Earthquake Games

by Bonnie Ramthun

  Maybe the New Madrid was just one of their worst-case simulations. Joe loved fighting virtual nuclear battles with his missile defense system, shooting down incoming nuclear bombs. Sometimes, though, his job as a war gamer called for fighting a losing war. In these games everyone died. He hated them. He understood the necessity of fighting for the last scrap of breathable air in Australia, the last penguin in Antarctica, the faint potential for human life to continue on the planet after a nuclear holocaust, but he still hated it. He hated fighting a war game and using every last brilliant pebble, every single ground interceptor, every patriot battery, and then sitting helplessly while the final missiles fell like deadly rain.

  Perhaps that was the New Madrid. An earthquake game that wasn’t supposed to ever happen. But it still didn’t quite fit right, it didn’t feel right. Why would Jim Leetsdale have included this game in his selection of secret pictures?

  Joe moved on to his second worry, the second puzzle piece that lay on his imaginary table. Why hadn’t a Tesla machine been built and used before now? Terrorist groups had existed in the United States since the American Patriots had kicked the English out and declared themselves a country. There were labor riots in the twenties and thirties, coal strikes in the West in the twenties. Then there was George Metesky, the Mad Bomber, who terrified New Yorkers from 1940 to 1957, an astonishing seventeen years. Joe had seen a late-night documentary on Metesky and was amazed when he saw the plain, ordinary face of the madman who had injured so many people with his bombs. Wouldn’t George Metesky have shaken down buildings with a Tesla machine if he could? Perhaps Metesky just wanted to see things get blown up.

  But what about the sixties? Joe knew about the dark side of the sixties, more than most children of his generation who’d only read the sanitized flower-power history textbooks or seen the vapid television shows from the period. His father was a Vietnam veteran and an insurance claim adjuster after his tour of duty. He worked a lot of claims from universities, hospitals, and government buildings that were bombed and vandalized by the “love generation.”

  He had, in fact, done some paperwork on the Patty Hearst case, the dreadful story of the kidnapped newspaper heiress who’d been tortured and raped by the Symbionese Liberation Army back in 1974. Beaten and psychologically terrified, she’d been compelled to join their bank-robbing gang. Joe, who’d heard about Patty Hearst from his father, remembered how disgusted his father was that she was put on trial as a gang member when the SLA was finally captured.

  So if Donald DeFreeze, the SLA leader, had access to a Tesla earthquake machine, wouldn’t he have used it? Joe blinked again, realizing his thoughts were slowing and stretching like taffy. He was starting to fall asleep. Yes, Donald DeFreeze would have happily slaughtered hundreds to spread his message of peace and love. Maybe the dark man, the legendary terrorist who somehow slipped away before DeFreeze’s death in fire, knew about the earthquake machine and they just hadn’t built it yet.

  Then there was the Oklahoma City bombing, and there was a dark man there too, wasn’t there? John Doe Number Two, the one so many witnesses had sworn seeing with Timothy McVeigh before the truck bomb had gone up and the building had come down. He had escaped somehow, just like the dark man from the SLA, escaped so completely that finally the FBI declared that he didn’t exist, that only Timothy McVeigh had parked the truck and set off the killer bomb.

  The print blurred in front of Joe’s eyes. He was tired, but he was spooking himself out, too. Somehow he was imagining the dark man as Stephen King had written him in his stories, the walking dude with his rundown bootheels and his jolly mad grin. Joe thought of hiking into the dunes, tomorrow or next week or next year, and finding latitude 37 and longitude 105, and there would be a man with no face sitting cross-legged on a dune crest, his arms cradling a metal device drenched in blood, his smile as sharp and mindless as the grin of a shark.

  There was a tapping on the glass behind him. Joe whirled around, the books on his lap falling to the floor, his heart giving a tremendous horsekick. For a second he saw a face, crazed and madly gleeful, framed in the black and the snow whirl of the window. Then it was just snow, and the tapping was a branch from his tree that had torn in the relentless wind.

  “Ah, jeez,” Joe said to himself, putting a hand to his heart. If he were twenty years older, he was sure he’d be dead right now.

