by Thomas Scott
It took a little careful maneuvering to get out of line. Once free of the tangle they then had to backtrack the way they’d come in on 64 and cross the Sherman Minton again. They ended up following both sides of the same river in two different states. By the time they arrived, they were almost two hours late.
The old man wasn’t pleased.
Of course he hardly ever was. Gus had told them that much and it was one of the main reasons they were there to begin with.
The meeting with the old man was in a trailer park a few miles northeast of Jeffersonville. They drove through the town and Reif thought if towns could cry, this one had been shedding tears for a long time. The trailer park was no different…pretty much what you’d expect as Southern Indiana trailer parks went. It was shaped like a horseshoe, the trailers angled in and packed tight. They made a slow pass through to take in their surroundings then turned around at the far end of the park and made their way back to the old man’s place, which sat near the top of the curve, close to the toe of the shoe.
Most of the trailers looked to be decades old, any number of them wind-beaten and listing to either port or starboard, depending on where you stood in the giant hoof print. They were packed so close together you could stand on the porch steps of one and reach out and touch the unit next door. Empty beer cans, plastic pop bottles and fast-food paper bags were everywhere. If a weed was less than two inches tall it was considered part of the lawn…anything taller was probably thought of as a landscaping bush. The trailer next to the old man’s sported a blue plastic tarp that covered most of the roof. It would have fit the entire roof except it had slipped its moorings and hung lopsided across the front quarter of the trailer.
The park was called Indian Village. If they were going to use Indian names, Reif thought Ass of Buffalo might have been a little more appropriate.
Stone, still thinking of Fischer and Reed, felt like he might be on thin ice, so he kept his mouth shut. Chase, however, knew the ice was a little thicker for him, though with Reif, you could never be too sure. He said it for him. “Jesus Christ. What a dump. The guy that’s going to make us rich lives in this shit hole?”
Armon Reif laughed out loud. “Relax boys. Two things: One, he doesn’t live here…this place is for meetings, and two, the old man isn’t the one who’s going to make us rich. Gus is, once the job is done. This guy’s a small part of the bigger picture.”
Chase looked out the car window and watched a young boy pedal toward them. He was riding a red and yellow plastic trike of some kind. What were they called? A Big Wheel? Chase thought it was something like that. He’d never had kids—in fact, never felt like he’d been a kid himself—so he wasn’t sure, but he thought it sounded right. The pedals were connected directly to a large plastic front wheel. The wheel was cracked all along its circumference like it was ready to split in half. It wobbled side to side when the kid pedaled and was out of round, like maybe he’d made too many emergency stops. When they got out of the car the kid cranked the handle bars to one side, locked the pedals and skidded to a stop. He gave them a blank stare.
Stone tried on a smile and waved at the kid.
The kid looked at the three men for a moment, then shot them the bird and pedaled away.
“That right there is the epitome of trailer trash,” Stone said. “The whole damn country’s going to hell. How old was that little shit? Seven? Who teaches their kid that kind of thing?” He was getting hot. “I ought to go down there and show that pup the other end of his finger.”
“Don’t let it get you down,” Reif said. “In a few months if the wind is right that kid will be dead.”
“That’s bullshit. We’re too far south and you know it.”
“So…what? You going to go terrorize a kid? When did you get so sensitive?” Then, “C’mon. Let’s get to it.”
The old man went by the name of Ron Weller, and his anger was apparent as soon as they were through the door. “The hell you’ve been? You think I don’t have better things to do than sit around here waiting on you? You’re so late I thought you’d been pinched already. Timing is going to be everything on this job and you can’t even show up on time for a meeting? I was told they were sending me the best of the northwest. It’s already starting to look like I’m getting the least of the southeast.”
Reif let the old man ramble…mostly because that’s what old men liked to do. He wasn’t really listening. He was looking around the inside of the trailer. Not that there was much to see. The interior walls had been removed and with the exception of a single notched-out bathroom at the rear and a small kitchen counter, the trailer was one big long narrow empty room. Skinny horizontal blinds covered all the windows, the only light coming from a single row of overhead fluorescents that hung low on thin galvanized chains. The lights made a faint humming noise that made Reif’s teeth itch.
On the other side of the kitchen counter were a few six foot collapsible tables. Next to the tables sat maybe twenty folding chairs leaning neatly against the wall. Weller had placed six of the chairs in a semicircle in the middle of the room. The trailer smelled of cigarettes, flat beer, and well-aged pizza, but it was surprisingly clean. Reif suspected the trailer was used as a meeting place for modern Nazis or the Klan. Something like that, anyway. It sure as hell wasn’t for the book of the month club.
When Weller felt he’d made his point, or perhaps when he’d run out of gas—Reif wasn’t quite sure—he sat down on one of the chairs and waited for the others to do the same. Once the four of them were seated, it became obvious they were two men short.
“Where’s the rest of your crew? Wait, don’t tell me. They overslept and are going to be here any minute.”
Weller’s grey hair was cut in a fifties style flat-top, one that was starting to go a little round on top. He wore grease-stained blue coveralls and steel toed work boots. Reif noticed that the laces of his boots didn’t match. Something about that bothered him. It was…sloppy.
