Zero Day (37 page)

“
H
EY
, B
ILL, HOW GOES IT
?”

Bill Strauss had just come out of the Trent office and was heading to his car. Puller was leaning against his Malibu. He’d been waiting out here for nearly an hour.

“Puller? What are you doing here?”

Puller pushed away from the car and walked toward the man. “My job. Got some questions. You have some time?”

Strauss glanced at his watch. “I’m actually late for a meeting.”

“It won’t take long.”

“It can’t wait?”

“Not really, no.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Blasting last Sunday night. No public notice given. Who authorized it?”

Strauss looked taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

“On Sunday night of last week blasting took place at one of the Trent operations. You have to give public notice. And blasting doesn’t usually take place on Sundays. You have to get special permission. The notice wasn’t given. Was the special permission obtained?”

“I’d have to check the records.”

“Roger said he knew nothing about it. Who at your company oversees that stuff?”

“Technically I do as COO. But I have a lot of duties and I have to delegate. We have people who cover the blasting authorizations and appropriate notice provisions.”

“Then they would be the ones I should talk to?”

“They would. Unfortunately, they’re not at this office. They work in Charleston.”

“Can I get their contact information?”

“Why is this important? Those people weren’t killed at the mining operation.”

“It’s still important. So you’ll get me the contact info?”

“Okay,” Strauss said slowly.

“Great, I’ll expect it tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure—”

Puller cut in. “Seen your son lately?”

“No, why?”

“Just wondering. You a member of the Xanadu club?”

“What? No, I’m not.”

“I’ll let you get on to your meeting.”

Puller climbed in the Malibu and drove off. On the way he called Dickie and made arrangements to meet with him that night.

When Puller got back to the motel there was a shiny blue Bentley parked out front, and Roger Trent was at the wheel.

“
I
ASSUME YOU’RE LOOKING
for me since there’s no one else staying here,” said Puller.

Trent had on dark slacks and a white open-collared shirt. A cigar was in one hand. His face was red, the corpuscles around his thick nose swollen. As Puller drew closer he smelled the alcohol on the man’s breath.

“You sure you should be piloting that thing around in your condition?”

“What condition is that?”

“One called inebriated.”

“I’m not even close. I have a big appetite for everything.”

Puller looked at the man’s gut. “I can see that. You ever think about Weight Watchers?”

“You’ve been pulling my chain ever since we met.”

“You’re a hard person to love, Roger.”

To Puller’s surprise the other man started laughing. “Well, at least you’re honest. I understand you and my lovely wife went to lunch today. At Vera Felicita.”

“Her invite, not mine.”

“Not saying otherwise. But you accepted.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“She’s very nice company. Did she tell you what happened afterwards?”

“That someone put a bomb under your car, yes, she did mention
that. That’s why I came by, to tell you she had nothing to do with it.”

“Thanks, that’s a big relief.”

“I was just thinking that we both have a lot in common.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“Somebody obviously wants us dead.”

“They’re just phoning you. I’m the one getting the bombs.”

Trent leaned against his Bentley. “You ever wonder why I haven’t moved away from here? I could live anywhere, you know.”

“Your wife prefers Italy, I know that.”

“That’s my wife. I’m talking about me.”

“Okay, yeah, I have wondered. And I can tell you’re itching to tell me. Big fish in a little pond syndrome?”

“Hardly that simple. You see, Puller, I don’t have a need to be loved. Far from it. You don’t go into the coal mining business to be loved. I like being loathed. It gets my juices going. I love it, actually. Everybody against me. You see, in Drake, I’m the underdog. A rich underdog, the richest in fact. But still the underdog.”

“You ever thought about getting counseling?”

Trent laughed again. “I like you. I’m not sure why. Hell, maybe I do know why. You hate me too, but you do it on a different level. You do it to my face, not behind my back like all the others around here.”

“Does that include your family?”

Trent leisurely blew a smoke ring and watched it drift upward and then disappear.

From the nearby woods the cicadas started up.

“Probably. Sam can’t stand me. Randy is a whack job. Jean loves my money.”

“One big happy family.”

“But I can’t blame folks. Remember I said jealousy? It’s true. I bet you’re a hotshot soldier. Probably were in combat in the Middle East. Got a slew of medals.”

“You just come up with that on your own?”

“I checked you out. Yeah, I bet it was rough over there. But let me tell you what real combat is like. Business is combat. And to
win you’ve got to be an asshole. No marshmallows make it to the top in business. It’s kill or be killed. And if you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom. And that’s where most people will live their whole lives.” He flicked his cigar to remove some dangling ash and then put it to his lips.

