by Mike Baron
“SHIT!” Hornbuckle howled. The fucking spike was buried an inch deep. Slowly, painfully, Hornbuckle lifted his leg free of the spike. They were all over the bottom of the pit forming dozens of tiny tents where the tarp had settled.
What kind of lunatic built a tank trap in his driveway?
And this was the man they had chosen to head an investigation?
What if the fucking spikes were coated with human feces?
The wound throbbed and bled. Sucking air through his teeth Hornbuckle leaned against the side of the pit--how had he done it without a backhoe? Even with a backhoe? Hornbuckle raised his right leg, pulled down the sock and looked at the bloody wound. Nasty. He tried to remember the last time he had had a tetanus booster.
Naturally he’d neglected to bring a first-aid kit. Maybe there was something in the house he could use. But first he had to get out. The hole was seven feet deep. Hornbuckle ran four miles every morning. He tossed his gym bag over the edge. Using a small boulder as a base Hornbuckle boosted himself up and out of the pit.
He walked back a few paces and sat on a rock, breathing heavily. Sweat popped on his forehead and he felt damp beneath the arms. Not that cool on the mountain after all. He squeezed his wound to make the blood flow.
Hornbuckle rummaged around in the gym bag and found a bandana that he used to stanch the blood. He drew the sock up over the wound and wrapped duct tape around it to hold it in place. Now he had to re-rig the tarp to hide any evidence of his visit. Hornbuckle stripped off his sweat shirt and went to work. It took forty-five minutes to restore the tank trap to its previous condition, by which time it was past two. He covered the hole the spike had made with dried leaves and sprinkled dust on it.
Sweating and covered with dust, ankle throbbing, Hornbuckle limped up the trail to the long-low structure built of native rock and mortar with a green metal roof hunkered beneath a massive red rock overhang. Hornbuckle paused ten meters from the sturdy oak door.
White was an explosives expert. Any man who would build a tank trap in his front yard wouldn’t stop there. Hornbuckle used his eyes. He couldn’t see any cameras or obvious alarms but that meant nothing. Cautiously he approached the house. He ignored the front door and did a three-sixty counter-clockwise, examining the windows for wires or tape. There was a propane tank at the north end. The house stretched back beneath the overhang but stopped short of the cliff leaving a six foot wide alleyway in perpetual twilight. Here there was door off the kitchen and a hot tub. Hornbuckle lifted the lid. It was turned off--the water was cold. Hornbuckle peered through the windows at the still interior. The back door provided ingress and egress in complete privacy.
A single power line entered the house on the south side, descending from a series of poles.
Hornbuckle emerged from the gloom at the south end of the house behind the massive 4X4 covered with a tarp. Bungee cords extended from grommets in the tarp to steel rings sunk in the rock. Big winds up here.
Using a flashlight Hornbuckle shimmied under the tarp. There was enough ground clearance beneath the old Dodge power wagon to race a go-cart. Hauling the gym bag beneath the tarp, he selected a motion-activated Honeywell GPS transmitter the size of a playing card, which he epoxied to the inside of the frame and smeared with axle grease.
A breeze stirred the tarp refreshing Hornbuckle. He crawled out from under the truck, grabbed his gym bag and walked around to the front of the house. He put on latex gloves and examined the lock. Schlage deadbolt. He tried the door.
It was open.
***
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Allergies”
The heavy oak door swung silently inward on oiled hinges. Hornbuckle threw a handful of talcum powder over the frame to check for lasers. He stepped into the house. It was cool inside with a faint aroma of sage. Within seconds Hornbuckle began sneezing. He pulled out a bandana and fired off sneeze after sneeze until he jammed a forefinger up beneath his nostrils and held it there for thirty seconds.
He was allergic to dogs.
Hornbuckle quietly closed the door behind him and stood just inside the entrance allowing his senses to adjust. First impression: hand-made sailing ship. The way the tongue and groove wooden floor was put together, the walnut cabinets and bookshelves built into the back wall, all very compact and ship-shape.
