The Last Good Guy

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “I didn’t know you’d studied in Finland, Burt.”

  “After Italy and before Japan.”

  “As a college student?”

  “Not exactly,” Burt said. “I was in college, but I’d been recruited to do a student-officer program. They didn’t call it that.”

  “CIA?”

  “Their Special Activities Division, SAD, sponsored by JSOC. I never knew which acronym was ordering me around. Wonderful years. Young and not a care in the world. I got a college degree out of it. Biology with an emphasis in ornithology. Finland was part of that. Olkiluoto had half of Finland’s nuclear power plants and they were trying to figure out where all the radioactive waste would be stored, like we are now. They finally decided on an island.”

  With these few sentences, Burt Short told me more about his past than he had in the last three years combined.

  I lifted my binoculars, balanced my arms on the Taurus’s steering wheel, and took a long look at the power plant. It wavered in the late-morning heat, magnified and flattened by the powerful field glasses. The employee parking lot was sparsely occupied. I’d read that there were only a handful of employees here now compared to the days when the plant was producing. And most of those employees were security subcontractors—the friendly professionals at SNR.

  They weren’t hard to spot. Silver SNR vehicles had the best parking slots, up near the entry/exit hut. Where, I could see, a uniformed armed guard awaited a woman now approaching. Middle-aged, a dark suit, white blouse, and black running shoes. She raised her neck badge to a scanner on a stand, then passed through a tall, steel-ribbed turnstile and entered a concrete hut. Through the open security door, pausing to use the wall-mounted hand geometry reader. She stepped to the guard, who scanned a dosimeter up and down her torso. They talked and nodded and smiled, as if continuing some running gag. A moment later, she stepped through another heavily barred carousel and into the plant.

  “More people set off those scanners after getting X-rays from their doctor than from exposure in the plants I worked at,” said Burt. “You’d be surprised what they hit you with in a CT scan or dental X-rays.”

  I watched the woman leave the hut and continue down a wide steep ramp leading to the Security Processing Facility building, a large structure at the north end of the station. Through the binoculars I scanned the concrete building, with its vehicle barriers set proactively out front, its steel double doors, the delay barriers topped with gleaming rolls of concertina wire, the anti-grenade-screen windows, and thousands of slender spikes sprouting from almost every surface of the roof on which a bird could land. In spite of the spikes, I noted three pigeons crowded into a bare corner of the security building.

  Looming above it was a boxy sniper’s nest, perched atop four steel columns bolted to the concrete beneath. Its retractable stairs were folded up against the bottom. The nest had firing slots cut into both sides that I could see from this angle, and pods of floodlights rising on poles from the flat roof. Another uniformed SNR man, headset on and an M4 slung over his shoulder, slowly patrolled the perimeter catwalk, looking down. Gulls circled haphazardly over him, sharp-winged in the blue.

  “Where did you serve, Burt?”

  He lowered his binoculars and gave me one of his odd smiles. “Attached but not formal. I was too short, of course.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “It never hurt my success in business,” he said. “My height.”

  “What business?”

  “Various. Commercial fishing back in Alaska, where I was born. Beef in Kansas City. Later, Wall Street. That’s where your rent comes from each month. I worked for the PGA, too, mostly for the fun of it.”

  “Law enforcement?”

  “God, no.”

  I didn’t want to quash Burt’s unusual candor, but I couldn’t resist. “Married, children?”

  Burt lifted his field glasses to his eyes. “Roland, I value you. I value your genuine interest in me. What we did that night in the mountains made something rare of us. We have an unusual bond. Over time we might become close in a more conventional way. So I’ll tell you just one more thing, to save you time and trouble—though I suspect you’ve already wasted some time and had some trouble with me. I came to Burt Short late in life. When I rented a home from you. But there is no Burt Short in my past.”

