Zero Day (40 page)

I
T WAS ONE
in the morning when Puller found himself in Afghanistan again, in the middle of the firefight that he would win every time, even if he couldn’t bring home the men he’d lost. He woke from the dream slowly, calmly. But he woke with something else.

An idea.

There had been a hole. A lead he had not followed up. While he’d been killing Afghanis in the desert, his mind had finally fixated on that hole. And he didn’t have much time to get it done. He rose, dressed, and left the house as quietly as he had moved through foot patrols in the Middle East. He had paused only to check on Cole. She was asleep in her bed, a single sheet over her in deference to the heat outside. He left her a note on the fridge, made sure her front door was securely locked, rolled his car out of the driveway and partway down the street before starting it up. And then he was off.

Thirty minutes later he eyed the bleak concrete-block building. There was no security system. He’d already noted that on his last visit here.

He scanned the area one more time and then moved forward. The front door lock took all of thirty seconds.

He moved through the interior. He hadn’t used his flashlight yet because he had memorized the interior from his earlier visit. Down the hall, fifteen strides, door on the left. He used a penlight to illuminate the lock while he used his tools to pick it.

Twenty seconds later he was on the other side of the door and had closed it behind him. He stared over at the other door. He tried the knob. Surprisingly, it wasn’t locked. He opened it with his gloved
hand. The large freestanding safe stared back at him. This would be the trickier one. But he’d brought with him several elements that could be used to defeat it.

He shined his light on the metal face of the safe. It was old but sturdy. He inserted his tools in the lock. He worked with a practiced hand for five minutes. There was a low click, and he tugged on the locking mechanism arm and pulled the door open. It took him ten minutes of searching before he found what he was pretty sure he had been looking for.

He unfolded the blueprints and placed them on the desk. He shined his light over them, going page by page. Then he took pictures of each page, folded the plans back up, replaced them in the safe, cranked the door closed, and made sure it locked properly. Five minutes later he was driving off in his Malibu. He reached Cole’s house, carried the camera in, and sat on his bed going through each frame. When he was finished he sat back and thought about it, trying to put things in order. Strauss had had these in his safe. Eric Treadwell and Molly Bitner had designed a plan to get them out of the safe and make copies of them. If he needed any confirmation that they had done so, he had it.

He had brought with him fingerprint cards of both Treadwell and Bitner. Both of them must have been sweating when they’d pulled their little raid at Strauss’s office, because the moisture along with their prints had been transferred perfectly to the paper. And it was the sort of paper that would carry latent prints pretty much forever. The matches had been perfect for both Treadwell and Bitner.

This is what they had risked so much for. This was ultimately what they had sacrificed their lives for. The one piece he had not followed up on.

Until now.

Now the question was: Should he tell Cole?

The answer was clearer and more immediate than he expected.

He looked at his watch: 0400.

Ironic. He was going to wake her up early again.

S
AM
C
OLE ROLLED OVER
, opened her eyes, and nearly screamed.

Puller was sitting next to her in a chair he’d drawn up to the bed.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she said, sitting up.

“Waiting for you to wake up.”

“Why didn’t you just wake me up?”

“You were sleeping so peacefully.”

“I didn’t think that mattered to you. You woke me up before from a sound sleep.”

“It was nice watching you sleep.”

She started to say something and then stopped. “Oh,” she said.

Puller looked down.

Flustered, she said, “So you decided to wait and scare me to death?”

“Wasn’t my plan, but it sort of worked out that way.”

Before she could say anything else he held up his camera.

“You want to take my picture?” she said in a confused tone.

“I want you to look at some pictures.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Stay here. I’ll make some coffee and we can look at them together.”

Thirty minutes and two cups of coffee later, Cole sat back against her pillow. “Okay. What does all this mean?”

“It means we have a lot more digging to do. And not a lot of time to do it.”

“And you’re sure this is important?”

