The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  Almost instantly, Amber flushed, as if she’d just been caught red-handed shoplifting or lying to a friend. “You read the note.”

  Tessa nodded. “Well?”

  “Patrick has nothing to do with why I’m leaving Sean.”

  Tessa wasn’t sure she believed her. “Whatever happened between you and Patrick? Did you guys… well… you know?”

  She half-expected Amber to evade the question or tell her in no uncertain terms that it really wasn’t any of her business, but instead she said, “It’s not what you think. It was… Mostly we just talked.” Amber slowly put her makeup back in her purse. “There’s nothing going on between us. Between me and Pat. You need to know that.”

  “What about when my mom was alive?”

  “No,” Amber said unequivocally. “Nothing. I swear. Pat and I didn’t even speak for almost three years.”

  “Is this why you didn’t come to the wedding?”

  “I was in the hospital.”

  Oh yeah, now she remembered, Patrick had told her. “Food poisoning.”

  A long, unbalanced silence. “It wasn’t food poisoning, Tessa. It wasn’t that kind of hospital.”

  The depression meds?

  “Oh.”

  “I was ashamed, so Sean and I never told Pat. Believe me, there’s nothing going on between me and your father.”

  Tessa wanted to believe her, in a sense did believe her, but felt like she needed to hear Patrick’s side of the story before she made up her mind about any of this.

  “Okay.” Tessa stood. “I think I’m gonna go wait for him in the lobby.”

  As Tessa passed her, Amber touched her arm gently. “I’m telling you the truth.” Tessa could hear a tiny tremble of pain in Amber’s voice, an unsettling fragility.

  She’s been dealing with this for a long time. It’s not just seeing Patrick again.

  “Okay.” Tessa managed a half smile.

  “Don’t say anything to anyone, Tessa. Please. Especially to Sean. I’m the one who has to tell him.”

  Yes, you are.

  “Okay.”

  Solstice watched the trail groomer’s headlights disappear into the tenebrous, snowy night, turning north along the trail.

  Since she and her team had arrived in the field, the trail groomer had systematically covered each of the main trails surrounding the old ELF site. Agent Jiang had stepped out a few times to look around, but that was all. Eventually, as the day grew dim and then gave way to night, they must have decided there was nothing here to see.

  Now the forest was nearly pitch black.

  After the trail groomer left, Solstice waited a few minutes to make sure they weren’t coming back, then, with everyone using headlamps to find their way through the storm, she led her people to the maintenance building.

  They buried their skis and poles in the snow, she picked the lock, everyone entered, and she snapped on the lights. Three lines of high fluorescents illuminated the vast, windowless building. She heard the sheet metal roof crinkle uncomfortably above her in the wind.

  The air was thick with the smell of motor oil, grease, and dust.

  A few chainsaws hung on the wall beside her, a cluttered tool bench lay just past them. Three forest service signs in need of repair leaned languidly against the wall in the southwest corner of the room.

  The maintenance building had a concrete, oil-stained floor checkered with thick seams in large, neat rectangles, sectioned off almost like sidewalk partitions. An old John Deere tractor sat at the far end of the building. Beside it, a brown rusted Toyota sedan rested on cement blocks.

  All in all, the building looked like someone’s vision of how a maintenance building was supposed to look.

  A caricature of the real thing.

  It’s a set.

  Solstice studied the uniform grid of cracks in the concrete, each rectangular section about four feet wide and six feet long.

  Typhoon and Eclipse grabbed their slings and cable cutters and headed outside. Solstice didn’t expect that it would take them more than a few minutes to ascend the telephone pole and take out the power lines stretching to the building, but she ordered Tempest to cover them. “In case the Feds decide to come back and have another look around.”

  He swung his AR-15 assault rifle into his hands. “Absolutely.”

