Seven Unholy Days

by Jerry Hatchett

  “Henry, I need you to calm down for just a minute. I have a question for you.”

  “I like you, Dicker,” he slurred as he threw an arm around me.

  “I like you too, Henry. Now please pay attention.” He half-stood, half-leaned on me, bobbling from side to side, but he appeared to be listening. “When was the last time you saw the blinking lights in the box?”

  “Last night,” he said. “They were acting stranger’n hell.”

  “You’re sure it was last night?”

  “Why hell yeah, Dicker. You want me to whoop your ass too?”

  I crouched and stepped out from under his arm. “Maybe later,” I said back over my shoulder as I jumped into the driver’s seat of the deputy’s cruiser and headed back to the main building with the deputy standing beside Henry looking confused.

  “Abdul, we’re almost to the switch. Have you confirmed there are no active communication links from GCE into the fiber?”

  “Yes,” his voice crackled quietly on the handheld radio.

  “Matthew, when are you going to tell me what’s on your mind?” Tark said.

  “I think I know how 69 is staying informed on our investigation.” We were making our way through the narrow clear-cut on the Robertses’ land, coming up on the switch from the rear.

  We were about ten yards out when I heard a faint zip of a whistling sound overhead, followed a quarter-second later by the report of a small caliber weapon up ahead. I hit the ground, dragging Tark down with me. Another shot fired. And another. I could hear the bullets ripping through blades of Johnson grass beside the narrow path. It sounded like a .22 rifle.

  Tark raised his head up and I tried to pull him back down. “Missy, is that you?” he bellowed. Geez, is there anybody around here he doesn’t know?

  “This is Wildcat Roberts! Who the hell’s out there on my land?”

  “Missy, it’s Jimmy Lee Tarkleton. Quit shooting at us, for crying out loud!”

  “Okay, I’ll quit.” I heard her coming through the weeds, and soon enough she came into view in the moonlight. I saw her and wished I hadn’t. No longer did I wonder how Henry had managed to find a wife. I wondered how she managed to land a prize like Henry.

  Wildcat and Tark slid into a conversation and I walked around them to the front of the switch. Just like Henry had said, there were lights. On the very left was an LED labeled LINK. It was a bright, steady green. Immediately to the right was a vertical row of ten blue LEDs that worked like a graph to show activity passing through the switch. The very bottom light was intermittently blinking. I keyed up my radio, watching the blue LEDs carefully. “Abdul?”

  “Yes.” LEDs two and three blinked, then died.

  “Talk about the weather or food or something and move slowly around the room.”

  He walked and talked and I watched as the lights grew stronger and weaker and stronger as I guided him. After five minutes of the back and forth I had the sweet spot nailed. “Abdul, remember your current location. We’re heading back.”

  “Yes.”

  I was right; no one had been monitoring my laptop. The control room was bugged, and 69 had been listening to every word we said.

  “Well I’ll be a jack-in-the-box. What are you planning to do with the bug?” Tark said as we began our hike back to the car.

  “For now, we’ll leave it in place and let him hear what we want him to.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Oh, you were in such a fit to get out here, I didn’t get to tell you what Brandon said on the phone.”

  “How belligerent was he?”

  “Keen Brandon said he hadn’t talked to you or Bob Rowe this afternoon. You were ordered off the case by an imposter.”

  That put a stutter in my stride. “Interesting. How’d Brandon act?”

  “I wouldn’t call him happy about our taking over his crew with a homegrown posse, but he was way more upset about his crooked agent.”

  “Make that plural. Someone called me.”

  “What about Potella?”

  “No, he and Reynolds were in view while I was on the phone.”

  “How do we know who to trust in the FBI, then?”

  “We don’t.”

  “So what do we do, Matthew?”

  “We get back to Yellow Creek and figure this thing out ourselves. We’ll stay in touch with the Bureau and as long as their input passes the smell test we go with it. And our people stay on hand just in case Brandon attempts a coup. Bottom line, they can’t slow us down if we’re one step ahead.”

