by Gordon Ryan
“Completely.”
“Good. Now see to Cordoba.”
Chapter 32
California Legislature
Sacramento, California
Dan was just shutting down his computer terminal when his private line rang. He logged off and reached for the handset. “Dan Rawlings.”
“Hi, Dan,” Nicole said. “I’m in Sacramento, and I need some help.”
“Are you a voter in the Eighth Legislative District?” he teased.
“Not yet, but I spend so much time here, I’m beginning to feel like I qualify. Seriously, can you meet me at your apartment in about thirty minutes?”
“Sure. Want some dinner first?”
“No, we’ll have to eat on the way. I’ll explain later, but I haven’t got time to go home first, so will you find some warm outdoor clothing for me? I’ve got boots in the trunk of my car, but I’ll need a jacket, gloves, and probably a rain slicker, if the weather report is right.”
“Are we going to a football game?”
“No, but plan to be out most of the evening. It sounds hokey, Dan, but something’s come up.”
“Actually, it sounds great. An unknown date with a mysterious woman.”
“Mysterious, all right. Oh, and find a shovel if you can.”
“A shovel?”
“Just trust me. I’ll pick up some hamburgers and see you in thirty minutes.”
“Okay. See you then,” he said, hanging up, grabbing his jacket, and turning off the lights before exiting his office and entering the elevator to go down to the garage. Once home, he changed into jeans, a Stanford sweatshirt, and hiking boots, then rummaged through his outdoor gear in the garage and found some hiking gear his sister had worn years earlier, still wondering where Nicole was taking them. Not too stylish, he thought, but then, she didn’t ask for fashion. Nicole arrived just as he reentered the apartment.
“Hi,” she said, pecking him on the cheek. “Let’s take your Blazer. We might need four-wheel drive.”
Grabbing his gear and hers, Dan followed Nicole outside, where they transferred some of her gear to his vehicle. “And where might we be headed, Secret Agent Bentley?”
Nicole smiled at him. “Make fun if you will, Assemblyman Rawlings, but this is, in fact, a very important trip. Care for a burger?” she asked, climbing into the passenger seat in his car.
“Sure. Directions, please.”
“Up the canyon. Take 16 to 20, then toward Lower Clear Lake.”
Dan looked at her quizzically and backed out of the driveway. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t break the speed limit or get pulled over, but time is important.”
“Give me more specifics, and maybe I can save us some time.”
She pulled a small notebook from her pocket. “He said follow State Road 16 to 20, and then go west toward Clear Lake. Then take 53 south to a side road near Lower Clear Lake.”
“Right,” Dan replied. “If you’re game for some bumps, I can save us about forty-five minutes by following a forest service trail over the foothills above Rumsey.”
“It’s your home ground. Lead the way,” she said, handing him some French fries and putting a drink in the cup holder in the middle console.
By the time they’d reached the straight run on Highway 113 from Davis to Woodland, Dan had finished his hamburger, and he glanced at Nicole. “Is this a ‘need-to-know’ only mission?” He grinned.
“No—well, maybe, but in your case, you do need to know. Is the name Richard Clarke Stevenson familiar to you?”
Dan thought a moment before responding. “I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“He was recently appointed Director of Elections in the California Elections Office. He was deputy to Ann Macintosh. She’s the former director who was murdered. Anyway, he held the acting post for awhile and then received the appointment. We’ve had him under surveillance.”
“A suspect?”
“No, but in light of the previous deaths in that office, we thought it best to keep an eye on him. We discovered that the brigade has occasionally kept an eye on him, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Not steadily, but on occasion, as if they wanted to make sure that he was still in place. They’ve discreetly entered his apartment.”
Dan looked questioningly at Nicole.
“All right, Counselor, we’ve got a mike in his place. It happens, and it’s legal. Anyway, the Shasta boys have had him under surveillance, probably to determine if he has any knowledge of the past elections.”
“And?”
