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

by Miles A. Maxwell

  They bunched into Juniata for a cup of coffee and a donut, and the day’s assignments.

  Metalhead asked, “There’s no way whoever it was in the woods could track Everon back here?” Her music pod was off. “Is there? I mean, they don’t know who he is, or where he came from or anything, do they?”

  Into The Forest Again

  “Go a bit slower,” Everon said into his headset. “I don’t want any surprises. We’ll stay out of range.” They were high. Several thousand feet. A bit safer up here. It was the first moment he’d even had to look into the weird attack. Nan had suggested — several times — calling the police.

  “So they just started shooting at you, E?”

  Everon heard her but didn’t acknowledge.

  She eased back on the controls, causing a slight backward tilt to the helicopter’s body. “We have about enough fuel left to make it back,” she said. “And ten minutes more. That’s all.”

  They were running on fuel Scrounge drained out of an old Williams’ bucket truck. Beneath the whirling blades, they searched the dull black forest in the early-morning light for the spot Everon was nearly killed.

  He could see steam rising from the Mercer plant along the distant river.

  “There!” he pointed.

  Inside the rectangular forest cutout was a fantastically long flat-topped building of industrial gray. On its near side, starting at a tall truck door, a wide drive narrowed and meandered out through the frozen woods toward a long horizontal cut in the trees. The highway.

  Nan’s short red hair swung forward. “Looks deserted.”

  “Let’s not get too close,” Everon said.

  Nan halted their downward progress at fifteen hundred feet.

  “Look! Their generator’s gone!” Everon pointed. On the building’s short south side a covered concrete pad stood empty. “There was a big transformer there too.”

  “And you think they were stealing power out the back of Mercer’s Switchyard?”

  “Something caused that phase imbalance,” Everon muttered, shaking his head as they circled high above the snow-covered blacktop. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Somebody closed that switch out in the yard.”

  “They were using Mercer as a backup?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What, then?”

  “I think the generator on that pad was their backup. It could never provide enough power for an operation this size. I’m betting Mercer was their main power source. That’s why they protected it. That’s the reason they shut it down before the bomb.”

  “Hmmm . . . I don’t know,” Nan said. “But anyway, that’s it for our fuel, E! Unless you want to walk back.”

  “Put it down on the drive,” Everon answered, not listening. “The blades’ll fit.”

  “We’ll be going back on reserve. What if there’s somebody still in there?”

  “Bring it down slow. Once you touch down, keep it running, okay? Just for a couple minutes. If someone shows, we’ll make a run for it.”

  “Ooh-kay . . .” she said reluctantly, lowering the collective. The MD-900 descended.

  At a hundred feet she paused, sitting there in midair. No guards came out of the building. No lights came on. She took them down to fifty.

  They waited, hovering thirty feet above the corner of the building’s roof, looking around. Particularly keeping an eye on the big truck door on the building’s end. Still there was no response.

  “I don’t think anyone’s here, E.”

  He nodded cautiously.

  She set them down in the middle of the drive, snow whipping around them. As the blades slowed, Everon unbuckled and reached behind his seat. He slid out a three-foot-long pair of bolt cutters and handed them to Nan. He faced front, reached under his seat and pulled out the revolver he’d taken off the Vegas mob guys in Spring Valley.

  She frowned doubtfully.

  “If someone shoots at us, this time I’m shooting back.”

  They went to the short end of the building. To the right of the big truck door was a regular walk-through door. No knob. Just a lock cylinder with a keyhole. On the left of the big door was the transformer pad. Small pale rectangles made it obvious where the equipment had been bolted to the concrete.

  “The bolt holes are still there,” Nan pointed.

  Everon leaned up against the truck door and listened. Shook his head. There was no reason to be quiet about whatever they did next. If no one heard the helicopter they weren’t going to hear two people on foot.

  Everon wedged the gun up under his tan leather jacket in the back of his jeans. He jammed his hands and shoulders hard upward against the big door’s corrugated metal. Nan mirrored his position. With a small bang it gave less than half an inch.

  “Locked,” Nan said.

  No lights came on. No men ran outside.

  Everon studied the walk-through door to their right. Clearly it opened inward. The lock cylinder was heavy-duty brass, two inches in diameter.

  Waving the bolt cutters toward the door, Nan said, “These things aren’t going to help much with that.”

  “Stand over there,” he nodded, pointing behind and off to their left.

  “What are you going to do?” she said backing away.

  Without an answer, he fished the gun out of his pants and backed off several steps himself.

  He pointed the gun at the lock, took a look over his shoulder to check where Nan was. She was already back to the edge of the woods. He checked the angle of the helicopter.

  He took aim. Six feet away, thirty degrees off center. He fired.

  BAM! — wing . . .

  The bullet cut a deep hole in the brass and ricocheted off to the right.

  BAM! The cylinder sat at an angle.

  BAM! The third shot took out the entire mechanism leaving a neat round hole.

  “Nice job, E,” Nan said, walking up behind. “There must have been some force left over.”

  Because the door swung slowly, several inches inward.

  It was dim inside. Everon pushed the door cautiously all the way open, which didn’t help much. The entire building appeared to be empty.

