At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  “Forget the Toyota Celica,” Jamison announced, as though reciting information he’d practiced and memorized. “We just got a call from Phoenix P.D. Seems that two of their cops let the Donovans go a couple of hours ago, half a block from the school.”

  Irene’s jaw dropped, and she closed her eyes. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  Jamison shrugged. “I wish I was. The cops involved never saw Jake, and no one had bothered to fax the picture of Carolyn. Guess everybody was in a hurry.”

  “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Is there anything-a single detail, somewhere-that Sherwood and his gang haven’t screwed up today?”

  Paul suppressed a smile and stayed focused on Jamison’s report. “What about the Celica?” he prodded.

  “Well, the folks stopped by Phoenix P.D. were in a white van,” Jamison explained. “We’ve got a plate number. North Carolina, registered in the name of Durflinger.”

  “And let me guess,” Irene growled, her eyes still closed. “The Durflingers are dead, right?”

  Jamison looked deflated, his thunder stolen. “How did you know?”

  “Because that’s how you get a new name,” Paul said, his voice heavy with disdain. It was the oldest trick in the book.

  “I don’t believe this,” Irene moaned. “Well, put it out on the Net, pronto. Every state east of the Mississippi.”

  “Sherwood’s already done that,” Jamison offered.

  Irene glared. “Yeah, well, Sherwood’s done a lot today. Let’s just back him up, okay?”

  Jamison nodded but didn’t move.

  Paul’s patience evaporated all at once. “Mike, if you’ve got more, spit it out.”

  Jamison cleared his throat and took a moment to search his memory. He seemed anxious to get it all right this time. “Apparently, some guy at a bank outside of town saw the news about the Donovans on TV. He just telephoned to tell Phoenix P.D. that he saw Carolyn Donovan in the bank this morning.”

  “Ah, the bank again…” Irene was growing tired of old news.

  “The guy said she needed to get into a safe-deposit box,” Jamison concluded.

  “And?” Jesus Christ, it was like pulling teeth getting this guy to talk!

  Jamison shrugged. “And he opened it for her.”

  “No shit, Mike,” Boersky snapped. “What did she get out of the box?”

  Agent Jamison looked a little panicky, like he’d forgotten to do something. “I don’t know. The guy can’t say for sure. He said that she entered the little room empty-handed and came out with a paper bag full of stuff. No one saw what she put into it.”

  Irene and Paul exchanged glances. “Cash?” she wondered.

  Paul nodded. “That would be my guess.”

  Irene dismissed Jamison by turning away from him. “You said you’ve got somebody down there already?”

  “Either there or on the way.”

  Irene waited until Jamison was gone before she talked about him. “He’s totally hopeless, isn’t he?”

  Paul nodded and sucked on a cheek. “Yep, and he’s allowed to carry a firearm in public. Makes you wonder sometimes, doesn’t it?” He stood. “Great at gathering information, he just can’t get out of his own way. Should have been a technician instead of an agent.”

  Irene’s mind had already moved on to other things. “And you, Agent Boersky,” she said, pointing. “I want you to get on the horn with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and get me a court order to get into that safe-deposit box.”

  Paul looked at her like she was nuts. “Why? You think she went there to put something in?”

  “Actually, no,” she said with a frown, intentionally putting him back on edge. “I think the box is empty. Now I want you to prove it for me.” She arose from her chair and headed for the door. “Besides, you look like you need something to do.”

  Travis sat in a folding lawn chair between the rows of shelves in the back of the van. They drove on in silence for a long time, Travis convinced that his parents had reneged on their deal to clue him in on what was going on. As the sun dipped below the mountain ridges ahead, he marveled at the different shades of orange and red and blue streaking the sky. The ridges looked like they were on fire; bright lights against a dark background. With the darkness, though, came a whole new world of fear.

  He’d never seen his folks like this, so tense. He’d probably spent a million hours over the years watching them from this angle as they drove all over the place, but tonight they looked different, and the transition scared him. His dad’s jaw was set sort of funny, and the muscles in front of his ears worked all the time. And there was the new look in his eyes-same as the one when the cop came up to the window. And his mom! Jeeze, she looked ready to explode.

