C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX
In her haste to make an 8:00
A.M.
meeting, Bonnie Jerome had time only to change out of her Nike walking shoes and into her pumps before scurrying down the hall to get checked off somebody’s list for attending her umpteenth mandatory security briefing. Spies were everywhere, the speaker had told her, and the spies knew who she was. In fact, they knew who everyone was. If you worked for the FBI—from a file clerk to the director himself—they had your picture and a dossier. People like Bonnie and the technicians who worked for her were just as likely to be approached by a foreign agent as was anyone else—perhaps even more so, given that technical types had no arrest powers.
Mentally, she’d checked out of the briefing once the guy got to the part about foreign spies seducing unsuspecting sources at the popular Washington, D.C., nightspots. The thought of it made her smile. If last night’s conquest—a hunky Georgetown student named Jonathan—was a spy, then he’d earned every secret he’d taken home with him.
The meeting finally ended, precisely three hours after it had begun, and now she could get back down to the business of being a computer geek. What she and her people did for the FBI could just as well have been done for any other agency in the government; or even the private sector. They made sure that the complex knot of computer systems—both hardware and soft—ran as smoothly as possible, thus keeping the world safe from the Red hordes, or whatever was the perceived threat
du jour.
In a town that was perpetually fissured by politics, Bonnie truly didn’t care about any of it, so long as her cats remained well fed, her rent was paid on time, and these woefully out-of-date pieces of crap they called computers continued to process the information they were designed to digest. Her compartmentalized Top Secret clearance granted her access to just about everything the system had to offer, but none of it held her interest. Whatever she saw during the course of a day was forgotten by happy hour.
At least, that was usually the case. Today would be different. Just a few minutes after returning to her desk, she discovered in her inbox an urgent message directly related to the
content
of information within the system, rather than on the function of the system itself. She could think of only one other time it had happened—a security breach in one of the older systems in the network, the warning for which surfaced as an error message to one of her programmers. In that case, Bonnie had merely bumped it to the security people and was done.
This morning’s message was different, however, and it came attached to a cover note written in hot-pink ink on a lime-green sticky.
Bonnie—This popped up as an error message at 0321 hrs. this a.m. Thought you’d want to handle it. I’d do it, but I’ve got kids to put through school.
He signed it with a dippy, ridiculous smiley face.
TR would be Ted Rosencranze, her assistant in charge of midnight shifts. Pulling the sticky off the printout, she read further. Apparently, someone over at EPA had tapped into a computer file that had been tagged by one of the old Justice systems for surveillance, back in . . . she checked the date again . . . 1983! Somehow the tag was forgotten, or maybe it expired. Anyway, for whatever reason, it was never transferred to the new system. The instructions were quite specific and, as such, rather unremarkable: in the event that these files were accessed by anyone for any reason, the case agent was to be personally notified right away.
At first, Bonnie didn’t see what the big deal was. This message contained nothing that Ted couldn’t have handled on his own. Then she looked more closely and saw the name of the case agent.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” She paused for a moment to figure out what she should do. Finally, she shrugged and reached for her Bureau phone directory and thumbed through the pages until she found the entry she needed. After one more short pause to collect herself, she lifted the handset and punched in the extension.
A cheerful yet stuffy-sounding woman picked up after the first ring. “Deputy Director Frankel’s office,” she said.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN
Nick knew he should be exhausted, yet the three-hour ride in the sleek Gulfstream jet had left him oddly energized. He could get used to this. The Gulfstream was a flying hotel suite, with lush seating, a fully stocked bar, and a miniature office, complete with a desk, computer terminal, telephones, and even a fax machine. Certainly, it was a far cry from the discount carriers he normally used, where service meant having some Cossack bounce a pack of greasy peanuts off your head while the passenger in front crushed your kneecaps with his seat back.
Nick was the plane’s only passenger. Like a child on an amusement ride, he sat in every seat and played with every button and knob in the passenger compartment, just to see what they would do.
They’d touched down in Little Rock at about five in the morning, where a stone-faced driver met the aircraft on the tarmac and shuttled Nick the rest of the way to Newark. He and his luggage were deposited at an ancient, condemned motel complex a few miles from the industrial park. A long, low roof covered a row of decrepit doors and windows, each identical to the one next to it. Window, door, window, door; and so it went at exact intervals, along the covered sidewalk, for the length of the abandoned structure. An empty metal frame and dangling electrical connections doubled for a sign atop a rusted pole in the crumbling parking lot.
Nick recognized this place as the decomposed carcass of the Ouachita Grove Motor Hotel—the same fleabag where he’d stayed last time, when he was part of a high-spirited team of hazardous waste site workers.
The mute, faceless driver piloted the vehicle past the thoroughly vandalized motel office and back toward the strip of rooms. For the first time, Nick’s stomach boiled with a sense of very real danger. Anything in the world could happen to a man out here, and no one would even hear the screams. Certainly, no one would find his body; the rodents would see to that. A place like this probably had rats the size of cattle. They’d have his bones stripped clean within hours.
