Death Angel (21 page)

His eyes were half closed, glittering slits.

“You know where I’ll be,” he said, speaking loudly and carefully to be heard over the noise.

“Lassiter’s going to the Sin Bin!” shouted Slim, one of the group’s inner circle. He fancied himself a joker.

“Damned right! Damned right,” Lassiter said, nodding heavily. He spoke to Varrin. “You know where to find me if you need me,” he said.

“Do me favor, though—don’t need me for an hour or so,” he added.

Sherree ran her fingers through his hair. “I need you, honey. And you need Sherree, don’t you?”

“We can get along fine without you both,” Diablo Cruz
said. He sat at a side of the table that was the farthest away from where Lassiter had been sitting.

Sherree stuck out her tongue at Cruz; Lassiter ignored him. “Okay?” Lassiter asked Varrin.

“Have fun,” Varrin said, seemingly not much caring one way or the other.

“Okay, then. Back in an hour or so,” Lassiter said. Varrin acknowledged him with a quick two-finger salute.

Lassiter straightened up, slipping an arm around Sherree’s slender waist, resting a hand on the curve of her hip. Not his gun hand.

Sherree, twenty, had a wide, red-lipped, smiling mouth and eyes that were as flat and dull as those of a dead fish. “Come on, sugar,” she urged Lassiter. “Let’s get it on!”

“Damned right,” he muttered. They moved away from the table, weaving through the crowd toward a rear exit door.

Teed, another of the bunch, shook his head. “I’m surprised he can walk, the way he’s been knocking back drinks tonight.”

“That pig,” Diablo Cruz said.

“Huh? You don’t like Lassiter, Diablo?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Because he’s a pig.”

“Diablo don’t like nobody,” Slim said, snickering.

All the bouncers were big, hulking bruisers and the one working the rear exit door was no exception. He looked as big as a brown bear standing up on its hind legs. He stood to the left of the door, leaning against the wall, brawny arms folded across his chest. He wore a black leather vest over a bare, barrel-shaped torso.

To the right of the door, a woman sat on a folding chair behind a card table. She was in her late fifties, with an orange coiffure, bulldog face, and the body of a prison
matron. A laptop computer lay open on the table. As did a twenty-ounce plastic cup filled with beer.

“Hey, Bev,” Sherree greeted her.

The woman at the card table looked Lassiter up and down. “Looks like you got yourself a big one this time, Sherree,” Bev said. Her rasping voice was harsh enough to file wood on. Her fingers worked over the keyboard, making a quick entry on the screen.

The bouncer at the door was watching the exchange. Bev looked up from the screen, nodding to him, giving him the okay.

Sherree steered Lassiter to the door. She opened it and they went outside, a coiled spring closing the door behind them.

Lassiter’s black brows furrowed in a mighty frown. “What’s with the old bat and the laptop?” he asked.

Sherree’s laughter sounded like a bird’s chirpings. “Don’t let Bev hear you calling her no names or she’ll give you a ass-whupping. She’s ornery; she don’t take no messing. She’s management.”

“So?”

“Us working girls got to pay the room rent on the trailers in the Sin Bin. Love for sale don’t come cheap, big man. Bev keeps track of our, uh, comings and goings. Who goes out, how often, and for how long. That way the house knows its cut down to the last penny. And Lord help any gal who don’t pay up.”

“Kind of like traffic control,” Lassiter said. His hand was on her rear, squeezing and kneading her buttocks through the tight denim skirt.

Sherree’s chirping laughter sounded again. “You got it, sugar.”

He rubbed her bare thigh. “Not yet but I’m gonna get it.”

His frown returned. He was thinking. His strained ex
pression indicated that for him thought was heavy labor. “I don’t know as I like being clocked by the house.”

“Honey, Bev don’t know you from Adam and she don’t care who you are. I’m the one on the clock, not you. So let’s not waste any time, huh?”

“I’m paying for it,” Lassiter said, glaring.

Sherree’s brittle laughter was tentative, uncertain. “Whoo-whee, big man, you sure got a mean look on your face. Brrrr!”

“I don’t like being rushed, that’s all.”

“That’s fine with me—I like a man who takes his time.” She squeezed his arm. It was like taking hold of a tree limb. “Lighten up, hombre. Don’t be mean. You’re like to scare the pants clear off of me.”

“That’ll save time,” Lassiter said, baring his teeth in what might have been a grin.

