Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2)

by Miles A. Maxwell

  Everon’s hand shot out. Not to punch — only a single punch like that could ever be necessary to take down a guy like Woodie. Everon’s fingers snagged the front of the falling tan jumpsuit to slow the fat man down, keep him from hitting the dirt too hard. He wanted Woodie out of the way, not dead. It was impossible to make the landing really soft. Woodie was just too damn big.

  Big, but not much muscle, Everon thought as the man’s shoulders landed in snowy gravel with a satisfying thud. Everon slapped two fingers alongside Woodie’s neck beneath his chin.

  Strong enough.

  “Jersey, Boss!” Holmes laughed, “It just happens to be the state we’re in.” Shaking his head as he helped Everon drag Woodie’s body to the front gate, one man gripping each armpit. “We’re going to have to start calling you that, you know. And next time it’s your fuckin’ life!”

  Everon’s mouth curled into a brief, reluctant smile. Then shrugged as they pulled Woodie outside and left him leaning against the fence.

  Now they could get back to work.

  Half an hour later Ewing stepped out of the control shed, laptop slung over his shoulder, “All good, Mr. Student. Lama has data again, and control.”

  Everon locked the control room door. Gave Holmes the key.

  The younger man turned, hesitated, then back to Everon. “You know, I guess you’re right, Mr. Student. Evil can’t always be seen just by looking. Woodie was always okay to me. At least, I always thought so. It’s like transformer Number One, isn’t it? Maybe evil is on the inside.”

  Ralph’s Unpleasant Reality

  “Franklin?” Ralph Maples walked into his Junior Minister’s office. “I need to ask if you —”

  Ralph stopped. The room was empty. Remembering now that he’d let Franklin leave for a few hours to get rid of that bird.

  But his eyes drifted to some pages sitting on the corner of Franklin’s desk. Several sheets stapled together. His feet seemed to move stiffly, involuntarily, pulling him closer.

  Face as white as the spread of pages, Ralph stared down, eyes focusing on the long column of numbers, the dash in the middle of each one. “How — ?”

  “He’s already left for Pittsburgh,” Marjorie Stemple’s voice said behind him. “About ten minutes ago. Can I — Reverend Maples? Is something wrong?”

  She was staring at him.

  “Uh — nothing Marjorie,” he lied. “Nothing at all.”

  He slipped briskly out of Franklin’s office, passing her in the doorway — for a man of Ralph’s size and shape, unusual in itself. And Marjorie Stemple wasn’t exactly thin either.

  She stood there, frowning after Reverend Maples, watching him turn quickly into his own office and close the door.

  The look on his face! She’d never seen anything like it. Something, she thought, is wrong. Very, very wrong.

  A Fight In Chicago Gold

  At 2:30 p.m. Mustafa Islam put on his old gold-colored jacket. He’d waited too many miserable years to count, for this very moment. Until Monday night, U.S. gold trading, all of it, had been executed in New York. Most of it electronically.

  But New York City no longer existed. Wall Street and the new World Trade Center had been cratered, their markets and data centers vaporized. The world’s commodity exchanges had to regroup.

  The markets remained closed two days.

  And then in Chicago, when the huge Corn Pit on the fourth floor on west Jackson Boulevard closed at 2 p.m., for the first time in many years, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reopened its own local gold outcry.

  Long and insistent, the bell rang.

  Mustafa pushed into the middle of the pit and shouted, “March Gold! ANY PRICE — BUYING!”

  The volume of voices that roared around his ears, the fingers that pushed at his face were matched only by the tremendous volume of scrap paper — orders flooding into his hands.

  Up on the wall, numbers flashed. The yellow metal’s price rose. He bought more. The price rose steeply. Men and women screamed. A street riot. More! More! Gold’s price curved upward hyperbolic — then rose nearly straight up.

  Until a new man on the other side of the pit, wearing a gray shirt and tie, gray trousers, and a gray trading jacket, someone Mustafa could never recall having seen before, began to sell. And sell big.

