Checkmate_The Bowers Files

by Steven James

  I crossed the room and picked up the helicopter.

  The other day Lien-hua had asked me about pain, about what haunts me the most, and I’d said it was the pain I wasn’t able to stop.

  Like today.

  With Corrine.

  And like on Monday when I couldn’t stop Stu from bleeding to death.

  I spun and threw the helicopter against the wall.

  The toy shattered, spraying shards of splintered plastic across the carpet. And there, right before me, they became lives, shattered lives, just like that little boy’s, now strewn across Kurt Mason’s path as he moved forward with his plan, the one that he’d told me would have its climax tomorrow night.

  The hotel room door opened up and Ralph came in. He saw me standing there with the broken plastic parts lying on the floor in front of me.

  “It didn’t help, did it?” he said quietly.

  “No. It didn’t.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  “Listen, I don’t know if this is the best time to bring this up, but I just had an interesting talk with Brin. She started having contractions, but she hasn’t gone to the hospital yet. She’d rather stay at the house as long as she can.”

  “So it may be a while?”

  “Could be. Or it could be quick—a couple hours. Really, it’s different for every woman. But either way it looks like I’m being called back home.”

  He pulled out his laptop and went online to check flight times, and a few minutes later announced, “So, there’s a flight to Dulles at nine fifty-nine and a ten fifteen to National.”

  It was already nearly nine thirty. “That’s not going to happen, Ralph.”

  “Yeah. Let me check for the morning.”

  He tapped at the keys. “Alright, we’re looking at a seven fifteen to National or an eight twenty-two to Dulles. Let me see if there’s room on either of them. I think I’ll call ’em—maybe they won’t charge us full fare because of the circumstances with the baby on her way. Save the Bureau a few bucks.”

  We’d flown out of Dulles and his car was there in long-term parking, but if he flew into National he could always make arrangements to have someone pick him up.

  He switched from his computer to his phone.

  It took a little while before he was able to speak to an actual person. Finally, I heard him asking if that was really the earliest flight they had room on; then he was giving his credit-card information to the person on the other end of the line and confirming his aisle seat on the eight twenty-two flight.

  End call.

  “I gotta head back, man,” he told me. “For Brin.”

  “Ralph, you don’t have to explain anything to me. Believe me, I understand.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “Maybe I’m just saying it for myself.”

  “Look, when you get some free time in the next couple days—I mean when Brin and the baby are sleeping—you can always work on the case from there in DC on your laptop, or you can make some calls, help coordinate things.”

  He seemed lost in his thoughts.

  “What time do you need to be at the airport?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t have any bags to check, just carry-on. I’d say as long as I’m there an hour or so before the flight we should be good.”

  One of the advantages of being an FBI agent: You can get through security without having to wait in long lines.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll leave here at seven just to be on the safe side.”

  57

  Louisville, Kentucky

  Richard Devin Basque was hunting when he heard the news about his sister.

  For the last two months he had restrained himself from acting on his urges. He’d been out to meet women, yes, had even brought a few home with him—yes, he had. But ever since the night Patrick had shot him, Richard had not killed anyone, not eaten anyone, not even forced anyone to come back to his place against her will.

  He’d heard about a magician who’d died from cobra venom while trying an elaborate escape in the Philippines last winter and it had made him curious. Consequently, he’d become interested in cobra venom—it was surprising how easy it was to acquire.

  Monocled cobra venom and ten vials of antivenom.

  Ordered online.

  Who would have thought?

  But he hadn’t used it on anyone yet. It would have made it impossible to eat them afterward.

  It was true that he’d been bold in his visit to the Supermax facility in Colorado to help free a prisoner there, and he’d needed cosmetic work done on his teeth since Patrick had shattered some of them when they fought in April, but other than that he’d made sure he didn’t leave any tracks that Bowers or his team would be able to pick up.

  Now he was at a roadside bar twenty minutes from the place he was staying.

  He wasn’t sure if he was going to kill the woman he was sitting next to—the woman who’d told him her name was Tiffany—and he wasn’t sure if he was going to eat her.

  He really didn’t know. Maybe it was time to end his streak.

  Hunting.

  Predator and prey.

  He bought her another drink.

  Richard was in his early forties but looked a decade younger, with stunning aquamarine eyes that he had learned to use to his advantage. He had some scars from an encounter with a young woman who’d lit his hair on fire, but they only served to make him look more rugged and stalwart. Picking up women had never been a problem for him. Sometimes he chose a disguise. Tonight he had not.

  The place was veritably empty: only the bartender, Richard, and the woman.

  Prey.

  A television mounted on the wall behind the bartender was broadcasting some highlights from a baseball game earlier that night.

  “And then . . .” Tiffany was telling Richard a story about how she got her apartment, “I was, like, are you serious? Seven hundred fifty dollars a month? That’s it? I’m telling you, you should see the place.”

