The Dark Root

by Mayor, Archer

  “He have the personality for it?”

  Boucher laughed softly. “He did in the old Prohibition days—at least according to the stories he tells. Plus, he wouldn’t have to do much—just tell whoever it is where our sensors are planted and keep quiet. That alone could be worth a lot.”

  I made a mental note to ask Maggie Lanier for a search warrant of Blood’s bank records, to see how much that sudden windfall amounted to. “I take it you don’t swallow the equipment-sales angle.”

  “He could get maybe ten cents on the dollar for the junk he calls equipment. He sold all the good stuff a long time ago—this thing’s been draggin’ on forever. He doesn’t have anything else.”

  “I’m assuming your knowledge of the locals only covers the area around Derby. Are there others like you in other substations that keep close tabs?”

  “I’m the only native Vermonter, if that’s what you mean, but there’re other guys who spend a lot of time drinking coffee on these people’s porches. You want me to call around?”

  “I’d appreciate it. I want to see if there’re any other Gene Bloods out there.” I gave him my pager number. He said he’d get back to me in a couple of hours.

  I returned to the conference to find everyone standing around the maps, talking fervently and taking notes. Lester stepped away from them and spoke to me quietly by the door. “This is about to break up. Nobody’s too happy with just letting us take fifty men and staking ’em wherever we want, so a few compromises’ve been made. The largest concentration is going to be around the concert site—Lucas and his boys on one side, Carter and his on the other. A smaller staging area will be Derby, near Newport, just in case something pops up to the east, and then there’ll be a third unit here, monitoring things in the communications center, with a helicopter on standby for quick transport. A few patrol cars—VSP, sheriff ’s men, Border Patrol, you name it—will be positioned along the boundary in between on regular shifts, advised on what it is we’re looking for. All this’ll happen ASAP. I told them I’d stay with the mobile unit here, since this is the eyes and ears, but I didn’t commit you one way or the other. What did you get out of Flynn?”

  “A line on a farmer named Eugene Blood. He’s been clean as a whistle up to now, but he’s got a barrel full of medical bills, and I just talked to a Border Patrol agent named Boucher who thinks he may’ve come into a lot of money in the last few days. He’s got a hundred acres on both sides of the boundary. Boucher’s calling around to the other substations to find out if there might be more people that fit the bill. He’s supposed to get back to me today.”

  Spinney raised his eyebrows. “But you’re putting your money on Blood?”

  “So far I am. I was impressed his was the one name Boucher came up with right off the bat, but I’ll know better in a couple of hours. I’d like to put some mobile sensors on his property in any case—ones he won’t know about. I wouldn’t mind getting a peek at his bank records, either, assuming Lanier thinks there’s enough for a warrant.”

  “I can take a shot at that,” Spinney said quickly and then smiled a little self-consciously. “I kind of like working with Maggie.”

  I smiled back and gave him Richard Boucher’s name and number for help on filling in the details of the affidavit.

  · · ·

  As motel rooms went, it had seen its better days, as had the bed I was sprawled across. It was generally dark and dingy, decorated in hues to mask the more flagrant stains and signs of wear. I had the television on with the sound off, a paper plate of Cheez-Whiz and crackers and a pickle balanced on my chest, and I was watching a small band of cowboys hiding behind boulders, high on a hill overlooking an Indian campfire. The requisite blonde, busty, perfectly made-up frontier woman, one shoulder of her dress attractively torn, was lashed near a fire to what looked like a utility pole planted in the desert by a forgetful service truck.

  “You don’t think this is going to work?” Gail asked on the other end of the phone line.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, sighing. “If it doesn’t, it won’t be for lack of planning or cooperation. It’s been a textbook case of how the system’s supposed to work.”

  “So why’re you in the dumps?”

  I didn’t answer for a moment, watching the cowboys split up. The hero pulled his hat farther down on his forehead. “Things have come up that make Truong a little less the monster I thought he was. He’s no pacifist, but he probably didn’t have anything to do with Dennis’s death, or the shoot-out Ron and I were in. And he didn’t grab Amy Lee, either—that was Da Wang’s doing.”

