by Earl Merkel
There was still no real proof, no evidence that was anything but circumstantial; no court in any civilized country would convict on such a flimsy basis. But all signs pointed to the cult. If Alexi was right, the Aum had initiated a suicidal war against all humanity and enlisted American militia groups as their allies.
Direct, logical and straightforward,the logical part of Beck’s mind argued. Yet . . .
How, then, had the Aum persuaded the militias to join them in certain death? The Aum might hold self-immolation both a virtue and a virtual sacrament; in Beck’s experience, few American militia groups held suicide in the same awed esteem. Had the Aum held out a promise, a vehicle of salvation that in the midst of plague would spare those engaged in spreading it?
Was there a cure, a treatment, a vaccine? Did the militia Beck now hunted possess it?
Again, the images on the videotapes he had seen—both the death rained on crowds from helicopters and the rows of dying flu victims in a Russian contagion ward—elbowed to the front of his thoughts.
But in his mind’s eye, each of the victims bore the face of his daughter.
And Beck flew on, west into the night. Had either of the pilots looked back, they would have seen a man seemingly absorbed in the study of the documents piled on the seat beside him. Beck looked calm, focused.
Inside, he raged at his own helplessness.
At last, Beck felt the Learjet turn in a wide arching curve to the north, vectoring into the airspace over Kalispell, Montana.
“Nothing else flying,” the pilot’s voice crackled in Beck’s earphones. “Looks like we have the approach path all to ourselves, Doctor. We’ll be on the ground in a few minutes.”
With a stomach-dropping maneuver, the plane nosed over into the sweeping descent of its landing pattern.
April O’Connor stood on the darkened airport apron and watched them touch down, suitably unimpressed at the expensive transportation that was delivering her new—what?she asked herself.Observer? Partner? Supervisor?
April was unclear as to the role her visitor was intended to play, and the uncertainty did not ease her mind. She had worked with the CIA before, and like most FBI agents had found it an awkward pairing. With spooks, one was never sure what priorities had been set, what plans had been made, what agenda was being followed. Invariably, it made for casework that to a law enforcement professional felt extremely loose—at times even inept, and one was never quite sure if it was intentionally so.
In the past few hours, April had wasted no time. She had run Orin Trippett through every electronic database available—not just the National Crime Information Center computer banks, but through systems that NCIC and the Bureau normally could not access directly: NSA and DIA, to name but two of the super-secret information banks that lurked behind the intelligence community’s black firewall. Barriers that were normally insurmountable had melted away like frost under the midmorning sun, a fact at which April marveled.
And all it takes,she told herself,is a killer plague that threatens to destroy world civilization.
In the end, with one notable exception, it had availed her nothing.
Most of the yield from the government’s electronic cornucopia was little more than a compilation of Trippett’s arrests and convictions, which April already had. The remainder was a collection of conjecture, myth and sheer rumors from the variety of informants that would make even a rookie cop scoff.
So much for modern criminology.
April had retreated to the tried-and-true: pulling out-of-date hard-copy files, sending e-mails and faxed inquiries to select local and county law enforcement agencies, working the telephone to tap into the network of colleagues and sources that every cop guards jealously—all of which,she thought sourly,I could be doing right now, instead of waiting for this guy to show up.
The single notable exception to the dearth of information had involved Dr. Beck Casey. While her boss Frank Ellis had been unable to provide additional detail on Casey, April had found a number of cryptic, sometimes intriguing nuggets among the NSA archives.
The Middle East,she thought, impressed despite herself,both Iran and Iraq. North Korea? And Russia. Lots of Russia, right up until—
Three years ago, according to the files, Casey had been tracking a Russian informant’s story involving a lost shipment of precursors—chemicals that were used in the manufacture of one or another lethal brew—said to have been diverted to a rogue North African country. He had followed the trail as far as Ekaterinburg, to a city that even April knew was a virtual fiefdom of the RussianMafiya .
And then Beck Casey had gone missing.
Six weeks later he turned up in a Moscow hospital, a torn and scarred skeleton from the effect of the physical abuse and the drugs that had left him virtually psychotic. He was turned over to American authorities and subsequently repatriated to the United States. There, the record stopped abruptly. The final entry was the dates of his admission and release from Walter Reed Army Hospital, near Washington.
They were, she saw, nearly eleven months apart.
“Nice shirt,” April said, after the ritual of introduction was complete. “Did somebody walk off with your luggage over there, Dr. Casey?”
Beck forced a smile onto his face.
“You can drop me off,” Beck said. “Somewhere with room service and a hot bath. I slept on the plane”—he grinned, a little too brightly—“but I’m feeling a bit gamey right now.”
“Place in Columbia Falls I know,” she said. “Should do you until morning.”
They climbed into her car, a Bureau-issued Crown Victoria. For several minutes, they drove in silence. Then Beck spoke.
“Maybe you can tell me why I’m here, Agent O’Connor.”
April cocked an eye at him. “You don’t know?”
Beck shook his head.
