Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Could be, sir,” said Whistler. “I’ve never seen a bomb that actually has to be plugged in to detonate. Not even a dry cell battery in there.”

  They were examining the device on a computer monitor. An open aluminum briefcase containing the object now lay on a heavy industrial plastic base plate inside an armored detonation trailer, parked several hundred yards from the hotel. The trailer had strong and heavy walls in addition to the base plate, but the roof was mere canvas; the force of any exploding device would not be compressed, but directed upward into the air. Whistler had considered moving the thing out of the hotel in a mobile wheeled bin also designed to direct any blast upward, but since the stairs were too bumpy and he wasn’t sure whether it had a motion sensor that might trigger it in the event of a slight jarring of the elevator, he had attired himself in Bakelite and fiberglass body armor, including a camera-equipped helmet. After shooing everybody out of the hotel, he calmly closed the briefcase and slowly, carefully carried it out of Bella Sutcliffe’s room, down the hall, down the stairs, and out of the building. He then carefully opened the briefcase again, locked it inside the trailer with the monitoring camera, and now he was trying to puzzle out what he was dealing with.

  The device that lay inside the briefcase looked strange, like some kind of machine from a 1950s science fiction movie. It consisted of four fat-looking smoked-green glass tubes approximately fourteen inches long and three inches in diameter, with odd nipple-like projections on both ends. A third nipple or globe of glass protruded from the center top of each tube. The tubes were attached together in a single row with aluminum brackets, nuts and bolts, and the entire set bolted to a square aluminum frame. Mounted on the front of the frame was a standard NAR 220-volt socket box, facing outward as the briefcase opened, and from the open back four short blue wires connected each to the front end of the four tubes. To the right of the socket was a smaller black plastic box with a digital readout window. “Okay, even I can figure this out. Obviously you’re supposed to plug it in, either to a house current or a UPS, a battery,” said Campbell, pointing to the socket.

  “Yes, sir, and I’d be willing to bet that’s a timer,” said Whistler. “Once it’s plugged into a UPS or just with an extension cord, you set the timer for X number of minutes or however long you want, and when the clock runs out it turns the socket on and those tubes get electricity. When the circuit is connected the juice goes in the tubes, and something is supposed to happen. Probably something nasty, but what?”

  “So there must be some kind of detonator in the tubes,” said Tom Horakova.

  “Not necessarily, Captain,” said Whistler. “It could be some kind of gas or compound that would ignite without a detonator, natural gas or a hydrogen-oxygen mix, or maybe simple black powder or guncotton, but if so you wouldn’t get much of a blast from anything this small. Whatever kind of charge it is, it must be pretty potent. Ordinary powder would just make this a big firecracker. Plastique or Semtex would require a detonator cap, yes, but if that’s what this is, it’s a damned funny way to wire it. I don’t see anything that looks like a standard cap. I loosened the connectors a bit when I was looking it over upstairs, although I didn’t try to actually pull one out. All I saw was what looked like a small flat silver ribbon or filament going into the tube. As near as I can see it’s not even a complete circuit.”

  “Why glass?” asked Tom. “Why not iron or steel pipe for better shrapnel?”

  “No idea, sir. Let’s run a diagnostic.” Whistler tapped on the laptop and the sensors inside the van began to whirr, although they could not be heard a hundred feet away. “Hmm! What the hell… ?”

  “What is it?” asked Campbell.

  “No chemtraces of any known explosive, Colonel, and the microwave density probe indicates that the tubes are empty.”

  “Huh?” asked Horakova. “So the bomb isn’t fully loaded yet?”

  “Uh, no sir, as I read this, they’re really empty. Those thingummies are plain old-fashioned vacuum tubes! Big ones.”

  “Like the first radios used?” asked Campbell.

  “Yes, sir,” said Whistler with a nod.

  “Okay. Uh—why?”

  “Let me think. Something about this looks familiar—I seem to remember something from high school science class back in Calgary—well, I’ll be damned! I know! Those are Röntgen tubes! I’ll bet that filament I saw really was silver!”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant, you’ve lost me,” said Campbell, shaking his head.

