Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “You owe your life to Ms. Nell,” Lou said.

  Albritten gave a rusty chuckle. “She owes it to that dog of hers. That sweet Peppy started walking in circles, whining. She knew you were in trouble, but of course I didn’t understand that. I thought she was sensing someone outside my house. So I called the boys, and they set a speed record from that farmhouse of theirs, you’d better believe that.”

  She nodded for emphasis. “I still don’t understand how a dog could realize a person was in trouble, but she knew, she knew.”

  “We’ve got her up to the farmhouse right now,” Lou said. “She’s happy there with our boy—seems to know you’re okay. We’ll keep her safe until you’re back on your feet.”

  It was Nell Albritten who’d phoned Lotty—I’d forgotten leaving Lotty’s name and number in case anything happened to me. By the time Lou and Ed had driven me to the hospital, Lotty was in Lawrence: she’d called in a favor from a wealthy man whose wife’s life she’d saved, and he’d put his private jet at her disposal.

  “How did you know I was in the silo?” I asked.

  “We suspected the silo,” Ed said, “but we didn’t want to drive out there until we had some definite proof, in case you were in another part of the county altogether. We didn’t know if that colonel had maybe dragged you off to Fort Leavenworth.”

  “Went against the grain with us,” Ed said, “but we rode into town, went to Five-Oh, talked to the one man there we knew was reasonably straight.”

  “Sergeant Everard,” I said.

  “Yep,” Ed agreed.

  Everard had defended Sheriff Gisborne to me, but privately the sheriff’s behavior was disturbing him. He knew that the sheriff was monitoring my position through the GPS signal on my phone. Everyone in the judicial center liked Everard; it wasn’t hard for him to get the county dispatcher to share what they were seeing on their tracking software.

  When I was using my phone’s flashlight inside the silo, I was forty-five feet underground. For a brief moment, though, early Wednesday morning, a signal came across. When I was holding my arm up the airshaft and weeping with despair because it was too narrow for me, my phone had come online.

  “The sarge got his lieutenant to let him mobilize all the Lawrence units, and the looey pushed on a deputy sheriff to override Gisborne and send county deputies out there. I don’t know who called the FBI, but they got there, too.”

  “I thought I saw U.S. soldiers?” I said.

  “Don’t know who brought them along to the party,” Lou growled. “Maybe they were trying to protect that colonel, or shoot him, who knows? Word around town is that the air force is concerned about a video that showed up online, something they say the colonel was sent here to seek and destroy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Wonder what that might be.”

  Ed pulled out a phone and showed me a screen from YouTube. “Assassins in the Heartland” had received 1,217,836 views since going up two days ago. The freeze-frame showed Matt in the instant he’d been shot, before the blood flowered across his shirt back, just as he was starting to fall.

  “People tell me the feds have been around, trying to find out who has the film and who posted it,” Ed said.

  “They getting any ideas?” I asked.

  “What I hear is, someone put it up in an Internet café over in Kansas City, no way of tracing who did it. They got themselves a fake Facebook page and told the whole world to come see, and by now just about everyone in the world has been looking. Might be an international incident coming out of it. Russians are peeved, on account of that lady scientist, Magda, being part of their own old weapons program. A whole lot of other people are, too, according to the papers. Of course, you can’t believe everything you read.”

  Sandy Heinz, the ICU nurse, appeared and said the guests had overstayed their visiting time. “We told you fifteen minutes, we stretched it to twenty, but it’s been thirty now, so off you go.”

  It was Heinz who wheeled me back to my room.

  “Sonia Kiel?” I asked her.

  “She’s coming around, more conscious hours than unconscious. Her parents still haven’t been to see her, but one of her brothers—one of her actual brothers, because you’d better believe we checked his ID six ways from Sunday—anyway, he flew in from Boston. He’s going to take her back with him when she’s strong enough to travel. You think she’s out of danger now?”

  “I hope so,” I said soberly. “Unless the people who were after her attack her out of spite. That video the guys were just showing me has all the information they didn’t want Sonia to reveal.”

