by Jon Jackson
Tucker shook his head. “Maybe it’s a waste of time. Still, you never know. There might be a sleeper among them.”
“I don’t think so,” Luck said. “I’m positive there isn’t a guy in that crew who even knows anyone who would dream of tossing a cherry bomb into a Parks and Recreation outhouse. Besides, we know who did the bombing, and it wasn’t any Arabs or militia groups, and it damn sure wasn’t some pissant Flag and Farm outfit. I liked that gag about the Holy American Flag, though.”
“Who do you think did it?” Tucker asked.
“Echeverria.”
Tucker smiled. “Could be.”
Luck frowned. “Why, you all but told me so yourself.”
“That’s what I thought yesterday,” Tucker said. “Maybe I still do, but I’m not positive. I’m keeping an open mind.”
“All right, then,” Luck said, “who the hell else is there?”
“I haven’t eliminated anybody,” Tucker said. “But there’s also the Mafia. And there are other, rival drug organizations, such as the one we almost got in Kosovo—Zivkovic’s group. They’re capable of it. They’d stick it on anyone. They seem to be interested in pushing aside Echeverria. You notice they don’t claim credit, by the way.”
He mentioned some other possibilities, even suggesting some left-wing groups, some neocommunists. He thought that would get a laugh from Luck, but he realized now that the man was a little preoccupied. He had noticed it earlier, in fact, but he’d attributed it to the stress of getting this whole meeting up, cooking, acting the host.
“So what’s bothering you?” he asked finally.
Luck grimaced. “I’ve been wondering whether to tell you,” he said. “I’ve got some trouble.”
“Uh-oh. One of your ‘patriots’ got a little too exuberant? He did throw a cherry bomb into a park toilet. Or . . . don’t say it: one of them was involved in the bombing!”
Luck shook his head gloomily. “I wish it were that simple. I’d shoot the idiot myself. No, the trouble is, your little project has gone awry. I’ve got Mulheisen locked up in the barn.”
“Mulheisen!” Tucker sat up. “Tell me all about it.”
Luck explained what had happened. “But now what do we do?”
Tucker thought for a minute. He didn’t seem all that concerned, oddly enough. But at last he said, “You’ll have to figure out some way for him to escape.”
It was Luck’s turn to be shocked. “We can’t do that! He’ll blow the whistle! We’ll be crawling with cops. This whole plan, this whole setup that we’ve worked at so hard, it’ll be blown. And we could end up in prison!”
“Don’t panic,” Tucker said. “I think I can handle it. He’ll have to come to me. He won’t go running to the cops. Besides, I am the cops. No, he’ll come to me. But, man, that was a close thing. What if he’d seen me!”
It took more discussion, of course, but soon enough Tucker was able to calm Luck down. It could be worked out. In fact, Tucker thought it might make his work easier, that it would be a piece of cake now to recruit Mulheisen.
Luck wasn’t so sure. He had a feeling, he said, that
Mulheisen wasn’t the kind of guy who would ever buy into the Lucani.
“Oh, not the Lucani,” Tucker said, “but into my new and top-secret ‘research group.’”
“You mean the Homeland Security thing,” Luck said.
“Well, that, of course. But you see, Imp, the Lucani are not the only group of its type that I envision.”
Luck was interested. Tucker explained that while he’d had some success with the Lucani, the concept needed to be expanded, he felt. There could be several such groups, with different constituencies. The Lucani had been started by disaffected agents, upset with the way the government had often thwarted their investigations for political and bureaucratic reasons. Tucker had gotten interested in the concept, generally. Why shouldn’t there be a whole range of such organizations, loose affiliations of like-minded people, designed to further the cause of justice and even, yes, patriotism? He wasn’t thinking of radical groups like Luck’s, he said.
“Remember,” he said, “I was the one who got you going on this. I thought, why shouldn’t we have our own patriot group? We could channel some of that anger and vitality and also get some of these guys under observation and control. It’s a good plan. But I’m thinking there could be more such groups, with a broad variety of interests and functions. Homeland Security is the government. It’s political. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I could be wrong, but I don’t have much confidence in it. What I was thinking was a quiet, shadow Homeland Security.”