What the hell have you gotten yourself into?
Once parked, the driver led Nick over the curb and up to room 24. The hardware had been ripped off long ago, but the silhouette of the numbers still remained in the chalky paint of the delaminated door.
Inside, a card table with four folding chairs had been set in the center of the room, under the skeletal remains of a ceiling fan. Overwhelmed by the stink of mildew and moldy foam rubber, Nick sneezed three times in the first half minute of entering the place. The driver produced a penlight from an inside pocket somewhere and, using its yellow beam to guide the way, found two battery-powered lanterns and turned them on. Next, he parted the tattered curtains on the window frame.
What did it say about the curtains, Nick wondered, when even the vandals left them alone?
“Here you go,” the driver said. “I delivered a few boxes for you last night. That’s them over there.” He pointed to a spot in the back of the room where a dozen cardboard containers lay stacked in an awkward pyramid. “Your friends should be here shortly. I know the place looks creepy, but don’t let it get to you. It’s safe. No one will be by who’s not supposed to.”
As the driver let himself out of the room, Nick called after him, “Where are you going?” but the guy ignored him. It probably was none of his business, anyway.
Three hours passed in silence, and Nick busied himself with the task of reading through the thick printout he’d brought with him.
It all came back quickly: the layout of the plant, the perimeter of the exclusion zone. He remembered it all so clearly, as if the intervening decade and a half had just dissolved from his mind. Preparing for the Newark cleanup had been his first solo shot as site safety officer, and he’d been determined not to blow it. If he’d done his job well, he’d have had it made.
Months before the entry-team cowboys showed up with their attitudes and their silver suits, he had been there with his assessment team, pulling samples out of the soil, air, and water to determine what might have leaked out over the years to threaten the fishes and the squirrels. It was nasty, filthy work—real wet-feet, dirt-under-the-fingernails stuff—the result of which was a stack of reports and maps and diagrams that empirically demonstrated just how little anyone knew about Uncle Sam’s Arkansas root cellar.
Sometimes, though, the absence of information told as important a story as a computerful of data. As he reviewed the ancient charts and graphs there in the moldy motel room, he remembered the sleepless nights these papers had generated so long ago. It had been his responsibility to select the equipment the Silverados would use to make that first entry, and his sleep had been haunted by the penalties they’d pay if he miscalculated the risks.
In the end, of course, the reality had played out to be far more horrifying than any nightmare. He simply had not foreseen the possibility of a terrorist attack.
Not that the Silverados could have known that. Not that they cared. All they heard were the explosions, if they’d heard even that much. Sometimes, in the darkest days of his depression, Nick wondered how many of his dead friends had spent their last instant on earth cursing him for screwing up the one job he had to do.
Hardly a day went by—even before Jake and Carolyn resurfaced in the news—that he didn’t think of those bodies; the way they dropped where they stood, strewn all over the roadway leading to Magazine B-2740. By the time anyone even tried to reach the exterior team, the corpses of those decon people and admin staffers were caked in soot. The ones closest to the open blast doors had melted into their moon suits, testament to the ferocity of the fire which had simply been allowed to burn. Further away, the bodies were just dead; so many lumps of flesh, contained within their protective garments, where their blood pooled out of sight.
Nick’s mind replayed the recovery operations, where each of the contaminated bodies was placed inside an enormous rubber pouch that had been designed for just such a use, albeit with an eye toward a radiation accident rather than a chemical one. The bagged bodies had been taken to a staging area, where they were bagged yet again and shipped off to a military base for decontamination and autopsy.
Not the entry teams, though. Their bodies were deemed to be contaminated beyond recovery. Unlike biological agents, which would have been killed by the extreme temperatures, the chemical agents in Magazine B-2740 merely changed form as they were burned, recombining with the products of combustion to form wholly new, and potentially even more hazardous, compounds. The products of such reactions were reasonably predictable when the process started with known entities, but as more chemicals were added to the recipe, the list of potential combinations grew geometrically, quickly reaching the point where meaningful predictions became impossible. In the Newark Incident, where no one even knew what the original chemical combinations were, the possibilities were infinite.
During the fire itself, the magazine had been a boiling cauldron of fire, smoke, and chemicals as burning rocket propellant and high explosives ignited crate after crate of chemical warheads, raising the temperature within those walls to 4,000º Fahrenheit. According to the accident report—itself an educated best guess—the inferno created its own windstorm, sucking in huge quantities of air through the same opening through which the fireball was trying to vent itself, thus causing a continuous recirculation of the same poisonous atmosphere.