  Heinz gave a crooked smile as she helped me out of the chair and back into bed. “The hospital wants to send her to a nursing home. Cost saving, you understand—she’s a Medicaid patient, and she’s beyond her limit of days here. But your Dr. Herschel has been pushing our administrators to keep her here with a guard on her room until she’s out of danger.”

  “The hospital should talk to Sergeant Everard,” I said, alarmed. “I gave you an informal, unprofessional opinion. I don’t want Sonia’s life in my hands when I don’t know what the bad guys are up to.”

  I was awakened an hour later by Bernie, who’d come in with Pierre before flying back to Chicago.

  I’d never seen Bernie in such a subdued mood. She apologized to me, over and over, for coming down to Kansas against my wishes, for not listening to my warnings about going out to the silo.

  “She will also be apologizing to her coach and her teammates. She knows that one more incident like this will be the end of her college life, right, Bernadine?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  I didn’t believe this meekness would last, but it made a welcome change.

  The next day Albritten came back, this time with Phyllis Barrier, the head librarian.

  “Phyllis carried a heavy load for the last month,” Albritten said. “She was visiting me that evening that August and Emerald showed up, wild with fear over what had happened at the farm. I wanted to call Pastor Clements, but Phyllis offered to hide them. After that she was the only person who knew where they were. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t want to guess, but when you showed up like that, asking questions, noticing the missing photograph—we had a few bad days, not knowing how trustable you truly were.”

  Barrier gave a wry smile. “Librarians can’t consult anyone, not even their lawyers, if we get a National Security Letter. I figured I was the best person to stand up to an interrogation. When you started snooping around the church basements, I was doubly glad we hadn’t involved the churches. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything to you that day you gave me Ms. Ferring’s bra, but she’s been wanting to thank you in person.”

  She turned her head, nodding. Emerald Ferring made a grand entrance from behind one of the potted trees in the atrium. She was wearing a caftan in a soft green wool that floated around her. August Veriden, in the signature black of the auteur, was almost invisible behind her.

  Ferring thanked me extravagantly for my “life-threatening efforts in the service of truth.” After a few moments of stilted conversation, she was willing to fill in the holes in what I’d guessed about the story.

  “When Doris McKinnon rented rooms to my mother and me, back in 1951, she opened doors to new worlds for us. For my mother it was a journey to true love, a love that took me a long time to accept. For me, Doris McKinnon enabled my journey to an education and to my vocation in the theater.

  “When my mother died, I had a hard time letting Doris be her chief mourner. My mother’s church needed to do some changing as well. They managed, though, as did I: we’ve learned to change our hearts and our minds and become open to love in its many wondrous forms.

  “When Doris called and said she was disturbed by activity around her farm, I wanted to come back, to help her, and to make my own peace with the past. I’d been there in 1983 to support the protesters at the silo, I’d come back a month later for Lucinda’s funeral, but I hadn’t been in the town sin
ce.

  “Young August agreed to come with me, to video some of the scenes of my childhood for me.

  “When we got here, we found Doris in distress over her land, as you know, but her distress increased after our arrival: she pulled out a box of Lucinda’s belongings that she hadn’t been able to bear to go through in the weeks after my mother’s death. She’d put these keepsakes away in a back cupboard and only remembered them as my arrival drew near.

  “We went through them, she and I, cozy in front of the fire, and then came on the basket that Lucinda had used for carrying supplies down to Jenny Perec in her tent. And in the bottom, under a hand-knit baby bonnet that Lucinda had originally made for me, we found the movie.

  “My old high school in Eudora had a projector that they let me borrow. We watched the movie in Doris’s living room. We didn’t know that poor, tormented soul, Sonia Kiel, was watching it with us through Doris’s front-room window.

  “My mother had told me about the people in Dr. Kiel’s lab. His unfortunate graduate student, Matt Chastain, and Magda from Czechoslovakia, with her crazy jealousy of Dr. Kiel’s wife. Sonia, with her sad, silly crush on young Chastain, and the way Dr. Kiel was forever taunting his own daughter. It was an unhappy story, but my world was filled with unhappy stories. I didn’t pay much attention to Sonia’s.