Sherree led him away.

A half-dozen trailers stood in a row behind the building and at right angles to it. A strip of bare ground ran between them and the structure. A string of colored lights like the decorations on a Christmas tree connected each trailer to the big red barn, providing enough light to see by—but not too much.

Lassiter and Sherree walked it arm and arm. She walked out of step with him so her thigh kept rubbing against his.

Chassis frame springs squeaked from trailers that were rocking and shaking from the action inside. The trailers weren’t air-conditioned. Small square curtained screen windows allowed the sounds from inside to be heard outside on the night air. One of the trailers sounded with high, thin falsetto shrieking.

“Is that a man or a woman?” Lassiter wondered.

Sherree giggled. “Who cares?”

Dim lights glowed behind the curtained windows of all
six trailers. “This way,” Sherree said, taking Lassiter by the hand and guiding him past the end of the last trailer in line.

Ten feet beyond it stood a rectangular shape. Like a boxcar only smaller. It was not a trailer but a recreational vehicle, a big, bulky late model self-propelled mobile home on wheels, with a cab compartment at its head.

The RV stood parallel to the row of trailers, its rear facing the back of the building. The cab was dark but lights showed through curtained windows in its interior. No string of colored lights connected it to the barn.

A closed door stood in the middle of its passenger side. Three metal steps on a tube frame led to the bottom of the door. Open screen windows stood on either side of the door. They were rectangular with rounded edges, like the windows on a bus. Behind them were thick, dark curtains.

Sherree knocked on the door, not loudly. Behind it, movement sounded.

The curtain on the window to the left of the door was lifted at the corner. “What?” asked a voice from inside, hoarse and husky.

“It’s me—Sherree,” Lassiter’s companion responded in a stage whisper.

The corner of the curtain dropped. The door was unlocked and opened from the inside. An oblong of yellow light slanted through the partly opened door to fall on the ground outside. “Okay, come on in,” a man said.

“Slow and easy,” he added.

Sherree climbed the stairs and stepped inside, Lassiter following. He closed the door behind him.

A center aisle ran along the middle of the RV’s long axis. A wide, open center space was flanked on both ends, fore and aft, by dark-curtained doorways. The curtains covered the openings from floor to ceiling.

Two men stood inside, flanking the newcomers. They
were a study in contrasts, pairing a short, stocky middle-aged man and a rangy, raw-boned youngster twenty years his junior.

The senior man had a big, bouffant blond hairdo. He was dressed neatly in a button-down short-sleeved shirt, pressed khaki pants with leg creases, and dark green deck shoes. He held a .357 leveled on Lassiter.

His partner had a wavy sunburst corona of long brown hair and a brown beard that reached down to his chest. A goatish face peered out from behind all that hair. A gun was holstered under his left arm, the shoulder rig being worn strapped on over a red T-shirt with a psychedelic print design. A Bowie-type knife with a deer-horn plated hilt and a foot-long blade was worn in a belt sheath on his bony right hip.

The duo was all business. “Go up front and stay there,” the senior man told Sherree. He was the owner of the hoarse voice. He stood to the side, where Sherree could move past him without putting herself between his gun and Lassiter.

Lassiter stood easy, hands held open and empty where the gunman could see them. Any traces of seeming intoxication he had displayed earlier were gone now. He looked cold sober.

Sherree parted the curtain to enter the forward passageway and closed it behind her, without as much as a backward glance.

“Lassiter,” the senior man said.

“Who’re you?” Lassiter asked.

“I’m Peck; my buddy here is Ted. You’ve got to be searched. That’s the routine here. Nothing personal.”

Lassiter shrugged, spreading his legs shoulder-width apart and holding his arms away from his sides. Ted moved in to frisk him, positioning himself so that Peck held a clear line of fire on Lassiter. “The gun’s on my left hip,” Lassiter said.

Ted lifted Lassiter’s shirt, baring a flat semi-automatic pistol tucked into the top of Lassiter’s waistband on his left side and relieving him of it. He put it away, out of reach, and resumed the frisk. “He’s clean,” he announced after a quick, thorough search.

Peck indicated the curtained doorway to the rear. “In there,” he said. Lassiter crossed to the curtain, lifting it to step behind it.

A narrow passageway opened into a room at the rear of the RV. Amber light filled the space. A slab-shaped table was folded down to the horizontal from where it was hinged to the wall. Behind it, in a high-backed, black leather-cushioned executive-style chair, sat a woman.

