Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  The ranger nodded. “Morning, Doctor.”

  “Thought we’d take the scenic drive, be back in time for lunch. Anything doing?”

  “Couple of rough spots on the trail, but the road’s good. Wind’s supposed to pick up this afternoon so we’ve already issued a campfire ban. See anybody out there cooking breakfast, tell ’em to put it out.”

  “Will do,” Osborne said.

  The ranger stepped back and nodded again. “Ladies.”

  Osborne drove into the park, the narrow, blacktopped, winding road first looping east away from the river, passing through some low bluffs and slope-sided broad canyons, until five miles later they came back to the present-day course of the river and one of the campgrounds and picnic areas. A few travel trailers and a scattering of tents were set up, but no one had started a cooking fire.

  “Law-abiding citizens,” Ashley commented as they passed.

  “Wish they all were,” Whitney mumbled.

  Osborne glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She looked sad, maybe even a little dejected. “You okay, Doc?”

  She looked at his image and managed a slight smile. “Don’t get me wrong, but sometimes it seems like I’ve been out here on this project forever, and I’ll never have a real lab again.”

  “Do you miss Atlanta?” Ashley asked.

  “Charlie Donovan promised me that I could have my old job back anytime I wanted it.” Donovan was the director of the Centers for Disease Control. “But that was six years ago. I don’t think he expected to wait that long.”

  “You’re just about finished, that’s what you’ve been saying, isn’t it?” Ashley asked.

  “The basic research and start-up experiments are done, but—”

  Osborne glanced at her again. “But what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A gut feeling?”

  Ashley was looking at both of them.

  “Like the sword of Damocles hanging over my head. All of our heads,” Whitney said.

  “Christ,” Ashley said. “Nate’s been feeling that way for the past couple of weeks. What’s with you two, what am I missing?”

  “Probably nothing,” Osborne said, but he didn’t know if he believed it, especially hearing that Whitney was having the same doubts. “Do you want us to take you back to the project?”

  “Absolutely not,” Whitney said. “This is just what the doctor ordered. I haven’t had a day off, let alone a weekend, for as long as I can remember. You’re going to show me the park, and when we get back I’m buying lunch, maybe a bottle of champagne or two. My going-away present.”

  “Nate will give us another concert tonight,” Ashley told them. “My turn to cook.”

  Last night after dinner Osborne had brought out an old flat-top Gibson and had begun serenading them as they cleaned up the kitchen. Old country-and-western songs, mostly plaintive about love gone bad, all of them very good, his playing and his voice perfect.

  It was a talent that Osborne didn’t show many people. Caroline, his ex-wife, had told him the music was hokey, pure corn pone. Her tastes, he should have known, ran to chamber music and opera. And she had hurt him badly enough that he’d never played for anyone until last night because he’d been humiliated.

  Ashley never suspected he could play, and at one point when she looked at him, a slight smile parting her lips, he knew that he had touched her, and he was no longer ashamed.

  When he’d finally put the guitar away, over Ashley and Whitney’s protests, they’d asked about the songs. They thought that some of the tunes sounded familiar, but they couldn’t place them.

  “You wouldn’t,” he’d said.

  Ashley started to ask why, but then a look of pure joy lit up her round face. “My God, they’re yours,” she said. “You wrote them.”

  “When I was over in Afghanistan, mostly, and then later here.”

  “After Caroline left?”

  Osborne nodded. Against all logic, his failed marriage still bothered him deeply. And sometimes he was afraid that the fault had been entirely his; there was some flaw in his character that sooner or later would drive Ashley away.

  A couple of miles farther, they came upon what looked like an old cattle ranch on the river. Osborne pulled off the side of the road so they could all get out. It was quiet here, not even the sound of the river broke the silence, only the light breeze in the distant treetops faded in and out in whispers.

