Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Mr. Herne told you that we found an e-mail account Mr. Paul used to communicate with Mr. Price. There are some recent exchanges. The language is oblique, but it may support the idea that something significant is planned very soon.”
“They also tracked down Heather’s insulin prescription,” I told Nichols. “She had it refilled last week before she wrote her mother. So we’re wondering if Heather was trying to tell her mom that something bad was going to happen tomorrow.”
“Like what?” Nichols asked.
“We know that Paul promised Roxanne he was going to blow the whistle on his own mine. That would make no sense unless there was something in it for the National Front,” I offered.
“Such as?”
“The National Front was trying to compromise the energy supply chain in Africa. Maybe that was just a trial run. What if they’re trying to put some kind of a crimp into coal production back home?”
“To what end?” The question came from Alpha.
“It could be financial. Half of electric power in the U.S. is generated by coal, right? Anything that threatened coal supply would drive up the price of other fossil fuels.”
“Would shutting down one mine really have that effect?” Alpha asked. It was a question for his staff, and after a moment of keys clicking, one of them responded.
“No. The largest mines are in Wyoming, not West Virginia. They’re exponentially larger than Hobart. And there’s a larger one in West Virginia, too—an underground mine.” I didn’t know the man speaking, but he sounded like an analyst.
I remembered something Roxanne had told me earlier. “Wait, didn’t Paul work at a big coal mine in Wyoming?” I searched my memory for the name. “North Antelope?”
There was silence on the other end of the line again. Then the same analyst spoke, with some excitement in his voice. “He actually worked at the two largest mines in Wyoming—the North Antelope Rochelle Mine and Big Thunder. Together they produce one hundred and eighty million short tons of coal every year. If you combine those with the two biggest mines in West Virginia—Hobart and Gilroy—you have twenty percent of the national output of coal.”
“Gilroy Mine?” I asked. “Have you found any reference to that?”
More clicking. This time Mongoose chimed in. “There was a mention of Uncle Gilroy in one of Paul’s e-mails last week.”
“In the theoretical case that you were able to disable that percentage of coal output in the U.S., what effect would that have on oil prices?” Alpha asked.
“Oil is a huge, globally-driven market, so it’s hard to say,” the first analyst answered. “But if you look at natural gas, things get interesting. The supply was stable for a long time. Then a few years ago, someone figured out how to inject pressurized chemicals into shale and extract natural gas that was impossible to drill for previously. It’s not as easy or cheap to transport as oil, so the market is more local. The U.S. has huge deposits. Now there’s a drilling boom and the price is at historic lows.”
“You’re talking about fracking, right?”
“Hydraulic Fracturing,” the analyst corrected me.
“And what would happen to the price of natural gas if the coal supply was threatened?”
“It would go through the roof.”
Nichols’s phone rang, shattering the silence on both ends of the line. She stepped out of the room.
“We know that Paul can disable the Hobart mine by releasing documents. But how would he shutter the other three?”
“Perhaps there are some clues in the attack on the oilfield that we can uncover,” Alpha said. The line went mute for a moment and I imagined the man issuing a terse string of orders to a roomful of analysts and surveillance experts.
“We’re going to figure that out,” Alpha said when he returned to the call a few moments later. “And we’ll contact the Gilroy mine. It’s in West Virginia, but some distance from Charleston. Perhaps...”
Nichols burst back into the room. “We’ve got an arrest warrant for Jason Paul and a search warrant for his house and office. Do you want to come along?”
Alpha answered for me. “Go. We have more work to do on our end, anyway.”
30
Jason Paul’s house was across the river from Nichols’s place—over the South Side Bridge in the Kanawha section of Charleston. The city is built mostly on the flatlands where the smaller Elk River meets the Kanawha, but the tonier houses are up in the surrounding hills. Paul’s was on Newton Road, in the thick of old Charleston money. It was a Tudor trying very hard to look like an English country estate.