Hornbuckle admired White’s carpentry. The man knew his way around a hammer. If only he’d pursued carpentry as a career.
Hornbuckle set his gym bag down on the sofa lofting a puff of dog hair into the air. Dog hair swirled with every step, attaching itself to his khakis. Hornbuckle’s sinuses backed up for a full-frontal assault. Tufts of dog hair stuck to the walls
A portrait of Jesus, one of the Madonna and Child and a wall crucifix confirmed what Hornbuckle had suspected, that White was a mackerel snapper. Man cannot serve his country and the Pope too. The U.S. should have learned that lesson after the election of Moscow’s puppet Kennedy.
Hornbuckle was too young to remember, but his father, a minor official at State, taught him well. Religion was for suckers. Religion was the oldest scam in the world after “I love you.” His father taught him that you could learn a lot about a person if you look at what he reads. Hornbuckle padded over to the built-in bookshelves, every step sending tiny puffs of dog hair scurrying.
The Bible. The Federalist Papers. A bunch of sci-fi shit. The freakin’ Boy Scout Handbook. Satan is Real by Charlie Louvin. Hornbuckle pulled it out and looked at the cover: two country singers in white suits shuckin’ and jivin’ before a lurid red image of Satan as flames consume the cover. He put it back.
Most shelf space was taken up with stacks of magazines: Road & Track, Field & Stream, Guns & Hunting.
A 1/25th scale model of White’s monster truck on the shelf. Hornbuckle examined the exquisitely detailed model up close. Everything was perfect down to the valve stems, brake lines and tiny Colorado license plates spattered with mud. He checked the numbers on the plate just in case. He withdrew a tiny spiral note pad and wrote them down. They did not match any of the numbers he’d obtained in Libya. The patience and craft that had gone into the model reinforced Hornbuckle’s image of White as obsessive/compulsive.
Obviously that did not apply to his housekeeping.
On another shelf Hornbuckle found a Mason jar stuffed with feathers. He was pretty sure they were eagle feathers, possession of which was a federal crime. There were enough that Hornbuckle took a chance on sealing one in an evidence bag. Next to the feathers were several flint arrowheads and carving tools, also federally protected artifacts that belonged in no private collection. Hornbuckle photographed everything with his Ocelot.
A bonsai tree on the window ledge.
Hornbuckle went into the kitchen. White wasn’t completely irrational. He had electricity. Hornbuckle checked the refrigerator. Moldy cheese, a six-pack of Fat Tire, an open box of baking soda and some summer sausage. He opened the freezer. Five frozen pizzas and some ice trays. Hornbuckle removed the pizzas but there was nothing hidden in the freezer. He replaced everything exactly as he’d found it.
Down the hall to the bathroom, flurries of dog hair hovering around his ankles. The bathroom was big enough to contain a shower, a Jacuzzi, a clothes washer and drier and the Rinnai tankless hot water system. Horizontal east facing window, tiny potted cacti on the sill. A cardboard box next to the toilet overflowed with magazines, mostly cars, guns and nature.
Hornbuckle checked the medicine cabinet. Aspirin, Right Guard, Axe Body Spray, toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, and little amber bottles containing paroxetine, clonazepam, and trazodone. Each had more than three refills on the scrip and had been issued six months ago. The doctor’s and pharmacy names did not appear on the generic labels.
Hornbuckle lifted the lid off the top of the old-fashioned five gallon flush tank. Nothing. Opposite the bath was more shelving built into the wall containing neatly folded ranks of towels and wash cloths. The next door opened on a small dark bedroom
backed under the cliff. Hornbuckle found the switch and turned on a table lamp on a slab of wood resting on two three drawer file cabinets that White used for a desk.
A half-built model truck lay on the desk next to modeler tools, tubes of glue, filler, sandpaper and a French curve.
No computer.
