I felt my pulse jump when I saw that one of the Sand Mansion REIT properties on the Bay of Dreams in Baja California was Casa de Angeles Caídos. House of Fallen Angels.
I’d fished the Bay of Dreams. A beautiful bay and a rich fishery. For decades it was known as Bahía Muertos—Bay of Death—because of the hundreds of head of cattle that had died there in a hurricane. More recent developers changed the name for obvious reasons, and the former Bay of Death was one of the most ruggedly beautiful places I’d ever seen. Like the Middle East, lower Baja California has an almost otherworldly beauty where the desert meets the sea. The coast is dotted with mansions, some merely spectacular and others competitively outdoing their neighbors. Sprawling estates painted in bright colors, mostly. Extravagant properties.
House of Fallen Angels was a ten-acre, ten-thousand-square-foot compound overlooking the Bay of Dreams. A main house and two guest houses, all painted white, with blue domes that appeared—on the House of Fallen Angel’s rental website—to be made of lapis-blue tiles. The windows were trimmed in red. A wide slope of green grass. Palms, neatly coiffed. Three crosses towered above it all, high in a pale blue sky. A helipad, landing strip, two swimming pools. All offered by the month, domestic and landscape staff included, for fifty thousand USD, serious inquiries only.
So Reggie had gotten his mansion, I thought. Bought it in partnership with a storied white supremacist’s breakfast-meat fortune, remodeled it to his own fantasy specs, and offset the costs by renting it to the wealthy when he wasn’t using it himself.
Not bad for the rookie Georgia evangelical who’d almost had his career beaten out of him by three black men but was rescued by an angel disguised as an old man, white hair combed back, blue eyes in a haunted face. A pastor who had mixed himself up with an eighth-grade girl who admittedly had a crush on him. And had unleashed his powers of seduction upon her. Although it could very well have been the other way around. Or some of each.
I took the virtual tour of the House of Fallen Angels. Mexican/Spanish/Moorish architecture. Hard to say where one style ended and another began. High windows and sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture. Blue-and-yellow tile mosaics framing the doors. Mahogany window frames. Bold paintings on white walls, elegant ceramics on pedestals, each one singled out by the gallery spotlights. Christs and Madonnas and saints and martyrs of all sizes and postures and materials, from the bloody to the beatific. But mostly angels. Angels everywhere, in paintings and stained glass, as sculpture, as wall sconces and freestanding figures, as candles and dolls, in metals and wood and wax and glass.
Twelve beautiful children would appear . . . and our family would become the foundation of the lost tribe of Israel . . .
And here in the House of Fallen Angels—I had to figure—was where the rest of those beautiful children were to be conceived. According to the gospel of Penelope. Based on sayings attributed to Reggie Atlas. One down. Eleven to go. And, if they were not to be born of the fallen child-angel Penelope, then why not by her daughter? His daughter?
I remembered his words the Sunday morning I’d met him in his office: The young are our future, Mr. Ford. They will multiply us into heaven.
From the far side of my spacious oak desk, wasp-cam one from Paradise Date Farm jumped to life on Dale Clevenger’s heavy red laptop. I watched Connor Donald striding from the main house toward the large, corrugated metal hangar. Evening by then, the school closed and most of the cars gone. Orange desert light, dust puffing with each fall of his duty boots.
Wasp-cam three picked him up, unlocking the convenience door to the hangar. A moment later the rolling door came up, revealing the dusty ATVs and the shiny John Deeres and the two long work benches behind them. I saw that the hand tools had been moved since I’d first seen them a few days back. The cans of nuts and bolts, too, and the soldering guns. Elves at work, I thought, making presents for Christmas. Just three months away, and all those millions to provide for.
