Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  “Nothing else?” asked Mondragon.

  “No, I... I really don’t know nothing,” stammered Trey.

  “I believe that,” said Mondragon, after a pause.

  LXXX

  12/06/10 16:00 EST

  The Secretary of Defense was uncertain how to present the situation to the members of his senior staff. He knew as well as anyone in Washington DC that several of the people in his office owed their positions to the successful handling of terrorist attacks of 2009, Under Secretary Margaret Smythe especially. Sitting inside his Pentagon office in her blue wool suit, she cut a figure that was both alluring and terrifying to everyone present. Like everyone in Washington, he dreaded bringing her discouraging news.

  “I have to touch on this,” he began. “Bring everyone up to speed on the matter. You must, I know, have read these things in the paper regarding the Colorado River dams.”

  Margaret was not going to let anyone, not even the secretary himself, get a step ahead of her. This was her issue and ultimately the basis of her reputation. She defended herself before anyone had launched a real attack.

  “Rumors,” she sneered. “The source was a radio talk show, for God’s sake!”

  Ronald Goodman, once Margaret’s lover and now special assistant to her, pointed out that other members of the media were picking up the same story.

  “The Times is reporting tomorrow,” he said, “that there are these two businessmen in California said to have some connection to the terrorists.”

  “One is a chronic alcoholic and the other is a tax cheat,” chimed in Margaret. “Real James Bond types.”

  “Both men have gotten quite wealthy since the disaster,” read Ronald from an inter-office memo. The rest of the staff knew he was animated more by his jealousy of Margaret’s success than by his sense of duty. “Look at the investments they made; they seemed to know what was going to happen. They positioned themselves exactly right months before the dams were hit.”

  “A couple hundred thousand other people also made money by positioning themselves the right way,” said Margaret, which the assembled under secretaries agreed was true. In fact, gratis their exalted positions, the under secretaries were among the elite who had profited from the catastrophe, for in government, doing well is one of the primary benefits of doing good, much as Mondragon himself had once observed.

  “This man Greeley, the pilot, the one the paper says was murdered in Alabama,” said NSA counter terrorist chief Henry Bartlet, “he had an outstanding military background. Once, when functioning as one of our operatives, he endured two years in a Central American prison and betrayed no one. He doesn’t seem to be the sort of man to kill his girlfriend and then shoot himself, as the local coroner has ruled. The situation doesn’t feel right.”

  “Forty-five thousand people kill themselves every year,” argued Margaret. “They each do it only once, and rarely does anyone see it coming. I might add that a lot of them take loved ones with them when they go. And where is there any connection between this man and the men in California?”

  “That would be, perhaps, Ms. Smythe, Col. Michael Method,” said Bartlet, the NSA man. “Not that I’m saying that this Method is, or was, anything to our government’s intelligence community.” He glanced at the CIA executive representing that agency at the meeting and at Margaret, and both appeared as unhappy as Bartlet himself was. The NSA man wondered if he should have mentioned the colonel at an informal conference. “If he were—”

  “Yes?” said the Secretary of Defense, brought to the edge of his chair. “If he were what?”

  “If he were technically alive, or had ever been,” said Bartlet. “Technically, he never was.”

  There was a flurry of shuffling feet, rustling papers and clicking teeth in the room.

  They knew what it meant when an intelligence chief began hemming and hawing around a former asset who was potentially embarrassing. They knew also that this inquiry was going nowhere. Margaret Smythe understood the same and was greatly relieved, so relieved she slyly showed Ronald Goodman her middle finger as she pushed her reading glasses back onto her nose.

  “He might, had he ever been... working for us, or for a related agency, he might have been in Honduras with the late Mr. Greeley,” explained Bartlet. “As I say, he wasn’t with us, so he wasn’t with Greeley.”

  “He still isn’t?” asked the Secretary of DoD, and rapped on the table to show he wanted the rustling, shuffling, and clacking to cease.

  “He isn’t in every sense of word... or of any other words, or any way you want it, sir,” said Bartlet. “Colonel Method never existed. The record shows that.”

  “I think we can safely say there is nothing to this story,” said the Secretary, not one to pursue anything he should not. “As Ms. Smythe has said, it comes from some silly talk show.” He nodded to Margaret. “Let’s all get to work, people, and I don’t want to hear anything more about this.”

  LXXXI

  12/07/10 20:21 PST

  In spite of the warning Mondragon had given him, Ed Harris had apparently spoken to someone in the media. Five different talk shows and two supermarket tabloids had received e-mails from Oshkosh. These messages told of how Mondragon and Taylor had purchased particular stocks in order to take advantage of the disaster. During his morning outing on the Seventh, a reporter from a despicable rag of a newspaper had followed Mondragon into the coffee bar and had asked him: “Is it true?”

  “Go away, young man. I am a private citizen,” Mondragon had told him and at the same time had signaled his antsy bodyguards to stand back. “I’m not some movie actor grateful for publicity. I’m no one. Just a simple businessman. These stories are all pernicious nonsense.”

