All the Wrong Moves (12 page)

“Armstrong Jr. spent a couple weeks at home with his folks before shipping out,” Mitch said quietly. “He brought his weapon with him. And several cartons of M118LRs. It’s against regs to fire those rounds for non-mission-related purposes, but he and his dad were both shooters. According to Armstrong Sr., he talked his son into demonstrating his skill by demolishing cacti at a thousand yards. He also talked him out of a carton of M118LRs as a keepsake.”

“Which he used to take out the man he believed responsible for the death of three marines,” I murmured. “His version of frontier justice, I guess.”

Mitch nodded and set aside his bowl. “No question it was premeditated. Armstrong admitted he’d laid in wait for the two men and took great care to erase his tracks after the shooting.”

“Except the boot print EEEK uncovered.”

“Except that.” Mitch scraped a palm across his jaw. “What bothers me is how Armstrong knew where and when Hooker would try to slip back into the U.S.”

“How
did
he know?”

“He says he got an anonymous call. The caller gave him the date, approximate time and place Hooker would cross the border. We checked his phone records and traced the call to a disposable cell phone that’s no longer in operation. It was purchased at one of those mall kiosks. Cash transaction, and the purchaser gave a false name and address. The clerk who sold it remembers only sketchy details about the buyer. Male. Caucasian. About five-nine or -ten. Brown hair. My guess is the phone is at the bottom of the Rio Grande right now.”

“So someone set Hooker up and let Armstrong do his dirty work for him?”

“That’s the current thinking, although we can’t completely discount the possibility Sandoval, not Hooker, was the main target.”

“Are you going to try to track the caller? Wouldn’t he be, like, a conspirator to murder?”

“The FBI’s working that, but I didn’t sense a whole lot of enthusiasm from Donati. Or anyone else, for that matter. The general consensus seems to be that Armstrong did the country a service by taking out both men.”

“I have to say I agree. How about you?”

“I don’t like the idea of a father who lost his only child being set up like that.”

As he turned to reach for his coffee I caught a flicker of something I couldn’t quite interpret in his eyes. It was gone when he faced me again.

“Did Armstrong say anything about firebombing my lab?” I wanted to know.

“No. In fact, he categorically denied knowing anything about the fire.”

“You believe him?”

“Yeah, I do. He was ready enough to confess to murder when faced with the evidence. He wouldn’t have held back on a little thing like arson.”

“That leaves two loose ends.” I stirred the mush at the bottom of my bowl with my spoon. “The anonymous call to Armstrong and the fire at my site.”

“There’s no hard proof the two are related,” Mitch reminded me.

“Not yet. But we may find a connection when we dig deeper.”

“We?”

“We,” I repeated firmly. “I’ve got a score to settle with whoever put me through the hell otherwise known as Chapter Seven.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Chapter Seven of . . . ?”

“Volume Twelve, DOD Manual 7000.14.” My voice reverberated with undisguised loathing. “
Financial Liability for Government Property Lost, Damaged or Destroyed
. Damned report took me all weekend!”

“At least you got yours done. I still have to write mine.”

Weariness tinged his reply. I added it to his red eyes and stubbled cheeks and firmly repressed any lingering, yowza-type thoughts.

The spark was there. I’d felt it when I opened the door to him. And in the way his glance had lingered on my face during our conversation. But the man was dead on his feet.

“You sound almost as wiped as you look,” I told him sympathetically. “Maybe we should call it a night so you could get to your report.”

He looked at me with a question in his gold-green eyes. I didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

“There’ll be a next time,” I said.

This from the woman who’d always lived for the moment? Who’d tumbled into and out of marriage in six short months? Who’d reacted to her husband’s cheating by marching into an air force recruiting office?

I was amazed at this new, restrained me, although the regret on Mitch’s face as I walked him to the door came perilously close to undercutting my decision. That, and the knuckle he curled under my chin.

“Next time,” he promised, tipping my face for a kiss that curled my toes.

CHAPTER NINE

I rolled out of bed, pulled on my uniform and departed my apartment at the unheard of hour of six A.M. Monday morning. I wanted to beat the traffic and have time to look over my report one last time before zinging it off to my boss.

