“No it…” West hesitated. “It’s Special Agent West now.” She stopped. “Is your son… Is Billy here?”
“Billy?” Wheatley frowned. “No! Why would he be here? More to the point, why are you here?”
West hesitated so long that Black took over. He flipped open his ID and showed it to Wheatley.
“We have reason to believe your son may have some information regarding a bomb attack on a chemical facility last night. Is he here please?”
Sam Wheatley barely registered the ID. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry Sam, I know this is a shock,” West found her voice again. “It’s a shock to me as well, but my partner is correct. We do need to speak to him.”
There was a silence as Sam Wheatley looked at all of them, staring back at him, without friendly expressions on their faces.
“Well, like I said, he’s not here.”
“Where is he?” Black demanded at once.
“I don’t know, and if I did I don’t think I’d tell you.”
“Obstructing a federal investigation is a felony crime…” Black began, but West cut him off.
“Sam – could we maybe come inside? And talk about this. It may be there’s some mistake but we do have to get it cleared up.”
There was a silence while Sam Wheatley considered, but then he stepped back from blocking the door.
They all took a seat at a small kitchen table. Except Sam, who stayed standing.
“So what the hell is all this about then?”
No one answered him.
“Could you please tell us where Billy is? Is he still living here?”
“No.”
“No?”
“He’s at college.”
“College? He’s seventeen?”
“He’s a smart kid. They bumped him up a year.”
The officers exchanged glances at this.
“I see,” West was the one who spoke. “Which college?”
“Boston. Boston University. Why is this important?”
“And he’s there now, you believe?”
“Yeah. He is.”
“You have an address for him there?”
Sam Wheatley didn’t move for a while, but then he started rummaging in a pile of paperwork on the work top. Eventually he found what he was looking for, a letter with the letterhead of the BU Accommodation office. It listed a room let out to one B. Wheatley.
“You mind if we keep this?”
Sam shrugged. “You mind telling me what this is all about?”
“OK.” West met his eyes and nodded slowly. “OK.” She said again, then took a deep breath.
“My partner and I have been investigating a series of bomb attacks on chemical plants within the eastern states. The latest one took place last night, and your son’s fingerprint was found on shards of metal from the bomb.”
Sam was silent, then after a while he laughed. “Bullshit.”
“The company in question is called Fonchem,” West went on. “I understand Billy was engaged in some form of protest against it?” She indicated toward the pile of papers where he had fished out the letter from the accommodation office. On the top was a small poster that said in large letters: SAVE OUR SEA-DRAGONS. Below it, in a smaller font, were the words. Stop Fonchem. Sam Wheatley stopped laughing.
“Fonchem?”
“Yes.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and his lips even moved, but no sound came out. Then he turned away. When he looked back his face was resolute again. Determined.
“No. There’s no way Billy would do anything like that. No way on earth.”
“We think the bomber is a committed environmentalist. With an agenda to force these companies to reduce their impact. Cut their waste. That sort of thing. I know Billy was very keen on marine animals. He sent me a lot of stuff about it. Papers he was writing.”
Sam Wheatley just stared at her.
“What’s he studying Sam? What subject is he doing at college?”
His jaw jutted out before he answered. “Biology. Marine Biology.”
A few minutes later, Black asked the police lieutenant to sit with Wheatley, and took West outside.
“Look Jess, I don’t know quite what’s going on here, but we need to send a team to his student address. Right now!”
She didn’t answer. But after a moment she nodded, only the action was so slight her partner didn’t notice it.
“He’s seventeen, we’ve seen he’s got a grudge against the company, and his goddamn fingerprint was on a bomb fragment. That’s enough to convict, let alone arrest him!”
“I agree.” West snapped back. “I just… I just don’t understand, that’s all.”
“Look,” Black tried changing his tone. “Remember the psych analysis we had done? Said the bomber or bombers was most likely interested in environmental causes, and of above average intelligence? This kid is at college a year early. Everything fits. You might not like it, but it fits.”
“I said yes OK? Phone it in. Get a team there to pick him up.” West stopped suddenly.
“What?”
“Well if he’s here, setting bombs on Lornea Island, then he isn’t going to be there, is he?” Her eyes widened as her mind started working. “Get onto the port, the ferry companies. We need to stop him if he tries to leave the island.”
Two hours later and a report came through. Two cars had gone to pick up Billy Wheatley at the address given by his father, Sam Wheatley. And while he was registered to that address, and his housemates confirmed he did live there, he was away at the time, and none of them had seen him for a couple of days. Black snapped down the phone, inside the Newlea Police station where they were now waiting.
“They say where he was going?”
“No. They didn’t know. Said he was a bit of a loner. Didn’t tell them where he went.”
Black formed his hand into a fist and squeezed. He looked at West. He began pacing up and down.
“OK.” West said. She looked resigned to something she didn’t want to do.
