Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Did you really believe that?”
“No,” she said and started crying again. Nichols just waited and let the tears exhaust themselves before she continued. Roxanne talked for nearly an hour. Nothing she said was new, but Nichols went through all the details to make sure she extracted everything Roxanne had to offer. Then Nichols put cuffs on her and we walked her back to the Suburban. Nobody saw us leaving the camp in the dead of the night.
* * *
“You like her, don’t you?” Nichols said as we stood in the cool, damp air after she’d put Roxanne, handcuffed, into the back of her Suburban.
“What she’s done...it’s horrible. But, yeah, I do.”
“Why? She’s responsible for two deaths.”
“She is, but she doesn’t think like we do. It’s not about people for her. I think she would have done anything to stop that mine.”
“Then why feel bad for her? She walked into this with her eyes open.” Nichols’s voice was softer than I’d heard it. Barely a whisper.
“This girl I’m looking for—Heather. Her father left her when she was three. Her stepdad and her mom didn’t try to find her when she stopped writing over the summer. Her friends here at Reclaim knew that Harmon was bad news, but they did nothing. Her roommate at CC Farms knew what kind of guy Harmon was, but she didn’t do anything, either. There was even a guy who had a crush on her at the National Front compound who knew Harmon was abusing her, but he never stood up for Heather. Roxanne...she let Heather down, too. She let all those kids on the bus down. But at least she has the decency to be ashamed for it. I think she may be the only one.”
Nichols put a hand on my shoulder. It was just for a second, and her touch was light, but it made an imprint. Then we got back into the Chevy and headed back to Charleston.
28
Nichols kept me out of custody again that night. Assistant Special Agent in Charge Daniel Levisay had a full head of steam when he intercepted us in front of the FBI Resident Agency in Charleston. He was the local man in charge, down the chain of command from the Pittsburgh field office. He was also Nichols’s boss.
Levisay handcuffed me on the spot, marched me inside his Spartan office and sat me down forcibly on a plain wooden chair in front of his desk. Nichols had moved to intercept him but I shook my head quickly. Levisay was a bit plumper than I expected for an FBI agent, with a shiny bald head, a smooth baby face and narrow eyes. He lapsed unconsciously into the third person while he was yelling at me—a finely tuned mix of threat and remonstrance. He talked to me as he would have to a five-year-old, speaking slower when he used large words. He assumed I had no idea how serious an offence shooting people or starting a forest fire might be. He vowed that I would spend the rest of my life in jail when the FBI got into the National Front compound and gathered forensic evidence of my crimes there, though we both knew any traces of evidence were long gone. But still he pushed on, openly speculating on what other federal crimes I might have committed.
Then the phone on his desk beeped. His assistant on the intercom said “It’s the Director, sir.” She said it that way, with a capital ‘D.’ Levisay froze. Looked at me for a second wondering if he should shoo me out of his office. But I was handcuffed and he didn’t have time. He picked up the phone. He said the words “Yes, sir” and sat up straight in his chair, then listened for five minutes before he put it down gently on the cradle. All the blood had run out of his face. He got up slowly, walked around the desk and uncuffed me, returned to his chair and, looking at me carefully said, “I would like to personally apologize for my behavior. The FBI appreciates your cooperation and the personal risks you have taken to uncover the truth behind the murders of the activists. We value interagency cooperation and would like to extend you the full support of this office in your efforts here in West Virginia. Please let me know what we can do to help you.” The apology must have taken two years off of his life, but Levisay looked scared.
“The Director. You mean the Director of the FBI?” I knew the answer but I wanted to hear him say it.
“Yes. The Director of the FBI.”
“I’m going to need an empty office and a phone right now. Then I need Agent Nichols’s undivided time. And you might want to keep the team you assembled to go into the National Front compound this afternoon on alert. You’re about to get a warrant to arrest Jason Paul from Transnational Mining.”
I turned and walked out of his office without glancing back at him. Then I got on the phone to the Activity. An hour later, as I was hanging up, I saw Nichols walk by the office and waved her in.
