Blowout (19 page)

The kid had been at the wheel when someone shot him in the side of the head, pulled his body out of the driver's seat, then cleaned up some of the mess, and drove off. Down here. Barry Egan. Apparently not a particularly easy man to work with. So far the body count was seven at the power station and more at the trailers—at least three of which were probably Egan's work. The woman just outside the station, the blood spoor at the ATV where the motor home had been parked—if the tire prints matched, which he thought they would—and this one.

The helicopter was coming in for a noisy landing as Osborne stepped around the body, avoiding the blood, and slowly made his way to the back of the coach. Lots of money, the thought came to him, but they weren't elk hunters. Guys like that were out for a good time—cards, booze, supper out of cans, or the freezer, no one cleaning up. Shit lying everywhere. He'd seen it before. But except for the body and the blood, this place was too neat.

And there was another smell that he couldn't place. He stopped about halfway back and cocked his head. Something warm, something that had been heated up, but not food. And it came to him that it was a smell he remembered from the FORECON days. But it wasn't from the field. Somewhere at a headquarters position.

He took another step toward the back of the coach. One of the cabinets above the dining table was ajar, and using the tip of a gloved finger he eased it open. The space was filled with electronic equipment, three units a little larger than DVD players stacked one on top of the other. Cables snaked from the rear of the units up toward the ceiling.

The cabinet spaces beneath the seats were filled with other electronic equipment, the purpose of which he couldn't guess. But he remembered the smell now; it was from a headquarters communications center where he'd been given a mission briefing. Electronic equipment.

It was a possible answer to the disrupted communications and computer systems at the power station. Which made these people something other than amateurs.

The helicopter had touched down outside, and someone was shouting his name. Captain Nettles, he thought.

He continued aft, past the bathroom compartment where he pulled up short. Another body lay on its side, its arms and legs splayed out as if it had been posed, its back a mass of clotted blood. The one from the ATV, he figured, where the coach had been parked south of Donna Marie.

The man was older than the one on the floor behind the driver's seat. He had a short, scruffy beard, gray like his hair, and he looked as if he had been in a great deal of pain when he'd died.

“Sheriff!” Nettles shouted from just outside the door. He sounded angry.

Something about the body seemed odd to Osborne and he stepped a little closer, avoiding the blood smears from where it had been dragged. The man's complexion was dark, his nose large and hooked, his eyes hooded; profiling, maybe, but he was just about certain that the man was Middle Eastern—Iraqi, Afghani, maybe Pakastani. Which raised the question in Osborne's mind about al-Qaeda forming some sort of an alliance with the Posse Comitatus, and it was not a very pleasant assumption.

He squatted down, his left prosthesis splayed out awkwardly so he could get a better angle on the face. Maybe something was there, something he was missing. He'd built something of a reputation in FORECON as a pretty good poker player. The guys thought he memorized the deck, like a card counter, which meant he had a better handle on the odds. But the plain fact was that he could read faces. He could pretty well tell when someone was nervous or anxious, or excited, or lying. And he'd always been surprised that everyone else didn't have the same ability. Worked in a poker game, but it was one of Carolyn's pet peeves; it just wasn't fair that he could tell when she was telling a lie. A girl had to have some secrets. But he'd always bit off the first thing that came to the tip of the tongue: “If you don't want to be caught in a lie, don't tell a lie.”

The Afghani, or whoever he was, wasn't a terrorist. Osborne had seen the look on some of the really dedicated guys who were willing to give their lives for the cause. This one seemed more like a cleric, maybe a philosopher or a scientist. And he thought about the milky liquid Ashley had seen one of the attackers pour into one of the well-head ports. Whitney—Dr. Lipton—had cordoned off the area, and the material and been pumped out by two of her people who understood biohazards, and it was right now being analyzed. A sample of it had been sent to the CDC in Atlanta, and another—a control sample—had been frozen in liquid nitrogen.

And for no real reason, or maybe a dozen mostly instinctual ones, Osborne was fairly certain that this was the man who'd not only poured the stuff into the wellhead port, but the scientist who'd created it. A biological scientist, which if that were true, meant he and Egan and the team who'd attacked Donna Marie knew a hell of a lot more about the Dakota Initiative than they were supposed to know.

“Nate, what the hell are you doing?” Deb Rausch asked from behind him.

He held his stare on the dead man's face for a beat before he looked over his shoulder at the FBI SAC from Minneapolis. “I think the stuff from the wellhead that Dr. Lipton's people are working with was created by this guy. He's either an Iranian or a Pakastani scientist and whatever he cooked up is just as important as why he was shot by his own team. By Barry Egan. If we can figure out those two things we might be able to find out where General Forester's leak is.”

“Get the fuck out of here, and that's an order,” Nettles said. “This isn't your county.”

“Shut up, Captain,” Rausch said, almost offhandedly. “Have you seen this guy before?” she asked Osborne.

Osborne turned back to the dead man and shook his head. “No, but I think I recognize the type. Outside Peshawar.”

“I thought you were stationed in Afghanistan,” Rausch said. “Peshawar is across the border in Pakistan.”

“Yeah, so is Karachi,” Osborne said absently. A few beats later he got to his feet with some difficulty because of his peg leg. “Did you bring a forensics team with you?”

“They're on their way.”

“Be my guess that the tire prints will match the ones we lifted south of Donna Marie, and I suspect that the guy in front and this one, were shot with the same six-by-thirty-fives, the Knight PDWs I encountered in the station. Ought to be able to trace who purchased them.”

“We're waiting for the results of your forensics report from Bismarck. What else?”

“Some of the cabinets forward are loaded with electronic equipment—none of which I recognized—but I smelled it. Might answer why communications for the entire facility went down, and maybe this stuff'll be easier to trace than the PDWs.”

