Another pause as he listened.
“Yep, they have everyone who was at work, plus a teacher and a class of kids that was touring the courthouse. That includes . . .” He read from a list in his hand. Herman listened, recognizing some of the names. Ethan dropped the list to the table when he finished. “That’s if they all showed up for work this morning. We’re trying to contact their homes to see if they made it in.
“I know for a fact there are other civilians in there, too. I don’t have a count on them. Some of the kids got through to their parents, but the info I’ve gotten from them is cryptic at best. Now the phone lines are clogged and we haven’t been able to get any more information. I’m surprised you got through. Are you getting the picture?”
He listened. “No, I don’t know how many kids, yet. This snow’s slowing everything down. We’re trying to get a head count from the school, but they’re having their own problems with parents who heard what was going on and drove over there. When they couldn’t get close, they left their cars right where they were, locking up the streets and now they’re all stranded in the school and jamming the phones even more. It’s gettin’ harder’n hell to get a call in or out.” He scanned the crowd beyond the doors. “I’m-a tellin’ you, Major, this is a damned blizzard here and no one is going anywhere for a while.”
Without a doubt, the Rangers would already be there if the roads weren’t closed, along with every first responder within a hundred-mile radius.
The Posada’s maintenance man tapped Herman on the shoulder. He held out a walkie-talkie. “Mr. Herman, I had an idea that y’all might be able to use these. I found out after we got ’em that they were on the same frequency as the high school. I charged ’em up and gave the school a holler. Somebody answered, and I told them where the command center is. They’re sending someone over.” He pressed the walkie-talkie into Herman’s hand. “Here.” Herman absently held the device as Ethan listened to a response from the other end.
It was obvious that Ethan was ready to hang up. “No. We haven’t heard any more shots, so I think they’re getting ready to make their demands. This has now moved from an active shooter scenario to a hostage situation. My men have the perimeter secure.”
Deputy Malone snatched a vibrating phone off the table and answered. As he listened, he wrote a note on the white paper covering the table and caught Ethan’s attention. He mouthed, “FBI. Said they’ve been dialing steady for an hour before getting in to us.”
Ethan picked up a pencil and wrote: They’ll just have to hang on.
He returned to the call. “No, they pushed us back, so I don’t have any idea what’s going on inside. Yep, I understand protocol, but you need to listen. This isn’t one loony inside intending to shoot everyone, then himself. These people took the building with military maneuvers and now we’re in the middle of a situation that’s controlled from the inside.”
Herman sat the walkie-talkie on the table and examined the drawing that sprawled over half of the white paper. Like everyone else in the country since the terrorist attacks in 2001, he expected another one somewhere. But he never expected terrorists to take over a building in Ballard. The threat of violence from the drug cartels south of the nearby Rio Grande was the main concern.
“Meant to tell you, Major, I have someone here with me you might have heard of. A retired Ranger named Herman Hawke.” He listened. “That’s right, Sonny’s dad.” He met Herman’s gaze. “Half his family’s inside with my daughter.”
Ethan’s voice choked. “We’re doing all we can for them, you see?”
Herman hadn’t spoken to Sonny in several days. He leaned close to Gabe. “Evangelina have a class trip today?”
Gabe’s eyes turned to flat, black pits. Herman had never seen that look, though he knew the man who’d worked with him for years had a dark side he’d never witnessed. The wrinkles in Gabe’s forehead smoothed as his jaw tightened. “Sí. Un viaje de campo, with Kelly.”
Wheels turned and the old Ranger evaluated the news. Evangelina was in the same class as the twins. Herman felt sick. “A field trip with Kelly means the twins are in there, too. That’s what he meant by half my family.”
“Yes.”
“Go out to the truck and get my rifle, and yours. There’s a box of shells for the .30-30 in the glove box, and one for the .243.”
“Yes.”
“Hey.”
Gabe stopped.
