At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  To hell with him, she told herself. If Mr. Important didn’t have the common decency to return a simple phone call, then she wasn’t going to wait around all day. What was it about the executive mind-set, she wondered, that made them think people had nothing better to do than wait for them to bestow their precious attention?

  The really irritating part was, she didn’t even care about the damn call. It was probably some computer glitch, anyway. With her luck, when Frankel finally rang back, she’d get an earful of just how important he was and how he didn’t have time for petty issues like this. That was certainly the impression she’d gotten from his secretary when Bonnie refused to pass along the substance of the message.

  “I’m cleared for everything,” the secretary had pointed out.

  “Not according to the message,” Bonnie countered, after which the conversation had ended abruptly.

  Maybe she should just call and get it over with; just leave a message with the secretary and get on with her day. Much as she hated to admit it, the prospect of talking to the heir apparent for the directorship had Bonnie a bit frazzled. All things considered, she’d be just as comfortable…

  The phone rang, nearly launching her through the ceiling. It had been like this all day. Every time the phone chirped, she’d assumed it was The Man, only to find it was business as usual.

  Don’t seem overly anxious, she told herself

  The phone rang again. Bonnie hovered her hand over the receiver until it just started into its third ring. “Information Systems,” she said, picking up. “This is Bonnie Jerome.”

  “Hold for Deputy Director Frankel, please.” She recognized the secretary’s voice from that morning, and she found herself on hold before she could say a word.

  Here we go.

  An abrupt click, and he was there. “Hello, Ms. Jerome, this is Deputy Director Frankel. I understand you have a message to relay to me?”

  It was him! She recognized his voice from all of the training videos she’d watched and from his appearances on television.

  “Um, h-hello, Mr. Frankel,” she stammered. “Th-thanks for getting back to me.”

  “What is it you needed?” Suddenly his tone was flat; all business.

  “Well, I work down in Information Systems. Actually, I’m a supervisor down here…”

  “I know who you are, Ms. Jerome,” Frankel interrupted. “This really is a very busy day. If you could get to the point?”

  How does he know who I am? Bonnie’s mind screamed. “Yes, sir. Well, overnight, we got notice that someone over at EPA had accessed a file that was apparently under surveillance at one time…”

  “A file?” Where once there had been only annoyance in Frankel’s tone, she heard a trace of interest.

  “Yes, sir. A computer file. On a place called Newark, Arkansas?”

  “Yes.” The word came fast and hard, as if shot from a nail gun.

  “You’ve heard of it, then?” she asked.

  “Heard of it! Good God, Jerome, do you live in a cave?”

  Whoops! Clearly, she’d revealed her ignorance. At FBI headquarters, everyone assumed that everyone else watched the news and read the newspapers. She struggled on: “In any case, the warning attached to the file said you were to be notified immediately if anyone accessed it. Of course, I nearly didn’t bother you, since the access came from inside EPA…”

  “Do you have a name?” Frankel interrupted.

  The question caught her off balance. “Well, y-yes, sir. I’m Bonnie Jerome, in Infor-”

  “Not you!” Frankel boomed. “The person accessing the file! Do you have a name on who accessed it?”

  Bonnie jumped at the sound of his voice and inexplicably felt like crying. Why did he have to yell like that? She fumbled through the printout, looking for the name. It was always in the header, buried among the lines of seemingly meaningless text, yet she always had trouble finding it. “Here it is,” she announced. “Shows up as a Nicholas Thomas.”

  She could hear Frankel whisper the name to himself, as if tasting the words. “ Nick Thomas?”

  Bonnie shrugged. Like he could see the gesture through the phone. “I suppose so,” she said, but her words were wasted on an empty line.

  Melissa Thomas was up to her elbows-literally-in clay when the phone rang. This was the first of her Christmas orders-for a rich museum patron in Los Angeles-and if she didn’t get started on them soon, she’d be giving back a lot of money to a lot of very disappointed people. When she’d first thought of mailing out a catalog of her works, never in a million years did she think she’d get this kind of response.