“Thanks for the Business 101, Roger. Now why don’t you talk to me about your financial problems?”

The cigar sagged in the man’s mouth and the mirth-filled look in his eyes vanished. “What financial problems?”

“You checked me out, I checked you out.”

“Then your information is flawed.”

“Tough-looking Marine you have guarding you now. Where is he, by the way? With death threats I wouldn’t be going around alone.”

“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”

“And I take it the bankers in New York weren’t receptive to your cash flow problems?”

Trent threw his cigar down on the dirt and ground it in with his foot. “What the hell did Jean tell you? That stupid bitch.”

Less than three days. That’s all Puller had. He decided to go for it.

“You have your fingers in lots of pies, Roger. Coal. But you operate gas pipelines too, right?”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“You tell me.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“You sure about that?”

“Real sure.”

“Being in debt is bad. Treason is worse.”

“You on drugs or something?”

“Just giving you some advice.”

“Why should I take advice from you?”

“Because it’s been given with good intent.”

Trent laughed. “You’re a real funny guy.”

“Not really, no. And if things play out the way I think, you’re going to need more than one Marine to keep you safe.”

“Are you threatening me?” bellowed Trent.

“You’re smart enough to know that the threat won’t be coming from me, Roger.”

Trent climbed back into his Bentley and drove off.

Apparently Puller had struck out again. He had to hope that Dickie would have something more useful to report.

I
T WAS NEARLY
ten o’clock when he arrived. The neighborhood was quiet. No one was outside. Puller could hardly blame them. It was hot, humid, and the mosquitoes were out in force. It was a night to stay inside the walls, not frolic outside them.

He steered his Malibu through the network of surface streets, following the path that he and Cole had earlier. He made one more turn and the firehouse was up ahead. No lights on, but he didn’t expect there to be. No electricity here. That’s probably why they all went home when it started to get dark. The overhead doors had been pulled down. Puller wondered if they were locked too. He stopped his car, got out, looked around, and sniffed the air. A mosquito buzzed in his face. He swatted it away. That would only signal more comrades to come, he knew. He’d trained in enough swamps to understand that.

He locked his Malibu using his remote fob. He’d parked it close to the building. He had decided to keep his car as close to him as possible from now on. He walked up to the overhead door, reached down, and tugged. It slid up easily on oiled tracks. He looked around again, could see no one. Still, his right hand sat on top of his forward M11. He’d grabbed his Maglite from the trunk and popped it on. The beam cut through the darkness as he moved inside.

While he was waiting for Dickie, he wanted to check out a theory.

There were two Harleys parked side by side to his right, their front wheels chained together. To his left was a rolling toolbox with a big padlock. It appeared that the members of the Harley club
didn’t completely trust their neighbors. Both Harleys had large saddlebags. They had locks on them. Not unheard of, and in fact Puller had expected to find them.

He picked the locks and probed the interior of the bags with his light. In the third bag he found what he was hoping for—a bit of plastic, an edge of duct tape, and a few nearly invisible shiny flakes. In another saddlebag he found a few crumbly brown grains. The shiny flakes were pure crystal meth. The brown flakes were an impure version of meth called peanut butter crank. Illegal drugs were more of a problem in the military than the brass liked to let on. Over the years Puller had seen just about every type of illicit drug there was.

So he had found the distribution pipeline for Eric Treadwell’s modest meth operation. The Xanadu bike club put it in their saddlebags and delivered it to their customers. And in impoverished areas where people wanted to forget about their reality because it was so bad, drug dealers had easy prey.

So Treadwell and Bitner had been small-time drug dealers. That wasn’t why they were killed, he was sure of that. He would let Cole know about this, but it didn’t get him any closer to stopping the terrorists.

He went through the storage lockers on the left side of the wall. Nothing. Mostly filled with stuff from the Harley riders. When he attempted to access the lockers on the right, he found them locked tight. He picked the lock of one of them and found nothing. He did two other lockers and found the same: nothing. He didn’t waste time on the others.

He checked his watch. He had gotten here purposely early just in case Dickie wasn’t playing straight with him and someone had set up an ambush. He had some more time to kill. He decided to employ it by searching this place. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that folks who distributed meth could be persuaded to do something far more heinous, even if it meant hurting their country. Maybe folks around here felt their country had already abandoned them, so what did it matter?

