Endangered Species (28 page)

“How’d he get it to you so fast?”

“Modem. Anything on computer disks can be telephoned via a modem.”

“Does it have any information to help me find King?”

“Nothing I’m able to tell you about, Gabe.”

Which meant that Mallory was ahead of Wager now and didn’t need him. The FBI knew enough to make them urgently marshal their agents and specialists into teams to defend Rocky Flats whether King was captured or not. It was what they should be doing, Wager knew, but a deal was a deal. “We’re supposed to be working on this together.”

“And we are! Anything I judge to be of help for your end of the case, Gabe, I’ll certainly provide you with.”

Even the man’s tone, falsely sincere, told Wager of the widening gap between Mallory and himself. “Why can’t I be the one to look at it and decide if it’ll help?”

Mallory’s next phrase was like a door closing; it left no room for argument: “It’s a question of national security.”

It was clear that the man wasn’t going to share what information was on the disks. “I see.” Wager kept his voice pleasant. “But you will call me if you do turn up something, right?”

“Sure! You bet.”

Mallory didn’t bother to ask if Wager had anything new. Perhaps he didn’t need to because he had it all. Instead, the line clicked dead, and despite knowing that the Rocky Flats threat was a hell of a lot more important than the Tillotson murder, Wager had the feeling he was being shoved out of his own case.

9/26

0342

E
LIZABETH WAS WAITING
up for him when he dragged himself to her house. Waiting up wasn’t quite right—she’d left a dozen lights on and curled up asleep on the couch wearing a flannel nightgown and quilt. The television set was showing a stoic Indian face that Wager vaguely recognized. Someone out of Hollywood from decades past … Jeff Chandler—that was the guy. Looked like an Ivy League professor dressed up as an Indian. He was making noises about sacrificing himself for his woman and his tribe.

The soft click of the “off” switch startled her out of sleep. “Gabe?”

“Yeah.”

Standing, she stumbled drowsily toward him to hold and be held. “I’m glad you’re here.”

He pressed the small, intense body close to him and felt her warmth penetrate beneath his weariness and into that icy knot that had formed and been ignored when Flaco Martinez shot at him. “I am too.”

“I have some fish in the refrigerator. Hungry?”

Food was something else he’d shoved to the back of his mind during the last few hours. Now the thought of it suddenly filled his mouth with a spurt of saliva. “Starved.”

“You make the salad; I’ll warm up the fish.”

His food disappeared in seconds, and Wager sighed as he leaned back from the kitchen table, a half-empty beer mug in his hand and a wad of half-chewed food in his belly. “That was good.”

“How would you know!”

“It really was good.” He watched her pick a cucumber out of lettuce leaves. “Have you talked to anybody yet?”

She nodded, mouth full. “A couple of people. The mayor—I managed to get him on the telephone. He verified a lot of what you told me.”

“Did he want to know where you found out?”

“No. A lot of people are whispering about it now. It’s not something you can keep secret.”

“What are they doing about it?”

“From what I could gather, pretty much leaving it up to the FBI. Any metro emergency evacuation plans dealing with something as massive as that don’t even exist, Gabe. Some of the municipalities have their own disaster plans, but not all of them do, and nothing’s coordinated. There’s no metro-wide plan at all.” She finished her salad and stacked the plates on the table while she talked. “Most of the people I spoke with weren’t sure that, with a catastrophe of that magnitude, anything could be done anyway.” A clatter of dishes. “Have you had any luck?”

“Plenty. All bad.” He drained the beer mug. “Could you call the mayor first thing in the morning and tell him the FBI’s not keeping the city police informed?”

“What?”

Wager explained. “We had an agreement—Mallory and me—to work together. Now he’s taken off on his own, and I don’t know what information he has. I don’t know his plans for stopping an attack on the Flats, I don’t know what he has that might help me locate the people I’m looking for.”

A red area appeared high on her cheeks, a sign of her quick temper, and she glanced at the electric clock on the kitchen wall. It was shaped like a large green apple, and each number was a different kind of fruit. A gift, she had explained once, from a West Slope fruit grower who had been gathering support for a bill to defend Colorado produce against malicious slander. “He has a breakfast meeting at seven-thirty. I’ll call him then.”

“Think he’ll help?”

