“Tell me about this eagle.”
“It’s just an eagle. Except there’s something odd about its tail.”
“Odd how?”
“It’s not like a regular eagle’s tail, which is all white. This one has other colors mixed in.”
“What colors?”
“Blue and red.”
Bo looked at him, wide-eyed. “Red, white, and blue? The eagle’s tail is red, white, and blue?”
Stephen said, “I’ve been thinking that must be because the plane was carrying a U.S. senator.”
Bo pulled out his cell phone, keyed in something, then said, “Does your bird look like this?”
The image was of an eagle in flight, wings spread, talons sharp, as if preparing to grasp some prey. The tail feathers, like those on the bird in Stephen’s vision, were red, white, and blue.
“That’s it,” Stephen said.
Bo tapped in something else on the phone and showed Stephen the screen again. This time the eagle was part of a commercial logo.
“American Byrd Industries,” Stephen read aloud. “Never heard of it.”
“The name William Byrd doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“William Byrd?” Cork said. “As in the Black Bird?”
“The Black Bird,” Bo confirmed.
Stephen said, “Wait a minute. Who’s this Black Bird?”
“William Byrd, a very wealthy Kansan with a finger in a lot of pies,” Bo replied.
“What does he have to do with my vision?”
“You don’t know anything about him?”
Stephen gave a shrug. “I don’t pay a lot of attention to the news.”
“This guy’s a heavy hitter in American business and has bullied his way into politics. His family made its fortune manufacturing drilling equipment early last century. During World War Two, they shifted to military production of all kinds, including weaponry. Which made them even richer. After the war, they got into mineral extraction, agribusiness, railroads, trucking, you name it. William Byrd has an interest in more commercial enterprises than you can imagine, but he’s still heavily invested in developing weapons for the U.S. and building much of the expensive armaments that we supply to our friends overseas.”
“Why did you call him the Black Bird?”
“It’s how he refers to himself.”
Bo tapped on his cell phone again and showed Stephen an image of a man with a dark complexion and a thick mane of hair the color of an obsidian knife.
“His mother was Italian, I think. Maybe even Sicilian. That’s probably where the dark skin comes from. Byrd’s somewhere in his eighties, but he keeps that hair as black as coal dust. His nickname probably comes from that. But I’ve had a couple of brushes with him, and it also describes the color of his heart. Calls himself a patriot, but if you ask me, what he stands for is what’s good for William Byrd.”
“What kind of brushes?” Stephen’s father asked.
“The first was up here, back when you were sheriff and I was Secret Service. He made a visit to the vice president at his vacation home on Iron Lake.”
“I don’t remember him coming.”
“It was very hush-hush, at Byrd’s insistence. The man was an asshole, behaved abominably to everyone, including the vice president and his family.”
“What about the second brush?” Cork asked.
Bo shook his head. “That one I can’t talk about. It’s the only job I ever walked away from.”
“How would he be involved in what’s gone on up here?” Stephen asked.
“For starters, the Senate begins debate on the Manila Accord next week. That’s an agreement Senator McCarthy was leading the charge against. Passage would facilitate trade with much of Southeast Asia. It’s aimed at taking away some of China’s economic influence there. Byrd Industries would certainly benefit from that. But a lot of the accord is about selling military armaments to these nations as well. I’d bet my bottom dollar there’s plenty of money earmarked for Byrd Industries. So that’s a possibility. I’ve got to tell you, the Black Bird’s a man who feels privileged right down to the marrow of his being. If he wanted someone dead, no matter the reason, he’d see that it was done.” Bo gave Stephen a long look of careful appraisal, one that made Stephen uncomfortable. “I’ve had my doubts about all this vision stuff. But like the man said, there’s clearly more in heaven and earth than I’ve dreamed of in my philosophy.”
“You really think Byrd might be behind all this?” Cork asked.