  “Peaceful Valley Ranch,” Osborne said. “Not a lot usually goes on around here between September and May, but in the summer the Tangens, who run the Shadow Country Outfitters, put together trail rides. Lots to see: pretty countryside, wild horses, buffalo, elk, mule deer and whitetail, eagles, coyote, a lot of prairie dogs.”

  The gate back to the old ranch house and barns was open and Osborne supposed that a couple of hands had come over from South Heart to get the place ready for the season.

  Whitney leaned against the hood of the SUV and lit a cigarette.

  “When did you start that?” Ashley asked.

  Whitney shrugged. She’d been far away for a moment. “A couple months ago. One of the new roustabouts at Donna Marie was outside smoking one morning when I drove over. And for the hell of it I bummed a cigarette from him. Told me it was a stupid habit, and I agreed, but he gave me one anyway.”

  “Does it help?” Osborne asked. He’d taken up smoking the first day he’d arrived in Afghanistan, and never started up again once his leg had been shot off and he’d ended up at Landsthul.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “I’ll quit when we’re fully up and producing.”

  “I thought you were there,” Ashley said.

  “We’ll see how the latest tweaking works. Looks good, but these kinds of bugs have a collective mind of their own. Not so easy as Pavlov with his dogs. Maybe if he’d been working with a pack of angry pit bulls it might have been something like we’re dealing with.”

  Osborne got back in the car and radioed his office. Rachel Packwood, their dispatcher, came back.

  “Morning, Nate. I thought this was your weekend off.”

  “It is. I’m over at the park with Ashley and Dr. Lipton, just wondering if anything’s doing?”

  “They had a power outage down at the project, but Basin Electric is taking care of it.”

  “I heard about it. Anything else?”

  “Quiet as a Quaker woman at Sunday service,” Rachel said. “You expecting something?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good, then stop bothering me, and say hi to Ash.”

  13

  MAKAROV PASSED THROUGH security at the airport with no questions asked about the dirty clothes in his bag, nor was he required to take off his shoes or belt, though he did have to put his iPad, wallet, and a few coins in a tray which was handed through, and had to show his boarding pass and a Los Angeles driver’s license under the name Edward Puckett.

  “Will the flight be on time?” he asked the TSA agent who was an older woman with a pleasant smile.

  “Just finished refueling, should get you down to Denver in plenty of time for lunch,” she told him. “Enjoyed your visit with us?” She was small-town snoopy and she’d never seen him before.

  “Just passing through from Billings with a friend, actually, when I got a call that a job was waiting for me Denver. So he dropped me off here.”

  “Well, the best of luck to you.”

  “Especially in these times,” Makarov said, and he picked up his things and walked back to the gate area where the thirty-passenger turboprop Embraer EMB-120 was pulled up fifty feet from the terminal.

  A dozen people, most of them men, a few in business suits, and one family with two kids, were sitting waiting. Only a couple of them looked up when Makarov took a seat nearest the exit door where if need be he could get out in a hurry.

  “Don’t get yourself in a situation where there is no way out,” the instructor said. “There’ll come a time when getting out with your hide intact is the most import
ant part of your mission. Remember it.”

  The full gamut of Spetsnaz training, which only a small percentage of recruits ever completed, took five years. During that time there were casualties, sometimes even deaths. Makarov had easily made the five years, in part because he was smart, but in a large part because he was ruthless. He had faked loyalty to the state, to the service, and to his unit; his highest loyalty had always been to himself.

  He and a small number of Spetsnaz advisers had been sent by Putin over to Afghanistan on a highly classified mission to talk to the American Special Forces who’d been on the ground for five years. As it was explained to them by General Viktor Kazin, who was the director of all Spetsnaz forces, it was to Russia’s advantage to help the Americans get out of the mess they were in.

  “The politicians think that if we can convince them to get out, the region will begin to stabilize so that we can resume with our interests there,” he told them, though he’d never explained what those interests might be nor did any ask.