“For a change, yes. He’s very worried about this, as he damn well should be.” They carried the dishes to the sink, and she began setting them in the washer. “I also talked to a man who’s active in a local peace movement. He’s not a wild-eyed type, Gabe, and I trust what he says.” Her dark eyes, puffy from the late hour, gazed at him—serious, upset, but more determined than fearful. “His biggest fear is the plutonium that’s still in the ductwork.”

“I was told they’re cleaning out the ducts. That they’ve already removed something like eight pounds of the crap.”

“He told me they plan on removing a total of thirteen pounds of dust. They say that will ensure against criticality. But, Gabe, the estimated total amount of plutonium scattered through the ducts is sixty-two pounds. That’s enough for seven nuclear bombs!”

Wager rubbed a hand across the weary flesh of his stubbly jaw. “What do you mean, ‘criticality’?”

“Concentration of plutonium. If too much is concentrated together, you can have a spontaneous nuclear chain reaction.”

“Jesus—like a bomb?”

“More a radioactive burst and fire, as I understand it.” She added, “And I don’t understand all of it. That’s what makes it even scarier. Anyway, it would be fatal to anyone in the immediate vicinity.”

“A local explosion, then—kept in the building.”

“Except that a major explosion would probably blow out the filters—they’re only paper—as well as the monitoring system. That would leave the other fifty-four pounds of plutonium dust free to escape into the atmosphere.”

Wager visualized the architectural drawings they’d got from Pipkin. He remembered watching Stribling’s finger trace the channel of ductwork through the maze of rectangles and symbols as he earnestly told them about the cleanup project. The channels converged at a final filtration center on the ground floor just before the air was drawn into the tall stacks. If the filter system blew and the building pressure equalized, the contaminated air could be pulled by the rising warm currents out of the bowels of the building and up those stacks like water through a straw.

“There have been two major incidents with the filter system already, in 1957 and 1969. Fires that breached filters and destroyed monitors. No one knows how much burned plutonium escaped each time.”

“It came over Denver?”

“No one knows. The tracking system and ground-level sample boxes weren’t in place then. But it had to go somewhere.”

Wager dug his thumbs into burning eyes and tried to fight back a yawn. It wasn’t boredom, it wasn’t the company, and it certainly wasn’t the subject; he was just exhausted. Elizabeth turned out the light over the stove and, as Wager pushed himself up on weary legs, once more held him tightly. “Somebody, Gabe—my God, somebody somewhere has to know how to protect us from it!”

If there was a somebody, Wager hadn’t heard of him. The only somebody he knew of was people like Milton Stribling and Lieutenant Walters, who thought they had everything under control. Or Mallory, who had started playing games with DPD. Or Wager himself, whose efforts were futile and whose flesh was aching with exhaustion. And along with his weariness, he felt the vast weight of death—the emptiness of space, and light years of nothingness surrounding this small drop of life, this tiny spark that could be snuffed out so easily by us alone.

The street. It was the morning of the twenty-sixth, and he should get back on the street. But his eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer, and the surging pull of sleep rose higher and higher like waves he could hear and feel. Even as he stood holding Elizabeth, they sucked at his consciousness like an onrushing darkness.

Elizabeth’s voice woke him, and through the lingering fog of slowly ebbing numbness, he half-heard what she was saying.

“Councilwoman Voss, and it’s more than important. It’s an emergency. Yes—right now. No. I don’t want him to return my call, god damn it—I said this is an emergency. Now!” She was propped against a pillow to hold the receiver to her ear. The figures on the clock radio flipped to 7:32, and Wager stifled a grunt as he began to struggle fully awake. Elizabeth smiled down at him, then turned her attention back to the telephone. “Yes, Frank, thank you for interrupting your meeting. I found out last night that the FBI is no longer working with our police liaison on the Rocky Flats case. … No, I’m not at liberty to say, but the information is accurate. An Agent Mallory. … I know what their primary responsibility is, Frank; I also know what our responsibility is to our citizens and that we need information to carry out that responsibility. … Yes, apparently they know about the terrorist’s plans and they’ve suddenly clammed up. … No, I don’t—but by God, we should, and we should right now. … Yes, you and the governor, both—a phone call’s not too much to ask in a situation like this. … Yes, that’s a good idea! All right, Frank, thank you.”