“You’ve got some smart ass in you, old man,” Reif said. “I sort of like it. Just don’t take it too far. I had an Auntie one time—she raised me up, you know—and she had some smart ass in her too. Her problem was she couldn’t find her off switch. Know what I did?”
The old man grinned at him, his teeth dark with nicotine stains. “Helped her find it, did ya?”
Reif bit into his lower lip and nodded. “That I did. You want to know where the rest of the crew are? They didn’t oversleep. I put them to sleep. If you want to go for a ride out to the quarry I’ll show you where we buried them.”
Weller’s grin stayed on his face, but the light in his eyes went dark. When he spoke his voice was flat. “I don’t need to know anything about that.”
“Good.” Reif stood from his chair and got right in the old man’s face. “We’re here and we’re ready. Quit trying to get on top of me because no one has ever been able to do that. I doubt very much that you’d be the one to finally pull it off.”
Weller held his stare. “All right. They said you were a tough guy. So let’s get on with it, tough guy.”
Reif continued to stare at him, waiting for the old man to look away. But the old man was a little tougher than Reif thought, so he finally sat back down, crossed his legs, then raised his eyebrows at him. “Where’s the rest of your people? I thought we were all going to meet at once.”
The old man shook his head. “My people are on another job. You’ll meet them when it’s time.”
“What kind of job?” Reif wanted to know.
“The kind that ain’t your business. Don’t worry about things that don’t concern you.”
“Everything concerns me, old man. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you and I are going to be friends.”
The old man barked out a laugh. He pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and lit up. He blew the smoke right at Reif. “This ain’t no social gathering and I’m not interested in making friends. I’m interested in making money. So how about we get to it
?” He replaced the pack of cigarettes and pulled out a slip of paper. “Here’s the address where you’ll be staying. Nice little house in a quiet neighborhood west of Louisville. Make sure you wipe down your hotel rooms before you leave. Move into the new place, keep the noise down and you’ll be fine. I’d tell you to take the Sherman Minton bridge and allow for the time you need to backtrack, but I guess you already know that, don’t you?”
Reif made a circular ‘get on with it’ motion with his hand.
“Report to the Jeffersonville Rail maintenance shop two weeks from Monday morning. That should give you plenty of time to settle in at the safe house. I’ve got the paperwork all set up under the identities you gave me. I run the shop so no one should give you any truck about anything. You won’t be there long enough for the union to bother you, but if you have any problems I want you to walk away and come directly to me. Let me handle my people. Everyone understand that?”
They all nodded. Listening closely now. It was starting to get real.
“Everything is locked up tight,” Weller said. “The car itself is locked, the container inside the car is locked, and the material crates inside the container are locked as well. I don’t know which one of you is the cutter, but you’ve got some work ahead of you and it won’t be easy. And you’re going to have to be quick.”
“We’ll get it done,” Reif said. “It’s really only two cuts. We can cut the material crates later.”
“Yes, but it’s two cuts in a row, not at the same time. That means it’s a lot of cutting, over a pretty short timeline.”
“Anyway…” Reif said.
“Anyway, the stuff is manufactured right across the river in Kentucky. The shipment is headed to Purdue University for their research departments. The rail line handles the transportation of the material from Kentucky. The shipments are always guarded, but there’s only one guard on the train and he rides up front with the engineer.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, then,” Stone said.
“How are you going to handle the tracers?” Weller asked.
They were getting into things Reif didn’t want to discuss. “That’s our problem. Don’t worry about it.”
“This is all happening in my yard. I am worried about it. When the Feds come knocking, they’re not going to accept a shoulder shrug for an answer. This is DHS we’re talking about. Those Homeland boys can lock you in a hole and toss the keys in a smelter. So it’s a simple question, Mr. Reif. How are you going to handle the tracers?”
Reif looked away for a moment before answering. “The tracers aren’t live. It’s not like a GPS system. They’re end-to-end. Scanned when they go out, and scanned when they arrive. What happens in between is off the grid.”
“They’ll be rethinking that pretty soon,” Chase said.
“That they may,” Reif said.
“How are we going to get them to divert to the maintenance yard?” Stone asked.
“There’s a switch in the line south of the yard. If there’s a problem on the northbound main—and that happens time to time—they switch the track and run the line that passes right by the maintenance shop. If we disable an engine on the main line, they won’t have a choice.”
“So they go by the yard,” Chase said. “Big deal. How does that help us?”
“It is a big deal,” Weller said. “When they go by the yard they have to reduce their speed to a crawl. We can cut a brake line on one of the cars and that’ll throw a warning at the engineer. Since he’s right there at the maintenance yard, we’ll be the ones in control of everything.” He stood from his chair and retrieved a package from the table then pulled out a diagram…it was something of a flow chart that showed the sequence of events.
Reif thought it was a little crude, but had to admit it was a decent representation of what they were planning to do. The dollar value of the material wasn’t very high, unless you had the right buyers. And their boss, Gus, assured Reif they did.