“It’s why they broke into Strauss’s safe. And I think it was why
the Reynoldses and Treadwell and Bitner were killed. So, yes, it’s important.”

“But I thought they were killed because of the soil report.”

“I did too. But there was nothing on it that would raise any alarm. They were killed because somehow it was found out that these plans had been taken from Strauss’s safe. And they also discovered that Bitner and Treadwell had told Reynolds about it. So they had to die too.”

“So what happened to the soil report?”

“Remember the pieces of the certified mail delivery we found under the couch?”

“Yes.”

“I think the killers planted them there. As a red herring.”

“Why? And why not just leave the whole thing for us to find?”

“Then we don’t waste any time running that lead down. But if we had thought about it some, it was pretty convenient that they left the green pieces of the certified mail receipt for us to find.”

“And Larry Wellman?”

“Was on patrol when they showed up. He had to be silenced.”

“Damn, Puller, it makes sense.” Her features became troubled. “So they killed Larry just to plant pieces of paper to throw us off?”

“Way I see it.”

“And Dickie?”

“In way over his head. I don’t think he knew anything about the killings. When he found out, it was only a matter of time. And when I enlisted his help I pretty much signed his death warrant.”

She looked at him quizzically. “When did you think of all this?”

“When I was back in Afghanistan.”

“What?”

“In my head only,” he said. “My brain tends to work faster when I’m there,” he added in a low voice.

“I can understand that,” Cole said slowly.

She looked at the pictures on his camera. “So what do we do with these?”

“I’m going to download them to my computer and then print out pages. But the bottom line is we need to go there.”

“Go there? You mean just to look?”

“No, I mean more than that.” He checked his watch. “It’s still dark outside. You game?”

“It wouldn’t matter if I am or not. We don’t have any time to waste. Now get out of my bedroom so I can change.”

P
ULLER AND
C
OLE
neared the edge of the woods, knelt, and did a quick scan of what was up ahead. Puller shifted the rucksack on his back from his left shoulder to his right.

He took another look around. They didn’t have a margin of error on this and he could afford no mistakes. Dawn was coming.

Cole copied him and took a long look around too.

No lights.

Homes dark.

No cars passed by.

They could have been the only ones left on the planet.

He looked right, left, and then at his target and gave Cole a nod.

They stepped out.

Puller had on his fatigues and his face was blackened. M11 pistols forward and back. His strapped MP5 rested against his chest.

Cole was dressed in black pants and a dark shirt. Her face was blackened like Puller’s. She had her Cobra, and a throwaway in a belt holster.

Sweat stained Puller’s undershirt. The humidity level was off the charts. The combination of the heat and air moisture was debilitating. He could imagine the people in the old homes with no electricity sweltering in the oppressiveness. Or maybe they felt lucky to have a roof over their heads.

He eyed the dome of concrete. It rose up into the night sky like a solid tumor among otherwise healthy organs. He used metal clippers to cut a hole in the fencing, and a few minutes later he and Cole were next to the tumor.

Cole pulled some pages from a knapsack she carried and they studied them under a penlight Puller had in one of the pockets on his pants.

“We need to get an approximate size on this thing,” he said, and she nodded.

While Cole waited where she was, he turned west and stepped off. A hundred long strides later he stopped. He’d been doing roughly four-foot exaggerated pacing. It was difficult in the undergrowth, but he managed as best he could. Four hundred feet. Longer than a football field.

He next stepped off the width of the dome.

Two hundred strides later he stopped. It was eight hundred feet wide. Nearly a sixth of a mile. He calculated roughly the square footage inside and came away impressed. The Feds rarely did anything in a small way, particularly back then when they actually had money to burn.

A large facility. Large enough for what?

The blueprints he’d found in Strauss’s safe hadn’t revealed that.

The plans had contained a warning from the federal government that no blasting could take place within two miles of the dome. In addition, various spots on the blueprints had been marked with the symbol for danger. There had been no date on the document. There had been no explanatory notes. Puller and Cole had scanned every inch of the plans and still didn’t know what the place had been used for.

