The Grid

by Nick Cook

  I can’t escape the feeling that somewhere along the line, these notes have been doctored.

  If that’s the case, we also need to know what the military holds on Master Gunnery Sergeant Matthew L. Voss. Who is – or was – the guy they tried to palm off as Gapes? I’ve left this with Hart, though I guess Voss must be dead or something would have come up.

  I close the file and open the next.

  Boonchatz was set up so rural communities can monitor local news and events, but it has morphed into quite possibly the world’s vilest bile and vitriol exchange.

  ‘Skylar Pyles is nothing but a two-bit piece of white poon trash …’

  ‘Rylee McKibben has six dirty kids and counting. She spends all her husband’s assistance money in bars …’

  Boonchatz is giving us a heads-up on Blacksoil, population 4,521, and the third worst crime index in West Virginia. If you’re lucky enough to have a job, the median annual income is $23,575. If you’re not, chances are you’ll be out of work for a good long while.

  The coalmines that had sustained the area for 140 years closed down in the late 1990s and the unemployment rate hovers around nine per cent.

  On the city’s eastern perimeter lies an almost road-free area of the Monongahela National Forest called the Laurel Forks. It’s billed as one of the least visited federal wildernesses in the United States, but is less than three and a half hours from the capital by road. Hetta’s 4WD Lexus is taking us there on US-48.

  I turn back to Boonchatz and start reading aloud.

  ‘Cody Wyatt is the world’s biggest deadbeat and a worthless ass druggie dad …’

  ‘Makaylah Nuckles – let’s just say it’s not what you know, it’s who you blow—’

  ‘OK,’ she says, ‘back up. Right there. That’s him.’

  To many, a connection between Cody Wyatt and Duke Gapes would appear paper-thin at best. Not to the Service, however.

  The earliest it is possible to track their association is almost twenty years ago, when Wyatt friended him on Facebook. But we know they attended the same school – Boulder View – and that, during what Katya described as a dark period in Gapes’s life, in the years after his father died, they hung out, did what kids in Blacksoil liked to do (and according to Boonchatz, still do): drinking beer, smoking weed, jacking cars and racing on the outskirts of town.

  A trawl of the NCIC database throws up Wyatt’s social security number, state criminal identification number and arrest record.

  The Pentagon makes little effort to track down military personnel who abandon their posts in war or peacetime; it simply doesn’t have the resources. It’s barely able to keep tabs on the numbers. Hetta has pulled the data from the Pentagon’s Office of Personnel and Readiness. I had no idea of the scale of it. None. Over the past fifteen years, they’ve listed in excess of 23,000 people as missing across the four services. The real figure is believed to be twice or three times that.

  When the AWOL epidemic was at its height, shortly before our forces withdrew from Afghanistan, a Rutgers University research team set out to discover where people go when they run from the military. Almost eighty per cent of them end up in the area they regard as home.

  After thirty days, the soldier’s name is dropped from the rolls – the roster of personnel listed as duty-ready – and a federal warrant is listed for his or her arrest. The deserter becomes a felon. But the military doesn’t have the personnel to pursue them, so becomes reliant on the civilian authorities.

  The truth is, a whole lot of deserters never get stopped for running a red light or pulled over for parking ticket violations, which means they’re left untroubled for weeks, months – decades, sometimes.

  Gapes’s personnel file shows that he was unluckier than most.

  Several days after he was posted as missing, a couple of MPs showed up at his mom’s trailer in the North Country Acres Mobile Home Park.

  When they didn’t find him, they looked around town for his known associates.

  Cody Butler Wyatt, a thirty-eight-year-old, blue-eyed, white-skinned, six-foot-one, 260-pound male living half a mile away, dinged up in a beat when Hetta entered Blacksoil into the Service’s Counter-Surveillance Unit Reporting database.

  ‘Eight months ago, he was overheard in the Coalhole Bar ’n’ Grill – a dive on the edge of town near the abandoned railroad depot – making threatening statements about President Thompson.’

  She glances at me as we branch off US-48 onto the WV-42 South.

