by Peter Sexton
Trammel said nothing.
“You still can’t tell me who I’m up against here?” Sarah asked.
“I honestly don’t know.”
Sarah stared long and hard, nodded to herself. “I get the feeling you’re telling me the truth.”
“I am.”
Sarah nodded before walking into the kitchen to check her computer. Still no sign of Miranda.
Miranda woke to find they were sitting in the Town Car, parked out in front of her uncle Walter’s house. “How long have we been here?”
“Just a few minutes,” Lawrence said.
“Did you see who came in that car?” Miranda asked, indicating the mid-size sedan sitting a short distance away, hidden just around the corner and behind some trees, barely visible in the soft moon- light. It looked very similar to the one from in front of Your Postal Partner.
“What car? I don’t see... Oh, all right, I see it now.” Lawrence shook his head. “It must have already been here.” A beat of silence passed between them. “You think maybe they’re waiting for you inside?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So now what?”
“I’m gonna go in,” Miranda said, “have a look around. If someone is waiting for me in there—”
“That’s not a very good idea.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Let’s think about it for a minute.”
“Have you ever used a gun?” Miranda asked, as she retrieved the revolver she had taken from the security guard at Earth’s Own and handed it to Lawrence.
He nodded. “Since a lot of my characters use them, I decided to take a handgun training course.” He paused. “I still don’t like them, but I can shoot fairly well.”
“Go to the back of the house and have a look around. And be ready in case I call out for help.”
Lawrence stared for a long moment at the weapon, obvious unease washing over his face. Then he opened the cylinder and confirmed that it was loaded.
Miranda pulled the Glock from her backpack and held it down by the side of her leg.
“What are you going to do?” Lawrence asked.
“Go in the front...see who’s waiting for me.” The sound of her own voice sounded foreign to her; it held a confidence that she didn’t truly own.
“No,” Lawrence said. “I should go in the front.”
Miranda said, “These people killed Maren, my father, Sarah....” She stopped, surprised that she had added Sarah to her list of the dead. She wondered if she truly believed her friend had lost her life back in Nevada. “They won’t stop until I’m dead too.” A beat. “But I can’t keep running.”
Miranda eased the door open with her foot, holding the pistol in both hands, pointing it into the house. She found no one in the dark living room. Still holding the pistol out in front of her, she made her way through the house to the guest bedroom. Nothing. There was a small pile of clothes on the bed in the master bedroom. She thought she heard a faint metallic whisper of steel sliding against steel, so she stood fast and listened. The sound seemed to be coming from the master bathroom.
Heart racing, beads of sweat formed on Miranda’s forehead as she kept the gun up and approached the bathroom. Light was stealing out from under the door. Someone was here. She crouched as low as she could, twisted the doorknob, and pushed her way into the small room.
Miranda gasped, as she found Steven Trammel struggling with handcuffs, attempting to free himself from the pipes he was shackled to. She saw an amalgam of anger, fear and frustration on his face.
“Miranda.” He sounded relieved.
Miranda stood up and let the gun down to her side. “Oh my God, Steven! What’s going on?” she asked. “What the hell are you doing here? How did you end up like this?”
“I came here looking for you. There was some crazed, half-naked bitch I thought was gonna kill me.”
“What? Who?”
“I don’t know. She held me at gunpoint and had me cuff myself to these pipes.”
Miranda’s heart was racing once again. “This woman, what did she look like?”
“Little taller than you, brown hair, brown eyes, maybe mid-forties.”
“Sarah,” Miranda said, more to herself than to Trammel. Then: “Where is she now?”
Sixty-One
Gillian exited the highway and pulled into a Chevron station, surprised the car hadn’t already run out of gas. She was certain Miranda and Lawrence were headed to Walter’s house in Little Rock. She could risk losing them for the moment.
Within minutes she was back on the road, steering with one hand and eating a prepackaged ham-and-cheese sandwich with the other. She pushed the car a little harder, trying to make up some of the lost time and distance.
Her mind drifted to Edward. She had missed him, contrary to what Miranda might believe, contrary to what she had tried to convince herself. She had missed him very much. She believed Lawrence had known this all along, while she herself had not. And still Lawrence had loved her unconditionally, un- selfishly. And now he was putting his life in jeopardy to help her daughter.
Gillian had thought she could walk away from her former life, walk away from the only man she had ever truly loved, walk away from her own daughter. She had told herself that it was the best thing for all of them.
But now she understood how very wrong she had been.
Sixty-Two
Major Toni Lee smiled as she listened to Anderson on the other end of the cell phone. He wanted an up- date, wanted to know where the girl was. He was fishing, and that gave Lee an idea. She said, “I’m minutes from pinpointing her exact location.”
“Excellent. Where are you?”
