Wild Fire (2 page)
Authors: Nelson DeMille
“How could I forget? You’ve been complaining about it all week.”
“I never complain.”
She thought that was funny for some reason.
I studied Kate’s face in the glow of the computer screen. She was as beautiful as the day I met her nearly three years ago. Usually, women I’m with age fast. My first wife, Robin, said our one-year starter marriage seemed like ten years. I said to Kate, “I’ll meet you at Ecco’s.”
“Don’t get picked up.”
I walked through the cube farm, which was nearly empty now, and entered the elevator lobby, where colleagues were piling up.
I made small talk with a few people, then noticed Harry and went over to him. He was carrying a big metal suitcase, which I assumed contained cameras and lenses. I said to him, “Let me buy you a drink.”
“Sorry, I need to get on the road ASAP.”
“You driving up tonight?”
“I am. I need to be at this place at first light. Some kind of meeting going down, and I need to photograph car plates and people as they arrive.”
“Sounds like the mob surveillance we used to do at weddings and funerals.”
“Yeah. Same shit.”
We crowded into an elevator and rode down to the lobby.
Harry asked, “Where’s Kate?”
“On her way.” Harry was divorced, but he was seeing a woman, so I asked, “How’s Lori?”
“She’s great.”
“She looked good in her photo on Match.com.”
He laughed. “You’re an asshole.”
“What’s your point? Hey, where is this place?”
“What place? Oh . . . it’s up near Saranac Lake.”
We walked out onto Broadway. It was a cool autumn day, and the streets and sidewalks had that Thank-God-It’s-Friday feeling.
Harry and I bid each other farewell, and I walked south on Broadway.
Lower Manhattan is a tight cluster of skyscrapers and narrow streets, which insures minimum sunlight and maximum stress.
The area includes the Lower East Side, where I was born and raised, plus Chinatown, Little Italy, Tribeca, and Soho. The major industries down here are diametrically opposed: business and finance, represented by Wall Street, and government, represented by Federal, state, and municipal courthouses; City Hall; prisons; Federal Plaza; Police Plaza; and so forth. A necessary adjunct to all of the above are law firms, one of which employs my ex-wife, a defense attorney who represents only the best class of criminal scum. This was one of the reasons we got divorced. The other was that she thought cooking and fucking were two cities in China.
Up ahead was a big patch of empty sky where the Twin Towers once stood. To most Americans, and even to most New Yorkers, the absence of the towers is noted only as a gap in the distant skyline. But if you live or work downtown, and were used to seeing those behemoths every day, then their absence still comes as a surprise when you walk down the street and they’re not there.
As I walked, I thought about my conversation with Harry Muller.
On the one hand, there was absolutely nothing unusual or remarkable about his weekend assignment. On the other hand, it didn’t compute. I mean, here we are on the brink of war with Iraq, waging war in Afghanistan, paranoid about another Islamic terrorist attack, and Harry gets sent upstate to snoop on some gathering of rich right-wingers whose threat level to national security is probably somewhere between low and non-existent at the moment.
And then there was Tom Walsh’s nonsense to Harry about file building in case anyone in Congress or the media wanted to know if the ATTF was on top of the homegrown terrorists. This may have made sense a few years ago, but since 9/11, the neo-Nazis, militias, and that bunch have been quiet and actually thrilled that we got attacked and that the country was shaping up pretty good, killing bad guys and arresting people and so forth. Then there was the holiday Monday debriefing.
Anyway, I shouldn’t make too much of this, though it was a little odd. Basically, it is none of my business, and every time I ask too many questions about things that seem odd at 26 Federal Plaza, I get into trouble. Or, as my mother used to say, “John, Trouble is your middle name.” And I believed her until I saw my birth certificate, which said Aloysius. I’ll take Trouble over Aloysius any day.
I
turned onto Chambers Street and entered Ecco’s, an Italian restaurant with a saloon atmosphere—the best of both worlds.
The bar was crowded with suited gentlemen and ladies in business attire. I recognized a lot of faces and said a few hellos.
Even if I didn’t know anybody there, being a good detective and an observer of New York life, I could pick out the high-paid attorneys, the civil servants, the law enforcement people, and the financial guys. I bump into my ex here sometimes, so one of us has to stop coming here.
I ordered a Dewar’s and soda and made small talk with a few people around me.