“We need to put out a public alert. We need to pick him up, wherever he is.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The alert went out as a photograph of Billy Wheatley, taken from records the police already kept – along with a plea for anyone who had seen him to contact a hotline without delay. The number actually reached the switchboard in Newlea police station, in the center of the island, but any credible sightings would be routed immediately to the two FBI agents. For their part, they went to have a very late lunch, West seeking out a diner she vaguely remembered from her earlier stay in the town.
But though they got there, and even ordered food, they never got to eat it. Just as the waitress had left their table Black’s cell phone went. He barked his name, then listened for a moment, then he covered the microphone and relayed the information to West.
“We’ve found him. Ferry company says he drove onto the afternoon sailing.”
“Shit. Has it sailed yet?”
Black asked the question. His face hardened at the answer.
“It’s gone. An hour ago. But it hasn’t docked yet. The boat’s still sailing. He’s on the ferry now.”
West looked pained. “When’s it due in?”
“Forty minutes.” They stared at each other for a long moment.
“Can we get that plane again?” Black asked, not entirely seriously.
“I’ll try.” West pulled out her cellphone and started dialing. At the same time she kept talking. “Phone the ferry company back, get them to slow the boat down – say they’ve got engine trouble, say they’re sinking. Anything to slow them down. I’ll get us there.”
Thirty minutes later they were at the island’s small airfield, and by a combination of offering a large sum of FBI budget, and sheer luck, had managed to commandeer a helicopter and a rather elderly looking pilot, who had taken a painfully long time to climb into his flight suit, and wipe the condensation from the inside of the chopper’s winds
hield. But he was now finally pouring power into the aircraft’s main engines. They lifted off, circled once – needlessly, as far as West could tell – and then finally started moving eastwards towards the sea, and the mainland beyond. They flew low over the water, and West spent the entire flight scanning below them for the ferry, while Black coordinated the welcome committee on the ground.
“We can land in the port,” Black shouted at the pilot, as the sprawl of Boston began to fill the view in front of them. “They’ve cleared space.” He turned, and continued only to West, having to shout loud to be heard above the noise of the motor.
“We’ve got four agents heading there now. They’re minutes away.”
“Has the boat docked?”
“I can’t get them on the phone.” He checked his watch. “It was due in ten minutes ago.”
They both scanned the water below them, looking cold and grey in the winter light.
“There!” West said, as they rapidly closed upon the land, and the much larger docks here on the mainland. A small car ferry was turning around, almost at its berth now, only minutes away from docking.
“Shit.” Black said. “We’re not going to make it.”
“We better.” West replied.
They landed on the harbor-side, and almost before the two agents had climbed out, the pilot saluted, and then lifted off again. But neither West nor Black even saw him as they were busy bundling into two black saloon cars that drove them to where the ferry was now edging sideways into its berth.
From ground level it didn’t look so small. It was the type with a bow that lifted up to allow cars to drive on board. West remembered it from her earlier trip to the island, years before. She directed one pair of agents to wait by the foot passenger exit, a gangway that was hoisted onto the ship as it was tethered to the dockside. West and Black, and the other pair of agents, waited on either side of the off-ramp at the bow, ready to stop each car as it drove off. With a series of shouts and clangs, the ship settled into her berth, and the bow was raised. Black went to work with the ferry dockhands, giving them instructions to allow the vehicles out slowly, one by one. As they exited the ferry, expecting to drive out of the port and away, they were instead stopped by the FBI agents, who checked the license plates, examined the faces of the passengers, and searched to make sure Wheatley hadn’t snuck onboard the vehicles. It was slow going, and no one was pleased for the interruption to the normal docking procedure.
Three long hours later, the line of vehicles waiting to exit the ship had dwindled and finally stopped.
But none of them had contained Billy Wheatley.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
West got on the phone to the other agents, by the foot passenger exit, but they’d seen nothing. The only people who had used the gangway to exit were two little old ladies, and they’d spoken to them, just in case they were a seventeen year old kid in disguise. They weren’t. Then she saw Black waving his arms at her from inside the steel cavern of the ferry’s interior.
“He’s still on board. His car’s here.”
Issuing instructions that the other agents should continue to monitor the ways off the ferry, West hurried aboard, and caught up with Black by a single car that remained inside.
“They take license plates when they come aboard. This is the plate he registered when he made the booking. He must have seen us stopping the cars. He’s still aboard.”
“OK.” West looked around, relieved to have an answer to the boy’s whereabouts. She nodded. “OK, we’re going to have to search it then.”
Black relayed the news to the ferry operator that their return sailing was going to be delayed even longer, West redeployed the other agents to search the ferry. Within twenty minutes a ten strong team were working with the ferry staff, going through all the different decks examining any space that a seventeen year old could hide. Half an hour later, another thirty agents joined the search.
