by P A Duncan
“From what little Analysis has found, and it’s very little, it might be along the lines of that compound, Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord. A compound and a church. It’s new, in the past three, maybe four years. Identity Christians, but if it’s a physical place, it’s a closely guarded secret.”
“Unusual. Most of the time, these guys talk too much.”
“That could mean someone who knows what he’s doing is in charge. What did you learn from Paul?”
She thumb-nailed the conversation, leaving out Paul’s offer about “their sons.” She explained he was the source of the Patriot City remark, and Alexei was intrigued by the lone wolf sentiments.
“He confirmed a great deal of our research. I’ll wager his words made it more real in a sense. Is it enough to start formulating a meet?”
“So far we’re hip-deep in the negative. I’d like to meet with that lawyer Grace told me about, Norton Ball. Before you called, I was on the phone with his head of security trying to get an appointment. Oh, I’ll give you the name and phone number. Could you have Sheryl Vejar telephone there and confirm Katherine Burke is a freelance writer and not a threat?” She gave him Bill Norris’ name and the phone number.
“I’ll do that as soon as we hang up. Why don’t you come home first, and we’ll go see Ball together?”
“That’s fine, but if I get a call-back before wheels-up tomorrow, I’ll go there first. It’s next door, after all.”
“All right, but be—”
Here we go. “Be careful. Yes, I know. I shall be, even though you aren’t here to watch my back, and before you ask, there’s nothing requiring the watching of my back.”
“You never know."
42
Fantasy and Reality
Mai zipped her overnight bag closed and looked at the mess of covers on the bed. She and Alexei had left many a hotel bed in such a wrecked condition, but last night she’d tossed and turned, alone with dreams she wished she didn’t remember. When she picked up her mobile phone to call her pilots, it began to trill in her hand. The Caller ID told her it wasn’t Norton Ball, but Grace Lydell. “Fisher,” she answered.
“So, I figured Las Vegas is about a four-hour flight in your airplane from New Orleans,” Grace said.
“That sounds about right, but why would I be going to Las Vegas?”
“To rent a car to drive to Kingman, Arizona, 180 kilometers away.”
“Grace, please, I understand the concept of miles. What’s in Kingman, Arizona?”
“Right now, your subject. Someone ran a credit check on him, and since we have a flag on his SSN, the information got cloned to us.”
“What kind of credit check?”
“A property management company. He submitted a rental application at Copper State Mobile Home and RV Park. I thought you might want to do some surveillance of him.”
“And why am I flying to Las Vegas instead of Kingman?”
“Kingman has an airport, yes, but a business jet would attract too much attention.”
Mai wondered if Natalia would accept a phone call instead of a drop-in at her layover in San Francisco. She’d have to.
“So,” Grace said, “you fly four hours to drive two hours. No big deal.”
“Says the person who rarely leaves her office.”
“Yes, but you live for fieldwork. I’ll send all the pertinent info in an email. Will this be your first trailer park?”
“I think that’s likely. You are talking about caravans, right?”
“Yes, but the trailers in these places are hardly mobile. Americans park their trailers or live in ones that don’t move.”
“Sounds…thrilling.”
“Have fun.”
Kingman, Arizona
The permanent trailers at the Copper State Mobile Home and RV Park were a mix of the well-tended and the neglected. During the early morning before the heat became hellish, young mothers and children congregated at the small playground. An hour or so before noon, the temperature drove them inside to the air conditioning.
However, their presence would make a daytime break-in at one particular trailer too dangerous. That trailer—well-kept, blue and white, fairly new—had been rented by John Thomas Carroll.
From a surprisingly thick copse of trees on a nearby hill, Mai had watched the trailer park and that one trailer for two days. With her rented pick-up truck well out of sight, she’d watched from the shelter of a pine tree until the heat pushed her back into the truck’s cab with the air conditioner on full blast. She focused her binoculars again on Carroll’s trailer.