  “Lauren, can you get that, honey?” she called out to her five-year-old. “Tell them Mommy can’t come to the phone.” The thunder of footsteps sufficed as a delighted “yes.”

  Now, of course, Nick was off on some dead-end job interview, so not only did she have to fulfill all the orders but she also had to mold, fire, paint, and glaze five pots a day just to make the mailing deadline. It was doable, but a royal pain without a little help.

  Melissa heard Lauren pick up the receiver and listened as she ran through the standard street-smart dialogue. “I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone,” the little voice said, bringing a smile to her mother’s face.

  Kneading the clay was therapeutic, created a ruminative state. If Nick could just move away from the past, this marriage could actually survive. But if he thinks, even for one minute, that I’m moving to Arkansas…

  “But he’s not home,” Lauren said to the telephone.

  Whoa! That was a major break from the script. How many times had they discussed this? Lauren was never to tell anyone that people weren’t home. Melissa stood, and turned the water on full with her elbow. The correct answer was always…

  “He went to Noah’s Ark,” Lauren said.

  What the… “Lauren! Who is that on the phone?”

  “No!” Lauren said emphatically. “That’s where he went! To Noah’s Ark!”

  Melissa turned off the water and grabbed a towel. “Lauren, answer me, young lady! Who is on the telephone?”

  “Yeah, that’s it!” Lauren announced proudly. “Newah… Whatever you said. That’s it.”

  Melissa closed the distance quickly, but not quickly enough.

  “Okay, you’re welcome. Bye-bye.” Lauren hung up the receiver.

  “Who was that?” Melissa demanded.

  Lauren shrugged. “I dunno,” she said uneasily, clearly aware that she’d violated a rule. “Somebody who wanted to know where Daddy went.”

  Melissa sighed disapprovingly, then planted her fists on her hips. “Young lady,” she said, “you and I are going to have a long talk about telephone behavior.”

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” Jake said, cringing in the dull light of the hotel room.

  Travis was more succinct. “God, it stinks in here!”

  “Is this the same room we had last time?” Carolyn asked.

  Jake brought his eyebrows together, and he turned to get his bearings out the front window. “Maybe,” he said, pulling on his lip. “Though I’d have guessed a little bit further down the row. It was close to here, though.”

  Nick led them to the card table, where he’d already prioritized everything they needed to talk about. As everyone settled into a chair, Nick touched Travis on the shoulder. “Hey, buddy, want to do me a favor?”

  Travis looked to his mom and got a nod. “I guess,” he said.

  Nick brought a penknife out of his pants pocket. “Great. Take this knife here and open up those boxes, okay? Be careful, though. Use the blade to break the tape only. I don’t want you to tear anything.”

  Travis’s eyes grew inadvertently wider, showing a youngster’s instinctive fascination with all things shiny and sharp. “Cool,” he said. “You want me just to open them, or do you want me to take stuff out, too?”

  “Just open them for now. I need to do an inventory.”

  Carolyn’s head tilted curiously as
she took in the pile of junk. “Is that the gear?”

  Nick smiled proudly. “Yep. We should have enough Level A entry stuff for three people. Suits, air packs, and tools.”

  Jake shook his head in wonderment. “Where’d you get it?”

  Nick frowned playfully. “Well, I can’t say for sure. But I did happen to mention to your uncle that there’s an EPA training school in Edison, New Jersey, that has a ton of this kind of crap. If a few sets disappeared, they probably wouldn’t even know they… were missing.”

  Jake smiled. “And I’m sure that Harry has lots of friends in New Jersey, huh, Carolyn?”

  Carolyn blushed and set her jaw. “He has business acquaintances all over,” she said defensively.

  “And I know for a fact he can be very persuasive,” Nick added.

