The Program

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Tim’s lip tingled along the scar, an itch too deep to scratch. “Where’s the dog?”

  A soft-voiced deputy with a droopy mustache pointed to a leonine German shepherd gazing forlornly from the passenger window of a Volvo. “That there’s Cosmo. She’s L.A. Sheriff’s and OES cadaver-certified.”

  Miller tossed the deputy a Racal portable. “Channel forty-eight. Make sure you don’t break in if she alerts over a dead squirrel.”

  The deputy bobbed his head. His name tag announced him as Danner. “Don’t you worry ‘bout no dead squirrels. Cosmo’s like that squinty little bastard from The Sixth Sense. She howls, there’s a corpse talkin’ to her.”

  A few of the deputies chuckled.

  “How many people are up there?” Denley asked.

  “Could be seventy, probably less,” Tim said. “We busted up their last meeting, so I hope we knocked loose the fence-sitters.”

  “So what’s left are hard-line zealots eager to die for Allah.”

  “Remember, we’re just serving a warrant here. It’s our job to make sure this doesn’t spin up.”

  “Tell that to the David Koresh motherfucker,” one of the deputies said.

  Tannino stuck his head into the circle. “This thing goes Ruby Ridge, I will personally chew off your ass.”

  The deputy’s grin faded.

  Miller had ordered some of the deputies to carry less-lethal. Bear handed around the Remington 870s, the clear rounds showing off the stuffed beanbags inside. Maybeck shouldered the big-bore launcher and dug in the APC for pepper-spray canisters.

  A county fire ambulance pulled up, red light strobing through the darkening air. Miller gestured at them, and the driver nodded, cutting the lights and idling at the curb. Law-enforcement and emergency-response vehicles crowded Little Tujunga. Drivers were starting to rubberneck.

  Duke and his deputies peeled out to shore up the secondary perimeter, leaving behind four units to join the caravan of vehicles to the front gate.

  Thomas jogged up the road, ballistic helmet under one arm, waving what looked like a rolled blueprint. “Sorry. I stopped off at the barn to grab the topograph for the ranch.”

  Miller stretched out the blueprint and squatted over it.

  The ART members were heating up, checking shotgun slides, testing the portables, changing out flashlight batteries.

  For a moment Tim took it all in—the vehicles jammed along the road, Denley snugging his goggles into place, the grind of steel-plated boots into dirt, the smell of gun oil, the big-barreled shotgun breach-broken over Maybeck’s arm, Guerrera tugging on thin black gloves, the splotches of dried sweat staining the tactical vests, Bear thumbing round after round into his magazine.

  Tim came out of his reverie, and everyone was staring at him, stacked back three deep, curved in a fat arc around the front of the APC.

  He realized that the circle had re-formed around him, that he was standing in the center.

  Miller nodded at the unfurled topograph. “Your show, Rack.”

  Maybeck firmed two tempered steel hooks around the bars of the gate, and the APC lurched back. The cable groaned, and then the gate popped free, skidding in the mud. The abandoned guard station seemed a pretty good indication that The Program’s ranks had been thinned by the unsuccessful colloquium, but Tim wasn’t going to count on it.

  The sheriff’s deputies lined out across the gap, guarding the staging point, Dray and Tannino holding back with them. Bearing his various weapons like a downsized Rambo, Rutherford paced ravenously, pausing to flash the ART squad a flight-deck officer’s thumbs-up. Waiting between Rooch and Doug far from the deputies’ vanguard, Will caught Tim’s eye and gave him a serious nod.

  Tim and Bear were the first over the fallen gate, the others drawn behind them, stacked in two-man cells with their shoulder weapons low-ready, sweeping up the hill like a force of nature. Tim’s badge bounced on his belt. His head buzzed with adrenaline. The five thrusts of cypress, the jagged ice plant like shag carpeting along the drive, the sharp tree-bark taste of the breeze—it was all disorienting yet familiar, a place he’d visited in the hazy grasp of a dream. They pierced Cottage Circle, the full authority of the federal government blazing its way through forbidden land. The Pros on the circular lawn gaped at the rapid approach. Tim noted bodies in the windows—he’d guessed right, catching them in their cottages before the nighttime Orae.

  “U.S. Marshals, we’re here to serve a search warrant,” Tim shouted.

