Walk the Wire

by David Baldacci

  Twenty minutes later she was finished and sat back. She glanced at Decker, her face pale and her expression one of slight panic. “They all have one common denominator from the time period that Daniels worked there.”

  Decker nodded. He had been looking and reading over her shoulder. “Back then all those facilities were involved in developing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.”

  “It apparently all began during World War II. We didn’t have those types of weapons, but Germany did. So we started researching and developing them. Both the Army and the Air Force. The programs accelerated from the end of World War II through the Korean War and beyond. During that time the U.S. and the Soviet Union made enough of the stuff to kill everyone on earth. And that doesn’t include nukes,” said Jamison as she scrolled down the screen. “But then Nixon halted all such programs at the end of the sixties. All stores of such weapons were destroyed and the facilities that those programs operated were cleaned up and reassigned.”

  “Only maybe some of them weren’t destroyed,” said Decker. “And maybe there was a facility that worked on them that wasn’t included in the list you just researched.”

  “Meaning London Air Force Station?”

  Decker nodded. “I think it was originally built not for radar array but for production of biochemical weapons. Then the place was converted into a radar installation, even though it duplicated what the other one did near Grand Forks. Hell, maybe they added on to it at that point, to make it look like the other facility. You know, a pyramid with a golf ball on top.”

  “Until they started using it for a secret prison. What, do people just wait around to do something secret and illegal and then just plop it here?”

  “You’re talking about the government, Alex, so anything is possible.”

  “So is that the time bomb we’re all sitting on here? WMDs?”

  “It’s a theory, but a good one. We just need to prove that it’s true.”

  “And if it is true?”

  “We need to find the WMDs.”

  “Oh, no sweat. We can wrap this all up by tomorrow.”

  When he didn’t respond to her sarcasm she glanced up at him. He was clearly lost in thought.

  “Are you thinking of some way to actually do that?”

  “We’ll need to alert Robie to what we found. Maybe they can get some people on it. But we have some angles to work, too.”

  “Beginning with what?”

  “London Air Force Station.”

  “If they were making WMDs over there, I’m not sure I want to go there again.”

  “But we will anyway,” replied Decker.

  * * *

  It was the next day. Jamison was driving, and Decker was staring out the window at yet another approaching storm.

  “Dollar for your thoughts,” said Jamison.

  “Not sure they’re worth that much.”

  “You seem down. I mean I can understand that, what with our line of work. But you always seem to be able to, I don’t know, rise above it.”

  He turned to look at her. “Stan has been my brother-in-law for over two decades. I’ve spoken to him more here than I have in the last twenty years. Same with my sisters.”

  “Well, they lived a long way away. And siblings grow up and move on with their own lives.”

  “You have siblings. You keep in touch with them all.”

  “I’m the oldest. It sort of comes with the territory. And not to stereotype, but girls are a little better at that than guys. At least in my experience.”

  “Before what happened to me happened, I did keep in touch. I would call and even write letters, if you can believe that. Before Stan and Renee moved to California, I went to visit them in Colorado. I was still in college. They were pretty much still newlyweds. I helped Stan lay a brick patio in their backyard.”

  “That’s really nice, Decker.”

  “I wasn’t drafted after my senior year. I was a walk-on with the Browns, worked my tail off and made the team, really just as a special teams player. I was a good athlete. I was big enough and strong enough. But the NFL is a whole other level, the best of the best. I didn’t have the speed or the other intangibles you needed to really be more than a journeyman. Then I was running down the field after the kickoff on opening day. And the next thing I woke up in a hospital. Both my sisters were there. I’d been in a coma for days. Renee was holding one of my hands and Diane the other. I didn’t even notice them at first. I was looking at the weird colors on the monitor and the clock. And I thought I was losing my mind. Then I saw my sisters, and even though I knew they were my sisters, there was just something . . . gone. I felt nothing for them. I mean nothing.”

  He looked away.

  Jamison, who had clearly been stunned by this candid out-pouring from her partner, finally found her voice. “You’d been through a terrible trauma, Decker. And then you had some unexpected . . . challenges.”

  “A nice, polite way to describe it.”

  “But you’ve changed. Since the first time I met you in that courthouse back in Burlington. You’re different.”

  “I know. And that’s what scares the hell out of me.”

  He said nothing more, but just stared at the darkening skies like they would any minute starkly reveal his even darker future.

  WHEN THEY DROVE UP to the front gate of the facility two men in suits approached them.

  Jamison rolled down her window and showed her creds.

  “Go right in,” said one of the men. “You’ve been cleared through.”

  The gate opened and Jamison drove on.

  “Robie’s doing?” she said.

  “When I called Robie and filled him in on what we had discovered, he said he was going to get the wheels turning for our visit here. And they were going to start making discreet inquiries about the chemical weapons piece.”

  They parked where they had last time and got out.

  Jamison said, “So where do we begin?”

  “Let’s try the pyramid building first. Probably the closest I’ll ever get to Egypt.”

