The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  All these thoughts whirled in his mind as he taxied out toward the runway, automatically checking his gauges and tuning to ATIS for the latest in flying conditions and runway information.

  He switched to the tower frequency. “Cessna N21993 is ready for takeoff,” he said, pleased to hear that his voice was rock-steady. “Departing North, have numbers.”

  By the time Mark and Dell turned off on the dirt road outside Micaville, California, Glenn Traywick had been in the air almost an hour.

  As Mark and Dell drove out to the abandoned hangar, a coyote crossed in front of them fifty yards up, a rodent hanging from its jaws. It stopped and gave them a look, its shiny gold eyes bright and knowing, then trotted off.

  “The trickster,” mumbled Mark.

  Dell looked at him. “What’d you say?”

  “Coyote. The trickster. That’s what they’re called by the Indians. Maybe it’s a bad sign.”

  “Bullshit.”

  But Mark was still puzzled about what happened at the port of entry. He’d assumed that the inspector would look at the manifest, then wave them through with a wink and a nod. But they’d gone over the truck for almost twenty minutes, and he’d seen the guy with the radioactive detector checking the casks.

  Maybe they were just making it look good. He shouldn’t let it bother him. They got through okay, didn’t they?

  The hangar was only a few hundred yards from the road, rising out of the creosote like a giant’s mailbox, sided with corrugated iron painted white. A row of many-paned windows, either opaque from the white paint or broken, ran along the sides. No sign of anyone, but that was the point. Bobby would be waiting inside with his rig.

  The wind had sprung up by this time and funneled dirt from under the truck’s wheels into the ceramic blue sky. They turned into the vast clearing that faced the hangar, feeling sandblasted. Bobby Burdette’s semi truck was backed in, and Bobby had somehow managed to pull the huge sheet of army-green canvas up to the scaffold. He hopped down and directed Dell to back in. Wind whistled through the broken windowpanes.

  Mark didn’t like Bobby Burdette, but he had to admit he worked fast. He had the GPS computer out of the dash of the Fleet truck and into the decoy semi in less than two minutes, start to finish.

  They put stolen plates on both trucks. The canvas used to cover the canisters took some wrestling, but thanks to the scaffolding Bobby had brought along, it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be.

  Still, the casks were tall and the canvas fell short on either side. “Reminds me of Dana’s little kid,” Dell commented. “Runs around the house in a T-shirt and a bare butt.”

  It was a trick to tie the canvas down, and Mark wondered if the wind, which now buffeted the hangar like an angry boxer, would get under the tarp and pull it loose.

  Mark opened his mouth to say something, but shut it again. It wasn’t his problem now. He and Dell were basically home free. All they had to do was continue along the route in the decoy semi to give Bobby some time, then ditch it in Seligman, where Dell had a car stashed.

  After that they’d melt into the woodwork. Dell had a friend who had a “safe house” in Kingman where they could stay for a couple months until things calmed down, and then Mark would fly to Indiana using his own name.

  It sounded really simple. But as his dad’s favorite poem said, “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men gang aft agley.”

  Bobby was still struggling with the last of the tie-downs when he said, “You guys better go. If anybody’s looking at TRANSCOM, you’ve been standing still almost forty minutes.”

  Suited Mark. He and Dell climbed up into the semi and drove out. His last view of Bobby Burdette was in the side-view mirror, arms folded as he leaned against the big front grill of the rig, cocky as ever.

  Mark and Dell were almost to the outskirts of Baker (home of the World Famous Giant Thermometer!) when they were nearly run off the road by a Corvette pulling out of a side road right across their grill.

  “Did you see that motherfucker?” Dell said.

  Mark watched the car dwindle quickly in the side mirror, remembering all over again his terror at the hands of Jimmy Hollings. Older, wiser now, he shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t want to be in his way when he goes off the road.”

  35

  The once-quiet Highway Patrol Division 2 office was buzzing with the hyperactivity of a beehive.