  Which tracked with all of the IvarDuggans.com, TLO, and Finders hours I’d logged, trying to snatch some truth about my new tenant from the multiverse of data rising daily into the cloud. Plenty of Burt Shorts. But scant information on my Burt Short—a recently issued California driver’s license with Apartment 5 at Rancho del los Robles as his home address, and a registration for his Cadillac Eldorado. No prior addresses, no criminal record, no known associates, no Social Security number. The more I looked, the less I found. No hits on their costly facial-recognition program, not even Burt’s picture on his CDL.

  Until one small piece of luck that seemed warm to the touch: video of a man watching a table-tennis match in Atlanta in 1996. Why was I watching such a thing? Because Burt loved to play table tennis. Like I do. Because he’d once mentioned a restaurant in Atlanta that I’d been to more than once—a modern take on southern barbecue. Because I saw on my screen that the 1996 Atlanta games were listed as one of seven Olympiads since 1988 in which table tennis had been played. Because the Internet to a PI is a porchlight to a moth.

  The BBC news clip of the men’s championship showed my Burt, ten rows back, in the audience. I plucked a frame of him. His image was out of focus and couldn’t be usefully enhanced. But I ran it through the facial-recognition program anyway. No match. Ran it again, same result.

  I still think it was Burt. My Burt. The new Burt Short.

  “I’ve known for a while that there’s no Burt Short in your past,” I said.

  “Thank you for telling me now.”

  “Did you watch the men’s final table tennis match in the Atlanta Olympics?” I asked. “About ten rows back?”

  He lowered his binoculars again and studied me. “Ninth row. Liu Guoliang over Wang Tao.”

  * * *

  —

  TWO EVENTLESS HOURS later, a white pickup truck with a shell pulled up to the vehicle sally port. The door decal read:

  RaptorLand

  Falconry, Breeding & Sales

  www.raptorlandisus.com

  “This should be fun,” Burt said. “In Finland we used Falco peregrinus. They’re popular for this kind of work.”

  I looked up at the pale blue sky, misted by the Pacific. Saw gulls again circling lazily.

  The guard opened the second sally gate and the truck bumped down the wide concrete road to the security building. RaptorLand Man got out. He was a husky, sun-darkened fellow, wearing cargo shorts, a shirt festooned with pockets, chukka boots with socks almost to his knees, and an Australian safari hat with the starboard flap snapped up.

  He went through the first set of delay barriers, spoke into an intercom on a steel stanchion. Both barriers slid open and he walked past them and into the building.

  He was out five minutes later, with what looked like a parking pass in one hand. Looked up at the sky while he waited for the barriers to open, then went back to his truck. Set the pass on the driver’s-side dash and went around to the back, where he lifted the shell gate and lowered the tailgate to expose the green raptor carrier inside.

  RaptorLand Man lifted the carrier by its top handle and set it on the tailgate. He was talking to it. He looked up at the seagulls cruising low over the beach. I could see the raptor’s leash extending from a cutout at the bottom of the crate door. The crate was windowless, to keep the bird calm. Even captive-bred falcons retain their wild fears and behaviors. The man pulled a heavy-looking glove onto his left arm. It went almost to his elbow.

  He held the leash in his glove, swung the door open with his right hand, and
brought the hooded bird into the sunlight. It perched on his upraised forearm, curious but blinded by the hood. I recognized the rusty, black-barred breast and legs of the peregrine, a large falcon but not a large raptor—maybe twenty inches tall. Crow-sized. This was a female, much larger than the male. Its hood was Arab style, red leather with black eye patches. I wondered what her name was.

  “Falco peregrinus anatum,” said Burt. “They’re all over the West, from the Rockies to the coast. Some people call them duck hawks, but they’re not hawks at all.”

  I don’t know much about falcons, but I do know that the peregrine is the fastest animal on earth. In a hunting stoop they fly more than 200 miles per hour. An alleged record speed of 242 miles per hour was reported by National Geographic. They tuck, dive, and club their prey midair with their claws clenched at those speeds, killing it or knocking it out. If the prey is small enough, the peregrine catches it, carries it to earth, and eats it. If it’s too large—peregrines kill birds much larger than themselves—they follow it down for dining. I’ve seen them hunting out on Point Loma; in a stoop, a peregrine looks like a small anvil dropped from above.

