They diverted at a side road and
threw off the tracking vehicles. Some of them may be headed east to Idaho.’
Griff rubbed his upper lip, first checking to make sure there was no blood on his finger. ‘He knew about us all along. He saw us cut down the tree.’
‘Makes you wonder where his righteous sons are,’ Rebecca said.
They both stared into the far stands of cedars and larches.
Griff cringed as a helicopter passed slowly overhead. Even at three hundred feet, the steady beat of the rotors thumped the barn and the ground under his boots. Three crime scene techs came around the main house, stringing yellow tape. The tape flapped and curled in the downdraft. There was a news station imprint on the chopper’s side—KOMO Seattle. Someone must have radioed the pilot that the scene was unsecured and dangerous, for the helicopter abruptly backed off and swung around, heading west over the woods to the highway, probably to take more pictures of the base camp.
Cap Benson approached bearing in his arms a more suitable blue blazer he had pulled from the trunk of his car. Griff slipped the blazer on over the T-shirt and decided he looked if anything even more ridiculous than he would have wearing Levine’s vest.
They all stood in the broad, scrubby front yard of the old farmhouse. Inside, the Patriach still lay sprawled on his stomach in a pool of blood, cuffed, awkward and bedraggled and not giving a damn one way or the other. Griff could see him like an after-image over the barn. He had killed three times—four, now—in his FBI career. Six or seven times before that, in the Navy. Much more than the average. He did not enjoy the distinction.
From the road, blowing in on a westerly breeze, they could hear the faint sounds of big trucks on the move. Washington State Patrol, FBI, ATF, Homeland Security, whatever.
Dogs running to sniff at the old man’s kingdom.
‘That’s one big barn,’ Benson said. ‘Wonder what’s in it?’
‘Why don’t you go have a look?’ Griff said. He would have to re-evaluate the entire scene. If Chambers had known he was being watched for several days, who knew what he could have accomplished? What chain of events he could have started by making a few night visits to the barn, or the second house…?
Chances were, with all the kids, there would not have been tripwires or other traps spread around the yard, or in the houses…but Griff just could not be sure.
He turned to the north. Several techs in white plastic suits and hoods were swabbing samples of powder off the distant trees. ‘Your people?’ he asked Rebecca. She nodded. ‘What do you think they’ll find? Chambers said they had sprayed for pests.’
‘I doubt that,’ Levine said. ‘He hated pesticides. Called them a conspiracy by the Jews to help feed the Mud People of the world.’
Rebecca looked amused. Griff did not know what to think about the world’s evil. Another tech closer in had climbed a ladder braced against one of many wooden poles around the property and was attaching a multimeter to the wires suspended overhead.
‘How many long arms of the law do you have back there, Cappy?’ Griff asked.
‘There’s me and my boys. ATF has pulled back, I don’t know why.’
‘Bureau asked for primacy. We still have some chips to play.’
‘I don’t see your boss, Keller,’ Benson said.
‘He was called back to Washington, DC,’ Rebecca said. ‘He’s going to testify before some senate committee.’
Griff sucked that back in. Not even collaring the Patriarch stopped the wheels of partisan politics, trying to grind down the FBI. Trying to kill it and hand its responsibilities over to
others. No matter. His retirement was secure. One more year and he would cross the boundary of GS-1811—into mandatory retirement.
Benson continued, ‘There’s Sergeant Andrews and four guys from the state inter-agency bomb squad. We got Dan Vogel from the K9 explosives unit. I saw Child Protective Services hanging around with nothing to do, and one black girl in a leather jacket, like a goddamned Black Panther, but I suppose she’s one of yours.’
Griff nodded.
‘And two other feds I don’t recognize.’
‘Homeland Security and Bureau of Domestic Intelligence,’ Griff said. ‘They’d love to horn in. I want Dan and his dog to sweep the main house, then the second house, in that order.’ He waved his hands, drawing a plan in the air.
‘Not the barn?’ Benson asked.