  Jon Service had been on the horn since they arrived from Oak Creek Canyon, putting together the task force and setting up a roadblock west of Searchlight, Nevada. Although a helicopter had already been dispatched to take them to the staging area outside Searchlight, the flight itself would take an hour. Jon was coordinating what resources were available on the ground—a logistical nightmare involving three state jurisdictions, several federal and local agencies, and the area itself, which was in a remote desert area lacking in law enforcement resources. Already, the Department of Energy, the ATF, and the Nuclear Emergency Search Team—NEST—were organizing their own people and heading out to Searchlight.

  The other resident special agent, Darcy Clayborn, had been dispatched to Jack Taylor’s house to oversee the removal of his computers and any other information he would have. She stayed in constant contact with Jordan Benteen, an FBI intelligence analyst who was working Rapid Start, a computerized clearing house which collated information coming from other sources. He was ensconced at one end of the conference table in the common room of the DPS Highway Patrol office—the yellow brick building facing Kaibab Lane—which had more room to spread out in than the detectives’ modular unit. Ranged around him were three mobile devices, two laptop computers, a laser printer, and fax. The laptops each had LCD projectors throwing their feeds up on tripod screens brought in by DPS. The table awash in paper. Two identical road maps tacked up on the bulletin board—one, marked in black, followed the regular Fleet Trucking route; the other, in red, showed the planned route of the hijacked truck.

  The routes were identical until they reached Searchlight, Nevada—south from the Nevada Test Site to Baker, California; east on Interstate 15, exiting onto 164 going east to Searchlight. There, the truck was supposed to turn south on 95, which would take it to Kingman, Arizona, and Interstate 40 going east. But instead of turning south, the hijackers plan was to continue straight through Searchlight on 164 to the Colorado River and Cottonwood Cove.

  Jon got a call on the speaker phone from Las Vegas Metro Police Department SWAT team offering their services. Jon told them to stand by; he’d get back to them ASAP.

  Laura said, “I bet they liked that.”

  “Can’t be helped. I have to clear it with the SAC.”

  That would be Special Agent in Charge Damien Peltier. Laura had worked with him before.

  “He’s still here? I thought he’d be running Homeland Security by now.”

  “They must think we need him.” He sat on the edge of the desk, one leg over the other knee, swinging. “Still, I don’t want to burn any bridges—we might need Las Vegas SWAT for point control.”

  “Point control. That’ll make them happy.” Laura looked at the blackboard where she had been putting up information in list form. Something about the stark white chalk against black made the information stand out for her.

  Two trucks had gone out of the Nevada Test Site this morning, one of them loaded with transuranic waste headed for Carlsbad, the other carrying empty canisters to Texas A&M. TRANSCOM was tracking both of them, and so far, both of them were following the prescribed route.

  Information was being collated on the drivers of both trucks and the trucking company contractor, Fleet Trucking. They had names, but little else at the moment.

  One of the two trucks—the one carrying the waste—had already turned south on 95 at Searchlight.

  “It has to be the other truck then” Laura said.

  Jon said, “The other truck is carrying empties.”

  Laura looked at him. “All HazMat loads are escorted by police. What about e
mpty trucks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Laura was already looking at another item: Jack Taylor had used a credit card under the name John Traynor to rent a semi truck. She tapped the paper with a fingernail. “Why would he rent a semi?”

  Jon stood up, ponderous as a bear—looks were deceiving. “Maybe they moved the waste casks to the semi. No, scratch that.” He glanced at the digital photos of a truck carrying the Trupact-II waste casks. “Even if it was a flatbed, which this one isn’t, they’d never be able to switch those things out in a hurry—it says here it takes four hours to load those things and tie them down properly.”

  Laura went over and stood behind Jordy Benteen, so she could follow the GPS location on one of the projection screens. She knew she was missing something. Maybe looking at the Global Positioning System notations would help, but Jordy had the log data up: all numbers—latitude, longitude, altitude, speed.