She longed to walk up to the front door and knock, but that wasn’t how it was done.
Even if she couldn’t sit down and chat with him right now, she could speak with someone he had encountered. Mai put the truck in gear and drove toward a strip mall she’d seen on the drive. She had some shopping to do.
When she stepped down from the pick-up, Mai debated the wisdom of picking the jeans one size too small for this little adventure. Judging from the attire she’d seen on the women who lived in the trailer park, her outfit made her look like a local. In her hotel room, though, she’d had to laugh, and that had deposited the seam of those jeans rather painfully in her ass crack.
She used mousse and the hair dryer to give her hair some lift. Lots of lift. A pair of glittery high-heel sandals, a tank top, and some extra make-up, and she’d pass for trailer trash.
As she walked to the first trailer inside the entrance, the one with the sign reading, “Rental Office,” a glance at the blue-and-white trailer confirmed Carroll’s car hadn’t returned. Back to the American accent.
The man who answered her knock was in his seventies, thin to the point of emaciation, but with bright, alert eyes. He looked her up and down and frowned. Maybe she’d overdone the outfit.
“Good morning, sir,” she said, imitating the accent she’d heard when she called Norton Ball’s office. “I’m sorry to bother you. If this isn’t a good time, I can come back.”
The politeness softened his frown. “No, it’s all right. What do you need?”
“I was wondering if you had a vacancy.”
“Got a couple. What size you looking for?”
“It’s just me, so not too big. I drove by the other day and saw that blue and white one in the first circle. Is it available?”
His mouth turned down. “No, sorry, it ain’t. Wish it was.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. A bad tenant?”
“Not bad, exactly. Just… I don’t know. Demanding. Oh, he was polite enough. Yes, sir. No, sir. All that. Pre-paid for six months. In cash.”
“Oh, my! Do you think he’s a drug dealer or something?”
“No, he’s too clean cut. You see, I hire the best cleaning company in town to come out and take care of the places after someone vacates. Costs a pretty penny. The tenant before him was a—excuse me—shitty excuse for a housewife. The place wasn’t filthy, just grimy, and those cleaners made it shine like new. That kid even said so when I showed him the place. What does he do on his first day there? Cleans it himself. Then, I see him throwing away the curtains that come with the place, and I tell him I’ll be taking that out of his security deposit. He said he’d washed them and they came apart in the wash. Said he’d replace them at his own cost. Yes, sir, you will, I told him. Anyone could see they weren’t the type of curtains you put in a washing machine. The next day I see new curtains in the windows, thick ones so you can’t see inside, and he stops by and shows me his K-Mart receipt. Promised he’d leave them behind when he leaves. Hmpf. We’ll see.”
Now, if everyone spilled their guts with so little prompting, my job would be easier, Mai thought. She remembered the curtains the man described—hung precisely, no drooping. The panels met perfectly in the center of the window and hadn’t allowed her binoculars a peek inside.
John Carroll preferred cleanliness and liked his privacy. What did he have in that trailer he wanted to keep private?
“Ki
ds these days,” the man said, with a snort. “No respect. Well, honey, that one’s not available for a while ‘cause his lease just started. I got one, same model, you can look at. The green one two circles away. Let me get the keys. You go look around and come back and tell me if you’re interested.”
He disappeared inside his trailer and emerged with a single key on a ring with a tag attached.
“Hand over your truck keys,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I been doing this a long time, missy. I give you the key, you run off and get it copied. You move in the middle of the night, and I don’t know no better. So, we trade keys.”
She gave him a little pout, but he was having none of it.
“You’re young,” he said, “and those jeans are too tight. A little exercise would do you good.”
How rude, she thought, but she swapped keys.
Inside the substitute trailer, she memorized the layout. Given the paucity of rooms, that didn’t take long. Satisfied she could find her way around it in the dark, she shut and re-locked the door. On the walk back, sweat pooled in her armpits, bra, and small of her back. Exercise needed, indeed.