Paul’s mansion had three sections—the main house and two wings. The central section was a large, conventional pre-war Tudor. The wings were much more recent additions. They might have been framed out with steel, and looked to be single-story with vaulted ceilings and vast expanses of glass. The living spaces inside must have been pretty impressive, but the place was a hodgepodge from the outside. The property sat at the end of Newton Road, on the plateau atop a hill overlooking Charleston. The driveway was long and stately, with a line of elms planted on either side that evoked an antebellum plantation. The driveway ended in a large circle. The island formed by the circle had a waist-high hedge maze landscaped into it. It looked like a real puzzler for a cocker spaniel.
A Maserati coupe and a Range Rover sat in the circle along with a dozen FBI vehicles. State police cars lined the rest of the driveway. An FBI SWAT team was milling about outside the house, wearing green military-style uniforms with body armor and carrying assault rifles. I had a hard time seeing Paul wielding anything more threatening than a birding shotgun, but you never can tell about people.
We parked at the end of the long line of official vehicles, more than a football field’s distance from the house. As soon as Agent Nichols stepped out of the Suburban, Agent Levisay started walking toward us. I realized he’d been waiting.
“Your status has really risen,” I whispered to Nichols.
“Sure. It’s me. It’s not your boss. I believe that.”
Nichols was right. When we reached him, Levisay ignored her and held his hand out to greet me. It was clammy and cold, just about the same temperature as the chill air. “Both vehicles registered to Mr. Paul are here,” he said, turning toward the house and putting his hand on my shoulder. “I understand that the man is single. We’re going to knock on the door now.”
“Have you tracked his cell phone?” I asked.
Levisay nodded. “It’s inside. Wait here and we’ll bring you in when we clear the house. Special Agent Nichols, please continue to accompany Mr. Herne.” Levisay did not even glance in Nichols’s direction as he spoke.
Nichols kept cool but I saw a tendon ripple in her jaw.
“You just know that man is constipated,” I said when Levisay was out of earshot. Nichols coughed to avoid laughing.
We watched as the helmeted FBI assault team approached the house. Levisay had a vest on under his FBI windbreaker, but his bald dome was exposed to the elements. It was drizzling, and a bit colder on the hilltop than down in the city.
“There’s something that still doesn’t make sense to me,” Nichols said as we watched Agent Levisay ring the doorbell, then pound on the door.
“What’s that?” I asked, distracted.
“Why did Jason Paul blackmail Roxanne?”
“To get her to cooperate.”
“But what did he actually need from her? A bus route? There’s nothing she gave him he couldn’t have done for himself. He could have found a simpler way to keep her off the bus. Why would he risk involving her?”
Nichols had a point. It was a loose thread in the narrative.
“You’re right—it doesn’t make sense. And I still don’t understand why the National Front sent Anton Harmon to infiltrate Reclaim.”
Nobody had come to the door and Agent Levisay was still pounding. He sent someone to retrieve an electronic bullhorn from his Suburban.
“Exactly. What would it buy them?”
“Why did you guys send an FBI agent into Reclaim?”
“I called someone about that this morning. A friend who talked to me off the record. We sent our guy in because we knew the National Front had put someone undercover at Reclaim and nobody understood why.”
“So your guy was in there because the National Front showed an interest?”
“Right.”
“But your guy was still there six weeks after Harmon left.”
“That’s true—so?”
“He must have discovered something that made it worth staying undercover.”
“Okay.”
“But that leaves us about the same place where we started. We don’t know why the National Front put Harmon in.”
“Unless...” Nichols said.
“Yes?”
“Harmon was an ordnance expert in the military—he was the guy who knew about bombs, right?”
“In Special Forces you train in a specialty. That was his.”
“What if he’s the one who persuaded the two Reclaim leaders to sabotage the dragline? And rigged the charge himself. It makes more sense than two environmental activists successfully sabotaging a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. Do you know how big that rig is? You could put four Suburbans in the bucket.”
At the door, Levisay was getting impatient. He held up one finger and then pointed at the entry specialist, who was carrying a sledgehammer that looked like it could take the door down with one stroke.
“But why would the National Front want to risk involving Reclaim?” I asked.