  Miller forged forward, Chomper straining on his lead. Denley and Palton peeled off to run a recon loop around the treatment wing and Growth Hall. The others began knocking and moving through the buildings, two cells per cottage. The first rule of any operation—clear and contain before progressing.

  Tim and Bear took Cottage Three, Leah’s last-known, Thomas and Freed covering their rear. Most of the rooms were empty. In the kitchen Lorraine was bouncing up and down, rubbing her arm as if trying to erase a stain. She looked aged beyond her years.

  “Where’s Leah?”

  She kept scrubbing, her voice a panicked whine. “Everything’s falling apart.”

  Tim left Bear to frisk her and headed down the hall. He let his muzzle lead as he shoved through doors. The first two rooms were empty.

  In the next, Don Stanford and Julie huddled together on an unmade bed. Tim lowered the MP5 and shuffle-stepped toward them, patting them down.

  Julie started to cry. “The Teacher said people were coming to kidnap us.”

  “We’re not here to harm you.”

  Freed stepped in and asked them to move outside.

  Heart pounding, Tim headed to the final bedroom. Aside from a few raised voices, torn away in the wind, it was quiet outside. No gunshots.

  He saw two feet shadowed beneath the door gap, so he stood to the side of the jamb and shouted, “U.S. Marshals. Open up.”

  No response.

  “Open the door now.”

  He pivoted and kicked, the in-swinging door striking flesh and eliciting a pained grunt. Janie spilled on her ass, gripping a swollen wrist, a kitchen knife on the rug beside her. “Asshole.”

  He kicked away the knife, and she scrambled for him, nails tearing against his bulletproof vest.

  Slinging the MP5, he flipped her, cinched flex-cuffs around her wrists and ankles, and frisked her. Beside one of the beds, a spray of wild-flowers leaned from a cone of cardboard.

  “Where is she?”

  Janie tossed her head to the side, laughing. “She got hers.”

  Tim hauled her outside and handed her off to Haines. She was still struggling against the flex-cuffs, so he had to put her on her chest.

  About thirty Pros milled around on the lawn under Miller’s watchful eye, looking dazed but compliant. Even Deano, the burly bouncer who’d tangled with Tim at the Radisson, was deferential in the face of the ART squad’s authority. Weapons lowered, ART members were moving the last Pros and Protectors—save for Skate—from the cottages to the lawn. No struggles, no flex-cuffed suspects except Janie, no white tear-gas smoke seeping from doorways.

  The area was now cleared, the population safely contained. His dread growing, Tim moved among the scattered Pros, spinning a few of the girls around to peer at their faces.

  Palton cut in on the primary channel to declare the treatment wing and Growth Hall empty—that meant Leah was downslope in Skate’s shed, TD’s bedroom, or the woods. The thought drove Tim toward the trailhead. Bear met him at its brush-funneled entrance, Thomas and Freed falling in behind them. Guerrera, Maybeck, and Zimmer joined their wake from one side, Palton and Denley sweeping in from the other. Danner jogged to catch up, leaving slack in Cosmo’s lead, and Roger Frisk from ESU brought up the rear.

  Elephant grass and chaparral crowded them at the shoulders. Tim tapped his belt to reacquaint himself with his can of pepper spray; they were entering Doberman country. The wind whipped upslope, carrying the reverberating wail of an opera singer.

  They broke int
o the clearing, which sat still and peaceful, bathed in an orchestral swell from TD’s stereo. Save the smoke splitting the rain cap of the shed’s chimney like languid steam, there were no signs of life. Denley started his preentry hum.

  “Seek, girl, seek.” Danner unsnapped Cosmo’s lead, and the German shepherd bounded off into the woods. Raising the shotgun across his chest, he lumbered after her.

  A blast of Italian reverberated off the trees. “... in Ispagna son gia mille e tre!”

  Tim and Bear stormed the shack first, kicking in the door.

  No Skate, no dogs, just the potbellied stove spewing sparks, the mail tub sitting empty before the open loading door.

  Bear keyed the portable to the primary channel. “Be advised assault dogs are unaccounted for.”

  Maybeck shouldered his tear-gas shotgun, trading it for a crowbar he kept hooked in his belt. Moving swiftly toward the mod, he hand-signaled Denley, Palton, and Frisk, though the music would have drowned out a shouted command.

