Takedown (20 page)

“Suppose he puts on glasses, a fake nose, and a mustache?”

“Ah,” Chris said as he waved Gavin off and left to address the bomb-squad team.

Gavin backed away, glad to not be making the decisions right now.
Bomb squad,
he thought and shook his head. On a day like today. These guys made him feel fortunate to be in homicide. The temperature
had climbed to around ninety, maybe more, and these brave men were dressed in black, insulated, modern-day versions of knights
in armor. Black helmets with thick face shields. The only thing going for them was that the viaduct provided shade. In the
sun they would probably pop like black ants under a magnifying glass.

A few moments later the immediate area was cleared and the perimeter was widened. The two sizeable locks were cut with hydraulic
bolt cutters and then the latches were cabled and uneventfully pulled open from a safe distance. Everyone stayed put as the
black knights tiptoed inside. A few minutes later they walked out and took their helmets off.

“All clear,” yelled one member of the squad.

“May I make a suggestion?” Gavin said to Chris as they came out from behind a patrol car.

“No,” Chris said.

“Send everyone away but forensics and spread the word that all we found were lawnmowers and rakes. Let everyone know we were
wrong. False alarm. Otherwise, by tonight the word will be out about the container and we’ll lose any chance of him ever showing
up here again. Also, break off any visible spot checks down the road, and keep one pair of eyes on anyone coming in here.”

Chris tugged on his chin in thought. “I hate to say it, but you might be right. But I still think I was right to bring everyone
on board to open it. If something were to go wrong…”

“You did the right thing, Big Dog. Get ahold of your bomb squad and tell them the plan before they hit the perimeter.”

Chris nodded and started off to cut off the squad.

“I’ll see you inside the box,” Gavin called, then started toward the container. He had only gone a few yards when he slowed
to a stop, frowned, and then looked left. Some excavating equipment, several fifty-five-gallon drums, beyond that some dirt
hills with tall grass on top blowing in the breeze, an old steel fence with a gate that was cracked open, a weed field, and
beyond that… low tide.

Gavin strolled the length of a football field and found himself standing atop a bulkhead at the edge of a canal, the only
water being a foot-wide stream cutting through the muck, bottom fed from a cement culvert about fifty yards away, behind the
stores on Main Street. The water was probably coming from the spring-fed duck pond across the street. Definitely low tide.
Gavin looked at the bulkhead on the other side. The high-tide mark was about three and a half feet above the muck. To his
right he saw the stream widen
until it reached the bay’s low-water mark, about a quarter mile away. By his feet was an old wooden ladder thick with barnacles
and seaweed… except for the middle of the rungs. He turned and looked back in the direction of the storage container.…

“Where were
you?
Taking a leak?”

“When’s high tide?”

Chris shrugged. “About six hours from dead to peak. Smells pretty low right now.”

Gavin nodded. “We might have caught a break for once.”

“How?”

“He’s got maybe an hour, possibly a two-hour window twice a day that he can get in that creek with a small boat,” Gavin said,
pointing his head toward the old bulkhead a hundred yards away. “So far everything he’s done has been by or on the water.
I don’t think he drives here. I think he gets here by boat at high tide… and probably only at night.”

Chris nodded. “That’s what I would do,” he said as he looked at his watch. “It’s time.”

“What?”

“His face is being spread across every channel as we speak.”

“All the more reason to come at night,” Gavin said.

“If he does, we’ll be ready for him. Come on, let’s have a look in here.”

K
rogan sat at the kitchen table of his host’s Jamaica Queens apartment, roaches scurrying around his bare feet, dressed only
in the boxer shorts he’d put on to go outside and get the newspaper. Light passed over his left arm through an open barred
window. The sounds of people, horns, and trains went unheard as he stared at the front page. “More Terror,” he said, reading
the headline over a strange-looking picture of a flipped boat. The paper said the capsized ferry was the fastest in the world
and belonged to some casino. He smiled.
Fastest in the world,
he thought.