  For a moment Mustafa lost his footing. In the tumult surrounding him he felt overwhelmingly puzzled. The price on the big boards flattened, slowed its upward climb. Then retreated!

  Surprising. But good! Cheaper for him! He had his instructions. Signed with a special code number. Huge dollar transfers had been made to him from an overseas account. The account and the code number belonged to a man known only to a select few.

  The Architect.

  Mustafa bought! March, April, June, August! Hundreds and hundreds of contracts. All anyone would sell him.

  Even the gray man.

  A Little More Information

  Black snowy trees, concrete bridges, icicle-laden road signs flashed past. Franklin found himself wanting to know more about her.

  “Hill’s an interesting name. I once knew someone named Hill. I guess I don’t travel much in your circles. It’s a very old family, isn’t it? Long Island Hills?”

  “Nope. Chicago Hills. Salt of the earth,” Victoria replied. “Originally railroad people. Friendly, congenial.” She smiled at him, “In my case, grateful.”

  “Chicago?” he smiled. “Irish Catholic?”

  “Well my mother is. I went to Catholic school. My father’s kind of agnostic. I’m really nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  She smiled at him.

  “So what brought you here?” he asked.

  “I came to find out how a minister knows so much about rescuing people trapped in wrecked subway cars. And what was that thing you did — when my knee hurt?”

  “Mmm, that.”

  She waited.

  “Well, it’s kind of like hypnosis.”

  “Whatever it was you did sure worked great on my knee. All the way to the hospital, I barely felt any pain. In fact I think it hurt worse the day after. The doctor gave me some hydrocodone.”

  “I sometimes use it to help people at the church,” his face turned grim. “My Senior Minister doesn’t like it too much.” He brightened, “I use it to learn new words.”

  “What, like memorizing a language? How many times do you have to hear a word?”

  “Usually, just once.”

  “Once! I don’t know any Russian,” she said, “but that couple in the subway seemed to understand you easily enough. How many languages do you speak?”

  “A few. You?”

  “I took some French in high school and I know a little Spanish. That comes in handy in the news biz sometimes. How many’s a few?”

  He was silent. She waited.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Nineteen? Languages?”

  “Some better than others.”

  “You’re so young. How could you learn so many languages, and find time to become a minister?”

  “Well, as a kid I learned to speak pretty decent Spanish with the ranch hands. Then after I left the Rangers —”

  “The Rangers? You were in the military too?”

  “Yeah. I liked the Rangers. I did a lot of climbing.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Something really bad happened.” He swallowed.

  When he didn’t go on, she said, “You don’t have to tell me. If you can’t talk about it —”

  “No, I can.”

  She waited.

  “When our unit got sent to South America, one of my translations got a lot of innocent people killed. After the horrors I helped unleash on this small village, I felt so guilty I quit. I went to Europe to get away.”

  “Europe? But how did you learn so many languages?”

  “Well, one day I was in an old bookshop in Barcelona and found a Spanish-English diglot — a version of the Bib
le with a line down the middle of the page. Old Spanish on one side — the Reina-Valera, Bible of the Bear they call it — and English on the other. During the day I took in people’s history, their languages. At night I read the Bible.

  “As I traveled country to country, I picked up more Bibles. I penned in my own translations. Latin versus English. Latin versus Greek. Hebrew and Aramaic against English. The Bible’s the only book you can get in every spoken language in the world. Some that aren’t spoken anymore, too.”

  “Bibles! I guess your basic vocabulary would be there.”

  “Most people use maybe a thousand words in everyday conversation. I’ve always felt pretty good, pretty fluent around three thousand. And really comprehensive at ten thousand. The mind techniques I know make it easier, speed up the process.”

  “You became a minister in Europe?”

  “Eventually. I wandered around for about five years and one day I woke up and realized I had almost no clothes, just a backpack full of Bibles. So I joined the seminary.”

  “You know,” she said, “I, was uh — really surprised when that newspaper vendor you rescued said you were a priest.”