Kate arrived, and I ordered her a white wine, which reminded me of my weekend problem. I asked, “Did you hear about the grape blight?”
“What grape blight?”
“The one on the North Fork. All the grapes are infected with this weird fungus that can be transmitted to human beings.”
She apparently didn’t hear me and said, “I found us a nice B and B in Mattituck.” She described the place based on some tourist website and informed me, “It sounds really charming.”
So does Dracula’s Castle on the Transylvanian website. I asked her, “Did you ever hear of the Custer Hill Club?”
“No . . . I didn’t see it on the North Fork website. What town is it in?”
“It’s actually upstate New York.”
“Oh . . . is it nice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to go there next weekend?”
“I’ll check it out first.”
Apparently, this name didn’t ring any bells with Ms. Mayfield, who sometimes knows things she doesn’t share with me. I mean, we’re married, but she’s FBI, and I have a limited need-to-know, lower security clearance than she does. On that note, I wondered why Ms. Mayfield thought that the words “Custer Hill Club” referred to a place to stay, and not, for instance, a historical society, or a country club, or whatever. Maybe it was the context. Or maybe she knew exactly what I was talking about.
I changed the subject to the memos about Iraq, and we discussed the geopolitical situation for a while. It was Special Agent Mayfield’s opinion that war with Iraq was not only inevitable, but also necessary.
Twenty-six Federal Plaza is an Orwellian Ministry, and the government workers there are very attuned to any slight change in the party line. When political correctness was the order of the day, you would have thought the Anti-Terrorist Task Force was a social service agency for psychopaths with low self-esteem. Now, everyone talks about killing Islamic fundamentalists and winning the war on terror—grammatical correctness would be “the war on terror
ism
,” but this is a newspeak word. Ms. Mayfield, a good government employee, has few politics of her own, so she has no problem hating the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and UBL one day, then hating Saddam Hussein even more when a directive comes out telling her who to hate that day.
But perhaps I’m not being fair. And I’m not totally rational on the subject of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. I lost a lot of friends on 9/11, and but for the grace of God and heavy traffic, Kate and I would have been in the North Tower when it went down.
I had been on my way to a breakfast meeting there in Windows on the World on the 107th floor. I was late, and Kate waited in the lobby for me. David Stein, Jack Koenig, and my former partner and maybe best friend in the world, Dom Fanelli, were on time, as were a lot of other good people and some bad people, like Ted Nash. No one in that restaurant survived.
I don’t get shaken up very easily—even getting shot three times and nearly bleeding to death on a city street didn’t have any lasting effect on my mental health, such as it is—but that day shook me up more than I realized at the time. I mean, I was standing right under the plane when it hit, and now, when I see a low-flying plane overhead—
“John?”
I turned to Kate. “What . . . ?”
“I asked you if you wanted another drink.”
I looked down into my empty glass.
She ordered me another.
I was vaguely aware that the news was on the TV at the end of the bar, and the reporter was covering the congressional vote on Iraq.
Back in my head, it was 9/11 again. I had tried to make myself useful by helping the firemen and cops evacuate people from the lobby, and at the same time, I was searching for Kate.
Then, I was outside the building carrying a stretcher, and I happened to look up and see these people jumping from the windows and I thought Kate was up there and I thought I saw her falling. . . . I glanced at her standing beside me, and she looked at me and asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
And then the second plane hit, and later I could hear this odd rumbling sound of collapsing concrete and steel, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and I can still feel the ground shaking under my feet as the building fell and shards of glass rained down from the sky. And like everyone else, I ran like hell. I still can’t remember if I dropped the stretcher, or if the other guy dropped it first, or if I was actually carrying a stretcher at all.
I don’t think I’ll ever remember.
In the weeks following 9/11, Kate became withdrawn, couldn’t sleep, cried a lot, and rarely smiled. I was reminded of rape victims I’d dealt with who lost not only their innocence but part of their soul.
The sensitive bureaucrats in Washington urged anyone who’d been involved with this tragedy to seek counseling. I’m not the type to talk about my problems to strangers, professional or otherwise, but at Kate’s insistence, I did go see one of the shrinks hired by the Feds to handle the large demand. The guy was a little nuts himself, so we didn’t make much progress in the first session.
For my next session and subsequent sessions, I went to my neighborhood bar, Dresner’s, where Aidan the bartender gave me sage counsel. “Life’s a bitch,” said Aidan. “Have another drink.”
