The Laura Cardinal Novels (73 page)

One of the two trucks—the one carrying the waste—had already turned south on 95 at Searchlight.

“It has to be the other truck then” Laura said.

Jon said, “The other truck is carrying empties.”

Laura looked at him. “All HazMat loads are escorted by police. What about empty trucks?”

“I don’t know.”

Laura was already looking at another item: Jack Taylor had used a credit card under the name John Traynor to rent a semi truck. She tapped the paper with a fingernail. “Why would he rent a semi?”

Jon stood up, ponderous as a bear—looks were deceiving. “Maybe they moved the waste casks to the semi. No, scratch that.” He glanced at the digital photos of a truck carrying the Trupact-II waste casks. “Even if it was a flatbed, which this one isn’t, they’d never be able to switch those things out in a hurry—it says here it takes four hours to load those things and tie them down properly.”

Laura went over and stood behind Jordy Benteen, so she could follow the GPS location on one of the projection screens. She knew she was missing something. Maybe looking at the Global Positioning System notations would help, but Jordy had the log data up: all numbers—latitude, longitude, altitude, speed.

“Jordy, could you pull up the map?”

“Sure thing.” He switched to the map, zoomed in to a fifty-square-mile area. On the map were two dots, belonging to the two trucks in question.

He clicked on the second dot and a window came up, listing the ID number of the truck, its destination and projected arrival time.

“You can forget changing out the casks,” Laura said, “There’s no way they stopped for four hours.”

Jordy said, “That’s the interesting thing. I did some calculations—what time they left, how long it would take to get to Cottonwood Cove? It looks like this second truck must have stopped somewhere. There’s a discrepancy of almost forty minutes.”

Laura looked at Jon. “They stopped for something,” she said, “but what?”

Jordy said, “That’s why they’re so far behind the other truck. But that’s not the weirdest thing. Somebody at TRANSCOM caught this—for a couple of minutes earlier this morning the truck disappeared.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Once a GPS is up and running, it doesn’t stop, even if the vehicle shuts down. Say somebody goes to the restroom—the thing keeps going. Which is weird if the truck just disappears like that.”

“Do you know what could cause this?”

He shrugged. “I guess if it was disconnected.”

She had a fleeting thought—two disparate items joining up—then noticed the look on Jon Service’s face. He was intent on something behind her.

She heard knuckles cracking. She knew that sound.

It was the sound of all the air being sucked from the room.

One of Bobby Burdette’s favorite stories was about Jim Thorpe, the Indian who was considered one of the greatest athletes of all time. On his way to the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe sat on the deck of a ship for hours on end and stared at a bar he’d set up, every once in a while getting up from his deck chair to raise it a little. When a reporter asked what he was doing, he said, “I just broke the record for the high jump.”

Maybe the story was apocryphal—Bobby didn’t know—but it sure resonated with him. He had a stack of books at home that said if you wanted to be successful, you came up with a plan, and then you visualized yourself going through it. There was one book that said just by thinking your way to what you wanted, you actually changed the molecules inside yourself, so that your whole body became a missile launching itself toward success.

That sounded a little farfetched. But he knew there was power in positive thinking.

Driving through the dull-brown-and-gray Mojave, it would have been easy to get bored, but Bobby was looking at other things, things inside his head. He was picturing his plan, step by step.

He saw himself driving up I-15 into Vegas.

He saw himself parking the truck outside the Blue Lagoon Hotel and Casino.

He saw himself walking up the street to the Mirage, going upstairs to the roof, where he’d have the truck perfect in his line of vision.

He saw himself calling the Blue Lagoon, asking to speak to the manager, the manager coming on the phone. He saw himself calmly and intelligently explaining the situation to the manager, telling him that the phone he was talking on was also a detonating device. He could be pretty persuasive when he talked—he had that ring of authority, had always been able to talk his way into or out of anything. That Fleet truck out there, just out your window? He’d say—those are Trupact-II canisters on the back. Look it up. Call the Department of Energy, call the Nevada Test Site, you’ll find that a truck with Trupact-II casks went out today, headed for Carlsbad carrying low-level nuclear waste. Except they’re not going to Carlsbad. They’re right here at the Blue Lagoon.