No television.
No numbers.
How the fuck did anyone hope to go through life without a friggin’ computer?
This alone disqualified White in Hornbuckle’s eyes.
One wall was entirely covered in shelving made of pine boards resting on red bricks. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. No fiction, lots of magazines. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Hornbuckle checked the closet and found a Patriot gun safe with a combination lock.
Fuggedaboudit.
Finally only the master bedroom at the end of the hall remained. No ceiling mirrors for White. A simple king-sized futon rested on a plywood frame, which in turn sat on cinder blocks. A discarded cable company wooden spool served as a nightstand on which sat a cordless alarm clock/radio, a hairbrush, another Bible, and a photograph in a frame that had been placed face down.
Hornbuckle knew there’d be another Jesus on the wall before he looked. The bed was made and covered with a gray wool blanket that was rife with dog fur. Hornbuckle whipped the bandanna out of his pocket and let fly.
He went around to the side table, sat on the bed and picked up the photo. It showed White and a good-looking blond in a bikini leaning back grinning in a catamaran with blue ocean, white beach and palm trees in the background.
Stella Darling.
But White was no careerist! From what Hornbuckle understood, White wanted only to be left alone. Only the entreaties of his one true love could bring him back.
Hornbuckle searched the closet and the home-made five-drawer dresser. He found a stack of Penthouses and a jar of Vaseline. So White was normal after all. More significantly, Hornbuckle found nothing on spontaneous human combustion. Wherever White kept his notes it wasn’t here.
Hornbuckle put a voice-activated recorder inside the center cinderblock beneath the bed. He put one in the living room underneath the sofa. From the looks of things the man never swept up. He put one in the kitchen behind the refrigerator. Hornbuckle would have preferred transmitters but they were too easy to locate with a simple tracking device.
From the looks of things White was still living in the 19th century but Hornbuckle couldn’t take the chance. Retracing his footsteps he looked to see that everything was as he’d found it.
As quietly as he came he let himself out the front door.
***
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Brochure”
Thursday afternoon.
In 1901, having recently established the Standard Oil Trust, John D. Rockefeller invited his friend President Theodore Roosevelt to join him on a hunting expedition in the Rockies. Roosevelt, then running for Vice President on the McKinley ticket, enthusiastically joined Rockefeller for one week in July. Their venue was then known as “Pawnee Park,” a wilderness area northwest of Estes Park, Colorado. The area is defined by a triangle of peaks: Mt. Isosceles, Mr. Pythagoras, and Mr. Archimedes, all in the 13,000 foot range.
In the course of bagging four bull elk two black bears and a cougar, Roosevelt suggested to Rockefeller that the site would make an excellent nature retreat, a place where men could shed the pressure and stress of the workaday world to relax with their peers in an atmosphere of rustic comfort and comity. Rockefeller concurred. In July 1903, two months prior to McKinley’s assassination, which made Roosevelt the youngest president in American history, the then-VP caused a bill to be introduced in the House of Representatives through his friend and protégé, U.S. Representative from New York’s 17th district Aaron Burpee.
The bill caused Pawnee Park to become part of Federal lands and preserved in perpetuity as a retreat and place of learning under the Aegis of the Dept. of the Interior, helmed by longtime Roosevelt associate Harmon G. Entwhistle.
Pawnee Park encompasses approximately twenty-two square miles in what is now known as the Roosevelt National Forest. It is bordered on the northwest by Mt. Archimedes and on the northeast by Mt. Pythagoras with Mt. Isosceles forming the lower point. Lake Pawnee covers approximately five and a half acres.
Construction on the main lodge began in 1904, paid for entirely with donations from Rockefeller and wealthy businessmen he invited to join. The first annual Pawnee Grove meeting took place in Cleveland, June 24, 1904. No minutes survive, but it is believed the group included both Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla.