Herman studied on the expression on his hired hand’s face. “Get the pistol out from under the seat, too.”
Gabe’s eyes narrowed. He backslid into Spanish, a sure sign he was under stress. “Crees que nos dejarán ayudamos?”
You think they’ll let us help?
“Yep. I ’magine Ethan’s gonna need all the help he can get before long.”
“Nos va en?” Gabe sounded hopeful.
We going in?
“We’ll see.”
Outside, a train whistle filled the air, muffled by the snow. The three engines and a hundred cars full of coal weren’t the least bothered by the weather.
Recalling the look on his face, Herman hoped Gabe would come back with the guns instead of going after Evangelina alone.
Chapter 38
Lorenzo DeVaca watched as a dusty cylinder rose on the end of a rope through the hole in the floor. “You were right.”
The elderly man who rode in with the American team stood to the side. He looked like a street person. One finger scratched under the wool cap pulled down over his ears. A sprig of gray hair sprouted from a hole in the side. His speech was juicy due to a lack of teeth. “Told you they were there.”
DeVaca refused to look at the man’s disgusting profile. “I wouldn’t have believed it. No one would believe it unless they could see these containers. Who would have thought the U.S. government would store nerve gas under a courthouse?”
Fred Bailey, the former employee of a black company called GORS, Global Ordnance Retrieval and Storage, watched the squatty stainless steel cylinder rise on a rude pulley system. The covered valve bumped against the end of an exposed floor joist with a hard thump and he winced. “Hey! The cap on that thing ain’t foolproof. It’s damn near old as I am. Be careful with that stuff or we’ll all drop dead in our tracks.”
The terrorist handling the rope swallowed and tried not to look at DeVaca, who was just as deadly as the sixty-year-old Sarin nerve agent squirreled away by the government during the Cold War. The man whose face was obscured by a blue bandana took a firm grip on the dusty container and guided it to the floor.
DeVaca knelt and pulled a camouflaged handkerchief from the pocket of his pants. He rubbed the dust off the side, as if he were waxing the steel. Finding nothing but the letters GB stamped into the metal, he adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses. “You’re sure this is Sarin?”
“That’s what I heard when we upgraded the building in 1956.” Fred eyed the canister like it was a live snake. “I was part of the team that did the cellar. That was a long time ago.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty.”
“And you haven’t said anything since?”
“They paid me not to, and I had to sign a paper, but it’s been too many years, and I don’t care anymore.”
“And there are other storage locations?”
“You bet. They’re everywhere. They’re even buried in junkyards in the middle of cities. ’Course they weren’t in the city limits when we buried ’em, but some of these places have growed so much the towns have spread out and covered everything up. I ’magine the government’s forgot where they put some of ’em, or them crooked bastards is keeping it quiet.”
He scratched at his cap.
“Shoot. We buried some of that stuff straight in the ground in Mesquite. It’s four or five stories deep in a pit right beside the LBJ loop around Dallas where they dug fill dirt for the highway. It sat empty for six or seven years, and people took to dumping trash down at the bottom. We went in one day and got rid of ’em
by using a dozer to move the trash and dig a hole, then we planted ’em like daffydil bulbs and covered ’em up.”
DeVaca felt an electric jolt at the thought of the chaos he could cause with that much gas.
“There’s a hotel on top of that dump in Mesquite now, and it’s all grown up around there with houses and gas stations and such. I’d hate to be diggin’ in some of those other places that weren’t as deep.”
DeVaca rose, savoring a pleasant mental image of a cloud of Sarin gas engulfing an innocent driver on a bulldozer, then drifting toward a nearby town, no wait, even better, a school or hospital. He knew better, though. Sarin is invisible and left a trail of twitching bodies to prove it had been released. With a slight smile, he hit his transmit button. “How many more are down there?”
His earbud was silent before Tin Man came through. “More than we can use. Some large canisters, others that size.”