  A few strong words and a slanted eyebrow sufficed to frighten his employees; the same action left the reporter unfazed. The young pup had followed Mondragon into the men’s restroom and later, right to the front door of the Mondragon Building, pestering Erin with provocative questions that revealed an insider’s knowledge of the assaults on the dams. Mondragon needed every ounce of self-restraint he could muster not to have the little snipe beaten senseless.

  After much reflection upon the revelations in the gutter press and upon the death of Kenneth Greeley, an event that should have intimidated everyone concerned into total silence, Mondragon concluded as he sat in the chilly foyer of his penthouse that he had been wrong about the colonel. Either Ed Harris was the phantom creating these embarrassing leaks, or he was feeding information to this nameless phantom. Col. Method was far too loyal and too obsessed to betray the conspiracy. Taylor had been watched day and night and had not talked. That left only Harris, but no, he too was the wrong man. Harris and Greeley had been friends. Why would Edward endanger a friend? Had not Harris gotten rich these past two years? What grievances did he have? No, Erin decided he had been correct the first time; these later developments had to be the product of Method’s agitated mind. He would be impossible for the authorities to find. He had no family or friends to protect.

  “The mad man is trying to silence us all, one by one,” decided Mondragon. “He created the reports, and he’s pretending to fix the problem he created. That is the only explanation that makes any sense. This has been his doing since the Washington state incidents.”

  Immediately he phoned one Vincent De Smit, the one member of his security staff with a real law enforcement background, as Vincent had been a cop in Boston before his brother policemen learned his true nature. Something had happened while Vincent was on duty one night, and someone had ended up in Boston Harbor. Vincent had the build of a shotgun shell and was every bit as emotive as a large piece of ammunition. No one in California knew exactly what he had done in his past life. When asked a question, Vincent never gave a straight answer. Some who knew him thought his taciturn ways showed an unexpected thoughtfulness in the man. Mondragon knew the man’s way of behaving actually showed how little was working above the twin mounds that were Vincent’s shoulders. The man in ques
tion sidled into Mondragon’s office fresh from the break room, baker’s sugar still on his mouth and fingers.

  “What do you think about going to Wisconsin?” Mondragon asked him.

  “Cold,” said De Smit after he had time to think upon that portion of the upper Midwest.

  “Take a friend of your choosing, someone from the security detail, and a road map,” Mondragon told him. “I have some guard duty for you to do in Oshkosh.”

  LXXXII

  12/09/10 02:12 CST

  Bob Mathers sat in his pick-up in the December Wisconsin cold, alternately turning his motor off and on to coax a little warmth from the heater. To ease the cold he had tried lighting some large hurricane candles he had gotten at Wal-Mart. The man in the hardware department had assured him that in case of an emergency, a single candle in its long glass cylinder would keep him alive through the worst blizzard. Bob had lit all four candles that came in the pack and still was shivering as he sat on Nineteenth Street in the suburban South Park area of Oshkosh and downed his sixth cup of coffee. He had been anxious throughout the night. Every thirty seconds or so he swore he could see the tall man he had spied in Alabama walking down the sidewalk toward Ed Harris’ home down the block from his truck.

  “Could be him,” Bob had time to think when another figure walked past. As soon as he had framed that thought he saw another man follow a tall figure into the front yard of the Harris house. This second man ran across the shadowy lawn in front of Harris’ two story house from the opposite direction. The tall man passing Bob on the sidewalk managed to open the front door’s lock and enter the house as quickly as the other man floated across the snow covered grass, and Bob Mathers could not have said which of the two was more daring. The second figure entered the house only footsteps behind the first. After hours of watching the silent street in the winter cold, the unexpected speed of the anticipated event when it finally arrived created a strangely fascinating scene that made Bob keep watching to see what happened, rather than take any action.

  Bob had seen Ed Harris twice during his surveillance of the house. The thirty-one year old engineer had decided not to run elsewhere despite what he had said to Mondragon concerning leaving Wisconsin. He was familiar with his home and electronics, and he had used the past week to place motion detectors around the parameter of his two acre estate.

  *

  Vincent De Smit was stationed in the front rooms while the other man from Mondragon’s security detail kept watch in the back. Beneath the peaked second floor roof that stood over the rest of the sprawling house like a watchtower over castle battlements was a third man, one Harris had hired himself, and this one was armed with an automatic rifle. Because of the electronic equipment Harris, and his three men had spotted Bob Mathers’ truck twice during the previous day and had suspected that he was Col. Method on a reconnaissance mission. The heavily armed household had been put on full alert. The four men were going to learn in the next seventeen seconds that caution is not prevention. They had seen Method coming long before Bob had. De Smit had actually succeeded in getting a few dozen steps behind the veteran of countless dirty little battles. Stopping Method was going to be much harder.

  *

  From his truck Bob saw rapid flashes of red light behind the darkened windows of the house. His rational mind knew these were gunshots, but they did not sound like gunshots Bob had heard on the firing range. From inside Harris’ home they sounded like dud firecrackers, fizzing and half-heartedly popping in the still, frigid air. Bob saw the black figure of Ed Harris race from the right-hand side of the house and down the white lawn toward Nineteenth Street.