  It was like old times, mining each other’s comments for maximum sarcasm. A playful enmity naturally existed between entry types, who tended to be rowdy, and toe-the-line administrative personnel like Nick, but Carolyn had always been the exception. Little Miss Safety, as the guys used to call her. Whereas the Silverados would forever ignore Nick’s daily safety briefings-belching, farting, and grab-assing through every session-Carolyn was always the one to stand and tell everyone to shut up. There’d be groaning and smart-ass remarks, but Nick always figured them to be grateful to her in the end. They still got to be macho pigs, even as they absorbed the information that would ultimately keep them alive. Not because they wanted to hear that crap, you understand-real men breathed smoke and ate nails, don’t you know-but because the wimpy lady said they had to. Everyone saved face.

  God, that had been a good group of people. They’d worked hard, partied hard, and accomplished some pretty impressive feats together. What a waste.

  As Travis set to work across the room on the boxes, the adults sat down in their impossibly uncomfortable chairs. Nick said, “Let’s begin.”

  “Thanks for doing this, Nick,” Carolyn said, straight from the heart. “I can’t begin to guess why you’d put yourself on the line like this, but many, many thanks.”

  Nick’s eyes softened, clearly moved. “I should have made this happen a long time ago,” he said. “I can’t compete with the hell you two must have been living, but that day ruined my life, too.”

  “We didn’t do it, you know,” Jake said abruptly. Then he looked embarrassed. “You never asked, but I thought I should tell you, anyway.”

  Nick smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. Actually, I never thought otherwise.” The comment hung in the air for a moment. Clearly, there was more, but it would remain unsaid.

  Nick smiled. “Well, whoever’s setting you up for this has done one hell of a job.” He turned to Jake. “Tell me about this body in the magazine.”

  Jake explained.

  “You heard him mention the body, too?” Nick asked Carolyn.

  She nodded. “Absolutely. You mean you didn’t?”

  Nick shook his head. “We weren’t allowed on the ops channel, remember? Sean Foley was project manager, and he didn’t want me interfering. Said if he wanted my input, he’d ask for it.” The story stirred some old emotions, but Nick still found his way back to the task at hand.

  “So do you think someone was monitoring the radio?” he went on. “That he heard you find the skeleton, and he just started shooting?”

  Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he planned from the very beginning to kill everyone there.”

  Carolyn cut the chat session short. “Okay, guys, speculate on your own time. We’ve got a job here. Nick, you’re the techno wizard. How likely are we to live till tomorrow if we go through with this?”

  Jake shot her a disapproving look, then nodded toward Travis, who seemed oblivious to it all, lost in a sea of cardboard. The kid had enough to worry about without her posing questions in those terms.

  “Actually, I think this’ll be a fairly safe entry,” Nick said cheerily. “But then again, I thought it could be done safely back in ’83, too. We’ve got Level A gear just for the hell of it, but the real hazard this time is particulate, I think. No gas hangs around intact for fourteen years, and whatever liquids might have survived have long since evaporated; maybe even biodegraded. But that still leaves a shitload of really nasty dust, dirt, and soot. We sure as hell don’t want to breathe any of that.”

  “Why?” Travis asked, looking up from his boxes. “What’ll happen?”

  So much for being oblivious, Jake thought.

  Nick caught the look and smiled. “Well, Travis, we don’t know for sure. Depends on what was in there to begin with and how it mixed during the fire. I’d expect some pretty severe respiratory distress. Maybe some systemic problems, too. Liver and kidneys, probably. Virtually everything affects them.”

  “That means you’d have trouble breathing and get really sick,” Carolyn translated, earning herself a look that said, I’m not stupid.

  “What about security?” Jake asked. “How big a problem will that be?”

  Nick ruffled through his papers until he came up with the one he needed: an aerial photograph of the magazine and the surrounding area. “Actually, it shouldn’t be too big a deal,” he explained. “There’s a general philosophy within the agency that people are not inherently suicidal. By putting up two concentric fences, here and here”-he pointed with the tip of his pencil-“and by posting signs every ten feet that say something like, ‘Extremely Hazardous Area, You’ll Die if You Go in Here,’ we thought we’d pretty much discourage people from entering.”

  Everybody smiled.

  “So, that in mind, no one saw a compelling need to have a resident security guard. Not only would it be a waste of time, but over twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, who knows? Maybe he’d pick up an unmonitored exposure to something.”