  Another man stationed there and also wearing a suit, his eyes shielded by sunglasses though now the dark clouds fully covered the sky, let them inside.

  They could see that the stone walls on the outside also constituted the interior walls.

  The inside was enormous. In the center of the facility was, at least Decker assumed, the PARCS radar apparatus that Sumter had told them about. It looked somewhat like the enormous telescopes one would see in an observatory but with lots of other equipment surrounding it, including workstations lining the walls, with banks of darkened computers on them.

  “Wow,” said Jamison. “This looks like something you’d see in a weird science fiction film where they’re plotting how to blow up the world.”

  “It might not be fiction,” retorted Decker.

  “Gee, thanks for that comforting thought.”

  Decker saw only one doorway set into the far wall. “Let’s go see where that leads.”

  Multiple sets of stairs led to a lower level, where Robie had previously told them the prisoners had been kept.

  They were cages more than prison cells, obviously improvised by the look of them.

  “They probably just dumped these things in here once they decided to use this place as a jail,” said Decker. “Doesn’t look like a lot of thought went into it at all.”

  “Imprisoning and torture don’t require a lot of thought. Just a lot of immoral people doing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons,” Jamison said forcefully.

  “I can see you’ve given this some thought.”

  “In my previous life as a journalist I did a story on the subject. It wasn’t pretty.”

  They both noted the blood and what looked like bodily waste on the floors of the cages. And the smell of urine was strong in the air.

  “Despite how disgusting this all is, I take it we won’t see any congressional hearings,” said Jamison.

&
nbsp; “They’re going to bury it all like they told us,” replied Decker. “And so long as the people behind it are punished, I’m okay with that. We have enough to deal with as a country without having this added to the pile.”

  “I suppose,” said Jamison doubtfully. “But what about the truth coming out being the cornerstone of democracy?”

  He glanced at her. “Your old journalist’s antennae tingling for the truth to come out again?”

  “But that’s in the past. I follow orders now.”

  “No, it’s not in the past, Alex. It’s why we’re here. To find the truth.”

  She smiled. “I knew I liked you for a very good reason.”

  “If they did work on chemical and biological weapons, it must have been down here somewhere.” He eyed twin corridors that went off to the left and right.

  “Do you think this place might be contaminated?” asked Jamison suddenly. “I mean some of that stuff can hang around a long time.”

  Decker stiffened. “I didn’t really think about that. But people have been working here for decades. If the place had been contaminated, they would have shut it down. At least they should have.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right. I’m not as confident.”

  He led the way down the corridor on the right. After taking flights of steps down they reached a cavernous room nearly as large as the one containing the PARCS system above them.

  “We went down several sets of long steps to get to this point,” noted Jamison. “So this space must be well underground. A hundred feet or more.”

  Decker nodded in agreement as he gazed around. “Doesn’t look like they used this when they were running the prison. And it smells moldy, too.” He walked the perimeter of the room, examining the walls and floor. In one place the wall was lighter than the other sections. Decker looked this over and then kept moving.

  He stopped abruptly and turned to Jamison. “Wait a minute. How did Ben Purdy even know that something like that had happened here? That there were chemical and biological weapons produced here.”

  “I don’t know. But we saw the research he’d done on those pages.” She tensed. “Wait a minute. What would prompt him to even do that research?”

  “That’s what I was talking about. And I think the answer is Brad Daniels.”

  “No, Daniels was the catalyst for Cramer’s coming here. He had nothing to do with Purdy.”

  “Why do you think that?” asked Decker.

  “Your cardinal rule: There are no coincidences.”

  “Well, for every rule there is an exception. In fact, I think he did learn about it from Brad Daniels.”

  “Based on what?” she asked.

  Decker pulled out Daniels’s hat and pointed to another pin on there.

  Jamison examined it. “An anniversary event the Air Force held?”

  “Two years ago, at Minot Air Force Base, right here in North Dakota.”

  “But how can we know they both attended, even with that pin on his hat?”

  “I know they did, because it was noted in Purdy’s service record that he attended that very same event.”

  “But we still can’t be sure that they met there.”

  “Which is why I’m going to call the nursing home in Williston and have it out with Brad Daniels once and for all.”

  “Go easy on him, Decker. He’s an old man.”

  “That ‘old man’ is tougher than just about any son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” Decker groused.

  “But he wouldn’t tell us anything before. Why would he now?”

  He held up the hat and smiled. “Because now I’ve got a bargaining chip.”

  “MR. DANIELS, IT’S AMOS DECKER with the FBI.”

  Decker held the phone away from his ear as the old man started screaming at him.

  “You son of a bitch. You give me back my hat. You’re a thief!”

  “So you noticed it was gone? I take it your eyesight is better than you let on.”

  “If I were forty years younger, I’d kick your ass.”

  “But you’re not, so let’s make a deal, Mr. Daniels. You answer my questions and I guarantee that you’ll get your hat back intact.”