  “Jordy, could you pull up the map?”

  “Sure thing.” He switched to the map, zoomed in to a fifty-square-mile area. On the map were two dots, belonging to the two trucks in question.

  He clicked on the second dot and a window came up, listing the ID number of the truck, its destination and projected arrival time.

  “You can forget changing out the casks,” Laura said, “There’s no way they stopped for four hours.”

  Jordy said, “That’s the interesting thing. I did some calculations—what time they left, how long it would take to get to Cottonwood Cove? It looks like this second truck must have stopped somewhere. There’s a discrepancy of almost forty minutes.”

  Laura looked at Jon. “They stopped for something,” she said, “but what?”

  Jordy said, “That’s why they’re so far behind the other truck. But that’s not the weirdest thing. Somebody at TRANSCOM caught this—for a couple of minutes earlier this morning the truck disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “Once a GPS is up and running, it doesn’t stop, even if the vehicle shuts down. Say somebody goes to the restroom—the thing keeps going. Which is weird if the truck just disappears like that.”

  “Do you know what could cause this?”

  He shrugged. “I guess if it was disconnected.”

  She had a fleeting thought—two disparate items joining up—then noticed the look on Jon Service’s face. He was intent on something behind her.

  She heard knuckles cracking. She knew that sound.

  It was the sound of all the air being sucked from the room.

  36

  One of Bobby Burdette’s favorite stories was about Jim Thorpe, the Indian who was considered one of the greatest athletes of all time. On his way to the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe sat on the deck of a ship for hours on end and stared at a bar he’d set up, every once in a while getting up from his deck chair to raise it a little. When a reporter asked what he was doing, he said, “I just broke the record for the high jump.”

  Maybe the story was apocryphal—Bobby didn’t know—but it sure resonated with him. He had a stack of books at home that said if you wanted to be successful, you came up with a plan, and then you visualized yourself going through it. There was one book that said just by thinking your way to what you wanted, you actually changed the molecules inside yourself, so that your whole body became a missile launching itself toward success.

  That sounded a little farfetched. But he knew there was power in positive thinking.

  Driving through the dull-brown-and-gray Mojave, it would have been easy to get bored, but Bobby was looking at other things, things inside his head. He was picturing his plan, step by step.

  He saw himself driving up I-15 into Vegas.

  He saw himself parking the truck outside the Blue Lagoon Hotel and Casino.

  He saw himself walking up the street to the Mirage, going upstairs to the roof, where he’d have the truck perfect in his line of vision.

  He saw himself calling the Blue Lagoon, asking to speak to the manager, the manager coming on the phone. He saw himself calmly and intelligently explaining the situation to the manager, telling him that the phone he was talking on was also a detonating device. He could be pretty persuasive when he talked—he had that ring of authority, had always been able to talk his way into or out of anything. That Fleet truck out there, just out your window? He’d say—those are Trupact-II canisters on the back. Look it up. Call the Department of Energy, call the Nevada Test Site, you’ll find that a truck with Trupact-II casks went out today, headed for Carlsbad carrying low-level nuclear waste. Except they’re not going to Carlsbad. They’re right here at the Blue Lagoon.

  “There are three places on that truck are wired with dynamite. I set them so they will penetrate the first tank. I can detonate it with my mobile device. You understand what I’m saying?”

  He’d outline the dangers of transuranic waste, especially on a windy day like this.

  “It’s not that it will kill anyone,” he’d say. “Not now anyway. That’s gonna come down the pike—lots of types of cancer you don’t even know the names of. People are gonna inhale, and that’s what is going to get them.

  “But that's not even the worst of it, right?”

  The manager stammering now, because he understands what Bobby’s getting at. It isn’t the potential loss of life ten, twenty years down the line. No, that’s not how casinos think. They think in terms of the bottom line, they think in terms of stockholders, they think in terms of the next business cycle.

