Dead on Arrival (18 page)

Their trips to the refinery at night were the most dangerous.

During the day, there were cars and people about, and trucks and vans were constantly moving around the area. A boy walking his dog in the open field on the west side of the plant wasn’t particularly noteworthy, provided the boy didn’t get too close to the perimeter fence. And a vehicle parked for a few minutes at some spot in which a man in a baseball cap appeared to be studying a road map or adding water to the radiator wasn’t likely to give cause for alarm if the vehicle didn’t stay there too long.

But at night it was different. The businesses closest to the refinery were mostly industrial, plants that manufactured things like tires and cardboard boxes and sheet metal, and most of these industries were open only during the day. The nearest restaurants and retail stores and homes were approximately two miles away, so there were few reasons for people to be in the vicinity of the refinery at night.

And on this trip the boy needed to walk the perimeter of the plant.

They were completing the final phase of their prepar ations. They needed to find a point of entry and then the safest route to the tanks and pipes containing the hydrofluoric acid. The refinery was well lit in some places, with huge overhead lights that shined down onto pumps and control stations that housed meters and valves. But other locations throughout the plant were less well lit because there was normally no need for people to go into these areas at night.

The perimeter of the plant was similarly well illuminated, particularly near the entry gates, and lights were placed every fifty yards or so along the top of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the plant, but there were many places along the perimeter where the lights didn’t overlap. So the boy had been given two tasks: find the best place to enter the plant and find a route through the plant to the hydrofluoric acid tanks that was mostly in the dark.

The refinery worked three shifts a day. They would plant the devices on the graveyard shift, which began at 11
P.M
. and ended at 7
A.M
. There were only about ten workers on this shift. He had read that these workers maintained the equipment, and their primary duty was to ensure, when the main work-force came to work the next day, that the refinery was fully functional and ready to operate. And he had seen only two guards on the graveyard shift, two middle-aged men who sat in a shack near the refinery’s main entrance.

The graveyard shift. He liked that name.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Eddie Kolowski said, and pulled his glove back on. Every time he took off a glove to get a smoke, his damn fingers almost froze.

Before they’d assigned the new guy to their shift, when it had just been him and Billy in the shack, this job hadn’t been too bad. He and Billy would sit there bullshitting, listening to the radio, nodding off when it suited them – and if he felt like taking a little nip, he’d take a little nip. But now they had the new guy, a little Mormon shit. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t cuss. Eddie just
hated
the son of a bitch.

They were supposed to walk around the plant on a continuous basis, one guy always outside walking, while the other guy stayed in the shack to man the phones. In the summer, that wasn’t so bad, but in the winter, when it was colder than shit out, when the damn wind just came screaming off the lake, him and Billy said, Fuck that shit. No way were they going to freeze their asses off, walking outside. But now with this new guy, they were afraid he’d rat them out if they didn’t follow the procedure; he looked like the type that would. They figured after a couple of months he’d either quit – most young guys didn’t last too long – or he’d figure out that there wasn’t much point in just walking around in the dark, but for a little while they’d have to pretend they were playing the game.

There was one spot near the southeast corner of the plant where there was a good windbreak, and for some reason, maybe the chemicals they had in these pipes, the pipes there were hot. So Eddie, when it was his turn to patrol, always headed right for that spot and planted his ass on one of the hot pipes, and then he would sit there and take little hits from his flask and smoke until it was time to head back to the shack.

What the hell? Was that somebody standing there? The guy – he thought it was a guy, a little guy – was just standing there in a shadow between the lights. What the hell was he doing? Eddie waited a bit, figuring the guy was just some bum and he’d haul out his pecker in a minute and take a piss and move on, but the guy just continued to stand there. What the fuck?

Eddie thought about pulling the pistol out of his holster, but to do that he’d have to take off his glove again to unsnap the little metal button on the holster flap. Screw that. He pulled the flashlight off his belt and shined it right at the guy’s face.

It was a kid. A short, scrawny kid with a big honker. Not black. Mexican or something else, and man, did he have a nose on him! He figured the kid would bolt like a scared rabbit when the light hit him, but he didn’t. He just shielded his eyes with his hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Eddie asked.

‘Looking for my dog,’ the kid said.

‘Your dog? At this time of night?’

‘I live over there,’ the kid said, and pointed vaguely behind him. ‘My dog was barking, and when I looked outside to see why I saw him run off. He must have seen something, a raccoon or a possum, and he chased it. He came this way and I just saw him, here along the fence, but now I don’t.’

