Blowout (16 page)

“We don't need to hear this,” Nettles said.

“I'm listening,” Forester said.

“The Posse hit Baytown to make a statement against big oil and the corporations who are screwing up the air for a profit. But this is nothing more than an ELF facility. The protests against the installation in Wisconsin never panned out. No one got brain cancer from the radio waves. So no one would be interested in attacking this place, unless they knew what was actually going on here.”

“Which is?” Forester said. The tent was silent enough for them to hear the whine of the still-spinning turbine in the power station.

“It's an experiment having something to do with the coal deposit you've tapped into and microbiology, which is Dr. Lipton's specialty.”

“And the purpose?”

“I'm guessing that you want to produce methane to power the generator. Use the coal we have to make electricity without the massive dump of carbon dioxide. Something like that.”

Forester glanced at Whitney again, and she shrugged. “What you suggest has been tried before,” he said. “Too expensive.”

“Excuse me, General, but you retired from DARPA and went to work for ARPA-E, a fair sum of money has been spent here, security is tight, and your project director is a chief scientist with the CDC. So from where I sit the Posse may have attacked last night but I think it's a fair possibility that big oil might have been calling the shots.”

“Why's that?”

“This place is a threat. What I don't understand is why they chose to attack last night?”

“An important experiment was to be conducted this morning,” Forester said.

“Then you have a leak.”

“It would seem so. But the timing was wrong, and we'll be back up and running within a week to ten days.”

“In the meantime you still have a leak, and the threat still exists.”

Forester took only a moment to digest what Osborne was saying. “The experiment will go as planned. The Air Force Rapid Response Team will work with Jim to heighten our security needs. And we'll look for the leak starting in Washington, because I don't think it's someone here. In the meantime I'd like it if you would agree to work with Agent Rausch in finding this Mr. Egan and whomever he works for. Would you do this?”

Osborne took just as long for his decision, which as far as he was concerned was a no-brainer, and he nodded. “I don't like bad things happening in my county.”

“Oh, shit!” Ashley suddenly shouted, and everyone turned to her. “I just remembered something.”

“Yes?” Forester said.

“When I was hiding I saw two of the terrorists unscrew some sort of plate near the rear of the plant, and pour in something from a gallon jug.”

“Where?” Whitney demanded.

“I can show you,” Ashley said.

 

Christmas, Michigan

BARRY EGAN WASN'T
so drunk that he would make a mistake and say something incredibly stupid; screw the pooch with the big mouth of his that had gotten him into trouble plenty of times before, but he was celebrating. His share of the money—twenty-five thousand—had been paid into his Big Sky Western Bank account in Bozeman. He'd taken out five hundred from a couple of ATMs over the past twenty-four hours, didn't want to leave a serious money trail, and already he was up nearly seven fifty at the Kewadin Indian Casino working the five-dollar slots.

The unincorporated township of about four hundred people, in the Upper Peninsula, was right on Lake Superior and in the old days the primary industry was iron smelting, twenty tons of pig in a day picked up by Great Lakes steamers. These days the primary industry was tourism, and during the Christmas season covers and postmarks, plus the occasional outlaw—which was what Barry thought of himself as—on the lam.

His uncle Fred, dead three years ago, had a single-wide trailer on a gravel road in the woods a couple of miles out of town beyond the end of Evergreen Drive that in the summer he'd used it as a fish camp and during the fall as a deer-hunting base and in the winter for snowmobiling. Barry used to come up here with his dad, so he was known around town, but the Yoopers—the year-round residents—mostly minded their own business and never bothered him whenever he showed up, opened the trailer, and bought a bunch of groceries and beer from Munising four miles east.

It was a weeknight, out of the summer tourist season, the lake hadn't frozen yet, so the ice fishermen weren't here, and it had been too warm lately, so the snowmobile season hadn't begun. Goddamn environmental shit was screwing with the seasons so that nothing was dependable anymore.

The casino was mostly empty; even so it took forever to get a drink girl to bring him a Bud and he could feel the old anger building up in him. There'd been no reason for him to have to shoot Ada and Dr. Kemal, but they'd gone crazy on him, wanting to go back for nothing.

And in the end it just made sense to take the kid down: “Loose lips sink ships,” his daddy used to say all the time, quoting his own daddy, a man Barry had never met. But from what his mother told him, the old man was just as bugshit as her husband had been. It was a tough old world.

The drink girl, not bad-looking, brought his beer and set it down beside the slot he was playing. “Want me to stick around for luck?” she asked.

He was about to tell her to fuck off, but instead he looked up and managed a smile. “I think I'm going to bug out while I'm still ahead. Catch up on my z's.”

“I hear ya,” she said, and she walked off.

Barry had come back here because he knew that he had some serious thinking to do, mainly about what was coming next for him. There'd been nothing in the papers or on television about the attack, which on the surface was not really surprising. Yet there was a niggling thought at the back of his head that something had gone wrong at the last minute. The one man missing who'd probably killed Moose and Brenda. Maybe he'd disabled some of the critical charges. Maybe Dr. Kemal's biological soup had been discovered and neutralized. Maybe the mission had been a failure.

He'd gotten the money, but nothing else. Nothing on the Posse's Web site, nothing on Twitter or Facebook, nothing in his personal mailbox that Gordy had set up for him through something called a blind remailer that was totally untraceable.

Cashing out he took his slip over to the cage and the woman crisply counted out twelve one hundred–dollar bills, two twenties, a five, and three ones. He left a twenty and the three ones for her and went out to the Ford Taurus he'd rented in Chicago using one of the three fake driver's licenses he'd bought from a Posse contact at the Department of Justice in Helena for five hundred bucks apiece.

