The Black Bullet (Sean O'Brien 1)

by Lowe, Tom

  “Exhume it for what? After all this time, what the hell can be left in a box?”

  “Have the medical examiner do an autopsy best she can. We’re looking for signs of more than one bullet wound entrance. And we’re looking for bullets.”

  “Sounds like a hellava scavenger hunt. Maybe the forensics test of the year.”

  “See if you can get a judge to sign it tomorrow morning.”

  “How’s this going to help us find who killed Taylor Andrews, the manager of the storage units?”

  “I don’t know, but if you can get an emergency court order for this, the information we learn might prevent another murder, the killing of Jason Canfield. I’m trying to put pieces of the past together. It might give me a bearing on finding the rest of the U-235 canisters.”

  “I don’t think Jason’s kidnappers hit Nicole Bradley. We picked up a gang-banger for that. Guy’s name is Lionel Tucker. Street name—Popeye. Did a nickel stretch for selling meth. On top of that, he’s a habitual user. When we picked him up, the guy had Nicole’s cell phone and her credit cards on him. Says he found the girl’s purse in a parking lot. He busted his probation, and he’ll sit in the county jail until a trial.”

  “You might want to cut him loose, Dan.”

  “What?”

  “Did he admit to killing her?”

  “No, says he never saw her, only saw the purse in a shopping cart.”

  “He’s probably telling the truth. I’m sure the kidnappers killed her, the same men holding Jason. Check with Agent Lauren Miles. The suspect you picked up most likely found the purse where he said he did. It was a decoy, and it gave them time to kidnap Jason.”

  “Who? Wait a minute, Sean—”

  “The people who killed Nicole and the manager are the same. They’re very smart, fast, and ruthless. There must be an enormous price tag for the HEU.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Try to find it before forty-three more hours expire.”

  O’Brien was silent, watching fog rise above the ocean as he drove north on A1A.

  “Okay, Sean, back to exhuming Billy Lawson’s body. What if we find evidence he died from multiple gunshot wounds? What does it prove?”

  “Lies, lots of them. How far back do your homicide investigation records go?”

  “I’ve never traced a case to 1945, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Maybe you could check. Get the report, if there’s one. See who worked it.”

  “They have to be dead.”

  “One’s not.”

  “Who?”

  “His name’s Ford … Brad Ford. See what his involvement was, and see if you can find a current address for him.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  O’Brien looked at his watch as he pulled off the shoulder of the road near Matanzas Inlet. It was a few minutes past nine. He parked, slid his Glock under his belt, and got out of his Jeep, the engine ticking as it cooled, and waves breaking on the beach to his right. The moon rose above the Atlantic Ocean, the light giving form to a shadowy mist rising from the Matanzas River, which silently rushed through the inlet into the sea. The moving water in the pass delivered the night smells of a changing tide, wet barnacles, mangrove roots, and baitfish. He remembered fishing here twenty years earlier.

  O’Brien stepped down the embankment under the Matanzas Pass Bridge, A1A now above him. A car passed. He stopped and listened, the sound of the car growing faint in the distance. He walked under the bridge to the water’s edge, following the shoreline a few feet until he had cleared the bridge above him.

  A nighthawk called out as O’Brien knelt down and lowered his hand into the wide stream, the current pulling toward the sea, a receding tide. Vapor rose from the brackish river like a conga line of ghosts riding a silent night train—the river, flowing around the dark mangrove islands. O’Brien thought about what Glenda and Abby had said—history of the inlet, the bloodshed and the fact that where he stood was a back door into the New World. It was a clandestine place that gave the Spanish dominance after the slaughter of 250 French settlers.

  As O’Brien moved farther toward the west, it appeared. A wink of light in the distance. To the northeast. Then it was gone. O’Brien waited and the light reappeared, the rotation of the lamp in the St. Augustine lighthouse took twenty seconds. He looked toward the northwest, the direction of the old Spanish fort. When the wind blew and the mist vanished, the coquina shell fortress was an outline in the moonlight. Its watchtower was a silent sentry, the block fortress still making an imposing statement.