“I understand that I have you to thank?” I smiled.
She shrugged. “One of the guys in the trailer gave me a card with a number to call if I needed help. I figured it was time to make that call. You just broke a high profile multiple homicide wide open. I faxed over a copy of Roxanne’s signed confession. I figured that would give your boss enough leverage to fix things on this end.”
“He certainly did. Agent Levisay just got a call from the Director of the FBI.”
Nichols smiled. “I am so very sorry I was not in the room when that happened.”
“You really are.” I motioned her to a chair. “The guys have been chewing on data all afternoon. I told them about Paul’s play to shut down the mine.”
“What did they think?”
“They’ve found a connection between him and the National Front. He has a separate Gmail account he uses to communicate directly with Eric Price. He was careful with it but he apparently accessed it once from his work computer, so they were able to identify and access it. Most of it is innocuous stuff, but there’s definitely a connection between Paul and the National Front.”
“It’s good to have confirmation. It makes more sense.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “it fills out the picture a little better. But Paul seems like more of an opportunist than a race warrior. He hooked up to the National Front through the PA.”
“That fits.”
“They’re looking into Paul’s personal records to try to find a motive. But they haven’t broken into the National Front’s system yet and there are terabytes of data, so it’s a big project. They might have something by the morning.”
“Do you think whatever he’s doing is just about him and not the National Front?”
“No, I don’t think so. Price must have sent Anton Harmon to Reclaim. And Harmon had to be there to help Paul with something. Maybe he was there to unmask the FBI undercover agent. What if they were tipped off about that by someone here?”
“I’m not biting on that yet, but it’s a possibility,” Nichols conceded.
I remembered something Alpha had told me. “The reason my unit was onto the National Front was energy. Maybe there’s a connection. Some National Front guys were sabotaging power infrastructure in Africa.”
“Africa? Why on earth would they do that?”
“It didn’t make a lot of sense. They first assumed these guys were just freelancing—that it had nothing to do with the National Front itself. But when we found the device in my room last night, it had the same signature. Ninety percent chance the same maker who pulled one of the African jobs built it. So we have to wonder.”
“Because now they’re intentionally shutting down an enormous coal mine...”
“Right. It’s not an exact parallel, but I wouldn’t want to call it a coincidence either. I’ll make sure our guys look at that, too.”
“What about the girl?”
I put a hand behind my neck, massaging stiff tendons. “It’s a cold trail. She hasn’t logged on to her e-mail account since Wednesday. I got into her room in the National Front dormitory—the one she shares with Harmon. All her things were there. And there was a couple week’s supply of insulin in the fridge.”
“So the message she sent her mom was false?”
“Or she was trying to say something else.”
“What?”
“She said she was going to run out on Monday. But she had plenty of insulin. So maybe the message wasn’t about insulin, but about Monday.”
“And what’s going to happen then?”
“A hurricane is going to hit. Beyond that, it’s a very good question.”
29
I woke to a burst of light in my eyes and the old question on my lips:
Where am I
?
A shaft of sunlight stabbed through a gap in the cloudbank over the Dunbar section of Charleston and pierced an east-facing window in the guest bedroom of the small house that Special Agent Nichols rented. It disappeared as soon as it arrived, leaving the sky an unbroken blanket of gray. I looked at the wind-up clock on the nightstand and saw that it was six a.m.
The night before, we’d eaten a quick dinner at the only diner still serving in Charleston near midnight. Then Nichols asked where I was staying. I told her to drop me at any motel, but she offered her guest room instead. Nichols’s place was a small, immaculately kept green Victorian. She’d painted and decorated the rooms—something I had never managed in any of the four apartments I’d lived in since moving off-base after my first few years in the Army. I had never hung so much as a poster on a wall until I was attending Georgetown. I’d never used an appliance other than the refrigerator, the toaster and a microwave.