  The tall man threw a living room coffee table through the front bay window; the ferocious old man followed the heavy rectangle of black through the broken glass and onto the snowy lawn. The sixty-seven year old warrior leapt forward like a broad jumper a third his age and swiftly assumed a shooter’s stance, his knee down and both hands on his pistol. Ed Harris was seventy feet away as the tall man drew his bead on the back of the engineer’s head. The colonel did not hurry; he let Harris reach the street, let him put his hand on the end of a parked car, then fired a single, precise bullet. The engineer pitched forward a step, stumbled a few more steps to his right, and fell. His body lay in an awkward heap, his knees tucked underneath his abdomen.

  “Holy shit,” whispered Bob, and slowly lowered himself behind his steering wheel so that only one eye was looking over the dashboard. He knew, then, that this had to be Col. Method. The killer walked toward the body, swaggering in triumph and popping another clip into his weapon; he intended to blast two more bullets into Harris’ skull, as he did to all his victims.

  Bob Mathers had the eerie feeling he was watching how Wayland Zah had died. Method was raising his pistol to fire, probably smiling in the darkness at a job well done, when a man with an automatic rifle hiding beneath the high peaked roof on the house’s second floor let fly a streak of fire that showed bright red against the night sky. Method turned and blazed away at his attacker.

  For what seemed to be five minutes but was really only a couple seconds pandemonium overcame the quiet residential street. Lights came on for blocks around. Dogs barked across southern Oshkosh in response to the gun shots. Snarling pieces of lead ricocheted off the pavement and zipped through the windows of parked cars. Everywhere on Nineteenth Street groggy men in t-shirts and women in curlers and bathrobes appeared on front porches asking what the devil was going on.

  As soon as they saw what the devil was doing, they darted back inside their houses to dial 911. The shooting ended as suddenly as if a film director had yelled “cut.” The rifleman on the second floor pitched forward through the brittle glass panes, and his firearm went rattling over the eaves.

  Method attempted to get himself upright and away from the people watching him from their doorways. On the white lawn where he had turned to fire he had made a wide patch black with lost blood; another man might have laid down in the cold and given up his life right there. Motivated by a will so strong it propelled his injured body onward, Method got to the sidewalk and staggered on wounded legs in the direction of his car. Bob Mathers held his breath while the tall man passed his truck and once more ducked his head below his dashboard. He heard Method mutter to himself when he drew even to his passenger door: “Be more careful,” he heard him say, a self-warning that came a little too late in this instance. Bob counted to twenty before raising his head again. By then he could see Method’s back swaying over the bare sidewalk as he progressed slowly toward his parked car.

  Bob’s mind at once became clear amid the swelling noise and the scores of lights switching on along both sides of the street; he knew he had to drive out of there that very instant. The police were going to arrive at any moment. If they blocked the street they would stop everyone attempting to leave the scene; a search of his car would produce his service revolver and the reams of information he had collected on Harris, and Bob could not talk himself out of that fix.

  He turned the key in his ignition and engaged the clutch, but kept his head down lest Method turn and fire a last shot in Bob’s rear window. In the mounting confusion on Nineteenth Street the tall man did not pay any heed to a single vehicle that was headed in the opposite direction. Bob was turning the corner of the block when he saw the blinking lights atop the first police car arriving in his rear-view mirror. He was not on scene to see Method fall on his way to this automobile, or to see the colonel rise and reach the inside of the car. Bob Mathers was two blocks away the moment two more police cars arrived in the neighborhood and sealed up the other end of the street, blocking the badly wounded Method’s last route of escape.

  Not until eight-thirty in the morning did Bob learn how the carnage in front of Harris’ home had ended. He was sitting inside a Fond du Lac diner approximately twenty miles south of the gunfight and sipping another cup of coffee (this would be the ninth one he had downed during the long night) when he saw a special broadcast on the televisio
n at the end of the long linoleum-topped counter. “Bloodbath in the Heartland,” read the caption over the wrinkled forehead of a serious looking female reporter standing in front of the yards of the late Ed Harris’ home, which was now decorated with yellow crime scene tape. She told her audience in her best journalist voice that three men had been found shot dead in the house behind her, a fourth was discovered lying murdered on the front yard, and a fifth man, a man police said had possibly killed the other four, had shot himself inside a car parked yards from the Harris household.

  “Police spokespersons speculate,” explained the newswoman, “that the killer saw he was trapped. Badly wounded and with little hopes of shooting his way out of the vicinity, the unknown killer put his own gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

  Bob Mathers paid for his coffee with a five dollar bill and told the waitress to keep the change. Back inside his pick-up he scratched off two more names from a list of names he had been carrying for the past twenty-three days.

  LXXXIII

  12/13/10 10:00 CST

  “You were in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department?” asked FBI agent Mark Lingworth of Bob Mathers as the two men sat in the agency’s Milwaukee office.

  “Police,” said Bob. “I was in the L.A. Police Department. We worked together on the Allison kidnapping case in 1996 when you were stationed on the west coast.”

  “I remember your face, Mr. Mathers,” conceded Lingworth. “I’m bad with names, good with faces. You say you’re in the security business now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand we can’t get involved in a private firm’s business,” said Agent Lingworth. “The Bureau has strict guidelines.”