I wasn’t consciously attempting to demonstrate my thoroughness and dedication to duty. Still, I
did
nourish a secret hope Dr. J would note the time of dispatch and be suitably impressed.

The sun was just beginning to bathe the Franklin Mountains in soft dawn light when I drove through the main gate of Fort Bliss. Did I mention that FST-3’s suite of offices is located in the historic section of the post?

The original garrison was established in 1848 to protect settlers from marauding Comanches and Apaches. General Black Jack Pershing launched his raid on Pancho Villa from here in 1916. He’s the guy the Pershing Missile System was named for, in case you didn’t know. I didn’t, until I toured the post museum on a slow afternoon.

Here’s another bit of trivia I picked up at the museum. Fort Bliss is named for Lieutenant Colonel William Wal lace Smith Bliss. A West Point grad and veteran of the Mexican-American War, W.W. married Miss Betty, the daughter of Major General and later President Zachary Taylor. What’s interesting is that W.W. never set foot on this particular patch of Texas dirt. Guess if you marry the boss’s daughter you don’t have to be present to have a military installation named after you.

Fort Bliss has always been predominantly army but does have ties to my branch of the service. Briggs Airfield, one of the very first flying fields, was established here in 1919. Back in the day, Briggs handled blimps, B- 17s, B-29s, B-36s, B-47s, and B-52s. For those of you not familiar with military prefixes and numerology, “B” stands for bomber. Don’t be embarrassed. The prefix didn’t register with me, either, until months after I’d donned an air force uniform.

Following WWII, German scientists dubbed “the prisoners of peace” began arriving at Fort Bliss to work on American missile development. Coming from a country where it rains more often than not, I can only guess what they must have thought of our searing blue skies and sun-scorched desert topography.

Since those early days, Bliss has grown into the army’s premier missile training center . . . and the home of FST-3. We’re housed in a thirties-era building that’s been renovated at least a dozen times over the decades.

Renovation dollars come out of Operations and Maintenance funds, you see. O&M is a different pot from New Construction, which requires congressional approval. Thus, it’s easier to gut a facility and rebuild it from the inside out than construct a new one. The problem is, you’re still left with the same exterior shell and limited square footage. All this was explained to me by a rather exasperated deputy post commander when I voiced a number of complaints about our cramped quarters.

After my team’s quarterly expeditions to CHU-ville, however, our 1930s building always assumes the aura of a well-loved architectural work of art. This morning was no exception. I gazed fondly at the two-story edifice as I parked the Bronco in the lot across the street.

I then took the unusual precaution of locking it. Not because I feared anyone would steal it. Truth was, I prayed every night this collection of rusted dents would disappear so I could file an insurance claim for whatever it was worth. No, my concern this morning was EEEK, who’d taken up semipermanent residence in the back of my Bronco until I could ship him to Harrison Robotics in Phoenix.

Since I was first in, I flipped on lights, powered up computer systems and made coffee. With luck, I could swill down a half a pot before Pen arrived and badgered me into switching to tea.

My luck held. By the time my team straggled in just before eight A.M., I was on my third cup and had sent my loss/damage report winging through cyberspace to Dr. J at DARPA Headquarters.

O’Reilly stuck his head in my office first. Since we’d returned to post and had to maintain at least a semi-professional image, he’d exchanged his T-shirt and wrinkled cargo shorts for a polo shirt and wrinkled Dockers.

“Greetings, oh Princess of Putterers.”

“Hi, Dennis.”

“Morning confab as usual?”

We’d formed the habit of gathering at the start of each workday to coordinate schedules and discuss ongoing projects. Since many of those projects involved unbelievably wacky inventions, our morning gathering often produced groans, howls or hoots of laughter that had started some weird stories circulating about FST-3 among the other occupants of the building.

“Confab as usual,” I confirmed.

I wasn’t sure when we’d go out to Dry Springs for testing again. I might have to work out an alternate site for less sophisticated tests. In either case, we needed to continue to assess items submitted for evaluation and line up those that might by some wild stretch of the imagination have potential for military application.