  ‘He said Thompson’s campaign pledge to disengage America from the multiple wars it was fighting against terrorism amounted to betrayal of his country. And that now that he was President, the only thing that was good for him was “a bullet through his worthless faggot brain”.’

  She trots out verbatim what Gapes had shared with me: that ‘the plan’, whatever it is, was well planned, advanced and would be well executed, unless we moved to stop it.

  Is that what we’re dealing with here, she asks me. A bunch of wacko nationalists?

  The GPS tells us the dark smudge on the far horizon is the Monongahela National Forest and that Blacksoil lies beyond it.

  I push my seat back and ask Hetta where she’s from.

  ‘Northeast Philly.’

  ‘Your dad a cop?’

  She glances at me. ‘My dad a cop?’

  ‘I figured you’d come from a family of them.’

  ‘You going to send me your bill when we’re done?’

  I smile. ‘It’s called a conversation.’

  Her eyes remained fixed on the road.

  ‘My brother’s a cop.’

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘My folks ran a bar. Had done since before I was born. Another brother runs it now. It’s a family business. I helped out till I went to college.’

  ‘You joined the Service from college?’

  ‘I joined the Feds, then the Service.’

  ‘What did you major in?’

  ‘Computer science.’

  Of course. ‘Big family?’

  She gives a shrug. ‘We’re Catholic.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Tell me about them – your family. So, one’s a cop and one runs the bar. That it?’

  ‘There’s seven of us.’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘Another brother’s got religion – he’s a priest. My sister has her own family. And I got two other brothers, both still in school. That’s it.’

  We follow an old railroad and a boulder-strewn river, swollen by the recent rains and melting snow.

  Fifteen minutes go by. I try again.

  ‘So, why the Service?’

  ‘When I was a kid, I saw patterns in things. I liked puzzles.’

  ‘That was your reason for joining the Service?’

  ‘No. I caught a guy my parents trusted to help them run the bar. He was skimming profits. It made me so mad I swore that’s what I would do.’

  ‘Hunt down fraud?’

  ‘Big as it came.’

  ‘So, it was the investigative side?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘But you can handle a weapon, too.’

  She seems to grip the wheel a little tighter. ‘It looks good when there are female agents protecting the President. I was a statistic in PPD’s diversity quotas.’

  ‘When Cabot came in?’

  ‘Cabot is all about how things look. He doesn’t give a crap about the President, honest to God. He was brought in to reform the Secret Service. He delegated the task of protecting POTUS to SAIC Lefortz.’

  The silence stretches between us.

  ‘You want to tell me what happened back there?’

  She doesn’t bother to ask how I know. My information can have come from one of two sources: Reuben or Lefortz. And Lefortz is too much of a gentleman to peddle gossip.

  ‘They were taking bets. The jackpot went to the ape who could fuck me first.’ She pauses. ‘That was Director Cabot’s idea of locker-roo
m fun.’

  There’s a flash of pre-dawn light in the wing mirror as the road bends to the right. Then it straightens again and the white line unwinds into darkness once more.

  14

  THE FIRST SIGN OF HABITATION IS A SMALL, OUT-OF-TOWN MALL with a bar, an auto repair shop, a furniture store, a take-out pizza joint, a jewelry exchange and a payday loan facility, arranged around two sides of a parking lot.

  We cross a bridge, hang a left and keep the railroad on our right till we find ourselves outside what was once a train depot: a long, low brick building with dust-caked windows, three-quarters of them smashed in.

  Hetta pulls up in front of a corrugated-iron maintenance shed with West Virginia Railroad stenciled above the concertina doors. There’s a steam locomotive out front, graffiti covering every inch of it. Between the shed and a warehouse is a single-story building with a flat roof and flashing signage. The Coalhole is open till midnight, serves beer, burgers and pizza, and is available for social functions.

  There is no one around, so we make a U-turn.

  Back in town, we turn into a street with a Pentecostal church at one end and a Baptist church at the other. Cody Wyatt’s one-story house stands in the middle. It has a swing in the yard and a GMC pick-up with black windows on the drive. The drapes are drawn and there is no sign of life. We park up a discreet distance away.