There was another room off to his left. He went in there, the
shadows devolving to cavelike darkness, for there were no windows in here. It was empty. He backed out, his ears straining for the sounds of anyone drawing near.

He ventured up the stairs. There was a kitchen that looked like it was being used by the club. He opened some cabinets and found cans of soup and cereal boxes.

There was another room adjacent to the kitchen. He opened the door and peered inside, his light cutting into the dark. This must’ve been the fire chief’s office, he thought. Old desk, old file cabinets, shelves, and a couple of rusty chairs. He looked through the file cabinets but they were empty, as were the shelves. He sat down behind the desk and started opening drawers. He found nothing until he dipped his hand farther back in one of the drawers after his light hit on something.

He looked at the yellowed piece of paper. It had the date 1964 on it.

The heading said “FIA.” He didn’t know what that meant.

He read the body of the document. It dealt with procedures in the event of a fire at the facility. There was nothing in it that revealed to Puller what the facility did. Maybe this had to do with what Mason had told him. About the bombmaking component work.

He eyed something written in the margin. The ink had faded but he could still make it out.

The numbers 92 and 94.

He put the page in his pocket and rose.

He heard the noise as soon as he left the small office.

A motorcycle, coming fast, its engine throbbing. He strode quickly over to a set of windows on the second floor that overlooked the front of the firehouse.

It had to be Dickie. He hit his watch with the light. It was time.

He could see the bike’s single headlight stabbing through the gloom. The motorcycle rolled onto the cracked concrete fronting the firehouse. Now Puller could make out more clearly the man’s image. Blocky shoulders. Chunky torso. It was Dickie.

The sound of the shot made Puller jerk and instinctively duck.
As he watched, the round hit the rider directly in the head, smashing through the helmet, drilling through the skull and brain and exploding out the other side. The Harley drifted to the right as the rider let go of the handlebars. The man fell off to the left and hit the concrete. He jerked once and lay still. The bike continued on before hitting the wall of the firehouse and falling over on its side, the engine still running.

Puller didn’t see this last part. He had leapt to the fire pole and slid down it.

The shot had come from the left. Long-range rifle round. Puller figured the sniper was on the ground somewhere. There was no high dirt here, just houses. The shooter could be in one of them. And there were a lot of them. All empty. Well, maybe not.

Puller eased out of the front entrance next to the still-running bike. He bent down, turned it off, his M11 making defensive arcs. He thumbed the number on his cell phone.

Cole picked up on the second ring.

He explained things in three efficient sentences.

She would be bringing the cavalry to his aid for a second time today.

He counted to three and then zigzagged his way to the Malibu. Keeping the body of it between him and where the shot had come from, he unlocked his trunk and quickly snagged what he needed.

Night optics.

And his body armor. The outer tactical vest was a modular soft armor configuration that could stop a nine-mil round. But that wasn’t good enough tonight. Puller took a few seconds to slip the ceramic plates into the inserts in the tact vest to bump up his protection level. He powered up his optics and the world was revealed in a sharply defined green. He looked over at the body. The helmet was still on, so he couldn’t see the person’s face. The last piece of equipment that Puller reached for in his trunk was probably the most important.

H&K MP5 submachine gun. It was the clear weapon of choice by Special Forces for close-quarters battle. Its max range was a
hundred meters, which meant Puller was going to have to get a lot closer to his target.

Sniper rifle against close-quarters small arms put the latter at a decided disadvantage. Added to that was the fact that Puller was certain the shooter had a night-vision scope to make the kind of shot he just had. He would have preferred to have his bolt-action sniper rifle. But the H&K would have to do.

Puller put his MP on two-shot bursts and slammed the trunk closed.

He had one bit of recon to do. He got in his car, started it, and drove it in reverse over to the body. He used the car as a shield while he slid out.

He saw the entry and exit wounds on the helmet. He popped open the visor and saw Dickie Strauss staring back at him.

He turned to his left and saw it. The slug was lying on the pavement. He focused on it without touching it.

It was a .338 Lapua Magnum round and Puller’s body armor was not rated to stop it. The Lapua also had a range of up to fifteen hundred meters. And with ideal conditions and a little luck, a talented sniper could hit his target from even farther away than that.

He broke all crime scene protocols by doing a quick search of the dead man and retrieving his cell phone and wallet, which he pocketed.

Puller got back in his car and, keeping his head down, drove it forward to the firehouse. He got out on the passenger side and slid the MP5 support sling over his head.

It was time to go hunting.