Checkmate

by Steven James

  So that’s what he was here to do.

  Every tank car has top and bottom shelf couplers, which basically means that they won’t pop loose, and if one car derails, the car attached to it will as well. Railway companies considered it safer than having a coupler come loose during a derailment and puncture the head shield of the tanker behind it.

  And that meant those tankers would all go down together.

  Which was exactly what Kurt wanted to have happen.

  After making sure the coast was clear, he closed the angle cocks behind one of the buffer cars near the head of the train and then returned to the woods to stay out of sight as he picked his way back nearly a mile through the undergrowth to close another angle cock five cars in from the end of the six-thousand-foot train.

  65

  11:30 a.m.

  4 hours until kickoff

  Over the past hour and a half, I’d pored over countless surveying maps from railroad and mining companies from the last two centuries and even located a few land deeds and shareholding documents of gold mines from the area.

  And, frustratingly, I didn’t really have a whole lot to show for all that effort.

  Here’s what I knew: The Rudisill Mine was larger than the Saint Catherine and was mined over the course of more than a century. When gold was discovered there in 1825, the area was still outside of the city. Charlotte grew up around it as people began to settle closer and closer to the mine.

  According to some documents, Saint Catherine had shafts that sank down 450 feet, while the deepest Rudisill shaft was 350 feet. However, according to one map, a shaft in the Rudisill mine actually dropped 650 feet.

  Based on the effort that Mason had gone through to locate and access the mine shaft and his words to me about the climax happening tonight, I figured that the secret to what he had planned was there, somewhere, in the Rudisill–St. Catherine Mine system.

  Solving crimes isn’t so much a process of gathering information as it is sorting through data and trying to discern which facts are pertinent and which are just static, or, worse, distractions.

  And that’s something I was uncertain about now: what, of all the information spread out before me, was static, what was distraction, and what was essential information.

  Professor O’Brien found a newspaper article from 1906 that showed the location of some Saint Catherine mine shafts near the railroad underpass close to the Bank of America Stadium. There were numerous tunnels slithering out in a southwesterly direction toward West Summit Avenue, but it wasn’t clear what depths they were at or where they met up with the Rudisill tunnels.

  I spent some time searching through the library’s digital card-catalog system, trying different search terms and combinations to see what I could come up with. Eventually I found a 2005 map titled “Old Gold Mines in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina: A Potential Geologic Hazard for Development.”

  Okay, that caught my attention.

  Call number NC C8 3:061 05-05. The map’s authors were Jeffrey C. Reid, Michael A. Medina, and Andy J. Goretti. There were two places listed for where the map might be located and neither was here in the special collections area.

  The first was on the fourth floor in the Atkins North Carolina documents section, but when I searched there I didn’t find it. So I went to the other location listed, in the maps room on the second floor.

  And that’s where I located it: a large laminated map nearly a meter wide and just as long.

  I read the abstract:

  Abandoned gold mines were geospatially located in the southwest of the Charlotte city center using historic documents and rediscovered engineering geology reports. The mines and mine workings comprise the Rudisill-St. Catherine’s trace of gold mining that ceased nearly 100 years ago.

  Geospatial compilation of these features can be of considerable assistance to planning large excavations and foundations as the Charlotte city center expands to the southwest and replaces the current warehouse district that is built over these old mine workings.

  Today there is limited evidence of previous gold mining except for street names. However, historic reports and rediscovered engineering reports show excavations of considerable extent that underlie warehouses, commercial structures, major transportation corridors and numerous property parcels.

  The rediscovered engineering geology reports identify areas as large as a city block that are so honeycombed below ground from mining to be a concern in land transfer.

  Site-specific geotechnical and/or engineering studies are likely to be required on individual property parcels. Mapped features in this study should be considered approximate.

  The map showed the location of sixty-three shafts in a line that stretched from just west of the stadium in a northeasterly direction, then down past the intersection of Mint and Summit to the southwest.

  There were overlays of some of the horizontal tunnels, but details of the tunnels’ actual layout was limited. One of the shafts was directly under the parcel of land where the old textile mill was.

  Mason found this map.

  That’s how he located that shaft.

  If Ingersoll and his team were able to use that ground-penetrating radar in conjunction with the information on this map, they should have the data they needed to detail the layout of the Rudisill–St. Catherine Mine system.

  Though it wasn’t perfect, this was something that I definitely wanted to get to Ingersoll right away.

  O’Brien agreed to keep looking through the documents that we’d pulled up and then, in the afternoon, head over to the main branch of the library Uptown to see what he could find there.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  He gave me his cell number in case I needed to contact him.

  Every library has certain books and materials on reserve that you’re not supposed to check out, and this map fell in that category. Right now, however, we needed it on-site, so I came up with my own checkout policy—I would walk out the door with it and return it when the team didn’t need it anymore.

