Zero Day (30 page)

Mason turned left down another hall.

Puller kept walking straight ahead.

Right now it was the only direction he could go.

P
ULLER DROVE DIRECTLY
to the Reynolds home in Fairfax City. It was in an older neighborhood of modest homes. Reynolds had probably been transferred back and forth from the D.C. area several times during his military career. For those who had to sell their homes at the lows of the real estate market and then buy back in at the highs, it could be rough financially. Puller didn’t know Reynolds’s personal situation, but he concluded the man was probably looking forward to a fatter paycheck in the private sector to offset all those years of earning far less than he was worth while serving his country.

Two hours later Puller sat in the living room of the home holding a picture of the Reynolds family in his gloved hands. Though the place had already been processed by DHS, he never broke crime scene procedures.

In the photo the Reynoldses looked happy, normal, alive.

Now they were none of those things. He had noted baseball gear in the boy’s room and swim and tennis posters in the daughter’s room. There were photos of Matt and Stacey during various military functions. And on vacation. Sailing, skydiving, swimming with the dolphins. There were pictures of their children on tennis and basketball courts. The daughter in her prom dress. The son, then just a toddler, hugging his old man when he was in uniform. Puller could easily read the expressions on their faces.

Dad was being deployed.

The son was not happy about it. He was hugging his father tight, trying to keep him from going.

Puller put the photo back where he’d gotten it. He locked the door on the way out. He sat in his car for a while gazing up at a house that had no one left to live in it. It would go on the market, be sold, the belongings dispersed, and the Reynoldses would live on only in the memories of their friends and family.

And in mine
.

Afterwards, Puller drove to his apartment and packed a duffel bag full of clean clothes. By the time he got there it was very late. He spent a few minutes with AWOL while he thought through the night’s events. He’d changed his return flight to Charleston for the next morning. He’d missed the last direct flight there tonight.

Carson had been more right than she thought and also more wrong. There
was
something big going on. Only she had thought that Reynolds and she were the only ones on the federal side who knew about it. That was incorrect. She had thought she had blown it by not contacting the authorities. Obviously, the authorities
had
known, albeit after Reynolds was dead. The fact that the Reynolds family had been slaughtered did not give Puller much confidence in DHS’s ability to cover his back if need be. But for the chatter, they’d still be clueless.

As he stroked AWOL’s ears his thoughts turned to Sam Cole. How much if any of this could he tell her? The official answer was simple: He could tell her little if anything. The unofficial answer was far more complicated. He didn’t like putting people in harm’s way without telling them the lay of the land. He would have a short flight and then a longer car ride from Charleston to think about it.

He checked his watch. He had prearranged this. He had to, otherwise it couldn’t happen.

He made the call. He spoke to a line of people and gave the appropriate responses. Finally, the familiar voice came over the line.

“Surprised when they told me you’d set up a call for tonight,” said Robert Puller.

“Wanted to catch up.”

“It’s late on the East Coast.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“The call’s monitored,” his brother said. “There are people listening.” He changed voices, dropping it deliberately into a deep baritone. “Can you hear us clearly enough, Official Monitor? If not we’d be glad to speak up while we plot the destruction of the world.”

“Knock it off, Bobby, they might cut the call off.”

“They might, but they won’t. What else do they have to do?”

“I saw him.”

For the Puller brothers this was not so subtle code. There was only one “him” in their lives.

“Okay. How’s he doing?” Robert’s voice had quickly turned serious.

“Not all that great, actually. Things tend to wander.”

“In and out of the stars?”

“Right. Exactly.”

“Otherwise?”

“Healthy. Live to be a hundred.”

“What else?”

“A beef he has.”

“With whom?”

“Blame game. Still the stars, he thinks. But trajectory shot all to hell.”

Puller didn’t care if the monitors figured out they were talking about their father. Unless their conversations were deemed to be criminal or inappropriate in any way, this call was confidential. And military careers could be curtailed and even destroyed if it was shown that any part of a prisoner’s conversation was revealed in an unauthorized way, particularly when a highly decorated combat vet was on the other end of the line.

“One guess,” said Robert.

“Right,” said Puller.

“He really believes that? The timing is way off.”

“Not in his mind.”

Puller heard his brother give a long sigh.

Puller said, “Thought about not telling you.”

“As in what does it matter?”

“Something like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

“No, no, you should have, little brother. I appreciate it.” He paused. “Working on anything interesting?”

“Yes and no. Yes I am and no I can’t tell you about it.”

“Well, good luck. My money’s on you.”

