“It ain’t what, madness?”
“They never killed anybody in these sorties and—”
“They killed ten United States GIs last night in the Bitterroot Mountains. That’s the body count up there. Executed them, pal. You heard about that?”
“There was something on the TV but—”
“But nothing. They robbed the people of the United States and murdered ten soldiers in cold blood. There was nothing holy about it. What the hell is there to be proud of in that? You know something, Ralph, I make it a cowardly act of terrorism. Engstrom can wave his Bible around all he wants, I’ll wave the United States Constitution right back in his face and we’ll see which one the jury believes.”
Ralph did not answer. He looked at Firestone for support, but the marshal stared down at his coffee and said nothing. He turned to Marie, who stood by the stove, arms crossed at her chest, staring at the floor.
“Maybe it was—” Ralph started, and then stopped in mid-sentence.
“Maybe it was what?” Vail asked, and there was anger in his voice.
“Maybe it was an act of war,” he said in a whisper. “Maybe it’s A-Day.”
CHAPTER 14
Vail sat quietly in the car as Firestone drove back toward the interstate. He knew why Castaigne had sent him to interview these two men. Jordan was the true zealot, a man who felt betrayed by his government, had given up on the legal process, and was devoted to the idea of revolution, like the hippies in the sixties. In many ways, his rant was more chilling than Ralph describing, without remorse, in a steady monotone, the lynching of an innocent black soldier. Jordan was a man of passion, far more dangerous than the young thug who had been trained almost from birth to be a psychopath, oblivious to the moral restraints imposed by his precious Bible. Ralph was a drone who did what he was bid regardless of the Ten Commandments. Jordan was a leader whose passion could instill civil disobedience and ultimately the violence that accompanies it.
Castaigne had made certain Vail heard both poles of the militia mindset.
The muscles in Vail’s jaw twitched as he thought about Ralph… and he stared angrily through the windshield.
Finally Firestone said: “Got to you, did he?”
“You could say that.”
“And Jordan didn’t?”
“You know, I felt for Jordan’s anger. I don’t agree with any of it, but I can see how he got where he is. He’s doing hard time, while this little scumbag is living off the taxpayers.”
“He gave us a lot of information, Martin.”
“Know what I think? I think the little bastard knew the bank robbery would go south and he didn’t want any part of it. He knew they’d nail him or we would. One way he’s dead, the other he has a murder rap and an armed robbery dangling over his head. So he played it smart. He gave up information and copped on testifying.”
“It’s not that uncommon in witness protection deals.”
“Instead of ending up doing the full clock, no parole, he’s got himself a farm and a pretty little wife who’s probably just as fucked up as he is, and he’s wiped murder and mayhem off his sheet.”
“You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“Look, I’m not knocking you for making the deal, I’ve put a few creeps in witness pro myself. I’m sure it sounded like a good move at the time.”
“It was the first break we got on the Sanctuary.”
“I’ll tell you something else, I don’t buy that rap about Schindler’s List for a minute. This guy is as big a racist and hate monger as he ever was. He made himself a cool deal and the Bureau bought it.”
Firestone stared straight ahead at the ribbon of highway for several seconds before he nodded. “I won’t argue with that.”
“Like I said, I’m not knocking you, Sam. You want to know the truth, the only thing Ralph whatever-his-name-is is good for is corroboration.”
“His real name was George Waller,” Firestone said. “You could figure that out with what you know about him. Hardistan and the A.G. are the only other people who know his real name and they have no idea what his alias is or where he is.”
“You’re the only one who knows?”
“No, now there’s two of us.”
Vail considered that for a minute and said, “Helluva responsibility.”
“Yep. Don’t have to tell you never to mention this guy to anyone.”
“I figured that out all by myself,” Vail said with a smile.
“The kid’s right in one respect. If we blow his cover by taking him into court, they’ll get him.”
“Sounds pessimistic to me.”
