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

by Miles A. Maxwell

  “Are these the white separatists you think may be the group behind New York and Virginia?” Line asked. “What’s in the trucks, Lance?”

  “We still haven’t got physical confirmation, but based on conversations just recorded, they’ve got to be nuclear.”

  “Well stop one, dammit!”

  “We haven’t got a sufficient force in the area! It would be suicide,” Bolini whispered back. “They’ve got fifteen hundred people, most of them heavily armed. We’ve got twelve agents here including myself. The Staties are setting up roadblocks. I’m pulling two dozen agents from around the area. But none of that will be here soon enough.”

  What In Hell?

  Franklin spent two hours packing books and clothes into suitcases, sad and a little angry. At who or what he wasn’t sure. The manse no longer felt like home. There was no reason to stay, not even overnight.

  He tried the Long Island phone number from Cyn’s report one more time. Robert Aramath. The bank’s CEO. Cyn’s ultimate boss.

  No answer, no recording, no busy signal. The same as when he called from Del’s, the line was dead.

  He looked around. This is it then. It’s over.

  He pulled out his keys. Something small and white flew out of his pocket with them, hit the floor and broke apart. He picked up a piece, a large white crumb. The Communion wafer I slid into my pocket during service. He picked up the other pieces, threw them in the trash.

  When he’d carried his last two bags outside, loaded them into the back of his jeep, for the very last time he walked back and stood in the doorway of the little living room.

  Back down the hall, the glint of something gold caught his eye — oh! Cyn’s gift! He’d almost left it lying on the nightstand. He snagged the chain’s broken ends, slipped the old cross into his pocket. The chain that almost killed him.

  He returned to the front. This had been his home for two years. Am I doing the right thing? he asked one more time.

  Franklin’s cellphone rang. He flipped it open. “Hello?”

  “Dr. Reveal?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Detective O’Neil. From the aviary yesterday? I have some, uh, bad news for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something kind of strange. We have — er, misplaced the body of the Oriental — the, uh, Asian who attacked you.”

  “What?”

  “I know. We can’t explain it. But the ambulance the corpse was riding in, and the paramedics driving it, have all disappeared. The gray sedan with the Canadian plates is gone too.”

  Franklin held the phone away from his head in disbelief.

  “How did this happen?”

  “We don’t know. The ambulance was on its way to the hospital. It never got there. The car somehow was taken from the impound yard. But there’s nothing on the gate tape. We’ve got a BOLO out on it — a Be On the Look Out. So far, there’s nothing.”

  “Why are you calling me?” An unpleasant sensation tickled Franklin’s neck.

  “Well that’s the thing. About two hours after the ambulance went missing last night, we got a call from an alarm company. It seems someone broke into the rear door over at the aviary. I went back and took a look around. Everything looked normal. I was about to leave when I noticed that owl you were telling me about, the dead one on the bench, had been cut open. Eviscerated, I think it’s called. All the internal organs, I’m told, were missing. Heart, liver, lungs.”

  Franklin said nothing. He couldn’t get his voice to overcome the feeling of sudden dread he felt creeping up his back.

  “Dr. Reveal?”

  “Yes. I’m here. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  O’Neil was silent.

  “Tell me,” Franklin said.

  “Well there’s a big cage in the back. There was nothing in it before but —”

  “That cage held a large golden eagle,” Franklin cut in.

  “Yes, I know. The bird experts we brought in said a large eagle was found waiting near the rear aviary doors. The doors to the back office. When the door was opened, it flew in and landed on top. They put the bird inside the cage.

  “Well, after the alarm went off the cage was empty again — except for something on the floor of it. I’m sending a picture through to you right now.”

  Franklin looked at the screen display. Waited. A picture opened. A coppery flat background overlaid by what looked like a series of thick, wavy lines. He set the phone to SPEAKER.

  “We think those are part of the owl’s intestines,” O’Neil explained. “Is this some kind of symbol?”

  Franklin’s jaw bulged. He knew the symbol. The sense of dread he felt suddenly increased a hundredfold. The owl’s guts had been cut into short lengths. In lines nearly straight, arranged in a kind of neat stack, laid out in a kind of square:

  “No one knows what it means,” O’Neil said.

  Franklin replied softly, “It’s a hexagram. Two trigrams, one atop the other. I haven’t looked at one of these in a long time. It’s from the Chinese I-Ching.”

  “For what, exactly?”

  “The upper trigram, the top three lines — solid-broken-solid — stands for fire. The lower trigram — broken-solid-broken — is water. Fire over water. Fire delivered over water. I warned you, O’Neil.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Together it’s the last hexagram — Number Sixty-Four. This one is known as Begin Again.”

  “Begin again?” O’Neil asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If this is connected to the New York and Virginia bombs, its real meaning is one of pure evil. Some I-Chings translate Begin Again as Unfinished.”

  O’Neil went silent. Someone in the background called his name.

  “What?” O‘Neil said. “Oh, shit! Reverend, I have to go.”

  Without another word O’Neil disconnected.

  Franklin stood there. Scared, worried. What does it all mean?

