Rampage

by John Sandford

  Armie said, “Gentlemen,” which made both Twist and Harmon smile and caused Harmon to say, “Let’s just go with men. We got a place to sit?”

  Armie took them in and then asked Harmon, “You carrying a gun?”

  Harmon held his arms out to the sides. “No, of course not. We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

  Hoyt asked, “What the hell is going on?”

  “Just listen,” his father said. “Come this way.”

  They all went into the living room, to a rectangle of beige Italian couches, and sat down. Shay outlined their involvement with Singular and where things stood now.

  When she was done, Harmon leaned forward and said, “I was there the day you came to San Francisco to talk to Cartwell, Stewart, and Sync. That’s when I figured out they were killing people, and I started to edge away. I heard through the grapevine that you hadn’t been fully recruited, as they say. That you were edging away yourself.”

  Hoyt stood up and said, “Killing people? Dad, what are they talking about?”

  “Sit down, Hoyt, and just listen,” Armie said, then turned back to Harmon. “They didn’t tell me they were killing people. I had to figure that out. I couldn’t see how they could deliver what they said they could without killing people. So—I never went through with it. They’re still pushing me, though. I talked to one of the top people a few days ago.”

  Twist said, “No time to beat around the bush, Mr. Armie—Cartwell and Stewart and Senator Dash are all dead. They’re trying to move the company—the research records and the critical personnel—to a new location, while leaving the impression that the company has been destroyed. They can’t have any loose ends. And you might be one.”

  “You’re telling me I need to buy some protection.”

  “The best you can afford, at least for a while,” Harmon said. “I have some friends who could give that to you, if you need a recommendation. We’re trying to track Thorne, who’s their main killer. We know he flew into Santa Fe, but we don’t know where he is now.”

  “So he could be coming here.”

  “He could be—but they’ve got lots of problems right now, and you’re not the worst of them. Unless you know more than we think you do.”

  “I know some stuff,” Armie said.

  “Like what?” Shay asked.

  He shrugged. “I was recruited by Varek Royce. You know him?”

  “Yes,” Harmon said.

  “He was my original contact with Singular. They put you together with another rich guy, like they’re recruiting you for the country club. He likes to talk about the way he set the whole thing up, because it was so complicated. He didn’t give me any of the details on the research, but he hinted at some of the other players so I’d know I’d be covered against…government interference.”

  “I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about it,” Harmon said.

  “Okay.”

  “We believe that the political protection goes all the way to the vice president.”

  Armie rolled his teeth across his lower lip, stared into the fireplace, then said, “Well, that scares the shit out of me.”

  “Why is that, Mr. Armie?” Twist asked.

  Armie said, “Because Varek called me the day before yesterday, told me that some environmental crazies were making lots of noise about the company and the plane accident and so on. That would be you.”

  They nodded.

  “Well, he said it would all be resolved in the next few days, that the FBI would be pulled off, that everything about the company would be as normal. I said I wasn’t sure how that could happen, and he just said, ‘Watch.’ ”

  He continued: “I’ve been thinking about it ever since. You can’t just stop an investigation like this, not after it becomes public. Not now, especially after Senator Dash…died…however that happened. And the Chinese are involved now—I saw it on a news feed this afternoon. So how do you stop that? The only thing I can think of is to have the president squash it—though it’d be ugly even then. But the vice president…he has no executive power….”

  Harmon said, “Tell him.”

  Armie asked Twist, “What?”

  “We’re running a little scared here. If the vice president should become president…,” Twist said, “the whole Singular story would be lost in the publicity that would follow an…”

  “Assassination,” Shay said.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Hoyt said, and was on his feet again, looking wild-eyed at Shay. “What are you, some sort of terrorist? Dad, we gotta get these people out of here….”

  Armie stood up and said, once and for all, “Hoyt, SHUT THE HELL UP!”