“And they haven’t found anything.” She paused for a moment, taking a sip of Coke. “But we have. We finally contacted him directly several days ago, outside his office, of course. He’s scared, Dan. Very scared. He knows he’s being watched, although I don’t think he knows it’s us as well as the brigade. Over the past six months, he’s been to the Missouri and Oregon elections offices to obtain election data from their prior election results, especially from the Home Telephone Voting System. What he’s turned up has scared him, and after what happened to Macintosh, and Phelps before her, he didn’t know who he could trust.”
After filling up with fuel and clearing Woodland, Dan headed up Highway 16, driving through a concentration of almond orchards and eventually passing the small airport located near the Yolo Country Club golf course, where Dan’s thoughts flitted through the recent ambush. It was full dark by eight-thirty, and they encountered only an occasional car on the road.
“How did you convince Stevenson to trust you?”
“He was out of options. I told him we’d been keeping a watch on him, and he was even more confused. I didn’t tell him about the brigade. He wants out of California and out of the whole problem. We said the bureau would help relocate him—if he agreed to assist with the case. That’s when he told me about the disks.”
Dan’s eyes widened. “Ah, secret disks.”
“It’s not quite James Bond, but if they contain what he says, they’re what we’re looking for, all right. He said that during the last general election, he’d stayed through the night, making complete backups every hour. That’s not the standard procedure, and he did it without permission. The interim tally printouts, which he burned, bore absolutely no resemblance to the final election results. But the last backup—now get this—taken just over an hour after the polls closed, showed a whole different set of numbers. The tally wasn’t even close to what had been happening and there was no record of the previous results.”
“Erased?” Dan asked.
“As if they never existed. Stevenson then knew he was on to something. Someone had obviously managed to compromise the system and manipulate the final count. He knew he needed to tell someone, but he didn’t know who to trust. He was scared. So he hid the disks.”
“And they’re at Clear Lake?”
“Stevenson’s family has a cabin up there. His father built it in the sixties as kind of a hippie retreat. No electricity and only a small wood-burning stove. He gave me directions to where he buried the disks—out behind the cabin.”
“Uh, oh. I forgot the shovel,” Dan blurted. “Oh, well—we can pick one up at Jack’s place in Rumsey,” he added. Ten minutes later, as they made the wide sweep around the west end of Esparto, Dan was silent. He thought of Jack as they passed the turnoff to the cemetery, where, only weeks earlier, they had laid Jack to rest. Leaving Esparto, they began the run up Rumsey Valley and reached Jack’s house about twenty-five minutes later.
“C’mon in, Nicole. I think we can find an old pair of jeans that’ll fit, and you can get out of your pants suit.”
Once they were back on the road, Dan advised that the turnoff through the foothills was located only a couple of miles up the road.
“What’s Stevenson going to do?” Dan asked, hitting a button on the dash and changing into four-wheel drive.
“He wanted the surveillance pulled and asked us to relocate him. He’s going to quietly gather his important stuf
f and meet two of our agents in Reno tomorrow.”
“Where will you move him?”
“How far up this road, Dan?” Nicole asked, sidestepping his question.
“A little over an hour to intersect with State Road 53, unless there’s a tree down or some other obstacle,” he said, dropping his inquiry. “Have you relayed this to Connor?”
“He wasn’t available. I left word on his voicemail that I’d contact him as soon as we were back from the field. Man, it’s dark up here at night,” Nicole exclaimed.
“If you hadn’t been there when I filled up, I’d try the old ‘ran out of gas’ routine.”
“Keep driving, Mr. Rawlings,” she said, smiling.
* * *
Richard Clarke Stevenson, the third director of administration in less than eighteen months for the California Elections Office, left the Bank of America lobby, glad that they stayed open until six on Fridays. An enormous sense of relief had swept over him since his two-hour talk with Agent Bentley. If it was the FBI that had been tailing him, then maybe he’d worried for nothing and nobody was really looking for him after all. Bentley had said they’d pull the tail and meet him tomorrow in Reno. Drawing out $17,000 in traveler’s checks made him feel a bit more secure. His VersaTeller card was limited to a daily withdrawal of five hundred, and he couldn’t get far on that.
