At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  Thorne jotted notes on a scrap of paper.

  “And if he can manage to make himself scarce while they’re there, so much the better.”

  Thorne smiled. “Want me to roust your pilots and get the planes ready?”

  Harry had to think for a moment on that one. “No, we’ve got the FBI watching us,” he mused aloud. He snapped his fingers as the solution came to him. “Tell you what. Does Universal Waste still owe us a favor?”

  Thorne laughed. “Didn’t we guarantee Peter van der Horst’s debt?” He didn’t wait for a response. “I’ll give him a call and see if he’ll let us borrow a couple of planes and pilots.”

  “Just the planes,” Harry corrected. “We’ll use our own pilots.”

  Thorne nodded approvingly and jotted some more. “I trust you want me to go to Washington?”

  Harry shook his head. “No. I’ll go to D.C. I want you to make the pickup in West Virginia.”

  Thorne seemed appalled. “You’re going to talk to the EPA guy yourself? Forgive me, sir, but I don’t think-”

  “There’s no choice,” Harry interrupted. “You can’t be in two places at one time, and I want the fewest possible people involved in this.”

  Thorne shook his head vigorously. “With all due respect, Mr. Sinclair, I’m much more persuasive than you-”

  “And much more resourceful. I need you to be with Sunshine.” Harry ended the conversation by turning away, his ample gut heavy with the press of time. “I want to be in Washington this afternoon.”

  Thorne considered arguing but knew better. There was much to do.

  “Oh, and Thorne?”

  “Yes, sir?” He’d already stepped into the hallway but now returned.

  Harry regarded him for a long moment. “You know how much Sunshine means to me…”

  “I’ll take care of everything…”

  “No, listen to me. Don’t go overboard, okay?”

  Thorne bristled. He knew how to do his job. He said nothing as he left.

  Alone again, Harry tried to sift through it all. It had been fourteen years, for God’s sake! Without a snag. Now, at the first glitch, Sunshine and her dipshit husband wanted to throw everything away on this crazy plan. Unbelievable. Maybe it was just the panic talking. If he could just speak to Carolyn personally, then he’d be able to talk some sense into them.

  But, of course, he could do no such thing. As much as he wanted to see his niece again-what did she look like now, as she closed in on middle age? — he understood that such a meeting was out of the question. Maybe if the kid hadn’t called the house directly, but certainly not now. With the connection made at the FBI, the risk was too great.

  Jake started the van as soon as he saw Travis walk back outside. He considered driving up to meet him but didn’t, fearing that it might somehow attract attention.

  “Where have you been?” Carolyn barked, the instant the door slammed shut. “We were almost ready to go in there after you.”

  “Sorry,” Travis replied with a patently unsorry shrug. Over the next ten minutes, as they searched with progressively greater urgency for a place to ditch the van, Travis told them every detail of his chat with Uncle Harry.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Special Agent John Carnegie shifted position uneasily, daring to look away from his scope for just a few seconds.

  He liked his work, on balance. It reminded him of his teenage years, when he and his father found true camaraderie hunting deer in the fall. Every Thanksgiving, they arose in the middle of the night and drove for hours before dawn, finding a spot to sit and wait, remaining still for hours at a time until their prey wandered in close enough to be taken.

  So it was this morning, in every detail but the prey and the weaponry. From his spot on the edge of the woods, he sat perfectly still, watching the Sinclair compound for unusual movement or activity. Several cars had arrived over the course of the morning, but none of them contained anyone remotely fitting the description he’d been given of the Donovans. Those same cars had subsequently left, only to be subjected to a search a mile or so down the road. So far, the Donovans remained invisible.

  By ten o’clock, he’d been on station for six hours, and his mind was beginning to play tricks on him. He’d heard noises that didn’t exist; seen flashes of light in his peripheral vision. He knew that such things were merely meaningless exercises commenced by otherwise unchallenged senses, yet they unnerved him, anyway. These were the times he hated most-when he’d been on for longer than his attention span, yet still was several hours from relief. Back in the old days, when he did similar stints for the Marine Corps-only then with a rifle-he enjoyed the benefits of a young man’s brazen cockiness. Now, as he approached his thirty-fifth birthday, he worried about what might get past him as his mind wandered.