  Hoyt sat down. Armie held on to his forehead for a moment, as if it were throbbing, then wandered over to the fireplace and said, turning back, “I can’t even begin to believe that something like that would be on order.” But he didn’t sound so sure.

  Harmon shook his head and asked Armie: “If you really had to, who’s the highest guy in the government you could get to? Who’d take your call?”

  Armie said, “Well, I’m a lifelong conservative Republican, so nobody very high in this administration. I guess maybe the Speaker of the House could find a few minutes for me.”

  “If you could get to him, tell him what’s going on here, ask him to talk to the head of the Secret Service…”

  Armie was already shaking his head. “Can’t do it. First of all, I don’t know him that well, and he’d think I was a right-wing nut peddling a conspiracy theory. Then, if anything did happen, if there was just an attempt of some kind, I’d be implicated. I’m willing to help with anything reasonable, but I can’t be the public face on this.”

  They all sat silently for a moment, then Twist asked, “What might ‘anything reasonable’ include?”

  “What do you want?” Armie asked.

  Harmon gave Armie the name of a company in Washington, D.C., that provided protection for high-risk government and corporate executives.

  “Most of them are ex–Secret Service, and a lot of those guys worked on the presidential protection detail. They’re very good, and they’ll provide you references—people you know.”

  “So what do you want?” Armie asked.

  Twist asked, “Does your company issue business credit cards?”

  “Sure. Both Amex and Visa.”

  Twist said, “We need to travel fast, but we haven’t been able to fly on our own credit cards….”

  “Not a problem. You want a plane, too?”

  —

  Ninety minutes after they’d paid their house call, Shay, Harmon, and Twist rolled up to the front of an ordinary-looking yellow-brick building in downtown Oklahoma City. Harmon got out of the Mercedes, met a security guard at the door, and was escorted inside.

  When Twist took the truck around the block, they found that the building that was so simple-looking from the front actually occupied two full city blocks.

  Ten minutes later, Harmon called and said, “I’m coming out.”

  They picked him up at the front door, and he said, “If Armie’s lying to us, which I don’t think he is, they might be able to track us with these things, but otherwise—no more Twist motels. We’re checking into someplace decent and we’re getting room service. We got an Amex black card. We could rent a jet if we needed one.”

  “Let me see,” Shay said.

  Harmon handed her the two cards, and she squinted at them in the overhead light. A black Amex and a Visa, issued in the name of…Dallas Harmon. She looked at Harmon and said, “Dallas? That’s your first name? Dallas?”

  “I don’t use it much,” Harmon said.

  “What do your friends call you?” Twist asked. “Dally? Dal-a-reeno? Dal-issimo? The Daller?”

  Harmon waited until Twist ran down, then said, “No.”

  “No nicknames at all?”

  “My friends sometimes call me Harm, because of what I do to people who call me Dal-a-ree
no.”

  “Ooh,” said Shay.

  —

  They got three rooms at the Skirvin Hilton, which, Shay thought, was the best hotel she’d ever been in, with sheets that appeared to have been ironed, marble Jacuzzi baths, and twenty-four-hour room service. The desk clerk glanced at the black card, then the company name on it, and after that, there was no problem with anything. They were even happy to see X, or pretended to be.

  In the elevator, Shay petted X on the head and said, “Room-service cheeseburgers.”

  There was no talk about it, but Cruz and Shay took a room together, with X. Cade and Harmon shared another, and Twist, who didn’t share, was by himself. Shay and Cruz were in the shower, with a fragrant bar of hotel soap, when the doorbell buzzed and Cruz said, “Can’t be room service. We put a DO NOT DISTURB sign out there.”

  The doorbell rang again, and then again, and again, and Cruz put a towel around his waist and found Twist outside the door. “You weren’t answering either the phone or the walkie-talkie….”

  “We turned them off,” Cruz said. “Because we didn’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “Okay, but we need you down in my room, like, in one minute,” Twist said.

  “What happened?”

  “Cade found something. One minute.”