“Los Angeles.” Silence floated over the line. She continued. “The girl will be out of the picture by morning.”
“Wait,” Anderson said. “I need to talk to her. Call me when you’ve located her.”
Lee heard the urgency in his voice.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I just need to clear something up,” Anderson said, “that’s all.”
“What’s going on?” Lee pressed.
But Anderson ignored the question.
“Actually, Robert, that might be best. There’s a photograph I want to ask you about.”
“What on Earth are you talking about? What photograph?”
Lee didn’t want to tell him more than she already had. It would be better to watch his face when she showed him the photo, gauge his reaction. So far she had given him just enough to make him curious.
General Foster could call at any time asking for an update. Lee could already hear the old man demanding to know what the fuck was going on. It was imperative that she determine just how much of a liability Anderson had become. At least she’d be able to inform Foster that the Earth’s Own security guard, Brian Meyers, had been removed from the equation.
She was about to say something more to Anderson when she noticed the blinking red light on the tracking system had stopped moving. She pushed the button activating the GPS Identification System, and a moment later she had a street address that she recognized.
“Listen,” Lee said, quickly formulating a new plan. “I’ve found her. How soon can you get to her uncle’s house in Little Rock?”
“About an hour,” Anderson said.
“Good. One hour.”
Sixty-Three
Miranda held up her hand, quieting Trammel. She heard a soft, rubbery squeaking. Footsteps. And whoever they belonged to was approaching the bathroom they were currently occupying. Miranda trained her weapon on the open doorway, holding it steady, the muscles in her arms taut. Perspiration coated her palms. She moved her index finger close to the trigger, held it there, ready to fire the weapon if necessary. The footsteps had almost reached them. Miranda wrapped her finger around the trigger, watched as the intruder moved into the doorway, then she let out the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding and lowered the gun. A wide smile enveloped h
er face.
“Sarah,” Miranda cried out. She set the pistol down on the counter, then hurried into her friend’s arms.
Almost immediately, Sarah pulled out of the embrace and said, “There’s a guy lurking around out back.”
“Oh, shit,” Miranda said, hurrying from the room. “He’s with me.”
Ignoring Trammel, Sarah followed Miranda to the backyard where they found Lawrence Blackwell. They brought him into the house with them.
“What about the guy in the john?” Sarah asked. “He told me he was here to help. He tried to feed me some bullshit about being Maren’s father.”
“His name’s Steven Trammel,” Miranda said. She made eye contact with Sarah and held it for a moment before continuing. “It wasn’t bullshit.”
Minutes later, Lawrence left the women alone in the kitchen so they could talk while he went back to the master bath to unshackle Trammel. He wanted Trammel’s help to load the car.
Alone now, Miranda said to Sarah, “I’d under- stand if you want out.”
Sarah looked up from her PowerBook. “Yeah, right! I’m not going anywhere.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved,” Miranda said. “They destroyed your home.” It was hardly a whisper. Miranda felt tears forming in her eyes. “They tried to kill you.”
“I know.” Sarah was shedding tears now, too. “But I don’t want to think about it anymore. The assholes responsible for all of this need to pay. Let’s just do this. For your father. For Maren.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah.” Confident and resolute.
Miranda hugged her friend close, neither woman speaking as they held the embrace. After nearly a minute, Miranda pulled herself away and said, “You have to tell me something though.”
Sarah nodded but remained silent for a time. Then: “Of course. Anything.”
“How’d you manage to get out of your house alive? I saw it; there was almost nothing left.”
“You remember who I bought the house from, right? Mr. Gemignani? Just one of the benefits of living in the former home of a paranoid crime boss,” Sarah said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know my office? You commented once on how it seemed like it should have been bigger? How from the inside it felt a little too...cramped?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a secret panel that opens to a corridor behind the west wall. Stairs take you to an underground tunnel that leads three houses down, about two hundred yards away. That other house was included in the property.”
“I knew that room should have been bigger than it was.”
“I laughed when Mr. Gemignani first showed me the tunnel and told me what it was for. I almost forgot it was there.”
“Good thing you remembered. When I saw the charred remains of your Land Rover it made it hard to believe you hadn’t been killed.”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore, all right?”
“So whose Mustang is that you’re driving?”
Miranda flashed on Sarah’s new set of wheels.
“Mine. Got it at a used car lot.”
Though she tried to move on, Miranda still had pressing questions. “Did you see who destroyed your house?”
Sarah told Miranda everything she knew about the attack, which wasn’t much. “All I know for sure,” she said, “is once I started tracking down the origin of the email address, that’s when someone started tracking me.”
“So these people are good with computers?”