Connor Donald weaved through the vehicles and past the work benches, then stopped outside the perforated steel security door near the back of the building. He pulled a key ring from his pants pocket, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
He stepped in and turned on a light and I finally got a look inside. A long stainless-steel table ran almost wall-to-wall in the back, upon which sat a large glove box roughly the size and shape of a coffin. The glove box was clear acrylic or glass, and had two sets of articulating arms on the side facing me. A rolling backless stool for each work station. I could see heavy-looking black hands—somehow both mechanical and human—at rest within the box. There were latches and lock pins at both ends, for loading and unloading from either direction.
Connor Donald walked around the table to the other side and returned with a handheld monitor of some kind, set it on the table near the glove box.
Arranged neatly on the table in front of him, on either side of the long glove box, I saw a flotilla of smaller box-shaped meters with read-out windows—some plugged in to surge protectors and others apparently battery-powered, some with handles and some without; handheld devices the size of large smartphones; handheld devices shaped like a cross between a pistol and a caulking gun; an assortment of what appeared to be tiny loudspeakers in miniature cabinets, no bigger than travel alarm clocks. Plenty of wires, narrow-gauge cable, and the flexible coiled extension cord once found on telephones.
Electrical diagnostic and measuring equipment? Maybe. Hazmat—chemical or biological? Maybe. But what of the pistol–caulking gun contraptions and the small loudspeakers attached to some of the meters? My next thought was radioactive devices. Not voltmeters but radiation dosimeters and radiometers? Not oscilloscopes but radiation detectors?
Burt barreled in, holding up his phone for me to see.
“They’re working with radioactive material,” he said. “The fume hood.”
At Burt’s prompt I saw it, suspended from the ceiling over the work table, just visible at the top of Clevenger’s laptop screen. For drawing up radioactive particles or gases suspended in the air, invisible, odorless, and potentially lethal. In my attention to Connor Donald, and the puzzling glove box and various gauges and meters, I hadn’t registered it.
Wasp-cam one came online, Eric Glassen crossing the dusty farm yard. Camera three picked him up as he entered the hangar and worked his way through the vehicles toward the lab. He moved quickly and lightly, like the athlete he had been in high school. A cornerback, requiring speed, strength, and the ability to hit an opponent—often a very strong running back—at high velocity. With his thick neck and pit-bull ears, Eric was a formidable-looking man. I remembered his brief and disappointing UFC career. And his odd choice of UC Riverside undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and history.
Which reminded me of Connor Donald’s contradictory curriculum vitae: an athlete-scholar who’d renounced a full football ride to study physics and philosophy at Penn State. Summa cum laude. Followed by his Christian mission in Somalia, where he’d witnessed the slaughter of nine people by Somali rebels. And his subsequent role as a founding member of SNR Security, a company with a proven record of hostility to blacks and Muslims.
So: football; university degrees in physics, mechanical engineering, history, and philosophy; martial arts fighting; and a Christian mission ending in blood, all conspiring to lead these two young men to a secret laboratory outside a small desert town in the Imperial Valley, to work with apparently highly radioactive materials in order to accomplish . . . what? I tried to make some sense of it, find a through-line, discern the narrative through the facts. I tried to put all that into my pipe and smoke it—as Grandpa Dick likes to say. But I couldn’t even get it lit.
“What are the pistol-shaped devices?” I asked.
“Dosimeters for measuring penetrating radiation,” said Burt. “X-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons. The smaller handheld devices are similar. I don’t know why they’d have so many. T
riple coverage. Must be handling some very lively stuff. The larger box-shaped units with the handles are high-end Geiger-Müller detectors.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“I took some nuclear remediation training in Olkiluoto, Finland, one summer. All that equipment around the glove box is standard issue in radioactive workplaces.”
“Why the loudspeakers?”
“Audio warning,” said Burt. “So if your eyes suddenly explode, your skin melts over them, and your brain ruptures, you can still hear the warning. Clever.”
“What do you think they’re up to?”
Burt smiled, a crooked thing containing something other than amusement. “No good at all, Roland.”