Kate, on the other hand, stuck to her counseling for about six months, and she’s much better now.
But something had happened to her that was not going to completely heal. And whatever it was, it might have been for the better.
Since I’ve known her, she has always been a good company girl, following the rules and rarely criticizing the Bureau or its methods. In fact, she used to criticize me for criticizing the Bureau.
Outwardly, she’s still a loyal soldier, as I said, and she goes along with the party line, but inwardly, she realizes that the party line has done a 180-degree turn, and this realization has made her a little more cynical, critical, and questioning. To me, this is a good thing, and we now have something in common.
Sometimes I miss the starry-eyed team cheerleader I fell in love with. But I also like this tougher and more experienced woman, who, like me, has seen the face of evil, and is ready to meet it again.
And now, a year and a month later, we are living in a state of perpetual color-coded anxiety. Today is Alert Level Orange. Tomorrow, who knows? For damn sure, it’s not going to be Green again in my lifetime.
Saturday
U
PSTATE
N
EW
Y
ORK
It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
—J.R.R. Tolkien
D
etective Harry Muller parked his camper on the side of an old logging road and gathered his gear from the front seat, then got out, checked his compass, and headed northwest through the woods, wearing an autumn camouflage outfit and a black knit cap.
The terrain was easy to navigate, with well-spaced pine trees and ground cover of moss and dewy ferns. As he walked, daylight began filtering through the pines, revealing a thick ground mist. Birds sang and small animals scurried through the undergrowth.
It was cold, and Harry could see his breath, but the pristine forest was spectacular, so he was slightly more happy than miserable.
Slung over his shoulders were binoculars, a Handycam, and an expensive Nikon 12-megapixel camera with a long 300mm lens. He also carried a
Sibley Guide to Birds
in case anyone asked him what he was doing there, and a 9mm Glock in case they didn’t like his answer.
He’d been briefed by a guy known as Ed From Tech, who’d told him that the Custer Hill Club property was about four miles long on each side, for a total of sixteen square miles of private land. Incredibly, the entire property was enclosed within a high chain-link fence, which was why the Tech guy had also handed him the wire cutters that Harry now carried in his side pocket.
Within ten minutes, he came to the fence. It was about twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. Metal signs, about every ten feet, read: PRIVATE PROPERTY—TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Another sign read: DANGER—DO NOT ENTER—PROPERTY PATROLLED BY ARMED GUARDS AND DOGS.
From long experience, Harry knew that warning signs like these were usually more bullshit than reality. In this case, however, he’d take the signs seriously. Also, it troubled him that Walsh either didn’t know about the dogs and armed guards or knew and didn’t tell him. In either case, he would have a few words for Tom Walsh on Monday morning.
He took out his cell phone and switched it from ringer to vibrate. He noticed that his phone had good signal strength, which was a little strange up in the mountains. Impulsively, he dialed his girlfriend Lori’s cell phone. After five rings, his call went into voice mail.
Harry said softly into the phone, “Hi, babe. It’s your one and only. I’m up here in the mountains, so maybe I won’t have good reception for very long. But I wanted to say hi, I got up here last night about midnight, slept in the camper, and now I’m on-duty, near the right-wing loony lodge. So don’t call back, but I’ll call you later from a landline if I can’t reach you by cell phone. Okay? I still need to do something at the local airport later today or tomorrow morning, so I might need to stay overnight. I’ll let you know when I know. Speak to you later. Love you.”
He hung up, took the wire cutters, sliced a gap in the chain-link, and squeezed through onto the property. He stood motionless, looked, listened, then put the wire cutters back in his pocket. He continued on, through the woods.
After about five minutes, he noticed a telephone pole rising between the pine trees, and he approached it. Mounted on the pole was a telephone call box, which was locked.
He looked up and saw that the pole was about thirty feet high. Approximately twenty feet up the pole were four floodlights, and above that were five strands of wire running along a crossbeam. One wire obviously powered the telephone and another powered the floodlights. The other three were actually thick cables that could carry lots of juice.
Harry noticed something unusual and focused his binoculars toward the top of the pole. What he’d thought were evergreen boughs from surrounding trees were actually boughs protruding
from
the telephone pole. But these boughs, he knew, were the plastic kind that cell-phone companies used to camouflage or beautify cell-phone towers in populated areas. Why, he wondered, were they here in the middle of the woods?