“No, not good. Fucking awesome,” Sarah admit- ted. “They had a lock on me before I even knew they were there.” She seemed to consider something. “If I had been working on my PowerBook, maybe I wouldn’t have lost everything.” She returned to her new computer and started tapping a few keys. “Well, I didn’t exactly lose everything. Look at this.” The elusive fourth list popped onto the monitor.
“You figured it out?” Miranda asked.
“Bet your ass I did.” Sarah pointed at the screen. “MRE. That stands for Meals Ready to Eat. They’re what soldiers eat when they’re in the field.”
“I don’t understand. What’s the connection?”
“Exactly! That was bugging me, too. What the hell’s the connection?” She made a couple of key- strokes and brought up new windows containing the second and third lists and placed them side-by-side.
“Think about what I taught you when you were in my computer programming class, then look at the info for each of these files.”
Miranda did as she was instructed, moving her eyes from one document window to the other.
“It looks like the MRE file is newer,” Miranda said.
Sarah maneuvered back to the documents them- selves and hit COMMAND-I in order to get the file information for each. Then Miranda noticed it imme- diately.
She said, “This says all the files were created on the same day, at the exact same time. This can’t be right.”
“It’s not.”
“Then how—”
“Probably the same people who took control of my computer before they torched my house. Let’s assume they doctored these files to make them all look like they were created by your father, all on the same day.”
“But why? What are you getting at?”
Sarah picked up some papers from the table and handed them to Miranda.
After a quick glance, Miranda said, “These are my dad’s notes.”
Sarah took the stack back, selected one specific page, and handed it to Miranda. “This was an email your father must have gotten by accident.” She pointed at the paper. “Read the bottom.”
Miranda read the passage over several times before looking back up at Sarah. She almost couldn’t get the words out, her mouth suddenly dry as the summer.
She said, “This must be why they killed him. He must have figured out what they were really planning to do with his research. And he put it together that they were setting him up from the very beginning.”
Sixty-Four
They were looking at another document now.
“Based on what your father wrote here,” Sarah said, “I’d say they’re planning a freakin’ massacre.”
Miranda’s head was still reeling from the last document she had read. Lacing a baby food product with a small quantity of caffeine to make it addictive was bad enough, but her father’s notes suggested that the caffeine levels in the MREs were so high that cardiac arrest following consumption would be a medical certainty.
“And from what I’ve been able to learn about MREs,” Sarah continued, “the amount of hot sauce and catsup and other crap soldiers drown them in would cover up any sign of the caffeine. They wouldn’t know what hit them until it was too late.”
Miranda picked up the email they had just been looking at and read the line at the bottom once more: Each soldier on this list will receive altered MREs. She looked up at Sarah and said, “They’re planning to poison American soldiers with their own rations.”
“It looks that way, yeah.”
“I don’t understand. How are they going to get the poison into the MREs?”
Trammel, who had just reentered the room, an- swered the question for Sarah. “In addition to baby food, Earth’s Own has been manufacturing MREs for the military for years. They’re already set up to do it. They can manufacture and ship tainted product any time they...”
Trammel’s thought trailed off.
“What, Steven?” Miranda asked. “What is it?”
“The tainted product is probably being loaded as we speak. Anderson had me arrange for some trucks to be delivered to the lab in Camarillo. I saw them there before I came here looking for you. That must be what the trucks were for. They’re getting ready to ship it out.”
“Where to?” Lawrence asked.
“I don’t know,” Trammel said. “I don’t even know who’s going to be driving the trucks. Anderson told me the drivers were going to be supplied. They would have their own destination orders.”
Sarah said, “Where do they usually ship the MREs from?”
“I don’t know,” Trammel admitted. “I’m just guessing here, but I think Earth’s Own ships to a military base somewhere on the east coast. The military handles overseas shipment themselves.”
Lawrence: “But they first have to get the product to the east coast. We just need to figure out if they’re shipping ground or air, then notify the authorities.”
Sarah shook her head. “Calling the authorities is out. I’ve seen what these people are capable of...they probably control the authorities. No. We need to contact the media...they need to be involved now. And then we need to find the trucks en route. If we can get live national media coverage, then the people behind all of this won’t be able to keep the American citizens in the dark.”
“That’s a great plan,” Miranda said, “but we still need to figure out where the trucks are gonna be headed.”
“They’re going to ship it by train,” Trammel said, confidence heavy in his voice.
Sarah: “How can you be sure?”
“Anderson specified that the trailers would be going directly onto flatcars.”
Lawrence: “So then they must be headed to Union Station?”
Trammel thought about it for a long moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s too much activity at Union Station, too many eyes. Too much potential for something to go wrong.”
“What other train station could they be planning to ship from?” Sarah asked.
“Maybe they’re not going to ship out of a train station,” Trammel said. “Okay, this is a long shot. I don’t even know if the stories I’ve heard are true, but if they are then this would be the perfect place for them to take the trucks.”