by Steven James
The hotel had been named a National Historic Landmark in 2004, and a federal grant had allowed the place to be restored and refurbished to its 1930s decor and even some of the little-used rooms in the lower level had benefited.
The two sections of the basement were on opposite wings of the building and weren’t connected. She’d chosen a room at the other end of the hotel yesterday for their meeting with Alexei Chekov. A small precaution, but if he were as good as she was beginning to suspect he might be, a wise one. Now, even if he came looking for them, he would be looking in the wrong place.
She traversed the hallway toward the room where Dillinger had once stayed for five days in 1934, waiting for federal agents to give up their search and go home. As she did, she passed the rarely used guest rooms that now housed the seven members of her team she hadn’t allowed Chekov to meet.
So, Bowers, the FBI agent, had survived—or been brought back to life, depending on the definition of death you wanted to use. In either case, even though it would probably take him time to recover, he was still around, and she would have to make sure the FBI didn’t poke too closely into her team’s affairs.
A brawny man who was standing sentry at the room at the end of the hall acknowledged her with an informal salute. She’d moved him into this role after she’d strangled Clifton White—who’d let her down when he encountered Chekov—and had her people deposit his body outside and cover it with snow.
She pressed the door open, and inside the room she found two more of her people on guard, as well as the man who’d been the reason for so many of the events this week.
Donnie Pickron.
Alive and well.
He sat at a desk with three flat-screen computer monitors arranged in front of him and now looked up from his work. Sweaty. Nervous. His bald head appeared shiny and polished in the blue-tinged light of the computer screens. “I want proof my wife and daughter are still alive.” He spoke with a surprising amount of determination. “Or I’m not going to do any more work for you.”
His words were not unexpected. Cassandra unpocketed her cell and walked toward him in silence. His right ankle was chained to the leg of the metal table.
“If I let you speak to your wife on the phone, will that be sufficient?”
He seemed shocked by the offer. “Yes.”
She excused the two guards, tapped in a number, handed Donnie her cell.
He waited for an answer, then said anxiously, “Hello? Ardis?”
Cassandra watched him closely. Getting the electronic voiceprint earlier in the week from his wife hadn’t been difficult. It simply meant stopping by their house to ask for directions and then recording Ardis’s reply and the short conversation that followed. With some of the software these days, you don’t need much audio at all to make a near-perfect match. To pull off the overlay, after you have the sample you just speak into a microphone hooked up to the computer, and the program does the rest.
However, there were always glitches in these types of operations, always—
“Is Lizzie there?” Donnie said into the phone. “Is she okay?”
Hmm . . . Good. Millicent Alman, one of the three people who’d met with Alexei Chekov in the basement of the Schoenberg Inn, was making it work.
“She’s okay.” Cassandra ran through the words in her mind, as if she herself were part of the conversation. “She’s right here, but she’s sleeping. They have guns. Oh, Donnie, please! Do what they say. They threatened to hurt Lizzie!”
“You’re going to be okay,” Donnie said, as if on cue. “Don’t worry.”
Cassandra had been careful to brief Millicent on what to say and what not to say. “If he tries to ask you anything personal, perhaps about where you met or went on your honeymoon, or if he mentions a specific name, location, secret item, don’t answer him. Stick to the threats you’re under: tell him they’re watching you. That they know everything. That they’re listening to every word. End by pleading for his help.”
Her operative had nodded. “I’ve done this before. I’ll be all right.”
After a few more moments of conversation, Cassandra took the phone from Donnie.
The look on his face made it clear that Millicent really did know what she was doing—he appeared convinced that he’d been speaking with his wife.
Now he looked at Cassandra. “And when this is over, you’ll let them go? Let us all go?”
Though she didn’t like to lie there were bigger things at stake here than her pointless sensibilities. She reassured him that he and his family would be fine.
“Okay,” he said at last.
She gestured toward the keyboard. “How long?”
“Two of the authorization codes won’t even be online until the sub leaves Bahrain tomorrow afternoon.” That made her think of another lie she’d told this man. She’d convinced him—as well as her Eco-Tech team—that they were going to take the nuclear weapons that were aboard an Ohio Class submarine offline to send a message to the world about the importance of nuclear disarmament.
However, in truth, that wasn’t quite the plan.
“And so,” she said, “give me a timeline.”
He glanced at the computer screen. “I’ll need several hours to hash the encryption and get past the authentication protocols, but I’ll need data from the station.”
“You’ll have it.”
“How?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll have it. You have a simple job: monitor the frequencies, access the deactivation codes, send the signal. And if we don’t get what we need, Ardis and Lizzie will die. I am not a woman who makes idle threats. Do you understand?”
For a moment he looked like he might challenge her, then said, “Yes.”
“No one needs to get hurt.”
He didn’t reply.