Krogan turned the paper over and saw a picture of himself on the back page throwing the Ninja guy out of the ring. He read
the title: “Resurrected From The Dead.” He cringed after the words left his mouth and had to shake off a shiver. He read a
little farther and found the article was about his host and how he had revived his career. “Fools!” Krogan laughed. “He did
nothing.”

He turned back to the front page and then back to the last page. He did this several times. He didn’t care that the front
page would get more attention from humans. He didn’t need their attention. But he did like what he saw on the front. “More
terror,” he quoted again, looking at the flipped ferry. He no longer wanted to look at the back page. He didn’t even want
to see the title again, but he paused a moment to picture the detective reading the title and laughing… knowing. He thought
about the Frisbees again.

“Agghhh,” he yelled, then threw the paper across the room, where it came apart and floated to the floor.

Krogan clenched his fists and closed his eyes, seeking a vision. Communicating between worlds was not as difficult for him
as it was for others. While he was comfortable in the darkness of his host, his view was limited to human eyes and he needed
the eyes of comrades in the waterless place. They might be in pain from the light, but their view was vast and none would
deny his request, lest they pay the consequences of his wrath. He would not bother asking them to find Buchanan. Wherever
that man was, demons in the other world were not likely to get close. No, the preacher would be inside one of thousands of
angel clusters. But the one responsible for the capsized ferry—now there was someone with potential. Influencing someone with
a brain could be a welcome change of pace.

The vision Krogan saw came fast but was not what he expected. He opened his eyes, pushed a kitchen chair over on his way across
the room, and turned on a small television with rabbit-ear antennas. He waited impatiently as a fuzzy version of the image
he saw in his vision appeared on the TV. No wonder the vision had come so quickly, with so many eyes watching televisions.

At a knock at the door, Krogan turned and, after a moment, smiled and nodded knowingly. He opened the door and pulled Tanya
in by the arm. Her glassy, distant gaze confirmed what he already assumed.

“Tell me what you’ve found,” he said.

“Reverend Jesse J. Buchanan lives in Hamden, New York, at Samantha’s Dairy Farm,” she said in a monotone, expressionless.

“Hamden? Where’s Hamden?”

“Just west of the Catskills. Take the Clearview Expressway to the Throgs Neck Brid—”

“Enough. I’ll find it,” he interrupted. She immediately stopped speaking.

He thought for a moment, piecing together answers to questions he had wondered about over the last couple of years at the
zoo while eating leaves. Samantha was Buchanan’s granddaughter. She had died in the Norway crash with her parents. Buchanan,
unfortunately, had survived the crash and had been hiding from him upstate before he got brave enough to hunt him down with
that stupid tortoise. He’d named a dairy farm after the girl. As a memorial? Or…

“Do you have the phone number for this… this farm?”

She handed him a piece of paper from her small, black purse.

He left her standing where she was while he went to his bedside and dialed the number. An answering machine picked up. The
voice was a young girl’s. He wanted to leave a message but instead slammed the phone down. Buchanan would know in an instant
he had been found… and he would run off again with his granddaughter…
who was still alive!

Krogan went back to Tanya, who was staring into space, her purse in hand. He looked deeply into her eyes. “When I snap my
finger you will not remember any of your assignment or research regarding Buchanan. It never happened. You’ve been here with
me the whole time,” he said, then thought a moment, smiled mischievously, and said, “You will also develop a headache and
be irritable to everyone but me. The only time you will have relief is when you think of me fondly.” He snapped his fingers.

Tanya blinked slowly, then frowned as she became aware of her surroundings. “I… I feel… strange.”

“A pity,” Krogan said, then walked away to get dressed.

Tanya followed unsteadily, looking about the apartment. “Where are we? What happened to this place?”

“We had a wild time. You were an animal. Don’t you remember?”

“I did this?” she said, pointing at herself as she looked around the messy apartment in amazement. “I tried to stop you,”
he said, pulling his pants on. “You hit me and started throwing things. You said you were better than any wrestler.”

“Me?”

“You were drunk. You drank half of that bottle of tequila on the counter.”

She looked at the counter. “Me?”

“You. Why do you think you have that headache?”

Tanya frowned, then winced and palmed her forehead. “I’m… sorry,” she said.