  “Hey,” Alan said from behind him, and Joe whirled again. Alan was standing in the doorway to his study, hair frowzled, eyes red, scratching at an armpit and frowning at Joe. “You were supposed to wake me up at two.”

  Joe started laughing and clapped a hand over his mouth to muffle it. It sounded wrong, too high and too scared. He had succeeded in completely weirding himself out. Two cops in the house with guns and a blizzard outside so he had to go inventing himself a supernatural monster.

  “I got carried away,” he said. “I was trying to fit all the pieces together and I just can’t do it.”

  “Like how come Ted Kaszinski didn’t use a Tesla machine to bring down civilization?” Alan asked. He rubbed his eyes and stretched.

  “Yeah, the Unabomber, exactly,” Joe said, feeling foolishly happy that someone, anyone else was awake. He didn’t want to be the only one awake right now. “Except with me it was Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking maybe because there’s something missing from your drawing,” Alan said, pointing at the Tesla book spread open on the floor. “Maybe the government took the real drawings and locked them up, and these are ones that don’t work right.”

  Joe bent down and picked up his books, feeling a new respect for Alan Baxter. That would make sense. And the earthquake gamers, they were a government agency, weren’t they?

  “The killers, they’re a government agency, so maybe they could get the good drawings,” Alan said, voicing his thoughts. “But you guys all seem to think the government is a good guy, an impression I really don’t share. Hey, would you mind making me some coffee before you go to bed? I didn’t sleep so well, and I don’t know where your stuff is in the kitchen.”

  “I’d be happy to,” Joe said automatically, his eyes still on the drawing. He was searching for the missing piece, the part of the machine that looked unfinished or strangely incomplete. It wasn’t obvious to him. He surprised himself by yawning, a huge jaw-creaker that made his eyes water.

  “Make me some coffee before you fall over,” Alan said with a smile. Joe nodded and rose to his feet. He was going to make Alan Baxter some coffee, and then he was going to go in and snuggle up next to Alan’s sleeping daughter. He’d be damned if he were going to sleep on his couch because of the measuring look in the old man’s eyes. Still, after making Alan coffee, he went to the bathroom first and brushed his teeth far too long. Alan was safely in Joe’s study when Joe opened the door and walked carefully to his own bedroom, feeling foolishly as though he were sneaking.

  But all guilt was forgotten when he slid carefully under his covers. Eileen was divinely warm and heavy with sleep, curled up on one side with her hair half covering her face. He slowly moved closer until they were spooned together, and within a few seconds, he was sound asleep.

  18

  Special Investigations Bureau, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  “I see you made it through the night,” Harben said. Eileen grinned around a mouthful of latte. She was still half frozen, exhilarated by the glorious morning world. The wind had blown all night, sculpting the heavy snow into enormous white drifts. The storm itself was now moving ponderously over Kansas and into the Midwest, feeding from the warm Gulf moisture and storming heavily where it went.

  Colorado Springs had woken to a lovely hard blue sky and a moveless world of glittering white. Because the storm had brought winds with it, the snow had blown from the trees before they could build up enough of a covering to crack branches and send old, weak trees to the ground. Therefore, everyone had power and hot water and, with the exception of icy streets, a harmless
aftermath to the storm.

  “We made it,” Eileen said. “But you’ll notice we’re wearing the same clothes as yesterday. I’m hoping to get some fresh stuff soon.”

  “We’ve got a bag for each of you,” Harben said. “I forgot about it yesterday. Sorry. Hetrick packed a bag for you, Eileen, so don’t worry about O’Brien going through your underwear.”

  “I have very unexciting underwear,” Eileen said. Her cheeks started to sting a little in the warm air, and her nose suddenly regained its sense of smell. Her latte suddenly came alive with chocolate and she took a heavenly warm gulp. “But thanks.”

  “Alan Baxter wants to head back to the San Luis Valley this morning,” Rosen said. “We couldn’t talk him out of it.”

  “He should be safe at the Williams’s Ranch,” Eileen said unhappily. Harben looked at her sharply, and she nodded her head slightly. That was enough, for Harben. Harben, like Rosen, would not discuss Eileen’s parentage with her unless she wished him to.