  He walked in, over to the truck door. There were sliders engaged on either side. He hammered them back out of their slots. Nan unhooked a chain along the left side and began pulling. The door went up. Now they could see.

  But there was nothing to see.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said. “They’ve moved it all out, whatever it was.”

  The building was huge. Incredibly long. Its back disappeared, gloomy, far in the distance.

  Everon studied the floor. “There may not be anything now but there was some kind of assembly line. Look here. And here! See these shapes the dust left around the bases of where the machines were.”

  “More bolt holes in the floor,” Nan agreed. “Looks a little like our solar panel line.”

  Everon nodded. “More like some sort of electronics fab. Narrower. More like our inverter line.”

  He walked back into the gloom. There were thin shapes in the floor dust jutting out from the right wall. Temporary dividers. The only things left were some wall switches, and far overhead a long double row of mercury vapor lights.

  He traced the conduits back to where their ends stopped. Disconnected wires dangled above the dust shapes of half-a-dozen electric panels that had been removed from the front wall. Only three large-diameter conduits remained, holes punched through to the outside.

  He walked out through the truck door. There were the thick ground tubes from Mercer. Their heavy wire cables neatly sliced off much like Mercer’s phone lines.

  Somebody was in a hurry.

  “Hey, E!” Nan called.

  He went back inside. Nan was looking at something on the floor where the building’s front wall met its concrete slab.

  “Take a look at this, will you?”

  Barely visible was a tiny half-folded piece of plastic film a quarter-inch s
quare. Covered with spiderlike traces, it was cobweb thin. Encased within was what looked a lot like an electrical circuit.

  Everon knelt down. Reached out for it, but Nan’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist.

  “Are you sure you want to touch that, E?”

  Everon hesitated. She let go.

  He looked at it from the right side. Then the left. The membrane was very thin. There were two tiny dots in the center. One black, the other silver. The dim light made it difficult to see.

  He reached out again. Pried one edge up with a fingernail and scootched an index finger underneath, wedged it back and forth until he had it.

  It was soft and flexible. It weighed so little it was hardly there at all. “I think . . .” he said rubbing it gently between his fingers “ . . . it’s a circuit of some —”

  “E!” Nan said.

  And that’s when it disintegrated. Just fell apart on his finger, leaving only a loose web of nearly microscopic traces.

  “It melted!”

  Everon tried to study the tiny dots. But in a moment, like the factory, they too disappeared.

  He hesitated. Looked around. A long reluctant breath, “Okay —”

  A few minutes later, big door lowered and locked, the walk-through held closed with a small twig jammed underneath, Nan fired up the MD-900.

  They lifted off and banked for Juniata.

  Erie

  “Yes, he’ll be out the rest of the afternoon,” Marjorie Stemple explained to an irritated church member. She’d seen Franklin’s note. He’d left while she was out getting lunch. And now she was doing her best to soothe things over. “No, I’m very sorry.” As she disconnected the call, a shadow passed across her desk.

  She looked up to find a huge towering Asian sporting a dark goatee.

  Marjorie was an excellent judge of people. Their moods. Their innate characters.

  But her reaction to this man was completely involuntary, like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Her shoulders hunched. She felt a deep tension pull up into her neck muscles. Despite the giant’s placid external demeanor, there was something extremely unsettling about him.

  Until he softly spoke.

  “You have some owl here? From New York?”

  . . . and then a chill at absolute zero shot right down her spine.

  Signs

  Edinboro . . . The wide green highway sign flew by overhead. Franklin’s foot found it difficult to hold off pushing the pedal to the old jeep’s floor.

  Radiation.

  He kept thinking about that woman Cheri they’d left behind at Teterboro Airport. Her son Johnny puking his guts out in the parking lot by the jet. “Melissa’s fine, boy!” Del had told him. “Not a sniffle.” Franklin felt fine too. So then why am I going down here? He glanced at the feather sitting on the passenger seat again.

  Meadville — the sign spattered with snow, barely legible . . . the trip was so much shorter with Victoria.

  He looked in the rearview mirror. He couldn’t help feeling someone was following him. He wanted to turn and look over his shoulder. See inside every car. Those three guys at the airport. This isn’t paranoia. They were real.

  He couldn’t vocalize it — what people usually called the intuitive sense he understood to be his subconscious — assembling the components of some unseen danger. But it bugged him not to know the cause.

  Melissa’s okay, Del’s fine. Is it Everon I’m worried about? Wish I could call him. Sunday’s sermon — tomorrow. One day away and I still don’t know what I’m going to say! What is it? Maybe I’m worried about another bomb? He couldn’t imagine what such a killer would look like.

  Grove City . . . the sign went by overhead. Crossing over I-80 . . . I-76 . . . . almost there . . .

  His mind focused on Cynthia’s papers again. He flipped a page back over the feather where they sat on the passenger seat.

  Cyn’s note: Col. Plates? It does sound like Collection Plates.

  UWOC? F — 1st B of E! Those are our account numbers. But how could she think those are our deposits? The church doesn’t have that kind of money. How can it be the church’s account? Should I have waited to ask Marj about it? She’s got to know what’s going on . . .

