by Thomas Perry
Leah read four of them, all California plates.
She used the police code to get onto the Colorado site that provided ownership information for motor vehicles, and requested information on four out-of-state vehicles, all registered in California. The responses took seconds.
The first one was Samuel Waltham, 19 Brock Avenue, Susanville, California. The second was owned by Violet Hughes, Rural Route 34, Johnstonville, California. The third was Robert Mullaney, Janesville, California. The fourth was Doyle Gottfried, Susanville. All of them were in Lassen County.
Leah called up a map on her computer and found Lassen County. It was up near the northeast corner of the state, close to the state lines of both Oregon and Nevada. It seemed like a good place for a fugitive. He could cross the Nevada border in the time it took to get a pizza delivered.
The state lines were a plausible enough reason to hide up there, but she remembered something else. Susanville had a federal prison, and a state one too.
Leah opened Ortega’s file to check her memory. Ortega was an alumnus. He had spent four years in the state prison at Susanville. He’d been convicted of grand theft auto and of having drugs for sale. He was twenty years old when he arrived. Maybe he had seen something that would give him an advantage now. The crimes he had committed that first time had not been violent. Maybe they had let him out on work details, and he’d gotten to know the place.
Leah decided to return her SUV to the Los Angeles International Airport rental lot and then get a new car to drive north.
The drive was long. It was 387 miles from Los Angeles to Sacramento, where Leah stopped at a motel for the night. She went online and found a cabin for rent near Honey Lake, off U.S. 395, and rented it over the phone. The realtor who served as rental agent said it was a mile from any other building. She slept, and in the morning she drove the final 197 miles from Sacramento to Susanville.
When she approached Susanville, Leah stopped at the realtor’s office. The realtor handed her the keys, a map, and a printed set of instructions with directions to the cabin, and bestowed on Leah a bag of chocolate chip cookies that she had baked.
After Leah had found the cabin and moved in, she explored the roads of Lassen County on her laptop, searching for the ranch in the photographs, with the gravel farm road, the big swinging gate, and the mailbox with the number 24900.
The smaller east-west highways were the state routes 36, 44, 70, and the big one was 299, which ran nearly the width of the state. There was a twist in U.S. 395 that ran east-west for a time north of Reno, Nevada, but that stretch seemed too far away from the small towns of Lassen County to be the place. Leah went on Google and typed in “24900” and the numbers of the routes, and then waited to see what appeared on-screen. Leah tried Highway 70, Highway 44, and then, on Highway 36, she found it. The picture on the screen included the big gate and the beginning of the road going up the hill to the house. But most prominently, she could see the big black mailbox with the number 24900 on it.
23
During the first two days near Susanville Leah spent eight thousand dollars of the city of Weldonville’s money on equipment. She found an infrared rifle scope that used body heat to pick out targets in darkness. She bought Level 4 body armor, tested to stop bullets up to and including .30-06. She ordered two sets of black-and-gray camouflage battle dress to go over the armor, with pads on the knees and elbows. She ordered combat boots in the same camouflage. She bought a pack for ammunition, water, and protein bars. She bought camouflage makeup and a marine Ka-Bar fighting knife honed to a razor edge. Finally, she bought a DJI Phantom 4 drone with both thermal-imaging and light-enhancing cameras.
Every night she dressed in full battle gear and prowled the fields and woods near the lake getting accustomed to the gear, the clothing, the packs, and the night-vision scopes. She practiced dropping and freezing to evade searchers, ejecting and replacing ammunition magazines, attaching suppressors to her weapons, finding good cover, attacking and retreating in darkness. Each night when she was finished with her training, she would run a couple of miles, go into Honey Lake for a swim at around 4:30 a.m., and then return to the cabin to sleep.
She used the hours of darkness, slept through most of each day, and gradually became nocturnal. When she wasn’t training, she studied the online images and photographs of the target area until she was familiar with every landmark.
After the first week of training, the drone arrived, and Leah began to fly it. At first she flew it only near her cabin in the morning or early evening, learning to steer and getting used to the control mechanisms, seeing and interpreting what the drone’s daylight camera saw. She had grown up playing video games and steering mechanized toys, so the concepts were not entirely alien, but the machines she’d used had been crude and clumsy compared with the drone. It took her time to become a good pilot. When she was competent, she began to fly the drone at night, using the light-enhancing camera and then the infrared heat-detecting camera. In a week she was flying it every night, piloting sorties along the perimeter of the lake.
When she had become expert, Leah went out to perform a surveillance mission with the drone. The ranch to the east side of Ortega’s plot wasn’t a family farm but a big parcel of land that was farmed by a corporation, so there were no people living there. She waited until 3:00 a.m. and parked beside a metal building at the far edge of the ranch to the east of Ortega’s, where her car could not be seen. Then she took the drone out of the trunk and launched it.
She began with a run at high altitude using the infrared camera, searching for the body heat of a sentry or guard, but detected none. The engine of one of the vehicles parked on the hill by the house glowed with warmth from some daylight excursion, but there were no human heat signatures. She surveyed the ranch with the regular night-vision-amplified light camera, taking recordings of what the cameras saw. She was as thorough as she could be, making sweeping runs only a hundred feet above the fields and hillside, covering every foot. She stayed higher above and around the house, but managed to circle it several times, hover over it, swing out along the ridge it occupied and the woods on a plateau beyond it, and then land the drone beside her car.