  Already Tim was moving across the clearing toward TD’s porch. MP5s raised, Guerrera and Zimmer were spread on either side of the door. Freed held open the screen.

  A swift peek ascertained that the front room was empty. The stereo volume was cranked so high that, even through the closed bedroom door, the crackle of interlyric static sounded like bubble wrap being crushed.

  Tim sidled in, Bear at his shoulder, Thomas and Freed riding their tail.

  Tim paused before the closed door and drew in a deep breath. Jamming the stock of the MP5 to his shoulder, he raised a steel-plated boot and kicked right beside the handle. The door splintered inward as they exploded into the room.

  TD jerked upright in his bed, bare chest slipping into view beneath a silk robe. A naked girl—maybe Leah—was on her knees on the floor before him, sobbing and covering her face.

  “Hands up! Hands up!”

  TD spun away from them, his hand sliding between the dark sheets. Tim crossed the room like a projectile, seizing him with two fistfuls of robe and hurling him. He hit the wall-mounted stereo at eye level, the sound cutting off in time to accent his crash to the floor.

  He’d come out of his robe, his bruised, naked body rendering a frisk unnecessary, but Tim kept the MP5 trained on him, his finger firm against the trigger.

  With a forearm, TD swiped blood from his split nose. Bear flipped back the sheets, revealing the stereo remote TD had been reaching for.

  The crying girl looked up at them. It took a moment for Tim to register her face as Shanna’s. Freed picked her discarded T-shirt off the floor and handed it to her. Quivering, she pulled it on.

  TD was blinking hard, sucking air, his face warring between disbelief and burgeoning outrage. For months he hadn’t so much as been bumped into, and now he lay sucking floor dust like a bitch-slapped socialite.

  “Get up.” Tim tugged the arrest warrant from his pocket. “You’re under arrest for destruction of the United States mails.”

  Betters rolled to a sitting position, making no effort to cover himself. “Is that all?”

  “Where’s Leah?”

  “Leah, Leah, Leah.” TD shook his head. “Can’t quite place the name.”

  “If you hurt her...”

  “Well, I’m certain of one thing. If she was hurt, it certainly wouldn’t have been me who did it.” His eyes flicked from Tim’s face to the MP5 pointed at his head. “Tempted to shoot me?”

  Tim’s boots knocked twice against the wooden floor. TD looked up at him with something like amusement. Tim drove the blade edge of his hand into TD’s upper lip, the pressure making him shriek and rise to his feet. Tim straight-armed him into the wall, freeing the metal handcuffs from his belt. They were loose on TD’s girlish wrists, so Tim interlocked them to pick up the slack.

  “Tempted?” Tim said. “Not for a second. Not with where you’re going.”

  Bear threw the silk robe over TD’s shoulders. “Maybe we book you in like this, see how they dig your Prince getup in the tank.”

  “Actually, I hear mail offenders are greatly feared on the inside.”

  Frisk’s voice sputtered from the primary channel—”Fucking computer in here’s got more levels of security than I’ve ever seen.”

  TD grinned. “Good luck there, Neos.”

  A howl sounded from deep in the woods.

  The first hint of unease crossed TD’s face as he took in their expressions. “What? What?”

  Their portables all sputtered at the same time, and Danner’s voice crackled through. “Cosmo just alerted on a fresh female cadaver. Looks like the rain washed away part of the grave. I’ve got visual on an exposed head and upper torso.”

  A deep red bloomed beneath TD’s cheeks, making his freckles disappear.

  “Does the name Nancy Kramer ring a bell?” Tim said.

  “Never heard it. We get trespassers—I order them removed. I don’t keep track of the Protectors’ recreational activities. They could be dumping nuclear waste out there for all I know. You’ll have to do better than that.” TD cocked his head, studying Tim. “I’d never kill someone. I don’t have to. You think I seek control from people? Not nearly as much as people want to give up control to me. That’s why you’ll never get me. I’ve never done anything to anyone they didn’t want done to them.” His eyes locked on Tim’s. “Including you.”

  Danner’s voice cut in. “Hang on. We’ve got another body here.”

  Tim felt his stomach drop out of his body. He thought of Will down at the staging point, no doubt privy to the same radio transmission. He thought of Ginny on the coroner’s table, cold and firm, the wisp of hair in her mouth.