“I'll have a full team from Washington within twelve hours,” Rausch said. She turned to Nettles. “Do you have the manpower to secure this site as well as the power station?”

“Yes,” Nettles said.

Rausch turned back to Osborne. “Well, Nate, I guess you're right in the middle of it now.”

“Yeah. And I guess this isn't the last of it.”

Nettles started to say something, but Rausch held him off. “How do you see that?”

“Too much money, too much inside intel. The Posse may have supplied some of the personnel, but the rest came from someone well-heeled. Someone high up on the food chain. Someone with a purpose.”

 

25

STANDING OUTSIDE THE
door to the main control center on the first floor of the Administration and Research-and-Development Center at three in the afternoon, Whitney Lipton was taken by the silence here and over at Vomit Valley and even Henry's, which had been all but deserted at noon. She'd e-mailed everyone to show up for a LF briefing at three sharp. Her Looking Forward staff meetings had always been free-for-alls; by Whitney's dictums, no subject, no matter how fringe, was off the table. There was no order of speakers. Nor was there any control over volume, though it was usually the one with the best idea rather than the loudest voice who won the floor. But she wasn't sure just now how it would go this time.

She loved the staff at this moment more than ever before, because she felt responsible for their well-being—both physical and mental. She wanted with everything in her power for them to feel safe, to trust her and the science, and to trust in themselves and their own abilities, including the facility to spring back in the face of a horrible adversity.

In the rush to put things together over the past week Whitney had not had the time to sit her people down and properly explain what had happened and what they were facing. Nor had she been able to give them a choice—considering the personal danger—of stay or go. She was going to do that this afternoon; and she would be disappointed, but wouldn't be surprised, if all of them quit on the spot.

Especially Susan, who'd seen the gore in the control room over at Donna Marie before the FBI people had allowed the cleanup to begin. She'd been weepy, unable to concentrate on working out what the delay in introducing the gadget to the coal seam already infected with the bacteria might have for the outcome. Only a few of the models she'd come up with made any sense, in a large part because she'd been so distracted that she'd entered a lot of objective-oriented predictive points that made no real sense, or in some cases were superfluous.

No one else on the team had been able to help her, because they, too, were distracted by the presence of the armed Air Force personnel who seemed to be everywhere and kept streaming in along with FBI agents.

Forester had refused to take the time to speak with them because they were
her
people, and it was she who could speak their language, and it was she whom they trusted. And, as he explained to her, he had a lot of what he called “fires” to put out in Washington and a leak to plug before it sunk them all.

She glanced at her watch and at three sharp she opened the door and went inside. Dominating the room were four large flat-screen monitors, blank now, mounted along one wall in front of which were a dozen workstations with their own computer monitors and keyboards. A pair of electronic document tables flanked the room on either side, and normally some kind of music played from someone's iPod attached to a speaker system—country and western or classical mostly—but this afternoon the center was silent. Nor were her six people busy at their various workstations as usual. They were clustered, as if for comfort, seated facing one another in a circle, a shabby Charlie Brown Christmas tree behind them. They looked up when she came in and pulled a chair over to join them. No lectures this time, no discussions at first, only some unvarnished past, present, and future truths.

Barnhart Stein, her lab coordinator, and Alex Melin, her assistant microbiologist, both started to speak at the same time, but Whitney motioned them off. No free-for-alls this time.

“Some really bad things happened to us,” Whitney began. “And I can't guarantee that whoever did this won't try again.”

“But who?” Susan Watts asked. She was a Harvard Med School Ph.D. in microbial genetics, who was as naïve as she was funny. She was deadly serious now.

“Someone who doesn't want us to succeed.”

Susan didn't look away. “Why?”

And Whitney had asked herself that question a dozen times since last night and she gave the only answer that made any sense to her. “Money. Coal provides almost fifty percent of all the electrical power generated in this country. That's a lot of money.”

“But we're not changing anything, except we won't have to dig the coal out of the ground, and we'll produce almost zero carbon dioxide.”

“That's the point. There's big money in mining the coal, processing it, transporting it to the stations, and processing it again. Lots of people, and not just the fat cats, depend on the process to earn a living.”

“But don't they know about the Keeling curve?” Susan asked earnestly. “We're on the way to becoming another Venus. Runaway greenhouse heating. Rivers of molten lead. Nobody will survive, and making a living won't make a fucking bit of difference.”

She had never used the F-word, and she was exaggerating, of course, but not by much. Dr. Charles David Keeling, an environmental scientist from San Diego, began to worry about carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere in the late forties and early fifties and he designed a machine to measure carbon dioxide concentrations. The nearest cleanest place he could think of to install the machine was the top of Mauna Loa more than eleven thousand feet above sea level in Hawaii.

The first readings showed 310 parts per million of the gas, which meant that every million liters of air contained more than three hundred liters of carbon dioxide. It was a base level, not really significant in itself at the time. But, as he suspected, most of that gas was caused by human activities. By 2005 when he died, the concentrations of carbon dioxide had risen to 380 parts per million. Some of the rise could be explained by natural causes—such as erupting volcanoes—but a great deal of it had to do with the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal.

The ppm were expected to top 400 soon, and reach 560 by the end of the century, which was nowhere near the atmosphere of Venus, which was 96 percent carbon dioxide, but high enough that almost every reputable scientist agreed that a great deal of harm would be done to our planet, including but not limited to massive changes of weather patterns—more intense crop and animal life extinctions caused by heat waves and more intense tropical storms and tornadoes.

The Keeling curve, which graphed the ominous rise, was considered so important it was inscribed on a plaque at the Mauna Loa observatory and on a wall in the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C., which also showed Darwin's finches and James Watson's double helix.

“The science doesn't matter to them. Only money does.”