  So Bobby lets that sink in and says, “You know what happened to Chernobyl, right?”

  By this time the manager’s shaking in his Guccis.

  “They put a fence around it. They got everybody out of there and they put a fence around it, around the town, around the area, and nobody could go in for hundreds of years.

  “Think about it. All these casinos. Your casino. Think about all the money that changes hands every day. Think about what would happen if Las Vegas didn’t exist anymore.”

  Then the kicker: How much is a million dollars compared to that? One lousy million dollars. I know what you’re gonna say. “How can we lay our hands on money like that?” But you know that would be disingenuous, right? You have that in petty cash right now. If there’s one place you can get your hands on cash, it’s Las Vegas.

  It was a perfect set-up. The truck in the parking lot, Bobby with the phone at—as Dick Cheney would say—another undisclosed location, and plenty of money downstairs and all over Las Vegas.

  “What I want is real simple,” he’d say. “If you do what I ask, it will be one of the simplest transactions in the world. All I want is one million dollars. If you can’t scrape up the money on your own, you can always call some of your friends. I’m sure you can come up with a million in no time.” He’d list a few interested parties: the Mirage, Mandalay Bay, the Bellagio, the Luxor. They’d all have a stake in this.

  And so he would make his demand: the million dollars, wired to a Swiss numbered bank account, which he would have to get confirmation on. Once the money had been successfully wired, he would take off in the car he had stashed in the Mirage parking lot.

  He knew, though, that they would try to cheat. Even for a million dollars, which should only be the cost of doing business when you’re trying to save Las Vegas from becoming a ghost town—even then. He’d learned that about folks, especially rich folks. Especially corporations. They liked to hold onto their money. The more they had, the more they begrudged the loss of even a penny. The casino guys, they’d think they were being really crafty, trying to put one over on the poor white guy with dirt under his nails. It could manifest itself in many ways: They would try to stall him so a bomb team could come out and defuse the bombs. Or they would enlist the police to make a hotel-to-hotel search in this immediate area. Or they would try to do something with the wire transfer itself—although that was pretty much foolproof.

  Still, he didn’t trust them. Hence, the hostage.

  Sometimes, th
e human factor was the only thing that could change the equation. The fear that a woman might be buried underground, left to die under a pile of earth—anybody could relate to that. Or at least the fear that the Blue Lagoon Hotel and Casino would be seen as putting the value of their bank account over the value of human life.

  If that came out, their lagoon would dry up into a tadpole pond.

  Bobby’s eyes tracked a jackrabbit as it loped across the desert, the same dull gray-brown as the landscape it ran through. Las Vegas, for all its billion lights and shows and waterfalls and fake-looking grass and the chiming that went on day and night, could be as dead as this desert in a week. He pictured it: refugees in Armani suits with smartphones, running out off the Strip like rats.

  Bobby knew he had to keep it between him and the casinos. He knew they wouldn’t want the media there any more than he did. Last year an al Qaeda operative videotaped casinos as possible terrorist targets. When the city fathers were notified that there were terrorists casing the place, they stuck their heads in the sand like ostriches. They didn’t want to hear about it. They didn’t want the bad publicity, didn’t want to discourage so much as one overweight, flip-flop-wearing, Hawaiian-shirted tourist from unloading his paycheck here. That was their answer—ignore it and it will go away.

  So he thought his chances were pretty good for getting away clean, if he kept it between himself and the Blue Lagoon.

  Something his mother always said popped into his mind: think positive. Coming from her, that was a joke. She never had one positive thought in her life, but she made that her mantra. As in: The trouble with you is you don’t think positive. You don’t aim high.

  High enough for you now, Ma?

  So he was going to think positive. Like the Little Feat song said, put on your sailin’ shoes, and he was going to sail all the way to Mexico. He wasn’t going to think about all the ways it could go wrong. He was going to set those happy, success-oriented molecules in motion.