Glassen went into the lab, slapped Donald’s shoulder, and swept around the big metal table. Donald joined him, and they each pulled on a pair of tight blue lab gloves, then another. Next they shrugged into white lab coats, and each man settled a white hard hat onto his head and swung up the clear protective shield. They came back to the front of the room, talking and smiling.
Then Connor Donald picked his way back through the vehicles, on his way to the roll-up door of the hangar. He touched something on the wall and the corrugated metal curtain closed on the scene within.
Burt and I stared at Clevenger’s screen in silence, as if we could will Donald to open the door again so we could watch them work.
Work done in white coats and face shields and two pairs of protective gloves. Using their clear, coffin-shaped glove box with the fume vent sucking up any loose radiation. In their hidden lab on a date farm in an infernal desert at the southern tip of California.
“The wooden crates in the freezers would fit in the glove box,” I said.
My phone buzzed and Mike Lark’s name waited on the screen.
“What the hell are they doing out there?” he said.
“I was just wondering myself.”
“Where exactly is that place?” he asked, his voice fast and sharp.
Burt gave me a doubtful look as I gave Lark precise directions to Paradise Date Farm.
“Have you saved the previous video?” asked Lark.
“All of it.”
“Send it over, now. Use my secure line in the field office.”
He gave me the number and I got to work on my desktop.
“What in hell are they doing out there?” Lark asked again.
“You’re the expert, Mike.”
“You said something about crates in freezers. Describe them again.”
When I was finished, Lark was quiet. I could hear the tapping sound of his fingers on a keyboard. Burt sat on the couch, head down, twiddling his thumbs.
“No labels or serial numbers on the crates?” asked Lark.
“Nothing.”
“You said metal bands. Okay—how many per crate, what size and color?”
I described them in detail. Tap-tap of Lark’s fast fingers on his keyboard. I looked at Clevenger’s laptop screen, but the wasp-cams were resting.
“All right,” said Lark. “After you told me that SNR did that number on you, I ran the company through our federal interfaces and dug into the structure of the company. You were right—it’s privately held. Marie Knippermeir has controlling interest and sixty percent ownership. Alfred Battle’s dear, breakfast-meat-wealthy, possibly addled wife. Battle’s name appears nowhere in the incorporation. Although his fine humanitarian views on race and brotherhood show through in SNR’s behavior.”
I pictured Reggie Atlas standing under the grand magnolia tree in front of his Rancho Santa Fe spread, smoking a cigarette while Alfred Battle retrieved the briefcase from the gleaming black Mercedes parked in Reggie’s garage. An apparently very valuable briefcase.
“Is SNR profitable?” I asked.
“Very,” said Lark. “No debt. They’ve got eight regional offices and three hundred–plus accounts in fifty states. From plant protection to executive security to mom-and-pop residential patrols. Agriculture to aerospace. School campuses, retail, and churches. Over six hundred employees. SNR invests in and donates heavily to needy Battle-approved organizations.”
“Such as Paradise Date Farm.”
“There’s quite a list,” Lark said. “Some of my personal favorites are the Fraternal Order of White Knights, Right Proud, the Christian Century Crusade, and Don’t Tread. Most of them are American, but some European groups, too—Lemborg Jugend and C14. It’s not illegal.”
Legal or not, I wondered at the riches amassed by Reggie Atlas’s Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry—cash donations to his church and subscriptions to his podcasts and streaming videos—some of it contributed to SNR, laundered into profit, then sent back out again to Alfred Battle’s hate organizations. Wondered that Reggie could afford such largesse to people like Alfred Battle, on top of joining Marie Knippermeir in the purchase of the House of Fallen Angels on the Bay of Dreams on the Baja Riviera. The generosity of the faithful has always impressed me. The rank-and-file believers. The five-or-ten-dollars-on-Sunday-morning people. Sitting in their pews, or in front of their devices, hearing the word, feeling the word, willing to pay for the word.