Wager was pulling on his clothes as Elizabeth hung up the telephone. “What’d he say?”

“He and the governor are going to call the local FBI office immediately and demand to know why the liaison’s been broken. And he’s going to call Senator Brown and have him demand full cooperation from FBI headquarters in Washington.” She added thoughtfully, “I didn’t think Frank had the guts to make waves—he’s even more worried than I believed.”

Wager glanced at the clock again. “He’s right to be worried; if the voters are killed off, he’ll have a hell of a time being reelected.” Getting close to eight
A.M.
Five minutes for a shave and a cup of coffee. He could check in at the office early enough to be over in District One by the time stores started to open. And while he was showing photographs, the wheels—big and little—started by Elizabeth’s phone call should be turning. Mallory would probably guess that the complaint originated with Wager, but that was something Wager didn’t give one small damn about; the FBI agent had broken his word. “Thank you, Councilwoman. You’ve got my vote next election.”

“Didn’t you vote for me last time?”

Using the sound of the hot water splashing into the sink, he garbled his answer.

Morning traffic was worse than usual, and an accident had clogged Speer Boulevard at the University intersection. Wager, half-listening to the news, worked his way through the back streets. But a lot of other people were listening to the morning traffic report, too, and had the same idea. He finally reached the office only a few minutes ahead of the rest of the shift and was disappointed there too: the only messages in his pigeonhole were one from Stovepipe—“Gabe, please call”—and another from Lieutenant Watterson: “
Denver Post
reporter Gargan requests interview re Pauline Tillotson and the FBI involvement. Be a good idea to accommodate ASAP. Chief wants to ensure success of I-PREP program.”

He tore yesterday’s leaf off his desk calendar and stared at the new numbers: 26. Then he quickly shuffled through the latest notices and alerts as he dialed Mallory’s number. It was busy. Disgusted, he dialed the one Stovepipe gave him. An elderly woman’s suspicious voice answered. “Detective Wager? Oh. Yes, just a minute—he’s here now.”

“Gabe—thanks for calling, man. Listen, I found an outfit that’ll lend me the money if I can get a cosigner.”

“That’s fine, Stovepipe.”

“You mean you’ll help me? That’s great, Gabe!”

“Whup—you mean you want me to cosign the loan?”

“Hey, who would be better than a cop—I mean a policeman?” He answered his own question. “Maybe a banker. I know a few of them. But we’re not on what you’d call speaking terms.”

“Stovepipe, I don’t have enough collateral to cosign a loan that size. I can’t do you any good.”

“Gabe, I talked to the lawyer and all. Remember you told me to go see a lawyer? He says with the house’s value, all I need is a—what’d he call it?—‘unimpeachable’ cosigner. Man, I’m not asking you to take any risk. The house is worth a hell of a lot more than I’m borrowing. It’s just my old man’s name’s on it as an owner, and it’s taking for fucking ever to call the bastard dead.”

“Why doesn’t the lawyer cosign?” Wager glanced up at a hand waving urgently at him from the doorway; the duty clerk’s wide eyes said it was important.

“Well, I didn’t really ask him. He seems all right, you know? But truth is, Gabe, I don’t trust him too much. After all, he is a lawyer. I mean, he gets his hand on a piece of property, he’s going to start acting like a lawyer. He can’t help it.”

“Look, Stovepipe, this is going to take some time—”

“No, Gabe, no time at all. All you got to do is sign it, man. I’ve already told Mother about it, and she’s really happy, Gabe. She’s really grateful, man. I tell you how much she likes it out there in the country?”

“Yeah, but look, Stovepipe, I’ve got—”

“Gabe, I swear to God, it’s no risk to you. I’ll get the papers ready and everything. All you got to do is drop by the bank and sign, man. Anytime in the next couple days. If anything goes wrong—and nothing will, man, I swear—the bank gets mother’s house. That’s it—nothing from you. And that house is worth a lot more than the loan, man. I got the—what do you call it?—the appraisal I can show you!”

The clerk’s silent lips mouthed “Chief Doyle wants you right now” and Wager nodded. “Stovepipe—”

“Jesus, Gabe, please. I’m begging you, man! This means so much to Mother and me. And it’s our only chance at it. I’m not shitting you, Gabe—you know me. I wouldn’t do that. I know how much you helped out before and all.”