  He locked the door, dropped the key in the little white mailbox. Walked back to his jeep. Started it up. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he thought he caught a whiff of something familiar.

  What the —

  There in the mirror, parked at the curb, driver’s door open, was a red convertible with a black top. And Everon! Already out of the car. Rushing up the drive.

  “Glad I caught you, Bro!” Everon yelled out.

  Franklin smiled back, feeling more cheerful than he’d felt in a week. “Hi! What are you doing up here?”

  But there was none of Everon’s usual cocky grin. Only the scrunched, intense look on his brother’s face of worry and determination. Everon jerked open the jeep’s door and pulled him by the arm from his seat.

  “Hey!”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Everon said. “Come on!”

  “What?”

  “TV working?” Everon yelled over his shoulder, rushing ahead up the snowy front walk.

  “I guess so,” Franklin said, running to catch up.

  “Come on! Your key! It’s probably on all the channels!”

  “What?” Franklin fished the key from the mailbox, unlocked the door.

  Everon said nothing about the lack of books usually scattered around, the orderliness of the furniture. He ran straight for the small portable television.

  The screen woke up to a nighttime view of people selling food in a long marketplace. The picture changed to a street where couples held hands, walking along the evening streets of a city, past a tall temple.

  Franklin thought, I’ve been there! It looked like —

  The picture changed. “The highways,” said an announcer, “all the way ’round ’Pindi are clogged. People trying to escape the city, trying to get far enough away before it comes down.”

  The camera panned up to a bright point of light that appeared to be slowly descending.

  And Franklin whispered three soft words: “What in hell?”

  The Stranger

  By S
unday morning, the Williams’ Mercer Power Plant again had a security guard. At seven a.m. that guard put a call through to Juniata. The little secretary Toni Sena located Hunt Williams in his office.

  “You said to call you personally if I needed anything.”

  “What is it? Family okay, Chin? Doug’s still coming in tonight, isn’t he?”

  “My family’s fine, sir. Doug’ll be here at six. No, I’m calling because I found a guy I didn’t know out back in the yard. When he wouldn’t give me his name I asked him what he was doing here. He said he was looking for a blond surfer-type guy.”

  “Think he meant Everon Student?”

  “Exactly who I thought he meant, sir.”

  “What did this man look like?”

  “He didn’t look like one of the line guys, that’s for sure. Cropped hair — a buzz cut. A real short guy with a thick neck.”

  Hunt’s memory clicked back a week ago when he’d first pulled into N-J with Everon’s crew. The man he’d never seen before who looked exactly like the man Chin was describing, leaving out of the parking lot at the end of that crazed bunch of customers. About the same time the log records disappeared from our hard drives — records that show our big Mercer generator was taken off the power grid minutes before the New York bomb exploded.

  “Where is he now?” Hunt asked.

  “He disappeared. I had to stay at the gate. I’m sorry, Mr. Williams. If I had a second man to back me up I might have tried to follow him. I guess I should have pulled my firearm on him —”

  “It’s okay, Chin.”

  Hunt finished the call and turned for the control room. A group of Everon’s tired linespeople were following their crew manager Right Deters out of the control room. As they reached Juniata’s front door the voice of Everon’s lead engineer rang out:

  “Rani! Right! You guys! Get back in here!” The urgency caused them to turn on the run. Hunt Williams hurried after.

  “How can they blame us? We had nothing to do with it!” the man in long robes shook fearfully. He was one of three Saudi royals, participants all, in the secret desert conference, staring at the huge wall screen. As if stricken by some terrible untreatable disease, faces clouded over, watching the tiny point of light come down. Two words repeating over-and-over in their minds: Man qādim — Who’s next?

  When Ray Williams found his younger brother downstairs at the computer, he grabbed Jacob’s shoulder with concern, “Bro, what are you doing?”

  “Trying again. Maybe . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Ray said, seeing what Jacob was up to. “I don’t want to be a downer, but we nearly ate it big time on that guy’s ID! Couple more hops and that Pakistani search would have —”

  Jacob smiled. His mouse clicked. “Here — there!” Images flashed across the screen. “Hey! Look at this!”

  It was a live stadium concert of some kind. The camera swung rapidly upward. A glowing object appeared in the dark sky, a bright burning torch. Small stabs of flame, tiny jets bursting from its sides.

  “What’s that coming off it?” Ray asked.

  “Mmm . . . decoy chaff?”

  “That’s got to be nuclear!”

  “Yeah Bro. And if it is, they’re toast!”

  With a click of Jacob’s mouse, an announcer’s voice came from the computer speakers.

  “The identification found on the body of a Pakistani engineer who washed up on a north Florida beach, combined with tests on New York City and Virginia Beach bomb residue — these things, ladies and gentlemen, have taken the President inexorably down this road . . .”

  “But Bro!” Jacob interrupted, they said together: “THAT ID WAS EXPIRED!”

  “Sir!” Lance Bolini implored FBI Director Charles Line, “If the white separatists on the video we’ve taken are in league with Benoit Kalagi, and if those garbage trucks are nuclear, we need to bring in the military on this now!”

