“Don’t know,” Warner said. “But I doubt it. Dave and Paulo maybe, but Frederico? Word around the village is that he really believed the shit he preached to you. It’s possible that all three were innocent. My guess is they got whacked just to scare you off, or to at least make you aware that everything you did, every move you made, was being watched.”
Being watched. Jack had never even considered that he had been watched.
Had been? Was being?
He felt cold. Far colder than the descent of night should really have made him feel. He glanced up and down the beach. Save for the two of them it appeared to be empty, but Jack no longer trusted how things appeared to be. Andy, for example, had appeared to be his friend for more years than he could remember.
”I’m in real deep shit here, aren’t I?” he asked rhetorically.
“The deepest,” Warner said, sipping at his coffee as though the situation gave him little cause for concern.
“So what do I do now?”
“Well, Mr. Bernstein,” Warner said, “the first thing you do is give me a copy of the list you gave to your senator friend, along with any other information you feel is pertinent. Then you take two of my guys for protection and you go home. You go home and you climb into that big, expensive bed you no doubt have, with its feather duvet and matching pillows, and you get yourself some sleep. To put it bluntly; you leave the shit you’re in to the people who are trained to shovel it.”
Jack’s face edged toward defiance. “I can’t,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “Not until I’ve found my grandson.”
Warner, already annoyed that he had learned the darker facts so far down a line he had been reluctant to travel, finally gave up on trying to contain his anger. Sympathy be fucked.
“Just how many more people need to die before you realise that you’re going to find the sum of nothing squared? You’re a fucking businessman, for Christ’s sake. Chess and software and big boxes with flashing lights. These people aren’t. They’re terrorists. That’s what they learnt at school and that’s what they’ve been perfecting ever since. They’re little more than cold blooded murderers and ultimately they want you dead. Along the way, they’ll take out anybody else they see fit. They’ve watched your every move and they’ve simply cleared up the pieces.”
Suddenly the irony of the word ‘pieces’ came into his mind. He paused. Sighed. Then lowered his voice, realising from the determined look on Jack’s face that anger was having an adverse effect. “Right now, Mr. Bernstein, the only thing I need you to do is trust me. Because right now... I’m probably the only useful friend you’ve got.”
Jack picked a handful of the soft sand. It was still warm from the heat of the day and dry enough to slide through his fingers. It fell back to earth like the sands of time. Eventually there were only a few grains left, desperately clinging to the moisture that had formed on his palm. Soon, those final grains would also be gone. Like his daughter, time would have run out.
“My friends... my useful friends... call me Jack,” he said with quiet reluctance.
“Yeah? Mine call me Special Agent Warner.” He smiled warmly.
Jack smiled back. “I thought they might.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Jack. You look like shit,” Warner said, turning to face his companion. “Go home, get some sleep... and trust me. I will do everything in my power to find these people - and your grandson - for you.”
all things work together
Romans 8:28
On the phone, Ellie had sounded far from happy. She had already known that her husband would be home late, but now he was telling her that he wouldn’t be home at all. She said that she would switch off the oven, then go out and buy them both a dog to put his dinner in. He had suggested she put it in the fridge instead, but did not know whether or not she would. That depended on how much the kids had been playing her up.
In the early days, when Frank had first become an F.B.I. agent, being married to him had been an exciting privilege. Talk of solving a murder or breaking an international crime ring had set the family apart from their friends and neighbours. Now, twenty-three years down a southbound line, it was one more murder and one more ring. They had, it seemed, become an integral part of Ellie’s everyday life the moment she had placed the ring Frank had given her on her slender finger all those years ago. Fresh homicides had subtly become less important than fresh vegetables. Even talk of a Spaniard burnt at the stake had seemed to pale into insignificance against that of yet another burnt dinner.
Warner placed the receiver down gently and sighed. At least, for her sake, he was not spending the night roaming the streets but held in the cold sanctity of the Field Office; protected by security and the twenty or so other agents who were working through. At least he was doing what he hated most; working at a bloody computer.
It had been a long trail but it was one that Warner hoped, now that he knew all the things that Jack Bernstein knew, was coming to an end. A man by the name of Simon, whoever he was or whoever he represented, had sown the seeds of doubt against Mil’el and offered Jack four postcards, which were now being twirled through Warner’s fingers. Those postcards had led Jack, via Dave and Paulo, to Frederico and talk of heresy. Hence; an organisation that presumably advocated that self-same heresy. Lara’s whereabouts, confirmed by GlobeLink, had been somewhere in or around Ephesus at the time of her last two transmission, but McKinnock had said that there were no cults on file in that area. Whether by fluke or insider knowledge, he had been right.
Ephesus, indeed Turkey as a whole, had come up empty.
Which only left the lists. Companies owned either by Pegasus Holdings, Mørkhest or RKI and all somehow linked by the products they bought. When the dull grey telephone on his desk rang, he hoped it was to give him that link. He’d been waiting for the call for what seemed like a lifetime. He checked the clock. It had been less than fifty minutes.
