by Jon Land
He retrieved Dobbler’s pistol from the floor and held it in his free hand as they retreated out the shattered white doors and retraced their steps through the “We the People” exhibit. Liz recovered quickly and was walking almost on her own by the time they reached an emergency exit. She needed only minimal support to manage the flights of stairs down to the ground floor. Blaine quickly found a door leading back outside and tensed briefly before bursting out into the night on the Fourteenth Street side of the building.
“The van,” Liz remembered.
McCracken jammed the pistol into his belt. “Never mind. We’ll find another vehicle and—”
“Don’t move!” a voice blared from behind them, emerging from a nest of bushes. “Don’t turn around!”
Blaine and Liz froze.
“Drop the gun!”
Blaine lifted Dobbler’s pistol lightly from his belt and let it plop to the soft ground.
“Now turn around. Slowly. Both of you.”
They swung together, eyes widening at the sight of the figure holding an ancient Colt .44-caliber, single-action percussion revolver in his hand.
It couldn’t be!
Blaine recognized the figure’s thick handlebar mustache and deep-set brooding eyes from Liz’s description of the ghostlike specter who had watched them from the hillside, the same face he had seen later on a picture in the Central Reading Room of the National Archives.
It was Colonel William Henry Stratton!
THIRTY-FOUR
By late afternoon the lure of the bottle had beckoned Will Thatch from inside the cheap motel room. He sat wearing his t-shirt, the one suit he still owned laid neatly across the room’s single bed, the darkness broken only by the splotchy flashing of a neon sign missing half its bulbs.
God, he needed a drink.
He had returned to Huggins’ office and taken up residence behind his desk at his keyboard, Will’s files on Jack Tyrell’s former soldiers pulled from his mind instead of his memory wall. It was time to find out where the former soldiers of Midnight Run were and who among them Tyrell might already have contacted. Will had committed twenty-six names to memory long before, for which he was able to track down eighteen firm addresses. Of these an even dozen could not be found. They had quit their jobs suddenly according to their bosses; or abandoned their apartments according to their landlords; had their phones disconnected or simply weren’t around to answer.
They were disappearing, and it had started four weeks ago, right after the funeral that had cost four men their lives in a New Jersey cemetery.
Jack Tyrell was putting his Midnight Run crew back together, the most lunatic of the lunatic fringe, by Will’s reckoning. Those who had stewed in the underground or rotted away in prison for a while, along with a few others, who had managed to slide into normal lives they were ready to abandon in an instant. And that didn’t even account for the fugitives society—and Will—had long lost track of.
The list lay before Will on the motel room table, aglow every time the sign flashed. He buried his face in his hands, traced each wrinkle and furrow as if he were following a map. Sooner or later some authentic FBI agent would realize who they were dealing with here, but Jack Tyrell wasn’t a name that leaped to mind anymore. For now, the truth lay solely with Will Thatch, and he had no plans to disclose it just yet, not until he took a crack at picking up Tyrell’s trail by himself.
But how? He had nothing to go on, besides the cold certainty that Tyrell had a lot of catching up to do and had a plan to manage just that.
It had come to Will in the early hours of the evening. Huggins thought he was crazy when he laid it out.
“You want what?”
Will repeated himself authoritatively.
“Why don’t you just get it from your own people?”
“Because the information I want only goes back two days, to the massacre. Local authorities—highway patrols and state police especially—will have much more complete reports that won’t have reached Washington databases yet.”
“That’s gonna take some time,” Huggins sighed.
“I can wait,” Will had said.
The waiting would have been easier with a bottle. Will sat at the table long past sunset, imagining those first sips going hot down his throat, warming his insides. To still the trembling and the fear. Take hold of the memories and blur them a bit so the edges wouldn’t be sharp enough to cut.
One bottle would take care of things. Oh yeah, just fine.
Will gazed at the phone instead, thinking of all the times over the years he’d dialed up the family the booze had stolen from him. Never said a word. Just listened to the voice and then the click. Eventually the numbers got changed.
Occasionally, when Bob Snelling tracked them down again for him, Will would dial up the new numbers. Or take a rental car out to one of his grown-up kids’ homes, hoping to steal a look at his grandchildren. He never stayed long enough, though, seldom even stopped the car. Just cruised up and down the street a dozen or so times before driving off, hoping no one had seen him.
Maybe he should give Bob Snelling another call. Get the latest names and addresses, so he could tell his wife and kids what he was doing.
He had actually started to reach for the receiver, when the phone rang.
Detective Huggins hadn’t been happy about meeting Will Thatch in his office at such a late hour. To his credit, the detective had assembled on a single disk all the crime reports from a dozen states that had occurred over the past forty-eight hours since the massacre at the Akron, Ohio, police station.
Thatch sorted all the domestic-type and petty crimes first and deleted them. He was looking for the kind of crimes Jack Tyrell and his soldiers had been known for the last time they’d made their presence known: unexplained disappearances, missing persons reports, kidnappings.