Mentally, she reviewed her schedule for tomorrow: after briefing her team at 11:30, three of her people would travel to the eastern entrance to the national forest to take out the telephone lines, then she and the rest of the team would head to the maintenance building that had been left at the site of the now-leveled ELF base.
And from there they would access the facility.
When she left the room, she found Becker waiting for her in the hall. “Well?” he said. “How long?”
“After he gets the data from the station, a couple hours.”
“But we have to have the uplink before 9:00—”
“I know. We will.”
Becker looked at his watch again.
“We’ll be in the base by 6:00,” she reassured him. “It’ll give us enough time. Don’t worry.”
“What did you tell him about his wife and daughter?”
She was tired of hearing about this. “You’re still upset about that.”
He was quiet.
“It was only two lives. There’ll likely be—”
“I know, Dana, but—”
“Don’t interrupt me, Becker.” He’d used the name he knew her by: Dana Murkowski. One of her aliases. “We needed the videos of them to make our threat credible when the time comes.”
“But you killed a little girl. Shot her mother in the—”
“It was necessary. Just like with Clifton.”
“Necessary? Couldn’t you have—”
“It was necessary.” She let each word fall like a stone: We are not going to discuss this anymore.
He didn’t reply, and she turned to leave but then felt his hand on her arm, gentle. An invitation. She paused.
“I’m sorry. I know you had to do it. Your conviction, your fearlessness, that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you.” Well, his remorse over the death of the Pickrons must not have been as deep as he’d been letting on.
She faced him and said with a smile, “That’s two reasons.”
“Two reasons, then.” He seemed to have already put the Pickron slayings out of his mind. “Twenty minutes ago I had a conversation with Valkyrie. Everything is in place.”
“I�
��m glad to hear that.”
“Alexei has the rest of the money. Picked it up from the dead drop.”
“That shouldn’t matter now.”
He was caressing her with his eyes and she didn’t discourage him.
He’d been an easy man to seduce.
One of her gifts was getting men to fall in love with her. And so, to solidify his loyalty, she had made sure that he was smitten; that he would do anything for her. She couldn’t help but think of him as a gullible little puppet. After all, he still believed they were going to be disarming the weapons on the sub to make a statement to the world.
She let him take her in his arms.
Oh yes, they were going to make a statement.
She said nothing as he bent toward her.
And when he kissed her she did not close her eyes.
Sean led Tessa into his living room and she froze. The tragic remains of two deer heads and a four-foot-long muskie hung on the wall.
All right, that was just plain troubling. She turned away. “Is Amber here?”
“Last I heard, she was at the hospital with Pat. She’s probably on her way home.”
Although Tessa didn’t know the details, from a few uncharacteristic moments of self-revelation from Patrick over the last year, she did know that before Patrick met her mom, he and Amber had had some sort of thing together.
Probably before she met Sean.
All ancient history.
Sean didn’t seem to give a second thought to Amber visiting with Patrick tonight.
As he was walking toward the kitchen, the house lights flickered briefly and he made a comment about how, this far in the country, the electricity goes out all the time. Now that she thought about it, she realized that on the way to the house she hadn’t seen neighbors anywhere close.
Sean motioned toward a pile of wood by the living room fireplace. “I’ll get a fire going just in case.” Then he caught himself. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m all right.”
“You want some juice or something?”
No sense fighting it. You’re not gonna fall asleep anyway.
“How about some coffee?”
“At this time of night?”
“I expect to be up for a while,” she said simply.
41
Alternating ice baths—fifteen minutes in ice-cube-filled water, then a soak in the other bucket for ten, in water as hot as I could stand.
Repeat.
Again.
The chilled water takes the swelling down, the heat rushes blood flow to the area, helping circulation.
It’s one of the best ways I’ve found to treat a sprain, but admittedly it isn’t exactly nirvana in the moment you switch your foot from the steaming water to the ice bath.
I’d been at it for nearly an hour, my computer on my lap, working on the case as I soaked my ankle.
We knew Donnie drove his Jeep to work on Thursday, left at noon with the sawmill’s truck, but where was it now? If he’d returned to the house and then left on the snowmobile, what did he do with the truck?
Obviously, if he was abducted, his captors could have hidden it somewhere, but I was a bit surprised it was still missing.
It hadn’t been overcast yesterday afternoon or this morning, so now I checked the Defense Department’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database, or ROSD, to see if I could get a glimpse of anyone driving to or from the Pickron home around the time of the crimes.
Since this is a remote, sparsely populated region, I wasn’t surprised to find gaps in the footage between satellite passes, but it was informative to note that one of those coincided exactly with the time someone would have needed to access the house immediately preceding the crime, then again ten minutes later when they might have exited the scene.
The killers knew the precise times the Defense Department’s satellites would and would not be passing overhead.
I had footage from 1:54 to 1:58, could even see the cracks appear in the glass from the gunshots.
