Bat out of Hell

by Alan Gold

  “Explain.”

  “Oh really! C’mon, Mr. Stone. Surely, your computer programmers can put together a simple algorithm so that you can link assaults against similar organizations associated with animal welfare in locations throughout the nation with anonymous tip-offs, even over decades? I would have thought it was fairly simple.”

  Stone merely stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

  “I’ve contacted your regional and head offices anonymously seventeen times and told you the connection between the particular organization which was going to perpetrate it and the crimes they were going to commit, many of which have been sheeted home to me. I’m as much their victim as poor Secretary DeAnne Harper. I also phoned the Washington Bureau and told them that CHAT was planning the murder of a cabinet secretary, but unfortunately, I didn’t know which one. I phoned hours before the actual bombing and told your office that CHAT was the organization that was going to be doing the killing. I knew about it because I’d heard rumors whispered into my ear that the head of that ridiculous organization, Tom Pollard, was planning something seriously big, a high-profile murder, but I had no idea who would be the victim. I phoned and warned you, yet your people took no action.

  “Y’know, Mr. Stone, connecting CHAT to a series of crimes isn’t rocket science. Every time there was an assault against some group that treats animals improperly, one of the senior members of this particular organization was either in the town or had just left. I would have thought you could have put cause together with effect. You do, after all, have some awesome computing power in J. Edgar Hoover’s Building, don’t you?”

  Stone looked at him, trying to hide his contempt for the man’s smugness. But as though he didn’t notice, or he just didn’t care, Chalmers continued unabashedly.

  “Look, in 1995, there was a carefully planned assault on a farm in California that was producing battery chickens from cruel and intensive hatchery methods. The cruelty to which the chickens were exposed was hideous, but whoever did the bombing obviously knew that if he released them, because of the way they’d been bred as egg-producing machines, genetic freaks that had lost the power to fend for themselves because they’d been bred for their meat, they’d not last five minutes in the farmyard . . . why, the poor things could barely even walk. So to put them out of their misery, he blew up the facility with five thousand chickens in it. Euthanasia. But he also killed four Mexican workers who were doing the night shift in the battery farm at the time. I phoned up your HQ in Washington and told them who it was, but nothing happened.

  “Then in 1996, a conference of cosmetic chemists in Seattle, people who experiment on live animals for the benefit of ladies who want to wear perfumes, was attacked. Funny, really, except that two scientists died. The killer poisoned the food that was being served for their lunches. Apparently, it was only meant to make them feel sick, but the two who died were suffering from amoebic dysentery, which they’d caught in Thailand at an earlier conference two weeks prior and hadn’t fully recovered. They were so weakened by the illness that their hearts gave out. The hotel was blamed for serving stuff that hospitalized one hundred people with food poisoning, but I know who did it. I phoned your Washington bureau and told them it was CHAT, but again, nothing happened.

  “Now we come to 1997. Again, I tracked one of their senior staff to Memphis, Tennessee, where the university has been granted a vivisection license to conduct experiments on capuchin monkeys. Tiny, beautiful little balls of fur. And they were going to be strapped to dissection tables and have probes and electrodes poking and prodding them, their inner organs exposed and monitored in order to find a cure for some disease or other. Unforgivable, when you come to consider that there were other perfectly good ways to research human ailments without taking an animal’s life. And what happened? As the chief scientist and two of his colleagues, all academics from the university, were getting into his car in the parking lot, the ignition triggered a huge bomb, and they were blown to bits. Again, Mr. Stone, I contacted DC in advance and told them what I knew, but . . .

  “In 1998, a bomb in a genetics lab in Maine that had cloned rabbits, dogs, and sheep. Three scientists were left maimed and they are still in wheelchairs.

  “In 1999, a Hollywood movie studio that had made a film glorifying men who go out hunting. Nobody killed, but a studio lot burned to the ground.”

  He shrugged. “I could go on and on. Through every year up until the present day and the assassination of Secretary Harper and her family. I’ve been monitoring CHAT and other liberationist movements for close to twenty years now and tipping you off every time they do some dastardly act. Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I applaud what they’re trying to do, but I fiercely, vehemently, and utterly object to the obscene ways they’re going about it. To take human lives . . . it’s abhorrent.”

  “If you knew all this, why didn’t you make your information known? Why give anonymous tips?” asked Agent Stone.

  “These people are fanatics. They kill without compunction. Just the leak of my name, inadvertently, and I’d have been their next target. No, Mr. Stone, I gave you all the information you’d need to stop these maniacs. But you and your colleagues chose to ignore it.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth, Chalmers? How do I know this isn’t rewriting history, reengineering the past to prove your innocence in the present?”

  “Easy,” he said, with a smirk on his face he could barely contain. This was the coup de grace, the moment he’d been planning and looking forward to for nearly half of his life. It had taken eighteen years of careful planning to reach this moment. There were occasions over the years when he’d been arrested by the cops, when he’d thought to pull out all stops during an interrogation to save himself by throwing the spotlight on those assholes from CHAT. But now, now that he’d been identified by name in front of a vast television audience by the president of the United States himself . . . now was the time to prove his innocence and humiliate Nathaniel Thomas and maybe even bring down his presidency.