“Realistic.”
“Hell, it would be his word against theirs,” Vail said, “and they’d gang up on him and make him the liar. I’ll say one thing, he sounded dead serious when he called the ambush an act of war.”
“If we’re to believe they have not hurt anyone thus far, then it certainly marks a serious change in their tactics.”
“Maybe they were desperate to get that arms truck and they wanted to avoid a firefight.”
“It changes the whole ball game,” Firestone said.
“That it does. I forgot to ask him who the surviving member of the Denver bank job is.”
“Name’s Luke Sundergard. He’s doing life without parole at Leavenworth.”
“What’s he have to say?”
“Nothing. His lips are stuck together with Gorilla Glue.”
“Well, if I take this job and I need Ralphie-boy, he’ll be in court and you can bet your paycheck on that, I don’t give a damn what kind of a deal the government made with him.”
Firestone smiled. “We heard you were tough,” he said.
“That’s what you heard, huh?”
“Yep.”
“If he doesn’t cooperate, you’ll find out how tough I am. I’ll tell him I’ll drop a dime on him so fast he won’t have time to pack his underwear before they come through the window after him.”
“I don’t believe you’d do that, Marty.”
“No, but before I’m through with him, he’ll sure as hell think I will.” Vail reached inside his jacket, took out a small tape recorder, and pressed the rewind button.
“You tape-recorded him?” Firestone said with surprise.
“I taped them both.”
Firestone didn’t say anything.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the tapes won’t be admissible in court since I didn’t get their permission first.”
“It crossed my mind.”
“I would never put them into evidence.”
“Just research, huh?”
“I may just find a federal judge who’ll listen to them and get nervous enough to give us some wiretaps, surveillance warrants, search and seizures, and maybe a computer hack or two. Without them we don’t have dick.”
“You’re gonna do the RICO case, then?”
“I didn’t say that. That’s if I decide to do this thing.”
“You’d blow off the President?”
“Sam, I’ve been playing political football for thirteen years, ten as a prosecutor, three as A.G. of the state. I’m sick of dodging political sharpshooters and PAC-whore congressmen and judges with too many friends in the wrong places.”
“Today didn’t change your mind?”
“This is the first time in my life I’ve been free. There’s a lot to be said for being rid of all constraints. I’ve been toying with a book. I’ve got an offer from Chicago U. Law School. I don’t need the aggravation that would go with a case that’ll be sitting on the President’s desk every morning.”
“You gonna tell him that?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to tell him.”
“For what it’s worth, Marge Castaigne is as straight a shooter as you’ll find in government. You tell her your ground rules, and if she agrees, so will Pennington.”
“And what happens if the IRS decides to snoop into our case looking for some easy-score ta
x money, or the FBI decides to go full-tilt on one of the supportive cases?”
“That’s between you and the A.G. They all work for her.”
“It would be a tough call for her. Hardistan comes to her and says they got an open-and-shut on the arms job. The FBI looks like a hero. The A.G. looks like a hero. And the RICO case goes downriver.”
“She’s the boss,” Firestone said. “She’s the one that decides when a case goes to court. The IRS or the FeeBees go to her and try to harpoon your RICO, she could put their cases on the bottom of the pile until the year three thousand, and they know it.”
“Politics,” Vail growled.
“Except this time you’ll be two chairs from the top man, and if Marge wants to play by your rules, you haven’t got a worry.”
“What’s in this for you anyway?”
“I’d like to be the one who delivers the warrants. I’d like to put the cuffs on Engstrom and Shrack and the rest of these bozos and bring them in.” He looked over at Vail. “By the way, I hate politics as much as you do.”
“How long you been a marshal?”
“Twenty-one years this June. Before that I was Montana State Patrol for six, and before that I was three years in the Marines, one in Vietnam.”
“That’s an impressive resume.”
“I’m like you,” he said, “I like the action. Keeps you young.”
“Where you from?”