  The distant beam from the lighthouse took on a diffused look when the haze returned, drifting above the water, becoming lost in the dark. Then, suddenly, like a flock of startled birds in the wind, the apparitions were gone. The silent stone sentinel remained, the edges of the coquina blocks worn, resembling stooped shoulders in a halo of revolving light.

  The light rotated in its 360-degree arch behind the old fort. Nothing punched through an opening in the watchtower. O’Brien kept walking in a westward direction, glancing up at the fort each time the light swept it. Nothing. He slapped the sand fleas biting the back of his neck.

  Looking toward the fort, he waited for the rotation of the light. As it swept behind the fort, the turret was dark and ominous. O’Brien studied the stream and a large sandbar just beneath the surface that straddled almost the distance of the stream. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants and stepped into the water. It was cool, and he felt minnows nibbling at his ankles. O’Brien sloshed through the water glancing up at the fort each sweep of the light, walking toward Rattlesnake Island.

  He dropped, water covering his head. It was as if a wool blanket was tossed over him. He knew he’d stepped into a hole. Water rushed around his body, sucking him downstream. A rip current pulled his clothes, his pants and shirt felt like dead weight.

  O’Brien kicked through the current and soon found the sandbar again. He stood and regained his balance, water dripping from his face, hungry mosquitoes orbiting his head with bloodthirsty whines.

  Rattlesnake Island had a strip of sandy beach, but fifty feet into the interior, it turned to mangroves and gnarled trees, bent like old men stooping in a field under the moonlight. O’Brien stepped across the sand a few feet to the west, wondering how the inlet, the island, and the topography had changed since Billy Lawson stood somewhere near. When he looked up toward the fort, he stopped in his tracks. In the direction of the lighthouse, it looked as if someone was signaling with a lantern from the watchtower, the window glowed for a second.

  O’Brien was motionless, ignoring the mosquitoes. He watched for the light to return and the dark opening in the tower to shine for a moment. Again it was there. He stepped twenty feet toward the west and stopped. When the beam returned it wasn’t visible from the opening in the tower. He retraced his steps.

  “Show me the light,” he said as the lighthouse winked in the distance, sending light through an opening on the tower’s north face to a stone window on the south side.

  O’Brien looked at his bare feet and wondered if he might be standing on top of the U-235. Eight canisters of the stuff could turn everything from here to the lighthouse, a distance of fourteen miles, into ashes. He used his right foot to mark an X in the sand and then found a large rock and lifted it onto the center of the X. He fished the cell phone out of his wet pocket and tried to call Dave. The phone was dead.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Forty-five minutes later, O’Brien stepped onto Gibraltar. Max jumped off Dave Collins’ couch in the salon and trotted to the sliding glass door. She whined a note as O’Brien slid open the door.

  “Hello, Max,” O’Brien said, stepping inside. She ran around his feet, panting, tail blurring. He picked her up, and she licked his face.

  Dave and Nick sat at the bar. CNN news was on the television behind them.

  Nick said, “Whoa … you look like you been on a safari in the jungle.”

  Dave stood. �
�How’d it go?”

  “I think I’m close to a lot more HEU. Enough to blow Florida in half.”

  Dave said, “You look like you could use a cold beer. Plenty in the fridge.”

  O’Brien sat in a canvas director’s chair in the salon, Max curling at his feet. He told them the story from his meeting with Glenda and Abby and of his surveillance on Rattlesnake Island. “I feel I was close to that stuff, sort of like the feeling I had before swimming into the sub. Something eerie, but you don’t quite know what.”

  “You got that right,” Nick said, lifting his glass in a toast.

  Dave said, “So you found an area where the lighthouse beam was actually hitting the back window—you said the north side of the tower and shining through from the south side window, right?”

  “Yes. When the light sweeps through the tower and aligns with the front and back opening, it shoots down a narrow, but long path. To find the U-235, if it’s there, you’d have to know where along the path they may have dug the hole. Maybe 200 feet south of the fort.”