Bo said, “I’m hoping my friend at the Pentagon can enlighten us.” Once again, his eyes settled on Stephen. “But you know that monster at your back in the vision? If there are real monsters in this world, William Byrd is one of them for sure.”
The night wore on, and the men finally split up and returned to their sleeping places. Stephen sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag in the meadow and thought about the eagle shot from the sky in his vision. He was relieved that it wasn’t a sacred eagle, but instead an evil thing that had taken an eagle’s form. He used his cell phone to explore further the monster named William Byrd. He wondered what could turn a man’s heart to such darkness. He wondered if there was any ceremony that could heal that damaged spirit. He might have spent the rest of the night caught up in the electronic web, which offered him information but no answers, except that his phone chirped at him and shut itself off, and he realized he’d emptied the battery.
Probably for the best, he decided. He lay down and gazed up at the stars, which were beautiful but, like the Internet, gave him no answers.
CHAPTER 45
* * *
The text from Bo’s contact in the Pentagon came in the dark hours long before dawn.
This is big. Meet contact 0400 hours. Fly silent. Code word: Eagle. The GPS coordinates followed.
In the meadow not far from where Stephen O’Connor was sleeping, Bo threw off his borrowed blanket. He couldn’t see the young man, the grass was so high. It had been a long time since Bo had spent a night like this, under the stars. Hiding out from Gerard, he’d slept in his Jeep. Under the night sky, it was as if something wonderfully clean and whole had been shared with him, a feeling he couldn’t recall experiencing since his days on the farm down in Blue Earth, when he was a delinquent teenager trying to become someone better.
He tapped at the door of Leah Duling’s cabin. Cork opened up.
“My friend at the Pentagon finally got back to me.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing except that it’s big. He’s set me up with a meeting, one of his people. I’m on my way.”
“Where?”
Bo gave him the coordinates, then said, “When I map it, that’s the junction of County Roads Eight and Seventeen.”
“South end of Iron Lake. Reasonable if he’s coming up from the Cities,” Cork said. “Want company?”
“I’ll take this one alone.”
“Be careful.”
“You sound like someone’s grandmother.”
Bo had parked his Jeep near the double-trunk birch. When he reached it, he was still an hour away from the meeting time. The headlights of the Jeep illuminated a tunnel in the dark, and as Bo headed toward the rendezvous, he considered again the players in this game.
NTSB, FBI, DoD, the Lexington Brigade, maybe William Byrd and Byrd Industries. And Gerard. Were they working at odds with one another, Bo wondered, or in concert? The most recent word from NTSB had confirmed that the Stinger found in the brigade’s lodge was probably what had brought down the plane, so all the official lips were saying the same thing. But Winston Goodsky’s photograph told a different story.
Bo came back to Gerard. He was pretty sure the man’s job was to keep a lid on the truth, to eliminate any evidence that contradicted the official story. Why? Who needed protecting? Gerard was a floater. He and his team worked for no one, and for everyone. So, who was he working for this time around?
Bo’s contact at the Pentagon, Max Freeman, had begun his
career in the Secret Service, training with Bo. Then he’d moved on, taken a position with DSS, the Defense Security Service, and been assigned to the Pentagon. They’d remained friends and in touch. But this was the first time Bo had tapped Max for something more than a few beers together whenever his own work took him to D.C. He hadn’t been certain Max would be willing to help but was grateful his friend had come through. As Bo approached the rendezvous point, he was still puzzling, hoping the information from his contact might help.
He was still a few minutes early and parked well shy of the junction of the two isolated county roads. He checked his Sig Sauer, slipped it back into the holster on his hip, and got out. He kept to the trees that edged the road. The moon was a deflated yellow balloon but gave enough light for Bo to see his way. There was no sign of anyone at the lonely intersection, and he hunkered among the trees, as still as one of the trunks, waiting.
The vehicle came slowly, two bright eyes in the distance, then a broad beam of headlights that illuminated the crossing. An SUV, dark blue or black. It pulled to a stop on the shoulder. The engine died, then the headlights. A door opened, closed. A figure separated itself from the vehicle and moved to the middle of the intersection. Bo couldn’t tell a thing about it in the faint moonlight.