“Born in northeast Idaho. I’m half Nez Perce Indian.”
“No kidding? Then you know the mountains out there.”
“Grew up in them. For the first ten years of my life I lived on the Flathead Indian Reservation just north of Missoula in the valley between the Bitterroots and the Anaconda Range. Right in the middle of the northern Rockies. When I was ten, my mom sent me to live with my grandparents in Seattle. They were white, so I was brought up in both cultures.”
“Which do you prefer?”
Firestone did not answer for a long time, and then finally he said, “I like the honesty of the Nez Perce. They have a way of cutting to the bone. And their religion is pure, not like all that Christian nonsense.”
“I think you and I are going to get along.”
“I’ll take you to meet my father someday,” he said. “He’ll prop your eyes open.”
“I’ll bet he will,” Vail said.
A few miles away Woodbine was flying lazy-eight patterns up and down the interstate, hoping he would spot the elusive black Taurus on its way back up 1-75. Nothing. He gave up and flew back to the county airport. The twin-engine Beechcraft was still on the field. He decided to stay aloft, not wanting to take a chance of being seen if he landed at the field. The weather over the airport had cleared slightly. The bad weather was moving to the east, so he climbed to fifteen hundred feet and cruised up and down the county road that led to the interstate, waiting for the car to return. He laid to the north about half a mile so Firestone would not get curious if he saw the plane. With a thousand-mile range, he was not worried about fuel. Ten minutes later he saw the car turn off the interstate interchange, go down the county road, and turn into the airport.
He checked his watch. An hour and thirty-three minutes.
That narrowed the field.
Woodbine could not land at the Lima county airport. They would be checking everything in and out of all the small airports, and car rentals in the entire area. He checked his sectional, measuring distances to local county airports, then made a radical decision. He would land in a county strip northeast of Fort Wayne. From the airport it was a straight shot south on an interstate access eight miles to the suburb of New Haven and the intersection with Route 30, and another fifty miles into Lima. He checked it out on his AAA maps. They had a car rental office at the airport. He called and reserved a car, then checked New Haven for motels and found one at the intersection of the interstate spur and 30. An hour’s drive from the motel to Lima. Ten minutes from the motel to the airport.
It was perfect.
He checked into the hotel an hour later, a nice corner room on the second floor. He called room service and ordered a sirloin strip, rare, mashed potatoes, a salad, and a bottle of French pinot noir, although he had to settle for Chianti. He got a map, a pair of dividers, and a compass out of his briefcase. He knew they were gone for ninety-three minutes. He knew they had gone south. He set out three options, each based on the length of time Firestone and his passenger might have talked to Waller, if indeed it was Waller they had gone to see. He estimated their car speed at seventy, which gave him some base figures. He took his calculator and figured how far the car would have driven in the event of thirty-, forty-five-, and sixty-minute interviews. If the interview had lasted thirty minutes, they could have driven seventy or eighty miles south on the interstate. He took his compass and drew an arc on the map on the outside and inside limits. Then he drew lines down both sides of the interstate based on his figures. When he was finished, he had a pie-shaped search area stretching south of Lima and intersected with three lines.
If they had gone to see Waller, he was somewhere inside that arc.
He would start at seven in the morning, first doing an air search, then scanning the area by car if necessary.
Five days max, he said to himself. If I can’t find Waller in five days, he isn’t there.
He took out the digital video recorder and checked the six single shot close-ups he had taken of the unidentified passenger. The photographs were excellent. He plugged the camera into his laptop computer and captured the best of the six shots in a file. Then he copied it into a fax file and hooked his cell phone to the computer. He dialed a number, and when it answered, he faxed the photo on.
Two thousand miles away at the communications center of Fort Yahweh in western Montana, the fax came over the machine. The sergeant on duty tacked the photo of Martin Vail on the bulletin board. Under the photo, Woodbine had written:
“Anybody know this man?”