A Laundromat sat in the center of the trailer park, an ancient drink machine outside it in the shade of a faded awning. Hoping it worked, Mai dug some coins from her pocket and went to it. No diet drinks, but despite the rental agent’s remark right now she didn’t care about the extra calories. She wanted something liquid and cold.
After a prolonged, ominous rumble, the machine disgorged a Sprite in a plastic bottle. Mai unscrewed the top and drank a third of it. Maybe the old man’s throat could use some additional lubricating. She bought another bottle for him.
When she made the offering, she thought he might cry. The renters probably only interacted with him to drop off a rent check, so she sat next to his trailer with him at a rickety table with an umbrella in its center. They talked for nearly an hour. She learned a little more about Carroll, but she heard all about the man’s long and interesting life.
She promised to think about the green trailer and drove back to the cool air of her hotel room.
A lukewarm shower rinsed the sweat away, and Mai lay across the bed with her laptop open to go back over her notes on Carroll’s military record and the conversation with Marcellus Block.
Elizabeth Drake had said a typical trait of these right-wing types was blaming others for their failures.
Mai found her notes on the part of the file dealing with Carroll’s resignation from special forces training. The resignation letter was succinct, citing his “diminished physical capabilities after a long deployment.” For a man who’d indicated on his enlistment application he wanted to be a Ranger, this had to be a bitter disappointment. Voluntarily dropping out meant the chance might be long in coming around again. But for a new pair of boots, the model soldier, the Bronze Star winner, got returned to his old billet at Fort Riley, Kansas.
Was it difficult for him to face his buddies knowing he’d failed? Did they rag him about it? Was the disappointment bitter enough he blamed the government?
Those were things the military file couldn’t tell her, and the only way she’d answer those questions was to talk to him.
Analysis had pulled together his driving record. No accidents, but he had a host of speeding tickets, all apparently paid because there were no bench warrants.
Social Security records showed after leaving the Army, he’d worked mostly minimum wage jobs at various spots throughout the middle of the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona. Right now, he was working in Kingman at a hardware store. The job in New York—the longest by several weeks—was as an armored car guard.
Armored car? Like The Order held up. She made a note to ask Analysis to look into armored car robberies in New York.
The job at the hardware store in Kingman was with another Army buddy, Lamar Duval, the slacker Marcellus Block had mentioned. One day, Mai had watched the hardware store. Carroll never emerged to smoke, but Duval did, twice an hour, every hour. She’d resisted the urge to go to the store, make some small purchase so she could see him in the flesh, but it was too soon. She needed to get deeper inside his head, find some common ground between him and her Siobhan Dochartaigh persona.
The day she’d watched the hardware store, she’d also followed them at the end of their shift. Carroll stayed for dinner at Duval’s trailer—in another part of town from his own. When she used her infrared mic on Duval’s residence, she heard Duval bitching about work and a woman screaming at a crying toddler. Carroll had said little but had picked up the crying child and soothed her into silence. Duval and his live-in girlfriend called Carroll Jay or J.T.
Carroll had left after dinner and visited a biker’s garage. Scruffy men and women guzzled beer as they worked on battered motorcycles. They were older men, with scraggly hair and beards and multiple tattoos. Carroll drank beer with them, listening intently to their stories without speaking much himself, but he’d pitched in to work on engines and mufflers.
Carroll was something of a freeloader, not much of a talker, and mechanically handy.
She’d followed him back to his trailer and wanted inside it more than ever. Her daytime surveillance had identified which trailer occupants had dogs, and her Irish luck was with her. None was close to Carroll’s. She’d also seen plenty of rifles on pick-up truck racks. Those carried openly would mean more inside the trailers. All she could hope for was Carroll to go on a date soon and vacate the trailer for a few hours. That was enough time.