  Carolyn was incredulous. “You mean, no one even watches the fence line?”

  Nick shook his head. “Not exactly. If you look here on the map, you’ll see that the old access road system-built in God knows when-still exists.”

  Clearly, Nick saw far more on the photograph than Jake did. Even as he followed the pencil, he still couldn’t see what he was talking about.

  “This road here is the closest one to the exclusion zone, about a hundred yards away, while this one here”-he moved the pencil-“is farthest away at about a half mile. We decided early on that it made sense to use the roadways as natural barriers and to build the outermost fences alongside them. Thus, three times a day, a rent-a-cop buzzes the place to look for any problems.”

  Carolyn interrupted. “Problems like…?”

  Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything, I guess. Holes in the fences? Birds falling out of the sky?”

  The bird imagery made Travis giggle in the background.

  Jake turned in his chair to face his son. “You’re welcome to come on up here and join us, pal,” he said with a grin. “Hate to have you straining your ears.”

  Travis flashed a sheepish smile, then returned to his cutting. “No, that’s okay. I’m fine.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a schedule for when those guards come?” Carolyn wanted to know.

  Nick shot her his coyest smirk and held up another piece of paper from the stack. “Suppose again, Mrs. Donovan,” he said. “So what time is it now?” He looked at his watch. “Two o’clockish. Next patrol is at three, and the one after that isn’t till nine. I say we make our entry at three-thirty, do what we have to do, then be on our way back to Little Rock before dark.”

  Jake looked over to Carolyn, who met his eyes with an uneasy glare. So this was it. All the years, all the running, all the new identities, and all the lies ultimately came down to a simple decision just to go for it. Could it possibly be this easy?

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Jake said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  As Irene watched the West Virginia countryside speed by, five thousand feet below, she tried to figure out why the Donovans would return to Arkansas-to the �
��scene of the crime” as it were. It sounded so cliched, she hated even to think the words. These fugitives had worked so hard for so long to stay invisible, how could they possibly profit by stepping into the open like that? It didn’t make sense.

  But Frankel was convinced, and when you sat in the big office, your hunches carried the weight of law. What he didn’t say was how he knew. Something about a hit on a computer field by some staffer at EPA, but between the sputtering cell phone connection and Frankel’s clipped, pompous way of speaking, she couldn’t get half the details she wanted. That was okay, though. She had staff back in Charleston to piece all that together for her.

  Ironically, her team had just discovered the Donovans’ white van, stashed in a dilapidated old barn, when word came from Frankel. It had taken a cool head and strong nerves for the Donovans to stay put like that in the middle of a full-scale search. Fact was, they’d done exactly the right thing. Had they tried to bolt, they’d have been caught for sure.

  They always do the right thing, Irene mused. It’s really beginning to piss me off.

  Judging by the equipment and supplies they left behind in the van, they hadn’t anticipated being caught in West Virginia. She figured that to be good news. The farther she could knock them off their plan, the more likely she’d be to force a mistake.

  Best she could tell, they’d been planning an extended camping trip. The van was loaded down with sleeping bags, lanterns, lamp oil, and canned goods-everything they’d need to hide out from civilization for weeks at a time, even with the approach of winter. Even more interesting, they’d abandoned an arsenal of weapons: three hunting rifles, a shotgun, and enough ammunition to invade Mexico. Frankly, the weapons confused her. Should she be relieved they hadn’t taken them along, or concerned that there were even more lethal weapons in the Donovans’ possession?

  Always better to err on the safe side. That’s why the flyers on the Donovans read “armed and extremely dangerous.”

  For a few minutes there-before Frankel’s call-Irene felt certain she’d figured it all out. Clearly, the Donovans were experienced woodsmen-a suspicion backed up by the magazines and literature found in their trailer back in Phoenix-so she’d have bet a pretty penny they’d be making a Von Trapp-style march over the mountaintops. In fact, she’d been in the process of mobilizing a search, in cooperation with the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the Park Service, when she got yanked away by her boss’s hunch.