“Let’s say that the National Front isn’t actually sabotaging Antelope Valley and Big Thunder. Those are strip mines that use tons of explosives ever year as a matter of course. How on earth would you slow them down? If you could only stop Hobart and Gilroy, how would that work? Instead of cutting off 20% of the coal supply, they would only be affecting 2%. So how do you move the price if you’re only stopping 2% of the supply? You do it like Sadam Hussein did when he invaded Kuwait. You convince everyone else that the first 2% is just the beginning.”
“How would you do that?”
“What if the National Front convinced everyone that environmental terrorists were targeting coal mines? If they did something really newsworthy? Then they wouldn’t have to hit so many mines to have the same effect. Not if it was terrorism.”
“Leaking a bunch of documents wouldn’t do that,” I agreed.
“What if the terrorists exposed the documents like a WikiLeaks thing? And then bombed a second mine. Gilroy, for instance? That’s underground, so it would be more vulnerable. Then the trail would eventually lead back to Reclaim—and there would be video proof that they had already used explosives at Hobart.”
“But how does this help if Paul is in custody? Wouldn’t he talk to keep himself out of jail?” I asked. “He doesn’t strike me as the type to sacrifice himself for the team.”
A helmeted FBI SWAT agent had his face pressed against mirrored glass, peering into one of the picture windows on the east wing of the house. Then he turned toward the main entrance, cupping his hands around his mouth. “There’s a man tied to a chair in here. He’s facing away from the window, but it could be our guy,” he yelled. Suddenly, the pieces in my head snapped into place.
I saw Agent Levisay motion to the breach specialist, who raised the sledgehammer parallel to his waist and behind him, like a baseball batter with a low swing.
“Wait! Stop! Stop,” I yelled as the man swung at the door. I was too far away. If Levisay or the breacher heard me, they took no notice. The sledgehammer hit the door just above the lock and started to swing open. I tackled Nichols and we hit the ground just as a fireball exploded from the house, sending a wave of heat and force that leveled everything in its path.
31
The helicopter carried us swiftly northwards under cloud cover. Special Agent Nichols sat next to me, her face still a shade paler than it had been in the morning. We both wore headsets but neither of us had said a word since the helicopter lifted from its launch pad near the end of the runway at Chuck Yeager airport.
I didn’t blame her. We’d both served in combat, but her experience at 10,000 feet had been less intimate than mine. I would have bet she’d never seen an IED cut through a convoy, or the aftermath of a suicide bomber in a crowded marketplace. She’d probably never had to look at the lifeless eyes of the children that terrorists had used as human shields. Still, seeing carnage on home soil shook me up, too. We were almost a hundred yards from the house when the bomb triggered, and it felt like we were copper beaten against a hot anvil. It would take days to make sense of everything in and around the house. And most of the FBI field agents in West Virginia were either hospitalized or dead.
Minutes after the blast, television news stations and print journalists received e-mails claiming responsibility for the explosion along with a link to a series of documents that tied Transnational Coal to a large number of environmental offenses. Many of them had Jason Paul’s name on them. The group behind the blast called itself Coal-Free Dawn. I didn’t doubt that the e-mails would somehow trace back to Roxanne and Reclaim.
In the chaos following the blast, we got caught up giving first aid to the FBI agents and State Police officers who’d survived the detonation. There was already an ambulance on site, but the injuries overwhelmed the two EMTs. It was a gruesome business; all the pieces of the house, from the glass picture windows to the cement foundation, had become shrapnel. We ended up helping the EMTs by tying tourniquets and dressing wounds. It took over an hour for enough medical personnel to arrive to allow us to leave the scene. By the time we boarded the FBI helicopter, the morning was almost done. I only hoped we weren’t already too late.
“I have a call for you from Washington, sir. I can transfer it through to your headset.” The pilot’s voice startled me, pulling me away from my thoughts. I wasn’t used to hearing anyone call me ‘sir.’
“You’re headed to the Gilroy mine?” It was Alpha.
“It’s not far from the Ohio and Pennsylvania borders, but we’ll be there in under an hour. We have two men from the state police bomb squad with us,” I said, eyeing the men in jump seats facing me. There was also a Malinois, a remarkably calm Belgian Shepherd strapped between them, looking about with an intelligent expression. “Sir, what can you tell us about the mine?”