Clandestine. Top secret. Probably why they picked Drake. Today it was a massive lump in the middle of nowhere.

Puller rejoined Cole. She said, “How big?”

“Bigger than it looks,” he replied quietly.

He looked back through the woods at the neighborhood. Late 1950s style. Over half a century old. A lot going on back then in the world.

He turned to her. “What else did your parents tell you about this place?”

“Not that much. There was a siren one time that went off. No one was ever told what happened, my dad said. The police were
never called here, that I know of. I talked to Sheriff Lindemann’s predecessor about it long after he retired. It was totally out of his jurisdiction, he said.”

Puller slipped the paper he’d taken from the firehouse out of his pocket. A fire plan. The numbers 92 and 94 written in the margins.

“So did you figure out what those numbers mean?” Cole asked.

“Maybe.”

“What, then?”

If it was referring to what he thought it was, this case was about to take on an entirely new and potentially catastrophic angle.

“I’ll tell you when I’m sure.”

“Why not now? You’ve been speculating to me before.”

“Not like this. I want to be sure. I don’t want to cause a panic if it turns out I’m wrong.”

She licked her lips. “I’m already panicked, Puller. I mean, pipeline, nuke reactor. How much worse could it get?”

“It could get a lot worse.”

“Okay, you officially panicked me right past my maximum level.”

He knelt in the woods, listened to the sounds of the wildlife passing close to him. Dawn was breaking. He heard a rattle from a nearby snake. He knew there were copperheads in here as well. The swamps in Florida had been filled with aggressive water moccasins. During the last stage of Ranger training some injuries came from snakebites. Some of his fellow Rangers had been afraid of snakes, but they could never show that fear. One had almost died from a deadly bite from a coral snake, but he’d recovered. Only to die four years later in Afghanistan when an IED had exploded under his feet.

Snakebites were bad. IEDs were worse.

Puller listened, considered their options. His deliberations went fast. He didn’t have many. He approached the concrete wall from the back side. He pushed through the thick vines and forest tendrils covering its surface. He touched the rough hide of the thing.

“You sure your dad said this was three feet thick?”

“Yes. He watched them do it.”

On a structure this big that would have been an ocean of cement. Only the Feds could have done something like this. It was like building the Hoover Dam in a way.

And for what?

“We have to get inside this sucker,” he said.

“Okay, how?”

He touched the smooth surface. Concrete, unlike wood, became weaker over time, especially in elements like these. But three feet allowed a big margin of error for degradation of the material. He stared up the side; it rose nearly ten stories into the air. A few trees were taller than it, but not many. He could climb some of the vines to the very top, but then what?

Three feet. He couldn’t hack through that. At least not without people knowing about it. He’d need a jackhammer plus dynamite. He looked down, where the concrete met the dirt. Burrow underneath?

He pulled out a collapsible spade from his knapsack and began to dig. Two feet in he struck something. He removed some more dirt and hit the hole with his light.

“Looks like iron,” said Cole.

“Yeah, it does. Rusted but still intact.”

He wondered how far out from the perimeter it went. It was probably a good many feet. People who engineered gigantic domes had almost certainly not gone cheap on the other details.

No way under. No way over.

Yet there had to be a way. You didn’t build something like this and not provide a back door just in case something happened and you needed to get back in.

Something hit him. “Let me see the plans again.”

She handed him the packet. He rifled through several pages before he found the one he wanted. He looked at the writing. It was clear. He just hadn’t focused on it before. That was it.

He looked at Cole. “We need your brother.”

“Randy? What does he have to do with this?” She scowled. “You’re not telling me he’s involved in this? First, you think my sister tried to blow you up and—”

He grabbed her arm. “No, I don’t think your brother is involved in this, but I think he can still help. We need to find him.”