Faced with so much uncertainty, the professional whiners and camera hogs at the EPA did what they did best: they played it safe, declaring the building’s threshold to be the absolute limit to entry. No one could take a step beyond the doorway without violating federal law. That the bodies inside were once people’s sons, or that they were once friends of Nick’s, was deemed an irrelevant detail.
He brooded on what he was about to do.
What if the EPA know-it-alls were right? What if we are walking into a toxic nightmare?
Even if he and Jake and Carolyn could figure a way to engineer the hazards down to the remotest possibility, how could he ever justify taking this kind of risk, just to put the past back on the right track?
As the sound of an approaching automobile pulled his attention back through the front window, he realized his answer had just arrived.
“I’m
not
staying here,” Travis said firmly as he climbed out of the Cadillac and saw what was left of the Ouachita Grove Motor Hotel.
“Hush, Travis,” Carolyn hissed.
“But I . . .” Jake’s gentle hand on his shoulder told him that it was prudent to shut up.
Carolyn moved only her eyes as she took it all in, her jaw slightly agape. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“One each, Arkansas-issue ghost town,” Jake mused aloud.
“You guys actually
slept
here?” Travis asked.
Jake smiled. “Well, it wasn’t quite this bad back then.”
They all jumped as the door to room 24 opened, and Jake and Thorne simultaneously swung their hands to their holsters. Jake stopped the instant he saw who it was, but Thorne kept going, bringing a huge, chrome-plated .45 to bear on the new arrival.
“Freeze!” Thorne shouted.
Nick Thomas’s eyes popped to the size of saucers, and he threw his hands in the air. “Jesus!” he shouted. “Holy shit!”
Jake threw a hand toward Thorne. “No! That’s Nick! Don’t shoot him!”
Thorne held his aim for another second or two, just to make sure, then brought the gun down. “Goddamn amateurs,” he grumbled, stuffing his weapon back under his sports coat. “You keep surprising people like that and you’re gonna die young.”
Nick haltingly lowered his hands, and his legs wobbled a bit as color drained from his face. Carolyn darted forward to help him sit down before he fell. “Holy shit,” Nick said again. It seemed to be the entire breadth of his vocabulary. “Holy shit.”
Travis started to chuckle but stopped when Jake nudged his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Nick,” Jake said, hurrying over to help. “Are you okay?”
“He nearly shot me!” Nick declared. “You send some thug to drag me all the way out here, and then you point guns at me?”
“He’s not a thug,” Carolyn corrected, but no one seemed to hear.
Jake shrugged, looking a little pained. “We didn’t know it was you, Nick. You just startled us.”
Nick looked at him like he’d grown a third eye. “Startled you?” he said incredulously. “Jesus, Jake, you were gonna shoot me for startling you? Suppose it hadn’t been me?”
Jake and Carolyn shared an uncomfortable glance, then changed the subject.
“So. What’s new?” Carolyn asked, sparking a welcome laugh all around. She ventured a hug, as best she could there on the sidewalk, and Nick returned the effort.
“Jesus, you guys look awful,” he said.
Jake helped Nick back to his feet. “How nice of you to notice. Diplomacy is still your specialty, I see.”
Nick wanted to laugh—to lighten the moment—but he couldn’t. “Seriously, Jake, are you all right?”
Jake’s look said it all:
Are you nuts?
“It’s been a tough fourteen years.”
“And who’s this?” Nick nodded toward the boy.
“This is our son, Travis,” Jake said proudly. “And our fourteen years don’t hold a candle to his last two days. He didn’t know about any of this.”
Travis offered a boyish, uncomfortable smile and extended his hand, just as he’d always been instructed.
“Nice to meet you, Travis.”
The boy nodded, then took his hand back and chased a rock with his sneaker.
The sound of tires crunching gravel startled them all, but when Jake saw no aggressive movement from Thorne, he relaxed.
“That’s the same car and driver who brought me here,” Nick explained.
As the green Chevy pulled closer, Thorne waved to the driver, who slowed to a stop. The two of them chatted for a while through the window. When Thorne came up for air, he strolled over to Carolyn.
“Okay, Sunshine,” he said. “I’ve got to go now. Mr. Sinclair wants me to keep a low profile. I’ll leave the Caddy here for you to use.”
“You can’t go!” Travis said. “You’re . . .” He shrank away from Thorne’s piercing glare.
“Everything you asked for should already be in the room. Mr. Sinclair said he’d take care of all the other details, whatever they are. Just be sure to be back at the airport on time tonight.” He delivered his entire speech to Carolyn, as if no one else was even there.
“Thanks, Thorne,” Carolyn said with a smile. She offered him her hand, but he looked confused. “And thank Uncle Harry for me, too.”
Suddenly, Thorne looked like he’d run out of words. He grasped her hand quickly, scowled, and disappeared.
“Well, you certainly have a way with criminal types,” Nick said after Thorne had climbed into the car.
“Stop calling him that!” Carolyn barked. “I owe that man a lot.”