At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  So how did they get to Arkansas? Answer: they had help. Paul could barely contain himself. He’d been first to suspect a connection with Harry Sinclair-the mystery man who’d yet to resurface-and sure as hell, it looked like he was right.

  She closed her eyes against the din of the chopper and rested her head against the bulkhead, trying to figure out if she’d done everything she needed to do. Why was it that she could never get ahead of this case? Normally, investigations took on a rhythm, and once you caught it, you could put together a plan to catch the bad guy. Here she found herself arriving perpetually too late, only to find out that the Donovans continued to be slippery. This whole thing was taking on the bumbling quality of a Keystone Kops adventure. Assuming that Frankel was right-that the Donovans were in fact returning to the Newark site-then she could only assume they’d get in and out quickly.

  But what do they have to gain by going back there?

  She ran through the details of the case, ticking them off one at a time, and couldn’t think of a single one she’d missed. The Little Rock field office had agents en route to Newark, and she’d notified the local police chief-a guy named Lundsford-to keep an eye on the site. If the numbers she ran in her head were correct, it would be another hour and a half, two hours, before any feds got on the scene out there, which made her exceptionally dependent on the abilities of the local cops. Remembering the bumbling antics of Sherwood and his crew back in Phoenix, the thought brought her little comfort.

  Officially, the Newark Hazardous Waste Site was only about a hundred acres in area. Unofficially, the site extended to virtually all 75,000 acres. Some addresses just didn’t lend themselves to corporate business cards. Of the few companies remaining in the business park, all were fly-by-nighters, representing new technologies in an industry known to vaporize inventors right along with their mistakes.

  For Jake, it was like reentering a nightmare. Everything was close to the way he remembered it, but nothing was exact. Areas that had been so carefully cleared during the park’s boom years had largely been reclaimed by the aggressive Arkansas undergrowth. Entire buildings had been swallowed up by field grasses, roads erupted by surging tree roots.

  The big Cadillac looked comically out of place, dodging potholes and throwing gravel on its way toward the middle southwest section of the park. On this trip, the protective gear took priority over passenger comfort, forcing everyone but the driver-Nick-to sit at impossible angles and hang on for dear life to keep from getting launched through the roof or crushed by a falling box.

  “You sure you know where you’re going?” Carolyn asked hesitantly.

  “As sure as I can be.” Nick shouted to be heard over the clatter of shifting equipment. “I studied the site maps pretty closely while I was waiting for you guys to arrive. So far, everything looks as it should.”

  “How much longer?” Travis wanted to know. His voice sounded strained against the weight of the breathing apparatus boxes.

  Nick shrugged. “Two minutes maybe? Ten? No way to be sure.”

  Actually, it was four. The access road dead-ended at a chain-link fence, which stretched left to right in front of them for as far as they could see. Every few feet, at shoulder height, red-and-white signs had been posted on the fence, reading:

  DANGER HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY LIKELY TO CAUSE DEATH DANGER

  “We’re here,” Nick said simply. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, the latex gloves making his hands look oddly artificial. If there was one stupid mistake he didn’t need to make, it was to leave fingerprints.

  No one replied for a long moment as they took in the message from the sign. Carolyn grasped her son’s hand and squeezed.

  “I’d feel a lot better if that guy Thorne was here,” Travis grumbled. The stinging no-confidence vote drew a look from Jake, but Travis held his ground. “No offense.”

  Jake let it go.

  “So what do we do now?” Carolyn asked. “We can’t drag this equipment a mile into the woods.”

  “There’s a gate right here on the fence,” Travis observed.

  Nick shook his head. “No, they’ve got an alarm on the gate. We need to snip our way through.”

  Jake twisted his face incredulously. “They alarm the gate, but nothing happens if you cut the chain-link?”

  Nick laughed. “Who in their right mind would want to break in, Jake? It’s not like there’s anything to steal, you know. The alarm just makes sure that the gate gets locked back up in case somebody has to come in to do something.”

  Amid the pile of equipment sent ahead by Harry Sinclair’s New Jersey connections were two long-handled bolt cutters, which made quick work of what people with right minds purportedly would never do. When they were finished, the hole was just barely big enough for the car.

  Jake winced at the sound of metal dragging along the paint.

  Once through the hole, Nick steered the car back onto the roadway, which continued on the other side of the gate. Half a mile later, as advertised, they arrived at another fence and another gate. Nick threw the transmission into park and turned in his seat to face the rest. “Here we are,” he announced. “Just your garden-variety certified hazardous waste exclusion zone.”

  “We’re in the middle of the woods,” Travis objected. “I thought there were supposed to be a bunch of storage buildings.”

  “Look again,” Carolyn told him, pointing. “They’re here. They’re just overgrown.”

  At its heyday, this part of Arkansas had been mowed flat, turned into a grassy flatland extending from horizon to horizon; perfectly level but for endless rows of storage magazines which arose from the ground like so many swells in a grassy green sea. From the air, back then, the place would have looked like a mogul field on a ski slope, only green; and constructed at intervals that were far too precise and with lines too straight to have been a random creation of nature.