  “A minister.”

  “But it’s like the priesthood, right?”

  “Not exactly. Similar.”

  She looked at him suddenly, swallowed her smile, frowning. “So your church is Protestant?” she swallowed again. “Protestant ministers can’t get married, either? Like priests?”

  “No, we can.”

  “So —”

  “So why aren’t I married?”

  She nodded.

  “My secretary asks me that question all the time. My brother too.” He chuckled darkly. “Haven’t found the right girl, I guess. Long story.”

  “I’d like to hear it sometime.”

  Snow-driven guardrails and frosty speed limit signs blurred past their windows. The miles rolled beneath them.

  The Mole

  Cheryl Narouski didn’t frighten easily. But in order to get what they needed, her partner had allowed himself to be held captive by domestic terrorists. And now it sounded as though he were about to be executed.

  On a deserted snowy road, two miles from the Sorensen property, two agents pulled up behind Cheryl’s Lincoln Navigator.

  “Russ Bezier and I were assigned to that big white separatist group,” Narouski explained to FBI agents Andrew Farr and Paul Esposito. “For about an hour, Russ was doing just fine. Until somebody caught on he wasn’t one of them — I don’t quite understand how — and they grabbed him. I was going to call in an extraction team but Russ radioed a hold. Said he was getting too much good intel. And he was transmitting some really good stuff.

  “Now suddenly they’ve taken him somewhere and he doesn’t know where he is!”

  “Is he still in there?” Farr asked.

  “No. He’s in a van somewhere. His mic’s still working.”

  Farr looked at Esposito. “Can we triangulate off his radio?”

  Esposito nodded. “Let me get the directional detector out of the trunk.”

  “Hurry!”

  Trussed up like a goose, Russ Bezier bounced off the van’s floor. His hair caught on a piece of metal, ripping out several dozen strands as the driver left the highway.

  Minutes later they were rumbling along a dirt track somewhere. With great difficulty Russ managed to tongue the gag halfway out of his mouth. But before he could transmit anything, the van stopped. Whoo boy, Russ thought. This can’t be good.

  They stayed low. In a place where tall snow-covered pines were mixed with bare pin oaks, Narouski, Farr and Esposito used tree trunks as cover, moving quietly up behind the orange van.

  They were ten yards back when they froze. A man with a huge beer gut had a pistol in his right hand and he was urging Russ Bezier out the van’s side door. Narouski thought she saw the flash of metal. “Russ’s arms are handcuffed behind his back!” she transmitted. Her weapon was already out but Bezier was on their side. She didn’t have a consistent shot.

  The fat man yanked Russ forward. Their fellow agent stumbled in the snow and disappeared between two trees.

  But Narouski could still hear over Russ’s transmitter.

  “Ya might as well say goodbye now, ya little weasel,” Russ’s captor laughed.

  “Billy Bob. That’s your name, isn’t it?” Russ asked.

  “In about two more seconds, my name ain’t goin’ ta matter to you. And neither’s anythin’ else! That’s far enough.”

  “Look inside my shirt,” Russ said. “Look inside my shirt, Billy Bob! A team of FBI agents are listening. They know everything.”

  The sound of a jacket being unzipped. There was a ripping sound, apparently as his shirt was torn open.

  “I don’t see nothin’.”

  “That mole, right there.” Static. “The dark one here on my collarbone.”

  “So?”

  “That’s a microphone.”

  “Har! Now I’ve heard everthin’!”

  Russ felt Billy Bob’s pistol pressed against his temple. Boom! The gun went off as a hand flashed from the side, knocking it off center.

  It sounded like a cannon. A rock chip flew out of the snow in one direction, the bullet whizzing back in the other. Ricochet! Paul Esposito screamed and went down. A red crease appeared down the center of his dark hair.

  Andrew Farr was already on Billy Bob from behind. The man was twice his size, but Andrew threw a choke hold, an arm around the fat man’s neck and wrestled the whale into the snow. “Hands — behind — your back — you son-of-a-bitch!”