Luck was not sure he saw how that would work, especially with a man like Mulheisen.
“A guy like Mulheisen,” Tucker said. “I don’t know . . . he doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about working for the feds. Maybe he’s skeptical, like me. He might be interested in a more secret organization, a small, elite group. He doesn’t have to know that it doesn’t have official status, or even recognition. I’ll call it a task force. It’s so secret the government can’t even acknowledge it. He won’t be paid through regular channels, won’t have to be vetted, won’t have to even talk to federal authorities. That might appeal to him. I’ll see.”
“But, in fact, the feds won’t know anything about it,” Luck said. He smiled and nodded. “It’ll be interesting to see if he goes for it.”
“But first,” Tucker said, “we’ve got to ‘escape’ him. So let’s put our heads together, Imp, and figure it out. What have you done so far?”
Luck explained about moving Mulheisen’s vehicle back to the motel.
“What were you thinking?” Tucker said, shaking his head. “Don’t tell me. You were thinking you might have to ‘disappear’ him. No, no, Imp. You’ve got to put those kind of ideas out of your mind. You’re dealing with Mulheisen. This guy is some kind of legend, you know. You can’t imagine how they talk about him in the department, in Detroit. They’d never stop looking for him. No, we’ll have to get that car back from the motel. Leave it where it was.”
They were working on that and their subsequent plan when the news was brought to them by Earl that Mulheisen had, in fact, already escaped.
“Oh, hell,” Tucker said. “All right. Everybody calm down. Let’s not get people overreacting. Have you got radio contact with all your men? Good. Keep them hunting for now, but alert them not to do anything stupid if they find him. No shooting, no rough stuff. In a way, this doesn’t change anything. We were going to spring him anyway.”
Luck immediately dispatched one of the two men who had brought the news. “Get on it, Earl. Make sure these guys don’t get trigger happy.”
Tucker turned to the remaining man, Darryl. “How long has he been gone? Not more than a half hour? Okay, it may still be all right.” He turned to Luck. “Is there any reason to believe that he’s aware that I’m here? No? Good. It’s important that he doesn’t know I’m here. That will blow everything. The second thing, we’ve got to make contact with him before he calls in the authorities. As for the car, well, at least it’ll take him some time to get to town. Find out if he’s been there. Most of all, find out where he is. How can I get out of here without him seeing me?”
Luck explained about the deputy at the motel.
“Pull him out of there, right away,” Tucker said. He got up and started to pace, then realized that the windows were unguarded. “Don’t you have curtains?” he snapped. “Let me think. How can I get out of here? Man, this is a mess.”
Within a few moments, he said, “All right. I am here. That’s the point. And the reason I’m here is . . . I heard you had picked Mulheisen up. I’m here to get him out and explain the situation. So we need to find him so I can explain. If he has already called somebody, that’s too bad, but it can be worked out. I hope. But it’ll be a lot simpler if I can find him and talk to him. It’s kind of pushing things, but that’s the way of it.”
Luck said he’d go talk to the men to make sure
they understood what had to be done.
“Good,” Tucker said. “I’ve got to make some phone calls.”
Outside, Luck called his men together. The first thing, he warned them, was to make sure they didn’t say anything about Hook in the Colonel’s presence. “Tell him to keep out of sight, in the bunker. I’ve got a job for him later.” He went back inside.
Tucker was on the phone to his task force office in Detroit. He explained to the duty man there that he was expecting a call from Mulheisen, or possibly from some police authority regarding Mulheisen. “The man has gotten himself into some kind of jam,” he said. “I learned about it from other sources. Alert the following agents.” He rattled off a list. “Have them contact me as soon as they hear anything about this.” He gave his personal cell phone number. “And have Agent Schwind call me immediately.”
When that was accomplished he said to Luck, “Okay, that ought to do it. Maybe we can head this thing off.”