In the end, Will was left with three reported incidents that fit Tyrell and his people to a T:
The family of four whose Winnebago had been used to smash through the Akron, Ohio, jail were found dumped off the road just outside Cleveland.
Two trucks carrying circus animals had been commandeered, the animals released and the drivers forced to walk through the outskirts of Pittsburgh in bare feet, chained to each other.
A pair of girls driving back to college from spring break had been reported missing in central Pennsylvania. Girls meeting that description had last been seen yesterday struggling to change a tire on their GMC Jimmy. The Jimmy was missing too.
Three incidents that were right chronologically as well as geographically, occurring over a twenty-four-hour period. Will imagined Jack Tyrell heading southeast from Ohio. Continuing the same line in his mind, he found no other police reports that fit Tyrell’s style at all. So with any luck at all, he hadn’t left central Pennsylvania yet.
And with a little more, Tyrell would still be there when Will Thatch arrived.
THIRTY-FIVE
“I said don’t move or I’ll kill you right here! Stop you from telling the world!”
“Telling the world what?” Blaine asked the man who was the exact image of William Henry Stratton.
“The gold! You’re bringing it all back, doing everything you can to destroy my family name!”
“Who are you?” Liz demanded.
“I won’t let you,” the man said, instead of responding. “I’ve worked too hard to bury the past to let anyone dig it up now!”
“The traps!” Blaine realized. “The barbed wire under the lake—it was you who planted it!”
“And it worked! For years it kept everyone from pulling up the treasure! … Until you showed up.”
“You wasted your time: there’s no treasure under that lake.”
“Bullshit! It’s there, and if someone finds it—”
“They’re not going to find it, because William Henry Stratton and his convoy got away,” Blaine said, as much to Liz as to the stranger.
“No! He was never heard from again! He stole the gold a
nd died on that farm!”
“He didn’t steal the gold at all,” Blaine insisted, “and I can prove it.”
“You, drive!” Stratton’s replica ordered Liz when they reached the corner of Fourteenth Street and Constitution Avenue, where his car was parked. Then he gestured for Blaine to join him in the back seat, his old Colt .44 still aimed dead-on.
Liz waited for both doors to close behind her before starting the engine and shifting into gear. She pulled out into the street and then jammed on the brake in the same instant Blaine’s right hand knocked the pistol aside. The Colt roared and a flash illuminated the interior. The window behind the stranger exploded as Blaine cracked his free hand into the man’s face, catching him in the nose. Before the man could respond, Blaine snatched the revolver from his grasp.
The man’s watering eyes regarded it fearfully.
“All right,” McCracken said, dropping the Colt into the front seat next to Liz. “Who are you?”
The man was holding his nose, his fingers red with blood. “Farley Stratton,” he said in a nasal tone. “The colonel’s great-great-grandson.”
“Okay, Farley, what would you say if I told you I could clear the colonel’s name?”
The man pulled his hands from his nose and let the blood drop freely. “That you’re crazy. My family has lived with the disgrace of Stratton’s Folly for a hundred and thirty-five years. The legend nearly destroyed us, but so long as it stayed a legend we could at least live in peace.”
“That’s why you booby-trapped the lake,” Liz said from the driver’s seat.
“Yes! Where the gold ended up after he stole it.”
“Wrong,” said McCracken. “Everything William Henry Stratton did complied with the orders of President Lincoln himself.”
“Lincoln ordered him to steal the gold?”
“No. Lincoln gave him the gold as a settlement he was supposed to deliver to representatives from the South.”
“What kind of settlement?” Liz asked before Stratton had a chance to.
“The kind you make when you’re suing for peace, ready to accede to your enemy’s demands.”
“Lincoln was surrendering?” Stratton asked incredulously.
“He ordered a quarter-million gold coins minted in secret just days after a meeting with representatives of the Northern industrialists who were actually running the war effort. Ten-dollar gold pieces missing the ‘United States of America’ on their tail because they had been minted for the Confederacy. As a payoff, since the gold in the Northern treasury must not have been enough. That gold was loaded in its own strong boxes in the heavy load wagons, along with the four keg chests containing the freshly minted coins.” Blaine tightened his gaze, looking at Liz briefly before turning back toward Stratton. “Your great-great-grandfather was sent to deliver the gold and the coins, along with the official surrender documents, to representatives of the South.”
“What’s the difference? He still stole it!”
“No, he didn’t. Stratton’s Folly was all a ruse, a plot hatched by Lincoln to get the Northern business leaders off his back. Your ancestor was never supposed to make that rendezvous in the South at all. His orders were to make it seem like he had stolen the treasure, so Lincoln would have no choice but to continue the war effort. Those orders included murdering the civilian detachment that was bringing along the accession papers.”
Farley Stratton’s mouth had dropped in shock. He was trembling slightly. “Prove it.”
“Help me.”
“How?”
“The route he was supposed to take. You must know something.”
“It doesn’t matter. He never got there. He never left that farm.”
“He did, I tell you. The convoy—and the treasure—were lost somewhere else.”