When she returned to the rented cabin, she transferred the recordings to her laptop so she could study them. There were two doors to the house. They both had steel or iron bars on the outer side. As a cop, she knew that it was so a battering ram would be held a few inches from the surface at first and not break through easily. Each door had two squares on its surfaces, which she guessed were steel plates for stopping bullets.
The house itself was not a normal shape. It was like a square in the process of melting, with soft corners and walls that curved outward near the ground. It had a rough surface, like stucco, but Leah had a nasty suspicion. There were two piles of unused rebar in back of the house, and two pretty large cement mixers. The walls might be concrete. She saw two rings of stone about three feet high on both sides of the house, and guessed they could be firing positions.
She had found nothing that looked like an outhouse or a porta-potty in her aerial search. But in an infrared image of the front yard of the house she could see a faint area of lighter yellow running along the ground, which could be the sewer line to a septic tank. The water was cool coming into the house from the tank above the back of the house, warmer leaving the house from the front, and then formed a rectangle of warmer ground a few yards away. There were chemical processes that might be the reason for the warmth above what she thought was the septic tank.
She could see two white tanks in the area near the side of the house. They looked like forty-pound propane tanks for use with barbecue stoves. Maybe that was how they cooked, and maybe even heated the house in cold weather.
A steel tank that held about three thousand gallons was on a rise in back of the house. Running from it was a white PVC pipe with a turn in it leading into the ground in front of it. She couldn’t see any power lines running up from the highway to the house
, or strung from anywhere. There was also no sign of the kind of service mast that was usually on the front corner of the roof of a house with commercial power. There was a metal shed about thirty feet from the house that might hold a gasoline generator.
She thought about the implications. There didn’t seem to be a way to provide power to an alarm system or a set of floodlights, unless they were on a battery system that was charged by running the generator regularly. The infrared camera had picked up no heat at the metal shed.
Each night Leah continued her combat training, her running and her swimming. Twice more she took the drone and drove to Ortega’s ranch to do reconnaissance. She hovered the drone close enough to take enhanced light footage of the license plates on the cars parked near the house and then slowly withdrew the drone. She explored the ranches on three sides of the Ortega ranch. She studied the highway that ran past the gate and the mailbox. But most carefully, she used the heat-seeking infrared camera to search for guards or sentries or patrols. She ran the same camera along the upper parts of the house, the three big old oak trees nearby, the fence posts along the gravel access road, and randomly in the nearby fields to detect any faint heat glow of a security camera. She detected nothing.
On the next night Leah was only two nights from the date she had chosen from the start. She was as physically and mentally ready as she was likely to get. She had studied the Ortega ranch and the area around it on several nights. If the men in that house had come expecting to repel an attack, they had long ago become satisfied with their preparations and stopped patrolling. All she could do if she waited was make mistakes and let them see her. The weather service said that in two nights it was supposed to be cloudy with a new moon, so it would be the darkest night she would get for a month.
Over the next two nights she became fully nocturnal. She spent half of each night training and the other half inspecting and preparing every item of her equipment and making sure there was no chance it would fail in stressful conditions. She had been on many police raids in her career, and she knew the time to worry about the smallest details was before leaving home. She didn’t want any piece of clothing or gear that pinched or rubbed or made a sound when she walked or made her more visible. She made sure that her firearms were cleaned, oiled, and loaded, and that each magazine was backed up by another loaded magazine. Her electronics all had fresh batteries and spares.
She cleaned the cabin thoroughly, getting rid of any sign that she had ever been there. She washed sheets and towels, vacuumed the cabin, washed the dishes, put the trash in black plastic bags to take with her, wiped every counter, bedpost, and doorknob with antibacterial wipes, and then went over all of them again.
She packed a set of civilian clothes in a black backpack she stored on the floor in the passenger side of the front seat. When she had finished preparing, she closed and locked the door of the cabin and drove away. It was 1:00 a.m.
She drove toward Highway 36, but didn’t go past the front gate of 24900. Ortega’s entire ranch seemed to have been designed for one particular threat. He appeared to have imagined that what would come for him was a convoy of police or FBI vehicles, which would break through the gate and drive up the long, straight gravel road toward the top of the hill intending to arrest people. That was not what was coming for him. She drove to an intersection with a farm road that met Highway 36 and turned up the road.
Leah pulled off the road onto the farm to the east of Ortega’s ranch, where she had piloted on her drone reconnaissance nights. The ranch was much bigger than Ortega’s, and the acreage was almost entirely devoted to growing vegetables. She drove up the farm road to the only building, which was a one-and-a-half-story prefabricated metal rectangle, like a big garage.
She took out the drone and launched it. She piloted it upward along the rows of leafy green plants, up the hillside, and then to a higher altitude above the ridge. She made a wide left turn to bring it along the ridge to Ortega’s, then guided it in widening circles, looking for body heat. After fifteen minutes, she had found none. She brought the drone back down, put it into a black trash bag, locked it in the car, and began to walk up the hill.
