Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  So my lover had been in the Navy SEALs, a macho group if there ever was one. Having grown up in a landlocked state, I knew next to nothing about the Navy, and nothing at all about its special ops unit. I had no use for water beyond drinking it and taking a shower, but it seemed that I’d gotten in bed with a man who knew how to just about live in it. I wondered what other little surprises Jack had in store for me. If and when he showed up again.

  I felt Leah watching me. Our eyes met and locked for a while. I wondered if she could tell that I was thinking angry, suspicious thoughts about her son. At that moment, I would have paid any price to know what she was thinking, to know what she knew about him, but I was so far off my emotional balance that I lacked the nerve to ask.

  Finally, breaking the silence of our interaction, she said, “Come eat, Em. You must be starving.”

  Starving. Was that what I had been, to fall in love with a man who had told me so little about himself?

  Over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits, we made plans.

  Brad and Walt would make inquiries regarding the weapon. “We need to find out where it came from. Who bought it? Who laid the plan to use it here?”

  “It may have been stolen from whomever bought it,” Tom said.

  Brad shook his head. “These guys may be crazy, but they’re not stupid. They’re usually into low-cost options, like using somebody else’s equipment. This they would have purchased. They would notice if it went missing.”

  Tom said, “You keep saying ‘they.’ Jack thought it was a solo act.”

  Brad shook his head. “That’s some major money there. I’d like to meet the solo terrorist who can afford a SAM-7.”

  Tom knit his brow in a particular way I had come to know spelled obstinate with a capital O. “Jack told me the guy was an errand boy for a hive of drug runners. But I’ll call in some favors, see who’s active in this area. Find out who’s got a beef.” It was strange watching Tom try to operate outside his expertise and jurisdiction—not that he had a jurisdiction anymore. It was half a year since he had turned in his badge. To me, he said, “Em, you’re in charge of forensic analysis of the geologic materials we found associated with the weapon.”

  I said, “Okay. There’s a protocol to this. I have to extract representative samples of the sand from inside and outside the bag. Then I need to split each sample into two. I’ll want someone to witness all this, because we’re talking evidence of a crime—lest we forget that we may need to cover our asses somewhere down the line, or need to make this stick if we’re trying to get someone jailed—we should make up a chain-of-custody document to carry with the samples. I’ll then express one set of samples to the FBI’s forensic geology lab in Washington, D.C., for safekeeping. The other set I’ll take across to St. Petersburg and pull every string I can to get the provenance of the sand inside the plastic.”

  “Provenance?” Tom queried.

  “It’s a fifty-cent geological term that means, ‘where it came from and what that means geologically.’”

  Tom waved his hand in dismissal. “For once, spare me the intellectual frivolities and just give me an X on a map.”

  Tom had a way of getting imperious when a job made him anxious, and that had a way of making me want to get just as arrogant right back at him. “What it means geologically and where the X is are one in the same, Tom. This is war, and war is one big game of geopolitics.”

  Walt looked at Brad and said, “What’s she talking about?”

  Brad said, “White girl angry.”

  Walt grunted.

  I said, “Walt, you’ve been trained to fight. What do you fight over?”

  “I fight for justice.”

  “I said over, not for.”

  Tom said, “The slogan used to be, ‘Peace, freedom, and the American way.’ The current administration changed it to suit the times.”

  I thought, Uh-oh, Tom’s getting sarcastic. An even worse sign. The master of manipulation is not in control of the situation, and worse yet, it’s got him downright scared.

  Brad matched Tom’s tone. “As I recall, that change had something to do with jets full of people flying into big buildings full of people. And if you’re calling me a patsy, maybe you’re right. I joined the Navy to follow someone I admired, and his name is Jack Sampler. But when I had become a soldier—and I mean fully trained as one—I began to see that I had a job to do, and that was to protect people who can’t protect themselves.”

  Tom lost his cool entirely and said, “You’re talking about a warrior. A soldier is some poor slob who’s been trained to follow orders. Em’s right, this is all a game of geopolitics. Those assholes didn’t care if we caught Bin Laden, they just wanted to get their grubby hands on Afghanistan so they could run a damned oil pipeline from the Caspian down to the Indian Ocean. They’re a bunch of opportunists.”

  Brad stood up and planted his feet as wide as his shoulders. “Bullshit. The secretary of defense was on our brothers’ asses every day to chase that SOB down. Whatever you say, boss. If being worked over by politicians means we get to roust a few terrorists into the bargain, so be it. Tonight, we disarmed a terrorist on our own shores.”

  Tom stayed in his chair, but his face was getting red. I’d never seen him this worked up before. “Right. We’re talking about an antiaircraft missile. Now, how do you suppose that shit head got hold of the thing in the first place? Oh, yeah, it was our brilliant Reagan administration sent about 900 of the goddamned things to the Mujahideen so they could shoot Russian helicopters out of the air, and surprise, a good number of them turned up missing. The problem with arming those jackasses is that we don’t seem to have the same ideas about how they’re supposed to be used. Imagine that, they shake down Uncle Sam for something to harass the Soviets, and now we’re finding them right back here buried two feet under a place where our children are playing. If you don’t think that’s totally fucked, you’re insane!”