Pulling into his apartment complex in Roseville shortly before seven, he climbed the flight of stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment. “Pack enough for a few days and we’ll send the rest.” That’s what she’d said. As he closed the door and set the dead bolt, he flicked on the lights, simultaneously noticing the smell of cigarette smoke.
“Mr. Stevenson?”
Stevenson jerked around, startled by the voice. “Who’re you?”
“No need to worry, Mr. Stevenson. We’re with the FBI, and we have a few questions.”
“But I just answered all your questions,” he blurted, startled to see a second man who was standing in the corner of the room. “Hey, you’re not FBI. I’m calling the police, and—”
“You’re calling nobody,” the second man said, stepping forward, his heavily tattooed arms now visible in the lamp light. He brandished a pistol in Stevenson’s face. “Have a seat. We’d still like to ask you a few questions. Since you’ve already had a jabber with the Feds, it shouldn’t be hard for you to repeat the message.”
Stevenson’s face blanched, and his legs felt weak. Shoved hard in the chest, he fell into a chair behind him. “Now, Mr. Stevenson,” his antagonist said in a calm drone, “this will be a rather unusual question-and-answer session, I’m afraid. You’ll have to respond by nodding your head, yes or no,” he said, slapping a piece of duct tape across Stevenson’s mouth. “If your answer needs talkin’,” he said to the terrified man, “you’ll have to write the answer on this here clipboard. Just to be sure it don’t slip off your lap, we’ll just lock it down,” he snarled, revealing a construction-type staple gun, which he used to drive a double-pronged staple through the clipboard into Stevenson’s knee, causing the terrified man to jerk upright in the chair, eyes blazing with pain.
The pain increased over the next hour to the point where Stevenson’s mind could no longer react to the repeated demands for information. The crude map he’d drawn on the clipboard was barely recognizable. Even Captain Roger Dahlgren, who accompanied First Sergeant Otto Krueger, had, at times, been forced to look away from Stevenson’s agony.
“I’m tellin’ ya, he told us everything he knew.”
“That’s what you hope,” Dahlgren said. “By the time you finished with him, he couldn’t have remembered his mother’s name. I told you to ease up. What if he knew more, or if he lied?”
“No chance, Captain. You haven’t got the stomach for what’s necessary,” Krueger scoffed. “He didn’t lie, and he got what he deserved.”
“Yeah, right,” Dahlgren said. “Tell that to the commander when you try to explain that the computer data disks are in some cabin near Clear Lake, and you don’t know what’s on ’em, and just in case they’re not there, that the informant’s dead.”
Shorter than Dahlgren by nearly a foot, and burly, Krueger replied, “We’ll find ’em, Captain. We’ll call the commander, and he can still get there before that useless female agent.”
Dahlgren looked once more at the slumped, bloody body and turned to leave, pausing at the door.
“If I remember right, this useless female agent is the same woman who put one between the eyes of your bank-withdrawal associate. Let’s get out of here before the neighbors smell the stench and call the cops.”
“Let’s call the commander. If he can get there before her, she’ll come up empty and think this guy lied to her.”
“Yeah, that’s a big if. Leave the message.”
Otto picked up the staple gun, blood still oozing from the handle, and stepped over to the now-silent body. He placed a small California bear flag against the dead man’s chest and fired the stapler once more. “Death to Traitors” was scribbled across the flag, affixed to what once had been the living, breathing body of Richard Clarke Stevenson. Newly appointed to his long-sought career position, Stevenson now sat lifeless in his apartment, his bloody head slumped to his chest. Surveying the room once more before leaving, Otto pulled off his rubber gloves and threw them on the floor.