  His legs and his back screamed for relief, for a brief stretch; but Carnegie was too well trained for that. Harry Sinclair-paranoid tycoon that he was-enjoyed a reputation for countersurveillance, and he was manic about personal security. If Carnegie moved, he knew in his heart that Sinclair’s men would see him.

  To keep his mind active this morning, Carnegie had practiced his times tables, through 25 times 25. When that grew boring, he tried factoring four-digit numbers in his head. After a while, though, that one gave him a headache.

  About forty-five minutes ago, he’d been told on his radio that the targets had contacted Sinclair by phone, bringing a brief rush of hopefulness, but now the adrenaline had bled away, and he was bored all over again.

  Movement. Carnegie rolled his wrist to get a glance at his watch and marked the time at 10:24. Returning his eyes to his spotter’s scope, he watched in fifty-power magnification as Harry Sinclair himself walked out of the front door of his mansion and lowered himself into the waiting limousine. Three staff members climbed in with him, and the vehicle took off for the gate.

  Carnegie thumbed his radio mike. “Target is moving toward checkpoint one,” he whispered. Despite the four hundred yards separating him from the compound, he feared that the fall breeze might carry his voice across the field.

  “Checkpoint one’s direct,” a voice crackled from his earpiece. “Attention all units, you’re cleared to follow but not to intercept.”

  Way to go, Sinclair, Carnegie thought. Be as stupid as you look.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Nick Thomas’s day had already been a bruiser, and it wasn’t yet two. Mesmerized by this whole business of the Donovans’ renewed flight from the law, he’d been unable to pull himself away from the early morning talk shows, thus destroying any chance he had of getting to work on time.

  By the time he finally got on the road, forty-five minutes behind schedule, his mood had soured enormously. Then, to top it all off, a tractor-trailer had overturned on Route 66 at Gainesville, closing down all but the shoulder lane of traffic into the city.

  It was already past eleven when he finally staggered into EPA headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue at 13th Street, and his boss spent fifteen minutes pointing out that had he left on time, the traffic jam would never have been an issue.

  Sometimes Nick wished he worked for the Postal Service, where people accepted homicide as a routine part of the job. As it was, he suffered his ass-chewing quietly and with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed.

  As the story of the Donovans’ capture and second escape unfolded on the news, Nick found himself entering corners of his mind where he hadn’t ventured in years. What was startling was the clarity with which it all came back: the faintly sulfuric odor of the burning munitions, the fear that the odor had brought, even five miles from ground zero, and later, the persistent questions regarding why Nick had ever endorsed hiring such “unstable people.”

  The truth is, his close relationship with Jake and Carolyn Donovan had cost him a decent career. Had it not been for that miserable morning in 1983, Nick would undoubtedly have been in the Senior Executive Service by now; or better still, a lofty executive in the private sector.
But things hadn’t played out that way, and here he was, a GS-12 program specialist, manning a cubicle surrounded by up-and-comers, many of whom hadn’t yet been born when he was graduating from college.

  Some of those kids looked up to him as the experienced old hand, but the savvier ones avoided him like the plague. Ambitious careerists were wise to stay away from people like Nick. At this stage of the game, there were only a few reasons why someone with his background and education would be stuck in bureaucratic hell, and none of them were good.

  He knew what the secretaries and the whiz-kid engineers had to say about him, and the names didn’t vary all that much from the epithets he’d heard in his youth. By the time the term “nerd” had fallen out of fashion, the new and popular word “dweeb” had fallen right in to take its place. Over time, Nick had come to write the name-calling off as the price one must pay for being smarter than most of the population.

