Cape Disappointment (44 page)

ONCE AGAIN WE DROVE
to the coast in the rain, this time in my car with its powerful engine and beefed-up drivetrain. Ecology be damned; we were worried about our lives here. I had rejected the idea of bringing along a weapon, although Snake volunteered to lend me one of his .44 Magnums and three boxes of cartridges, a generous offer considering he thought of his guns the way others thought of their children. Kathy and I wanted to be free, but we didn't want to hurt anybody doing it. Mired in our own thoughts, we didn't say much on the drive. Nor did we listen to the radio or play music. During the past two weeks we'd been thrust into another world, one that the plane crash, our own research, and Bert's harebrained actions had shattered into a million pieces. It was as if we'd stepped into
The Matrix.

We used up an hour in Tacoma, eventually locating my man in a pool hall on Pacific Avenue. Tommy had been peripherally involved in a massive theft from a construction company but had begged me to forget he was implicated and for reasons too complex to go into, I granted his plea. In return, he'd promised anything but his firstborn. It was time to collect. “Give me your cellphone,” I said. “Take mine to Mount Rainier and hide it somewhere in the inn where nobody will find it for a couple of days. Get out of there yourself. Do not stay near it. Can you do that?”

“I'll have to go AWOL at work for a day, but you got it. Is this going to make us even?”

“Even Steven. Under no circumstances are you to tell anybody about this. No fingerprints.”

“Got it. You in some sort of trouble, man?”

“You don't want to know.”

Tommy was a Finnish immigrant with a pins-in-his-mouth accent, and a penchant for small-time goof-ups and big-time theft. He was in his early forties and had a pregnant girlfriend who had just turned nineteen. It was the first time, he told me, he'd ever been truly in love, and this would be his first child. “My kid is not going to want for anything,” he told me once. “I was an orphan, but I'm going to take care of this kid.” Maybe I shouldn't have, but I believed him.

Tommy walked to the back of the pool hall and brought me four cellphones. “They all work,” he said. “Use one until you don't feel comfortable with it, then toss it. Keep them in the trunk or something. You don't want brain cancer from all those microwaves.”

“These all yours?”

“More or less.”

“They're stolen, huh?”

“More or less.”

We had reached the coast before we finally turned on the car radio. It was just before midnight, the odd headlights zooming at us from the opposite direction, once in a while a pair of luminescent eyes staring at us from the roadside. One item in the newscast jumped out at me: “In breaking news, the body of National Traffic Safety Board supervisor Timothy Hoagland was found late this evening east of Seattle near Interstate 90. Cause of death was not immediately disclosed. Hoagland had been in Seattle to head up an investigation into the crash of a light plane two weeks ago in which Senator Jane Sheffield and ten others were killed. State patrol officials say there will be an autopsy tomorrow morning. Police declined to say whether they think his death is linked to the now-concluded Sheffield investigation. Results of the Sheffield investigation were slated to be announced at a news conference tomorrow morning, but officials are now stating that the announcement may be indefinitely delayed. In other news—”

I got Bert Slezak on the line the first time I tried him. “You bastard! You killed him after I left.”

“I didn't.”

“That's why you didn't want me going back to check. What did you do, drug him so he would die of exposure? Or did you knock him in the head with a rock?”

“I didn't do nothin'. I only heard about it an hour ago myself. They must have been tailing us.”

“Why would they kill Hoagland? He was masterminding the cover-up.”

“Maybe they thought Hoagland was going to talk. No matter what he told them, they would assume he spilled at least part of it. It's not illogical that they would kill him. These people are colder than Eskimo spit. These are the same assholes who wanted to set off a nuclear suitcase bomb in San Francisco so they could declare war on the entire Mideast. Wiping a major city off the map meant about as much to them as changing the channel does to you.”

“You killed him.”

“Maybe he had a heart attack. We didn't exactly treat him according to the Geneva Conventions.”

“Oh, now it's ‘we'?”

“You were asking questions, too. I swear on my grandmother's grave the man was breathing when I last saw him.”

“Your grandmother is aboveground.”

“My
other
grandmother. He must have gone out to the highway and got hit by a truck. Or had a heart attack. You've got to believe I didn't kill him. You know this isn't even the United States government chasing us. This all comes from the Bilderberg Group. World financial powers. They're behind this. They're the ones on our tails.”

“The Bilderberg what?”

“There's three cabals of rich folks giving orders to every government on earth. Bill Clinton met with them in Germany before he ran for president. Both Bushes are members. The Rockefellers. This is why nothing is ever going to change. Don't you see? They control everything. You don't think so, pop your head up, call a news conference, and see if you and Kathy wake up for breakfast.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, and hung up, disgusted with the turn of events and Bert's ever increasingly paranoid, off-the-wall theories. I'd bought into so many of them, too. Kathy looked across at me in the darkness and said, “What did you two do to Timothy Hoagland?”

“It's a long story.”

“Good, because we have a lot of time.”

I was still feeding her details when we checked into a dark little motel on the ocean. The motel was on the beach and not far from the last one we'd stayed at. The lulling roar of a high tide accompanied our arrival. By the time I'd finished explaining everything and we'd turned on the crummy television to catch the late-night news, neither of us was in the mood for anything romantic. Kathy was furious with me for not turning Hoagland over to the police the minute I had the power to do so, and even more furious for holding on to the story until now.

“He threatened to have us murdered,” I said. “If I turned him over, he would know my name. We released him out in the woods, where he would be safe and free and we might be, too.”

“But he wasn't safe, was he?”

“Maybe not, but Bert swore letting Hoagland know who we were was the same as signing our own death warrants.”

“After everything that's happened, how could you trust Bert?”