CHAPTER 15
Jane Venable stood at the big picture window of the cabin and watched Magoo, like a ghost in the twilight, darting through the woods near the lake, stopping occasionally to sniff at a rabbit hole or root around a fallen tree. Behind him, Martin dodged through the bushes, stopping to scale a Frisbee toward the white dog, who watched its arc and gauged it perfectly, leaping into the air and grabbing it. The dog dropped the platter at its feet and stood with his tail straight down, his head hunched down as he watched his master approach. The German shepherd waited until Vail was beside him, then turned and looked out at the lake, where two men had been fishing for most of the afternoon.
“I see them, pal,” Vail said.
Satisfied, Magoo turned and raced off again. Vail picked up the Frisbee and strolled closer to the shore. He watched the men for a few minutes. Occasionally one of them would pick up a pair of binoculars and scan the large lake, concentrating on the shoreline.
Fishermen my ass, Vail thought.
Magoo barked and Vail tossed the Frisbee underhand out into the large lawn between the house and the lake. The white dog ran like a racehorse but couldn’t catch up with it. It hit the snow-frozen ground and bounced toward the house. The dog looked back at Vail with disgust, ignored the toy, and trotted toward the house.
Jane went to the back door and opened it as Magoo approached. He jogged past her and went straight to his food dish. Vail followed him in. He pulled off his gloves and rubbed his hands together.
“Damn, it’s cold out there,” he said.
“Doesn’t seem to bother your buddy,” she answered, nodding toward the dog.
“Hell, the colder it is, the better he likes it. I think he’s got a strain of husky in him.”
She moved closer to Vail as he took off his parka and kissed him gently on the cheek. “You were gone awhile.”
“Walked all the way down to the dam.”
“Notice the fishermen?”
“Yeah. Magoo is concerned.”
“Pretty lousy day for fishing
.”
“If they’re fishermen, I’m an opera tenor. The one in the back has been studying the lake through binoculars all day.”
“I noticed. Who do you think they are?”
“Nazi spies,” Vail joked. “They’re gonna blow the dam and flood the valley.”
“God, what an imagination. That trip has gone to your head.”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’ve been pro-ing and conning on our walk.”
“And… ?”
“Big decision, Janie. We’ve got a great thing going here.”
“I’m going to have to go back to work one of these days, darling.”
“Is that a vote in favor of my taking the job?”
“God no, I’m not going to get involved in that decision.”
“It’ll affect us both. You have a right to cast a vote.”
“How about Magoo, does he get a vote, too?”
“Sure.”
The white dog came into the big room licking his chops, and Vail said, “What do you think, Magoo? Take it or leave it?”
The dog snorted, plopped down in front of the window, and dozed off. “What a life,” Vail said, and to Jane, “Hungry?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll grill a couple of steaks.”
“I made some apple turnovers.”
“That’s what smells so good. Ain’t you the domestic one.”
“That’s me. Martha Stewart.”
He went into the kitchen, turned on the electric grill, and set it on high. He took two T-bones, four frozen ears of corn, and the makings of a salad out and put them on the cutting board.
“I’ll do the salad,” she said, and started breaking up the lettuce and washing it in a colander.
Vail melted butter and mixed it with garlic while he waited for the grill to heat up. The night before, when he returned from his trip, he had described the day, being careful not to give up too much of his interview with Waller. But he had played the tape of his talk with Jordan at Coyote Flats and told her about Waller and the lynching and arms robbery. She sat silently while he talked and saw his mood grow darker as he spoke. But she also heard something else in his voice: an excitement she had not seen or felt in him since the RICO case. She had worried about him, watching him halfheartedly pick away at his book or talk about teaching, and she knew he did not have the taste for either. In her heart she knew this was the perfect job for Vail. But she also had a sense of danger she’d never felt before. Like an omen. These were dangerous people, and if Vail took the job, she knew it would put him in harm’s way.
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