  “Sonia apparently kept telling people in Lawrence that she’d seen all these people—Magda and Matt, Jenny Perec and the babies—in a movie. Most people didn’t pay attention, thought they were just more drug-addled ramblings—but the wrong ears did listen, as you well know.

  “August and Doris and I had been out for a drive. We came back to find Magda dead on the kitchen floor. We were badly frightened, as you can well believe. Doris kept her head the best. She sent us on to Aunt Nell—Ms. Albritten—while she stayed behind to collect her soil samples. She was obsessed with those. It was the last I ever saw of her.”

  We all sat quietly for a time when Emerald finished. I finally asked if she’d been in touch with Troy Hempel in Chicago—I hadn’t heard from him.

  “Oh, yes. I assured them that your work was essential for allowing August and me to come out of hiding. I don’t know how long we could have stayed in the library basement before someone found us—thankfully it was you who alerted Phyllis to the danger of the lights we were showing. I’ve instructed Troy to pay you for your work. You’ve earned your fee.”

  Emerald was Doris McKinnon’s heir. She had decided to remain in Lawrence, at least while she wrapped up the sale of the McKinnon farm. August was going to stay with her, to finish making his video about her life.

  60

  Fairy Tales

  My convalescence was slowed by an e-mail from Jake, a long-distance breakup letter.

  I love you, V.I., but you don’t love yourself enough to stay away from danger. I can’t continue like this, not knowing if you will live or die. I tried to persuade you to come with me to Switzerland, to start a new kind of life, but you seem to want to keep falling off cliffs without a safety net. I don’t have the stamina anymore for watching you do it.

  While I was crying to myself in my hospital bed, Colonel Baggetto swept into the room. He was in uniform, all his medals in place, a junior officer at his rear.

  Sandy Heinz followed him, took a look at me, and drew the curtains around the bed so that she could wash the tearstains from my face. She combed my dirty hair and brought me a sweater to put on over my hospital gown before she let Baggetto talk to me.

  Jake’s e-mail had left me at my most belligerent. “What’s that West Point motto they show in all the corny war movies—‘Duty, Honor, Country’? What duty were you fulfilling in betraying your country? And do you think you did it with honor?”

  Baggetto pulled a chair over.

  “You do not have my permission to sit,” I snapped. “You nearly murdered me, you very nearly murdered Sonia Kiel and Cady Perec, and the deaths of Doris McKinnon, Magda Spirova, and Dr. Francis Roque can surely be traced to you. You should be facing a court-martial and a criminal inquiry instead of jangling your medals in my face.”

  “I know what this looks like, Ms. Warshawski,” Baggetto said. “Let me have five minutes to explain.”

  “‘Once upon a time.’” I scowled. “That’s how all fairy tales begin.”

  “Once upon a time,” he agreed. “Magda Spirova came to Kansas from the Soviet bioweapons lab in Těchonin, Czechoslovakia. Was she a defector, as she claimed? A spy, as the U.S. feared? Or a woman who’d fallen in love with an American scientist? I doubt we’ll ever know the answers definitively, but after a year or two in Kansas she felt like a woman scorned: Nathan Kiel had slept with her during a big conference in Bratislava. When she got here, the affair continued in a desultory, hole-in-the-corner kind of way, but the harder she pushed on Kiel, the clearer it became he was never going to leave his wife.

  “There were three people in Kiel’s lab who had an idea of the affair—his technician, Lucinda Ferring; his most despised graduate student, Matt Chastain; and his devoted secretary, Gertrude Perec.

  “Kiel was doing research on bioweapons for the army. Of course, by the 1980s, we—the U.S.—had signed on to protocols repudiating all bioweapons. But—and there’s always a big ‘but’ with weapons—we were still doing research into cures or vaccines against other countries’ bioweapons. That meant we had to grow our own organisms, because how can you test an anthrax or plague or whatever vaccine if you don’t have any anthrax?” He gave a sour smile. “Kiel was doing some low-grade weapons work for the DoD on a Y. pestis relative.”