They spoke for another thirty seconds on innocuous matters and said their goodbyes. When Puller clicked off he stared down at his phone imagining his brother being walked back to his cell. Nothing to do but wait for the next day when he would get out of his cage for an hour. Wait for the next phone call from his brother. Or the next visit. Totally out of his control. There wasn’t one segment of his life in which he had real input.

I’m all he has left
.

I’m all the old man has left
.

God help me
.

And them
.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
the jet lifted off from Dulles Airport and climbed smoothly into the sky. Puller drank a bottle of water and spent most of the short hop staring out the window. He checked his watch. Nearly 0600. He had tried to sleep some last night, but even his Army training failed him as his mind continued to whir about as fast as the plane’s engines.

The plane landed in Charleston less than an hour later and he retrieved his Malibu from the parking lot. He arrived in Drake in time for breakfast. He met Cole at the Crib Room after calling her on the drive in. He drank two more cups of coffee and had the biggest breakfast platter the Crib offered.

She stared over at him as the mounds of food disappeared.

“Don’t they feed you in the big city?” she asked.

He took a bite of eggs and pancakes. “Not this trip they didn’t. Not sure the last time I ate, actually. Maybe breakfast yesterday.”

She sipped her coffee and tore a bit of toast off and ate it.

“And was your trip productive?”

“It was. We actually have lots to talk about. But just not here.”

“Important?”

“Wouldn’t waste your time otherwise. Anything on your end?”

“Got the court order faxed.” She slid out several sheets of paper. “And I got the results of the soil testing.”

Puller put his fork down and eyed the paper. “And?”

“And I’m not a scientist.”

“Let me have a look.”

She slid the report across.

As he picked it up she said, “The first two pages are legal mumbo-jumbo basically covering their ass if their report is wrong or they did a test incorrectly, or the results ever end up in court they are one hundred percent not liable.”

“That’s comforting,” muttered Puller.

He flipped to the third page and settled in to read. After a minute he said, “I’m not a scientist either, but while I see terms like apatite, rutile, marcasite, galena, sphalerite, and other stuff I’ve never heard of, I also see uranium, which I definitely recognize.”

“Don’t get your shorts in a wad. There’s coal in fifty-three of the fifty-five counties in West Virginia, and pretty much where you find coal, you find uranium. But the levels of radioactivity are low. People breathe in uranium particles all the time and do just fine. And the level of the parts per million on the uranium shown on that report means it’s naturally occurring.”

“You’re sure about that? You said you weren’t a scientist.”

“As sure as I am that coal is more a rock than a mineral. Since it’s formed from organic remains it technically doesn’t qualify as a true mineral. It’s actually made up of other minerals.”

“Everyone in West Virginia knows this stuff?”

“Well, not everyone, but a lot of folks do. What can you expect from a state whose official mineral is a lump of bituminous coal?”

He sifted through the pages. “Do we even know where these soil samples came from?”

“That’s the hell of it; we don’t. It could be from anywhere. The report doesn’t specify. I guess they assumed Reynolds would know where he’d taken the sample.”

“Well, presumably it’s somewhere from around Drake, because I don’t think Reynolds ventured much outside of here.”

Cole played with a packet of sugar, bending it back and forth until it broke and sent the white crystals cascading down. She swept them onto her coffee cup saucer. “Do you think Reynolds was working on something that didn’t involve Drake? Maybe these samples are from D.C.”

“I don’t think so, particularly after what I found out up there.”

“So why don’t you hurry your butt up and finish eating so we can leave here and you can tell me all about it.”

“Okay, but we need to stop by the police station. I have to fax that soil report to a couple of places.”

They paid their bill and climbed into her cruiser parked outside. She drove to the police station and Puller faxed off the report to Joe Mason in D.C. and Kristen Craig at USACIL in Georgia.

Back in the cruiser Cole turned to him. She was wearing her uniform, and her gun belt made this maneuver more difficult than it should have been, but she seemed determined to face him.

“So spill it, Puller, and don’t leave one thing out.”

“You have any security clearances?”

“I already told you that I don’t, unless you count the little certificate I got when I was a state trooper, and I doubt that would impress you federal types.”

“Duly noted. Now I know that going in, and what I’m about to say is probably classified and my ass could get fried for telling you.”

“Duly noted. And they won’t find out from me.”

He gazed out the window. “Dickie Strauss and his big friend were in the Crib watching us.”

“Along with half the town of Drake,” added Cole.

“We still need to run down his tat connection with Treadwell.”

“Yes, we do. But right now all you need to do is talk.”

“Start driving. I’d rather be on the move when I tell you what I’m about to. And head east.”

“Why?”

“Because after hearing it, you might want to keep going until you hit the ocean.”