  Burt and I stood next to the car for a better view. RaptorLand Man snugged a jess around each leg—down by the talons—then removed the leash. With the falcon on his raised arm, he started toward the middle of the plant, where the cooling pools were housed. Gulls circled haphazardly.

  Halfway to that building, the man stopped, talked to the falcon for a moment, then unhooded her. She pivoted her head quickly, taking in this sudden new world with her shining black eyes. I wished I had eyes as strong as those. He released the jesses. The bird hunched, turned, and launched with a puff of downy feathers, wings slender and sharp. She flew low over the spent fuel casks until she almost reached the beach, then climbed and shrank into the blue.

  If the gulls noticed, they didn’t show it. I glassed the pigeons I’d seen earlier, but they were gone. Some of the plant employees had come outside near the switchyard. They stood together, most of them looking up. Behind them loomed the switchyard, the tangled mountain of transformers and coils and relays and the fat black power lines rising over I-5 on their way inland. Three SNR guards watched from outside the cooling pools; four more waited near the sunken casks of fuel rods.

  “She’s got an audience,” said Burt.

  Suddenly a small black object dropped into view. It was hard to pick up with the binoculars, but when I locked onto it I saw the tucked falcon bulleting down from the heights. She looked half under control and half out of control, her midair adjustments sudden and tense, like an airplane in a dive too fast to withstand and too steep to pull out of. I thought she might start smoking. The gulls cried and scattered and the falcon angled sharply and a moment later a gull burst into feathers and dropped, pinwheeling through the sky, wings and feet akimbo, the falcon following in relaxed switchbacks, minding her investment on its way to the sand. The three pigeons I’d seen loitering amid the spikes sped over the rooftops like fugitives.

  The guards and employees clapped and hooted, some heading back to their tasks, others enjoying a moment in the warm midday sun.

  “The seabirds in Finland would stay away for two weeks after a peregrine patrol,” said Burt. “I don’t know about these Californians. You know how optimistic we can be. But a falcon is cheap security against birds. You get a seagull loose in the electrical or pigeons sneaking inside to nest over the cooling pools, you’ve got a problem.”

  I watched RaptorLand Man work his way between the buildings and come to a stop at the security fence. His falcon squatted a few yards away, tearing at the gull.

  34

  ////////////////////////

  JUST after three o’clock, a well-worn panel truck pulled up to the deliveries gate. It was white, with a large cooling unit on top and a faded Paradise Date Farm graphic on its broadside panel. I noted the license plate number. An SNR guard with a clipboard stepped to the driver’s side as the window went down. The driver was a young blond man in a black golf shirt and Ray-Bans who said something to the guard and smiled. The guard laughed, tapped his sidearm, and went back into his booth. A moment later the gate rolled open and the produce truck went in.

  “I don’t think they’re delivering fresh Medjools,” said Burt.

  “I doubt they’re delivering anything,” I said.

  The produce truck trundled past the security building and down the road toward the cooling pools, then went out of sight between the steam-containment domes. Came out farther south and stopped in front of a small windowless building.

  The driver parked, the tall door at the back of the truck rolled open, and he hopped out. Three SNR guards barged from the squat building, all wearing heavy gloves with high safety cuffs, bearing a small but apparently very heavy wooden box.

  “Look familiar?” I asked.

  “The heaviest thing on earth is the nucleus of a uranium atom,” said Burt.

  “There are eighteen hundred tons of enriched uranium now in storage right here,” I said. “In the form of spent fuel rods. Guarded by SNR.”

  “Think portability,” said Burt. “The rods are titanium and they encase the fuel pellets. Small pellets. Like dog kibble. Break open a titanium rod and you’ve got death pellets, ready for deployment.”

  “Think concealability,” I said.