Shots fired through the living room window. Why?
I considered the time: 1:54 p.m. . . . the date: January 8 . . . the orientation of the window to the sun . . . the longitude and latitu—
Hang on.
Going back to the satellite images, I saw that—
Yes.
Oh yes.
At that time of day, with the position of the house, the sun, the satellite, there was no glare on the house’s northern exposure living room window.
The interior house lights were on when the police arrived, remember? Only the study’s lights were off.
I don’t believe in coincidences.
No, I don’t.
The cracks in the glass obscured the view of the house’s interior; however, it wasn’t a person outside in the marsh that might have peered in and seen the killers at work, it was a satellite.
I zoomed in on the image of the window. Looking at the house, first without the cracks in the glass, then with them, I realized that with the carefully placed shots causing the networked pattern of cracks, I could not see clearly inside the house.
Then there was the phone call, then the final shot—
Was someone watching a live feed through the ROSD? Is that the reason for the call, to let the killer know another shot was needed? A status report on the satellites? A warning? A signal?
It was impossible, of course, to discern what the caller or killer might have been thinking at that moment, but the precise timing and location of the shots told me that whoever was coordinating this thought like me.
No. he’s smarter than you.
You almost missed this.
Frustratingly, this line of thinking brought up more questions than it answered: How could someone have accessed the DoD’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database in the first place? Were we looking for a federal employee? Obviously there was a team of people involved, but how many?
You would need a world-class hacker to pull off something like that.
It was impressive as well as unsettling.
Researching further, I found that the cloud cover earlier today hid any view the satellites might’ve had of Chekov’s movements. And if someone did place the helmet in the open water on Tomahawk Lake, they must have done so during the night when there wasn’t enough light for the satellites to image the area.
Based on crime scene photos and lab analysis, I confirmed that one set of boot prints from a men’s size 9, LaCrosse 400 G pac boot matched prints approaching the open water on Tomahawk Lake and the prints exiting the Pickron residence.
Donnie Pickron wore size eleven.
Nothing solid pointed toward him as the shooter, absolutely nothing.
I felt strangely encouraged, however. Taking into account all the effort someone had gone through to make it look like he was dead, I began holding out hope that he was still alive.
I wouldn’t be able to do much tonight to track Chekov, so I did the next best thing and took some time to study the ELF files Margaret had sent me concerning the now-closed Navy communication base.
Here’s what I learned:
The Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic transmission technology was developed during the Cold War and was used to communicate with US and British Trident nuclear submarines. At the time, it was the only communication system that was able to contact subs while they were at stealth depths and running speed.
The signals were nearly impossible to jam or decipher, which provided a perfect way to get messages to subs while they remained submerged.
Radio signals can travel through water, but their ability to spread out is reduced as the frequency of the signal is increased: lower frequency, longer distance under the water. To get the messages to subs, the signals would need to travel hundreds of feet below the surface, thus the extremely low frequency of 76 Hertz or less, allowing the signals to travel down a thousand feet or more.
There were two locations for the ELF stations, one in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Fo
rest, the other about 150 miles away in Republic, Michigan. The sites were chosen because of the efficient low conductivity of the underlying bedrock, which helped transmit the signals, not through the earth’s crust as I would have expected, but up into the atmosphere. Apparently, the ionosphere and the curvature of the earth served to diffract the electromagnetic waves into the oceans around the world. Every ocean that the subs patrolled was covered by the signals.
Every ocean.
Every route.
Every sub.
I found it impressive that this technology was developed in the eighties, but when I read on I saw that it had actually been pioneered in the 1950s, which was even more astonishing. The original proposal was to build a deep underground system in Wisconsin called SHELF—Super Hard ELF.
The Navy had given the development of this original extremely low frequency system the name Project Sanguine and had debated using dozens of underground bunkers with buried electrical wires running thousands of square miles, but in the end decided it was more feasible and cost effective to use the aboveground wires, and Project Sanguine had been scrapped.
However, according to some reports, they’d actually started work on Project Sanguine, constructing more than two dozen miles of tunnels and even an underground bunker in the years before the environmentalists caught wind of what they were doing.
I could see where this might be going, and I hoped my hypothesis was wrong.
I read on.
The Wisconsin ELF station officially began operating on October 1, 1989, but even a decade before that there was vigorous debate about the environmental effects of the program and the resultant magnetic fields created by the station. Environmentalists claimed there would be wide-ranging and disastrous consequences—that the signals would cause leukemia in humans and all sorts of maladies to the wildlife of the region.
At the time, the Navy studied the problem and concluded that the risk of any adverse effects was minimal.
But in the 1984 case of Wisconsin v. Weinberger, the Seventh District Court disagreed—stating that there was substantial evidence of serious health hazards—and halted construction, but in the end the national security threat posed by Russia superseded the ruling, and the station was completed and commissioned.