“Don’t apologize. Just clean up your mess.”

“Where are you going?”

“To visit a friend. What are you driving?”

Tanya thought a moment. “My Ferrari, I think.”

Krogan smiled. “Give me the keys… and your money.”

Tanya did as she was told and said, “What time are you coming back?”

“I’m not.”

She didn’t reply at first, watching him pull his boots on. “How will I get home? I… I don’t think I even know where I am.”

“You’re in hell, baby. Call a cab.”

“I have no money.”

“Then take my bike.”

“Where is it?”

“You just walked past it on your way up.”

She frowned. “But I’ve been here all night,” she said, then winced again, harder.

Krogan didn’t reply, just grabbed the tequila and laughed on his way out the door.

Outside, he found the Ferrari parked in front. A convertible-black like everything else Tanya owned. He noticed the license
plate: WWX-3. He shoved the seat all the way back and squeezed in. The black leather interior had that new smell, but was
already very hot. That would change soon at the speeds he had in mind. He inserted the key and started the engine. He loved
the sound of it.
What a toy,
he thought. He guzzled down some tequila and then looked at the dashboard, noticing a monitor under the stereo. He pressed
the power button. “GPS,” he said aloud, remembering the one he’d had on the lobster boat in his last human life. He pressed
the menu and scanned down the options until he saw “phone number.” He smiled, took another swig of tequila, then pressed in
the phone number. After a brief moment of calculating, “Samantha’s Dairy Farm” appeared on the screen. He pressed, “OK to
proceed.”

“Please proceed to the highlighted route,” said a woman’s voice. A road map with a red arrowhead indicating Tanya’s car filled
the screen.

Krogan drained the rest of the tequila and threw the bottle into the side of a passing car. He shifted into first and crushed
the gas pedal. Horns blared and tires screeched as the Ferrari fishtailed into the traffic, leaving a cloud of burnt tire
behind him. He heard one crash and then another as the female voice of the GPS said, “Make right turn ahead.”

G
avin stood with Chris before the half-open doors of the storage container under the Roslyn Viaduct with a couple of forensic
techs—two women who had introduced themselves as Sasha and Jenny. Sasha was a pretty brunette and Jenny was just as pretty,
but strawberry blonde and a little shorter. Chris “Big Dog” Grella had told them to stand behind him in case something went
wrong. They both tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t.

The scent of low tide was still lingering in the late-morning heat. The fire truck, ambulance, bomb squad, patrol cars, traffic
cops, and crowds of people wondering what in the world was happening had all left. A few plain-clothed spies had been strategically
placed near and far to give a no-profile heads-up in case anyone, especially Walter Hess, were to show up unannounced.

“Gloves on now. And please be careful,” begged Sasha.

“We’ll be all right,” Chris said.

“She means with what we touch, genius,” Gavin said to Chris and then turned to the techs. “You’ll have to excuse him. He’s
really a kindergarten crossing guard, and we’re all mindless toddlers walking into traffic.”

The women now looked at Chris with benevolent smiles, obviously thinking him adorable. Gavin shook his head, stuck his hands
into the stretchy latex gloves, and pushed open the door. “Night visits,” Gavin said, motioning at the hinges.

“Greased.” Chris nodded. “Why would he care if the door squeaked during the day?”

“Exactly.” Gavin took a few steps in and stopped to take in the view.

“Wow!” Chris scanned the interior. “This looks more like a contractor’s workshop than a terrorist’s ammo dump.”

“It’s both,” Gavin said, proceeding very carefully. He didn’t care that the bomb squad deemed the container safe. They had
their own definitions as to what a bomb was: something that explodes. But Hess was rewriting the book on how to derail trains
and capsize ferries and who knows what else. He was as out-of-the-box a thinker as one could get, and he’d made the art of
the unconventional seem easy.

Along the left wall were shelves and bins holding supplies of wood, steel, plastic, rubber, and some scuba gear. Along the
entire right wall of the container was a forty-foot workbench, half of it mounted with a grinding wheel, chop box, radial-arm
saw, drill press, lathe, and vertical belt sander. The very end seemed to be a small section with books and magazines. Fluorescent
lights ran along the ceiling over the length of the counter, but there didn’t appear to be a switch anywhere to turn them
on.