He lowered his binoculars, raised his Nikon, and snapped a few shots of the pole, recalling that Tom Walsh had said to him, “In addition to cars, faces, and plate numbers, photograph anything else that looks interesting.”
Harry thought this seemed interesting and good for the files, so he took his Handycam and shot ten seconds of tape, then moved on.
The terrain began to rise gradually, and the pines gave way to big oaks, elms, and maples whose remaining foliage were brilliant hues of red, orange, and yellow. A carpet of fallen leaves covered the ground, and they rustled when Harry passed over them.
Harry did a quick map-and-compass check and determined that the lodge was straight ahead, less than half a mile away.
He broke out a breakfast bar and continued on, eating, enjoying the fresh Adirondack mountain air while staying alert for trouble. Even though he was a Federal agent, trespassing was trespassing, and without a warrant, he had no more right to be on private, posted land than a poacher.
And yet, when he’d asked Walsh about a warrant, Walsh had said to him, “We have no probable cause for surveillance. Why ask a judge if the answer is no?” Or, as the NYPD liked to say about bending the law, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness later than to ask for permission now.”
Harry, like everyone else in anti-terrorism, knew that the rules had changed about two minutes after the second tower had been hit, and the rules that hadn’t changed could be broken. This usually made his job easier, but sometimes, like now, the job also got a little riskier.
The forest had thinned out, and Harry noticed a lot of stumps where the trees had been felled and carted away, maybe for firewood, maybe for security. Whatever the reason, there was a lot less cover and concealment than there had been a hundred yards back.
Up ahead, he could see an open field, and he approached it slowly through the widely spaced trees.
He stopped under the last standing maple and surveyed the open land with his binoculars.
A paved road ran through the field and downhill to the entrance gate, where he could see a log-cabin gatehouse through his binoculars. The road was lined with security lights mounted on metal poles, and he also noticed wooden telephone poles with five strands of wires coming out of the woods, crossing the field and road, and disappearing again in the woods on the far side of the road. This, he assumed, was a continuation of what he’d seen near the fence, and it appeared that these poles and wires circled the property, meaning the whole sixteen-mile perimeter was floodlit. He said to himself,
This is not a hunting lodge.
He scanned the road as it traveled uphill to a huge two-story Adirondack-style mountain lodge that sat on the rising slope in front of him, about two hundred yards away. On the front lawn of the lodge was a tall flagpole from which flew the American flag and, beneath that, some sort of yellow pennant. Beyond the lodge were some utility structures, and at the top of the hill was what looked like a radio or cell-phone tower, and he took a telescopic photo of it with his Nikon.
The lodge was made of river stone, logs, and wood shingles, with a big columned portico out front. The green-shingled roof sprouted six stone chimneys, all of which billowed gray smoke into the air. He could see lights in the front windows and a black Jeep in the big gravel parking lot in front of the house. Obviously, someone was home, and hopefully they were expecting guests. That’s why he was here.
He used the Nikon to take a few telescopic photos of the parking lot and lodge, then he turned on his Handycam and took some establishing footage of the lodge and his surroundings.
He knew that he’d have to get a lot closer if he was going to photograph arriving cars, people, and license plates. Ed From Tech had shown him an aerial photo of the lodge and pointed out that the terrain was open, but that there were lots of large rock outcroppings for concealment.
Harry looked at the outcroppings rising up the hill, and he planned his route to sprint from one rock formation to another until he could reach a vantage point about a hundred feet from the lodge and the parking field. From there, he saw he could photograph and videotape parked cars, and people going into the lodge. He needed to stay there until late afternoon, according to Walsh, then get over to the local airport to check out arriving-passenger manifests and car rentals.
He recalled the time he was on the case of a bunch of Irish Republican Army guys who’d set up a training camp not far from here. The Adirondack Forest Preserve was as big as the state of New Hampshire, a mixture of public and private land with a very small population, making it a good place to hunt, hike, and try out illegal weapons.
This surveillance was a little different from the IRA bust, in that no crimes had apparently been committed and the people who lived in that big lodge probably had some pull someplace.
Harry was about to make his first rush toward an outcrop when suddenly three black Jeeps appeared from behind the lodge and started traveling cross-country at high speed. In fact, they were traveling straight toward him. “Shit.”
He turned and moved back into the tree line, then heard dogs barking in the forest. “Holy shit.”