“There are three places on that truck are wired with dynamite. I set them so they will penetrate the first tank. I can detonate it with my mobile device. You understand what I’m saying?”

He’d outline the dangers of transuranic waste, especially on a windy day like this.

“It’s not that it will kill anyone,” he’d say. “Not now anyway. That’s gonna come down the pike—lots of types of cancer you don’t even know the names of. People are gonna inhale, and that’s what is going to get them.

“But that's not even the worst of it, right?”

The manager stammering now, because he understands what Bobby’s getting at. It isn’t the potential loss of life ten, twenty years down the line. No, that’s not how casinos think. They think in terms of the bottom line, they think in terms of stockholders, they think in terms of the next
business
cycle.

So Bobby lets that sink in and says, “You know what happened to Chernobyl, right?”

By this time the manager’s shaking in his Guccis.

“They put a fence around it. They got everybody out of there and they put a fence around it, around the town, around the area, and nobody could go in for hundreds of years.

“Think about it. All these casinos.
Your
casino. Think about all the money that changes hands every day. Think about what would happen if Las Vegas didn’t exist anymore.”

Then the kicker:
How much is a million dollars compared to that? One lousy million dollars. I know what you’re gonna say. “How can we lay our hands on money like that?” But you know that would be disingenuous, right? You have that in petty cash right now. If there’s one place you can get your hands on cash, it’s Las Vegas.

It was a perfect set-up. The truck in the parking lot, Bobby with the phone at—as Dick Cheney would say—another undisclosed location, and plenty of money downstairs and all over Las Vegas.

“What I want is real simple,” he’d say. “If you do what I ask, it will be one of the simplest transactions in the world. All I want is one million dollars. If you can’t scrape up the money on your own, you can always call some of your friends. I’m sure you can come up with a million in no time.” He’d list a few interested parties: the Mirage, Mandalay Bay, the Bellagio, the Luxor. They’d all have a stake in this.

And so he would make his demand: the million dollars, wired to a Swiss numbered bank account, which he would have to get confirmation on. Once the money had been successfully wired, he would take off in the car he had stashed in the Mirage parking lot.

He knew, though, that they would try to cheat. Even for a million dollars, which should only be the cost of doing business when you’re trying to save Las Vegas from becoming a ghost town—even then. He’d learned that about folks, especially rich folks. Especially corporations. They liked to hold onto their money. The more they had, the more they begrudged the loss of even a penny. The casino guys, they’d think they were being really crafty, trying to put one over on the poor white guy with dirt under his nails. It could manifest itself in many ways: They would try to stall him so a bomb team could come out and defuse the bombs. Or they would enlist the police to make a hotel-to-hotel search in this immediate area. Or they would try to do something with the wire transfer itself—although that was pretty much foolproof.

Still, he didn’t trust them. Hence, the hostage.

Sometimes, the human factor was the only thing that could change the equation. The fear that a woman might be buried underground, left to die under a pile of earth—anybody could relate to that. Or at least the fear that the Blue Lagoon Hotel and Casino would be seen as putting the value of their bank account over the value of human life.

If that came out, their lagoon would dry up into a tadpole pond.

Bobby’s eyes tracked a jackrabbit as it loped across the desert, the same dull gray-brown as the landscape it ran through. Las Vegas, for all its billion lights and shows and waterfalls and fake-looking grass and the chiming that went on day and night, could be as dead as this desert in a week. He pictured it: refugees in Armani suits with smartphones, running out off the Strip like rats.

Bobby knew he had to keep it between him and the casinos. He knew they wouldn’t want the media there any more than he did. Last year an al Qaeda operative videotaped casinos as possible terrorist targets. When the city fathers were notified that there were terrorists casing the place, they stuck their heads in the sand like ostriches. They didn’t want to hear about it. They didn’t want the bad publicity, didn’t want to discourage so much as one overweight, flip-flop-wearing, Hawaiian-shirted tourist from unloading his paycheck here. That was their answer—ignore it and it will go away.