Gavin wondered for a moment where the electricity came from, then saw a small generator under the counter. He didn’t remember
anyone mentioning an exhaust pipe on the outside, but there had to be one.

The rest of the counter was sparsely littered with bits and pieces and some partially assembled objects that made no immediate
sense. Mounted on the wall behind the work counter were all manner of hand tools and a six- or seven-foot-wide plastic laminated
map of Long Island Sound. On a shelf under the map were erasable markers of various colors. There were no marks on the map,
but semi-erased tints and hints of where marks had been.

“Here,” Chris said, pointing to a reddish area in the light blue water where the ferry had flipped.

“Didn’t you say the ferry hit something anchored in the water just under the surface?”

Chris rolled his eyes. “A minor fact that’s been in every newspaper and news channel, and yeah, I may have mentioned it a
few times. Glad to see you’re paying attention.”

Gavin sensed the techs glancing in their direction. “Then you might want to put this in your scrapbook,” Gavin said, handing
Chris a small photo he noticed among the counter debris. “Bet you dinner this was taken on the
Sachacus
.”

Chris looked at the photo of a monitor that showed a map from Glen Cove to New London, Connecticut, where the ferry would
dock for the waiting casino bus. The two locations were connected by a dotted line with a little boat image showing the exact
location the ferry was at any given moment.

“Their monitor would have helped him confirm that his own, probably handheld, GPS readings were in line with their regular
route.”

Chris nodded. “We had wondered whether he followed the
Sachacus
with another boat to get the readings, or actually went on as a passenger.”

“Probably both,” Gavin said, looking at another tinted smudge mark on the map. “And this would be the Long Island Railroad.”

There was something very eerie about reading the pre-strike map of terror.

“This looks familiar,” called Jenny.

Gavin turned to see a hydraulic jack like the one used to spread the train rails apart.

“He put it all together right here with the help of that welding equipment,” Chris said, pointing to a couple of tanks of
acetylene and oxygen, some coiled rubber hose, and a small selection of
torches against the wall. “You know, Gav, you could use a container like this at your house. You’d have everything you need
to put your home back together. All we need is a fraction of this stuff for evidence. Why don’t you just impound it and have
it dragged over?”

“Great idea, Big Dog. And while we’re at it, we could build one of these and keep it in your backyard,” Gavin said after rolling
open a blueprint on the counter.

Chris came to his side. “Yeah, baby. We can play with it in the pool… Where do you suppose he found blueprints to the
Sachacus
?”

“I don’t know.
Popular Mechanics
?” Gavin pointed to hand calculations written near the bow. “This guy is in serious need of a hobby.”

“Yeah, like writing programs for video games.”

Gavin sighed and let go of the blueprint. The drawing rolled up on the counter, exposing even more debris. “There’s so much
here, but how much of it is from past projects and how much of it has to do with his next target?”

“Has he used one of these yet?” Sasha asked, holding up a shiny brass tube that was quickly recognized as a very large caliber
cartridge.

Gavin raised his brow. “Nope. Let me see that.”

“Uh-oh,” Chris said. “BMC fifty-caliber. Looks like he brought a souvenir back from the gun show. What do you think the chances
are that he just collects the ammo?”

“Zero,” said Jenny, turning the pages of some kind of magazine. “Ever hear of a Barrett’s rifle?”

Chris cursed. “Tell me you’ve found an owner’s manual.”

“Complete with cash receipt on page… four,” she said, holding up a yellow paper. “Bought three months ago, if we can believe
the date. Your boy has a new toy.”

“Our terrorist just turned sniper,” Chris said.

“Unless he’s got other plans for it.” Gavin stared closely at the cartridge.

“Like?” Chris said.

“I don’t know. He’s a run-a-muck racist with a flair for the spectacular, with a gun that could hit a head-sized target from
a mile away.”

“Are you thinking who or what?”

“Both with this guy. The first thing is to check if any visitors are coming to town, starting with the president. Check both
official and unofficial trips.”