“You’re supposed to help me find a man named Orin Trippett,” she said. “He’s Montana militia—you know, camo clothes and an AK-47 under the floorboards. But he’s tied in with the Japanese who started all this insanity. They gave him a load of nerve gas he didn’t get a chance to use. But we think he may be carrying something else they sent him. Something very bad.”
“I guess we know what that means,” Beck said. “The Russians say that the Aum dangled the same promise in front of some Russian extremists.”
April nodded grimly. “I saw the transcript from their prisoner.”
“Now we have our own loonies to worry about.” Beck was silent for a moment. “Look—I’m not a cop. I’ll help any way I can, but you need a trained investigator, not a historian.”
“Couldn’t agree more. No offense.”
“None taken.”
They fell into silence again, and Beck found himself lulled by the passing miles. He dozed, chin drooped upon his chest.
He awoke twenty miles later, as the sedan eased to a stop under the canopy of an unpretentious motel. April watched without comment as Beck climbed out, hefting his computer and traveling gear. For a moment, he leaned in the passenger window, tentative in posture. Finally, he aimed a thumb over his shoulder at the lobby.
“Let me try to catch up with the geniuses in Washington. That will keep me out of your way for a while. If you get a lead on this Trippett guy, I’ll be glad to watch your back.” He smiled—to April, it seemed an apologetic gesture. “If you want, I’ll even carry your handcuffs for you.”
“Fair enough,” said April evenly. “I saw the videotape from Moscow. If I need any help like that, I know where to call.”
Without waiting for a reply, she stepped on the gas. From the look on Beck Casey’s face as she drove away, April had no doubt that he had understood exactly what she meant.
Chapter 27
Columbia Falls, Montana
July 23
It was almost two a.m. when April O’Connor punched in the telephone number of the motel where she had deposited Beck Casey.
It had been a toss-up. No FBI support was yet available locall
y, and this was not an assignment to handle solo. Worse, her supervisor also had his orders from on high; he had ordered April to make the pairing more than a marriage of convenience. She had little desire to be chained to a spook, and even less inclination to deal with the shadowy motivations Casey might bring to this case. There were lots of reasons not to want—
She forced back the sudden memory of Jesús Robles illuminated by the muzzle flash from her weapon; April also did not want the responsibility that wet-nursing Beck Casey would inevitably entail.
But in the end she had decided: she had her orders, any backup was better than none, and Casey had been her luck of the draw.
For more than five hours, she had been asking, cajoling, threatening and otherwise gathering information from the various offices and enforcement agencies with which Trippett had run afoul during his life. Armed with this background, she had checked Trippett’s fairly impressive criminal record, selecting as most promising a number of arrests outside the Columbia Falls area.
After several dead ends, she hit pay dirt.
According to state records she obtained from a computer sited in the Montana capital of Helena, Trippett had been arrested for felonious assault in White Bison County, a largely mountainous region seventy miles southwest of Columbia Falls. He was listed as a resident of White Bison County, a fact that caused April to sit upright in her chair. Then she reached for the phone and somehow talked the White Bison court clerk out of bed and into the office.
There, the court records told April that the original felony had been negotiated down to a misdemeanor, and the fine had been suspended. Trippett obviously had a gift for slipping through the system.
But it was here that she also struck gold, in the form of the name of the arresting officer. She thanked the clerk, sent him home and kept digging, working the computer and her telephone deftly as she slogged through layer after layer of the bureaucratic machine. And by half-past one—after working her way through an ascending hierarchy of third-shift line sergeants, lieutenants, shift commanders and captains—April had finally gotten to Senior Deputy Carl McGuire of the White Bison County Sheriff’s Department.
She spoke to him in the jargon that makes up the lingua franca of the law enforcement profession. She tinged it with the codes and key words that communicate both the urgency and the importance of such inquiries to police brethren who are too often inundated by their own caseloads. And when she hung up—after long minutes of waiting while McGuire consulted his own notes and memories as well as those of his colleagues—she looked at the descriptions and directions she had scribbled and blew out a long breath.
She passed along the relevant information to Frank Ellis in Helena. Ellis relayed it to an assistant United States attorney who already waited, cellular phone at his ear and the proper paperwork in his hand, outside the home of a federal district judge. Less than fifteen minutes later, April had the confirmation that the warrant had been issued and was being faxed to her immediately.
Then April dialed one more number.
The phone rang at the other end, and she heard a familiar voice.
“Yo.” There was a television in the background.
“O’Connor. You doing anything special right now?” she asked without preamble.
“Oh,hell yes,” Beck Casey replied. “They have cable TV. I found one of thoseFunniest Videotapes shows. They had a guy playing catch with his kid in the yard—he turns his head to look at something, kid throws the ball. Hits him . . . well, in the crotch. Then they showed somebody else trying to climb a tree—I think his kite was stuck in it.” April smiled at Beck’s dubious tone. “Anyway, he’s climbing up, slips, comes down on a tree branch. Guess where it catches him? Right in the crotch.”
“I think I’m beginning to sense a theme,” April said.