A couple of years ago he'd began to think of himself as a fugitive on the lam who needed to muddy the trail as much as possible. James Bond had done the same thing, only he'd had help, while Barry was on his own. Wiley, he thought of himself, and he had to grin. Wiley Coyote.

It had snowed a little this afternoon while he'd been at the casino and coming to the driveway back to his trailer he glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind him, then stopped on the paved road before he turned in. No tire tracks. No one had been here. No one had traced him yet. No reason for them to have done so, because he'd wiped down the motor home before he'd stashed it under cover back in one of the canyons a couple of miles off U.S. 85. Moose and Brenda had refitted the Newell in South Carolina and had it shipped up to a rental agency in Billings, not picking up the others until Cheyenne, so there was no connection to him.

Eluding possible pursuit, Barry thought, and he'd always loved the sound of it, the concept.

He drove the half mile through the woods to the clearing in which the fifty-foot-long trailer was backed up to a stand of pine. The day before yesterday he'd had a load of straw bales delivered and he'd stacked them around the skirt to help prevent the waste pipe from freezing up when it got windy. The physical labor felt good to him; he was a self-sufficient man, a hell of a lot better than guys like Dillinger and Capone who'd only known one trick because he understood manual labor and they hadn't. He was a castle builder.

It was too early in the season even here to need to plug in the car, anyway the Taurus wasn't equipped with a block heater, which in another month would be necessary. But by then he would be long gone. Maybe somewhere in Mexico. Someplace warm. Which in a way was disappointing to him. He wanted more.

Even though he was sure that he was alone out here, he took the Beretta from under the driver's seat, switched the safety off, and holding the pistol out away from his right leg approached the trailer on a hair trigger, ready to shoot anything that moved.

He'd left the front door unlocked; people up here mostly did the same, because no one stole each other's shit and he really appreciated the law-abiding honesty. Pulling it open he jumped inside, moving fast, sweeping the pistol left to right as he sidestepped into the kitchen.

“Hello,” he called out, pointing the gun down the narrow corridor that led past the living room to the two bedrooms and bathroom in the back.

No one was here, but he felt really good for taking all the precautions. In his opinion there were old fugitives and bold fugitives, but never old-bold fugitives. It paid to take care.

Switching the safety on, he laid the pistol on the counter, took off his jacket and laid it on the back of a chair, pulled off his boots, and in sock feet went back to the second bedroom where his laptop was plugged into the dial-up connection.

He logged on to his Gmail account and other than spam there was only one message, this one from [email protected], the same address from which Bob Kast had initially contacted him for the North Dakota assignment, and the same from which his payments originated.

The computer was slow, but just now Barry had no need for speed as he hit the box in front of the message line. North Dakota had been a failure—maybe—even though the money had been paid. But there'd been nothing in the news. Not even a mention, which he thought would have been likely had real damage been done to the project. A lot of government people had been wiped out, someone must have taken notice.

When the e-mail came up it was only one word: Come.

 

Greenville, South Carolina
Command Systems

PEOPLE SHOULD BE
more important than things. And sometimes even more important than mere ideas, which was true for the so-called North Dakota District Initiative, because actually at the core of the effort were two women of overriding importance. Dr. Whitney Lipton, of course, because the idea of talking the language of bacteria so that microbes could be taught to work in concert toward a specific goal was hers. And surprisingly, the young Ashley Borden, because her father, General Robert Forester, was in charge of the ARPA-E project, and like General Leslie Groves who'd ramrodded the Manhattan District Project in the forties, so went Forester so went the Initiative. Interfere with his family and the project would suffer at least until a change of leadership took place.

And upon hearing Barry Egan's report, D. S. Wood knew what had to happen next, along with the why and the how, because he clearly understood the real value of people, always had ever since he'd been a kid of fourteen working in his father's hardware store in Ames, Iowa.

In the first months his father had been determined to teach Donald the business from the bottom up, starting with sweeping the floors, washing the plate glass windows, and dusting the shelves. It led of course to learning about their regular customers who were the self-styled handymen, who needed the most advice, and especially those to whom expensive tools could be sold. It also led to running the cash register and doing the books each evening, keeping the ledger that showed expenses on one side and receipts on the other.

By the time he was fifteen he had discovered the stock market quotes in the
Des Moines Register,
and he began to plot stocks, settling at one point on the stock of the fast-food chain McDonald's. He got a social security number, different from his own, by sending for the birth certificate of a baby who'd died at the age of one and who was buried in the Catholic cemetery. Using that, he rented a post office box down in Des Moines, getting there and back on a Greyhound bus. One week later he opened a checking account at a bank one block from the post office and began buying his first McDonald's stocks using money he embezzled from the hardware store.

The problem was that the bank in Ames held the mortgage to his parents' house as well as the revolving line of credit that kept the hardware store open.

Two years after Donald first began buying his stocks, branching out to other corporations that he felt were up and coming, the bank audited the hardware store's books and found that nearly eight thousand dollars was missing. The blame, of course, was placed squarely on Donald's father. And although the old man denied everything, he was found guilty of embezzlement and was sent to jail. The house was lost, and within three months Donald's mother accidentally overdosed on the Valium she'd been prescribed for her depression.

By then Donald was on his way to becoming, if not exactly wealthy, at least well-off for a seventeen-year-old, and without looking back he went east to get his degrees in business and finance, though he didn't think he really needed those pieces of paper. But they would look nice on his office wall, and the people who came to him with their money would be impressed.

His philosophy then as now was never to look back. Guilt and especially remorse were for weaklings. If his father had kept his eye on the ball, he would never have been robbed.

Nor was he angry that he'd been forced to make his mark the hard way. And he wasn't angry now that the attack on the Initiative had been a failure, because Egan had shown them a better, more elegant solution. All he needed was time.