Gavin looked at the map again. “There are natural gas tanks along this coastline. What thickness steel is safe against one
of these rounds?”

Jenny’s brow rose. “We’ll let you know. Those rounds come in quite a variety, including explosive.”

“Great,” Gavin said. “He can aim, fire, and explode from a mile away. And a gas tank is bigger than the broad side of a barn,
so he doesn’t even have to be a good shot.”

“You know,” Chris said thoughtfully. “He might be thinking of Senator Sweeney.”

“Sweeney? Why? I mean, I know why I would want to shoot him, but what are you thinking?”

Sasha was nodding her head. “He’s having a rally tomorrow at Bar Beach.”

“It’s been in all the news, Gav. And he’s made terrorism—and specifically Hess—his whipping boy. And that thing could go right
through standard protection.”

“Then Sweeney should call it off,” Gavin said.

“Yeah, right. He’s going for the glory in the next election. If he backs down from this rally, the media will be all over
him.”

“Then we’ll use him for bait.”

“What do you think he is, a worm?”

“Yes, but one we have to protect. If our soldier guy is after Sweeney with a BMC fifty, he’ll be shooting from within a mile
radius. The only clear shot would be from the harbor or the power plant on the other side. It would be easy enough to stake
out and screen the power plant.”

“The plant, yes, but what about the harbor?”

“Harbor patrol.”

“There’ll be thousands of boats camped out in this and every other harbor all day tomorrow for the fireworks,” Chris pointed
out. “If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”

“Well, the harbor will take some thinking,” Gavin agreed, “but if he takes a shot, we’ll have him. The mouth of the harbor
can be sealed. He’ll be surrounded.”

“But remember, tomorrow’s the Fourth—even a bomb wouldn’t be noticed with all the competition. He can take a shot and we won’t
know where it came from.”

“Interesting reading,” Jenny said from the back of the container. “Some gun magazines I’ve never heard of, some military stuff,
a copy of
The Turner Diaries
, and a well-used Bible.”

“Bible?” Gavin said. He looked at his watch. 12:47. The pastor’s Salt lunch meeting, or whatever the thing was called, would
probably be over soon.

“Yeah. complete with highlighting and underlined verses.”

“Chris, I hate to say this, but you’re going to have to call the Feds and let them know what we got here. We can’t automatically
assume Sweeney’s the target. If not, we still need to know what he plans on doing with these fifties. Before the Feds get
here, we need to get this place dissected and labeled. Let’s go through those books and magazines and look for any underlines
or dog-eared pages. Any newspapers or magazines stuffed under tools or buckets might have articles he saved and got tired
of reading,” Gavin said, handing the cartridge to Chris.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got a lunch date. I’ll be back.”

“Lunch… with who?”

“Some pastors.”

“Pastors! We back to this Krogan crap again? Look, I know you just think you’re protecting your family, but this is going
to get you in trouble. Big trouble. And what pastors do you know? You don’t know any pastors.”

“Maybe not, but Father Lauer does, and we’re going to chat a bit. It’ll keep me out of trouble.”

“Father Lauer. A priest? Who is this guy? What kind of craziness are you getting yourself into now? What’s he, an exorcist?
He’s an exorcist, right? God help us, Gav, you’re off the deep end.”

“Father Lauer was the priest at the train wreck.”

“Him? The one giving last rites? He’s an exorcist?”

“There was only one priest there. And he called me. He wanted to meet. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know what he is.”

“Bull. You’re going too far, Gav. You can’t do this now…
not now!
I know you, man. You’ll hook up with these guys and I won’t see you again. You’ll drag them over to see Jackhammer Hoban,
embarrass yourself down to your toenails, and waste the most valuable time you’ve ever been needed for. You see all the work
we have here,” Chris said angrily.

“I have to go, Chris. I’m late. The sooner I get out of here, the sooner I’ll be back.”

“You’re nuts, man. We need you here. If the lieutenant calls, you’re on your own. I’m done covering for you.”

“
Don’t
cover for me. This is my fight, not yours.”

“Yeah, right. Go on. Get out of here. Wacko.”