  Narouski ran to Esposito, who was still conscious, a bloody hand held to the top of his head. “Let me see,” she said, gently pushing his hand away. She parted his dark hair. “That’s a pretty deep gouge. You’ve lost a bit of scalp but I think you’ll be okay.”

  “Only a flesh wound,” Farr cackled at Esposito in a fake British accent, right knee in the center of the fat man’s back.

  With Narouski’s help and a folded piece of cloth torn from the tail of her shirt, Esposito got to his feet, blood leaking around his fingers.

  “Ahem!” Russ said. “Anybody remember me?”

  “Oh!” Narouski said. “Keep pressure on that, Paul.” She examined Bezier’s cuffs. “These things are ancient. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “The key should be in his right pants pocket,” Russ said.

  Agent Farr rolled Billy to the side and Narouski fished a set of keys from a disgusting pair of sodden jeans. She found the right one and unlocked Russ’s elbows.

  “Whew,” Russ smiled weakly. “For a moment there I didn’t think you’d make it.”

  Roommate

  In Trenton Memorial’s fourth-floor ICU, Enya lay immobilized, arms strapped to the bed.

  What’s happening? she thought fiercely, suddenly conscious. She couldn’t speak. The thick tube down her throat made her gag. She fought against the straps that held her arms, and her own panic.

  It was useless, hopeless, completely self-destructive. In the dim emergency lights mounted on the wall, she tried to give control back to the respirator. To force herself to relax. She tried to think.

  Voices echoed outside. She could only guess what had happened.

  The hospital generator must have run out of fuel.

  As much as the tube in her mouth that restricted her head would allow, her eyes traced out small tubes, wires. Her fingers found the nearby panic button velcroed to the bed. She pushed it and waited, still struggling to calm herself.

  An IV pump delivered a heart drug into her right arm at a certain rate. A balloon pump connected through the catheter in her left arm fed directly into her aorta, taking pressure off her heart. An IV sedation pump was supposed to keep her asleep. Hers was plugged into one of the red wall outlets, the only source of power when the hospital was on its emergency generators.

  But it appeared to have no battery backup. Now she knew why she was awake.


  She pushed the panic button again.

  There was no response.

  Her EKG monitor still showed her pulse. Internal batteries. Those should last a while. Her eyes turned sideways, to the rising . . . and collapsing white accordion ventilator. Whooosh — shhhhhh . . .

  As Enya slowly relaxed her heavy chest muscles, she realized there was another machine running, another ventilator connected to somebody in the bed next to hers.

  Whoooshhh . . .

  She listened to the other EKG. Blip . . . Blip . . . . Blip . . .

  It felt like its rhythm was changing. She was pretty sure the other patient’s ventilator was slowing down.

  Maybe her roommate didn’t need the ventilator anymore.

  She twisted toward the sound.

  Big eyes stared back. He was conscious too. A kindly old man, unable to speak to her either. He winked, sharing a look of comradery, as if to say, “We’ll see this through together.”

  His head twisted to consider the small now-dark display on the portable machine. His EKG had stopped. His shoulders moved. Was that a shrug?

  He was still okay. Each of his machines had its own separate battery.

  Then, with a final slowing whoooooosh . . . his ventilator died completely.

  In the dim light she could see his eyes go wide.

  He struggled. Thrashed in his bed against the straps, trying to twist his head, trying to pull his mouth off the throat tube.

  Enya pushed at her panic button — over and over. She wanted to yell, to scream out: Help! Help him! Her own restraints prevented her from doing anything.

  A gurgling noise echoed from his mouth.

  No one came. Nobody to squeeze the purple bag of last resort.

  His thrashing slowed . . .

  Stopped.

  He was silent.

  She lay there, tears in her eyes.

  Trying to relax.

  She was glad to be conscious. It seemed worse somehow, to die without knowing. Her own EKG monitor continued. Blip . . . blip . . . blip . . .