  The database holds a mugshot of Wyatt: a smalltime drug-dealer in a no-hope shit-hole with convictions for domestic battery and larceny.

  When the coal company threatened to close down both Blacksoil’s mines in the mid-1990s, Duke Henry Gapes Sr, known as Hank, mounted a spirited campaign to save them, rallying local people to march in defense of their vanishing pension and retiree healthcare rights.

  The subsidiary of the company that owned the mines was declared bankrupt and most of its pension funds died with it. Years later, this was exposed as a scam. For Gapes Sr the betrayal was too much. Two days after the deal brokered by the mineworkers’ union became a fait accompli, he died of a heart attack.

  When Hetta told me this, I was filled with admiration for Duke, and compassion. He could have ended up doing a Cody Wyatt, but after three years kicking around the fringes of Blacksoil’s petty crime scene, he took himself off to a recruiting office – the Armed Forces Career Center in Heatherfield – and signed up with the Marines.

  Was there anger there?

  Perhaps.

  Enough to harbor rage against the system?

  Unknown.

  A twenty-year-old Ford pick-up with smashed wing mirrors and a West Virginia Black Bears sun-strip sits out front of the Gapes trailer. Its white paint is chipped and peeling, and the shutters have faded on the side that gets the sun. Shingles are missing from the roof. The lights are on behind the lace drapes, but there are no other signs of life.

  Heavy metal rocks the trailer on the left. The one on the right looks like a junkyard. A pit-bull on a leash shivers and whines in the sub-zero sunshine. A pine forest sweeps down a wide, rock-strewn slope behind them. A pair of eagles soar above the ridgeline.

  I close the window as the Gapes porch door opens. An overweight woman appears. She uses a stick and moves with difficulty. Tight gray curls protrude beneath her blue woolen hat. She is wearing blue slacks and a white windcheater. She looks around seventy.

  Hetta and I exchange glances. This has to be Misty Buckhannon, Gapes’s aunt, his mother’s sister.

  Hetta has pulled up the mother’s medical records. The Alzheimer’s is advanced. Louisa Gapes – Lou – needs Misty’s full-time care. She is all but confined to the trailer.

  Misty approaches the pick-up and puts her key in the driver’s side lock. She wiggles it, removes it, looks at it, sticks it back in the lock and tries again.

  Hetta shuffles in her seat. ‘Lock’s frozen.’

  I open my door.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You got any hand gel?’

  Course she has.

  Misty turns around when she hears my steps on the gravel. She raises a hand and squints against the sun.

  I step forward and squeeze some of the gel into the lock. This time, it opens.

  She studies me more carefully. ‘You from around here, mister?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m from Washington.’

  ‘Worshington?’

  She turns back to the porch, then stops and says over her shoulder: ‘Then I guess you’re here about Duke.’

  I’m sitting in a bay window at the rear of the trailer. Duke’s mother, Lou, is beside me, her gaze apparently fixed beyond the chain-link that separates her yard from the trees.

  Two framed photographs lie on the table in front of me. The first is of Duke in dress blues: the white cap, blue tunic, red piping, white belt of a Marine. The peak of his cap is low over his eyes. Mo was right; he had been a good-looking boy.

  In the second photo, Duke is aged around twelve or thirteen; Hank in his late forties. They’re both clutching fishing rods, and Duke, beaming, holds up two decent-sized trout to the camera.

  Misty has already told us how much Duke loved his dad. And I don’t doubt it. She knows that we know more than we’re letting on. I can see it in her eyes. She also knows that we are not the people who showed up without warning to ask questions about her nephew. Those people carried no identification, wouldn’t say where they were from, and appeared after Katya had agreed the compensation package.

  ‘Do you recall the date?’ Hetta asks. They are in the kitchen, Misty washing pans and dishes, Hetta drying them.

  ‘It was the night before Lou’s birthday.’

  ‘When?’ I ask.

  ‘A little over a year ago. November 20th.’