Rockefeller chaired the meeting during which the group, at least twelve men but possibly as many as nineteen, agreed to a Constitution and By-Laws. Their contents remain secret to this day. Members swear to keep these matters secret. There have been rumors that membership requires a blood oath.
The first annual meeting at Pawnee Grove took place amid snowdrifts on June 1, 1904. Pawnee Grove now serves as a retreat for members and a Petri dish for new ideas. In an interview with The Cleveland Plains Dealer Rockefeller said, “Our mission is to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.”
Otto set the brochure down on his desk, leaned back and stretched. The brochure had arrived by courier a little after one. The 15x20 centimeter leaflet was printed in black and white on coated card stock. The cover said Welcome to Pawnee Grove above an ink drawing of the main lodge, the lake, the mountains in the background.
The inside cover listed the Director Emil Witherspoon and contact information. No website. The first page showed black-and-white photos of Rockefeller and Roosevelt standing side by side in their hunting togs, rifles at parade rest, over a mound of Canadian geese.
The center spread of the eight page pamphlet provided a map of Pawnee Park and the Grove, showing the locations of all buildings including twenty-eight separate cabins, nature trails around the lake and through the surrounding mountains. No mention of the many controversies the Grove had engendered merely by existing in the PC age.
No women. There were rumors that JFK was the only exception. Only by maintaining a low profile and greasing the right media wheels had Pawnee Grove survived a mass feminist attack in the media.
Otto’s phone buzzed. He picked it up.
“White.”
“Mr. White, will you hold for Mr. Gabe Winner?”
***
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Detonator”
Otto went blotto. Gabe Who? The tether snapped and he realized where he was. “Sure.”
A moment later a man came on the line. “Otto? Gabe Winner. Stella’s told me quite a lot about you.”
“I’m sure she has, Mr. Winner.”
“Call me Gabe.”
It was a bit unnerving to hear the famous voice coming over his phone, as if Otto too were an actor in a play.
“Gabe, did Stella tell you what’s going on?”
“She said it had to do with an investigation into the Senator’s death. Naturally I’ll do whatever I can to help, but I never met the Senator. Wish I had.”
Being a lawyer, Stella would not have mentioned the specifics of why she called.
Otto put his feet up on the desk and leaned back. Steve farted.
“Can you get me into Pawnee Grove?”
Beat.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been but my agent Ralston is on their board of directors. Can you tell me what this is about?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Of course our goal is to discover what really happened to the Senator.”
“He didn’t die in a car crash?”
“I’m sorry to be so mysterious, Gabe. The sooner we can get together the sooner I can talk.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
Otto turned his attention to Army
experiments with infra-red weapons.
The ADS works by firing a high-powered beam of electromagnetic radiation in the form of high-frequency millimeter waves at 95 (a wavelength of 3.2 mm). Similar to the same way that a microwave oven heats food, the millimeter waves excite the water and fat molecules in the body, instantly heating it and causing intense pain. (Note that while microwaves will penetrate human tissue and remove the water to “cook” the flesh, the millimeter waves used in ADS are blocked by cell density and only penetrate the top layers of skin, so it will not damage human flesh. Such is the nature of dielectric heating that the temperature of a target will continue to rise so long as the beam is applied, at a rate dictated by the target’s material and distance, along with the beam’s frequency and power level set by the operator. Like all focused energy, the beam will irradiate all matter in the targeted area, including everything beyond/behind it that is not shielded, with no possible discrimination between individuals, objects or materials, although highly conductive materials such as aluminum cooking foil should reflect this radiation and could be used to make clothing that would be protective against this.
A spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory described his experience as a test subject for the system:
“For the first millisecond, it just felt like the skin was warming up. Then it got warmer and warmer and you felt like it was on fire…. As soon as you’re away from that beam your skin returns to normal and there is no pain.”
This was different from the sustained intense heat necessary to reduce a body to ashes. Tests with animal carcasses caused them to wither and smoke but not to burst into flame, much less sustain intense heat long enough to be incinerated.