So he thought his chances were pretty good for getting away clean, if he kept it between himself and the Blue Lagoon.

Something his mother always said popped into his mind: think positive. Coming from her, that was a joke. She never had one positive thought in her life, but she made that her mantra. As in: The trouble with you is you don’t think positive. You don’t aim high.

High enough for you now, Ma?

So he was going to think positive. Like the Little Feat song said,
put on your sailin’ shoes
, and he was going to sail all the way to Mexico. He wasn’t going to think about all the ways it could go wrong. He was going to set those happy, success-oriented molecules in motion.

Bobby was still thinking about all of this and starting to feel really good about his prospects when he came up over the rise and saw the line of cars in his lane up ahead.

“So what have we got?” Special Agent in Charge Damien Peltier said as he pushed past Laura into the room

Laura looked at Jon.

His demeanor had undergone a change. He seemed polite, attentive even. But the light had gone out of his eyes; they were still blue marbles in his head. As he gave the rundown, his voice was as flat as his eyes.

Peltier, short, slender with black hair and a narrow nose whose flared nostrils always seemed to sniff out something bad. Elegant ringed fingers always in flight, the black hairs on the back of his pale knuckles catching the light. Laura had once heard Jon call him Captain Queeg, because he focused on minutia at the expense of what was important.

And he was a little bit crazy.

In early 2000, he’d been one of the supervisors who had ignored warnings of potential terrorists wanting to fly planes without learning to take off and land at an Arizona flight school. For that oversight, he had been promoted to Special Agent in Charge, Phoenix Division.

Jon got about a paragraph into his description of events when Peltier raised his hand. “We don’t have time for this,” he said. “I want the boiled-down version.”

Jon started over, using short sentences. He outlined the basic points, but there were big gaps in between. Peltier seemed to like it; he cracked his knuckles when Jon was through. In Peltier-speak that meant rolling up the sleeves and getting to work.

Peltier glanced at Laura. “Good the way that worked out—thanks for the tip. As soon as the helicopter gets here, I’ll be setting up house at the command post. We’ll be out of your hair pretty soon, so you can get back to your routine.”

FBI-speak for dismissal: Your work is done here.

Laura knew better than to get in a pissing match with him over that. But she wasn’t going to back down regarding her own case. “You’re not in my hair,” she said in as pleasant a voice as she could muster, “although we have our own interest in Bobby Burdette. He’s suspected in the murders of two people. We’ll be working the case from here.”

He smiled, but his little current eyes glinted hard. “Of course you need to follow your case,” he said. “What you need to understand, though, is we have a nuclear emergency here. You can go ahead and do your thing, but I just want to be clear. Don’t expect us to hold your hand through all this—we’re busy trying to avert a disaster.”

“I wasn’t aware until now that the two cases aren’t linked.”

“Priorities,” he said briskly. “You know how that works.” He turned to Jordan Benteen, dismissing her. “When’s that chopper going to get here?”

“Any minute, sir.”

Peltier put his hand to his chin like The Thinker. “You picked the right place—east of Searchlight. Good job, figuring that out from here. But I think we should be a little closer. We’re moving the command post two miles back toward Searchlight—about six miles east of town instead of eight.” He walked to the map and tapped the Route 164 just east of Searchlight. “I’ve got FBI SWAT on their way now.”

“Las Vegas Metro offered a SWAT team.”

“We’ve got that covered. Did you call for helicopter surveillance?”

“No,” Service said. “We don’t want to spook them. We’ve got them on satellite.”

“We’re going to have to have a real show of force—we want them to give up right away, realize there’s no way out. I want every law officer within a thirty-mile-radius right there behind the roadblock, make sure they don’t get to the Colorado River. We can’t afford to let these guys think they can run the roadblock and get away with it.”

“We should have somebody on 95,” Jon said. “Just in case the truck turns south.”