  These long silences were frightening, too; second only to those intense, whispered conversations they’d have between themselves, where Travis could only catch bits and pieces. If there was anything good to say, they’d have said it by now.

  Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer. “Hey, Dad?” His voice sounded uneasy; like he wasn’t sure whether to ask his question.

  “Yes, Travis?”

  “Would you really have shot that policeman?”

  “Travis, not now,” Carolyn snapped.

  Jake raised his hand. “No,” he said. “I think we need to discuss this.”

  “But Jake…” There was a pleading tone in Carolyn’s voice.

  “Carolyn, he’s got to know. I wish he didn’t, but now he has to.”

  Instantly, Travis was sorry he’d asked. Out of nowhere, he remembered a story that Jay Kowalski had told him about the day Mr. Kowalski announced to the family that he had cancer. It was a lot like this, but without the car and the guns. Jay said that his mom and dad fought for a long time about whether the kids should be told, and finally, when his father prevailed in the argument and told them everything, Jay’s life was never the same. His dad was dead within a year. Travis didn’t want his dad to die.

  Jake began with a deep breath, the way he always did when he was about to Teach a Lesson. “Trav, there are things about your mom and me that you need to know…”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Newark, Arkansas. August 1983

  Building 234 lay nestled between Buildings 1719 and 2680, near the center of what used to be the Ulysses S. Grant Army Ammunition Plant. At one time, the numbering system must have meant something to someone, but now the signs were just random markings on countless low-rise red brick buildings. If the exterior of Building 234 was boring, then the interior was downright ugly. The glare of the fluorescent lighting, reflected off baby-shit brown walls, cast a yellow tint, making everyone inside look chronically ill.

  As usual, Jake and Carolyn were running late, although this time it truly wasn’t their fault. Not that having an excuse would buy them any sympathy. Today was opening day for the biggest job in Enviro-Kleen’s history, and everything had to go perfectly. As they dashed down the hallway toward the packed conference room, Jake tried not to think about the trouble they might be in. Worrying was Carolyn’s job, anyway.

  “Hey, it’s the newlyweds!” Glenn Parker announced gleefully as the Donovans tried to sneak in. Clearly, they’d yet to get to the serious portion of the meeting. “I was just telling everyone what a superman you were last night, Jakester. Those thin walls are better than a porno flick, man.”

  Carolyn blushed crimson as the room erupted in laughter and applause. Jake grinned wide and bowed. “I’ll leave the curtain open for you tonight, buddy. Pictures to go with the sound.”

  With her jet-black hair, huge brown eyes, and pleasing shape, Carolyn was the only female on a crew of thirty-seven horny, single young men. That she undoubtedly played a major role in their fantasies as they sought relief alone in the darkness of their motel rooms didn’t bother her a bit. Truth be known, it was kind of a turn-on.

  “Don’t have any trouble walking this morning, do you, Carolyn?” Parker persisted, drawing another big laugh.

  “If you can
still use your hand, then I can still walk.” That one brought the house down.

  Nick Thomas, site safety officer on the Newark project, and the man in charge of this last meeting before the operation went hot, struggled to regain control of the room. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, pressing the air with his palms. “Could we get back on topic, please? Jake, Carolyn, take a seat. Where’s Tony Bernard?”

  The folding metal seats in the conference room appeared to predate the building itself, and the two remaining at the back of the room were the worst of the lot. Guaranteed butt-busters. Jake tried sitting for about two seconds, then opted to stand.

  “Tony’s sick,” he announced, rubbing the place on his lower back where the chair had dug in. “That’s why we’re late. We were trying to roust him out of his room, but he’s heaving his guts out. Trust me, you don’t want him here.”

  The concern on Nick’s face was immediate and obvious. They’d rehearsed this operation a hundred times and had calculated the work-rest cycles based on a full contingent of entry workers. He turned to Sean Foley, the project manager, who’d been scowling from the corner behind Nick.