  Brad leaned toward Tom and spoke through his teeth. “Tom, you’re a former G-man, and I suppose you think you’re different from me, but you guys have violated peoples’ civil rights left and right, and as we speak you have big-time problems in the Bureau. My comrades and I are warriors. If we don’t care, or we quit and walk away, who is going to do the job? And who is going to keep the powers-that-be honest? I’m just a reservist these days, but some of us are staying in for careers, and those few that reach the top hope to make a difference someday, because just like you, we believe in protecting the Constitution and the freedoms that we still enjoy in this country.”

  Tom turned his face away. For once, he offered no comeback.

  By the time I had collected my samples and rigged a crude chain-of-custody documentation for them, it was seven A.M. I was ready to head straight back to St. Petersburg, but Tom was still off somewhere talking to Brad and Walt, so Leah insisted that I try to get some sleep. But when Leah showed me to her spare room, I was jolted into full wakefulness again as I surmised that I was in Jack’s boyhood bedroom.

  Feigning fatigue, I closed the door and greedily got to work snooping. Here was a trove of personal treasures collected by the boy who was to become the man. Here were relics that had given meaning to his young life. The shelves were filled with field guides, snakeskins, animal skulls, rocks, game balls, and sports trophies, an eclectic mix that suggested both a loner who liked to explore and a team player who liked to compete. He had books on electronic surveillance, code breaking, and weaponry. There were several volumes on military history, primarily eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naval battles. A corkboard was shingled with jokes cut out of newspapers, wise and witty sayings from Kipling, funny pictures of himself and pals horsing around making faces in four-poses-for-a-dollar booths. On the walls were posters of coral reefs, sailboats, and what the well-dressed medieval soldier is wearing. There was one very sweet photograph of him and Brad, ages approximately nine and twelve, out fishing on a boat in the ocean, not a spec of land in sight. Brad had caught a mac
kerel, and Jack had an arm around him in congratulations; a couple of good-looking boys out having the times of their young lives. In all, it was a calm, friendly room. Yet something was missing. What could that be?

  Certainly it was not Jack that was missing from the room. The essence of his searching, mischievous character was here just as certainly as he had been with me ten nights earlier, when we had consummated our love. He was here in force, in layers and details I had not imagined existed. And yet there was a blank spot in the chain of information.

  I lay down on the bed, but the sensation of Jack’s presence was so acute that there was no hope of sleep. My neck was rigid with stress and my eyes would not close. I kept staring at the ceiling, trying to read words I imagined that Jack would have etched there with his eyes.

  Suddenly I realized what was missing: Jack’s father.

  I got off the bed and toured the room, searching for anything that would point toward whoever Mr. Sampler had been. Finding nothing, I headed down the hall past several more pictures of Jack, and into the living room. Jack’s face appeared again and again, but he was the only male present. I walked into the kitchen to check for candid snaps on the refrigerator door. Nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact. Just like Jack’s room, the rest of the house was beginning to strike me as lost in time, out of sync with the present moment.

  I heard a step behind me and turned to see Leah just coming to rest, leaning against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest. “You’re not sleeping,” she observed.

  “No.”

  She smiled guardedly. “What is it you are trying to discover ?”

  There was no point in denying that I had been snooping. “I was just trying to glean a younger Tom from the photographs,” I said lamely.

  “Glean,” she said. Her eyes narrowed as she mulled my choice of words.

  My stomach shrank to the size of a baseball. “I’m sorry to be skulking around. I’m just realizing that I don’t know much about Jack. He doesn’t offer many details about himself.”

  Leah’s eyes went to slits, and her lips tightened to a thin, straight line. After a moment she closed her eyes the rest of the way, as if in meditation. When she opened them again, she said simply, “That’s probably for the best. The past is just the past, after all.”

  “But Tom said you were the person to ask.”

  She shook her head. “Not today.” She sighed, then said again, “Not today.” She straightened up. “Well then, you’ll be on your way I suppose.”

  “Yeah.” My heart was busy joining my stomach in its little nut-sized packet.

  “Let me give you my cell phone number. If you discover anything about where Jack is, will you please let me know? We both know we can’t trust Tom to do that.”

  “Certainly.”

  She wrote the number on a piece of paper and held it out to me, then gave me a very stern look. “You will give this to no one else?”

  “If you say not.”

  “I say not.”

  “Then I shall simply memorize it.”

  “That depth of care won’t be necessary. I can always change it if necessary. Well, it’s time to go.” She glanced at the door, an indication of where I was to go.

  I passed through it to the carport. Leah followed me, carrying the suitcase. She closed the door behind me and put the case in the trunk of her car. “I hope we meet again, under better circumstances,” she said. Then she bent suddenly and gave me a light kiss on my temple, got into her car, and drove away.

  – 24 –

  Tom had the car up above eighty. My brain was cooking with fatigue, but the rate Tom was driving had me wide-awake. “Okay,” I said. “Time to fill me in on a few things, Tom.”

  “Speak.”

  “Why aren’t we just calling the cops, or the FBI, or the CIA, or the fucking armed services?”