  Such was life when you put your name on paper as the safety engineer at a hazardous waste site that killed sixteen people.

  This morning in the shower, Nick tried to calculate the net cost of that single act of terrorism, and he realized no equation could handle it. In many respects, the corpses were the lucky ones. They merely died-relatively quickly, by most estimations. The courts then decided the value of their deaths, in the form of seven-figure settlements, and life went on. Even the loss of stockholder equity in Enviro-Kleen, and in their customer, Newark Industrial Park, Inc., could be measured in finite terms, albeit in nine digits when all was said and done.

  The emotional costs, on the other hand, were incalculable. The violence of that afternoon had cost Nick his marriage. At least that was how he saw it. For the sake of the kids, they still lived in the same house, but they hadn’t shared a bed or a civil word in years. He’d told Melissa from the very beginning that his name was tarnished in his industry, but she chose to believe otherwise. When the truth of that assertion was ultimately borne out, and she realized she’d never have all the trinkets her friends thought were important, she’d written him off as a loser.

  Then there were the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income from jobs for which he’d easily have been the best candidate, had it not been for the dirt associated with his name. At an intellectual level, he knew it was useless to feel sorry for himself, but sometimes he just didn’t have the strength to rise above self-pity.

  Nick never believed for a minute that the entire story of the Newark Incident had been reported. Everyone had been so damned anxious to bring the incident to a close and to seal off the site from further leakage that evidence had been gathered way too quickly and way too sloppily. He’d expected more from the FBI. They considered only one option: that the entire nightmare was a wild-eyed tyrannical act by two people whom Nick knew personally to be very ordinary. Rationally, he supposed their flight from the scene represented a de facto admission of guilt, but still, someone should have considered an alternative.

  Nick was no cop, but as a safety engineer, he’d done more than his share of accident investigation work, and he knew from experience how persuasively and effectively hypotheses can drive investigations. Instead of allowing accumulating evidence to lead naturally to a conclusion, investigators locked onto a pet theory, then set out to prove it. In the process, they ignored contradictory evidence, mentally discounting it as irrelevant. It happened all the time in the media, but he expected more from the police.

  In Nick’s view, the Newark investigation had been driven by politics; and as with all things political, the investigation had an agenda. Publicly, that agenda was to render the area as safe as possible, as quickly as possible. Privately, Nick had always suspected something more. The president of the United States at the time had staked his entire reputation on the reconstruction of the country’s defenses. The last thing he needed was for the public to be distracted by the horrendous consequences of an accidental “special weapons” release. If accidents like that were truly possible, then the dangers inherent in such weapons would overshadow everything else. On the other hand, if a release could be written off as the senseless ravings of a couple of lunatics, then the issue would not be the weapons themselves, but rather the people who abused them.

  Nerve agents don’t kill people. People kill people.

  The bodies recovered from the exterior of the magazine most definitely had been shot to death, with a precision that simply was not possible via the random spray of small-arms munitions as they cooked off. And certainly, the one worker who was sick that morning-Tony Bernard-was murdered. Shot at point-blank range in his motel room. Terrible thing.

  But why? Why would Jake and Carolyn Donovan go on such a rampage? And why on that particular day? Why not the day before or the day after? Or the month after, for that matter? Christ, they were scheduled to be there for half a year. Then again, such questions could be asked of any act of violence, he supposed. Why didn’t Lizzie Borden wait another day? Or the Menendez boys?

  And the note. By far the most damaging and inexplicable bit of evidence, it just never made sense to Nick. It seemed too pat. These two terrorists blow away over a dozen people, and then they go by to pick off Tony Bernard-they shot him in the face, for heaven’s sake-and they top off the day by leaving a typewritten note in his room, confessing to the whole thing and ranting on about governments who choose to play God.

  Puh-leeze.

  Nick told the FBI agent in charge of the investigation-an arrogant control freak named Frankel-that Jake and Carolyn were not the sort to do such a thing, but the safety officer’s protests were written off as the frantic pleas of a friend who simply refused to believe he’d been duped. The agent’s condescending words rang clear in Nick’s mind as he revisited those days: Ted Bundy’s friends were shocked as hell, too.