  As far as the rest of the crew, Cane stood guard beside Donnie, whom they’d forced to ski over here but now stood handcuffed near the disabled sedan. Cyclone and Gale were bent over the radio jamming device, checking the settings. Squall and Cirrus were carefully removing their backpacks that contained the triacetone triperoxide canisters and were placing the packs gently on the concrete. Equator, the rotund hacker, was looking vacantly around the room, awaiting further instructions.

  “Everyone get ready,” Solstice said into her headset mic so that the three people outside would hear her as well. “We move in five minutes.”

  66

  I arrived at the Moonbeam Motel.

  Just a few minutes ago Torres had called to let me know that Margaret was on board with the SWAT team coming up to help out. He and his men were just finishing packing and would be on their way shortly.

  When I entered the lobby I saw Tessa waiting for me, half scoping out the guy behind the desk, half watching the front door. When she saw me, she made her way toward me, but the lobby was packed with ten people I hadn’t seen before, not even when we searched the motel room by room. Two men were pleading with the clerk, trying to finagle a room. A cluster of young children clung to the pant legs of their mothers or moped around the lobby looking as exhausted and beleaguered as the adults did.

  Tessa circumnavigated the crowd. “What’s up?” she said.

  “How are you?”

  “Hungry.”

  One of the men at the counter pulled out his wallet. “We can all share one room,” he offered. “And we’ll pay you for two.” But the dark-haired guy who’d caught Tessa’s eye just shook his head apologetically. “There’s nothing available. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded toward them. “What’s the story here?”

  “They were stranded in the storm, I guess. Agent Jiang said she wanted to talk to you about that. She just got back a little bit ago.” Tessa looked at me expectantly. “Mostly I’ve been hanging out with Amber.”

  “So you two got a chance to get to know each other?”

  “We seemed to hit it off. We talked for a while.”

  I sensed she was hinting at something. “And what did you talk about?”

  “Movies. God. Drugs. Guys.”

  “You talked about drugs?”

  “She’s a pharmacist,” Tessa explained, then added suggestively, “It was mostly guys. Relationships.”

  If this had anything to do with my past with Amber, it was not something I wanted to chat about. “Fair enough.” I gazed around the lobby. “So where’s Lien-hua?”

  “Follow me.”

  Squall was staring at the building’s cement floor. “You’re sure they’ll still have electricity down there?” he asked Solstice.

  She could hardly believe she was hearing this. “Everything is run by the generators on the command level.” She said into her mic, “Cyclone, Typhoon, Eclipse, on my mark.”

  “Roger that,” came back the replies.

  The people inside the building turned on their headlamps.

  “Five,” she began. “Four… Three… Two… One-”

  The overhead lights cut off.

  “Outgoing and incoming radio signals are jammed,” Cyclone said beside her. “Once we’re down the shaft, I’ll take care of the unit-to-unit comm inside the base.”

  A moment later Tempest’s voice came through Solstice’s headset. “It’s done.” But since the interior of the building was already dark, it wasn’t exactly a noteworthy announcement.

  “Good,” Solstice told him. “Come back inside and let’s get ready to go down.”

  With the electricity out, the maintenance building was now
illuminated only by the streaks of light shining from her team’s headlamps.

  Solstice aimed hers at the sedan.

  Their means of getting into the base.

  I stepped into Natasha and Lien-hua’s room while Tessa waited for me in mine. Lien-hua was there, Natasha was gone.

  “I had no idea that Jake was going to do that,” Lien-hua said apologetically, “to follow you. When he left he just told us he needed to check on something.”

  “Honestly, I don’t really blame him. If I was in his place, I probably would’ve done the same thing. I’m just glad Alexei’s behind bars, but I hope it didn’t harm our chances of finding Kayla.”

  For a moment neither of us spoke; it seemed to be a way of honoring Kayla’s plight. Then I told Lien-hua about Torres and the SWAT guys, we exchanged cell phones so that we each had our own once again, and I returned her Glock to her. “What else do we know?” I asked.