She had long black hair, wide slanted green eyes, golden skin, and a generous red-lipped mouth. She wore a tan short-sleeved safari shirt with lots of flaps and pockets, black slacks, and low-heeled red leather ankle boots. She was smoking a thin chocolate-brown cigarillo; a strand of smoke rose from its tip in a thin straight line.

She was Marta Blanco, sister of Torreon Blanco, and a power in her own right.

Varrin would have paid a small fortune for information on her current whereabouts.

Her eyes were a vivid emerald green. They studied the newcomer for a moment.

“Lassiter,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

1:36
A.M
. MDT
Ironwood National Laboratory,
South Mesa, Los Alamos County

The Snake Pit pulsed with rising power. “I thought the tests were over for tonight,” Jack Bauer said.

“They are. The last firing was around midnight,” Gabe McCoy said. He looked puzzled, frazzled, irritated.

“Something’s happening,” Hickman said.

They were in the INL Laser Research Facility, crossing the main floor toward the blockhouse.

The LRF had an otherworldly quality even in broad daylight at the height of a busy working day. At this late hour it was positively eerie, a mad scientist’s surrealistic science fiction dream. Or nightmare.

Big as a blimp hangar, the huge space dwarfed the three humans hurrying toward the blockhouse. Floodlights and
spotlights showed at various places on the structure. Windows were lit in the upper-floor control room area but their translucent nature hid what was occurring behind those squares of light.

An intense pulsating vibration now shivered through the surroundings. It oscillated, rhythmically rising and falling. Each time it reached the peak of a new cycle, the vibration grew stronger. Its source was the blockhouse.

Jack Bauer felt the hairs tingle at the back of his neck. A whiff of ozone touched his lungs, fresh, intoxicating.

“Look!” Hickman said, pointing to the blockhouse roof. A pale blue glow was coming into being at the top of the structure, forming an aura outlining the spiky array of conductors and antennae.

“That’s a coronal phenomenon—a harmless by-product of the laser-energizing process,” McCoy explained.

“Which means that the laser is charging up,” Jack said.

“Well, yes—”

“And it shouldn’t be happening now.”

“No, it shouldn’t.” McCoy looked and sounded worried.

The trio angled across toward the blockhouse’s front, double-timing it.

Earlier, pilot Ron Galvez had flown Jack and Hickman to INL, touching down on a helicopter landing pad at the site. OCI/SECTRO had been notified of their imminent arrival to avoid any unpleasant incidents resulting from an unauthorized aircraft entering the lab’s airspace.

OCI Chief McCoy was instructed via secure scrambled communication not to allow Dr. Nordquist or Dr. Carlson to leave the building, and to monitor their whereabouts and any incoming or outgoing phone messages sent or received by either man. Otherwise, the scientists were to be left to their own devices, unmolested and unaware of the heightened scrutiny.

Jack Bauer gave these instructions to McCoy in the form of an order. He hadn’t gone into details, merely informing the other that an emergency situation was in the process of developing. He’d had to pull rank on McCoy, invoking the authority to command that Washington had bestowed on him to be used as needed.

McCoy hadn’t liked it at all, but he was a person of interest as far as Jack was concerned, and for now would be given only the information that Jack deemed necessary.

Jack then contacted Orne Lewis, CIA’s permanent liaison with the lab, telling him to meet them at INL. “I’m on the way,” Lewis said.

Galvez delivered Jack and Hickman to INL. He told them he had to return to his home airfield to refuel. Jack told him to remain at the airfield on call to be available as and if needed until notified otherwise. “In a fast-breaking situation like this, a helicopter ready at a moment’s notice is a good thing to have,” he said.

“That’s fine with me as long as you’re paying for it,” Galvez said.

“Keep the meter running.”

“You can be sure of that.”

The helicopter lifted off.

SECTRO guards escorted Jack and Hickman to McCoy’s office. McCoy was hopping mad. Veins stood out on his forehead and his neck was corded. He waited until his assistant Debra Derr exited his private office and he was alone with Jack and Hickman before demanding an explanation.

“You’ll get it,” Jack said coolly. “But first—Nordquist and Carlson are still on-site?”

“Yes, they’re both in the LRF. The last firing was two hours ago and the rest of the staffers have gone home, but apparently those two stayed behind to review the data and correlate their findings. And before you ask, no, neither of them have made or received any phone calls.