  “Yes, I know, Y. enterocolitica.”

  “How did you learn that?” Baggetto was instantly suspicious.

  “I can read the professor’s publication list, Colonel, even if I don’t understand the big words. The air force asked Kiel to try out an aerosol version of his pet bug—it would make anyone who didn’t vacate the camp sick to their stomachs, clear any remaining protesters out of the camp, and show the Defense Department how wide a radius the aerosol would reach. Someone switched Y. pestis for Y. enterocolitica. My money’s on Spirova.”

  I could now say “enterocolitica” three times in a row without stumbling. I guess I’d brought something away from this wretched case.

  “At the time Kiel blamed his graduate student,” Baggetto said, “but you’re probably right. No, I’m trying to be honest: you are right. I’ve read the classified reports.”

  “How lucky you are to have access to work done at taxpayer expense. The rest of us aren’t so fortunate.”

  He flushed. “I’m not going to debate that with you, not now anyway. The DoD had a pretty good idea that Spirova was behind the switch. They wanted the whole ugly episode laid to rest. They gave Spirova the choice between working for them or being deported, and she figured the odds of landing in a gulag were better than those of getting a hero’s parade if she went home. She changed her name to Fleming, as I told you, worked at Fort Detrick for about a decade. In the nineties we were being all lovey-dovey with the Russians, and we shut down a lot of weapons programs. The DoD let Spirova go and didn’t think about her again. At least not until about six months ago, when we got whiff of a secret plague lab in eastern Kansas.

  “No one believed it at first—conspiracy rumors float around the army, more maybe than in civilian circles. We all know that we can be sent off to fight at a second’s notice, so we’re on hyperalert. Sometimes we don’t know if we’re fighting shadows or real enemies.”

  I rubbed my forehead. I was still unbearably weak, and having to listen to Baggetto spin his tale at such length was exhausting. I made a job of swinging my table next to me, pouring water, bathing my eyes.

  Baggetto started to sit, but I shook my head: he hadn’t earned it yet.

  “Then a farmer in Douglas County died. The symptoms were consistent with pneumonia, which was listed as the cause of death, but Nate Kiel—he’s still active in the public-health service—was worried. He sent a message
to an old buddy at Fort Detrick. About that same time, the man who filmed the air force video that you know about, he was dying. He made a deathbed statement that he’d shot the whole thing and lost the only existing reel. When the air force heard what was actually on the reel, they went to DEFCON Two without passing go. I was deployed to Fort Riley to keep a watch on the situation.”

  His voice was getting hoarse. He helped himself to a cup of my water, but I didn’t try to stop him.

  “When Emerald Ferring showed up with a filmmaker, I met with them, because filmmaker and missing film went together in my mind. After a morning with the pair, I knew, or thought I knew, they had nothing to do with the air force’s missing reel. But then you showed up. Private detective, coming to Kansas, looking for a filmmaker. The army agreed you were worth keeping an eye on.”

  “And an ear,” I said spitefully.

  “Yes, an ear. I’m not going to apologize for bugging your room. I needed to know what you knew.”

  I gave a tight smile. “I would have told you if you’d seemed at all trustworthy.”

  The junior officer in the doorway was surprised into a coughing fit. Baggetto turned to frown at him: there went Junior’s next promotion.

  “Be that as it may, when you stumbled on Spirova’s dead body, I knew that whatever you knew, whoever you were really looking for, you were close to the same quest I was on. I badly needed to keep tabs on you but, even more, on Bram Roswell at Sea-2-Sea. The morning Sheriff Gisborne and I found you at the silo, I let Gisborne know I sympathized with the CARE-NOW baboons. He introduced me to Roswell. We roped Kiel in. I could see what Roswell was doing, but it was damned hard to keep track of you.”

  I looked at my fingernails. They’d broken off in jagged pieces while I’d worked on the ventilator screws. They were black underneath, dried blood. A manicure wouldn’t do much to prettify them.

  “So your story is that you were infiltrating CARE-NOW? And AKA Pinsen—what was he doing?”