  She ticked off the items one by one on her fingers. “Natasha’s with Linnaman at the morgue. Jake’s in his room making some calls. I didn’t see anything unusual out there by the ELF site.” She sighed. “Doesn’t surprise me, though. If there is anything there, it’s not going to be sitting out in the open.”

  “True,” I acknowledged, “but we needed to have a look.”

  “It’s possible that the ELF connection is just a red herring.”

  Yes, it was possible, but the farther we moved into this case, the less likely that seemed. “I’d like to visit the area myself in the morning.”

  A nod. “Listen, some state troopers found two families of stranded tourists out on the highway. They brought ’em here to the motel.”

  “I saw them in the lobby. No rooms available.”

  “Right. So here’s what I’m thinking. Tessa’s things are all back at your brother’s house; everyone’s been cooped up here all day. Amber’s been acting a little, I don’t know… something’s on her mind. I told her I wasn’t upset about last night, that I really wasn’t, but she seems rattled being here. I was anticipating that you’d want to go out to the ELF site tomorrow and… well, from here it’s a haul but-”

  “From Sean’s house it’s a lot closer.”

  “Yes. You and I could head out first thing in the morning. I talked to Sean, and he has cross-country skis we could borrow-if that would work with your ankle. Maybe if we taped it really well?”

  Last night I’d downplayed to her how badly my ankle was bothering me. Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine cross-country skiing on it, but I buried that thought for the moment. Lien-hua was right about one thing: the location of the Moonbeam really was working against us. It hadn’t been a bad choice when we were investigating the Pickron residence and the site of the snowmobile’s disappearance on Tomahawk Lake, but now the focus of the investigation was shifting toward the ELF site and the area surrounding Elk Ridge and the Schoenberg Inn.

  If Natasha and Jake stayed at the Moonbeam while Lien-hua and I went to Sean’s place, it would give us a strategic, two-pronged approach for searching the region both for the Eco-Tech people that Alexei had told me about and for Kayla Tatum and Donnie Pickron, who, as far as we knew, might both still be alive somewhere.

  “That might not be a bad idea,” I said. “We should all be able to cram inside the cruiser.”

  “Amber’s car is here too.”

  “Okay.”

  Lien-hua went to tell the desk clerk that two rooms had just become available-mine and Amber’s-and I went to touch base with Jake and then grab my things.

  67

  Solstice peered into the sedan. She envisioned something from a Get Smart or a James Bond movie, with a seat that would flip backward and then shoot the driver through a chute that led to a secret high-tech military base.

  It wasn’t quite like that.

  Not quite.

  “All right,” Solstice said to Donnie. “You’re on.”

  “I don’t have my keycard,” he said. “I’ve been telling you that-”

  “There’s an override. Right before the retinal scan.” She told him the access code she’d gotten from Chekov, that he’d gotten from Rear Admiral Colberg. “Type it in.”

  “How did you…?”

  “We have your wife and daughter,” she said irritably, “and we will not hesitate to kill them if we need to. Now get us into the base.”

  Still in handcuffs, Donnie climbed into the driver’s seat and flipped down the windshield sun shade. A key dropped into his lap, and, though the car was on cement blocks, he slipped it into the ignition. When he turned the key, rather than the engine starting, the radio flipped around in the console, revealing a numbered keypad. He typed in the code, and the car’s trunk clicked open.

  Solstice studied the concrete. “Where is it?”

  Donnie pointed to one of the uniform rectangles formed by the cracks near the front of the car.

  “We go in two groups,” she called. “Eclipse, Tempest, Cyclone, you’re with me. Squall too. Tempest, bring Donnie over when he’s done.”

  The crack that outlined the rectangle was nearly a centimeter wide. Solstice had been a little worried about the width, but it looked big enough to allow the web router’s relay line to pass through. She was prepared to deal with things either way, but it would make everything a lot simpler, of course, if her team could remain online the whole time while they were in the base. She tested her weight on the section of concrete. It felt as solid and ungiving as the rest of the floor.