“Frank, it’s Will. I think we need to have a serious talk about that list you sent me.”
Frank had never met Will Hicks, the man who ran the late shift at the F.B.I.’s Laboratory Division, but he knew by reputation alone that the man was damned good at what he did. Usually he dealt with physical evidence; a shard of glass, rifling on a bullet, a drop of semen or blood. He would receive a package by courier and, with an eye and machinery trained to look for anything out of the ordinary or incriminating, would have an answer within hours. A list of products, therefore, was a relatively easy task. It had taken less time than even he had hoped.
“Go on” Frank said.
“Well, as you suspected, individually these products are relatively harmless and all have viable commercial uses, but they’re all what we call ‘Y-COMPONENT’ elements. Which means, start combining them and you can get some really nasty things. Not only that, with this list you’ll get them in quantities that makes some of the shit we found in Iraq look like it’s come right from the manual of a home chemistry set.”
“And these guys are being very careful with their purchases as well. Sure, they’re dirty products but the companies buying them have enough individual integrity to keep them clean. Our government, and a great many others for that matter, would ask any purchaser of these elements to demonstrate quite clearly why they would need them; on a commercial level that is. They would also have to demonstrate that they are in no way linked to any other companies that are buying mixable elements. Presumably they’ve managed to do that, because I’ve run some checks and they gained all the approval they needed.”
“So they were buying them legally?” Warner asked.
“Sure,” Will said, “because it’s only when you give me the list as a whole, and detail all fifteen companies, that it actually starts to stink.”
Warner could see that he was getting somewhere. “So, if the companies are part of a hidden ‘whole’, what’s the sum of the parts?”
“You’ve definitely got some interesting acquisitions here,” Will explained, his stud
ious nature adding a slow drawl to his voice. “We’ve got one company, AgriChem, listed as buying over three hundred sacks of sodium fluoride, another taking possession of one hundred and thirteen steel drums containing phosphorus trichloride and a third who seem to have a special fondness for isopropyl alcohol. All of these ingredients are pretty innocuous on their own and I’ll bet you my last dollar that they gave extremely valid reasons for the purchases....”
Warner pondered the three items for a moment. He knew nothing of chemistry. “But...?” he pressed.
“But... if you put them together at high temperature and pressure - very carefully mind - and you probably get enough of your little accident in Lancaster to wipe out the entire population of the globe three times over.”
Frank’s eyes had widened. “Sarin?”
“You betcha. And... just in case of accidents I’d say... Persona Pharmaceutical are listed as taking delivery of large quantities of pyridine aldozime methioxide pills and atropine. As far as I’m aware, they’re the only two known antidotes to a sarin attack. Or indeed an accident.”
“Shit.”
“It gets worse,” Will continued. “We’ve also got large quantities of both nitric acid and glycerin, both kept well away from each other, commercially speaking. Now if I wanted to buy that stuff, I’d declare it as items to be used in the manufacture of products for treating angina sufferers or cosmetics, but I’m betting they were making the obvious...”
Frank needed to think for a moment. Nitric acid and glycerin. “Nitroglycerin?”
“Nitro-fucking-glycerin,” Will confirmed. “To use raw or to make extremely large quantities of dynamite or a number of other explosive compounds, the choice is theirs really.”
“Anything else?”
“How much do you want...?” Will replied. “We got phencyclidine; developed and still used as an anaesthetic but commonly known as PCP or ‘angel dust’. We got one hundred and sixty 18 litre cans of peptone used for culturing bacteria. I would reckon that the average university research class would get through...” there was a pause, presumably whilst Will did the mental arithmetic, “...about a litre a year. These guys ordered nearly three thousand litres of the stuff and I really don’t like the sound of that.”
“Neither do I, Will,” Warner said gently. “Neither do I.”
“I presume you think that these companies are working together?” Will asked.
Warner smiled to himself. “I wouldn’t have sent you the lists if I didn’t.”
“Well then,” Will explained, “they’ve been very clever. They’ve known that they would only be investigated closely if it was decided that the same company, or two linked companies, were buying mixable ‘Y-COMS’. As, seemingly, none of your three holding companies have known links, and the subsidiaries had been careful enough to steer clear of a ‘MIXABLE-Y’, not one of the applications for purchase has been challenged.”
There was a pause on the line. Two men thinking. Warner did not choose to burden Will with the details he had on the directors of the investment houses. There was no point. That was another field, another department and probably yet another headache waiting to develop.
“Can you really link these companies? I mean... prove that they’re trading ‘Y-COMS’ and turn this into a case?” Will asked. “That’s the killer question.”
“I sure can,” Warner offered defiantly.
“How?” Will asked. He sounded relieved. As though, as was often the case, the work he had done was not going to bounce repeatedly against a bureaucratic brick wall.
Warner’s reluctant laugh echoed down the line. “As yet,” he said with mock confidence. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
he came to deceive thee
2 Samuel 3:25
It was almost six in the morning before MaryBeth was driving Jack back to the campus and the freeway was already starting to fill with traffic. He had needed to wait over two hours for her to finish dealing with the press. The two junior agents that Warner had assigned for Jack’s protection; Dan and Robert, followed close behind in their own car.
