by David Capps
“No.”
“So metal or wood?”
“Too damn many insects for wood. It’d have to be metal, or plastic.”
Stafford smiled. “We have an entire company of mine sweepers here. If it’s got metal in it, we’re going to find it.”
Jake and Honi approached the lead CID agent. “How’s the search going?” Jake asked.
“So far, nothing too unusual, we did find three cell phones hidden in the back of a drawer.”
“I need them,” Honi said quickly. She checked the phones. “No batteries. Did you find any cell phone batteries?”
“Let me check. Yes, in a box with eighteen other batteries, other side of the house.”
“Show me.”
The two of them headed off.
Jake turned to Stafford, eyebrows raised. “Mine sweepers?”
“On their way. Hellova lot faster than the ground-penetrating radar machine. Time counts.”
Honi returned. “Password protected. It doesn’t stop us. It just slows down the process.” She called Brett at the NSA. “Three more cell phones to add to the new program, I’m sending you the numbers.”
Jake stood at the window and watched the army tech run the ground-penetrating radar machine over the property, row after row.
For sure, time counts, Jake thought. Time left… He looked at the strange watch: 21 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes and 22 seconds. With a missing nuclear weapon at this particular time, Jake’s gut was telling him the two were intimately connected. But how, and why?
* * *
Sylvia Cuthbert finally calmed down enough to fall asleep, only to be awakened by the sound of the jail cell door opening. Her heart pounded, fear raced through her chest. Are they coming for me?!
“Get up,” the security guard demanded.
She slowly sat up and then stood.
“Turn around, hands behind your back.”
She complied, wincing as he tightened the handcuffs around her wrists. He pushed her out of the cell door into the hall, pointing her to where she had heard the awful sounds during the night.
“Don’t move.”
She stood, weakened and wobbly from the lack of sleep. The sound of water sloshing behind her drove a new wave of panic through her body. She turned her head slowly to see what it was. A maintenance man pushed a large bucket of soapy water with a ringer attached and a mop standing up into the air. The man slowly cleaned her jail cell, wiped everything down, stripped the sheets from the cot and placed clean folded ones on the bare mattress.
When he was done, the guard guided her back into the cell, removed the handcuffs, closed and locked the cell door. She made her bed and laid down to rest. The noises of the daily operation of the security office made sleep difficult. She tried, but some loud noise always disturbed her. Her exhaustion deepened as the day wore on.
* * *
Three hours later, Jake’s phone buzzed. He looked at the text message.
“Okay, we’ve got six pieces of property connected to General Teague.”
“Where do you want to start?” Honi asked.
Jake breathed out slowly and studied the list.
Major Stafford rushed into the room. “Mine sweepers found this plastic box. It contains a gun, money, keys and a map. Just like you thought.”
“Which road?” Jake asked.
“Northwest exit.”
Jake looked at the list of properties again. Northwest. Probably something close. Someplace he could get to overnight. There it was. Just across the state line into Oklahoma.
“This one first. Get the ground-penetrating radar and the tech. We gotta go.”
“I’ve got a helicopter on standby,” Stafford said. “We’ll be at Teague’s Oklahoma property in an hour.”
* * *
The dust swirled out from the downwash of the helicopter blades, lifted up into the air and was caught up again in the downwash. It looked like they were landing in the hole of a giant dust donut. As the blades wound down, the dust subsided, mostly.
The house was small, maybe a vacation home, plain wood plank side boards and a cedar shingle roof. Jake looked around at the rural landscape: Scrub brush and pale soil for as far as he could see. The general could have come here hunting, Jake thought. Certainly secluded. A perfect place to begin a trek into obscurity, and another identity, maybe another country. But with what? There has to be something here worth the stop.
A search of the house revealed a few rifles, some canned food, clothes; the usual items. Jake and Honi followed a narrow stairway down from a slanted wood door mounted next to the outside of the house. Looks like a storm shelter, Jake thought. He checked the walls: They were solid.
“Set up the ground-penetrating radar,” Jake said. “Start close to the house and work your way out.”
The army tech wheeled the machine over to the side of the house and began the search. Twenty minutes later, he came running into the house.
“Agent Hunter! There’s something buried by the storm shelter. It’s huge.”
They all ran to the back of the house.
“It’s right under here,” the army tech pointed out. “And it runs out to here.”
“How wide?”
“About six, maybe seven feet.”
Under the stairs, Jake thought.
Stafford looked at the stair steps. “They’re screwed down. Torx bit drive.” He ran back into the house and emerged a minute later with a cordless drill in his hand. “Torx bit in the drill, extra battery, all charged and ready to go.”
Stafford unscrewed the steps and tossed them into the small storm cellar. Under the steps was a panel of plywood, also screwed on the edges. He removed the screws, hooked his finger into a half-inch hole at the top, and lifted the panel up and out. Jake pulled the plywood panel out into the back yard. Honi emerged from the house with a flashlight and tossed it down to Stafford.
“More steps going down,” Stafford called out. He stepped down out of sight into the darkness. “There’s a buried shipping container down here. You guys need to see this.”