  “The first X-ray devices, from 1895 if I remember correctly,” explained Whistler. “Basically, when you shoot electricity through a vacuum tube, you get cathode rays, and at certain frequencies or wavelengths you get the kind of electromagnetic radiation known as X-rays.” He tapped some keys on his laptop and studied a series of digital readings. “Yep. Those tubes are radioactive. Eighty cpm, not dangerously high above normal background for this area, but enough for me to know somebody’s revved that thing up recently. Which in a sense is almost as dangerous as if it was a bomb, although not as destructive.”

  “In what way?” asked Campbell keenly.

  “There’s no shielding and no directional focus on that damned thing, sir,” said Whistler “It’s not an actual X-ray machine, it’s just a device for generating X-rays, if you get the difference. It’s medically useless. As near as I can see, you hook it up and you start running current through it and what you get is X-rays flying every which way. Too much exposure can be fatal, not to mention causing all kinds of tissue damage and brain damage and cancer. Probably wouldn’t take too long, either, depending on how many rads those museum pieces generate, which would in turn depend on the voltage and amperage of the power source, but I’d guess it’s a lot of damned rads. A potentially deadly amount. It’s an odd kind of destructive device for the ONR or whoever is behind this to use, but it’s a killer nonetheless. It’s a good way they can poison people without slipping arsenic in their beer, or whatever.”

  “But if there’s no shielding, wouldn’t the person who activated the device also be exposed?” asked Horakova.

  “Yes, but I suppose that like most bombers, he or she doesn’t plan on being around for that part,” said Whistler with a grim smile.

  “Damn!” muttered Campbell. “That bitch! What the hell was she planning on doing with this bloody thing? Probably setting it off where Ally and Bobby would get caught in it. If I’d known I would have strangled her myself! Lieutenant, you say this infernal thing has been used or fired recently?”

  “The Röntgen tubes are emitting a low level of X-radiation, yes sir, so I’d say somebody fired it up in the last 24 hours. It’s not dangerous now, but it would have been when that occurred.”

  “Dear God, she might have been running it last night and blasting X-rays throughout the entire hotel!” hissed Tom Horakova. “Maybe she left the bar at eleven, went up to her room and plugged this bastard in, then left her room to try and clear out of the building…”

  “Then she went down to the indoor pool where she met somebody who strangled her and dumped her in the drink?” queried Campbell. “Like Sherlock Holmes said, it is a capital error to theorize without data. Lieutenant, when you found this device, did you find a power source, an extension cord, anything that looked like it might have been used to plug this thing in?”

  “No, sir,” Whistler told him. “Nor was the timer set. You see it there just as we found it.” He gestured to his computer screen. “I understand that Detective Botha actually discovered the device, inside one of the decedent’s larger suitcases. He also pointed out to me some clothing of hers that was piled on the floor of her closet, almost like it had been removed from the suitcase to make room for the aluminum briefcase.”

  “So she didn’t bring the briefcase in with her, which we seem to have confirmed since nobody remembers seeing it,” said Horakova. “As it happens both Doctor Wingard and David Speidel have similar briefcases they use for carrying work material, but both of theirs are accoun
ted for. MacPherson checked. Could someone have planted the X-ray bomb or whatever it is in Bella Sutcliffe’s room?”

  “In which case she’s not a spy, she’s an innocent victim and there is most likely no connection between her and her killer. Sure, just what we need, a little extra complication to make this case more interesting!” muttered Campbell. “You have a hazmat officer on your team, Lieutenant Whistler? And a Geiger counter?”

  “Yes, sir. Two, myself and Sergeant Swanepoel.”

  “Go over the hotel and see if the place is going to be glowing in the dark after sunset. Have your paramedic check out the guests as well,” Campbell ordered. “If any of them had been exposed sometime last night, how long would it take for them to show symptoms of radiation poisoning?”

  “Uh, with something as raw as an X-ray overdose, we’d know pretty quick, sir,” said Whistler. “If I recall my training, there would be burns, maybe third-degree, violent nausea and vomiting, extreme pain, fever and heart arrhythmia, skin peeling off in flaps, good stuff like that, very soon after exposure. But I’ve never had to deal with anything like this, Colonel. You might want to call in an NDF biowar officer, and I think we need to take this contraption back down to Missoula and show it to an engineer and figure out just how it works and how much X-radiation it throws out, what its range would be and how powerful.”