  26

  1:42 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  HART COMPLEX

  Jana slid into a shallow sleep in her suite. Soft knocks on the door jolted her out of it. She couldn’t believe she was about to be dragged back down to the dungeon again so soon. Hadn’t she just left there? Or was it the next day? Her heart started pounding; if it was the next day, it could be time for the royal wedding.

  She opened the door and saw Dane Christian there. “May I come in?”

  “As if I have a choice.”

  “You do. I’m not here to take you to him.”

  Relief flooded over her, followed quickly by apprehension. “Then what are you here for?”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “What time is it?”

  He looked at his watch. “Around one-forty.”

  “AM or PM?”

  “AM. Why?”

  “I just like to know. Come on in, I guess. After all, how often does a girl get a chance to chat with her kidnapper in the middle of the night? Lucky me.”

  Dane eased into the room like a shy boy picking up his first prom date, and Jana saw the chink in the armor. He was there with something personal to say, a fish out of water. Conversely, when it came to one on one, Jana was very much in her element.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, staring at his feet, “I’m sorry all this happened.”

  “So you’ve said, but I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “I’d like to help you get out, but it’s not possible.”

  “I don’t buy ‘impossible,’ but first, why don’t you tell me what in heaven’s name is going on.”

  He pulled a bottle from his pocket and swallowed a handful of pills from it. Jana took the bottle and looked at the label.

  “You just took a handful of Percocets. Why?”

  “Tumor. My brother didn’t even know.”

  “I see. How bad?”

  “It’s been there for several years but it’s growing like crazy now. I have a couple of years, maybe less.”

  “Despite what you’ve done to me, I hate to hear that. Is this how you want to wrap up your life, kidnapping and murder?”

  “I said I’m sorry. I meant it.”

  “I appreciate the fact that you didn’t want to leave me at home where the bomb is, and of course that you didn’t kill me, but it’s hard to see how you did me a favor by bringing me out here and handing me over to that monster downstairs.”

  “I had no idea he was going to pull that.”

  “He’s certifiably crazy, Dane. You do know that, right?”

  “You have no idea,” Dane said, still staring at his feet. “And you have no idea what horrible things I’ve done for him.”

  Jana knew he was a hardened criminal but he suddenly looked like nothing more than a sad and broken human being. She took his hand in hers. “What kind of things? What is this all about? Please tell me.”

  He shook his head and Jana saw the wet eyes. “I’m so sorry ... so many people dead ... so many more to die ... so sorry ... ”

  Jana walked him to the bed and sat him down. She took his face in her hands and looked him in the eye. “Dane, you can’t help what you’ve already done, but can’t you stop more people from dying?”

  He took his fatigue jacket off and used it to wipe his face as the tears flowed. “No, it’s too far gone. His people are everywhere. People I hired and trained to set everything up out in the field. It’s already in
motion and he won’t let anybody stop it. Aside from the professionals that had to be bought, he has hundreds of people out there who worship him. They think he’s some kind of savior or something. This has been in the works for years, and they’ll die for him.”

  “What’s in the works, Dane? What is he going to do?”

  “He’s had all communications cut off and any exit from the grounds is barred unless he gives express approval. He’ll never let us out of here. Even though I’ve been the operational head all along, he’d have me shot if I tried to drive off the compound right now. And while we’re inside, he can sit down in that room and seal us all in here forever. He can cut off our air. But I’m going to try to—”

  A small radio on his belt chirped. “Mr. Christian. I require your presence in my chambers immediately,” Hart’s voice said.

  “We can get out of here together. I’ll help you stop him,” Jana said.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Dane said on his way out, “and I’ll tell you more about what’s going on.”