She was carrying her M4 rifle with a night scope attached, her numberless Glock with its silencer screwed on, a supply of loaded magazines for both weapons, and her razor-honed marine Ka-Bar knife. She walked in the rows of vegetables, following the lines straight up the hill to the crest, where there was a dry plateau of uncultivated land occupied by stunted California oaks.
She reached the summit a few hundred yards from the house and turned toward it. The land up there was broken by rock outcroppings and a few steep depressions, so there was little mystery about why it had never been farmed. In many spots the dirt was so thin that it barely covered the bedrock. She slithered under a barbed-wire fence onto Ortega’s land, reached the water tank behind the house about ten minutes later, and sat down with her back to the tank.
She studied the house through her night scope and listened. She could hear and feel a gentle wind up here, but that was the only sound. The house was as she had feared. It had a flat roof with a wall that extended above it a little in case someone wanted to use it as a firing position. There were windows, but they were all tall and narrow, like the slit windows in a fort, and they were all closed.
She got to her feet, crouching to stay low, and walked as quietly as possible to the side of the house. She knelt and touched the surface. It was concrete, and this side of it felt cool. It would be impossible to cut or breach in any way. Firing at it would accomplish nothing. She moved around the building, and the only windows she saw were the same—high up and only about four inches wide. The glass was thick, set in steel frames with latches like the ones on basement windows. She kept going around to the front. The door was as it had seemed in the drone’s camera—steel rods over steel plates.
She passed the front steps and saw more of the long, narrow windows, all of them closed and latched. As she reached the third side, she still saw nothing that would admit an intruder. Everything was high and narrow and unreachable. She kept moving and turned the corner to the rear of the house.
She saw the two large, white propane tanks at the back of the house. One of them was hooked up to a hot-water heater with a flexible braided half-inch hose. The other was fitted with the same kind of valve and the same kind of hose. The hose went into a conduit made of a length of pipe that had been set into the concrete when it was poured. She looked up and saw that almost eight feet up was a flat, hinged vent cover set into the wall, the kind used in kitchens. There must be a stove and a hood inside, and they must be using propane to fuel the stove.
Leah knelt and turned off the two valves on the tanks. Then she took out the Ka-Bar knife and cut both of the hoses. She pulled out the severed end of the hose leading from the kitchen and set it aside. Then she pushed the remaining length of the hose from the propane tank back through the pipe into the kitchen. She pushed until the hose moved easily into the space, and then she opened the valve on the propane tank.
Next she examined the hot-water heater. Two copper pipes were inserted through other openings built into the concrete wall, one for the lukewarm water supply from the house and another for the heated water flowing back into the house. The copper pipes were a bit smaller than the holes in the wall, and the extra space was packed with rags. She pulled the rags out, cut the hose that went from the propane tank to the hot-water heater, and then stuffed that hose into the opening beside the pipe for the cool water and refilled the extra space with rags. Then she turned on the second propane tank.
As she turned to look in the direction of the big water tank, she saw there were four more forty-pound propane tanks stored under a pair of door-size plywood sheets joined like a peaked roof. She rolled two of them to the place where she’d left the others so they’d be ready.
She crawled away from the house and then walked back up to the water tank, sat down, and held her rifle across her knees, listening for t
he sound of a door.
At the end of a half hour, Leah went back to the rear of the house, checked the float gauges on the two propane tanks, and saw that they were down to 10 percent. She replaced the two tanks with the full ones she had brought from their storage shelter and turned on the valves. Then she went back to sit beside the water tank, waiting for somebody to move.
24
Paul Duquesne woke. It was dark in the house, but he knew that something was terribly wrong. He tried to sit up in the narrow bed but needed to put his hand on the wall to help himself up. There was pain. He felt as though an ice pick were being pushed into his right temple, an excruciating headache that took up the space behind his eyes. He coughed, and pain came in a sharp throb. He knew that whatever was going on, he must stand up, but he was weak and dizzy. He rose unsteadily, started to topple, but pushed his hand against the wall and held himself there.
His room smelled horrible. Had a skunk somehow gotten caught in this cramped space and sprayed? He tried to see, but the only place a skunk could be was under the bed, and he knew if he crawled down there to look, he might not be able to get up. The next minute, the smell was like rotten eggs.
So much seemed to be happening—to him, to his thoughts. He tried to clear his mind but couldn’t focus on anything except pain and discomfort. But after an indeterminate time standing there, he began to recover a bit. He coughed a few times, and that seemed to help. Something awful was going on. Was the horrible smell from a fire—an electrical fire? No, it was a chemical smell, like sulfur dioxide.
He had to wake everyone and then start opening doors and windows. He headed for the doorway, managed to grasp both sides and hold himself there, and then stepped into the hall. He pounded on the first door, not caring whose room it was. “Wake up!” he shouted, but then he had to cough a few times. He knew he had to be louder, so he yelled as loudly as he could, “Come on! Get up! The air is poisoned!” He staggered to the next door and the next, pounded on the doors and shouted, “Help! Help me!”