  After Whistler went to get his sergeant and the Geiger counters, Campbell rubbed his chin meditatively. “Tom, does this make any kind of sense to you? What an odd weapon for the ONR to use! Why? What’s it all in aid of, and how does the killing of Bella Sutcliffe figure into it?”

  “I think we need to talk to two people,” said Horakova. “Amanda Wyrick, because she knew Bella best, in fact the only one here who really did know her so far as we are aware, and that NP&L guy Speidel, because he seems to have appeared on the scene right when she did.”

  “Wyrick’s out at the dig.” With Campbell’s permission, Dr. Arne Wingard had taken the rest of the Eminent Persons on out to the Lost Creek site. Normally one wouldn’t disperse witnesses on a homicide case like that, but Campbell didn’t want them sitting around brooding and getting paranoid; the devil made work for idle hands. He decided that the best way to make them temporarily forget the loss of a colleague and get them sufficiently interested to stick around and not embarrass the Republic by fleeing while screaming bloody murder, was to get them out on the site and thinking about old bones. “Let’s have a word with Speidel. Where is he?”

  “Mrs. Thiessen is serving a kind of brunch out by the outdoor pool,” said Horakova. “Making a virtue of a necessity until we tell them it’s all right to go back inside. I don’t think the other guests have anything to do with this, sir. They’re all regulars and they’ve been here before all this Lost Creek business came up. The Thiessens know them.”

  “Okay, cut them loose, except for Speidel.” Horakova’s phone buzzed and he answered it.

  “Horakova. Yes, Cathy? He does? Aha! Hang on.” He looked up at Campbell. “Speidel has a political file.”

  “He does, does he? Get the skinny on it and catch up with me.”

  Campbell went up to the remaining guests who were clustered around the pool, some of them sipping coffee or sitting at the white wrought-iron tables munching a late breakfast. “Comrades and citizens, thank you very much for your patience,” he said to the group. “I gather you’ve already given your statements to Sergeant MacPherson or Detective Botha. If that’s the case, then we need detain you no longer. I know you have things you need to be doing. Mr. Speidel, could you stay for a bit?” Speidel stayed. He seemed somewhat edgy as Campbell sat down at the white wrought-iron table by the pool. “Mind if I grab some of that coffee?” he asked.

  “Be my guest. Mrs. T. makes a great pot. Why me?”

  “You understand, you were speaking to the dead woman yesterday out at Lost Creek, and apparently also in the bar last night, so I need to go into things a little more in depth in your case,” said Campbell reassuringly.

  “Sure, Colonel,” said Speidel. “I don’t know what I can tell you, though. I never met the woman before yesterday, out at Lost Creek. She just walked up and started a conversation about Tesla energy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She wanted to know what I did, how life was in the Republic for the average guy, that kind of thing,” said Speidel. “Just conversational.”

  “How personal did the conversation get?” asked Campbell.

  “You mean did she, uh…”

  “Was she trying to ring your chimes?” asked Campbell bluntly.

  “Huh?” asked Speidel in confusion. “I never even saw her before yesterday. But yeah, she was friendly, kind of—well, these American women, they’re all… you know what I mean. I heard you’ve been Out There.”

  “Oh? Where did you hear that?” asked Campbell, his eyebrows arching.

  “Come on, Colonel. Everybody remembers what you did during the war, you and that brave lady comrade.”

  “There were many others equally brave involved, but yes, I see what you meant,” said Bob with a sigh. “My fault. Sometimes I forget I was famous once.”

  “How can you forget being a national hero?” asked Speidel curiously.

  “Oh, it can be done, with practice and effort,” said Bob. “Anyway, Bella Sutcliffe was flirting with you out at the site? And later on in the hotel bar, possibly trying to lure you up to her room?”

  “Well, yeah, maybe.” Speidel was truly sweating now. “Look, Colonel, I kidded around with her, but I never would have done anything like that, I swear. My wife would kill me!”