  27

  1:45 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  YELLOW CREEK

  “Show me where the last spot was,” I whispered in Abdul’s ear. He moved like a cat—quick, limber, silent—to the end of one of the console cabinets in the middle of the room and stopped. I nodded, he stepped back, and I got down on my knees for a closer look. The cabinet had a vented metal panel on the side. That would be X on this treasure map.

  Tark held a flashlight while I gingerly removed four retaining screws and eased the panel off. And there it was, the microphone itself about half the size of a thimble. It was wired to a bare circuit board that was in turn patched into a fiber communication junction. 69 had enjoyed a streaming audio feed, unfettered access to everything we said. Who knows how long it had been there, but one thing was for sure: his entertainment package was about to change.

  I powered up my laptop and routed a message to the big display. Back to work on the password, Abdul. Act naturally. I’m splitting this screen so we can work together. A duplicate of your monitor will show up on the left side, mine on the right. Tark, I need you outside.

  “I know this is your plant, Tark, and I’m not trying to bust your turf. Right now we’re in the tech end of things and I need operational control. You got a problem with that?”

  “You just let me know how to help.”

  Seems as though I’d pegged the guy wrong on the pissing contest thing. Maybe I was the one with a penchant for the game. Maybe I’d need to rethink parts of Decker Philosophy 101 when this mess was fixed.

  “I appreciate it. I need you to get hold of the Bureau. It’s hard to figure Rowe’s angle on this thing, but maybe they can shed some light on it. And we really need to know what their profilers have to say about this guy based on what we have from him.”

  “All right, what else?”

  “Be sure Litman has people on Rowe’s trail. His car’s still in the lot and transportation and other resources will be hard to come by. He expected to remain in charge here and he’s out there unprepared.”

  “I can handle that. What are you going to focus on?”

  “We have a nasty deadline coming up in eight hours. I intend to find that password. I don’t know what he’ll do if we do find it, but I sure don’t doubt that he’ll make good on his threats if we don’t.”

  Ask me out loud if I think it’s safe to go online. The big screen was coming in very handy for non-verbal communication.

  “Will you go online again?” Abdul said.

  “No, can’t take the chance. He’s tapped into my laptop somehow and I don’t want to risk it. I’ll follow his rules and keep trying to break the code here.”

  “Okay,” Abdul said with a wink as I was logging on through the satellite link.

  I grabbed the stack of system logs Abdul had run for me when I first started trying to check out my pattern theory and striped the key events with a highlighter. The Fox site was way perkier at two in the morning, and within three minutes I had their timeline downloaded and printed. I took the hard copies and headed to the lounge, where I spread them out across a table and started scanning for the pattern I was sure existed.

  I didn’t have to look long. It was so obvious that I felt like an idiot for not having seen it far sooner. I ran—not walked—back to the control room and slid into my workstation. Abdul, I need the text files of the system logs that you printed. ASAP.

  The man was good at ASAP. The file icons appeared on my laptop within fifteen seconds. I opened them and went to work merging the list of internal GCE system events into the Fox list, cutting, pasting, pulling it all together in a spreadsheet file. As soon as I was done I printed the results and motioned for Tark and Abdul to follow me as I headed to the break room.

  “You guys see anything odd about this list?”

  “Yes,” Abdul said. “Everything happened at sixteen minutes after the hour.”

  “Sure did,” Tark said. “First failure here was at one-sixteen. National drop was exactly twelve hours later, and the chemical weapon attack in Los Angeles was at eleven-sixteen. I guess it could be coincidence, but it sure would be a stretch.”

  “It’s no coincidence. The pattern is stronger than that. Take another look,” I said. They looked but I could tell they didn’t see it. “These events didn’t just happen at sixteen minutes past the hour. They all happened at sixteen past the same hour.” I handed them another version with all the times transposed to U.S. Eastern Daylight Time.

  “Oh my gosh,” Tark said. “You’re right. Everything on here happened at two-sixteen Eastern!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And there’s no way that happened by chance. This, my friends, is a hard pattern. The guy has a thing for two-sixteen.”