  Inside the first month in country it became clear to Makarov that the Americans would never quit, especially not until they got themselves out of their other mess in Iraq. And it was about that time he came to the full realization that conditions back in Russia were never going to change except for the worse. The only interesting possibility that he could see was the Mafia. They had the muscle and they had the money through the rackets, but in his estimation they were little better than street thugs—rich, but street thugs with no manners.

  “Nekulturny.”

  They’d been working in pairs with the Americans near the border with Pakistan, when Makarov, who was a captain by then, killed his sergeant and slipped across the border. The next night he stumbled across a Taliban patrol of four men, and he managed to kill all of them. He hid their bodies at the bottom of a nearby ravine, after changing clothes with one of them.

  From there he made his way to Peshawar, where he tracked down a businessman returning home from his office, killed the man, and once again exchanged clothes and identities.

  One week later he was in a luxury hotel in Mumbai, from where he considered his options. He was missed by then, AWOL, but years ago—soon after his Spetsnaz training had begun and he’d been given the lecture about the importance of always making sure you had a way out—he’d taken a train down to Helsinki on one of his leaves where he opened a bank account with a fictitious ID.

  It hadn’t been much money at first, but he was a natural-born card counter and did well at gambling, along with smuggling whores and booze into basic training barracks, money which he sent to his Helsinki account. Individually the recruits didn’t have much, but collectively they’d made him relatively rich.

  And sitting in Mumbai he’d decided that he would become a businessman. First in Helsinki and then after a couple of years Stockholm, where he became a reasonably successful stock broker and money manager specializing in exotics from around the world: oil fields in Iraq, uranium fuel processing equipment for Iran and North Korea’s programs, investments in weapons dealers supplying governments such as Cuba, Angola, and lately Venezuela, which was one of the reasons he’d come to the attention of SEBIN.

  Nine years ago he’d married Ilke Sorenson, a woman he’d met in Helsinki, and though they’d never had children, they had a loving, intimate relationship. He left from time to time on scouting trips, to places he kept secret for business reasons.

  But when he was home he was a devoted, loving husband who kept regular office hours where he treated his handful of employees—who did legitimate work on the floor of OMX, the Stockholm Stock Exchange—with understanding and kindness. His only quirk was his aversion to cameras. He never allowed a photograph to be taken of his face; no wedding pictures, none at the office Christmas party and summer picnics, and none when he and Ilke traveled on vacation.

  In fact the only photographs of him were on the half-dozen passports and supporting documents he owned. He’d had his features slightly altered by plastic surgery in Berlin three months before he turned up in Helsinki, so that he could not be easily identified from his Spetsnaz files except for his brilliantly violet eyes. For all most Russians knew, Makarov had died somewhere in Afghanistan, his body never found.

  A young woman dressed in a Great Lakes Airlines uniform showed up at the gate and opened the door for the pilot, first officer, and one flight attendant who went outside to the aircraft.

  At nine she opened the door again, and announced that flight 7135 with service to Denver’s International Airport was ready for general boarding. Makarov joined the line, handed the agent his boarding pass, and made his way back to the window seat of row nine on the starboard side, at the emergency exit. He stowed his bag in the overhead, strapped in, and watched out the window for any sign that he’d somehow been connected to the incident on Highway 22 and the unlikely possibility that he’d somehow been traced to this flight.

  Nothing other than routine traffic announcements had been made on the Stark County Sheriff’s frequency that he had been continuously monitoring. No police cars had shown up on the tarmac, nor did anyone sit next to him. And he began to relax as the forward door was shut, the engines spooled up, the cabin pressurized, and the oldish flight attendant with short, gray hair explained about electronic devices, seat belts, and emergency exits.

  Makarov shut off the iPad and stuffed it in the seat pocket as they taxied out to the runway, where the pilot powered up even as they were turning off the taxiway and a minute later they were airborne heading south.

  Almost immediately Makarov spotted the Basin Electric truck parked beneath the pylon, the bucket raised, but he could not make out the lineman’s body, nor the body of the sheriff beside his patrol car, or that anything might be wrong with the people inside the pickup truck on the other side of the highway.