According to Gus the buyers were Russians who claimed to be backed by ISIS, though Reif had his doubts. On the other hand, he didn’t care either. Gus had told them they were hooked up with a terrorist group who’d never set foot in the states, but wanted to move up the radical ladder by doing something none of their fellow jihadists had ever done…
Set off a dirty bomb in the U.S.
They discovered making the bomb wasn’t hard…they’d been doing that for years in Iraq. Even getting their hands on the nuclear material—though much harder—was still doable. But they’d never figured out a way to get one past the sniffers at any of the state-side docks. Sure, you could make a statement by taking out an embassy somewhere, but that sort of thing had a news cycle of about a week.
With Reif and his crew, the terrorists were now one step ahead of the game. They’d take the nuclear material already in the country and make a dirty bomb out of that. The bomb wouldn’t do much physical damage…a building, maybe two depending on where it was set off. Gus hadn’t told them that part yet. Even the material they were using wouldn’t have long-term physical effects on a great number of people. Yes, a few hundred might die…maybe as many as a thousand. Reif thought that would be on the upper end of things, but the real damage would be the fear. It would rip the country apart. A small explosion with a few rads of radiation in a major metropolitan area would bring the country to its knees. The people would panic, the stock markets would crash, and anyone who knew that in advance would be in a perfect position to reap the benefits. The best part, Reif thought, is that the media would do most of the work for them.
He could already envision the headlines:
Terrorists Set Off Nuclear Bomb In U.S.
And why should he care? He wasn’t a terrorist. He was a quiet, semi-wealthy Canadian, an orphan of agents of change, one who liked to dabble in the stock market. He’d short the market right before the blast and when it was all said and done, Reif and his crew would be worth hundreds of millions.
And they’d be gone.
8
When Patty Doyle regained consciousness she did so similar to someone who wakes from a dream and doesn’t immediately remember where they are or the circumstances that brought them to a particular point in time. Her head and body ached from…what?
Then it all came flooding back in an instant and her eyes popped open. She’d been pushed down the basement stairs. The first thing she saw was a single light fixture above her head, well out of reach, surrounded by a protective cage of some sort. The light was on and it lit up her surroundings but it may as well have been a blanket that covered her spirit and soul.
She looked around the entire basement. Her captors were nowhere in sight. She was alone, the men either upstairs waiting for her to cry out, or gone. She held her breath and listened carefully for any sound from above, but it was of no use. The walls, ceiling and virtually every single inch of the entire basement was covered with the sound-proof foam. Any cries for help probably couldn’t be heard if her rescuers stood at the top of the steps and listened with a stethoscope pressed against the door.
She was on her back on a simple canvas cot. The tape that had held her hands and legs and ankles was gone, her skin red and sore from the adhesive. Her jaw ached from the gag, the same type of feeling she used to get from smiling too much at charity fundraisers to finance the school’s next expedition. A thick steel band was wrapped around her left wrist, the band shackled to a log chain that was looped around and locked to a metal post in the center of the room. A small, pale-green chemical toilet, the kind a camper might use, sat near the end of the cot. Two cases of bottled water were under the cot, along with a box of food stuffs—tuna in stay-fresh foil packages, crackers, chips, beefy jerky, and vanilla-flavored protein bars.
When Patty Doyle stood a wave of nausea flooded her system and it took everything she had to make it to the chemical toilet. She vomited, then spat, thankful she saw no blood.
The chain was just long enough for her to reach the cot. Even when she laid do
wn on the floor and stretched as far as she could she discovered she was at least ten feet away from any of the walls.
A single roll of toilet paper sat on the floor next to the chemical toilet. It was the saddest site Patty had ever seen. She sat down on the cot and screamed. If someone had been standing on the other side of the basement door at the top of the steps, if they heard anything at all they might have thought it a bird screeching from very far away.
Patty screamed until her voice was used up and then fell into a restless sleep for an indeterminate amount of time. When she woke again, this time it was with the knowledge that she was a prisoner. But why?
The men had her and she’d been unconscious for long enough they could have done whatever they wanted, but they hadn’t. Her initial fears of being sexually abused and then discarded were still present, but clearly the men had put some thought into what they were doing. Why go to all the trouble of setting up their little prison and then disappear? Wouldn’t they try to rape her as soon as possible? She had given one of them a reason to wait, that was for sure, but what about the other? Maybe they were at a bar getting liquored up and ready for the big event. Patty hoped so. She’d be ready. She took the cot apart and ended up with a light-weight aluminum rod. She smacked it in the palm of her hand. If they wanted a fight, she’d give them one. Short of killing her, she’d figure out a way to escape. She was certain of it.
When Virgil turned into the bar’s back lot the next day he found Murton sitting on top of a lopsided picnic table, one they all jokingly referred to as the ‘Employee Lounge.’ He sat down next to him, put his arm around his shoulder and gave him a squeeze. Then he waited.
He waited so long he thought perhaps his efforts; maybe even his very presence was going unnoticed. After a while Vigil slapped both his knees and moved to stand but Murton clamped his hand on Virgil’s shoulder and held him in place. Another full minute passed before he spoke.