Then the figure struck a match and lit a cigar and Bo understood.
He didn’t even turn when he heard the click of the cocking hammer at his back.
“The Colonel would like to see you.” It was a woman’s voice, as cold as he’d ever heard.
The smoke Gerard blew was dark gray against the waning moon. The cigar ember was a third eye low in his face. Two of his people were with him—one just behind Gerard, and the woman with the weapon still in Bo’s back.
“I’ll take it from here, Lieutenant Craig,” Gerard said, and Bo sensed the woman retreat a step or two. Gerard held up a photograph, and Bo didn’t have to look to know what it was. “You should be more careful who you trust, Thorson.”
“So much for friends,” Bo said.
“In our business, friendship is a luxury we can’t afford. Which is too bad. In a different world, I think you and I might have had something.”
“That’s a world I can’t even imagine,” Bo replied.
“I offered you a chance to get out of this cleanly. That was partly because of our relationship. Not exactly friendship, but about as close as I ever come.”
“What’s your relationship with the Black Bird?”
“I have none.”
Bo thought about this, then said, “You’re a fixer. You were called in to fix a fuckup. His?”
“William Byrd has always been a shrewd businessman, but in his old age, he’s chosen to wade into areas well beyond his expertise. He used to be satisfied just giving a shitload of money to both sides of the aisle in Washington, currying favors, which we both know is pretty much the norm. But the Black Bird is a little cantankerous these days and impatient with Congress. He finally decided to take things into his own hands.”
“And get rid of Senator McCarthy?”
“Not a bad idea when you think about it, with the Senate poised to debate the Manila Accord and Senator McCarthy the very vocal leader of the opposition. And then there’s that pesky assault rifle legislation she was about to introduce. If she’s out, your governor steps in to fill her shoes, and he’s made his own sympathetic views on the accord and his opposition to gun control quite clear. There’s one other interesting intersecting consideration here, probably not even on your radar. That mine that’s got everybody so worked up in these parts? If you follow the very convoluted trail of ownership, who do you think it leads back to?”
“William Byrd.”
“Turns out all those heavy metals in the ground under our feet are necessary to the production of sophisticated military weaponry. A kind of beauty in the synchronicity of all this, if you look at it in the right way. Do you know your Keats? ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ ”
“Byrd brought in the brigade to do his dirty work?”
“Not exactly. You remember General Buck Cushing? Well, if you don’t, he was removed from his command in Iraq because of his very public criticism of how our commander in chief was conducting things over there. After Cushing’s forced retirement, Byrd, whose sympathies were much in line with the general’s, hired him to head up research and development in Byrd Industries’ military weaponry division. Now, guess who was Cushing’s chief adjutant. Colonel Cole Wannamaker. He took retirement along with Cushing and got himself a ranch in South Dakota, where he raises horses and continues to play at being a soldier with the Lexington Brigade.”
“Cushing supplied Wannamaker with the weapon in the photograph?”
“Cutting-edge electronic warfare, Thorson. It’s the Vulcan N-17X, still in the test phase. It has the capability of sending out a powerful EMP, yes, but it’s also a neutron cannon.”
“Which is what?”
“Remember the neutron bomb? Kills a whole city without damaging any of the superstructure. This is a big gun that does the same thing. It fires a directed neutron beam. Imagine being able to take out a whole cadre of terrorists deeply embedded in the buildings of a city block without reducing that block to rubble. Humanitarian in its way. Keeps homes and businesses intact for the return of the citizenry. Think what most of Syria might be today if we’d been able to use it there. The beauty of employing it to assassinate the senator is that everyone on board was dead before they hit the ground. No chance of survivors telling a tale.”
“Senator McCarthy and her family weren’t deeply embedded terrorists.”