“Now, considering that I’m only Director of Counterintelligence here, I presume it won’t be asking too much for you to tell me just what the hell is going on?”

McCoy’s voice rose and his face reddened as he was speaking, so that he was shouting and livid by the end of his remarks.

“Let’s go to the LRF, I’ll brief you along the way,” Jack said.

“Damned decent of you,” McCoy muttered, sarcastic.

“I think so.”

The trio exited McCoy’s inner office, entering the main working space of the OCI staff, now manned by a skeleton crew. Assistant Director Debra Derr’s office was next to McCoy’s. Her door was open. Her face expressed intelligent alertness and a keen interest in the mysterious goings-on, but she had the inbred discretion of her trade and asked no questions.

McCoy stuck his head in her office. “We’ll be in the LRF,” he told her.

“Has Lewis arrived?” Jack asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

“When he gets here, please tell him to meet us in the control room.”

Derr glanced at McCoy, who nodded affirmatively. “I’ll tell him,” she said.

“Thanks,” Jack said.

“Lewis lives up on the Hill. It’s a fair drive from his place to here,” Hickman said.

“At least he won’t have any traffic problems at this hour,” Jack said.

Hickman grinned tightly. “A private helicopter is a handy thing to have at that.”

Jack Bauer, Hickman, and McCoy went out of the OCI section into the lobby of the main building. The only others present were a pair of SECTRO guards posted inside the front entrance.

The trio began threading the maze of corridors leading to the LRF, each swiping their blue badge cards through the scanner readers accessing the secured portals along the way. They walked quickly, their footfalls echoing down the empty halls.

“Now—what’s this all about?” McCoy demanded, peevish.

Jack thought it best to withhold the truth about Kling’s death. The late Rhodes Morrow had used Kling and Peter Rhee to conduct a secret off-the-shelf investigation. He’d kept the rest of his OCI staff, including his then–Assistant Director Gabe McCoy, out of the loop. Maybe he simply hadn’t trusted McCoy’s discretion; maybe a more sinister suspicion had prompted him to withhold the information. Whatever the reason, Jack Bauer judged it prudent to maintain silence on the subject for now.

“Kling’s dead,” he began.

McCoy was surprised but not noticeably grief-stricken. “What? How—”

“He was killed trying to prevent a kidnapping attempt on Sylvia Nordquist and her daughter.”

That news hit McCoy a lot harder than Kling’s death. “Good Lord!”

“They’re okay, except for a bad case of shock. They’ve been taken to a hospital for treatment and are under guard,” Jack said.

McCoy’s flushed face had gone pale. His eyes widened, pupils expanding into black dots. “When did this happen?” he asked.

“An hour or two ago at the Nordquist house,” Jack replied.

“But—what was Kling doing there?”

“That was Harvey, always freelancing,” Hickman interjected, taking up the thread of the cover story he and Jack had worked out earlier. “He was always going off on his own, snooping around for leads, digging for clues. This
time he dug up a hot tip and was following it up. He died a hero, for what it’s worth.”

“There’s more,” Jack said.

McCoy groaned. “More?”

“Carlson’s wife, Carrie, is missing. We don’t know if she was abducted or went off on her own.”

“Oh god!” McCoy became indignant. “I can tell you this: Mrs. Carlson is not the sort of woman to go wandering off on her own on Saturday night, or any other night for that matter!”

“No?”

“Certainly not!”

“You know her personally?”

“Socially—and I consider her a friend,” McCoy said primly. “Carrie Carlson is a model of probity, a genuine humanitarian. Respected not only by our lab community but throughout the greater Los Alamos area, thanks to her charitable works.”

“She wouldn’t be the first respectable married woman to have a little something going on the side,” Hickman suggested.

McCoy looked at him like he was something that had just crawled out of a sewer. “Preposterous! I know you keyhole-peeping G-men are inclined to believe the worst about everyone but this is going too far. It’s a smear, a slander, on one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known.”

“Kind of fond of her, eh?” Hickman said slyly.

McCoy openly sneered at him. “I admire and respect her, yes. But if you’re trying to make anything more out of it than that with your nasty-minded insinuations, you can go to the devil—”

Hickman held up his hands palms out in an I-surrender gesture. “Don’t get sore, McCoy. I’m only trying to get a fix on her, who she is and what her personality’s like, that’s all. The kind of thing I need to know to do my job.”