  And then an image came to him: Cranes. Girders rising. Walls going up. The new church addition last summer. Construction of the Great Room Annex rushed ahead. New furniture. New robes! That remodel — the altar woodwork around the organ pipes! Where did all that money come from? A tiny voice in his head said: No government audits! The church is tax exempt! A few personal checks every week — not many — mostly cash. What was Cyn’s report saying?

  Were those huge bank deposits actually two, three — five times the actual amounts collected on Sunday? What if the church kept some part? Sent the rest to that other account? At UWOC.

  United World of Christ was the national organization to which First Cong of Erie belonged. He shrugged, hands gripping the wheel. It’s normal for the church to send them money. But so much? And every week?

  New Castle the sign said . . .

  The Word Is Spread

  Stapled to telephone poles, glued to the sides of abandoned concrete buildings across Baghdad, Tehran, Rawalpindi and Islamabad — even in the cities of Saudi Arabia, excepting only Mecca — scattered white posters had been appearing for weeks. Four feet high, four feet wide. In the large black and flowing script of Modern Standard Arabic:

  And now they appeared en mass. Their meaning raising a terrible anger among the truly faithful:

  In Saudi Arabia, quick as the notices were banned, peeled down and burned, the next morning more replaced them. The Saudi government began looking for those responsible.

  But in Turkey and Egypt authorities simply had the most prominently located posters removed — without making a national case. Those governments had enough to worry about. In Iraq, the notices were completely ignored by authorities. Eighty percent of the posters remained where they were.

  In nineteen countries across the Muslim World, the faithful pondered the meaning in growing outrage, the heretical words at the poster’s bottom:

  Marjorie Discovered

  In a light soft voice, the wispy gray-haired church organist sang happily to herself as she walked the hall to the church office, an old country gospel called This World Is Not My Home. Though her soprano was thin, she always sang along with the choir as she played on Sundays. Not so loud that it took anything away from them.

  Everyone loves this song! Why haven’t we sung it in service? We should! Franklin loves my musical choices. I’ll just bring it up . . .

  She turned the corner, walked several steps through the office door and was confronted by a river of deep red blood.

  She screamed and screamed and screamed. Not whispy or thin at all. The janitor and the members of a Bible study class downstairs in the old basement would all later admit it difficult to believe her vocal chords had such power.

  And then she fainted.

  Twenty minutes later, the Detective-in-Charge knelt by her, holding her hand. He was trying to calm the woman down. He helped her to a chair. Eventually he realized, she’s just a church organist who walked in on it. She doesn’t know anything.

  He handed her off to one of the uniform guys and turned his attention to the victim.

  Poor old gal, the detective thought, who the hell would cut her like that? A single clean slice. Left to bleed out all over the desk. Probably took her a while with her weight.

  He didn’t know what to make of it. This was no Mafia killing! Her tongue wasn’t pulled through her throat like one of those Italian necktie jobs, for one thing. These people aren’t even Catholic! They’re Protestants, for Christ sake! And the eyes! Why the hell would somebody do that to her eyes? In a church! The detective’s hand slid into his right pocket, unaware he was rubbing the lucky rabbit’s foot on the end of its keychain.

  One of the ministers bustled in, a portly guy. Shocked
at first, of course, but then egotistical. Condescending ass, demanding answers. What nerve! To mumble something about how the secretary’s death might be part of God’s higher plan!

  Not a suspect though. Not the type.

  The Youth Minister. That TIME guy. Supposed to have left shortly before — the one thing the organist did know. She saw him on his way out.

  The detective found a yellow post-it pad on the secretary’s desk. He used his handkerchief to wipe away the splattered blood. There was nothing written on the top page. Using the old lightly-applied, flat-pencil-lead-under-the-middle-finger trick, he made a name appear.

  Adlans? He didn’t know what that was. But he recognized the street. In Pittsburgh.

  Everon’s Press

  When Everon and Nan stepped out of the MD-900 in N-J’s helicopter yard, three television people were pretty much blocking their way back to the control room. Everon decided on the spot: the fastest, easiest way to get rid of the media was to talk to them.

  The reporter’s name was Sheila Koontz and she was with some national news show. She said she knew that Everon and Franklin, together, had cleared the George Washington Bridge to foot traffic.

  “You’re both heroes,” she gushed. “Okay. Maybe he’s on the cover of TIME. But you flew! He wouldn’t have been able to do anything without you. Now look what you’ve accomplished!”

  Then she stuck a microphone in his face.

  Everon used the opportunity to tell her about how, in the process of re-establishing local power, they’d discovered the missing computer log. The pre-New-York-bomb Mercer shutdown. He told her about Mercer’s mystery switch. The cut telephone lines. Everon peeled away the bandage on his cheek and showed her the crease left by the bullet.

  This bullshit is kinda boring, Sheila thought, still smiling as she pretended to listen. He was shot at? Come on! That so-called cut from a bullet looks more like a scratch from working around all this crap. She wasn’t really interested in the guy’s bogus claims. And anyway, it’s all much too technical for my audience.