  —

  Five minutes later, after a thorough rinse, Cruz and Shay were in fresh clothes and in Twist’s doorway, Cruz muttering in frustration, “Damn Cade is messin’ with us, I just know it….”

  “I don’t think so,” Shay said, finger-combing her wet hair. “I don’t think Twist would let him.”

  “Get in here; close the door,” Twist said. Harmon and Cade were sprawled in chairs around a desk, Twist standing over them. Twist said to Cade, “Tell them.”

  Cade looked up from his laptop at Shay and Cruz—and all of them felt a bit of his heartache as he took them in—then looked back to his screen and said, “I lost Thorne for a while. So I started looking back through old flight plans to see where else he’s been, see if there were any patterns or other sites we should know about. I found a trip into Mid-Way Regional Airport, which is near Waxahachie, Texas, which is south of Dallas–Fort Worth.”

  “Used to be a hell of a whorehouse in Waxahachie,” Harmon said. Then, into the following silence, “That’s what I heard, anyway. And I don’t think that’s why Thorne went there.”

  Cade said, “No. I don’t think so. The name Waxahachie is so unusual that it stuck in my head from something I’d seen before, but it took a few minutes to get it back. It’s where North Texas Ballistics is.”

  Shay: “And that is?”

  “A custom gun company. I think that’s where he got the super-gun. When I looked, I couldn’t find anyone else making them. Not like you guys saw…”

  “Okay,” said Cruz. “Why is that urgent news?”

  “Because I just found a new flight plan for Thorne—he’s going there again.”

  “Getting another gun?” Twist said.

  “The one they have is working pretty good,” said Harmon.

  They thought about that for a minute, then Shay asked, “How far is it down there?”

  “Three and a half hours, more or less,” Cade said. “I already looked it up.”

  “We could get there faster by driving than we could by trying to fly,” Harmon said.

  Shay looked at them all. “So you want to check out and go? I’m a little worn down, to tell the truth.”

  “We all are,” Twist said. “We thought we’d get some sleep tonight, something decent to eat, and take off at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. We’d be there before noon.”

  “Good, let’s do that,” she said. “And hey, Cade, great work tonight.”

  “Yeah,” he said into the screen. “Thanks.”

  Cruz gave her a nudge, and Harmon twiddled his fingers, and Twist said, “Get some sleep.”

  —

  Shay and Cruz went back to their room and ordered room service. It was outrageously expensive, and Cruz scrawled an equally outrageous tip at the bottom of the bill, after which the room-service guy bowed his way out of the room.

  Shay pulled the top off a silver tray and found the largest steak she’d ever seen.

  “I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian,” she said. “Some other time.”

  They ate and talked about nothing and went to bed. Shay had been surprised to find that Cruz was gentle and not all that experienced. In the midst of so much ugliness, it was wonderful to be alone with him again—to focus on each other for a night and let their worries and fears slip away.

  Before she slept, her thoughts turned to Odin. Where was he, what was he doing? Was he in the hospital still? In jail? And how would she find out?

  She might have worried about it longer, but rest had been scarce, and she felt herself sinking, as though sleep itself had caught her by the hand and pulled her under.

  —

  At that same hour, Odin was in none of the places Shay imagined. He was asleep in a Holiday Inn. He’d spent the day at Dash’s ranch with an FBI forensic team. The doctors at Flagstaff hadn’t been happy about it, but they’d given him a wheelchair and released him under the supervision of the FBI.

  The FBI was all new faces: the lead investigator was named Karl Barnstead, a tall, thin, red-faced man who wore a cowboy hat and boots and reminded Odin of Harmon.

  Once at the ranch, Barnstead said, “Show us where this so-called cremation area is.”

  Odin pointed down the runway. “That way. Right at the end.”

  And so three Chevy Tahoes headed down there. Odin was relieved to see what appeared to be an undisturbed mound of ash.