‘Well, he sure as shit ain’t on
this
side of the fence,’ Eddie said. ‘Not unless he dug a hole to get under it.’ Eddie shined his flashlight along the bottom of the fence. ‘And I don’t see no hole.’

‘Yeah,’ the kid said. ‘Maybe he went back home.’ Then the kid turned to leave, but before he did, he said, ‘Thank you.’

Nice kid.

‘Hey, what kind of dog was it?’ Eddie said.

‘A German shepherd,’ the boy said. ‘Be careful if you see him. He bites.’ Eddie thought the kid might have smiled when he said this.

* * *

It was his fault the boy was almost caught. He hadn’t been watching the guard shack at all. He’d been watching a group of three workers who had left one of the buildings and were working on a pump on the north side of the refinery, and he’d been making sure that the workers didn’t go to the other side of the refinery where the boy was. If they had, he would have called the boy on the cell phone he had given him. The boy had been told that if the cell phone vibrated, he wasn’t to answer it; he was to come quickly back to the car. But he never saw the guard leave the shack, and that was inexcusably careless on his part.

‘You did well,’ he told the boy. ‘Very well. The worst thing you could have done was run.’

He was extremely concerned that the guard had been standing where he was. Previously the guards on this shift had never left the shack near the front gate. And the boy said the guard had been sitting in the shadows, not walking where the lights were, so he hadn’t been able to see him.

‘You still think the southeast corner is the best place to enter?’ he asked the boy.

‘Yes. It’s the shortest route to the tanks.’

‘Well, the guards have changed their procedure since the last time we were here. We’re going to have to come back a few more nights and watch them.’

The boy didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head.

He loved this boy.

DeMarco needed Emma and he needed Fat Neil. He needed Emma because there was something he wanted her to do that he couldn’t. He needed Fat Neil because he wanted to pry into the finances of a United States senator.

Neil was an old friend of Emma’s, and DeMarco had used his services in the past. He called himself an ‘information broker,’ this bland euphemism meaning that if a client was willing to pay his outrageous fees and wanted information on a certain party or subject, Neil would tap into a vast network of contacts to obtain said information. And if he couldn’t obtain the information legally, he would hack into computer networks or place bugs in boardrooms and bedrooms or do anything else necessary to satisfy a paying customer’s desires. Neil worked for both the private sector and the U.S. government, and it was most likely because of his government work that he wasn’t currently in jail. DeMarco assumed that he had worked for Emma on occasion when she was with the DIA, though neither she nor Neil had ever confirmed this.

Neil was a short, wide man with a big head and a bigger ego. His once-blond hair was thinning on top, but what remained he tied into a thin, shaggy ponytail that reached down past his collar. Neil had married not long ago, and DeMarco was surprised that Neil’s new wife hadn’t made him clip off the unsightly extension. Wives can’t resist the urge to renovate their spouses, and Neil was ripe for major improvements. She was managing to get him to dress a little better, though, DeMarco noted. On all the other occasions when he had seen Neil, he had been wearing shorts, beat-up sandals, and a Hawaiian shirt. He must have owned fifty Hawaiian shirts. Today he was wearing a V-neck sweater, a nice pair of gray slacks, and cordovan loafers.

The meeting was being held in Neil’s office because Neil, even though he was the one billing DeMarco for his time, didn’t like to leave his desk. Emma, who was working for free and had come only as a favor to DeMarco, had been somewhat reluctant to attend. She said she was training Christine’s dog to do its business outdoors, and she didn’t want to disrupt the process. DeMarco immediately had a vivid image of Emma wadding up the critter like a bedraggled furry sponge and mopping up the pee on one of her Persian rugs. Fortunately, Emma didn’t like Bill Broderick’s politics and had decided that DeMarco’s problem took precedence over housebreaking Christine’s mutt.

After they had assembled in Neil’s soundproof, electronically impenetrable room – Neil was paranoid that there was someone out there as good as he was – DeMarco briefed them on the few facts he had and concluded by saying, ‘So I have no idea if there’s really some sort of super conspiracy going on here, but there are too many things that don’t make sense.’

‘Such as?’ Neil asked. He’d been only half listening while DeMarco had been talking, busy taking something out of a box.

‘Such as the following,’ DeMarco said. ‘First you have a guy like Reza Zarif killing his family, an act that’s inconceivable to those who knew him. Then the guy whose fingerprint was found on the bullet box conveniently dies in a car accident before the Bureau can talk to him. Next there’s Rollie Patterson, a normally indecisive slug who suddenly decides to take a walk around the Capitol in freezing weather and becomes some sort of take-charge Wyatt Earp when he sees Mustafa Ahmed. Rollie’s actions, just like Reza’s, were out of character and he too died, making it impossible for anyone to question him further. Oh, I almost forgot: Rollie had a newly purchased RV sitting in his driveway.’