  “I’d like to.”

  She laughed lightly at that. “Maybe I’ll let you come over and take a peek.” As she reached for her drink she brushed her arm against his. “That is, if you have a little time to kill.”

  The irony of what she’d said was not lost on him. “Actually, I do have a little time to kill.”

  Playing things right, he might have taken her hand in his, but that’s when it happened.

  The sports show went to commercial and the bartender tapped at the remote, surfing through the channels: sitcom reruns, more commercials, news, another game somewhere, some sort of science fiction movie with exploding space ships and—

  Hang on.

  “Hey,” Richard said to the bartender. “Flip back a minute. Please.”

  The guy, early twenties, disinterested, reversed order and paused at the game.

  “Keep going.”

  One more channel—the news.

  “Yes. There.”

  The bartender set down the remote and started absently drying some glasses that didn’t need to be dried.

  CNN was covering a developing story about a woman who had been killed that afternoon in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  But people get killed every day and don’t make it onto the news.

  This woman, however, was special, memorable, newsworthy. Because of who she was related to.

  She was the sister of one of the most wanted men in the country.

  Apparently, she’d been missing for the past couple of days.

  Richard didn’t watch the news much. He hadn’t heard. He just—

  Her name was Corrine Davis.

  His sister.

  And they were saying that she was dead, but that couldn’t be right.

  No, she couldn’t be dead. They had to have the wrong person. She was okay.


  Corrine was fine.

  But then, they were reporting that Kurt Mason had killed her, that he was the leading suspect in an explosion earlier in the week that’d taken the lives of five FBI agents, and that he was also the prime suspect in a related homicide of an agent at his home in the DC area.

  Kurt Mason was the man Richard had helped escape from prison. Richard had posed as his lawyer and smuggled the Mikrosil in to him, gotten him the paper clip he’d used to pick the lock on his cuffs.

  They’d been in touch twice since that day and Richard knew of Kurt’s plan for this weekend.

  But nothing had ever come up regarding his sister.

  She’s not dead. No. She can’t be.

  “What are you . . . ?” Tiffany’s voice was stark and strained with concern. “Are you okay?”

  He looked at her, then down to where she was staring, at his hand. He’d crushed the beer glass he was holding and the shards were digging into his palm. Beer had splattered across the bar and onto his pants and blood was seeping out around the jagged glass that was embedded in his flesh, but it all seemed so unreal. He hadn’t even noticed.

  Beer. Blood. Glass in his palms.

  She’s dead?

  Not Corrine.

  She can’t be.

  Patrick Bowers’s name came up on the broadcast. That was not entirely surprising, but it was informative.

  Richard noticed the bartender peering at him with concern, but also with a hint of admiration. “I’ve never seen anyone . . . Dude. That’s sick.”

  He handed over the towel he’d been using and Richard wrapped it around his hand.

  Tiffany just stared at him. “Are you alright?”

  “Yes.” His attention was on the television screen, and now he watched as his own face came up—the most recent photo the FBI had of him, taken in April after Patrick had apprehended him at his home an hour outside of Washington, DC. It was the photo that’d been taken right before he escaped from FBI custody.

  Your sister is dead, Richard.

  Corrine is dead.

  “Randy?” The woman was waving her hand in front of his face, using the name he’d given her. “Are you sure you’re . . .”

  But then her gaze shifted past him to the television screen.

  His picture was still up there.

  It took only a moment for recognition to light up in her eyes, and when the bartender saw her staring at the screen, he glanced up there too, then at Richard.

  His hand snuck beneath the bar.

  Richard stood.

  “Hey, buddy,” the guy said. “Hang on a sec.”

  Richard was turning toward the door when the bartender whipped out a shotgun that’d been hidden under the bar. “I said hang on. That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Richard stopped and faced him. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “There’s a reward, isn’t there?” He was pointing the barrel directly at Richard’s chest. Less than ten feet separated them. “I’m guessing there’s a reward.”

  Tiffany was still seated but looked dismayed, confused, overwhelmed.

  Afraid.

  Richard unwrapped the towel and laid it on the bar. He pried a large piece of glass loose from his palm, licked the blood off it, then set it on the towel.

  Both the bartender and the woman watched him in dead silence.

  “I’m going to walk out of here now.” He pulled another piece of glass loose. “Don’t try to stop me.”

  And another.

  Licked the blood off them both.

  “Call the police if you want,” he said, “but I would suggest you don’t try to follow me.”

  When the bartender spoke he seemed intimidated, even though he was the one who was armed. “I have a gun.”

  “Yes,” Richard said simply, then he turned to go.

  Corrine is dead.

  Mason did this.

  The bartender called out once for him to come back, but his voice cracked as he did. Richard walked out the front door to his car.

  Every FBI agent and police officer in the state of North Carolina was going to be looking for Kurt Mason and, even knowing what Richard did about him and about what he had planned, it wasn’t going to be easy to track him down before the authorities did.