  “No reason to hold him here,” Harben said. “But let’s go into my office. I’d like to know what you came up with last night.”

  “Some interesting things,” Eileen said. This was going to be fun, laying out the different information they’d discovered and seeing if Harben bought their way of piecing everything together. Breakfast that morning had been far too early but more fun than Eileen expected. Joe had dug a huge bag of pancake mix from his cabinet and what seemed like a five-gallon jug of pancake syrup. He continually surprised her with what he considered important. Who would think, pancakes? He made them superbly: thin and steaming and with a crisp crust at the edges that crunched beautifully under her fork.

  The morning sun was striking in dazzling spears through the windows as she followed Harben to his office. Eileen knew the storm was going to be more bark than bite, today, for the police. The drifts would be a trial for the snowplow drivers and an education for the military personnel from points south of Colorado who’d never tried to bust a snowdrift before. This would bring lots of business to the body repair shops and a few stitches at the local hospitals. Who would think that such a lovely light thing like snow could make a drift that would crumple a car so completely? The dangerous driving conditions would exist for the next few days, as the melting snow froze into glare ice each evening. That would be a problem, but a problem the department handled each winter.

  This morning, the ideas that everyone had come up with during the night were handled and examined and set aside or placed in what they all thought of as the explanation. Someone in Jacob Mitchell’s organization, perhaps even Mitchell himself, had killed Jim Leetsdale and Krista Lewis. They had done this to keep their secret project under wraps, which meant that they probably received funding from black money and their project would be shut down if they were exposed.

  Black money was fragile stuff. The military had a budget that they spent on items so secret not even Congress knew where the money went. This money, nicknamed “black,” was legitimate but dicey. Only successful black projects, like the Stealth bomber, were ever revealed. The unsuccessful ones disappeared. But no project, however secret, had permission to murder people. Area 51 had UFO nuts practically tunneling into it, and the worst that happened to the nuts was the confiscation of their cameras and a quick escort out of the area.

  “Mr. Baxter wants his Bronco cleared,” Bob said from his station near Harben’s office. He was holding a hand over the phone receiver, a habit that irritated Eileen to no end. Why didn’t he ever put anyone on hold? Bob was the office manager, and he and Eileen had never gotten along.

  “Clear it,” Harben said. Then when they were in Harben’s office with the door shut, he seated himself and folded his hands calmly. “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  The Williams’s Ranch, San Luis Valley, Colorado

  Alan Baxter drove carefully past the destroyed rest stop. Gonzalez or one of his deputies had wound orange tape around the entrance sign and put traffic cones across the entrance to the parking lot. The cones were half buried by snow thrown up by a plow. The roads were actually quite good, plowed and sanded and now nearly dry after a half-day of brilliant sunshine. Alan caught only glimpses of the valley as he negotiated his way down the pass. The snow had fallen here, too, frosting the tops of the mountains and turning the tan stretch of the sand dunes into a glittering prism.

  He didn’t care to breathe in the beauty, today. He wanted to get to the Williams’s Ranch, to rest, to decide what to do. He had to call Marcia Fowler, he knew that. Perhaps they should meet. He had the feeling Marcia had the same distrust of government organizations as he did. He hadn’t made any promises to keep the information he’d learned a secret. In fact, he’d promised Gonzalez that he’d come back to the valley and tell him everything.

  The ranch turnoff was neatly plowed. Alan could see tire tracks leading into the pasture where the cattle were kept. Susan and Frank, undoubtedly, feeding the cattle or making sure they were okay, or whatever they did after a snowstorm. He took the main road to the ranch house and parked next to Sam Williams’s truck.

  “Well, hello, Alan,” Beth said. She was, as always, in the kitchen. This time she was seated at an old-fashioned pull-down desk. The front was down, revealing a powerful looking laptop. Beth was typing rapidly as Alan entered with a quick, country-style knock, a double rap of the knuckles that announced entry.

  “Hello, Beth,” Alan said.