  “And don’t forget pure power,” said Burt. “Close exposure to one pellet is enough to kill a man within minutes. I’ve seen acute radiation syndrome in rats. Brutally thorough and surprisingly fast. Nausea, convulsions, diarrhea, seizures. Hemorrhage of eyes, nose, and ears. Sudden organ shutdown. Like in old science-fiction movies. Over in minutes.”

  They hefted the box into the truck, leaning hard to get it in far enough for the door to close. The four men talked for a while, one of the guards gesturing at the sky, one gloved hand the gull and his other hand the falcon, knocking her meal from the sky.

  “You think they’re selling this stuff?” I asked.

  “It’s the opposite of valuable,” said Burt.

  “Except to well-financed players smart enough to work with it.”

  “SNR wouldn’t sell to jihadists,” said Burt. “But they might act themselves. So how about a dirty bomb targeting blacks and Muslims, in keeping with Alfred Battle’s sociopolitical beliefs? Manufactured in their little lab way out in the desert? Led by SNR’s physicists and mechanical engineers.”

  “For use where?” I asked.

  “Again, who do they hate?”

  “Blacks. Muslims. Nosey PIs.”

  “A mosque,” said Burt. “A black church. A Black Lives Matter rally. A feast at the end of Ramadan. A nightclub popular with young blacks. A black celebrity. The home of a Muslim family. No end to the possibilities.”

  The guards and driver touched fists and the driver boarded his truck. The backup warning sounded as he made a three-point turn and headed out the same way he had gone in.

  * * *

  —

  WE GAVE THE lumbering produce truck a comfortable head start down Basilone Road toward the freeway. Stayed far back as it joined the tractor-trailers and the extra-slow drivers all the way down to San Diego and onto Interstate 8 East, bound for the Imperial Valley. Near Buena Vista the truck took the Rattlesnake Road exit, made a left at the stop, then slowly accelerated toward the town and Paradise Date Farm beyond.

  I went right on Rattlesnake, swung a bat turn across the median when it looked safe. The Taurus fishtailed severely in the fine white desert sand, and for a moment I thought we’d go under. But the road shoulder rose up to meet us, then asphalt, and I punched the car up Rattlesnake, back to the freeway onramp, and onto the interstate.

  “You’d have felt like a real idiot getting stuck back there,” said Burt.

  “PIs don’t get stuck.”

  I was about to call Mike Lark when Mike Lark called me.

>   “Ford, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children just got a tip. A girl matching Daley Rideout’s picture and description was seen in the company of three or perhaps four men on the beach in front of Cotton Point Estates in San Clemente five minutes ago. She’s even wearing the Beethoven top you said she took with her. San Clemente sheriffs are rolling.”

  “Here’s one for you, Mike.”

  I told him that the Paradise Date Farm produce truck about to trigger one of the wasp-cams might have just picked up one very heavy wooden crate from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

  “Like the ones in the freezers?” he asked.

  “Fresh from the nuclear energy plant.”

  “Do you know this for a fact?”

  “I watched them load it.”

  “This changes everything,” he said. “This is now federal. This is us.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “The truck just came on-screen. Tell me what you find at Cotton Point.”

  Lark rang off and Burt held his phone up for me to see.

  * * *

  —

  I HELD THE Taurus to eighty most of the way to San Clemente, radar detector plugged in and Burt’s keen eyes on the lookout.

  It’s a long haul from deep in the Imperial Valley to south Orange County. Had to gas up in Alpine, wade around a wreck in Del Mar and construction traffic in Oceanside.

  I badly needed a posse of deputies in fast radio cars, an aggressive watch captain, and three units on their way, dispatched well ahead of me. And how about a helicopter? All the useful tools I used to have and now do not.

  But I did count my blessings. I had me. I had Burt. A six-cylinder Taurus with a radar detector on the dash and a Colt .45 1911 in the console. A concealed-carry permit to make it legal.

  I called Lark again, but he hadn’t heard anything from the San Clemente sheriffs. Because they’d gotten there too late to intercept Daley, I thought. Or it was a false tip to begin with. Happens all the time. Sometimes on purpose.