‘So you’re assuming that this Rollie person was told in advance that Mustafa was going to try to blow up the Capitol and he was paid to kill him,’ Neil said. Neil had finally managed to extract from the box whatever was inside it, but DeMarco couldn’t see what it was.

‘I’m not
assuming
that,’ DeMarco said. ‘I’m just saying it’s a possibility. And although I don’t have any evidence to support it, I think something similar may have happened with the air marshal who shot the hijacker. I think he may have been tipped off in advance that Youseff Khalid was going to try to hijack the plane, and just like Rollie he plugs the guy before he can do anything. Or confess to anything.’

‘Is the marshal dead too?’ Neil said.

‘Not that I know of. I tried to see him when I went up to New York, but he wasn’t home. He’s one of the reasons I need some help; while I’m trying to track him down I need to get some other things moving.’

Now DeMarco could see what Neil had taken from the box. It was one of those games they give hyperactive ten-year-olds on car trips, the type where you try to get all the little BBs to roll into the proper hole. Neil was now playing with the game.

‘I’ll tell you another thing that’s bothering me,’ DeMarco said, speaking to the top of Neil’s head as he tilted the BB toy back and forth in his hands. ‘With the exception of Zarif’s family, none of these three terrorist events resulted in anyone dying except the supposed terrorists. Reza was shot down before he could crash his plane into the White House, Mustafa’s bomb didn’t explode, and the shuttle hijacker was killed before he could do anything other than scare a planeful of people. If al-Qaeda’s really behind these things, I have a hard time believing they’re this inept.’

‘So what do you want us to do?’ Emma said, speaking for the first time.

‘A bunch of things. The first thing I want Neil to do is find out who Broderick’s biggest backers are.’

‘Bastard,’ Neil said, speaking to one of the BBs; then he added, ‘Do you actually think Broderick could be personally involved in these incidents?’

‘I’m not saying he is,’ DeMarco said, ‘but everything that’s happened works in his favor. So maybe that’s why someone is doing these things, to scare people and get Broderick’s bill passed, and maybe that same person is backing Broderick financially.’

‘I don’t know,’ Neil said, sounding unconvinced. ‘Someone would have to
really
want that bill passed. I mean – Jesus, two kids were killed.’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ DeMarco said, ‘and I can come up with a couple different motives. One is hate. Whoever’s doing this hates Muslims and wants them treated like the Jews in Nazi Germany, little yellow stars of … of somebody pinned to their coats.’

‘But why do they hate Muslims?’

‘Hell, I don’t know, Neil! Why are some people bigots? Why do some people become white supremacists? And, by the by, the guy Donny Cray worked for, some character name Jubal Pugh, heads up some white-power group and Rollie had some racist literature in his house. So maybe the people doing this are just Muslim-hating white-power loonies. Guys like Timothy McVeigh who get a screwball idea in their head and start blowing things up.’

Before either Emma or Neil could object to DeMarco’s logic – or point out the flaws in his logic – DeMarco said, ‘Another motive could be money.’

‘Money?’ Neil said. ‘How could anyone make money from this?’

‘I don’t know, but whenever a law is passed in Congress, some people make money and some people lose money. It’s like a political law of physics.’

‘But how could someone make any money by kicking out Muslim students?’ Neil said.

‘I just said I don’t know, Neil! Will you put that damn game down and pay attention? What I do know is that we need to look for a money motive, particularly among anyone backing Broderick.’

‘There’s something else we should look for,’ Emma said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Expertise. If these events were not orchestrated by al-Qaeda, you need to look for somebody or some group who has the ability to acquire C-Four and fabricate a plastic gun. Somebody who has the experience, the contacts, and the organizational ability to plan these ops.’

‘Good point,’ DeMarco said. Then, sounding like the man in charge, knowing that no one was ever in charge of Neil or Emma, he added, ‘So Neil finds out who’s supporting Broderick financially, and sees if any of these people could have a hate or a money motive and if they have the expertise to pull this stuff off. He also pulls the financial records for Rollie and this air marshal who shot the hijacker to see if there’s anything squirrelly there. I wanna know how Rollie paid for his RV. I’m going to get the autopsy results for Rollie and Donny Cray, and I want to check out this air marshal some more.’

‘And what do you want me to do?’ Emma said.