A picture of Nichols with a tall guy who looked like he might be an Abercrombie & Fitch model sat on the kitchen counter, staring into the dining room. I hadn’t asked her about it—I just thanked her for her hospitality after she showed me the room and fell asleep a few seconds after I hit the bed. I’d forgotten the toll that being shot at takes on you, the adrenaline deficit that exhausts the body. Not to mention the physical toll of being tortured and then jumping off a bridge. Or maybe the aftereffects of this kind of stuff were getting worse since I passed thirty.
I left the house, glad for the Blackhawk shell I’d discovered in the large duffel Nichols had passed on from the Activity. It was drizzling outside; a cold haze hung over the street, highlighting how close the mercury was to freezing temperatures. An electronic weather station sitting near the door revealed 90% humidity at 40 degrees as I left for my run.
I returned forty minutes later with coffee and muffins from Dunkin Donuts. Nichols had pulled on a wool turtleneck and jeans and was reading e-mail on her laptop. I handed her a coffee and the bag of muffins, then headed straight for the shower.
When I was clean, I dug through the duffel until I found the encrypted satellite phone I knew would be there. I perched myself against the window in the guest bedroom and called Alpha. A half-hour later, I emerged with the phone in my hand. Nichols was sitting at the counter with a newspaper open and one foot up on a chair, eating a muffin.
“I’m putting you on speaker. Special Agent Nichols of the FBI is here with me,” I said.
“Nice to meet you, Agent Nichols. Your assistance has been invaluable,” Alpha said.
“You boys sure can throw some weight,” she replied. “Thanks for including me on this call. I have to tell you, though; I’m confused by your involvement in this case. I thought Mr. Herne was here on a personal errand to find a missing woman. I don’t understand why the Army is getting into the middle of a missing persons case.” I’d never heard someone talk to Alpha that way, but it was a fair question.
“Mr. Herne’s trip started as a private investigation, but matters changed when we discovered that someone from our community left an explosive device in his motel room.”
“You’re certain about that?”
“We are. After he notified us, we were able to retrieve the device from the West Virginia State Police before they disposed of it. Our experts confirm that the bomb-maker was trained in the special operations community. Several men connected to the National Frontfit this profile.”
“That’s true.”
“Yesterday, the National Security Council authorized my command to liaise with the Bureau in an advisory capacity. Based on some of the new information we’re looking at now, we may need to expand the relationship.”
“New information?”
“Last night, I told Agent Nichols that you linked Jason Paul to the National Front,” I interrupted.
“Good. In the interim we’ve been analyzing Mr. Paul’s e-mail. We’re also working to gain access to information on the National Front.”
“Working?” I asked. Getting the Activity’s hacking program installed on an inside computer usually compromises the network immediately.
“The security protocols on the National Front’s network are top drawer. The server you got us into was nearly a closed-loop system,” Mongoose piped up. “They almost caught us right at the beginning. We’re working a plan to break through, but we’re still at least half a day away.”
“We’ll never be able to use any of what you’ve found in court.” Nichols stood and paced away from the phone, turned back.
“The Reclaim leader’s confession gives you the proof you need to arrest Mr. Paul and seize his hard drives. We can show you how to connect him to the National Front. Once you document the connection between Mr. Paul and the National Front, you’ll be able to obtain a warrant to search their headquarters. But our concern is prevention, not prosecution, Agent Nichols. The National Front is responsible for several bombings overseas. We need to ensure they’re not planning domestic terrorism.”
“I mentioned the African activity to Special Agent Nichols, sir, but you might want to brief her.”
“There was an attack on oil fields in the South Sudan. A few months later, a team infiltrated and sabotaged two South African power plants. We were able to connect the attacks to members of the National Front.”
“You think they’re planning something here?” Nichols asked.
“Possibly. Mr. Herne has a strong opinion on that.”
“They have to be up to something significant, sir, or they wouldn’t have been trying so hard to kill me. When they...
questioned
me yesterday, they were trying to find out what I knew of their plans. Which suggests that they have plans.”
“I think Michael is right,” Nichols said, glancing at me and quickly looking away. “Eric Price is a megalomaniac. He’s been growing his organization by leaps and bounds. We know the National Front has sold arms and drugs to finance operations. Price will do just about anything to expand his influence.”