  ‘What did they do?’ Hetta asks.

  ‘Turned the place over good.’

  ‘Sounds like they were looking for something, not someone,’ Hetta says.

  I don’t have the first idea what to make of this. I just listen and observe.

  When Hetta and Misty are finished, Misty comes over with a fresh pot of coffee and fills my cup.

  Under Hetta’s Opsec rules, we have implemented a few precautions.

  The local field office, contrary to protocol, is completely in the dark about our visit. The only person that knows we are in West Virginia is Lefortz. I have told Misty no more than I told Katya: that the White House is interested in looking again at Duke’s case. There is no TV here and no Internet. She seems unaware of the events in D.C.

  Lou picks up the picture of Duke in his uniform and stares at it intently. She turns to me and says something. It sounds as if she’s asking whether I know her son.

  The clinical advice is easy to dispense. My training has given me the tools, supposedly, to deal with the victims of Alzheimer’s. But now that Lou is focusing on me, her eyes searching mine for something – anything – I can tell her about Duke, I haven’t the first clue what to say. And I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth.

  She takes my hand in her thin, bony fingers and asks me again. This time I hear her clearly.

  ‘Do you see him?’

  ‘Now come on, darlin’,’ Misty says. ‘You don’ wanna be talkin’ that way …’

  ‘Why does she say that?’ Hetta asks.

  Misty dabs at a bead of white spittle that is beginning to trickle from the corner of her sister’s mouth. ‘Because this is how life is, that’s why.’

  I hear her anger, bitterness and frustration.

  ‘Katya told me your sister received some calls from Duke,’ I say to Misty. ‘After he ran.’

  ‘Uh huh. Did she also tell you they only ever happened when I was out?’

  ‘No. Did you check with the phone company?’

  Misty nods. ‘There were no calls.’

  She glances at her sister and taps the side of her head. ‘She weren’t ever the same after Duke got blew up in A-rak. She said Duke was callin’ her ’cos he was in a place that made him sceert.’

  If he was foreign-deploy
ed, if he had been sent back to the desert, as Katya had maintained, it wasn’t surprising that a return to the Middle East, with its memories of the war and the incident that gave him the brain injury, would re-traumatize him …

  Misty shakes a finger. ‘She said Duke was sceert ’cos he kept seein’ his dad. She said he’d spoke to Duke – number of times.’

  ‘But his father’s dead.’

  ‘Uh huh. Dead years.’

  Lou has gone back to staring out the window. ‘Duke …’ she says suddenly, with heartrending sadness.

  ‘I told you, Lou honey. You gotta stop talkin’ that way. Duke’s with our Lord now. He’s at peace.’

  Misty sets the milk down on the table and prizes Lou’s hand from mine.

  ‘Where does she say she sees Duke?’

  And then, because I realize I’m not addressing the question to the person I ought to be, I take back Lou’s hand. ‘Where do you see him, Lou?’

  She points again toward the trees.

  I re-examine the pictures on the table. ‘Where did Duke and his father like to go fishing?’

  Misty doesn’t know. But it was somewhere up in the North Laurel Fork. They had a cabin up there. Sometimes they’d be gone for days.

  ‘A cabin?’

  ‘Old place, beat up.’

  ‘Where?’

  Lou gives my knuckles another squeeze. Her grip tightens. ‘Creek Finger. That’s where my boys go. That’s where they are.’

  We park in the out-of-town mall, next to the payday loan shop with the splintered window that radiates to the four corners like a spider’s web. Hetta has managed to find a signal for her call to Lefortz and we’re waiting for the encrypted feed he’s promised her – a satellite image, downloaded from a database held within the Service’s Intelligence Division – of an area of the North Laurel Fork, eighteen miles east of the North Laurel River.

  The commercial satellite maps we’ve examined over the past thirty minutes show a lake fed by a tributary of the Laurel, shaped like a finger. It’s unnamed on all the maps we’ve managed to access thus far.

  The minutes tick by. Hetta produces her notebook. ‘Can you function with post-traumatic depression?’