  “We go, anyway,” Foley grunted. An MBA marketing type, the boss had little time for the entry workers’ cowboy mentality to begin with. He’d be damned if he was going to pull the plug on a multimillion-dollar contract just because somebody got sick without permission. The room fell silent.

  Nick took the cue as his opportunity to continue. He flipped on the overhead projector, and the pull-down screen was filled with a line drawing labeled “Magazine B-2740.”

  “Okay, troops, this is our home for the next twenty-eight weeks. Assuming that this place is identical to its five hundred brothers and sisters here at the Newark Mass Destruction Emporium, we’ve got interior dimensions of one hundred feet across and seventy-five feet deep.” As he spoke, he moved a rubber-tipped pointer to highlight items of interest on the screen. “These little squares you see on the drawing are the reinforced concrete pillars. And in case I’m going too fast for the Aggies in the crowd, pillars are things that hold the roof up.”

  A chorus of whoops arose from the crowd as two Texas A amp;M graduates extended birds high into the air. A graduate of Oklahoma State, Nick never missed an opportunity to pull their chain. As the laughter died down, he placed a color photograph on the machine.

  “As you can see here, the place is built like a bunker: an igloo design with reinforced concrete all around and five feet of earth piled on the top and sides. God only knows how much dirt there is in the back. A lot. There’s only one way in or out of this place, folks, and that’s through these blast doors in the front.”

  None of this information was new to anyone in the room, and Nick knew it. Every detail of the Newark cleanup had been rehearsed in an identical magazine, far away from the exclusion zone. But this was show time, and a person couldn’t be too prepared. Of the thirty-odd people gathered in the conference room, only eighteen would even leave the command center once the operation started; and of them, only six would actually enter the magazine. No one knew for sure what they would find, but by all indications, it was going to be ugly.

  At one time or another, Magazine B-2740 had housed everything from high explosives to the full spectrum of chemical warfare agents. As for the present, speculation abounded, but all anyone knew for sure was that the place “had a lot of shit in it” (the words of the EPA inspector who saw a container of mustard gas near the entrance a year ago and panicked). Being more specific was Enviro-Kleen’s job.

  The worst concerns for everyone were the nerve agents VX and GB, both of which they expected to find in large quantity. Toxic at an exposure of 1/100,000 of one part per million, the stuff scared the hell out of Jake. Translated to layman’s terms-Aggie terms, according to Nick-that ridiculously low number was the equivalent of one drop of nerve agent dissolved in the total quantity of air breathed by an average adult over a twenty-seven-year period.

  “Just remember,” Nick concluded, “a little dab’ll do ya.” Suddenly, his demeanor switched from safety guy to professor. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and pointed at Adam Pomeroy, the newest addition to the Enviro-Kleen team. “Mr. Pomeroy!”

  Adam’s head jerked up from the doodles he’d been drawing on his spiral notebook. At twenty-three, he looked sixteen and had already been voted most likely to contract a venereal disease. “Huh?”

  “Tell me the mechanism of injury for VX agent, please.”

  Adam looked like he was back in school, raking the ceiling with his eyes as he searched for the answer. When he got it, he smiled. “It’s a cholinesterase inhibitor,” he said proudly.

  “And what does that mean?”

  The smile went out like a snuffed candle. “Um…”

  “Mr. Parker.”

  Glenn smiled. He’d been in this business for eight years now and rarely got caught short. “It means that impulses can’t pass from one nerve cell to the other.”

  “Excellent. Jake, what do you do in the event of an exposure?”

  Jake rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Nick.”

  Carolyn nudged him with her elbow. “ You come on, Jake,” she said harshly. “This is serious stuff.”

  A rumbling “Ooo” passed through the crowd.

  “You swell up and die,” Jake answered finally.

  “ Bzz,” Nick said, mimicking a game show host. “Wrong. Thanks for playing, though. Carolyn?”

  “Atropine, self-injected in the thigh.” Precaution being her middle name, she’d actually practiced the procedure, using sterile saline. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as she’d feared.

  “Very good. Mustard gas. What happens when you’re exposed to that?” This one was for anyone to answer. Jake raised his hand. “Jake.”