  “But he did kill Benny Travers?”

  “As far as we know.” I tried to get a better handle on what was bothering me. “It’s not that he’s not guilty. It’s just that, usually, the further we dig into a case, the more dirt we get. That’s been true here, too, of course, but it’s a little different. I mean, I realize everyone always has a reason for knocking the other person off. People get pushed to that fine line and then they rationalize crossing it. Truong’s no different, and considering he’s been after his brother’s killers for years now—and carving them to death, one by one—you can’t say he’s the victim of any sudden impulse. But look where he came from, the models he had to follow, and the effort he made to defy them all. That was no slouch.”

  “You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?” Gail asked in the pause that followed.

  The hero cowboy cut the ropes tying the Indians’ horses in place, and he and his buddies quietly slipped onto the backs of a few of them, preparing to start a stampede. The supposedly wild, prairie mustangs looked as wired as a bunch of overfed cows.

  “Not exactly, but I do feel sorry. I can’t put my finger on it. Somehow, there’s a sense of betrayal and disappointment that keeps pulling at me. I don’t know if it’s Truong losing his brother, and then being stabbed in the back by his own lieutenant, or the constant sight of people hell-bent on grabbing the American Dream, being screwed by their own countrymen, and then somehow taking it in stride. Could be I’ve been drawing parallels between Truong’s brother and my avenging Dennis, even though I know it’s not the same. Maybe I’m getting old enough that all the blacks and whites are fading into grays. We’re getting ready to begin the biggest operation I’ve ever been a part of, and I don’t think any one of us knows a damn thing about the people we’re about to close down. If it works, we’ll slap ourselves on the back, and everybody’ll file reports bragging about how well things worked—I’ll even be handing the selectmen a bundle of confiscated cash they won’t believe—but none of it’ll have the slightest effect on the root cause of the problem.

  “Not only that, but I don’t know if any of this will help find Amy Lee. Maybe that’s what’s really getting to me. After all the rest of this is history, she may still be out there, like some tossed-away pawn—the one person who should’ve had nothing to worry about.”

  “You can only do what you can, Joe.” It was a platitude—but a truthful one nevertheless.

  The hero, in the lead, charged his mustangs across the campground, scattering the Indians. He flew off his now wild-eyed steed, slashed the ropes holding the young lovely to the pole, and swept her up in his arms, oblivious to the peril of being flattened by the horses behind him, or stuck by an arrow from one of the suddenly displaced two hundred Indians.

  They kissed and faced the camera, smiling. Neat and tidy—no questions left hanging.

  28

  IT WAS PITCH-BLACK, DRIZZLING, and a thick ground fog had settled into the low spots. Gene Blood’s farm lay like a dark, misty blanket across the high undulations east of Lake Memphremagog, the rough edges of its streams and shallow ravines—even of the boulders lining its fields—smoothed and contoured by years of northern ice and snow and bone-cracking wind, making it all at once beautiful, soothing, and utterly hostile.

  It was as quiet as a graveyard.

  I was crouched in the lee of a small outcropping of rocks, high on a field that fe
ll away to a row of trees marking the boundary with Canada. The fog had piled up against the base of the woods, so even with the pair of night-vision binoculars I’d been issued, all I could see at the bottom of the field was a slowly shifting, impenetrable haze, which in the artificial green glow of the binoculars, looked like a slow-motion surf, rubbing up against a dark and mysterious forest, full of promise and threat.

  I ran a finger between my neck and the tight throat-mike fitted just to the side of my vocal cords. It was about as comfortable as those cheap, elastic bow ties waiters are forced to wear, but it enabled me to talk on the radio in a barely audible murmur and still be clearly understood at the other end. Strapped to my right ear, also with constricting bands that ran around my head, was a single large, padded headphone. A receiver on my belt allowed me to change frequencies between the small group of people hidden along Gene Blood’s farm, the Border Patrol dispatcher in Swanton, and Lester Spinney, who was standing by the helicopter we’d been lent by the New York State National Guard.