  Line shouted, turning to a personal aide, “We’ve got to get this video to Colorado!”

  The aide shook his head. “It’s too late. The President just announced they’ve launched a nuclear attack on Pakistan!”

  In the vodka clubs of Moscow, the beach-side clubs of Rio, the bars of New South Wales, a grainy picture took over video screens. A yellowish-green, ethereal view; lights of two cities glowing on a dark canvas. They watched death knocking on the doors of another five million people.

  “Do we know how far away, how high up that is?” said the voice of a commentator.

  “Well our technical people —”

  “Hold on —” interrupted the first voice. “Something we’re becoming more and more used to seeing as war technology progresses. It looks like this feed is an embedded view direct from the missile itself! Those are the plains of Pakistan down there. Rawalpindi in the center, uh, Islamabad to our upper right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Ninety?” the first asked, referring to a number at the screen’s bottom. “Ninety seconds? And what are those numbers in the lower right corner?”

  “Uh — altitude to impact.”

  “So we’re looking at 180 miles up, impact in . . . seventy-five seconds now?”

  “One hundred fifty miles,” the technical man put in. “The missile accelerates the closer its approach to the ground . . . One hundred and —” The picture suddenly glowed white and was gone. Returned to its ground-based view.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure!”

  One message after another crawled across their screens. Pakistan’s air force had launched jet fighters.

  PAKISTANI AIR-TO-AIR MISSILE INTERCEPTOR . . .

  ANOTHER ONE . . .

  But they could not fly that high, and as the bright burning star descended, it became obvious the interceptors were all too slow.

  The missile still descended in the sky, like a sign to mark the birth of a new Holy Child.

  Pure Confusion

  In Washington D.C., a telephone beeped on an oak cadenza. The phone had long connected exclusively to the White House. It now ran to the mountain above Colorado Springs.

  “Line!”

  “Charles, look —”

  “Marc, he’s got to listen!” said FBI Director Charles Line. “We’ve got direct video now from that farm in New York! They’re moving out!”

  “When?”

  “Right now!”

  “Hold on,” Praeger said.

  A two-second pause.

  “Charles?”

  Finally! Line recognizing the voice of President Wall, his ultimate boss, the man he’d been trying to reach for more than a day.

  But another voice in Line’s head was telling him something terrible, something frightening: It’s already too late!

  No! Not yet, he hoped. He had to try!

  Charles Line flipped a switch alongside the phone, connecting it to the FBI’s internal network . . .

  “Mr. President,” Director Line’s voice urged from Christopher Wall’s Cheyenne Mountain speakerphone, “it may not have been the Pakistanis at all. We’ve got live video, sir. A group of more than one thousand white separatists on a farm in upstate New York — appear to be preparing another nuclear attack!”

  “A third attack? Where?”

  “Sir, please listen to this!” Excited voices blasted from the President’s speakerphone:

  “ . . . we move on to the next city on the list!”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it!”

  “Shit!” Wall screamed, “Philadelphia?”

  “Perhaps,” Marc Praeger said calmly, “these so-called separatists are simply taking advantage of the situation.”

  Director Line continued, finding it difficult to remain as calm as Praeger, “Our computer experts have found a bank trail that leads directly to a major arms dealer. Benoit Kalagi. As you may recall, sir, from the mixed-agency briefing last month, Kalagi is strong in Pakistani and Afghani weapons. Isn’t it possible they hired a ship,
that this ship delivered the New York and Virginia Beach bombs?”

  “Speculation, Charles?” Wall shouted. “What about the Pakis, the Iranians?”

  “It could very well be this Hashim,” Line suggested, “the Pakistani engineer who washed up in Florida — what if he was working for these white separatists? Please, sir. We’re talking about millions of innocent lives.”

  “Goddam!” screamed Wall. “What the fuck would white separatists be doing with Pakistani plutonium?”

  “Could these white seps,” Line asked, patience diminishing rapidly, “have bought Paki bombs from Benoit Kalagi?”

  “Goddam, Marc!” screamed Wall. “Our missile’s in the air!”

  No! thought Line, standing in Washington behind his office desk. It’s already too late!

  That’s Not Right!

  “Sorry about that,” said the commentator. “We lost the picture. Apparently the heat of re-entry was too much for the onboard camera.”

  On Franklin’s screen the picture suddenly split down the middle. On the left, in the dark sky an object glowing brilliantly. On the right side of the screen a face appeared.

  “No! Do not run,” the man implored.

  “Where are we getting this from?” asked the commentator’s voice. “Uh — oh,” he answered himself, “both pictures are coming to us from Al Jazeera. Uh, you’re looking at the — Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium!”

  “Seventy miles to impact . . . Fifty . . .” a second announcer said.

  Franklin and Everon watched the man kneeling in Arabic prayer, his voice growing. Begging Allah for intercession, a rapid-tongued English translator speaking over top, beside himself with fear.

  Pindi, Franklin thought, horrified. Its nearby twin Islamabad too. The cities are only miles apart — full of schools and shops, irreplaceable ruins of Hindu temples.