Jack did not appreciate having the men shadow his every move. He had always shunned personal bodyguards in any form, seeing them only as an unnecessary restriction on his privacy. He had the guards and he had the gates but, within the confines of the ranch or the campus, he also had his freedom. Now, until this situation was resolved, he had lost that as surely as he had lost so many of the other things he cherished.
When MaryBeth had driven Jack down to Rodondo the previous morning, they had spoken about the ensuing launch and the sense of excitement they had both felt. At that point, everything had seemed to be slotting neatly into place. Boston was back on-line, Eric had found a way to temporarily secure the system for the duration of the launch and the day was going to be nothing short of a public relations tour de force.
That had been less than twenty-four hours ago. It seemed like a lifetime.
Jack stared out of the window toward a new day as it began to rise above the distant mountains. A new day with new possibilities, good and bad. Although, for now at least, the latter was outweighing the former and he felt numb inside.
“I can’t believe he sold me out,” he said quietly. It was not a statement directed at MaryBeth, just a verbal expression of his present state of mind.
“So he’d really passed none of the details you gave him through to the F.B.I.?”
Jack could feel Andy’s betrayal sliding like molasses through the pit of his stomach. “Seemingly not,” he said. “He was trying to stall me finding the child. Their ‘New Messiah’ or whatever the hell they think he is.”
“But he couldn’t have stalled you forever.”
“No, but he’d done a pretty good job so far. There was no damn wonder he put himself forward to oversee the 320 investigation. He would have known that the cult had carefully emulated the methods that Mil’el had used previously, so he placed himself in the ideal position to sit on anything nasty that might be uncovered. At least long enough to warn his new friends.”
“Then maybe he’d known that 320 was downed purely to stop Lara coming home,” MaryBeth said. “He might even have known about the bombing before it happened.”
Once again, Jack realised that he had failed to see the obvious. Of course, there was always the possibility that Andy had been recruited after the bombing, but what if he hadn’t? What if, in addition to trying to stall Jack’s attempts to find his grandson, he had also been directly involved in his daughter’s murder? Yet Jack had known Andy since they were children. Their own father’s had been more than good friends and the two had studied together at Yale. How the hell could he have done that to him? If he could not trust his oldest friend then who the hell could he trust?
Nobody.
Shit, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Jack Bernstein had made so many errors of judgement recently that now he even wondered whether or not he could trust himself.
“So why did he give you all that crap about David Koresh?” MaryBeth asked, changing the focus. “I mean, he told you about his revelatory ‘meeting in Ephesus’ or whatever it was.”
“Either he did that to make me think he was actually doing something or, worse still, he did it to throw me off the scent.”
MaryBeth looked puzzled. “In what way?”
“He knew we were focusing on Ephesus in Turkey. Why? Because that was where Frederico had claimed that Jesus had settled after his crucifixion. There was undoubtedly a settlement there in biblical times, so it became the ideal location. If Andy was in league with these people then he would have known about Lara from the start. He would have known that we’d be able to pinpoint her last transmissions. He was doing what he could to back up our theories.”
“But the transmissions pointed to Ephesus as well,” MaryBeth said, cutting in front of a truck in order to take the Glendale exit. “She was definitely there.”
“But why was she there?” Jack asked rhetorically.
As
though it was obvious, MaryBeth said, “Because they were there?”
Jack shook his head defiantly. “They’re not that stupid. Warner’s run some checks and Ephesus is definitely coming up clean. It’s a tiny village where the tourists overpopulate the locals. Besides, they would never have allowed her to send the messages if they thought that they could ever be used to pinpoint them. I think they allowed her to keep her computer and send messages back to me because it suited them. They probably took her there specifically to send those messages. They’ve made us look in the wrong place at every turn and that puts me right back at square one. They could be anywhere.”
MaryBeth stopped the car at the main gate and waved to the guard on duty. He smiled and moved across the cabin to his control panel.
“So they knew who Lara was. Which meant that they knew who you were.”
“Exactly. And they knew that one day she’d either try to come home or that I’d try to find her. Either course of action would have threatened their hold on her child. You see? They were covering their asses a long time before I got involved.”
The barrier was lifted and the car was waved through.
“So where did Andy fit into all this? I can’t see what he had to gain.”
Jack shrugged. “Money, power, who knows? As far back as Yale he was too damn greedy for his own good. You never know, he might even have believed in the shit they preached.”
“Nah, he was too smart for that,” MaryBeth said bluntly.
It suddenly occurred to Jack that Senator Andy McKinnock, given recent events, might not have been very smart at all.
MaryBeth pulled the Mercedes into a space well away from Jack’s Bronco, allowing the F.B.I. sedan to continue past. It pulled up alongside the four-by-four and the two men climbed out carrying small black devices and mirrors on sticks. Dan and Robert had been instructed by Warner to check the vehicle as thoroughly as possible before Jack even considered driving it again. Just in case.
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