A few moments later, Schwind called. She was one of Tucker’s most reliable associates, a fellow member of the Lucani. “Ah, Dinah,” he said. “I’m glad you’re available. Thanks for responding so quickly. Listen, this guy Mulheisen, you remember him? Good. He’s stumbled into a bit of a mess. I’m hoping it can be ironed out without any trouble. The thing is, I’m up here talking to Luck. I should have discussed this with you beforehand, but the opportunity didn’t come up. Well, Luck is cooperating with us on this investigation. That’s right. The trouble is . . .”
He went on to explain about Mulheisen’s accidental stumbling into the situation, his unfortunate detention, then escape. She caught the drift of the situation immediately, he was pleased to note. He went on to explain the importance of keeping this situation quiet. She should use whatever means she had to intercept any official reaction, if Mulheisen should contact police authorities. “You can use the Homeland Security authority to override their objections,” he said. “And keep me posted. I’ll try to locate him and iron all this out. I don’t think it’s a big issue, but I don’t want it to go any further. Understand?”
He clicked off. “All right,” he said to Luck, “I think we’ve got it in hand, for now. Let’s go see if we can find him.”
“You want me to come?” Luck said.
“Why not? The fat’s in the fire. We can deal with it.”
Twenty minutes later they were in Queensleap. The deputy was gone, but Mulheisen’s car was still there. “Well, what are we waiting for?” Tucker said. “Let’s go in.”
It took them only a minute to realize that Mulheisen had been there and gone.
Tucker stood in the room. He noticed, of course, that the bathroom window was wide open. He stood on the edge of the bathtub and peered out into the alley. The little screen had been removed and was lying on the ground. He tried to imagine Mulheisen clambering through this window, then back out, while the deputy stood watch in the parking lot.
“I smell a rat,” he said to Luck. He clambered down.
“Did you talk to the guard in the barn?” he asked.
Luck had. The assumption was that Mulheisen had somehow managed to open the door. It had been dark. All the guard could remember was being “sucker punched,” then he’d been dragged into the room and trussed up.
“I think Mulheisen had help,” Tucker said. “He didn’t get out by himself. That changes things.”
He paced around the room, thinking. “The guy I need is Joe Service.”
“The mob guy you told me to mention on the Web site?”
Tucker nodded. “Ex-mob,” Tucker said. “He’s a contract guy, been doing a little work for us. Trouble is, he’s got some kind of wild hair up his ass. He’s not being cooperative lately. That’s why I wanted you to put his name out there, put a little pressure on him.” He shrugged. “It’s just a little gamesmanship. It looks like it didn’t work. But he’s just the guy to help us with this.”
Luck looked resentful. “It might help if you didn’t keep everything so close to your vest. Maybe he’s the guy who sprang Mulheisen.”
“Some things have to be kept close,” Tucker said. “Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. Need to know. But one thing you can count on, Joe Service isn’t ever going to be helping Mulheisen. These guys go back a long way, to mob days. Mulheisen almost had him in the slammer once or twice. Oh, I had some notion, I guess, that they both might work for me, in a way, but not together, you see. No, that wouldn’t work. These old mob guys, they don’t forget. You and me, we go back a long way too, Imp, but we always worked on the same side. It’d be like us working for Charlie.”
Luck nodded. “That’s something that’d never happen.”
Tucker looked at him. “You yanked me out of that crash zone, Imp. I’ll never forget that.”
Luck laughed. “I guess not. Those VC were coming up the hill when I spotted you and dropped the ladder.”
“The wildest ride of my life,” Tucker said. They both laughed, recalling the chopper ride through the Vietnam night, with Tucker clinging to the rope ladder, rifle shots whizzing through the tree-tops. A hair-rasing escape, it created a bond that would never break.
“What do we do now?” Luck said.
“Now we’ve got a manhunt. I’ll get some of my people up here. I’m wondering if we can get some local cop help, scour the motels and hotels, see if we can’t locate Mulheisen. He must be with his pal, whoever it is. They could be halfway to Detroit by now, but somehow I don’t think so. Mulheisen had some reason to be out there, snooping around. What do you suppose it was?”