  Bear said, “Go make the ID. I got him.”

  Tim shot past Guerrera and Zimmer at the door, shouting into the radio for Danner to give him his bearings.

  “—northeast about a half mile, just past a low run of granite.”

  Tim crossed the clearing at a dead sprint, crashing into the woods. The Racal coughed out the updates as the rest of the operation wrapped up.

  Denley in the mod—”We can’t access the corresponding Dead Link computer files. The folders are useless on their own—”

  Tannino shouting, “Can you make a positive ID on the body as Leah Henning?”

  “—the face is messy with mud—”

  His right leg throbbing, Tim stumbled between trees, over rises. Behind him he heard Bear, Thomas, and Freed spreading out in the woods, shouting to one another.

  A gunshot came at him in surround sound—echoing through the trees and amplified on the portable—and then a flurry of barks and snarls.

  Bear’s voice issued from the portable. “We’re on the way.”

  Tim accelerated, trying to ignore the screeching pain through his leg, radio pressed to his lips. “Danner. Danner. Danner.”

  He’d just hit the granite hump when he heard the double whistle— Skate’s release command. Before he could raise the MP5, a Doberman flew through the brush at him. He got an arm up in the jaws before he went down, and he rolled to a stop at a broad pair of boots, looking up past the slobbering jaws at the bore of a Sig Sauer and Skate’s face.

  Skate’s fingers snapped, and the dog released Tim’s arm and sat. At the sloped root of an oak, Cosmo squared off over Danner’s body, snarling at the other Doberman. Danner’s hand, gripping his shoulder near the base of his neck, was slick with blood. He was breathing but weakly.

  Part of the hillside had slid away under the weight of the rain. Just past the oak, a half-exhumed corpse thrust up from the earth like a vomited secret. The female form was sticky with sheets of mud, like a tar-mired seagull. Ten feet to its left, a gnarled hand reached from the earth like a B-movie effect.

  The image of Leah carrying her own shovel to this spot made Tim cringe with grief. He flashed on a crime-scene photo of Ginny, the snow-angel imprint her torso had left in the muddy creek bank where it had been found.

  Skate stripped him of his weapons and said, “Git up.”

&
nbsp; Tim found his feet. The sounds of the other deputies grew fainter— deputy marshals in the woods was like the start of a bad joke.

  Skate nodded at Cosmo. “A person, sure, but I couldn’t shoot no dog.” One of the Dobermans lunged for Danner, but Cosmo repelled him. Skate put his dogs on a sit-stay, his index finger pointing to the mud. They froze, black-marble eyes on Cosmo, licking their chops, the scent of Danner’s blood driving them wild.

  Skate’s cheeks were heavy, almost mournful. “You had to come poking around in paradise, didn’tcha?”

  Tim held his hands up, loose, a feigned “keep cool” posture that kept them ready. The semiauto was double-action; Skate would want to cock it for a smoother pull.

  Skate took a step forward, a tear beading on the brink of his eyelid. The gun bucked slightly in his hand when he thumbed the hammer. Tim lunged for him, catching the barrel in the rising fork of his right thumb and index finger, his left hand chopping Skate’s elbow, bending the arm. The gun snapped up and fired just below Skate’s chin, sending off a mist of blood as it blew off his face.

  Skate staggered back, the Sig plunking into the mud, his dogs watching the flat sheet of his face with their heads cocked inquisitively. He let out a pained grunt, and his breath bubbled through his former mouth, emitting a faint double whistle.

  The release command.

  The Dobermans fell on him, snapping and tearing.

  Tim tugged the pepper spray from his belt and directed two blasts into the dogs’ snouts and eyes. They whimpered and dropped, pawing their faces. Skate no longer moved. Tim could barely look at what was left of him.

  He shouted for Bear and tried to get at Danner, but Cosmo lowered her head and growled at him, driving him back. He was radioing Miller by the time Bear, Thomas, and Freed stumbled over the granite crest. Letting them take over, he ran to the first corpse, sliding on his knees through the sludge. His hands scrabbled over the bloated face, bending the mud-slick hair aside.

  Nancy Kramer.

  He’d seen TD give the command to march her into the woods. With the help of a forensic entomologist, a medical examiner could set the time of death, corroborate Tim’s eyewitness account.