  Incredibly no one else had shown up yet, though as they continued to gain altitude over the Antelope Creek he thought he spotted the glint of sunlight reflecting off something coming up the highway from the south.

  He sat back and glanced at his watch. They would be touching down in Denver at 11:38, less than two hours. And within twenty minutes of that time—say noon at the very latest—he would be at the United gate in an entirely different part of the terminal and traveling under his Thomas Park identification, aboard the one o’clock flight to New York’s LaGuardia, and from there to Paris, where he would once again switch passports for the trip home.

  No law enforcement agency, especially not a rural sheriff’s department, would make the connections in time to have the authorities waiting to arrest him when he got off the plane in Denver.

  When the attendant reached his row and asked if he wanted something to drink, he almost ordered a Bloody Mary, but changed his mind. No matter how unlikely, the situation could change, and he was still on a job.

  He looked up and smiled. “Just a glass of mineral water, with maybe a twist, if you have such a thing, luv.”

  14

  IN THE SIOUX Falls Control Center Stuart Wyman came back to his station from his coffee break, and sat down at his desk to take a look at the three flat-panel computer monitors in front of him, and then up at the status board, showing the conditions on his AOR—Area of Responsibility—all 12,353 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

  Carl Nesbitt, the assistant area desk dispatcher, looked up from what he was doing. “Roger Kohl called for you a couple of minutes ago, wanted to know what the hell we were doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Beats me. Said he recorded a power spike on his board about an hour ago, but nothing like that showed up here.”

  A hollow feeling crept into Wyman’s gut. “You checked our data recorders? No possible leakage from elsewhere in the system?”

  “That’s the Donna Marie special circuit. Most of the time it’s isolated.”

  “Yeah,” Wyman said. He phoned Kohl over at Donna Marie.

  The chief engineer answered on the first ring. �
�Kohl.”

  “Stu Wyman. Carl said you called with a problem?”

  “No problem here, but I showed a definite spike on the line at eight twenty-nine, lasted less than two seconds.”

  Wyman pulled up the electronic record of conditions throughout his entire AOR for several minutes before and several minutes after 8:29. “I’m seeing nothing on my monitor.”

  “Well it showed up here.”

  “Could it have come from you? Maybe a faulty relay that opened and immediately closed?”

  “First thing I checked,” Kohl said. It sounded like he was angry. “You’ve got a lineman down there, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Wyman said, the very bad feeling in his gut worsening.

  “Well I just hope the guy was protected.”

  “Me, too,” Wyman said, and he broke the connection. He called Tony Bartlett’s cell phone.

  It did not ring, instead it flipped over directly to the voice mail service.

  Wyman tried again with the same results. Tony should have been up on the pylon at the time of Kohl’s power spike and the thought of it was hard to bear. All he could think was that Kohl had made a mistake, gotten a faulty reading from somewhere. MAPP’s monitoring and control systems with safety systems around every turn were foolproof. They’d been in place for so long with nearly perfect results that it was impossible to believe that Tony was in trouble.

  He tried a third time to contact his lineman, still with the same results.

  He ran a quick diagnostic on his systems, but everything turned up normal.

  Nesbitt scooted over. “Do we have a problem?”

  “Got a lineman in the field on the 250 kv line from Donna Marie, who probably finished early and didn’t bother calling in before he headed home,” Wyman said.

  He lit a cigarette, though smoking was not allowed anywhere in the center, and called Bartlett’s wife, Juliette, who didn’t answer until after four rings. She sounded harried, out of breath.

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Bartlett, I’m Stu Wyman, the dispatcher at Sioux Falls Control Center. We sent Tony on a job south of Dickinson, and he doesn’t answer his cell phone. It’s probably on low battery or something, because it doesn’t ring, just switches over to voice mail. He has shown up at home, hasn’t he? Or called?”