  Good enough for me.

  It sounded like a policy Tessa might have come up with.

  I rolled up the map, tucked it under my arm, and assured the librarian working the front desk that we would take good care of it.

  As I was walking to the car, I checked my texts and saw that Ralph had made it to the hospital and that Brin’s contractions were becoming more frequent. Baby this afternoon! he typed.

  I texted back asking if he and Brineesha had decided on a name yet, and he responded that they were still going back and forth between Shanelle and Tryphena.

  Shanelle: Gracious beauty.

  Tryphena: Delicate.

  I liked them both; I wasn’t sure which one I preferred. Trying to decide between them, I climbed into my car and left for Third Ward.

  + + +

  Kurt Mason finished with the second angle cock. He disappeared into the woods again and started to make his way to his car so he could return to the house in Charlotte, where he would monitor the train’s progress on his laptop by surreptitiously logging in to the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch center.

  + + +

  Ingersoll met up with me outside the warehouse.

  I spread out the map on the hood of one of the cruisers parked nearby and we studied it carefully.

  “This is good,” he said. “We’re still taking radar readings. The ground isn’t ideal for the equipment, but along with this map, it should give us enough info to start clearing those shafts. If all goes well I’d say we’ll be able to get rolling by this evening.”

  “Great.”

  I called Voss to check on things and found out he was at police headquarters, working on some joint task force issues. Since I was still wondering if he might possibly be more of the problem here in dealing with the CMPD than the solution, I phoned t
he police chief and, without mentioning any names, made sure there were no issues I needed to be aware of.

  It sounded like, at least for the time being, things were on track.

  After the call, I headed to the Field Office to update the case files with what I’d learned at the UNC Charlotte library.

  66

  A few minutes ago I’d grabbed a sandwich in the Field Office’s rather meager cafeteria. Now, it was almost quarter after twelve and I was seated by myself in a vacant conference room on the first floor. I was thinking about how Mason might have known which people to text at the NCAVC back on Monday, when a young agent tapped on the door and leaned his head in.

  “Agent Bowers?”

  “Yes?”

  “Phone call.”

  I expected it would be word from Ralph or Lien-hua about Brineesha and her baby, but then I realized they would most likely have contacted me through my cell phone.

  “Who is it?”

  “Says it’s Loudon Caribes.”

  A chill settled into my gut.

  “What did you just say?”

  He looked at me strangely. “The guy. He said his name is Loudon Caribes. You know him?”

  That was one of the aliases Richard Basque had used. Caribes was the root word for “cannibal.”

  “I might.”

  Of course, just because someone was using that name didn’t mean for certain that it was Basque, but there weren’t too many people who knew about it and I couldn’t think of anybody other than Basque who would call me, claiming to be Loudon.

  The young agent looked like he was impatient to get back to his desk. “You want me to tell him you’re not available or—”

  “No, no.” I stood. “Can you trace the call?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  Though the Bureau strives for uniformity, the ability to trace calls and the available technology differs by Field Office. “How long do I need to keep him on the line?”

  “Twenty seconds or so, once we patch into it.”

  That’ll work.

  There was no phone in this room.

  “Where can I take the call?” I asked him.

  “You can use my office. Follow me.”

  We went halfway down the hall and he led me to his desk. He was about to pick up the receiver when I said, “I’ll want this recorded as well.”

  He used his cell to contact the Cyber unit to tell them to record and trace the call; then he picked up the handset, tapped the blinking button, and handed the phone to me. He hesitated for a moment, as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to stay in the room, but finally left and eased the door shut behind him.

  I held the phone to my ear. “Hello, Loudon.”

  “Hello, Patrick.” It was Basque’s voice “There’s something we need to talk about.”

  67

  Though I wanted to keep him talking for as long as possible, he was too smart for games and gimmicks, so I just told him, “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  Yes, Richard was a man that I wanted to find, wanted to bring in, wanted to take down. Yes, he was the person who’d tried to kill Lien-hua and Tessa, but what I told him was true: I did feel sorry that Corrine, an innocent woman, was dead.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Just hearing his voice brought back a stream of memories, and none of them were good. Bodies. Crime scenes. The look in the eyes of family members when we told them what had happened to their loved ones. The tears. The screams.

  But maybe the hardest response of all to see: those blank, disbelieving stares. And then you had to repeat the news and things just got harder from there. I couldn’t afford to forget for one second who I was talking with right now or what he had done.

  And despite how I felt about speaking to him, I needed to keep him on the line.

  “I know you cared about Corrine,” I said. “That the two of you were close.”

  “Yes, we were. From what they’re saying on the news, you tried to save her.”

  I’d done my best to keep my name out of the reports, but it’d leaked out. It seemed like a lot of stuff was leaking to the press lately.