  An older, gray-haired man with a handlebar mustache got out of one of the Tahoes, followed by a middle-aged woman with maroon hair. They both looked at the ash, and the woman said, “Wood ash.”

  “Yeah. What they’d do is make a big pile of wood, put the body on it, stack more wood on top, and set it off with gasoline,” Odin said.

  The man sniffed. “I can smell some gas. Of course, this is a landing strip.” He looked at Odin and said, “My name is Frank Cantone, and my colleague is Anne Wexler.”

  Wexler said, “Let me go get a probe.”

  She took out what looked like the shaft of an extra-long golf club without the head. She stuck it in the ash, moved it around a bit, and said, “We got about four feet.”

  Barnstead said, “Some of these places burn their garbage.”

  Cantone shook his head. “Not garbage. You can always smell that. Could be paper trash.”

  “Better make a cut,” Wexler said.

  Cantone looked up at the clear blue sky. “Yeah. We’re gonna get hot.”

  —

  They put on white suits that appeared to be made out of paper, or some kind of thin plastic, and breathing masks and pulled paper hoods over their heads. They made a cut through the ash using a narrow hoe, carefully scraping a thin, straight trench in the middle of the heap. Progress was slow, but Barnstead and Odin sat in the back of a Tahoe, where they could watch in air-conditioned semi-comfort.

  After a half hour of work, both the forensic scientists stopped and put the hoe aside and knelt near the cut. Cantone reached into it, and they both huddled, and Barnstead got out of the Tahoe. Odin rolled down his window so he could hear, and Cantone said, “Piece of black plastic.”

  Barnstead asked, “Mean anything?”

  Odin called, “Body bag. They didn’t take the bodies out; they burned them in the bags.”

  “That would be consistent,” Wexler said.

  “Keep working,” Barnstead said.

  A fed from another one of the trucks carried some water bottles to the sweating forensic team, then came back to Barnstead’s truck. “We got cold water and Coke. Want anything?”

  “How come you got cold water and Coke?” Barnstead asked.

  “I was a Boy Scout,” the other agent said.

  —

  The wait grew longer,
but then Cantone and Wexler came up with something black-and-white and perhaps a half inch long.

  Barnstead got out of the truck again. “What?”

  “That’s what you call a piece of a spinous process,” Wexler said. “It’s a bone—once, not long ago, part of somebody’s spine, now somewhat burned.”

  “Not long ago?”

  “It’s fresh.”

  “Told you!” Odin called from the truck.

  —

  When they took him to the Holiday Inn, late that evening, more than twenty pieces of human bone and a few teeth had been taken out of the ash heap, and they’d examined less than a tenth of it. None of the material was old, Cantone said, and though they’d need DNA work to determine how many bodies were involved, and DNA would be tough because of the burning, he was confident they would get some from the interior of the teeth. In the meantime, he had two different slivers of what he said were femurs—and they didn’t match.

  “Two different individuals, at least. From the way the finds are layered, I think we got a lot more than that.”

  Barnstead said, “I gotta make a call. Really got to make a call.”

  —

  Before Odin went to sleep, he wondered where Shay and the others were. And what would happen to him: the investigators had been nice so far, and now that they had bodies, they seemed to believe him. What they might do, though, was unpredictable. They certainly had enough on him to put him in jail—for the Eugene raid that started it all, if nothing else.

  He didn’t worry about that, though. Instead, he thought about Fenfang…her powerful will, their first laugh, the way she kissed….

  It took a while, and his wounded leg ached, but he finally slept.

  Of the interstate highways that Shay had driven, I-35 ranked near the bottom for scenery. On the other hand, it was efficient, taking them through the Dallas–Fort Worth glob fairly quickly.

  They never got into the main part of Waxahachie. North Texas Ballistics was located in a business-industrial park along a frontage road north of town, behind a big Owens Corning plant. They missed the exit they needed, took a while turning around, and cruised North Texas Ballistics for the first time just after eleven o’clock.