Stratton blinked his eyes rapidly. “But I don’t know where he could have gone! The storm would have made him change his route, deviate from the original plans.”
“Give me a ballpark destination.”
“Pennsylvania,” Farley Stratton said, after a pause. “He planned on heading north through Pennsylvania. It was in a letter he wrote. Just that much.”
“Good.”
“What now?”
“Get out.”
“But—”
“Do as I say!” Blaine ordered, reaching across Stratton to throw open the door.
Stratton slipped out reluctantly, still holding his nose.
“If I’m right,” Blaine told him, “there’ll be proof, and I’ll bring it to you.”
“How will you find—”
“Don’t worry.” Blaine swung back toward Liz. “Go!”
She screeched away from the curb. “Where we going?”
“To pick up my friend Johnny. Then to have a talk with the last man your father saw before he disappeared.”
4
DEVIL’S BREW
THIRTY-SIX
“We’d like you to move away from the window, sir,” one of his bodyguards told Maxwell Rentz as he surveyed the view of Paradise Village from his penthouse apartment.
But Rentz had more important things on his mind than worrying about his safety.
“Still nothing from Dobbler?” he asked a second bodyguard, trying to hide his concern when the man shook his head.
Rentz had come to think of the three bodyguards Dobbler had hired to supplement his own security force as the Three Bears. He had secured himself with them in the high-tech confines of Paradise Village. Until he could make more permanent arrangements tomorrow, holing up here was the best he could come up with. He even began to think he might be writing the best commercial for the facility yet: based on what he had learned in the past day, if these walls could keep Blaine McCracken out, then maybe there was hope for him to revitalize the project. The irony was striking. Even his father would have approved of his grit. Refusing to give up in the face of utter failure.
It all came down to how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted. After Dobbler finished with McCracken, the plan was for him to “borrow” Liz Halprin’s son for as long as it took the woman to come to her senses. Now Rentz was beginning to fear that it was McCracken who had finished Dobbler, in which case he had come to the right place to get through the night.
Rentz had managed to get twenty men to Paradise Village, a combination of the private force that patrolled the facility and the company that handled security for his office building. Additionally, all gates had been sealed, Paradise Village closed off behind the ten-foot brick-andcobblestone wall that enclosed it. Electronic surveillance kept a constant watch on every inch of space, alerted by any stray movement. Armed patrols crisscrossed the streets in Jeeps, their firepower increased for the night.
Rentz had chosen for himself and the Three Bears an eighth-floor, fully furnished model penthouse where he could look out over half the community. The steel-core doors were outfitted with cobalt locks programmed for keypad entry only. The windows could withstand anything up to a shotgun shell and, with the hurricane shutters in place, a forty-millimeter grenade.
Since this had always been intended as his personal residence, the king living amongst his people, the penthouse was also equipped with a miniature version of the main security deck: a converted closet containing a built-in console featuring three closed-circuit monitor screens that provided a rotating view of the grounds. Rentz had stationed one of the Bears behind the console to be his eyes as the long evening wound down.
In spite of the other Bear’s warning, he remained by the window, gazing out over his domain, refusing to concede anything within its confines.
Come and get me, he urged McCracken, as he stared out into the night. Just try it … .
Bear Number One swung from behind the monitoring station. “Security reports a couple of vagrants just outside the main entrance.”
Rentz headed over. “Bring it up on-screen.”
The middle screen of the three built into the console showed the vagrants seated against the hi
gh wall, their clothes tattered and stiff with soil.
“Get them out of here. Last thing we need tonight is distractions.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And after you’ve done that, run another status check. Anything seems out of place, no matter how small, I want to know about it.”
Rentz moved back to the window, reviewing his options if Dobbler had been removed from the picture for good. The Three Bears were good men, certainly capable enough to handle the simple kidnapping of a child. But Rentz questioned if they were good enough to deal with McCracken.
“Mr. Rentz!” Bear Number One called a few minutes later. “There’s a problem in sector one.”
“What is it?” Rentz asked, hustling over.
“An intrusion of some kind, but I’ve got nothing on my screen.”
“Small animals set the motion sensors off sometimes. That’s probably it.”
The man touched a hand to his headpiece. “Wait a minute—we got a report of a man down.”
“Where?”
“Same sector.”
“Find it, goddamn it!”
Rentz grabbed a second headset and fitted it over his ears, watching tensely as Bear Number One searched through the camera views of sector one without success.
“A mobile patrol is responding.”
“I can hear for myself!” Rentz snapped at him.
On screen number three, a Jeep with two men inside streaked toward the scene. Rentz followed the Jeep’s progress on screen number two, but then it vanished from sight.
“Patrol Two approaching coordinates,” Rentz heard in his headset. “Patrol One, do you copy?”
Silence.
“Patrol One, do you copy?”
Rentz and the Bear behind the console looked blankly at each other.
“Er, Central, I’m having trouble raising Patrol One.”
“We had Patrol One on visual just a few minutes ago,” the central monitor in Paradise Village’s security headquarters told Patrol Two.
“Where?”
“Returning from main entrance.”