“Because he saved your life.”

“But you helped torture a man.”

“I believed Hoagland when he said he was part of the conspiracy. He was in town before the plane went down. He collaborated in the murder of ten people. Eleven if you count Ruth Ponzi's husband. Twelve when you include Deborah Driscoll. Fourteen if you count us.”

“We're not dead.”

“No, but you
were.
And I
almost
was. And we still might be.”

“You think the bomb had anything to do with the rest of it?”

“I don't know. You look around the country, you don't see any other Senate races like this.”

“We need to work by the rule of law here. Go to the authorities. Bring this all out into the open. Get the newspapers involved.”

“The newspapers are not going to do anything but repeat the official line. If we're arrested, the newspapers will treat us as criminals. Anything
and everything we say after that will be suspect. And Bert threw the rule of law out the window when he saved you from riding that plane into the ocean. That was the start.”

“If you're going to act outside the law, we can't expect the law to come to our rescue.”

“So far the law hasn't had anything to do with this.”

Kathy blamed me for not taking the high road and turning Hoagland over to an ambulance crew the minute I saw him, and Bert over to the police. She even blamed me for getting gulled by Bert at Cabin Creek. On all counts, I was forced to agree with her. Bert had always been sneaky, and I should have taken that into account.

Twenty minutes after we doused the lights, Kathy said, “Thomas?”

“What?”

“I hate to say this, but if that man is guilty of half of what we think he is, he deserved what Bert did to him.”

“Maybe so, but we're not the judge and jury. The last thing I want to do is be responsible for somebody's death. Even his.”

“When was the last time anybody in the intelligence community in this country was prosecuted … for anything?
You
might go to prison. Bert might. But they won't. I'm sorry I got so upset. You think there's any chance we'll get our lives back?”

“No.” That was when she started crying.

Two days passed. We walked on the beach. We talked. We drove around talking to locals and trying to figure out if anybody else had experienced any kind of electromagnetic interference on the day of the crash. That was our real reason for hiding at the beach, to do some more investigation. Later in the week, I would contact my friend in the Coast Guard and see if he'd heard any rumors about EMI. We went to a local grocery store and stocked up on popcorn and magazines. We watched the Seattle news for more information on Hoagland's death, but there was nothing new. I phoned Snake about it, and he called back half a day later and said that as far as he could tell, Hoagland's death had been ruled a homicide, and because of his position as a federal investigator the FBI was handling the case. It was unusual but not unheard of for the FBI to look into homicides. While he was calling around trying to scare up news about Hoagland, he'd spoken to one of his contacts at the King County Medical Examiner's Office and
learned that Deborah Driscoll's death had been ruled accidental. “Accidentally drowned in a bathtub?” I said.

“Don't holler at me. I'm not the one who called it. My buddy in the ME's office wouldn't come out and say it, but I got the feeling there was some pressure for the verdict. She had some wine in her system. They're saying she fell asleep and drowned.”

“And nobody's questioning it?”

“The ME's office is not a debate society.”

Later I phoned Ruth Ponzi at her house, expressed my sorrow at her husband's death, and tried to find out how much work she'd done on the Sheffield tragedy before the car accident put her out of commission. I wanted to know how much dust she'd stirred up before her car accident. She refused to talk to me. She didn't sound offended or confused. She was firm, and when I tried to push it, scared. “Did they ever catch the guy who hit you?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and hung up.

Several times I contacted Bert by cellphone, and each time he continued to deny he'd had anything to do with Hoagland's death. He said he thought agents were on his trail and he didn't have long before they would murder him. I was certain he was exaggerating, but there was never any way to be sure with Bert. Later that day and all the next he was unreachable.

I asked Snake to go out to his grandmother's property and see if his brother was holed up in the trailer. Snake told me he would call back with a report.

We switched motels each day, always using phony names. My wounds began to heal. Perhaps it was the salt air or the feeling of relative security that concealment endowed on us. Rain or shine, mostly rain, Kathy and I walked the beach, talking, speculating, and wondering if either of us had any kind of grip on reality. “After reading all that stuff on the Internet,” Kathy said, “election fraud, all the problems with the 9/11 report, the campaign finance problems, I wonder why I wasn't aware of all of it before. It's all public information.”

“It's human nature to ignore what's wrong. It's the reason people don't want an X-ray that might show cancer. What if they have it?”

“I'm now wondering if any of the last three national elections were
legitimate, and so are millions of others. When was the last time in this country this many people felt our elections were rigged?”

“Not in our lifetimes.”

“Even if they weren't rigged, all those people believing it represents a massive failure of the system. The collective paralysis in refusing to recognize that we've lost our focus in this country boggles the mind. Hell, it took a death and a near-death experience to wake me up.”

“I got news for you. Until your average American can't watch football, buy another beer, and turn on the lights, everything's fine.”

Around sunset of our second evening at the beach, Snake called and said that it looked like Bert had vanished. When he went out to his grandmother's property to check on Bert's trailer, all he found was a hole in the ground. All the barns and outbuildings had been blown down or obliterated by a massive explosion that the local authorities had chalked up to teenagers with stolen dynamite, but Snake said his grandmother had recently been visited by gentlemen with military-style haircuts and ill-fitting civilian clothes who'd asked harsh questions about both her grandsons and about a man named Black.

“So where's your brother?” I asked. “Did he blow up with the trailer?”

“They didn't find any body parts. I think he's hiding. I'm thinking you and Kathy should disappear permanently.”

“I refuse to throw my life away because some thugs, government-sponsored or not, are trying to run me out of town,” said Kathy, when I relayed Snake's suggestion. We were walking on the beach, the only figures on the sand for miles. We might as well have been the last two people on earth.