  “You swell up and die.”

  “Yes! That one you got right.”

  There was more laughter, but with a nervous edge to it; like everyone knew that show time had arrived. Nick turned serious again. “Please be careful, people.”

  Magazine B-2740 rose out of the Arkansas forest like some ancient native shrine, its smooth, reinforced concrete face rising twenty feet over the crumbled access road. As he struggled into his suit, just at the line where the support zone met the decontamination zone, Jake couldn’t help but wonder what future archaeologists would think of this place a thousand years from now. What conclusions would they draw from the giant cave dwellers who called this neighborhood their home?

  Dressing for a Level A entry like this required a group effort. The air packs came first, worn on top of two layers of clothing: the shorts and T-shirts they wore to work, under the obligatory royal-blue Enviro-Kleen uniform. Latex inner gloves came next. The final step was the entry suit itself, with its built-in five-ply gloves and booties. Leather work gloves finished off the ensemble, along with calf-high neoprene work boots, size huge, with splash deflectors to keep scary shit from getting inside and rotting either the suit or its occupant.

  With his own air pack in place now, Jake fitted the holster for his portable radio around his waist and cinched it tight, threading the hands-free microphone through the straps of his air pack and into his right ear. After he clipped the customized transmit button to the right-hand shoulder strap, he mashed the mushroom-shaped button with his gloved palm. He looked like a Roman legionnaire saluting his emperor.

  “Entry One to Ops. You there?”

  “I got you, Entry One.”

  Jake shot his hand down to the volume control, cringing as Drew Price’s voice pierced his brain.

  “A bit loud there, honey?” Carolyn laughed on the air.

  Jake stuck his tongue out at her. “Hey, Ops, give me a short test count, will you?”

  He could hear the smile in Drew’s voice as he replied, “Test for Jake. One, two, three, four, five. Five, four, three, two, one. That okay?”

  Jake touched his chest again. “Peachy. Thanks.”

  While the rest of the teams went through their radi
o check protocols, Jake and Carolyn fitted their masks to their faces and tightened the straps.

  “You look like an anteater,” Carolyn’s voice said in his earpiece.

  “Well, we can’t all be as beautiful as you, sweetheart,” he replied.

  “Can it, guys.” Foley was on the air now. Mr. Personality. “From this point on, it’s all business, understand?”

  “Got it,” Carolyn said sheepishly.

  Jake flipped him off-well out of sight, of course.

  The Donovans and their fellow moon-suiters moved to the final dressing stage, where secondary decon personnel stood waiting to seal them into their “protective ensembles.” They called themselves the Silverados, thanks to the aluminized fire-resistant outer layers of their suits, which had been specially manufactured for this job. According to theory, the outer layer would buy the owner of the suit an extra ten to fifteen seconds in the event of a fire. Jake thought it was hysterical. They were dealing with explosives, for God’s sake. If it burns, you die. Any questions?

  The Silverados stood with their arms extended out to their sides, and their feet stuffed into their booties, as the decon toads helped them wriggle into their heavy armor, guiding their arms and hands into their corresponding holes.

  Jake felt a quick rush of panic as the big hood was lifted over his head and the vaporproof zipper was pulled closed. It had happened to him before, and just like last time, he was able to swallow the feeling before it became a problem.

  A body bag with a window.

  His brain launched a shiver. Once zipped inside, there was no escape from that suit without help; the zipper was simply not accessible. Always a borderline claustrophobic, he’d had nightmares about being stranded inside as he sucked his air pack empty, then slowly suffocated. The thought was absurd, but he nonetheless kept a six-inch Buck knife in the pocket of his coveralls.

  Literally sealed off from the outside world now, Jake could hear nothing but the sound of his own breathing: an eerie hiss that sounded remarkably like Darth Vader. He turned to survey the status of the rest of his team and caught a glimpse of his own reflection on the suit’s visor. Just his eyes, actually, and they looked huge. Last came the syringes of atropine-the only known antidote for what they might find. These were duct-taped to the outside of their suits, on the opposite shoulder from each Silverado’s dominant hand.