  He’d spent all those years monitoring the movements of CHAT senior personnel and then using their visit to some town or other to give the green light to any one of a dozen assaults he or one of his cells would unleash against animal murderers. And the tip-offs he’d given either hours or days before the incident had been sufficiently obscure to almost guarantee that the Feds wouldn’t be able to follow them through. But it was all there on the record, and now it would prove his innocence.

  He took out a book from his inside pocket. A handwritten leather-bound book containing details of each assault that he was blaming on CHAT and the name of each person in the Bureau to whom he’d spoken, as well as the time and other details of the call.

  “Check this out,” he said handing over the book. “I’ve kept a record of the assaults I can certainly sheet home to CHAT and the other murderous lunatics. . . and the tip-offs I gave you in advance. It’s all here, Mr. Stone. The incident, the time, and place I contacted, and the person to whom I gave the information. And, of course, the CHAT staff member who was in the location at the time. There have been more, many more, but I just don’t have their details. The information I gave you came directly to me from the late and lamented Ms. Christine Knowles, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, who recently committed suicide because she couldn’t bear to live in a world where her dear friend, DeAnne Harper, and her beautiful family had been murdered. She pretended to support CHAT to get inside information on them, but she was actually acting on my behalf so I could report their activities.

  “All you have to do is to examine your records and you’ll find that hours before each assault, you got an anonymous telephone call telling you that CHAT was behind the murder and mayhem. Okay, so they were spread out over eighteen or more years, but it shouldn’t be beyond your computer programmer’s ability to join assaults conducted against people who mistreat animals, with a tip-off around the same time.”

  Stone nodded. If Chalmers w
as telling even a fraction of the truth, it was a monumental screwup on the part of the Bureau. But he’d need time to get the information together.

  “But if you knew these people from CHAT were visiting a state or a city to commit a crime, why weren’t you more explicit? Why be so covert? You could have saved lives.”

  “I’ve already told you. I had to protect myself. And not only that . . . the CHAT people travel extensively, and Miss Knowles often didn’t find out the specific information about which executive was in which city and who would do the evil deed. So we relied on your organization’s professionalism . . . big mistake! Many of their personnel go all over the country raising funds and giving speeches. I didn’t always know which one would commit the crime so I couldn’t be too specific with the information.”

  “But Jesus Christ, all you had to do was to come in with this notebook years ago, and we’d have arrested the lot of them. Yet you’ve led us to believe that it was you and WEL that were the terrorists . . .”

  “I’ve led you to believe nothing, Mr. Stone. I’ve led you to the truth, but you treated me like Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes. Instead of transforming me into a woman for seven years, for the past seven years and more, you’ve ruined my life by transforming me into a terrorist. I’ve been arrested and set free, harassed, tormented without remorse, but you’ve never once offered me an apology. And all the while, like the blind Tiresias, like Cassandra, I was trying to tell you the truth, but I was never believed.”

  Stone didn’t follow what he was saying but asked, “Then Professor Chalmers, why didn’t Ms. Knowles go to the police?”

  “She was terrified that she’d be next on their hit list.”

  “We could have protected her.”

  “Like you protected Secretary Harper and her family?”

  Ignoring the cutting remark, Stone flipped through the book. Even without the benefit of a forensic examination, he could tell by the fading of the ink in the reports starting eighteen years earlier that it had been written over a period of many years, and the likelihood was that Chalmers was telling the truth.

  “Would you mind waiting in this building while I contact my HQ in Washington and begin investigations as to the veracity of what you’re saying?”

  Chalmers smiled. “It would be my pleasure, Mr. Stone. And when you’ve verified what I’ve told you, and now that I’ve closed down WEL, I’d be happy to assist the Bureau in apprehending these murderers at CHAT. They do the good and honorable name of animal and plant welfare no good at all.”

  Stone stood, still restraining the anger he felt at the hubris and arrogance of the man. Profoundly disturbed by the evidence he’d been given, he picked up the battered leather notebook and walked to the door, but before he even touched the handle, Chalmers said, “Oh, and maybe you could work out a way that the president of the United States could offer me a public apology.”

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  As he escorted her from stateroom to stateroom on the first floor of the White House, all sounds of commerce and industry, of national and international commotion that ruled the lower floors seemed to lessen and become muted. As though absorbed into the thick carpets and luxurious furnishings of the upper floors, as she ascended the White House, it transformed from a center of activity to an ancient temple of a deity, of potency.