  Charlotte.

  From here it would be at least a seven-hour drive.

  No, Richard hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t eaten anyone since April.

  But that was about to change.

  As soon as he found the man who had murdered his sister.

  58

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  Kurt Mason, dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck in order to blend in with the night, eased out of the underbrush near the tracks where M343 was going to come through tomorrow afternoon on its way from Spartanburg to High Point.

  He made sure he remained in the shadows.

  The stadium loomed above him on his left, and ahead of him the I-277 overpass spanned the tracks.

  Tomorrow that overpass would crumble when the concrete foundations supporting it gave way.

  Explosives on the tracks would have been far too easy to detect. Instead there was a pressurized sensor that would send the radio signal to the detonator located in the capped-off mine underground nearby.

  He’d thought about using Astrolite. The idea of using a liquid explosive that could be sprayed onto the ground and was nearly undetectable was attractive to him, but he eventually abandoned the idea when he realized how hard it was going to be to obtain the material.

  Semtex was much more available. Just like C-4, which he’d used before, it was relatively easy to mold, safe to transport, and surprisingly available if you knew where to look.

  Kurt had consulted the U.S. Army Special Forces Handbook that he’d found on the Internet. The book wasn’t as detailed as FM 3-34.214, the Army’s Explosives and Demolitions manual, but it did include a helpful chapter on rail cuts and derailing trains.

  Using the information from the two publications, and taking into consideration the location and layout of the mines, he’d figured out what he considered to be the most effective placement for the Semtex.

  The railroads transported nearly two million bulk shipments of hazardous materials every year. More than seventy percent of hazardous materials shipped in North America were shipped by rail. Some trains were made up almost entirely of hazmat cars. They went through our cities unnoticed.

  Until, of course, a spill occurred.

  A six-axle locomotive weighed about two hundred tons and most loaded tank cars only weighed about a hundred-thirty tons. And there was also a mandate that when a line was transporting hazardous material, there had to be five buffer cars between loaded hazmat cars and the closest engine.

  Kurt had taken all that into consideration when placing the sensors in the ballast under the tracks.

  There were three engines on M343, and when the lead engine hit the pressurized sensors it would trigger the mechanism and, based on the speed the train would be going at this point in its route, the Semtex that was in the mine shafts that ran alongside and underneath the railroad bed would blow just as the anhydrous ammonia tanker cars passed.

  As the shafts and tunnels that interlaced a stretch of ground as large as a city block collapsed, the entire area would fragment, and when those tanker cars full of anhydrous ammonia ruptured, the vapor cloud would be enormous.

  It would fill the open air stadium and, with the overpass taken out in the explosion, the authorities wouldn’t be able to evacuate the area quickly enough to save the people inside.

  The real-life application of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, limits: inhale 150 parts per million of anhydrous ammonia, you’ll experience irritation in the eyes and throat. At 300 ppm there’s imm
ediate danger to a person’s health. The more concentration you have, the more discomfort you’ll have until, as you approach 1,000 ppm, victims’ eyes will swell shut and they’ll struggle for breath. Bronchial spasms start at 1,500 ppm, and at 5,000 ppm, pulmonary edema will cause death within minutes.

  The tank cars could each hold 35,000 gallons, but to account for heat expansion they were usually filled to about 85 percent so there would be a vapor space above the liquid.

  But still, Kurt was looking at potentially releasing more than three hundred thousand gallons of liquefied, compressed anhydrous ammonia into Uptown Charlotte.

  In the stadium, there would be mass panic as people became blinded and tried to breathe but choked on the vapor. Depending on the turnout for Fan Celebration Day and the wind and weather conditions, tens of thousands of people might be inhaling 4000-5000 ppm.

  But it’d never been about a big body count to him. However many people died, one or ten thousand, it’d always been about the bigger story that was being told.

  It all had to do with those four statues at Independence Square.

  Now, Kurt used the handheld sensor to check the transmission signal and dialed the timer to 3:15 p.m. so the next engine after that to cross the track would set off the detonators. No trains other than M343 were scheduled to cross that section of track between 2:30 and 5:00 p.m.

  It only took a few minutes to verify the readings.

  Yes.

  It was set.

  All was in place.

  Tomorrow afternoon the train would come through, right around the time of the scrimmage game’s kickoff. The track would blow. And the story would move on from there to its final act.

  PART IV

  M343

  59

  Saturday, August 3

  7:30 a.m.

  8 hours until kickoff

  I pulled up to the curb in front of the check-in and ticketing counters for American Airlines. For some reason, traffic was heavy and it had held us up a little, but it looked like Ralph would still be good for his flight.

  As we exited the car to get his suitcase from the trunk, he got word that Brin was having regular contractions and had started to have a little bleeding. “So you’re at the hospital?” he said. “Four centimeters? Why didn’t you call earlier?”