  “Coffee if you want; let me finish this up and I’ll join you and we’ll catch up,” she said, her fingers rattling over the keys. Alan found hot coffee in the pot but chose the teakettle instead. It was steaming, on the edge of a boil. He made himself some mild hot tea and sat down at the empty kitchen table and thought for a moment that if Eileen were here right now, he’d be the happiest man alive. Even if she looked at him without love, even if she mistrusted him.

  “Accounts,” Beth said balefully, closing her laptop and her pull-down desk. She stretched and stood up, knuckling the small of her back. “I make myself keep up, or I have to spend days making all the numbers work. How are you, Alan?”

  “I’m fine, now that I’m here,” Alan said, and smiled guiltily. “I hope that doesn’t sound wrong.”

  “Not to me,” Beth said. She poured herself a cup of coffee and stirred in milk from the refrigerator. Sitting down, she curled both hands around her cup and looked directly at Alan. “Tell me all. Did you see your daughter?”

  “I saw her,” Alan said. “She has a boyfriend. He’s a good man, I think. But I still want to punch him in the nose. Isn’t that strange? She’s thirty, and I disapprove of her having a boyfriend.”

  “The last time you saw her she was just out of diapers,” Beth observed with a wry smile. “It takes time, I think. Though it’s not easy for me, even now.”

  “Susan?” Alan asked.

  “She’s—well, she’s what she wants to be, I guess,” Beth said. She gave a small, pained shrug to her shoulders. “She’s the same age as your Eileen. Thirty. Time to get married and have kids, and she acts like she’s twenty. But who am I to drive her life? My mom tried to drive mine, and I ran in every direction but the one she wanted me to go in.”

  “I don’t want to drive her,” Alan said sadly, sipping at his tea. “I just want to get to know her. I think I made a little bit of a start yesterday. I don’t know. But there’s more than Eileen to all of this.”

  “Krista Lewis?” Beth asked. “Your friend Marcia Fowler called last night. She thought you might be able to get out for dinner, but I told her you’d be back today. Is she involved in this too, this Marcia?”

  “She’s the schoolteacher who found Krista’s body on the dunes,” Alan said. “We met at the donut shop the other morning and I thought we should get together. Does your brother know anything more?”

  “More than getting no sleep last night and throwing a dozen half-frozen drunks in his jail?” Beth said. She threw up her hands in a little gesture of disgust. “Early fall snow is bad enough
without adding a bunch of out-of-towners. Reg wouldn’t know anything more about Krista unless the murderer tapped him on the shoulder and confessed. Poor guy. He’s going to have to ask the county to give him another deputy. At least we didn’t have any fatalities last night. Couple of fender benders, but no big wrecks.”

  “So the roads are okay today?” Alan asked. “They were good coming into the valley, but I wasn’t sure how much you’d gotten.”

  “They’re fine,” Beth said dismissively. “Little bit of blowing, six inches or so of good fall snow. Susan and Frank are out in pasture two looking at some of the cattle, but they’ll be back soon. My Sam is working in the barn; he’s got a tractor he wants to fix before it gets really cold. Spring storms are the real killers. That’s when we lose the babies. Calves, I mean. Don’t forget to scrape your shoes the next few days, it’s going to be muddy.”

  “I won’t,” Alan promised. “I better call Miz Fowler and find out if she still wants to talk to me.”

  “She’ll want to talk to you,” Beth said, laughing. Alan, puzzled, looked at her for an explanation, but she waved a hand at him and raised her bulk to her feet. “Got to get the roast in for supper. You go on and call Miz Fowler.”

  The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

  Lucy felt strange without a stroller and a diaper bag. She locked her car and swung her tiny, light handbag over her shoulder. The morning was humid and hot. She’d left Hank with Ted, who’d agreed to take a day off work. School hadn’t started, but most teachers were already putting in full days in meetings and administrative work. Ted was happy to miss a day of that. He’d swung Hank to his hip and declared that they were going to visit the Washington Zoo. Hank giggled delightedly. He loved his daddy.

  Suddenly, Lucy stopped still, wondering if Ted had put sunscreen on Hank. Was he wearing a hat? Did Ted have enough diapers? She blinked and forced her feet, feeling funny in brand new shoes, onward.