  Today, from the ground, this part of the facility was so overgrown that nature had camouflaged everything. Trees now grew where roadways used to be, and thick undergrowth-kudzu, mainly, cohabitating with countless other varieties of the region’s most hearty bushes, vines, and creepers-had long ago choked out any ground cover as fragile as grass. To the casual observer, these woods might have been around since the beginning of time, untouched by any human. On closer examination, though, beyond the thick tapestry of leaves and the random angles of the foliage, the repeating pattern of the land became obvious, rising and falling at precisely the same height and precisely the same interval. Like staring at one of those computer-generated 3-D art creations, the longer Travis examined his surroundings, the more the place began to look like the explosives storage facility it once had been.

  The image solidified in his mind the instant he saw the first of the concrete-filled steel blast doors, set back in an overgrown tunnel, precisely in the center of one of the earthen mounds. Having seen one, it became easy to see others; dozens of them just by pivoting his head.

  “Whoa,” he breathed, his tone alive with wonderment. “This place is unreal.”

  “Are we safe, Nick?” Carolyn asked.

  Nick’s head bounced noncommittally. “Well, I wouldn’t want to build my dream house here, but it should be pretty safe, yeah. Certainly for the short time we’ll be around.” He opened the door and stepped out. The others followed as he walked up to the fence and cut a hole big enough for people to pass through. That done, they all climbed to the crest of the nearest mound. “See there?” Nick asked when he got to the top. They all followed his finger. Two rows away, they could just make out a brownish black stain against the bright, fall-colored foliage. “That’s where we’re going,” he said.

  “God Almighty,” Jake said, clearly overwhelmed. “It’s a moonscape.”

  “Pretty close,” Nick agreed. “Won’t get much to grow there for the next hundred years.” He looked first to Carolyn and then to Jake. “Ready to rock and roll?”

  “Um, guys?” Travis said, an odd look
on his face. “I–I don’t know how to work any of the equipment.”

  Jake smiled and rumpled the boy’s hair as he descended the steep hill. “That’s good,” he said. “Because you’re staying here.”

  “I am not!”

  Jake stopped midway and made his smile disappear. “It’s not because you’re not good enough, Travis, or not smart enough or not strong enough. It’s because we only have three sets of gear. You need to stay back and keep an eye out for the security people. If you hear anything, you’ve got to let us know.”

  Travis looked for a moment as if he might argue but ultimately said nothing, choosing instead to help unload the car.

  Deputy Sheriff Sherman Quill mumbled audibly to himself as he pulled his nightstick out of his Sam Browne belt and slid it into its spot next to the driver’s seat. I hate going out to this place.

  Ever since he joined the force, Newark Industrial Park had been the bane of his existence. Every time he turned around, there was some damn thing going on out there, and with only the two of them in the department, he handled fully fifty percent of the calls. For some unfathomable reason, the local teenagers-local, hell, he’d arrested them from as far away as Little Rock-found it to be a romantic spot.

  To date, no one had been stupid enough actually to climb the fence and get it on, but they’d come damn close, giving themselves away by jiggling the lock on the gates. But for the coils of razor wire along the top of the fence, he had little doubt that people would be scaling the thing every day. Crazy kids.

  Now he was on his way to “check the place out,” whatever the hell that meant. Apparently, some hotshot FBI lady had called the chief and told him to expect some kind of trouble out there. If Sherman had heard correctly-and he must have, else why would the chief have said it twice? — the same people who started it all way back when were returning to do it again.

  “Don’t make no sense,” he grumbled, putting his ten-year-old Ford in reverse. “Ain’t nothin’ left out there to burn, for God’s sake.”

  Damned entertaining thought, though, getting his hands on the son of a bitches who squeezed all the life out of this town. Sherman’s family had come from these parts for generations; even stuck around during the bad times in the sixties, when Sherman himself was coming up as a teenager. People used to stick around, because sticking around was the thing to do. Now the kids were flying out of Newark as soon as their wings were big enough to support them. The luckier ones got to go to college somewhere and then get decent jobs. For the others-folks like Sherman, who struggled through high school with just enough Cs and Ds to warrant a diploma-it was damned difficult to find something that paid enough money to keep food on the table. As it was, downtown Newark had all but closed up. Places like the health clinic stayed open just because the state said they had to. God knows they had enough business to go around, just none of their patients had any money to pay their bills with.

  Goddamned sad state of affairs is what it was. If Sherman could get his hands around those punks who made the whole world afraid of his hometown, then that just might be the best present anyone had ever given him.

  One of the funny things about all this hazardous waste stuff was that no matter how much you rationalized the problem away in your head, and no matter how hard you listened to all those suit-and-tie experts the EPA sent out to tell you just how safe everything was, it was tough not to listen to the rest of the world. When everybody thought of Newark, Arkansas, in the same light as Love Canal or Chernobyl, it was hard to stand up as a resident and say, “No, no. My home is safe!” The instinct was to listen to what the other people had to say. The instinct was to avoid the place like the plague.