“Send two more of these up. We’re taking the rest out through the tunnel.”
“What tunnel?”
“The one you’re going to find. Look for anything out of the ordinary on the west wall. Differences in brick, if that’s the foundation material. If not, variations in the rock they used for the walls. It has to exist, since the gas is there.”
“Yes sir.”
DeVaca watched Fred’s face. “There is a tunnel, right?”
“That’s what I heard. All ’at mess was brought in through a tunnel that comes up in a house across the street on the west side.”
“You heard?”
“Yeah, the whole damn thang was so top-secret, one group didn’t know for sure what th’others was doin’. I heard ’bout the gas when a buddy of mine got drunk one night and told me his part of the operation.” Fred was hit with a realization. “You know, I never saw Duke after ’at night.”
“Does anyone live in the house?”
Fred brought himself back. “No, that’s the beauty of the whole thang. No one’s lived there since the fifties. The gov’ment pays to keep ever’thang looking normal from the outside. If anybody goes snoopin’ around the paperwork, they’ll find out it’s been part of a lawsuit that’s dragged on for years. It’ll be in the courts ’til hell freezes over because the gov’ment owns it and they want it to stay that way.
“I bet you didn’t know they’s houses in neighborhoods all across the country that looks like all the others, but when you go inside, they ain’t nothing but shells for water pump stations. That’s where they got the idea . . . from that house across over ’ere.”
Fred hitched his baggy pants. “I’ve been wonderin’. Why didn’t we just find out which house it is and sneak in ’ere and come up down there’n the basement? It’da been easier and made a lot less noise.”
DeVaca turned on him with the dead gaze of a rattlesnake. No one on his teams knew all the parts of the operation. He kept his cards close to the vest. In fact, neither he nor Chavez trusted the other and for good reason. Chavez had no idea DeVaca’s part of the operation involved nerve gas.
Once DeVaca learned their target was the Ballard courthouse, he investigated on his own. Despite the extensive file provided by Chavez, DeVaca didn’t trust anything to chance. Always attentive to detail, DeVaca researched Ballard, the courthouse, and the surrounding area in the months leading to the takeover.
During his investigation, he came across stories of a basement beneath the courthouse. Most of the locals laughed it off as legend. One Internet story said the basement was constructed as a last-ditch retreat in the event of an Indian attack, with a tunnel leading to an escape point still hidden somewhere several hundred yards away and maybe now under one of the nearby houses.
The mythical basement was also rumored to contain the contents of the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine, documents dating back to the original Spanish land grant, survival supplies in the event of a governmental meltdown, gold and silver discovered from lost Spanish expeditions, and forgotten historical archives.
When he discovered the courthouse had been renovated and restored in 1956 and again in 2001, he found an unknown company that was selected over the job’s low bidder and knew he was onto something.
He dug deeper into chat rooms full of stories about illegal payoffs giving a clandestine company the job. DeVaca wasn’t interested in political maneuvering. He wanted one thing, the truth behind a mysterious off-hand mention by an individual with the online name of Reddy Freddy. Finally descending into the Dark Net, he found obscure comments in antigovernment chat rooms, rumors of something called GORS, and Reddy Freddy, who told stories about his career in unnamed government organizations.
DeVaca tracked him down. Freddy, or Fred, was disenchanted with the government, which had subsidized the renovation. DeVaca offered Fred more money than he could spend for the rest of his life if he agreed to help the Cause. The sour-smelling old man agreed.
Standing in the middle of the busy rotunda, DeVaca’s rattlesnake eyes held Freddy’s gaze until the man dropped his eyes. The Demon swelled with pleasure at the small victory and the hair on DeVaca’s neck rose, a delicious response that made him want even more. Unfortunately, he was running behind schedule and knew he had to check in. He’d been out of communication for too long. He pressed the dedicated transmit button to call Chavez. “Oz.”
Chavez came back a second later. “Go ahead.”