  “Let the stuff stay there,” Nick said. “An island named after rattlesnakes.”

  “If I knew where Billy stood that night, knew what the inlet and the island looked like sixty-seven years ago … it might be easier.”

  “This,” Dave said, fixing a fresh drink, “may sound strange to you—”

  Nick shook his head. “Nothing we do, from this point, will sound strange to me.”

  Dave said. “Have either one of you ever heard of remote viewing.”

  “From what I read,” O’Brien said, “it was some kind of ESP used by the military. Some debate over its accuracy.”

  Dave grunted. “It depends on the talents of the person doing it. We did tests in the mid-nineties. Bottom line: the person who is doing the remote viewing is using his or her subconscious to locate or find something. Could be a target like a missile silo, maybe some detail of a military base, whatever the individual is trying to locate. Time, space and geography are meaningless, have no bearing, no borders, no walls, if you will.”

  “Sounds like psychic stuff,” Nick said

  “No, no it’s not. It takes practice with specific techniques and protocols. But the trained viewer sort of taps into a universal mind where all things are allegedly filed, connected, stored in some way … past, present and future. Some people have called it a form of traveling via virtual reality.”

  “That’s soul travel,” Nick said.

  O’Brien asked skeptically, “So you think this might help us find the buried U-235 canisters?”

  “Maybe. But we’d have to find the right person.”

  “Plenty of psychics out there … way out there,” Nick said.

  “They’re not psychics. They’re people, most of ‘em trained though the Defense Department, who often can get a fix on the location of something … something lost. They sketch the object on a piece of paper.”

  O’Brien said, “I’m assuming you know someone with this talent.”

  “I do know someone.”

  “Time’s our biggest problem.” He looked at his watch. “We have thirty-nine hours to save Jason’s life. How quickly can you contact this remote viewing person?”

  “Her name is Anna Sterling. She lives in an old farmhouse in Michigan. If we show her a picture of Fort Matanzas, give her the date Billy Lawson saw the Germans and Japanese bury the stuff, she might give us a location.”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “Sounds like this woman’s got to tap into the subconscious of a man who’s been long dead, maybe find his spirit.”

  “Wrong idea, Nick. Time and space are irrelevant. It’s just how and where the event is floating in the universal filing cabinet, and whether Anna can open that drawer.”

  “How do we find her?” O’Brien asked.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Dave Collins called Anna Sterling and told her what was at stake, and what they needed. She agreed to go online and speak with O’Brien via a camera between Dave’s laptop and the camera on Anna’s computer.

  As the connection was made, O’Brien thought the woman on the screen looked like Suzanne Sommers. She said, “It’s been a while Dave. The project sounds intriguing. I don’t know if I can give you anything. I’ve had a long day. My brain is firing with more visual noise than I can cap, but for old time’s sake, I’ll give it a go.”

  “Great, Anna. This is Sean O’Brien. He’s been to the site. At least where we think the site might be after all these years.”

  Nick slid off the barstool and stood between Dave and O’Brien, looking at the screen. Anna asked, “And who is the handsome fella you have hidden behind you?”

  Nick grinned and leaned toward the camera. “Nick Cronus … you come to Florida, I give you a boat ride. The ocean helps you see things better.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Anna smiled.

  Dave said, “We have a link to a picture of Fort Matanzas. I just sent it to you.”

  “It’s here,” she said.

  “Good. Sean, give Anna what you have.”

  “Billy Lawson saw the men bury the material at night, May 19, 1945. We think it’s on a place called Rattlesnake Island. It’s national monument land, and it hasn’t been developed. Before Lawson was killed, he told his wife, a woman named Glenda Lawson, who’s still alive, that the men buried it on the island aligned with the path of light as it shines through the tower. The light comes from the old St. Augustine lighthouse.”

  Anna stared at the image on her screen of Fort Matanzas, her eyes burning into the symmetry of the building. She didn’t blink for fifteen seconds. Intent. Concentrating. Then she squinted slightly, like she was seeing something at a great distance. She kept her focus, her body motionless.