“Your files on Paradise are coming through,” said Lark. “How many SNR soldiers are usually out there?”
“It changes. At least six, the night they jumped me. I’ve seen as many as eight or ten at a time from the wasp-cams.”
“I’m looking at Connor Donald and Eric Glassen right now,” said Lark. “The date stamp says four days ago.”
“They’re the ones who picked up Daley Rideout from school,” I said.
“And put a bullet in her boyfriend’s head,” said Lark.
“If my gut is right, they’ve got her right now. I don’t know where, or even why. But it has to do with Reggie Atlas.”
Silence then, as Lark tried to get his head around the hydra: Paradise Date Farm, SNR, Pastor Reggie Atlas, and a missing fourteen-year-old girl.
“How much life do those camera batteries have left?” he asked.
“They’re down to half-charge,” I said. “Two weeks. Clevenger said the heat will wear them out fast.”
“No way to replace them?”
“The Bureau might be able to get inside,” I said. “But Paradise has seen enough of me and my people.”
“Thanks for this,” he said. “If I see what looks like evidence of a federal crime being committed, we’re going to be knocking on some doors out there pretty damned fast.”
“They won’t be happy to see you.”
“About as happy as they were in Oregon and Nevada.”
“I don’t want your job.”
“I don’t want yours. You’re on your own. But it suits you, Roland.”
“Thank you for Alfred and Marie,” I said. “But Daley Rideout is who I want most, Mike. She’s in the hands of bad people. Anything you can find out. Anything.”
“I’m sending you a link you’ll like,” said Lark.
I pocketed my phone and returned Burt’s calm gaze.
“Why does the San Onofre nuclear power plant keep coming into my mind?” asked Burt.
“Because it’s patrolled by SNR Security,” I said. “And because Daley frolicked with her SNR pals on the beach there.”
“Why would they take her to that particular beach?” asked Burt.
“Maybe it was a simple diversion to keep her happy and busy and not missing home,” I said. “They took her to that particular beach because they know it. Home turf. Remember, that was the day she ran away. She wasn’t quite a captive yet. Or didn’t know she was.”
Burt gave me a doubtful look.
“We need another look at the San Onofre power plant,” I said. “Now that we know Paradise Date Farm is bristling with radioisotopes.”
“And the same security company is guarding them both,” s
aid Burt.
My phone chimed when Mike Lark’s texted link came through. I opened it.
WHITE POWER HOUR
Sunday after church
113 Orange Hill, Escondido
Special Guest: Kyle Odysseus
Refreshments and Education
Your Supremacy Is Your Admission
32
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LATE that afternoon, Grandpa Dick made a point of me joining the Irregulars for dinner and a “group discussion,” say, around seven o’clock sharp.
“We haven’t seen much of you since your last title defense,” he said. “We miss you. And Violet spent half the day hand-fashioning raviolis. One of your favorites.”
I figured their discussion topic would be Penelope Rideout. She had showed up unannounced at Rancho de los Robles not once but twice, successfully honked her way into the property on the second occasion, invited herself to dinner, dressed my wounds, kissed my split lip, and showered me with gifts. And I had spent a recent night away from home, which my tenants would have duly noted and attributed to Penelope.
The discussion began over shrimp appetizers and Liz’s potent martinis.
It was after sunset and a cool breeze came up the San Luis Rey River Valley from Oceanside. Faint smell of ocean, mixed with sage. A half-moon had begun its rise over the hills. I propped my phone against my water glass, to view wasp-cam streams, if any came online.
We sat around the big picnic table, four men, two women, and a pitcher of martinis sunk deep into a bowl of ice. A stray black dog lay at Frank’s feet. Somehow the dog had managed to travel the acres of coyote-heavy scrub and chaparral that surround this property. And shown up the previous day, to be swiftly adopted by Frank, who had named him Triunfo, after his home in El Salvador.
The Last Good Guy Page 19