The team crowded into my cubbyhole of an office a few minutes later. Pen had spiffed up for our return to civilization by exchanging her Birkenstock sandals for Birkenstock clogs and several layers of natural fiber linen. A pair of ebony Chinese chopsticks anchored her lopsided bun. Rocky wore a summer seersucker suit. Sergeant Cassidy, like me, was in ABUs.

Before getting down to business, we rehashed the news from Friday night. My team’s reactions to Armstrong’s arrest and confession ran the gamut. Pen shook her head over the tragedy of it all. Noel Cassidy thought Armstrong deserved a medal for taking Hooker out. O’Reilly wanted to dissect every gory detail. Rocky fretted about whether the murders were connected to the fire at the lab.

I was careful not to reveal the additional information Mitch had shared last night. I wasn’t sure how much of it was sensitive, and contrary to my mother’s frequent assertions, I
do
learn from past mistakes. But that business about the mysterious phone call to Armstrong came to mind later, during our confab.

The review session produced more hoots and howls than usual. They were probably a release mechanism or reaction to the stress of losing our lab. But I defy anyone to keep a straight face while listening to Pen read the specs on artificial sweat or Rocky try to explain the intricacies of an emergency evacuator.

One submission got me thinking, however. Always a dangerous occupation on my part, although I had no idea how dangerous in this instance.

The inventor claimed to have come up with a surefire way to retrieve digitized voice patterns from ordinary cell phones, then match them to fingerprints and iris scans for a biometric signature 20-30 percent more accurate than DNA. This project was clearly outside our charter of evaluating inventions with potential for use in desert terrain, but as I said, it got me thinking.

“Didn’t we receive another submission along these same lines a few months ago?” I asked my team. “As I recall, the inventor proposed a methodology to retrieve signals from a quiescent device.”

“Totally different concepts,” Rocky asserted. “The methodology you’re talking about involved powering up tele matic units using remote command signals.”

“Didn’t the command signal include a unit identifier?

“Yes.”

“And the command information could be uplinked from one of several sources, right?”

“Correct.”

“Give me the case number, will you? I want to pull it up and take another look at it.”

“Why?”

That’s the thing about working with brainiac civilians. They always want explanations. I didn’t want to blab about the phone call Armstrong Sr. received, so I fobbed my test engineer off with a half-truth.

“Before I decide whether we should evaluate this new submission, I want to review our rationale for disapproving the other.”

“They’re completely different concepts,” Rocky reiterated. “And we didn’t disapprove it. We bounced it to FST-1.”

“What did they do with it?”

“They disapproved it.”

“Just get me the case number. Puh-leez.”

That’s another thing about civilians. Nice works better than tough. Sometimes.

Rocky duly sent the case number to my desktop computer and I pulled up the file. The specs soon crossed my eyes. There were pages and pages of ’em, all written in excruciating technicalese. But the bottom line was that the inventor, one Girja Singh, claimed to have fabricated a way to retrieve signals from a telemetric device dropped in the Bering Sea and now thought to be buried somewhere under the polar ice cap. The very expensive device was supposed to have tracked the migration of harp seals, which related to naval operations in a way I couldn’t quite grasp.

My team had no desire to go polar so we’d forwarded the submission to our sister team up in the Alaskan tundra. FST-1 had made an attempt to evaluate the invention but gave it up when one of their team members developed a severe case of hypothermia while testing the device. FST-1 did, however, indicate the invention might merit further study . . . sometime in the distant future.

You’ve probably figured out my rationale. If this handy-dandy invention could, in fact, retrieve signals from a stone-cold dead device buried under tons of ice, maybe it could pick up signals from a cell phone Mitch speculated was now at the bottom of the Rio Grande. I knew it was long shot but what the heck.

I noted Mr. Singh’s email address. Or was Girja a Ms.? I wasn’t sure so I sent a gender-neutral email asking the inventor to contact me for a possible re-evaluation. I included my name, title, duty address and phone number. After clicking send, I got down to business.

THE next few days passed in a blur of activity. Dr. J acknowledged receipt of my report and said he would appoint an inquiry officer. He also told me the CID had confirmed their suspicion of arson. With great relief, I jettisoned all worry about being held personally or fiscally responsible for the damage to the lab.