  Nick took a long pull on a bottle of beer and started to speak, but Dave held up a hand. Anna began sketching then paused, looked into the camera and said, “Give me a half hour. If I can complete something, I’ll scan in my drawing and e-mail it to you.”

  “Anna, we really appreciate this.”

  “No problem. It’s a lot different from what we did at Langley. I’m going to fix a hot tea and see what the leaves tell me.” She smiled, pressed a button and her image in the box on Dave’s screen went black.

  “Tea leaves,” Nick said.

  “She’s kidding,” O’Brien said. “Let’s see what the woman can do. Dave, do the intelligence agencies or DOD use anyone like Anna today?”

  “I don’t know. The project, called Stargate, closed shop in 1996 amid controversy over costs versus real results. However, Anna was at the top of the class.”

  Nick snorted. “So our government was training people to do this remote stuff?”

  Dave sipped his drink. He said, “Some of this goes back to the study of quantum and theoretical physics during the second world war. A guy by the name of Ethan Lyons, who was working on the Manhattan Project at the time, first wrote a paper on Remote Viewing potential. He didn’t call it RV … called it universal perception and did some experiments with subjects drawing sketches of photos he sealed in envelopes. He had a success rate about twenty five percent over the average.”

  “That’s impressive,” O’Brien said.

  “Ethan Lyons may still be alive. One of the physicists we’d worked with in the beginning on the Stargate Project was Lee Toffler. He’d studied Lyons’ work and added to it. Toffler was a professor who used to work at a nuclear facility in Georgia. I recently read where his only daughter was killed in a car accident. Damn shame. He had raised her by himself.”

  “Do you know what became of Lyons after the war?” O’Brien asked.

  “Sad story. Arrested by the FBI for selling some of our atomic secrets to the soviets. He did a long stretch in prison. I only know this because I researched it before we hired Toffler as a consultant. He had great admiration for Lyons’ grasp of physics, not so much for his concept of politics and government.”

  “How’d they catch him?” O’Brien asked.


  “FBI sting. It didn’t take the FBI too long to nail him and others. There were at least two physicists working on the Manhattan Project who sold secrets to the Russians. One of the FBI agents was working undercover, posing as a soviet or communist sympathizer. The agent was acting as a courier, getting the secrets from Lyons and others and then reportedly meeting with Soviet spies.”

  O’Brien scratched Max behind the ears. “Do you remember the name of the agent acting as the courier?”

  “Not off the bat. I’ll check online.”

  “And I’ll check the box for a beer,” Nick said.

  ***

  DAVE PUT HIS GLASSES ON, keyed in the names, and began to read the information. “Oh, I remember now that I see it. The agent’s name was Robert Miller. The irony is that Miller went to Harvard the same time Lyons was there. May have been classmates, and he had to bust him. Had to testify against him. Lyons is lucky he wasn’t executed.”

  “Did you say Robert Miller?” asked O’Brien.

  “Yes, why?”

  O’Brien stepped over to the computer and read the name. “Because Glenda Lawson told me that Robert Miller was the young FBI agent who investigated the killing of Billy Lawson. The one who said Lawson died as the result of a mugging … said he died from one bullet. I’m betting an autopsy will prove it didn’t happen that way.”

  “Is this FBI guy still alive?” Nick asked.

  “Let’s find out,” O’Brien said.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  O’Brien spent a few minutes searching online for information about FBI agent Robert Miller. “There’s a brief mention in relation to something called the Venona Project,” O’Brien said. “In 1950 it was a project designed to catch Soviet spies in the U.S.”

  “If he’s still alive, wouldn’t take much to find him,” Dave said. “We have two dozen FBI agents here now. I’m sure one of them could locate him or his grave.”

  “Let’s not mention to the FBI, yet, what we’ve discovered so far. After what Glenda Lawson told me, we may need access to FBI records, information we might want to corroborate all this. Let’s see what Billy Lawson’s autopsy reveals.”