Dead Game (28 page)

“Are we going there, Dad?”

“Yeah, if you’re okay with it we’re going to take a ride into the delta and look for this house.”

“That’s fine, and it’s really pretty out here today.”

“Do me a favor.” Marquez handed her his phone. “Scroll through the address book until you find SEH. Right above it will be SEC. It’s a guy named Stan Ehrmann. He’s with the FBI. The H is for his home number.”

“Clever.”

“Yeah, I know, and I try so hard to be cool.”

“Okay, I’ve got it.”

Marquez held the phone to his ear, and a teenage boy answered. He said his father had gone to find a store that was open to “get something for my mom.”

“Tell him John Marquez called. Here’s my phone number. Will you tell him I need to talk to him this morning?”

The road was empty and clear, and Marquez drove hard. He waited for Ehrmann to call back.

“That guy was so up about college,” Maria said.

“Yeah.” He glanced over at her. “You heard where he’s coming from.”

She didn’t say anymore about it, and they crossed the river and came up past Poverty Road and the pink-stucco Ryde Hotel. People were starting to get out into the day. There was traffic and a long line of motorcycle riders going past from the other direction and a few boats out on the river. They were already to Isleton when Ehrmann called.

“You shouldn’t be calling me,” he said. “I have to refer the call to my S.A.C.”

“When you talk to the S.A.C. tell him I only want to talk to you.” He recounted the conversation with Julio. “Raburn should have led us to this house, but he never mentioned it. There’s a skyblue house like the one Julio described among those photos Raburn had stored.”

“I remember a few photos of houses. We haven’t been looking for a house in the delta, but sure, it’s worth checking out. Do you think you can find this place?”

“I’ll know soon.”

“I’ll make some calls in the meantime.”

He hung up with Ehrmann.

“What’s that about, Dad? How come you’re calling the FBI?”

“Because we followed a lot of people and none of them ever went to this house Julio is describing.”

“But is that really any big deal?”

“Probably not, but it’s worth checking out. Raburn had downloaded photos he was saving. Some of the photos he might have taken on the sly, and the FBI has been looking for other connections. Still, it probably doesn’t mean anything.”

There was one house he had in mind and could see now. He’d found it after he’d looked at Raburn’s photos. It wasn’t that far upriver from Raburn Orchards. They rolled down a lightly graveled road for almost a mile, and there weren’t any fresh tire tracks ahead of them. He could tell, driving in the long straight road through the bare vines, that no one had been here through several storms. When they got there the house still looked empty. No other cars.

It was an older Victorian raised off the ground in what had been a delta habit to avoid yearly floodwaters in the years before the levee system was completed. It sat high on a thick concrete foundation, stood six feet off the ground like a house trying to get a view of the river by looking over the levee road a mile away. He looked at the faded blue siding, at the porch Julio had described, then at Maria.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Sounds like what he described.”

“I’m going to knock on the door and take a look.”

When no one answered the door he walked back to the truck and gave Maria his keys.

“Sit in the driver’s seat and we’ll talk by phone as I walk around the back.”

“That’s pretty paranoid.”

“So if anything happens, you head for the road. You call 911.”

“What?”

In the back of the house he saw locks and the heavy-gauge steel doors covering an entrance to the big basement space created by raising the house above the floodwaters. He’d seen enough houses raised a similar way, but none with the basement locked up like this. He kept an eye on the windows of the house as he looked at the quarter-inch steel doors and the locks and chains. It would take two men to lift a door.

“Maria, I’m going to hang up. I’ve got to call the FBI back.”

Lift one door, then the other, and you’d walk down four or five steps and be in a storage room under the house. He got Ehrmann’s son again when he called.

“Dad said you should call him on his cell phone. He’s got a new one. I’m supposed to give you the number.”

Marquez copied it down. The kid was as efficient as his father. He called Ehrmann.

“I’m on my way to you,” Ehrmann said, “but there are two agents who’ll get there in a few minutes, and if anything looks suspicious, just wait.”

“Why did you decide to start driving here?”

“Something fit with a piece of conversation we eavesdropped.”

“This is one of the two things I really like about the Bureau.”

“What’s that?”

“When you decide to move, you don’t waste time.”

“And what’s the second thing?”

“You don’t seem to need to ask anyone anymore before going in to look at something. I’m here with my daughter. No one seems to be home at the house. There are heavy steel doors and hardened steel chain and two padlocks like you don’t see often around here.
Someone wants to restrict access to the basement. You’ll need tools to get in, if that’s what you decide to do.”

It was half an hour before the first government sedans came through the vineyard. It was another hour before they had the tools to break in. Then the doors got opened.

Maria was in the truck cab on the phone to her mother. Marquez left her and walked over as the first of the FBI went down into the basement. He knew from their voices they’d found something, and looking down the steps he saw them squatting near long metal boxes. Behind the boxes he saw hundreds of guns.

“Kalashnikovs,” Ehrmann told him, and then walked a distance away with him. “This is it, Marquez. This is what we were looking for. A whole lot of people are on their way here now.”

“What else is in there?”

“Handheld missiles. Some other hardware. They’re going to chase you out of here.”

“That’s okay.” He looked at Ehrmann. “Are you sure it’s what you were looking for?”

“Yeah, we’ve got a printed list. We’ve been a buyer, but someone here in the States had outbid us for some of this.”

“The handheld missiles?”

“Yeah, somebody really wanted them.”

“And you don’t know who that other buyer is?”

It was a stupid question. Obviously, they hadn’t found the other buyer, and no wonder they were so anxious to find the arms cache.

“Would Karsov have come back for these?”

“Probably. Eventually. He had the other buyer; he’d try to make it work. It’s all about money.”

They watched more cars come down the road, and then a couple of special agents started toward them. Ehrmann pointed at a car pulling in.

“That’s our S.A.C. I’ve got to go talk to him.”

Marquez stayed where he was and waited for the special agents to walk up to him.

“You’ve got to back away, sir,” one of them said. “Your daughter and you will need to leave the premises now. We’re closing off the area.”

“Yeah, Stan just told me.”

Marquez felt the tension coming off them, and they were trying to be nice. He started toward his truck.

“They wouldn’t even let me move,” Maria said. “I wanted to come over to where you are, and they told me to wait here. What’s over there?”

“Come have a look.”

The first FBI agent who spotted Marquez and Maria walking back knew it was Marquez who’d found the house. He hesitated, and it was the next two who moved to block them.

“She’s going to see this, and then we’re gone,” Marquez said.

“No, she’s not, sir.”

“This is the world she’s inheriting, and I want her to see it.”

One of the handheld missiles had been carried up into the sunlight, and the box opened. Marquez used his bigger frame to shield Maria’s approach and repeated they were just going to take a look and leave. She got a look and a glance down into the basement.

A few minutes later they were in the truck, driving back through the grapevines. From the levee road they could still see the government cars down in the field in the distance. Off to their
right the river was running hard. Does the way we treat other species say a lot about our chances of making peace among ourselves? Marquez was pretty sure it did. He was thinking about that when Maria spoke again.

“It’s weird that a sturgeon is how we found those,” Maria said. “Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?”