Jake grimaced in pain as he jumped across the open space and landed in the storm cellar. The bullet wound on his right side hadn’t healed yet. Honi followed him.
“You alright?”
“Mostly,” he replied, holding his right side.
They walked down the steps. Twelve feet underground the concrete block walls and steps opened up and framed the double doors to a standard shipping container. Stafford was pulling the doors open as they arrived. The flashlight illumined the open end of the container.
“Light switch,” Jake said. He reached over and flipped the switch mounted in an electrical box on the left.
Fluorescent lights flickered to life. The container was twenty feet long, lined on both sides with wood shelves, two feet deep.
“Holy mother of God,” Stafford said softly.
As they looked down the center aisle, it was obvious that every shelf was stacked full with something, right out to the edge of the shelf and up to the bottom of the next shelf up. Stafford had pulled a packet from the shelf. It was a banded pack of hundred dollar bills, and the shelves were stuffed with them. Jake took a packet from the shelf and thumbed through the bills.
“These packets are ten grand a piece. How many packets are there?”
Honi and Stafford started counting.
“These stacks run all the way back to the wall,” Honi noted. “Just this much is a million dollars, and there’s…”
Stafford was counting in groups of a million as he worked his way down the aisle. When he got to the end, he turned. “I get one hundred million per shelf.”
“And we have ten shelves,” Honi said. “Five on each side.”
Jake leaned against the shelving, feeling a bit dizzy. “Where the hell did Teague get a billion dollars?” He looked at Stafford and then at Honi.
“The warhead,” they said together.
“That’s a lot of money for a single warhead,” Jak
e said.
“There are a number of nuclear weapons available on the black market,” Stafford explained. “They’re very expensive. But what you don’t get are the activation codes. A terrorist can get hold of a nuke and blow it up with conventional explosives, but what he’d get is a dirty bomb. The sequence and control of the detonation is critical in order to get a nuclear detonation.”
“And to get the activation codes?” Honi asked.
“You need someone like General Teague, and a lot more money.”
“General Teague was planning on getting away. Now that he’s in custody…” Jake said.
“The army doesn’t fool around. Teague will hang,” Stafford replied.
A metal cabinet stood at the far end of the aisle. Stafford opened the doors, Jake and Honi joined him.
“Guns, passports, ID papers,” Stafford said, handing over the passports. Jake examined them briefly. The papers revealed General Teague’s image, but with a different name. “I got ammo, traveling clothes, extra socks and a watch.”
“A watch?”
“Yeah. It’s weird. It runs backwards.”
Jake grabbed the watch out of Stafford’s hand. It was the same as the one he wore.
“So what’s with the weird watch?”
Jake and Honi glanced at each other and then back to Stafford.
“You’re in the middle of it now, so you might as well know,” Jake said. He held his arm out, exposing the watch on his wrist. “It’s a bit of a long story.”
CHAPTER 9
Okay, Peter Steinmetz thought. No battle plan remains intact after the first encounter with the enemy. So I counter their move. He took a look at the people he had available and who could best accomplish the job. It’s an expensive move, but Teague is currently indispensable. He got on his computer and sent his message through the encrypted network. Collateral damage, but an acceptable loss.
* * *
By late that afternoon Ken Bartholomew had arrived and confirmed that the billion dollars was real currency and not counterfeit. The passports and other forms of ID were so well done Ken couldn’t tell them from the real thing.
“They even have the correct ultraviolet markings on them,” he said. “You don’t get this level of quality from just anywhere. Somebody put a lot of time and money into these papers.”
“Bag everything up and log it into evidence,” Stafford told the CID team. He turned to Jake. “We have enough evidence to convict Teague. Time to interrogate him.”
“Mind if we join you?” Jake asked. “I know this is army jurisdiction, but I just want to get his reaction to the watch. Maybe we can get a line on why he decided to betray his country, and how he became associated with this international criminal organization.”
“I can make that happen. I’m gettin’ used to havin’ you two around.”
When they returned to Fort Hood, General Teague had already been transferred to Fort Belvoir.
“He’ll keep,” Stafford said. “We still have a mountain of paperwork to go through here. Agent Bartholomew still needs to see if he can tell us what day the W79 warhead disappeared. If he can do that, we stand a chance of finding out who else is in on this thing.”
“Do we know anything about General Teague’s mental state?” Jake asked.
“We thought we did. But finding the countdown watch and the buried shipping container containing a billion dollars? What else did we miss? Is this some kind of a death cult thing?”
“I don’t know. The guy who gave me the watch said we were all going to die when the time ran out. One nuclear artillery shell can take out part of a major city, but I don’t see that as killing all of us.”
“Maybe it’s all of the people in a particular city?” Honi said.
“Could be. He was from New York City, but he was in Washington when he told me.”
“So, two potential cities?” Major Stafford asked.
“Yeah. Both big potential targets. New York for financial reasons, and Washington for political ones.”
Major Stafford thought about the underground container with a billion dollars in it. “My guess is that Teague didn’t have a beef with the financial sector.”
“So, political,” Honi commented. “Which means Washington.”