‘Griff thinks the barn is rigged,’ Levine said. He paced in a small circle, eyes on the ground, sweat on his forehead despite the chill.
‘Bots coming soon?’ Griff asked.
Benson nodded.
‘Send a bot into the barn. And get some more troopers into those woods. His sons could be drawing a bead on us right now.’ He closed one eye and cocked his finger at Levine.
‘Hell, they would have taken you out after you killed their pappy,’ Levine said. ‘The sons are long gone.’
‘Maybe.’
Griff did not think the houses were rigged with explosives. Kids had been there too recently; tough to control kids, keep them from setting something off. No one had seen anybody walking outside to the rear house after the bus had departed. Still, it would be necessary to thoroughly check for both explosives and kids in hiding—and the K9 could do that.
He now stood with hands on hips and faced his main nightmare directly. The big sliding barn door had been left
open six or seven inches, not enough for a man to easily squeeze through. He did not want to touch that door. It was too much like an invitation.
‘The Patriarch would plan for bots, don’t you think?’ Griff asked Rebecca.
‘Sounds like,’ Rebecca said. ‘X-ray triggers. Trip mikes tuned to machine sounds.’
‘All these wires,’ Griff said. ‘What the hell are they for? What level of paranoia should we consider unreasonable? He’s been at this for fifty years, right?’
‘We should wait,’ Rebecca said. ‘Less chance of someone clumsy hitting a tripwire.’
Griff turned on her but kept his voice low. ‘What if it’s all hooked up to a goddamned timer, Special Agent Becky Rose?’
‘Your call,’ Rebecca said, pursing her lips. Griff was the only agent who called her Becky and she didn’t like it much, but in the grand scheme…
‘Is it? Or is News breathing down my back?’
‘As I said…’
‘Right. It’s my call. Well, fuck that, too.’
The police waiting up at the start of the clearing were milling about, observing the four of them as they faced the barn.
‘He’d know,’ Levine said. ‘He’d plan for dogs.’
‘Our dogs are trained to avoid wires. They work through all sorts of masking scents,’ Benson said. ‘I’d rather trust them than the bots.’
‘No dog I ever met could spot a tripwire in dim light or slip past a motion detector,’ Griff said. ‘I think the houses are safest. Dogs for the houses. We’ll send bots into the barn.’
He was starting to shake. It had been hours since he had shot the old man. Shot him six times in his fucking living room. A man’s home is his castle. Deep things were churning in him and making his hands and shoulders tremble. ‘Well,’ Griff said. ‘Let’s bring them all forward. Get me Watson.’
Rebecca used her comm.
Special Agent Alice Watson pushed through the crowd of police and agents and walked down the road with quick, offkilter steps. She was a plump woman of thirty-three with one leg shorter than the other, acres of attitude, and the expertise to justify it. Long scars pulled her face on one side. She wore a thick lens over one eye but with the other eye she could still see clearly.
Watson had nearly died two years ago, in Paris. She had made one small mistake dealing with an Al Aqsa handbag packed with a proximity fuse and two charges of T6 Anafex, set to release a vial of osmium tetroxide through spray cans that had once held Raid. The bag had been found in a public park. There had been no time to bring in robots. The main charge had dudded. The canister of tetrox had remained intact, sparing a large crowd—and Watson. But there had been a third fuse buried under the pack, and she had taken the backup charge—just a pinch—square in the face.
Later, in the hospital, she had told Griff, ‘I met the ghost of that bomb. I put both my fingers up its nose and twisted. That’s why it let me go. Next time, it’ll share some secrets.’
Watson had spent time recuperating with her husband and kid. She had returned to the job after six months but had spent the next four months in a powered walker. The bomb ghost might or might not be a joke. Griff didn’t care.
She was the best bomb expert he knew.
Watson shook hands with Rebecca, then stood beside Griff and said, ‘We’re on bombnet at HDS and Eglin. They’re feeding it to experts in Los Angeles and Washington. We’re going to have about fifteen good eyes on this one, including mine.’ Her grin was a cruel parody but it bucked up Griff’s spirits.