“We sent the video to Team Five. Any news on our progress?”
“The primary target has been contacted. Maintain your position. The talking heads are still reporting on outgoing phone calls. Is there a problem with the scrambler?”
DeVaca felt a flush of anger, both at Chavez’s questioning of his performance and the failure of his soldiers. “I’ll get back to you.” For the first time that night, he felt uneasy. He hadn’t heard a word about Scarecrow and the scrambler.
He activated the VOX radio to speak with the other team members. “Dorothy. Why isn’t Scarecrow finished?”
“No se. I started to find him, but then something happened.”
The edges of the operation were fraying. Gritting his teeth, he turned his back on Reddy Freddy. “Scarecrow, report.”
His earpiece was silent.
“Scarecrow, report.”
Still nothing.
“Lion.”
“Sí.”
“Something is wrong. It might be Scarecrow’s radio, or worse. This damned building isn’t that big. Check it out.”
“Sí.”
DeVaca peered into the basement. “Tin Man. I need that tunnel. Now.”
“Trabajando en ello.”
“Of course, you’re working on it. Dorothy?”
Her voice was quiet, as if he’d dressed her down for failing to follow orders. “Yes.”
He thrilled at the fear in her tone. “What arose?”
“I was with the one whose photo we took.”
“And.”
“She tried to get loose. I had to restrain her. Scarecrow slipped my mind.”
“After I left? You were the first to leave with the orders I gave.”
“I had to go back. You were busy with the excavation, and I didn’t want to bother you.”
He wondered if she’s seen the hunger in his eyes when he looked at Katie. The young secretary’s fresh innocence beckoned him almost as much as Dorothy’s eyes. Maybe Dorothy saw his desire and beat the woman in jealousy. It was a wonderful idea and his roller-coastering spirits rose. Either woman would help relieve his frustrations over Chavez’s constant nagging. “Is she secure?”
“She is now.”
He’d have to check that out just to be sure. Now he was doing the jobs that were the responsibility of others.
DeVaca studied the container at his feet. In a few days, he’d travel the highways with a load of Sarin, opening one canister after another in as many crowded locations as possible in Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and where it would cause the most damage and panic, on Wall Street.
His Demon giggled as targets lined
up in his mind. Times Square on New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl, a college graduation . . .
Chapter 39
The short terrorist thought he’d turned off the confiscated cell phones one by one before tossing them into the trash can. Those lifelines to the outside world had been silent ever since, but music filled the air with a sense of urgency. In addition to the ringtone, the missed phone buzzed against the metal side with an annoying rattle.
Every hostage snapped toward the sound, most wondering who was on the other end. America’s insatiable need for instant information and socialization made Kelly want to scream. It was all she could do to sit there under guard, rubbing her face in frustration.
It fell silent.
In their corner beyond the judge’s bench, the frightened kids had migrated toward their teacher like filings to a magnet. The guards ordered them to remain behind the fixed separation bar that Kelly once found pleasantly ornate, but the crotch-high pecan-wood spindles offered no protection from the men carrying automatic weapons.
Matt leaned against her, and the others slid closer. They were all touching in some way, seeking comfort as best they could, except for her twins.
They’d positioned themselves at the edge of the group to better see their captors. Neither had their heads raised, but she knew her kids well enough to tell they were watching the terrorists. That worried her most of all.
The tallest captor, Stretch, stepped out and hadn’t returned for some time. The terrorist she thought of as Shorty sat against the opposite wall, submachine gun resting across his lap.
Kelly couldn’t stand sitting any longer. “Hey, you.”
He shifted the weapon. “No talking.”
“Fine. I won’t talk, but I have to stand up and stretch.”
“No.”
“Listen, buddy, none of us are as limber as them kids.” Mr. Terrill’s voice was stronger than Kelly expected. The weathered veteran was tough enough to spit nails. “Let us up for a minute.”
Hawke's Prey Page 14