  While she waited for the people she’d just called to gather, Donnie, guarded by Tempest, went to the car’s trunk, rooted around beneath the carpet until he came out with another key, then returned to the driver’s seat. When he inserted this one into the ignition, a small light came on in the lower corner of the dashboard, and he stared into it while a small laser scanner swept across his retinas.

  Cyclone connected the comm line to one of the legs of the workbench, then unreeled it and brought the remaining coil of wire to the concrete slab beside the car.

  When the retinal scan was down, Solstice heard the deep grinding sound of giant gears crunching against each other.

  Slowly, the slab began to lower.

  The initial incursion team packed in around her on the platform.

  Tempest grabbed the keys and manhandled Donnie onto the platform, which was beginning its methodical, controlled descent through the maintenance building’s floor.

  As the slab lowered, rough cement walls appeared on each side of them, with one wall showing the reticulated steel track that supported whatever beam or cantilever rested beneath their concrete platform.

  When Solstice tipped her light down the narrow slit between the edge of the slab and the shaft walls, she saw only uninterrupted darkness stretching into the earth.

  The communication relay line trailed above them, snaking up through the opening. Squall, the slim man who’d counted the money that Chekov had brought to the meeting yesterday, watched it nervously. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get cut when the opening closes.”

  “It won’t get cut,” Cyclone assured him.

  Solstice wasn’t quite so sure.

  After they’d descended about fifteen feet, she shone her light up and saw another concrete puncheon, identical in size to the one on which they stood, and supported on long, sturdy hydraulic arms, unfold from the side of the shaft and rise to cover the opening. The comm relay line was pressed to the side, but threaded comfortably through the crack between the second concrete barrier and the rest of the maintenance building’s floor.

  It appeared to be fine.

  Cyclone checked her equipment. “Good to go.”

  “All right,” Solstice said. “There’ll be at least one Master-at-Arms waiting for us in the entry bay.” She spoke rapidly, restating what she’d briefed them about earlier in the day. “The others should be down on the command level. But be ready. There’s a small arms locker in the crew quarters, and it’s possible the warfare information officers will be armed as
well. And don’t forget about the MA who’s off-duty.”

  As they descended, Eclipse and Tempest readied their AR-15s. Everyone else pulled out Tasers or sidearms. Solstice unholstered her FN Five-SeveN single-action autoloading pistol-fifty-meter range, twenty-round magazine firing a 5.7x28 mm cartridge. A nice little package.

  “Remember, I want them alive, if at all possible.”

  Cyclone recalibrated the portable tactical radio frequency jammer so that whoever they might encounter on the top level of the base would not be able to communicate with the other sentries throughout the facility.

  They were now about fifty feet down, just over halfway.

  A few moments later, a sliver of light emerged in the narrow space between one side of the slab and the wall. Solstice already knew that the other three walls would remain closed off, just like in a real elevator.

  The thin strip of light grew brighter as they neared the bottom of the shaft.

  “Donnie, you don’t say a word,” she warned. “We’ll do the talking.”

  As they finally edged past the end of the shaft, light spread around them, and the cavernous room on the top level of the base came into view.

  Solstice called out, “Set down your weapons, we have Lieutenant Commander Pickron!”

  “Run!” Donnie yelled suddenly. “Get the-”

  Solstice swung her sidearm violently at him, a harsh pistol-whip to the side of the head. He dropped to the concrete like a spent cartridge.

  A sole Master-at-Arms stood twenty feet away with his sidearm drawn, a look of shock on his face. “Put down your weapons!” he yelled unconvincingly.

  The slab settled onto the ground.

  Whatever the MA might have been expecting, it was undoubtably not a team of people holding his friend at gunpoint. And it was almost certainly not having two assault rifles with laser sights aimed at his chest.

  He looked at Donnie. “Commander.” His voice cracked. “You all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Solstice answered.

  The MA turned his gaze to the semiautomatic in Tempest’s hands. “Let him go,” he managed to say, but his voice was faltering, uncertain. Solstice wondered how someone this easily rattled had ever gotten this assignment.