  I made sure I was on the local channel. “This is Alpha One with a wake-up call. How’s everyone doin’?”

  One by one, the six people I had assigned to me checked in, all with nothing to report. The last was Richard Boucher, the Border Patrolman who’d put me onto Gene Blood in the first place. We’d met shortly after that first phone conversation. I’d liked him instantly, and had gone to some pains to make sure he was made my on-ground liaison to his superiors.

  “I had a doe trigger one of the infrareds about half an hour ago, but that’s it so far.”

  “10-4.” I took my finger off the send button and sighed. We’d been out here for four nights running. The concert in Highgate had come and gone, along with the almost fever-pitch tension that had accompanied it. Forty-eight hours earlier, a wandering doe would have triggered an instant recon patrol and brought everyone on the team to the edge of their seats. This time, I was sure, Boucher had merely waited for the animal to clear the woods and had checked it out with his binoculars. We were, after all, only some five hours shy of dawn—and of bringing this entire operation to a close.

  There had been some bright spots, especially far west of us, above Highgate, where quite a few people had been rounded up crossing the border to see the concert. Those “hits” had apparently justified our putting the majority of our manpower there, despite my personal opinion that Truong would opt for a place of calm over chaos. That’s why he’d chosen to undermine Da Wang from Vermont in the first place, instead of fighting him directly on his own Montreal turf—and why he’d taken so long to reach this point in his plans, after years of tracking down and eliminating the lesser players, slowly nibbling away at a nemesis who’d been watching him get closer for years.

  I couldn’t complain, though. The committee running this coordinated operation—nominally under Frazier’s guidance—had listened to all viewpoints, and mine had been catered to with my squad of six now very bored people. They’d even gone beyond that. Boucher had found a couple of others like Blood—people living on the border with no past smuggling histories, but who were on the financial ropes and vulnerable to persuasion—and the committee had placed small squads on their properties, too.

  So now I was trying to come to grips with the fact that despite my instincts—and my further belief that, of all the candidates, Blood was the best—I’d still been wrong. Either Truong did have enough money elsewhere to keep himself going, or he had other means to restock his coffers. It was possible he’d undermined more than one of Da Wang’s pipelines, that despite Nguyen’s denials and all the other intelligence we’d gathered on him, he’d still managed to keep some part of his business from all of us. But I still didn’t believe it, even when confronted by the obvious.

  A small tone went off in my ear, indicating someone wanted me on channel two—the frequency of the Swanton headquarters dispatcher.

  “Alpha One from 6-40,” came the flat, disinterested voice, “We got a hit on Whiskey-Three. 2-53 investigating.”

  I switched my radio over and murmured an acknowledgment. I wasn’t as attuned as the Border Patrol was to the names and locations of all their dozens of monitors—I relied on Richard for that. I switched back to channel one in time to hear his low, calm voice say, “Memphremagog, eastern bank.”

  “10-4.” I shifted my weight to get more circulation to my left leg. Normally, sensor hits were recorded by the dispatcher, and either checked remotely by camera or by a notified patrol unit. Given this particular detail, however, and the fact that none of us knew for sure where Truong might try to cross, all of us were being told of every “hit,” regardless of where it was located. Only the small mobile sensors, like the several Richard was monitoring, bypassed this system, since their broadcast strength wasn’t enough to reach the Swanton receiver.

  Of the three types of sensors, the infrareds gave off the most alerts, since they were designed to capture anything that broke their invisible beams, including animals, falling branches, and even occasional tricks of light. The seismic units, triggered by the vibrations of passing vehicles, and the magnetics, which could pick up the metal shoelace holes on a single pair of boots, were custom-made for this kind of surveillance. But the infrareds were the cheapest, the lightest, and the easiest units to install, and as such accounted for the majority out here. I therefore assumed the sensor by the lake was one of them, and that its object of interest was either a floating log or two lovers in a canoe with a fetish for frostbite.