  Which was why Sherman hated going out there so much. He’d signed on as a cop eighteen years ago to deal with crime and criminals. God knew they could be dangerous; especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the knife and gun clubs got together after an evening of drinking and hollering. But the biggest and the baddest guys he’d ever run into on the street were visible, living creatures. Well, the winners were living, anyway, and the losers didn’t pose a hazard to anybody. Out there at Ground Zero, the worst hazards were invisible.

  The suits from the EPA were very clear about that. The chemicals that were spilled out there were mostly odorless and tasteless, and the ones that weren’t were so toxic that by the time you smelled them, you were already poisoned. They’d say this stuff, and then in the next breath, they’d tell Sherman and his neighbors that they were perfectly safe where they remained. How stupid did the government think they were, anyway?

  What Sherman wanted to know was how the hell could they be so sure that there was nothing wrong if there was no way to know the hazard was there in the first place? That just didn’t make any sense.

  So what did the EPA do to protect the community? They built a damn fence. They start with a hazard that nobody can detect, and then they try to throw a fence around it! Like the germs or the atoms or whatever the hell you called those toxic little monsters were afraid to cross a line drawn in the dirt. Who was kidding who here?

  Sherman was no scientist; far from it, and he’d be the first to admit it. But he knew that things that were invisible weren’t going to stop at any fence line. They were going to get picked up by air currents, and they were going to be spread all over hell’s half-acre, poisoning everything and everyone they came in contact with. Unless the government had come up with some special kind of force field that they hadn’t told anybody about, and if they’d done something like that, why wouldn’t they have said?

  No, sir, a fence was just a fence, nothing more. It wasn’t designed to keep out anything but people and animals.

  Which made him reflect that, after fifteen years of inbreeding, some mighty scrawny, mighty strange-looking deer lived inside those fences. Sherman and his buddies-avid hunters all of them-had talked about that a lot over the years. One of these days, Sherman liked to say, one of them deer was going to talk back to him, and when that happened, he was leaving town for good.

  God damn he hated this part of the job.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Clayton Albricht’s closest staffers had redubbed his office the War Room. The place was bedlam as a dozen people manned fifteen phone lines, all in a united effort to save their boss’s ass.

  Everyone agreed early on that staying at home and running damage control from there was exactly the wrong image for the senator to project. Illinois’s ship of state needed to look strong and steady, even as the hull leaked water by the tankerful.

  Better late than never, Clayton started his day around two that afternoon. He had smiled politely and waved to the sea of reporters and cameramen as he backed his Oldsmobile out of the garage, but he refused to entertain any questions. “I’m running late,” he mouthed through the glass. Man of the people that he was, the senator drove himself, alone in his car, while his chief of staff, Chris MacDonald, and his press secretary, Julie Baker, sneaked out the back door to drive separately in the cars they’d stashed a block away.

  The media motorcade was something to behold. On the drive in to Capitol Hill from his home in McLean, Virginia, Clayton felt genuine concern for the other drivers on the road. The news vans were so intent on photographing his every move that they’d forgotten some of the most basic principles of right-of-way. Entering the Beltway, in fact, an NBC truck very nearly lost a game of chicken to an eighteen-wheeler hauling gasoline. In the interest of public safety, the senator turned on his flashers and slowed to an unnatural fifty-five-miles-per-hour pace, thus allowing the camera crews to get their obligatory shots of him driving to work. He wore his blandest committee-meeting face as he navigated the right-hand lane, and tried not to think about just how much he needed to sneeze. Under this kind of scrutiny, he didn’t feel like providing easy footage for Saturday Night Live.

  The parking garage under the Russell Senate Office Building proved to be the great equalizer. Security restrictions prohibited the cameramen and report
ers from following him to his parking space, so, for a few minutes, he was alone again to collect his thoughts, absorbing the peace of the silent vehicle. This story was barely a day old, and already it was spinning out of control.

  Clayton sighed. It was going to be a very trying couple of weeks.

  The elevator ride wasn’t nearly long enough to suit him. By the time the polished wooden doors opened onto the marble hallway, the knot of reporters had re-formed, and they followed him all the way to his outer office, where Julie Baker had already arranged to have coffee and snacks brought in as appetizers for the vultures.

  Finally, as he reached for the handle to his private office, Clayton turned and faced his pursuers for the first time. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, the softness of his tone forcing everyone else to fall silent, “the stories printed this morning in the Washington Post are entirely false. I have my suspicions as to what might have prompted such vicious attacks on me, but until I have more details, I truly have no more to tell you. The moment I have those details, you’ll be the first to know. Thank you very much.”

  The room exploded with questions, but he just turned and disappeared through the door. The center of activity seemed to be the conference room at the end of the inner hallway to his left, so he headed that way. Activity in the War Room ceased as the door opened, and Clayton beckoned with two fingers for Chris MacDonald to follow him. Activity resumed the instant the senator turned his back to the room.

  “Good morning, Senator,” Veronica said as Clayton entered her office on his way to his own. Under the circumstances of the day, she seemed far too chipper, but Clayton didn’t mind a bit. Part of her job was to remain optimistic, even when everyone else’s mood was in the sewer.