“But why would a vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank travel from New York, a city he may have considered to be safe, to Washington, the potential target of a nuclear weapon?”
“To warn the people in that city. That would make sense. Jacobson had a countdown watch. He knew Washington was going to be safe for how many days?”
“Thirty-five, at that time.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe you’re right. With Jacobson’s countdown watch, the watches on the two Chinese businessmen, Sylvia Cuthbert’s watch, and now General Teague’s watch, it just feels a lot bigger to me than it might look at this time. I’m beginning to think this is a worldwide operation. And with the connection between General Teague and a missing nuclear weapon, the whole thing has a very disturbing feel to it.”
“And what was Teague’s motive for betraying his country?” Honi asked.
“A billion dollars are a lot of reasons,” Stafford replied.
“True,” Jake said. “But only if you know you’re going to be alive long enough to spend it. Teague had a countdown watch. I’m thinking he knew a lot of people were going to die, and he didn’t want to be one of them.”
“What about the nuclear weapon?” Honi asked.
“Price of admission to the organization with the phoenix in the watch,” Jake said. “I think the money simply sealed the deal.”
“So what is this strange organization going to do with the nuclear weapon?”
Jake shrugged. “At this point, I have no idea.”
“Could be almost anything,” Stafford said. “The W79 is a big weapon, but it’s not that big. I mean, we have weapons here that are a thousand times larger. Why didn’t he steal one of those?”
“We’ve still got a lot to figure out,” Jake said.
“Meanwhile,” Honi interjected, “Agent Hunter and I have an interrogation to do back in Virginia.”
Jake and Honi took the FBI jet back to D.C. and caught up on some desperately needed sleep. They’d been up for the last 41 hours.
* * *
Sylvia Cuthbert again woke to the sounds from down the hall in the middle of the night. The man’s pleading varied but the torture continued unabated, every two hours, like clockwork. After three agonizing sessions, she was totally distraught. Pettigrew walked down the hall, wet as before, still ignoring her.
Half an hour later, he returned pushing a hospital gurney down the hall toward where the sounds had emanated. Ten minutes after that, he pushed the gurney back toward the front of the security office, but this time there was a large black bag on the top with a body inside.
Her stomach clenched, forcing her to bend forward in severe pain. She willed herself to lie back on the cot, trying to get the pain to subside. It seemed to take forever, but the pain finally left her just before the morning cell cleaning ritual commenced.
* * *
At 8:00 a.m. Jake and Honi entered the security offices at the NSA building. Jake saw the gurney with the body bag against the wall. He walked over and unzipped the bag.
“So where’d you get the manikin?”
Pettigrew grinned. “Cousin works at a department store in Alexandria.”
“Nice touch. Is she ready?”
“I think so. Where do you want her?”
“Let’s start in her cell. That way she has to physically make a choice. The interview room or going into the back with you.”
“So what, exactly, did you do to her,” Honi asked.
“I had Pettigrew play some tapes of people, who were being water boarded at Gitmo, from a room down the hall. She wouldn’t hear it clearly, but her imagination would fill in the blanks.
“People fall into two different classes. The majority, who live
with fear and other emotions, and those few who don’t experience such feelings. A psychopath’s primary emotion is either anger or a lust for power. Sometimes I can manipulate that, but mostly no one can. What we learned at Gitmo is that even water boarding won’t work on a pure psychopath. For ordinary people, like Sylvia, fear is your key. Her fear of pain and suffering is much more motivating than the pain itself would be. It’s not about what the body can stand, it’s about the mind.”
“And people like Giles?”
Jake grinned. “He cares. Love will over-ride fear if you give it half a chance.”
Pettigrew unlocked the cell door, let Jake and Honi in, closed and locked the door, and headed into the back room where he had played the tapes.
“This is how it works,” Jake said. He walked over and sat on the cot next to Sylvia, not touching, but intruding into her comfort zone. “We talk. As long as you keep providing me with truthful and useful information, we keep talking. When you don’t, I leave and Pettigrew takes you into the back room. Then we will talk again tomorrow. Same conditions. Only you will determine what happens to you. I have an established procedure, and you have a simple choice to make.
“Did you join the organization before you went to work for the NSA or after?”
She looked around the jail cell and glanced toward the hall where Pettigrew had gone.
“This is completely voluntary, Sylvia. Either we talk, or I leave. It’s up to you.”
She looked down and fidgeted with her fingernails. She took a deep breath and whispered, “After.”
“Please speak up, Sylvia, I need to hear you clearly. I want to avoid any misunderstandings. Don’t you?”
She nodded her head. “After,” she said louder.
“Does this organization have a name?”
“They refer to it as the Phoenix Organization.”
“Did they offer you money?”
She paused and looked at the floor. Finally she nodded.
“A lot of money?”
She waited as long as she dared. She shifted away from him on the cot. “Yes.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Sylvia, just keep talking with me.” Positive feedback, Jake reminded himself. Establish a connection, one person to another. Ask only questions to which she can answer ‘yes.’ The longer she says ‘yes,’ the harder it becomes for her mind to say ‘no.’