“Have a nice day, Mr. Stevenson.” He spat at Stevenson’s lifeless body as he closed the door.
* * *
Dan and Nicole were lost in their own thoughts during much of the steep, uphill climb. The quiet and darkness were almost welcome in the growing tension of the hunt. Reaching the crest, Dan stopped the Blazer and turned off the headlights and engine, plunging Nicole and himself into silence and near total darkness.
“Sorry, but nature’s call waits for no man,” he said, stepping out of the car and disappearing off the dirt road.
There was an overcast sky, completely hiding the moon, and only an occasional star shone through the growing cloud cover. Nicole stood outside the vehicle for a moment, and when Dan returned to the car, she gathered the courage to ask him about the voices of his ancestors he always spoke about. He laughed at first, but quickly understood the seriousness of her question.
“But do you actually hear them, Dan?”
He pulled her close. “No, I’m not schizophrenic. They don’t really speak to me. I thought about it years ago and came to the conclusion that they were somehow … well … genetically implanted in me. It’s almost as if I really knew them. Actually, it answered a lot of questions I had about reincarnation and other unexplainable beliefs. Imagine, if you will, that our cells—our individual DNA—come with implanted memory from our ancestors. Tiny computer chips that contain the memory of the ages. I know it sounds far-fetched, but if such a thing actually happens, it would account for people who can speak foreign languages under hypnosis and remember places they’ve never been. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
Nicole was silent for a moment. “We are them, you mean?”
“In a sense. We add our own experiences to their knowledge, but basically, we are the current rendition of all those who have created us and made us who we are. We can still choose to do different things, act differently, even deny our basic instincts, but we can never really escape our heritage. If one believes that …” he said, pausing a moment to formulate his thoughts, “then it becomes important that we live so that our children and their children will benefit from our actions, rather than spend their energies trying to overcome whatever bad tendencies we’ve created. The theory could go in many directions, if you wanted to pursue it to its extreme. Psychologists could have a ball with it.”
“Is that something your grandfather taught you?” Nicole asked.
“No.” Dan laughed. “It’s vintage Rawlings Psychology 501—of my own making.”
Nicole stepped back to the Blazer and opened the door. “No time for philosophy tonight, Mr. Rawlings. We’ve got a tight
timetable, but I think I understand your theory.”
They reentered the Blazer, then crested the mountain road and commenced down the other side. “One other thing, Nicole,” Dan said, anticipating Nicole’s thoughts. “I haven’t had my dream about Susan’s accident or any trouble sleeping for a couple of months now.”
She remained quiet, accepting Dan’s way of thanking her for entering his life and helping to put a troublesome and difficult memory to rest.
Reaching State Road 53, Dan turned north and began to search for the Anderson-Marsh Park Road. Several miles up that canyon there would be a side trail, Stevenson had told Nicole, which would be identified by a rusted bulldozer pushed off the side of the California Forestry Department’s fire trail. Finally, after making two passes, a small, faded sign reading Anderson-Marsh State Park appeared, and they turned off the gravel road onto a dirt fire trail. As dark as it was, only the glow from their headlights provided any guidance, and then only for short distances as the road broke left and right. Finally, after going about six miles, Nicole told Dan to stop and back up. Shining her flashlight to the side of the road, she spotted the broken bulldozer, now partially covered with brush and new growth.
“Can you turn around on this road? Stevenson said the trail was about a hundred yards farther south from this bulldozer, running east another three or four hundred yards to the cabin.”
Dan maneuvered the Blazer around and located the fire trail, following it slowly. Dan spotted the cabin first and angled the car so the headlights provided partial illumination.
“Let’s get the shovel and walk around back. It’s gonna be hard with everything so dark. Can you leave the headlights on?”
“Yeah, for awhile. We don’t want a dead battery up here at night.”
Behind the cabin, Nicole tried to identify the landmarks Stevenson had named, tripping over fallen logs and righting herself again.