  “I tried to.” I didn’t want to be talking about this. It only reminded me of my failure to get to Corrine in time, my failure to stop Kurt Mason. “Where are you, Richard?”

  “I helped him escape from prison.”

  “I know.”

  “So that means Corrine’s death is also partly my fault. If I hadn’t done that, she would still be alive today.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. He had a point in a butterfly-effect sort of way, as Tessa might say.

  On the other hand, Richard hadn’t made the decision to kill Corrine—that was all Mason’s doing. So how much responsibility should he really bear for his sister’s death?

  It wasn’t an easy question.

  He went on, “I’m guessing you’re not the only one listening to this call, are you?”

  There was no reason to lie. “No.”

  “And we’re being recorded?”

  “Yes.”

  Certainly they’ll have the call traced by now. Certainly this is long enough. Richard must know that. Something else is up here.

  “I need to talk to you alone,” he said. “I have a proposal to make.”

  “I’m not going to make any deals with you, Richard. Tell me where you are.”

  “I’ll meet you in one hour. Uptown Charlotte.”

  I looked at the time: 12:19 p.m.

  “Where exactly?”

  “Be at Independence Square exactly sixty minutes from now.”

  It was a busy, public place, but certainly he would know we would have backup there, SWAT or HRT as well.

  Before I could respond, the call ended.

  “Richard? Are you there?”

  No reply.

  The line was dead.

  I rushed into the hallway to locate the agent who’d let me use his phone. I found him running my way from a nearby office suite. “Well?” I asked. “Do we have a location?”

  “He’s calling from the Bank of America building.”

  68

  12:30 p.m.

  3 hours until kickoff

  The two units who responded found no evidence of Richard Basque at the Bank of America Corporate Center.

  The officers stationed outside the building hadn’t seen anyone fitting his description enter or leave. Video footage confirmed that.

  I was on the second floor of the Field Office with the Cyber unit and they were analyzing the data on the phone trace.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” the agent who was seated at the computer said. “You’re sure it was him on the phone?”

  “It was him,” I said.

  The guy shook his head. “It looks like he must have found a way to reroute the call.”

  Yes, I thought. That’s what it looks like.

  Richard was brilliant and knew his way around computers, but he wasn’t a hacker, and as advanced as the Bureau’s tracking abilities were, I doubted he would’ve been able to get past or manipulate them.

  “Get this data to the Cyber Division at HQ,” I said. “Ask for Angela Knight. We need to figure out where Basque was when he made that call.”

  I got on the line with Voss, who was still at police headquarters.

  “So what do you propose we do?” he asked.

  “I go to Independence Square at one nineteen. I meet him.”

  It would have been useless for Basque to tell me to come alone. He would’ve known that, no matter what, we were going to be there ready and waiting.

  As much as I anticipated that he would know that, I couldn’t shake the thought that he had something in mind. A trap of some kind. A trick he was going to pull.

&n
bsp; “We need to be ready for anything,” I told Voss, “but if we shut down the square he’ll never show. We need a response team there. I want undercover agents on the ground, snipers, a—”

  “Hang on, now. Snipers? In Uptown Charlotte?”

  “I don’t care what strings you have to pull. If you need to have the mayor call FBI Director Wellington, I’ve got her cell number with me. We have to be ready. There’s no telling what Basque has in mind, but I can tell you one thing: He’s not just going to turn himself in.”

  It took some convincing, but finally Voss got on board.

  As long as Ingersoll’s team was here it made sense to have them, rather than local SWAT, take the lead on this thing, and Voss agreed to contact them.

  * * *

  When we ended the call, my mind was buzzing. On one front, we had the analysis of the mines. On another, we had the search for Mason. And now, additionally, I had a meeting with Richard Basque thrown into the mix.

  “Give me a sec,” I said to the guys who were analyzing the phone data.

  I stepped away from the desk and into the hallway by myself.

  The conversation I’d had with Ralph earlier this week came to mind—the one in which we’d discussed how it’s impossible to give a hundred percent to both your job and your family.

  Well, right now it was just as impossible to give a hundred percent of my focus to only one case.

  I tried to sort things out.

  Basque helps Mason escape from prison, and then Mason kills Basque’s sister—knowing full well that Basque will come after him when he does.

  Despite myself, I couldn’t stop asking why. As futile an exercise as that was, I caught myself trying to guess motives.

  Right now you need to focus on Basque. This is something solid. He knows Mason. Maybe he can lead you to him.

  Richard had told me on the phone that he had a proposal to make. I wasn’t about to negotiate with him, but I also wasn’t naive enough to think he wanted to meet with me just to unconditionally surrender.

  Based on what had happened to Corrine, I imagined that Richard was going to propose something in regard to tracking down Mason.