  “And you told her that?” Bob asked.

  “Uh, yeah. She thought it was funny, believe it or not.”

  “Yes, I think she would have,” replied Campbell with a sigh. “If Americans aren’t screaming that we’re evil incarnate, they think we’re quaint. I don’t know which is worse. Mr. Thiessen says you were the next person to leave the hotel bar after Miss Sutcliffe. That right?”

  “Yeah, I left at maybe ten after eleven.”

  “You didn’t see her again in the hallway? You didn’t go down the corridor by the desk that leads to the indoor pool?”

  “No, absolutely not!” said Speidel firmly. “I had to get to bed. I got up early this morning and I was about to hit the road but then those kids found the body. I really need to be in Free Helena right now checking out the main transmitter. Are we done yet? I really need to get going.”

  Bob glanced over and he saw Tom Horakova beckoning him. “Excuse me a moment.” He walked around the pool. “Yes?”

  Tom grinned at him. “Question. You go to a lot of Old NVA shindigs with Jason, right?”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Bob. “Why?”

  “Ever run across Commandant Billy Basquine from the Corvallis Flying Column at any of them?”

  “A couple of times. He was a lean, mean bastard and he deserved every bit of his rep. Why do you ask?”

  “You remember about four years after Longview, when the government finally figured things had settled down enough to where we could start passing out the medals and commendations? When the Old NVA Association was formed, for those who were Volunteers during the guerrilla war, before the changeover when the NVA became the NDF?”

  “Yes, at the end of the July Days, if memory serves. I was fourteen and Missoula was still occupied then. No, I tell a lie, I was still thirteen. And this has what to do with our case, exactly?” asked Campbell.

  “It’s relevant, maybe. That’s when yon laddie Dave had his little contretemps that earned him a file,” explained Horakova. “A thin one, admittedly.”

  “Twenty-eight years ago?”

  “Yeah. This happened in Bend, Oregon. There was a desk at the local Party office where former Volunteers could come in and fill out the form for their veterans’ benefits and all the little extras NVA vets get, plus the right to wear the decoration and the roundel on their civvies. Actually it was just a table in the lobby
in this case. One day Billy Basquine was in the office, and the guy on regular duty goes on his lunch break, so the Commandant himself sits in for him.”

  “Yeah, I recall Jason telling me that was Billy B, no job too big or small, during the war or after,” replied Campbell with a nod.

  “Anyway, in comes young Speidel, and he fills out the form for NVA benefits and the medal and hands it to Basquine, whom he apparently doesn’t know by sight, which was odd right off the bat. Then Basquine sees the form isn’t filled out all the way.” Horakova began to chuckle. “So Basquine asks Speidel what company he was in, who was his company commander, who was his brigade commander, who were the required two other Volunteers who would vouch for him? So forth and so on. Speidel says ‘I wasn’t with an actual NVA unit. I was on special duty.’ ‘What kind of special duty?’ Basquine asks him. In response, Speidel pulls a sheaf of papers out of a shopping bag and plunks it down. Old computer screen shots of a blog. Okay, long story short, Speidel wasn’t even in the Homeland during the war, never mind being a Volunteer. He was a blogger who spent the entire War of Independence sitting in his mother’s basement in Florida, writing under an anonymous name through proxy servers on a site hosted in Kazakhstan. To add insult to injury, the stuff he wrote was so damned mild that he never even got an FBI visit!”

  “That’s mild,” agreed Campbell with a bemused grin.

  “Then when the shooting’s all done and the blood spilled, he comes slithering Home and demands full NVA bennies for his so-called service.”

  “I assume Commandant Basquine was duly impressed?” queried Bob.

  “When he finally realized what the story was, Basquine jumped up and beat the living crap out of Speidel, then arrested him and dragged him down to the Guard station and turned him in as a counterrevolutionary. Which he wasn’t, he was just being an asshole.”

  “Yeah, even in the Northwest Republic, being an asshole isn’t against the law, although it’s not a good idea in a society long on guns and individual responsibility,” commented Campbell.