Yet, her surveillance had noted something unusual for a man in his twenties. Carroll had brought no woman, nor man, back to the trailer. No phone calls asking for dates, no mention of a girlfriend. Was he on the rebound? Or was he the type of man who worked hard during the week and raised hell on the weekends? That didn’t fit the picture she’d drawn of his time in the Army. All the more reason to get inside the trailer.
The door to his trailer opened, and Carroll emerged. Mai brought her binoculars up. He had a beer in hand and sat on the top step of the small deck at the trailer’s entrance. The binoculars brought him close enough to touch. She saw the furrow in his brow as he peered into the encroaching twilight. She saw the sweat stains at the armpits of the hardware store shirt. He was thinner, his hair a bit longer from when she’d spotted him at Killeen. He finished his beer and went back inside. Mai put the binoculars aside for the infrared mic.
Water running. A shower. Indeterminate noises. A phone rang, and she caught his hurried footsteps as he went to answer.
“Yeah? No, I won’t make an excuse for you at work tomorrow. You work it out with him.”
Duval, but the mic didn’t pick up his side of the conversation.
“I want to leave later tonight. Midnight. I’m taking a nap so we can drive straight through to El Paso. What? Nine hours or so. Yeah, I do need to go. It’s the biggest gun show in that part of Texas. I need the extra cash. Yeah, I’ll come get you. Yeah. Yeah. Look, shut up and let me grab a nap. Yeah. See ya.”
He came close to slamming the receiver. Mai heard footsteps again and the creak of bedsprings. After a few minutes, light snoring made her switch off the mic.
Too bad Alexei had Natalia duty for a few more days because her father had delayed the visit. While Mai tossed Carroll’s trailer, Alexei could have tailed him to El Paso.
Were there gun show groupies? Was that how to approach him?
Maybe he didn’t go to gun shows for guns or right-wing propaganda but to pick up women.
Yes, a gun show was a perfect place to encounter Siobhan Dochartaigh. It fit the character of an IRA soldier on the outs. She’d be drawn to a place to procure guns with some ease.
But, first things first. She should go back to her hotel and get ready to do a little trailer park recce.
Mai almost rubbed her hands together. She did like a successful B&E.
43
Death Machine
Dressed in tactical black to blen
d with the near-moonless night, Mai detached herself from the cover of a tree and moved across the scrub to the dark, quiet trailer. Her boots soundless on the parched grass, she eyed the trailers on either side of Carroll’s. No lights. No movement. She jogged the rest of the way to the steps leading up to the blue and white structure.
She stopped and crouched when her weight on the first tread elicited a creak. No barking dogs. No lights coming on. Still crouching she came up onto the deck. So far, so good.
Unless Carroll had booby-trapped his residence.
In myriad hotel rooms around the world, she and Alexei had used tell-tales to show them if anyone had searched their rooms. Some people, however, rigged things to injure intruders. Once she picked the door’s lock, she could stand aside if he’d rigged a gun to shoot. She was out of luck if he’d placed a small bomb. Any other measures—coins on a door jamb, powder on the floor—she’d have to risk.
This lock was even less sophisticated than the one she’d picked at Calvary Locus. Mai was inside within seconds and closed the door behind her. Her dark-adapted eyes showed her it was the twin of the one she’d looked at earlier. The forty-foot expanse divided roughly into thirds: living/dining, kitchen/bath, and bedroom.
Not much furniture, well-used but serviceable: a sofa and chair, a two-chair dinette set. She flicked on her penlight with the red lens and cast the beam low along the floor. No powder to capture footprints, no trip wires.
No obvious paranoia. Yet.
Mai was surprised Carroll trusted his gun collection to the simple door lock. She crossed the room and knelt to examine them. Lined up with military precision, they were on the high-powered side, though her home arsenal was more formidable.
Carroll had a Colt AR-15A2 Sporter, 5.56 mm. She had an M-4 and an M-5.
His choice in shotguns was a Mossberg 500A 12-gauge. Alexei had a Remington 12-gauge; Mai a Beretta 20-gauge.