“I can assure you that she didn’t take it into her head to go out alley-catting on a night that her husband is working late.”

Jack Bauer was grim-faced. “So much the worse for her. That means she was probably grabbed.”

McCoy was agitated. He looked ready to tear his hair out, what was left of it. “This is monstrous! Ironwood is under attack!” He halted, grabbing Jack by the arm. “Is it terrorists, Bauer? Is it?”

Jack, silent, looked at McCoy’s hand clutching his arm. McCoy got the message and released his grip. “The dead kidnappers were career criminals, associates of the Blanco gang,” Jack said.

McCoy’s eyes narrowed in recognition. “The Blancos? I’ve heard of them, seen them in the papers and on the local TV news. Drug gang crooks, aren’t they?”

“And then some,” Hickman said.

“What have they got to do with defense weapons research?”

“Plenty, apparently.”

Jack said, “There’s an extensive interface between the worlds of crime and terror and it’s getting stronger every day. Organized crime routinely terrorizes its victims to promote underworld enterprises. Political terrorists use the tactic to promote ideological causes.

“Where does the political shade into the criminal and vice versa? The line between the two is blurred and crooks and terrorists jump the fence as they please. The Taliban uses the heroin trade as a major funding device. Mexican drug gangs kill prosecutors, police officials, politicians, and reporters to maintain their illicit empires. I could give you hundreds of similar examples from all over the world.”

“Yes, but here in Los Alamos—it’s unthinkable!” McCoy said.

“Maybe that’s why it’s working. It could be that some political intriguer or group has hired the Blancos to do their dirty work. How many files does your office keep on local drug gangs and gunmen? Not many, I’d say.”

“That’s outside the parameters of a counterintelligence office,” McCoy said.

“Which is why it’s proven so effective so far.”

McCoy turned on Hickman. “It’s the FBI’s job to monitor violent criminals! Seems like you’ve been asleep at the switch.”

“We’re on the case, aren’t we? That’s more than you can say,” Hickman fired back.

“What’s being done about this Blanco gang?”

“Everything possible. The gang leaders are smart and tough—and lucky. A rival outfit blitzed a Blanco meth lab today. The firestorm that’s eating up half the county is collateral damage from that strike. The attack put the Blancos on alert and they’ve abandoned their usual haunts and gone to cover. And there’s a hell of a lot of cover with all the canyons and arroyos in this area. The fire hasn’t made things any easier, either.

“The hell of it is that there’s nothing to implicate Torreon Blanco or his sister Marta in any of the violence that’s been turned against INL today. The shoot-out at Rhee’s apartment, the attempts on Bauer’s life, the botched kidnapping were all carried out by Blanco gang members.

“But there’s no hard evidence tying Torreon or Marta to the assaults. Like other top crime bosses, they know how to legally insulate themselves from acts carried out by their underlings.

“Not that we plan to be too fussy about legal technicalities once we apprehend them. The attacks on Ironwood affect the national security and we can use the Patriot Act to hammer the Blancos once we apprehend them,” Hickman said.

“It was negligent and worse of you not to share this information with OCI,” McCoy accused.

“You can’t share what you don’t know. We just discovered the Blanco connection ourselves a little while ago. You’re hearing it now. So what have you got to kick about? Hell, it’s your office that’s been maintaining all along that the Ironwood kills were purely coincidental and that there was no pattern behind them!”

“Let’s save the finger-pointing for later and get down to the LRF now,” Jack said.

He fit deed to word by moving forward, resuming the progress toward the Snake Pit that had been interrupted by the confrontation. The others fell into step alongside him and hurried through the halls. Crosstalk sniping and mutual suspicion continued along the way.

“I can see why you wanted Carlson’s phone calls monitored, in case the kidnappers tried to contact him. But why Nordquist?” McCoy asked Jack.

“They might have tried to run a bluff on him that his family had been successfully abducted, spooking him into running so he could be more easily grabbed on the outside. The scientists are the object of the exercise; abducting their loved ones is just a means to an end to influence them,” Jack Bauer said.

“But Nordquist and Carlson aren’t the only members of the cadre. There’s Stannard, Tennant, Delgado—”

“They’d already left the lab building by the time we got the big picture. Vince Sabito has arranged protection for them and their families. But they’re the smaller fish. Nordquist and Carlson are the big brains of the project, Nordquist for the conceptual breakthroughs and Carlson for making them work,” Jack said.