The three Jeeps came right up to the trees, and two men exited from each vehicle. They carried hunting rifles.
Out of the trees around him came three men with German shepherds straining at their leashes and growling. The men, he noticed, had sidearms strapped to their hips. Harry now saw a fourth guy coming out of the trees who walked as if he were in charge.
Harry realized the only way his position could have been fixed so accurately was if there were motion or sound detectors planted in the area. These people
really
liked their privacy.
He felt an unaccustomed sense of anxiety, though not fear. This was going to be messy but not dangerous.
The security guards had formed a circle around him but kept a distance of about twenty feet. They were all dressed in military-type camouflage fatigues with an American flag patch on their right shoulders. Each man wore a peaked cap with an American eagle on it, and each had a wireworm sprouting from his left ear.
The man who was in charge—a tough-looking, middle-aged guy—stepped closer, and Harry saw he had a military-type name tag that said CARL.
Carl notified him, “Sir, you are on private property.”
Harry put on a dumb face. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, geez. Well, if you’ll point the way—”
“How did you get through the fence, sir?”
“Fence? What fence?”
“The fence that surrounds the property, sir, and is posted with ‘no trespassing’ signs.”
“I didn’t see any—. Oh,
that
fence. Sorry, Carl, I was following a woodpecker, and he flew over, so I found a hole in the fence and—”
“Why are you here?”
Harry noticed that Carl’s tone had become a little less polite, and he’d forgotten the “sir” word. Harry replied, “I’m a bird-watcher.” He displayed his guidebook. “I watch birds.” He tapped his binoculars.
“Why do you have those cameras?”
“I take
pictures
of the birds.”
Asshole.
“So, if you’ll point me to where I can exit the property—or, better yet, drive me out—I’ll be leaving.”
Carl didn’t reply, and Harry sensed the first sign of possible trouble.
Then Carl said, “There are millions of acres of public land around here. Why did you cut a hole in the fence?”
“I didn’t
cut
any fucking hole, pal. I
found
a fucking hole. And by the way, Carl, fuck you.”
Harry, and everyone around him, realized that he was not sounding like a bird-watcher any longer.
He was about to flash his Fed creds, stand these bastards at attention, and tell them to give him a ride back to his camper. His second thought, however, was not to make a Federal case of this. Why let them know he was a Federal agent sent here to snoop? Walsh would have a total shit fit. Harry said, “I’m outta here.” He took a step toward the forest.
All of a sudden, rifles were raised and pistols came out of their holsters. The three dogs growled and pulled at their leashes.
“Stop, or I’ll let the dogs loose.”
Harry took a deep breath and stopped.
Carl said, “There are two ways to do this. Easy or hard.”
“Let’s do hard.”
Carl glanced around at the other nine security guards, then at the dogs, then at Harry. He spoke in a conciliatory tone. “Sir, we are under strict instructions to bring any trespassers to the lodge, call the sheriff, and have the individual transported by a law enforcement person off the property. We will not press charges, but you will be advised by the sheriff that if you trespass again, you are subject to arrest. You may not, under the law or under our insurance policy, exit the land by yourself on foot, and we will not drive you off the land. Only the sheriff may do that. It’s for your own safety.”
Harry thought about that. Though the assignment was belly-up, he could pull out a little win by seeing the inside of the lodge, and maybe getting a little info there, and a little 411 from the local sheriff. He said to Carl, “Okay, sport, let’s go.”
Carl motioned for Harry to turn and walk toward the Jeeps. Harry assumed they’d put him in one of the vehicles, but they didn’t, so maybe their insurance policy was real strict.
The Jeeps did stay with him, however, as he was directed to the road and up the hill toward the lodge, accompanied by the whole contingent.
As he walked, he considered these ten armed security guards with the dogs, the gatehouse, the chain-link fence, the razor wire, the floodlights and call boxes, and what were most likely motion and sound detectors. This was not your everyday hunting and fishing club. He was suddenly pissed off at Walsh, who’d barely briefed him, and more pissed at himself for not smelling trouble.
He knew he shouldn’t be frightened, but some instinct, sharpened by twenty years of police work and five years of anti-terrorist work, told him that there was an element of danger here.
To confirm this, he said to Carl, who was walking behind him, “Hey, why don’t you use your cell phone to call the sheriff now? Save some time.”