  And another thing that Debra noticed was that whenever the president led her to each door, he’d put his arm around her shoulder as she exited. It surprised her, and she wondered, as they became more and more remote from the hordes of people who worked one floor below in the functional offices of the White House, whether their isolation in the vastness of the exquisite upper staterooms gave him more freedom to be less president and more man. And if he was now a man showing her around the president’s home, alone and unobserved, was he was going to go further than just putting a friendly arm around her shoulders? Was he going to hold her hand, back her into a corner, and try to kiss her . . . take her into one of the state bedrooms, close and lock the door, and seduce her? Was this her President Clinton moment with Monica, the means of seduction used by President Kennedy to overwhelm Marilyn Monroe, the isolation used by President Eisenhower when Mamie was downstairs and he was alone with his driver Kay Summersby?

  As they walked from room to room, her heart was thumping. Was this a calculation on his part to get her to lower the barriers that professionalism had erected? Would the uniformed guards who were stationed on walkways and the tops of flights of stairs suddenly disappear as the president rounded a corner and an unoccupied bedroom suddenly put her in the position of yielding to a man she was finding increasingly irresistible? Did she care that he was married and had a young family? Did she worry that his wife may be in the family quarters, doing what First Ladies did while their president husbands were getting more than advice from one of the young and vulnerable assistants?

  Or was her mind playing ridiculous tricks on her? She was being escorted around his house by a man who had been offering her a tourist’s eye view of the White House and who had been nothing but supportive, charming, and civil from the time they’d left the downstairs conference. Yes, he’d become more and more friendly and at ease with her as they walked through the first floor of the White House; he’d touched her far more than previously. But it had been the touch of a friend, the gentle touch of a mentor, the innocent arm around the shoulder of people who were suddenly relaxing in each other’s company.

  Leaving the magnificent East Room with its teardrop chandeliers and Steinway piano, they walked slowly along the eighty-foot long Cross Hall with its plush red- and gold-edged carpet toward the state dining room where he’d promised her a place at the next appropriate state banquet.

  “This corridor isn’t just a corridor. That’s the genius of the architects. We use it for receiving lines after there’s been an official arrival ceremony on the South Lawn. Often guests line up on either side, and I accompany a visiting national head of state as we walk down the red carpet. My wife and his wife, or her husband, walk behind us, as though we’re walking down the aisle of some cathedral on the red carpet at a wedding,” President Thomas said. “It looks all very formal, British pomp and circumstance, but you’d be amazed at how much private humor there is between world leaders, so long as the television cameras aren’t eavesdropping. Once, I was escorting the president of France into a banquet, and I whispered into his ear, ‘Maurice, will you marry me?’ Without a second’s consideration, he said, ‘Yes, with pleasure, but you’ll have to be the wife . . . I am French, you understand.’”

  Nathaniel Thomas smiled, and Debra burst out laughing. “You’d be amazed at the language we use when the advisors have left the room, and we’re alone. And I won’t mention whom, but the wife of one of the European leaders is pretty fresh with her language as well. My wife was shocked, at first, but now she’s a lot more used to it.”

  Debra realized with surprise that it was the first time that he’d mentioned his wife since the start of the impromptu sightseeing tour he was taking her on. The tour had begun warmly enough, with him showing her through the ground floor of the West Wing and introducing her to many of the people that she knew by name or she regularly saw on television. Then they’d gone upstairs where the frenetic atmosphere of the working house transformed into the staterooms of the White House and where ceremony replaced the commerce of political life. From the magnificent East Room, they were about to go into the state dining room when the president’s press secretary came running up the stairs and said hurriedly, “Sir, can I have a word with you?”

  The president stepped four paces away, and the press secretary whispered into his ear. Nathaniel turned to Debra, his face creased in sudden worry and said, “Sorry, but we’re going to have to cut this short.”

  “That’s okay, sir, I’ll see myself back to my office.”

  “No, this concerns you.” Suddenly the relaxed and avuncular president vanished and the hard-working, no-nonsense President Nathanie
l Thomas appeared, striding meaningfully down the hall toward the stairs. They returned in silence to the Oval Office. Waiting for them were three of his senior aides, the secretary of agriculture, and Daniel Todd.

  When she entered, she walked over to Daniel and asked hurriedly, “What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea. A car suddenly pulled up and whisked me back to the White House. I was told that the president’s chief of staff had sent for me, but they haven’t told me a thing.”

  The president walked to his desk, and everybody gathered in the seats that formed a semicircle. Without any preamble, he said, “Ross?”

  The secretary of agriculture began, “Five hours ago, the governor of Texas was called out of a budget breakfast meeting and given some news about bats in her state. She immediately flew to Garden Ridge, near to San Antonio, where . . .”

  Debra felt Daniel’s body, seated beside her, suddenly go limp. “Oh shit,” he said under his breath, but everybody in the room heard him. He was in no mood to apologize. From his reaction, Debra knew what was coming.

  “She found a scene of utter carnage and devastation. The governor is on video link on your television right now, Mr. President.”

  An aide reached over and pressed a remote control. The blank video monitor suddenly came to life, and the governor of Texas was visible, standing in a field. The helicopter was in the background, and the camera, obviously a steady-cam, was transmitting a clear and immediate picture.

  “Mr. President?”