  “How did everybody miss this? It seems so obvious now,” Tark said.

  “It’s easy to see why we missed it,” I said. “Since I got here on Monday afternoon, we’ve been putting out a steady stream of fires.”

  “What about all everyone else, however?”

  “Strong question, Abdul. Knowing Washington has its stables of investigative geniuses all over this case, why hasn’t someone else picked up on it? CIA, FBI, National Security Council, they all miss it while our little ragtag crew down here in Mississippi spots it first.”

  “There are plenty of smart people up there, but our government got caught with its britches down and they’re scrambling to keep their heads above water too,” Tark said.

  “I guess so. All right, let’s keep our forward progress going. What does the pattern mean and how does knowing it help us?”

  The speculative brainstorming began. A February sixteenth birthday? Something special about the two-hundred-sixteenth day of the year? A latitude or longitude? We had our pattern but we seriously needed to get something out of it because the deadline was bearing down on us and the trial-and-error code breaking was going nowhere.

  “One-oh-eight times two ... ” Abdul was pacing, thinking out loud. “Fifty-four times four ... ”

  “Does that number mean anything special in computers?” Tark said.

  “Nothing jumps out at me,” I said. “We do of course want to try it and every variation we can think of as the password.”

  “It divides by two so it is not a prime number ... twenty-seven times eight ... ”

  “One-one-oh-one-one-oh-oh-oh ... ”

  “That’s binary for two hundred sixteen,” I explained to Tark, who had a puzzled look on his face.

  “D-eight ... ”

  “You boys can stop guessing,” Tark said slowly, a strange look spreading across his face. “I know exactly what it is.”

  He walked over to a whiteboard on the wall and wrote out 216 = 6 x 6 x 6, then turned to us and said, “It’s six-six-six, the mark of the beast.”

  28

  2:02 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  HART COMPLEX

  “Are you absolutely certain the audio monitor is functioning
properly?” Hart said.

  “It’s working. We heard them talking just a few minutes ago,” Dane said.

  “But they’re not talking as much. I want to know why.”

  “Mr. Hart, it’s two o’clock in the morning. They’re probably worn out. I know I am.”

  “Sleep at a time like this is for fools and simpletons. This is a time of destiny.” Hart had not slept in three days and nights. He was wild-eyed, circling the room.

  “How the hell could a simpleton like me have a sense of destiny? Have you ever shared the whole story with that crew of robots upstairs? Does anybody on this whole damned earth know what’s going on other than you? Destiny, my ass.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that. I won’t hesitate to order you executed for insubordination.”

  “I want my money and I want out of this. I’ve had enough.”

  “You are thoroughly delusional, Mr. Christian. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “You’re wrong, you sick asshole. And you know what? I don’t even want your money. I’m out of here.”

  Dane stood up and headed for the door. He heard the hammer going back on Hart’s Walther PPK and hit the floor as a .380 hollow point bullet punched into the concrete wall in front of him. He instinctively rolled and reached for the small .38 revolver he always kept in the right cargo pocket of his fatigue jacket. Only then did he realize the jacket was lying on the bed in Jana’s room.

  Several more shots rang out and he sprang into a low running crouch, heading for the cover of Hart’s most prized possession, the glass-encased ancient copy of the Torah in the middle of the room. It worked. Hart froze, his face locked in a look of panic at the thought of harm befalling the treasure. The smell and haze of gunpowder hung in the air. Dane stayed in a crouch behind the pedestal—also made of glass—of the display, circling to keep it between them as Hart resumed his advance.

  Hart circled and closed, and Dane knew he was running out of time. In thirty seconds Hart would be close enough to shoot him pointblank without fear of hitting his precious book. His only option was a few seconds of distraction. Without warning he gave the heavy pedestal a shove. It hit the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces but the case holding the Torah itself must have been Plexiglas because it didn’t break. Hart shrieked like an animal and Dane sprinted toward the door.