A few steps behind Watson followed a short man with close-cut brown hair, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt and leading a golden retriever on a glittering chain. The dog
whined and dodged, eager to earn her play treat. This would be Dan Vogel and Chippy, Griff thought. Beautiful dog, fluffy and reddish-gold, recently shampooed and totally focused on the red ball that Vogel clutched in one hand. A happy dog with way too much energy. Under one arm, Vogel carried a thick folder filled with scent tabs: a library of bomb ingredients to help Chippy focus. In the last ten years there had been a substantial revolution in both the variety, the compactness, and the strength of explosives. Microreactors—chemical factories little bigger than a breadbox—had put the creation of lethal amounts of dangerous substances into the hands of small groups, and even individuals.
‘Chippy’s happy,’ Watson said.
‘All my bitches are happy. Where first, boss?’
‘That is a big barn,’ Watson said.
‘What’s your ghost telling you?’ Griff asked.
Watson glared at him with one good eye, the other goggling behind its lens like a blank moon in a telescope. ‘That was private, Griff.’
‘All right. What kind of bomb would fill a barn?’ he asked. ‘Fertilizer,’ Watson said. ‘But this bastard has used kitchen TAMP, C4, Semtex, Anafex, triminol, passage clay, Poly-S phosphate, and aerosol kerosene—that’s a baby daisy-cutter, to you guys—you name it. I really don’t know. This would be his
pièce de résistance
?’
‘Sounds right,’ Griff said. ‘He died proud. He said it was all in God’s hands.’
‘Shit,’ Benson said, and his face went a shade more pale in the dusk. Levine stopped pacing and shoved his hands in his pockets. Rebecca looked down at her feet, then up again, eyes slitted.
Vogel knelt by the retriever and opened the book to the first page, a stimulating scent. The dog snuffled happily, eyes bright and tail wagging. Then she sneezed.
Watson looked at the network of wires on poles
surrounding the house and strung over the dirt road. She took a cleansing breath, let it out, pointed to the edge of the clearing, and said, ‘Gentlemen, Agent Rose, if you’re nonessential, you best move on out. Who knows what you might step in—or on?’
Rebecca said, ‘I’ll stay.’
‘You’re not going in there, Rebecca,’ Griff said.
‘We’ll see,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’ve put in my request.’
‘Shit. We need to reduce personnel and do our search, no crap. I’ve been involved in tracking this bastard for twenty years.’
‘No crap,’ Rebecca said steadily. ‘I’ve been working bioterror for longer than that. I’m here, I’m interested. I won’t get in your way.’
‘Becky—’
‘Can you identify a minilab, Griff? Sequencers? Fermenters? Do you know what to look for?’
Griff set his jaw. ‘You could tell me. You’re a Janie-come-lately here. You three, bug out.’
Benson shrugged. ‘You’ve got enough grief, you don’t need any more from me,’ he said, and patted Griff’s arm. He and Levine walked up the road, leaving the field and the barn to the experts, and to Rebecca Rose, who had set her jaw and was
interested.
Levine looked back over his shoulder. Griff did not like having people look back, one last glance; that sort of shit bothered him. He pointed his finger at Rebecca. ‘You’re not even rated for a bomb suit.’
She folded her arms.
Watson eyed them both with amusement.
Chippy was whining and tugging toward the barn.
‘Is Chippy good on her own?’ Griff asked Vogel.
‘Got a four zero on the Fairview course last month,’ Vogel said. ‘Found ten out of ten devices, including Anafex.’
‘Is she okay with kids?’ Griff asked.
‘Loves them. Kids play fetch.’
Chippy strained at her leash. She really wanted into that barn. Griff did not want her or anyone else in there. That barn was creeping him out badly. He glared at Rebecca.
‘Number one.’ Griff pointed to the main house. ‘Then the house behind.’
Vogel led the dog away to the first house. He opened the screen door then reached down and unclipped her collar. The golden retriever trotted inside.