  “What questions?” Daniels barked. “I told you I can’t answer nothing. It’s classified. Do you know what ‘classified’ means, moron?”

  “What I’m going to ask you has nothing to do with classified information. I just want to ask if you met someone at the anniversary event you attended at Minot Air Force Base.”

  “How the hell did you know about that?” Daniels barked.

  “You have a pin about it on your hat.”

  “A hat you stole. That’s a felony.”

  “At most it’s a misdemeanor. And like I said, you’ll get your hat back. I promise.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “Because, like you, I took an oath to serve this country. And that oath means a lot to me, like it did to you.”

  “Go on,” said a suddenly calmer Daniels.

  “Was there someone there you met named Ben Purdy, he was a sergeant with the Air Force?”

  Daniels didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “Is he dead, too?”

  “No, but he is missing. So you did meet up with him?”

  “What the hell is going on up there?”

  “I’m trying to find that out. Did you mention to Purdy that the London facility was used to work on biological and chemical weapons?”

  “That’s classified, dammit. You said nothing you asked me would make me reveal classified information. You’re a big, fat liar, you are.”

  “I know all about the program that went on up here and at other facilities around the country. Pine Bluff, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Fort Detrick.”

  “Camp Detrick, least it was back then.” He fell silent. “So, you been read in, I see.”

  “I have been. I have top secret security clearances.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “I’m not sure. But it seems that a lot of people are interested in it enough to kill other people. So it wasn’t a radar facility back then?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you worked with radar and such. Why would they send you there if it involved working on chemical weapons? You had no expertise in that.”

  Decker heard a long sigh, and then Daniels said, “It was supposed to be a radar facility, so they had to have radar people stationed there. Otherwise, it would look funny. So I was one of those guys. You know, keeping up pretenses.”

  “Did you know that going in?”

  “I didn’t know anything. I went where I was told.”

  “Did you have anything to do with the work there?”

  “Not really. Us radar guys learned pretty quick that something was up. I mean we weren’t running a radar facility, for starters, and we had been sworn to secrecy, even beyond what you normally are. We had to sign papers and stuff. Now, we knew the commies were in a nuke race with us. But we also knew the Germans had been making chemical weapons during the Big One and we had to play catch-up. That wasn’t a huge secret. So when we started seeing some of the stuff being brought into London? Well, I saw enough boxes marked with skulls and crossbones to know what was going on. And then they recruited us to do some stuff with what they were doing. I don’t mean making the shit. But I’d seen some of the labs they had down there.”

  “You mean in the lower level of the pyramid building?” Decker asked.

  “Yeah. They usually didn’t want us down there. We mainly worked on security and keeping up the facility, stuff like that. But occasionally, as time went on, we were sent down there to do some tasks. And we had to put on masks and special suits and crap like that.”

  “Did you see any of the stuff that came out of there?”

  “Yeah, we helped put it in these special storage rooms in these bombproof containers. Scared the crap out of me, I can tell you. They had warning signs all over the place: ‘Highly toxic,’
‘Do not touch,’ ‘Never take your masks and goggles off,’ stuff like that. Even with that some of the guys got sick. I mean inadvertently. They never tested stuff on anybody, nothing like that. This is the good, old U.S. of A. We don’t do that shit.”

  “Anything else?”

  Daniels didn’t answer.

  “Mr. Daniels, anything else? It’s important.”

  Daniels didn’t respond and Decker decided to just let the silence linger. He wanted Daniels to feel the moment, to let him understand that something momentous was happening and he could be an integral part of it. If he would just open up.

  Daniels said, “Then, sometime in the late sixties, it all went away. They closed up shop and then we started using the facility as a radar station. I got to do what I was trained to do. It was really exciting stuff. We were protecting our country from the commies.”

  “So they took all the ‘stuff’ away?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now, can you tell me about your talk with Purdy, the young man you met at the event?”

  “He was a nice young guy. Stationed where I had been. He had proper security clearances. We had a lot in common. We hit it off. We had a couple drinks even. Made me feel young again.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then, well, I told him about some of the stuff that we had done up there.”

  “And he was interested?”

  “Yeah, asked a million questions. I answered what I could.”

  “Did you ever tell him about Mary Rice?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “How did you leave it with him?”

  “I didn’t leave it any way with him. If he followed up on any of it, I didn’t know nothing about that.” He paused. “You said he’s missing. He was a right nice young fellow. Proud to serve his country. You think he’s okay?”

  “I’m hoping he is, Mr. Daniels. But in my business sometimes hope isn’t good enough.”

  * * *

  Decker filled Jamison in as they left the facility.

  “So Ben Purdy did learn about the WMDs from the same source that Irene Cramer did—Brad Daniels.”

  “Yep,” replied Decker. “But we still have a lot to figure out.”

  As they passed the land ringing the installation, Jamison pointed out a large John Deere combine that was kicking up dust in an adjacent field.