“Of course not. No one would ever consider what the Black Bird and Cushing did a reasonable action. But the kind of weaponry Byrd Industries is developing, now that’s worth protecting.”
“Have you known it was him from the beginning?”
Gerard blew smoke toward the stars. “Pretty much. Three weeks ago, someone inside Byrd Industries leaked to the Pentagon that one of the N-17X prototypes had gone missing from Byrd Industries’ test facility in Utah. That kind of weapon doesn’t just go missing. None of this was ever made public, of course. When the senator’s plane came down, I was sent to check it out. Hell, everyone was sending someone to check it out. It was a mess of bureaucracies stumbling over one another. Nobody was sure of all the details. That’s where you came in. You and your friends up here, you’ve been very helpful. I didn’t know the territory like you do. I didn’t have the local contacts. Once you gave me the lay of the land, I passed that along and things finally began to be coordinated. From very high up.”
“How high?”
“You have no idea, Thorson.”
“All to protect the Black Bird?”
“If you blow that photo up enough, what you see is that one of the men operating the N-17X prototype is Cushing himself, no doubt acting on orders from Byrd. If I could, I’d just put a bullet in those nutcases. But Byrd Industries is important to our national security.”
“What happened to the N-17X?”
“Two days after the plane crash, some of my people intercepted it on its way back to Utah, along with Cushing. He claimed they’d done a field test in Wyoming and denied any involvement in the senator’s death, but what we got off the black box was pretty damning. We thought that was it, the end of it. Then you and O’Connor led us to Wannamaker, and he told us about the photographer on the mountain. If that photo of Cushing and the N-17X ever got out, there was no controlling the damage.” Gerard smiled around his cigar. “Thanks to you, that’s not a problem now. Cushing and the prototype have been returned safely to the Utah test facility. The NTSB’s report, when it’s finally made official and public, will confirm the Stinger story.”
“You planted the Stingers and the flight recorder?”
“It’s what I do.”
“And the massacre of the brigade, that was your work, too. What about Wannamaker? Did you kill him, dump his body somewhere he’ll never be found?”
Gerard gave his head a shake. “He still has work to do.”
“And me? I’ll just disappear?”
“Not quite yet.” Gerard threw the butt of his cigar to the ground, crushed the ember with the heel of his boot, and said, almost sadly, “I need some answers from you first. Then I have another massacre to arrange.”
CHAPTER 46
* * *
Trixie barked.
Cork, who was in a sleeping bag with Rainy on the floor of Leah Duling’s cabin, woke in the dark. The old mutt was up, teeth bared, growling at the door. Cork’s first thought was that a black bear had come prowling. Then another possibility set in, and he rose quickly, but too late.
There was no lock on the door. Meloux had no need of locks in his little piece of paradise. The door was thrown open and banged against the wall. Cork crouched, his hands empty but fisted, ready to throw blows. The light from the doorway blinded him.
“Hold it right there, O’Connor, or I’ll shoot you where you stand!”
Rainy had risen and stood shoulder to shoulder with her husband. She was dressed in gray sweatpants and a blue T-shirt and held herself tense. Behind them, bunk springs creaked.
“What’s happening?” Leah said.
“We need you folks to come with us.”
You folks, as if this were a friendly invitation, but the voice was icicle sharp.
“Who are you?” Cork demanded.
“Everything will be explained.”
“Let me put on something warmer,” Leah said.
“We’ve got a fire going. It’ll be plenty warm.”
Trixie continued to growl and bare her teeth, the hackles on her neck raised. No one moved yet.
“Maybe this will help,” said the voice behind the blinding light.
Little Waaboo, looking confused and scared, was shoved into the beam of the flashlight. Cork lunged for him protectively, but a black-gloved hand grabbed the child and pulled him back into the dark.
At that Trixie, in full protective mode, gathered herself and launched her old body with a youthful vigor toward the source of the light. But the automatic rifle barked several times. Trixie fell short of her mark and lay sprawled on the cabin floor, perfectly still.
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