  The Donovans hadn’t even signed the note they supposedly left! Their names at the end of the manifesto were typewritten. For Christ’s sake, anybody could have pecked out the damned thing on their portable typewriter. But almost instantaneously, the sheet of paper became another piece in the “incontrovertible case” against the Donovans. To Nick, it all had the odor of a fish market on a hot day.

  Still, the FBI was the FBI, and back then, he was merely Nick Thomas, suddenly unemployed and unemployable. If the Donovans were innocent, they were on their own. He sure as hell wasn’t going to fall on his sword on their behalf.

  So he’d pushed it all behind him. Or tried to, anyway; with growing success, until the Big Story broke yesterday. The stock footage shown on the news of the fire and the evacuation and the body recovery operation brought everything back with disturbing clarity.

  And to think that there were still bodies sealed up in there…

  His phone chirped twice, an inside call. Nick considered ignoring it but decided that his boss hated him enough as it was. He pushed the speaker phone button. “Yes?”

  “Call for you on line seven,” informed Maura, the group secretary. Says it’s really important.”

  He moaned. “Does it sound like a salesman?”

  “Well, he spoke in complete sentences, if that helps.”

  Always the joker. “All right,” he obliged with a sigh. “I’ll take it.” He thought he knew who it was. He’d made the mistake of expressing interest in a new computer system that his group couldn’t afford and that he hadn’t the authority to buy, anyway. He’d been dodging the guy for weeks. It was time to come clean.

  “Nick Thomas,” he said sharply, snapping the telephone off its cradle.

  “Hello, Mr. Thomas,” said an older voice he didn’t recognize. “My name’s Fox. I need to meet with you as soon as possible.”

  Yep, it was a salesman. Different one, but same technique. “I’m really bogged down at the moment,” he said flatly. “Why don’t you call me next week?” Why can’t you just say, “Thanks, but no thanks”?

  The voice remained calm but took on a very distinct edge. “Actually, Mr. Thomas, this is something of an emergency. We need to
meet right away. Now. I don’t mean to frighten you, and you’re certainly not in any danger.”

  “Danger?”

  “At least not right now,” the mysterious Mr. Fox went on. “And neither are little Nicky and Joshua. In fact, they’re still tucked away in their classrooms at Stephen Foster Elementary School. When they walk home at three-ten, I’m equally confident that they’ll still be just fine.”

  A sense of horror drenched Nick like a bucket of ice water. This asshole was threatening his children! “Listen here,” he said, raising his voice. “I don’t know who-”

  “If you raise your voice to me, Mr. Thomas, I will hang up the telephone, and then you’ll never know what I wanted to talk about.” The stranger paused for effect. “Am I making my point?”

  As his fear peaked, Nick’s will to fight drained right out of him; as if someone had pulled a plug. This guy knew his children’s names. He knew their school…

  “Mr. Thomas, are you still there?

  The voice startled him. “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Good,” said Mr. Fox, a smile suddenly materializing in his voice. “Really, I assure you that you’re in no danger. But I need to meet with you. Right now. Look for a white Lincoln out in front of your building-on the 13th Street side. I’ll wait exactly five minutes.” The line went dead.

  Shit! Nick stared at the handset for a long moment, wasting a good half minute of valuable time. He considered calling Security but instantly dismissed the notion. Whoever this guy was, he’d done his research. And whatever he was up to, he’d have planned a countermove if Nick did the obvious.

  Besides, there was no time. That thought shot him out of his seat. Time. He said five minutes! God, if the elevator was cranky, it’d take him that long to get down to the lobby.

  The handset bounced off the cradle as he tossed it down and headed for the door. His boss saw him tear out of his bull pen, and made a move to block his path, but then shrank away from whatever he saw. Even opened the door for him.