In the meantime an FBI vehicle recovery truck drove onto the boat and lifted Wheatley’s car onto its back, wrapped it in tarpaulin, and took it away to the Agency’s Chelsea offices. West watched, her phone ringing every ten minutes as the ferry company implored her to finish the operation and let them get back to work. Outside, on the dock, she could see the lines of cars and trucks, their journeys interrupted by what she was doing. And still the search teams found nothing.
In the end they did three complete sweeps.
“He’s not on here Jess,” Black said, after the third was complete. They were standing on the open air deck, an iron railing the only thing protecting them from the ferry’s slab side drop down sixty feet into black harbor water.
“How sure are you? There’s a hundred places to hide on this boat.”
“And we’ve searched them all. He’s not here.”
West suddenly snapped. “Then where the hell is he?” She ran her fingers through her hair, and turned to her partner, meaning to apologize, but there was no need.
“Look, we know he got on. And we got here before the ship docked. We searched every car, so there’s no way he got off early. And we have searched every inch of this boat, and he’s not on it. So that leaves one option…”
She breathed hard, and then lifted her head to look at him. “What’s that?”
“You notice the TVs in the café? Tuned to a local news channel. It’s been on the whole time we’ve been searching. Three times while we’ve been on board, it’s shown the appeal for information. So if he was on here, he’d have seen it.
“What if the security guard’s death was an accident? What if this Billy isn’t such a bad kid, like you’ve been saying, and this whole thing just went horribly wrong? What if he saw we were on to him, and he knew there was only one way out?” Black looked up and outwards, back towards the open water where the ferry had come from. Then he looked down again, at the sixty foot drop to the water below.
“What if he just jumped off?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
West insisted on one final search of the ferry, before calling the agents off and releasing the boat back to the control of the operator, which let the frustrated crowd of new passengers back on. But still she stayed, from a position that allowed her to watch both the bow doors and the foot passenger gangway. Yet still there was no sign of a teenager trying to sneak off. Eventually, seven hours delayed, the ship’s horn blared out, and with a volley of shouts, the mooring lines were cast off. On board there were still four agents, with instructions to blend in with the passengers, and keep an eye out just in case Wheatley had somehow managed to evade the searches of the ship. And when it did finally dock on Lornea, in the small hours of the morning now, it would again be met by local police, checking every car.
West herself met Black early the next morning, at the FBI regional headquarters in Chelsea. There had been no reports of Wheatley during the night, and the ferry had finally been allowed to continue its normal operations. However, a request for CCTV images had turned up a hit. West and Black gathered around a monitor as a series of images were emailed across. They came from a camera covering the check-in booth for vehicles at the Lornea Island dock. The system was old, and mostly meant for show, to dissuade tourists who had to queue to leave the island from yelling at the ferry staff. But still, it showed a jumpy black and white clip of Wheatley’s car arriving and a lone occupant presenting a ticket. West froze it when the face was briefly upturned and pointing towards the camera.
“Is that him?” Black had a print out of the photograph they had used on the appeal for information in his hands, and he looked from one to the other. “It could be,” he answered his own question.
There was a slightness of stature, to both images, and after replaying the clip several times, they concluded that if it wasn’t Wheatley, it had to be his twin brother. West stared at it a long time, trying to reconcile how the slight, precocious eleven-year-old she had known, had turned into this young man.
“Doesn’t change anything.” Black said. “We kn
ew he got on. And we know he didn’t get off.”
They spoke to the Coastguard, which confirmed that there had been no reports of a body floating in the waters between Lornea and the mainland, but also that there rarely was, on the not infrequent occasions that someone went into the water from a vessel, either by accident or design. The problem was the depth of the water, and the currents, which tended to pull a body out to sea, not onto the land.
“Could he have swum ashore?” West asked, already knowing the likely answer. She had a history as a competitive swimmer, so had no particular issue imagining someone fit and healthy covering the distance, even if they’d gone in midway between the island and the mainland. But she knew the distance wasn’t the main issue.
“It’s forty two degrees in the water right now,” the coastguard agent replied. “Without a wetsuit, or survival suit, you’re looking at half-an-hour absolute maximum, but it’s much more likely that the cold would slow down the muscles quicker than that. People think they can swim, but their arms and legs just stop working. We’ve seen people drown in just a few minutes. And that’s if he didn’t black out when he went over the side of the ferry.”
West ran her hands through her hair again, and was only dimly aware of Black putting a cup of coffee on her desk.
The car was an enigma. There were no records showing any vehicles registered in Wheatley’s name – though he did have a license to drive. And running the license plates from the car recovered from the ferry quickly showed it be a rental from a small car hire firm in Boston. Their records showed it had been rented three days previously under the name of Hans Hass, aged twenty-five-years old. According to state and federal records, Mr Hass didn’t actually exist.
“Hans Hass?” Black said, as they pondered this discovery. “Weird name. Do you think it could be an anagram?” He grabbed a blank piece of paper, and wrote the letters down in a large circle, and started trying different combinations. West watched him for a few moments, then turned back to her computer, where she typed the name into the search bar of her web browser.
The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4) Page 15