  The tone went off again in my ear. This time, the dispatcher sounded a little more interested. “6-40 to all units. Whiskey-Eighteen just went dead. 6-40 to 2-53.”

  2-53 was the Derby-based car that had gone out to investigate the first hit. “6-40. This is 2-53. I’m on City Farm Road now, heading north. I’ll take a look from Allen Hill.”

  I stayed on the main frequency, eavesdropping. I remembered Allen Hill from the guided tour of the landscape Boucher had given me five days earlier. From the top of it, the lake had spread out below like a vast black oil slick, curving around the tree-spiked humps of the islands and peninsulas with a menacing invasiveness. It was easy to imagine the lone patroller now, sitting in the warmth of his vehicle, adjusting his night-vision goggles to fit against high-power binoculars, steadying his elbows on the steering wheel.

  “6-40, this is 2-53. We have multiple craft on the water, northeast of Black Island. Looks like they’re heading toward the Holbrook Bay area, moving fast.”

  The Swanton dispatcher slipped into his Chuck Yeager, calm-in-any-storm voice. “10-4, 2-53. Advise you stay put for further incursions while we tend to mop-up.” He followed with an alphabet soup of call letters, directing multiple units—both vehicles and boats—to converge on the scene.

  He was interrupted by 2-53 again: “6-40, you better step up the response. Now I’ve got more Charlies heading south, maybe to Indian Point. They’re spreading out to hit the shore on a broad base. We’re going to need everybody we can get.”

  Swanton Dispatch reacted accordingly. Unit by unit, he read off numbers, including Spinney’s helicopter crew. Like heavy footfalls coming along a corridor, I could hear him getting closer to me and my small, suddenly alert band. “Alpha One,” he finally said. “2-57 is to follow the Johns River SOP. Your command has been terminated.”

  2-57 was Richard Boucher, and he was being ordered to take over from me and abandon the Blood farm. In the pause that should have been filled with my own curt and acquiescent “10-4, Alpha One command terminated,” I heard the double tone of our own frequency go off in my ear—Boucher wondering why I was hesitating and impatient to get going.

  I switched channels. “Go ahead.”

  “Joe,” he said, without all the formalities, “you hear that last request?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking. Anything going off on your monitors?”

  “Negative. The action’s on the lake.”

  “It is right now—out in the open where everyone can see it.”
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br />   Swanton signaled to me to answer. I went back to their frequency and told them to wait. When I returned, Richard asked, “What’re you saying? You still think he’ll hit here?” His voice was incredulous, and a touch irritated.

  “This could be his last shot. He laid the ground, did his homework, took his time. I have a hard time believing it all boils down to a bunch of boats flying across open water in clear weather, especially since he must know we’re on high alert.”

  This time it was Boucher who hesitated. “They’re still going to need troops along the eastern shore.”

  “Fine. How many will it take?”

  “I’m running the sensors,” he said.

  “How ’bout you, me, and Steve stay put, and I cut the other three loose?”

  I knew what that decision was costing him. The northern border was normally quiet enough to be considered by some a retirement post. To be on duty and miss an event like this cut deep. “Thanks, Richard. I appreciate it.”

  I let him do the honors of breaking the news to 6-40. In true military style, they took it without comment, saving their wrath for when it could be dished out face to face, by the man with the most brass on his shoulders.

  I stayed on the general frequency, as I knew Boucher and Steve were doing from their hiding spots. Tucked away among my little pile of rocks, I could hear all hell breaking loose, as VSP, Newport Police, and sheriff ’s units were called in for backup, visualizing from experience what was taking place. Five minutes later, adding to the unreality, I heard the distant thudding of Spinney’s helicopter through the ear that wasn’t covered by the headphone, some six miles to the west.

  As the minutes dragged on, I began wondering if the anticipated dressing down I’d be getting later wouldn’t be richly deserved.

  The small double tone went off. I switched over.

  “Joe, I got a hit, about halfway between us,” Boucher reported.