Luck gave it some thought while they drove back to the house. Colonel Tucker was busy on the cell phone, talking to various agents, arranging for them to fly in to Traverse City.
“I think he was curious about the Hill,” Luck told Tucker when the phone was quiet for a moment or two.
“And what’s the Hill?” Tucker wanted to know.
“Well, that’s where the boys nabbed him. He was nosing around back there in the woods. It’s just a little . . . um, I guess you could call it a dump.”
“A dump?” Tucker eyed him shrewdly. “An ammo dump, I take it?”
At the gate, Luck got out to talk to the guard while Tucker waited in the truck.
“I’m taking the Colonel to the Hill,” he told Earl. “He has to see it. Call ahead and get Hook out of there. We won’t be long.”
Luck drove directly to the Hill. There was a door, a discreet metal one. Luck opened it. He flicked on the lights. It resembled a barracks, with the addition of its own kitchen, plus the usual bunks, some desks, and other apparatus like computers. It obviously doubled as a classroom, where Luck could conduct lectures, complete with a blackboard.
“Interesting,” Tucker said. He gestured toward a door in the back. “What’s back there?”
Luck showed him. There, in a largish room with slatted wooden floors, were piles of arms. RPGs, boxes of automatic rifles, ammo. Explosives of various kinds, from Plastique to cans of black powder. Boxes of grenades.
Tucker didn’t say anything. He looked around.
“Well,” Luck said defensively, “you gave me the money. I thought I should equip the guys as well as I could. It’s well ventilated, has good drainage. You don’t need heat, really, but I’ve got some generators for power.”
“Jesus, Imp, you took this pretty seriously,” Tucker said. He glanced back out into the barracks portion, nodded at the cots, the blankets, the cans marked with a red cross indicating medical gear. “You could fight a war. All you need is the army, eh?”
Luck didn’t say anything.
“I suppose the men are well trained, know how to use all this stuff?”
“Sure,” Luck said. “It’s what we do. You can’t just have them come over for cookouts and talk about what we’ll do when the big day comes.”
“The big day?”
“You know . . . invasion, whatever. Look, we’ve got lots of supplies, staples, got a well that provides twelve gallons a minute. We’
re pretty well prepared here. There’s filters, in case of a nuclear attack . . .”
“Imp . . . nuclear attack?”
“What?”
“There isn’t going to be an attack,” Tucker said. “Nuclear, or otherwise. Unless, you mean . . .” He let it hang.
“Our own government, you mean,” Imp finished. “Well, that could happen too, you know.”
“They’d take this place out with one bunker buster,” Tucker said, “on the first pass.”
“If they can see it,” Luck countered. “There’s pretty good camouflage, grown trees, mostly pine. It’s not visible from the air, Vern.”
Tucker picked up an RPG launcher. “You could take out a bank with this,” he said. “Or a courthouse.”
“Don’t look at it that way, Colonel. These guys aren’t thinking of doing any such thing.”
“Are you sure? The truck that slammed into that courthouse—or would have, if that bus hadn’t been in the way—was packing a mass of nitrate, a kind of homemade bomb like they used at Oklahoma City. Where’s your nitrates?”
“Over here,” Luck said. He showed him the barrels. “But it’s all here, Colonel. None of my guys used this stuff, they weren’t involved in that.”
“You’re sure?”
Luck said, “I’m positive.”
“I’ve got to have your files on these guys,” Tucker said. “We’ve got to check them all out. You might have some sleepers here.”
Luck looked pensive. “I vetted them all,” he said. “I’m confident.”
“All right,” Tucker said, “for now. But give me a list of names.”
“I can do that.”
Tucker looked around for a few minutes, then said, “All right, let’s go.” In the car, he said, “Mulheisen didn’t get a gander at any of that?”
“No way,” Luck said. “They stopped him two hundred yards away. He probably saw a hill, a wooded hill. That’s all.”
“And that nice road,” Tucker said. He sighed.
When they were alone in the house, Tucker said, “You’ve got to get rid of that stuff, Imp. It won’t do. You can explain to the guys something about security. Get some heavy equipment in here and bury it. Deep.”