“Yep,” Beck observed, “it’s a scream. Right now, there’s this fellow trying to impress his girlfriend by walking tightrope on top of a chain-link fence.” There was a moment’s pause. “Ouch, that must have hurt. So if I can tear myself away from all this must-see TV, what do you have in mind?”
“I’ve got a possible location for Trippett, and the paperwork is arriving on my desk even as we speak,” she said. “I was pretty sure you wanted to go along.”
“Good deduction,” Beck said. “Am I going as an official observer?”
“Depending on whether we find him there,” April said, “I suppose we’ll figure out how official you are as we go along.”
Chapter 28
White Bison County, Montana
July 23
“You’re sure, this time?” Beck’s voice was doubtful. “I don’t know how much more my kidneys can take. Probably less than the suspension on your car.”
In the driver’s seat next to him, April O’Connor peered out the window, and then squinted as she reread the notes she had taken earlier. The notebook pages glared brightly in the beam of her pocket light, rendering useless what was left of her night vision. She inched forward, turning slightly so that the headlamps illuminated a gravel road that led away from the blacktop of this rural county two-lane.
“Hell, I don’t know,” April muttered, only partly to Beck.
Who would have figured that the street sign hadn’t made it out here in the sticks yet?she thought, with an irritation made worse by the fact that she suspected her companion was somehow laughing at her.
“The odometer says we’ve driven a mile and a quarter from the bridge,” she said louder. “Thiscould be the road.”
“It’s possible,” Beck replied unhelpfully. “Of course, the lasttwo could have been.”
He looked down the bright tunnel the car’s lights bored into the night, then back at April.
April shrugged and stepped lightly on the gas. The car dropped several inches as each set of wheels left the county roadway, and the crunching of tires on a graveled surface mingled with the engine sounds. She accelerated slightly, but the weathered surface of the road was like an old washboard. An unhealthy vibration tried to tear the steering wheel from her hands. April eased back on the gas until the alarming shaking subsided to a thudding bounce that was merely maddening.
“Watch the ditch,” Beck advised unnecessarily.
For Beck, the ride had been a replay of the night flight to Moscow, a disorienting ride in the dark. He enjoyed the mountains—by day, that is; at night, and with a relative stranger behind the wheel, they struck him as a particularly perilous place in which to wander. For no particular reason, he was now certain the road was flanked by sheer precipices littered with the rusted hulks of cars that had already taken the plunge.
“You think anybody’s been down this road recently?”
Intent on her driving, April shook her head. “Can’t tell a damn thing,” she said. “For all I know, this could be what they consider an expressway out here. Thousands of people maybe use it at rush hour. Or this mightbe rush hour out here.” She leaned forward, surveying the road through the windshield. “Look like it’s getting narrower to you?”
“You want me to drive?”
“With all due respect, Dr. Casey, blow it out your—”
Abruptly, the road rose and dipped, curving to the right as it sloped downward. A quarter mile beyond and below the range of their headlights, specks of reflected starlight rippled over a dark area perhaps the size of a football field. April quickly reached forward and snapped off the car’s lights.
“This is the place,” April said. “See—that’s gotta be the old quarry the deputy described. Trippett’s trailer should be off to the left of it. In some trees.” Once again, she squinted into the night. “You see anything?”
Beck shook his head.
“Uh-uh,” he answered. “But if he’s there, I vote we leave the car here and go in quiet.”
April nodded, and switched off the engine. Before she could prompt him to do so, Beck reached above the rearview mirror and snapped the switch of the dome light toOFF . It was the action of a man who had
done this sort of thing before, and for a moment it gave April pause. Then she opened her door carefully, stepped outside and gently pressed it closed until the latch engaged with an almost inaudible click.
Outside, the noises of the night filled the chill mountain air. Cicadas and other nocturnal insects crooned their ceaseless choruses of sex and procreation, sometimes enticing a willing mate, sometimes merely attracting the notice of a hungry predator. High overhead, shadowy forms darted in erratic flight, as sonar-guided bats zeroed in on unsuspecting targets. Motionless in the trees lining the road, great horned owls focused their night eyes in the low grasses, alert for the tiniest movement of some doomed prey.
Their heads close together, April and Beck spoke in low voices that carried even less than whispers would have.
“No flashlights,” April cautioned. She looked up at the sky. Far from the light pollution of any city, the sky was a heavy black velvet curtain gleaming with uncounted blue-white pinpoints. The moon was a thin Moorish crescent almost directly overhead, exceptionally decorative but decidedly nonfunctional as illumination. April decided that was lucky.
“We follow the road down to the quarry,” she told Casey. “Stick to the left side of the road, and stay close enough that we know where each of us is. Once we get down there, we ought to be able to see Trippett’s trailer. If anybody’s there, we take him down, fast. If there’s any surprises, I want them to come from us.”
“Fine with me,” Beck volunteered. “You want to flip a coin to see who goes in first?”
She shook her head. “I’m FBI,” she said. “In case you’ve forgotten the story you told me, you are a historian working for the CDC. Let’s pretend to believe that for now, shall we? I go in first, you stay behind me. You know the standard entry drill?”