  “The police wouldn’t know how to deal with this. Jack and I are the FBI. This is on our shores, so not CIA. And we are using the fucking armed services.”

  “No, Tom, you are retired from the FBI, and Jack is on leave, remember? This missile came from somewhere else, so that makes it a job for CIA. And Brad and Walt are obviously very highly trained, but they are not on active duty.”

  Tom shook his head. “It’s better to keep this tight. If we run a crew of FBI or CIA or big army in there right now, we could lose all the connections.”

  “What connections?”

  “The connection that got that thing into the hands of whoever put it there. This is high-stakes poker we’re playing, Em.”

  “I know that, Tom. But don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid? Don’t you think there’s maybe somebody out there in your profession who has an ounce of integrity?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know which ones anymore. They’ve all started to look and act alike.”

  I flopped back against the seat. “Then it’s a good thing you retired.”

  “I agree.”

  “And Jack should, too.”

  “Same again.”

  “What are you talking about, Tom?”

  “I asked him to go into consulting with me. He is considering it. He figures when you two get more committed, you’ll want—”

  “What?”

  Tom glanced sideways at me. “Wait a minute, hasn’t he talked to you about this?”

  “No!”

  “Sorry.”

  I kicked the dashboard. “You sons of bitches!”

  “Watch it there. You don’t want to set off the air bag. It could break your leg if—”

  “Fuck the airbag! And fuck your idea of security!”

  “Em, your language is getting—”

  “Fuck my language! There’s some funny business going on here. Try this: Why did Jack’s mother take off like that?”

  “She’s a smart woman. She knows that whoever buried that thing may have been watching. Might have followed us to her house. And people who do that kind of thing aren’t nice people,” he said, sarcasm beginning to make his tone crisp. “So she went somewhere else where they won’t know to look for her.”

  “But she had that bag packed and waiting! And it looked like it had been waiting for years!”

  Tom did not reply.

  I kicked the dashboard again. “So now you’re into ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ You have to tell me, Tom! There’s too much riding on this! I love Jack, truly I do, but that’s the space shuttle we’re talking about. Seven people will be on board that thing, and hundreds of millions will be watching. It was bad when those jets hit the World Trade Center. Let’s not let them knock out the space program, too. It’s the thing we still get to feel good about.”

  “Yes.”

  “So let’s tell NASA. Get them to scrub the launch. They can say it’s another malfunction, or the hurricane winds again. Anything. I’m sure they’re masters at that kind of bullshit.”

  Tom was suddenly spitting mad. “Yes, they are. But do you want to tell them? Hey, here’s a cell phone. Give them a call. Tell them what you want to tell them. Who do you ask for? And how are you going to get them to believe you?”

  “We’ve got the missile. All we have to do is show it to them.”

  “And where did you get this missile, Ms. Hansen?”

  “In the …” I stopped and stared. I couldn’t believe what Tom was saying to me. “You’re extorting silence from me. You have all the connections it takes. You could stop that launch with one phone call.”

  “And I will if I deem it necessary. But right now, it is not. We still have time. We have to find Jack and know what he knows. Because for once, my dear Em, you know exactly what I know. We are both in the dark.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Right. So let’s analyze your samples and find out where our friend has gone.”

  “But how would he know where it came from?” I asked, for the moment forgetting that I had ever suspected him of having put it there himself. It was simply too difficult to keep both thoughts in my he
ad at once: that Jack was a good man who did the right thing, and that Jack was a psychotic shit head who aimed killing weapons at space shuttles. And why did I even think the latter?

  “All he’d have to do is follow the son of a bitch home.”

  “You’re still thinking it’s just one son of a bitch. That means that you do know something you haven’t told me. Jack could be wrong.”

  Tom gritted his teeth with exasperation. “I have all but put it in neon for you: Jack told me it’s just one man.”

  “But how did he know that?”

  Tom clenched his teeth. His knuckles grew white. “Because he has a friend going up on that shuttle, and that person knows this man.”

  Back in St. Petersburg, we drove straight to the USGS and tracked down Miles Guffey. Even as tired and stressed as he was, Tom managed to slow himself down, sink his hands into his pockets, and say, “Hey, thanks again for dinner the other night. That was some stimulating conversation.”

  Miles looked back and forth between Tom and me, evaluating us over the tops of his reading glasses, no doubt trying to discern the message embedded in the fact that Tom had come with me to his office. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, like I said, I’m real concerned about all that.”

  “Then you might be interested in helping us figure out which island one of these sand samples came from.” He beamed at Miles as if he were an old fraternity brother inviting him to a striptease party. “We’ve made splits of them to send to the lab in Washington, but we thought you might like to have a shot at them first.”

  Miles’ eyes went wide with interest, but mine went narrow. So Tom was misdirecting me again. He’s known all along that we’re looking for an island. So what island would that be? I looked up at the map of the Caribbean that hung over Miles Guffey’s desk. I located Cocoa Beach, then the islands closest to it. The Bahamas …

  Following my gaze to the map, Miles said, “Well, there are only 700 islands and 2,400 uninhabited islets and cays in the Bahamas. This shouldn’t be too tough.”