The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  She was tired of hearing about this. “You’re still upset about that.”

  He was quiet.

  “It was only two lives. There’ll likely be-”

  “I know, Dana, but-”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Becker.” He’d used the name he knew her by: Dana Murkowski. One of her aliases. “We needed the videos of them to make our threat credible when the time comes.”

  “But you killed a little girl. Shot her mother in the-”

  “It was necessary. Just like with Clifton.”

  “Necessary? Couldn’t you have-”

  “It was necessary.” She let each word fall like a stone: We are not going to discuss this anymore.

  He didn’t reply, and she turned to leave but then felt his hand on her arm, gentle. An invitation. She paused.

  “I’m sorry. I know you had to do it. Your conviction, your fearlessness, that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you.” Well, his remorse over the death of the Pickrons must not have been as deep as he’d been letting on.

  She faced him and said with a smile, “That’s two reasons.”

  “Two reasons, then.” He seemed to have already put the Pickron slayings out of his mind. “Twenty minutes ago I had a conversation with Valkyrie. Everything is in place.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Alexei has the rest of the money. Picked it up from the dead drop.”

  “That shouldn’t matter now.”

  He was caressing her with his eyes and she didn’t discourage him.

  He’d been an easy man to seduce.

  One of her gifts was getting men to fall in love with her. And so, to solidify his loyalty, she had made sure that he was smitten; that he would do anything for her. She couldn’t help but think of him as a gullible little puppet. After all, he still believed they were going to be disarming the weapons on the sub to make a statement to the world.

  She let him take her in his arms.

  Oh yes, they were going to make a statement.

  She said nothing as he bent toward her.

  And when he kissed her she did not close her eyes.

  Sean led Tessa into his living room and she froze. The tragic remains of two deer heads and a four-foot-long muskie hung on the wall.

  All right, that was just plain troubling. She turned away. “Is Amber here?”

  “Last I heard, she was at the hospital with Pat. She’s probably on her way home.”

  Although Tessa didn’t know the details, from a few uncharacteristic moments of self-revelation from Patrick over the last year, she did know that before Patrick met her mom, he and Amber had had some sort of thing together.

  Probably before she met Sean.

  All ancient history.

  Sean didn’t seem to give a second thought to Amber visiting with Patrick tonight.

  As he was walking toward the kitchen, the house lights flickered briefly and he made a comment about how, this far in the country, the electricity goes out all the time. Now that she thought about it, she realized that on the way to the house she hadn’t seen neighbors anywhere close.

  Sean motioned toward a pile of wood by the living room fireplace. “I’ll get a fire going just in case.” Then he caught himself. “Are you hungry?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You want some juice or something?”

  No sense fighting it. You’re not gonna fall asleep anyway.

  “How about some coffee?”

  “At this time of night?”

  “I expect to be up for a while,” she said simply.

  41

  Alternating ice baths-fifteen minutes in ice-cube-filled water, then a soak in the other bucket for ten, in water as hot as I could stand.

  Repeat.

  Again.

  The chilled water takes the swelling down, the heat rushes blood flow to the area, helping circulation.

  It’s one of the best ways I’ve found to treat a sprain, but admittedly it isn’t exactly nirvana in the moment you switch your foot from the steaming water to the ice bath.

  I’d been at it for nearly an hour, my computer on my lap, working on the case as I soaked my ankle.

  We knew Donnie drove his Jeep to work on Thursday, left at noon with the sawmill’s truck, but where was it now? If he’d returned to the house and then left on the snowmobile, what did he do with the truck?

  Obviously, if he was abducted, his captors could have hidden it somewhere, but I was a bit surprised it was still missing.

  It hadn’t been overcast yesterday afternoon or this morning, so now I checked the Defense Department’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database, or ROSD, to see if I could get a glimpse of anyone driving to or from the Pickron home around the time of the crimes.

  Since this is a remote, sparsely populated region, I wasn’t surprised to find gaps in the footage between satellite passes, but it was informative to note that one of those coincided exactly with the time someone would have needed to access the house immediately preceding the crime, then again ten minutes later when they might have exited the scene.

  The killers knew the precise times the Defense Department’s satellites would and would not be passing overhead.

  I had footage from 1:54 to 1:58, could even see the cracks appear in the glass from the gunshots.

  Shots fired through the living room window. Why?

  I considered the time: 1:54 p.m… the date: January 8… the orientation of the window to the sun… the longitude and latitu Hang on.

  Going back to the satellite images, I saw that Yes.

  Oh yes.

  At that time of day, with the position of the house, the sun, the satellite, there was no glare on the house’s northern exposure living room window.

  The interior house lights were on when the police arrived, remember? Only the study’s lights were off.

  I don’t believe in coincidences.

  No, I don’t.

  The cracks in the glass obscured the view of the house’s interior; however, it wasn’t a person outside in the marsh that might have peered in and seen the killers at work, it was a satellite.

  I zoomed in on the image of the window. Looking at the house, first without the cracks in the glass, then with them, I realized that with the carefully placed shots causing the networked pattern of cracks, I could not see clearly inside the house.

  Then there was the phone call, then the final shot Was someone watching a live feed through the ROSD? Is that the reason for the call, to let the killer know another shot was needed? A status report on the satellites? A warning? A signal?

  It was impossible, of course, to discern what the caller or killer might have been thinking at that moment, but the precise timing and location of the shots told me that whoever was coordinating this thought like me.

  No. he’s smarter than you.

  You almost missed this.

  Frustratingly, this line of thinking brought up more questions than it answered: How could someone have accessed the DoD’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database in the first place? Were we looking for a federal employee? Obviously there was a team of people involved, but how many?

  You would need a world-class hacker to pull off something like that.

  It was impressive as well as unsettling.

  Researching further, I found that the cloud cover earlier today hid any view the satellites might’ve had of Chekov’s movements. And if someone did place the helmet in the open water on Tomahawk Lake, they must have done so during the night when there wasn’t enough light for the satellites to image the area.

  Based on crime scene photos and lab analysis, I confirmed that one set of boot prints from a men’s size 9, LaCrosse 400 G pac boot matched prints approaching the open water on Tomahawk Lake and the prints exiting the Pickron residence.

  Donnie Pickron wore size eleven.

  Nothing solid pointed toward him as the shooter, absolutely nothing.

  I felt strangely encouraged, however. Taking into account
all the effort someone had gone through to make it look like he was dead, I began holding out hope that he was still alive.

  I wouldn’t be able to do much tonight to track Chekov, so I did the next best thing and took some time to study the ELF files Margaret had sent me concerning the now-closed Navy communication base.

  Here’s what I learned:

  The Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic transmission technology was developed during the Cold War and was used to communicate with US and British Trident nuclear submarines. At the time, it was the only communication system that was able to contact subs while they were at stealth depths and running speed.

  The signals were nearly impossible to jam or decipher, which provided a perfect way to get messages to subs while they remained submerged.

  Radio signals can travel through water, but their ability to spread out is reduced as the frequency of the signal is increased: lower frequency, longer distance under the water. To get the messages to subs, the signals would need to travel hundreds of feet below the surface, thus the extremely low frequency of 76 Hertz or less, allowing the signals to travel down a thousand feet or more.

  There were two locations for the ELF stations, one in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, the other about 150 miles away in Republic, Michigan. The sites were chosen because of the efficient low conductivity of the underlying bedrock, which helped transmit the signals, not through the earth’s crust as I would have expected, but up into the atmosphere. Apparently, the ionosphere and the curvature of the earth served to diffract the electromagnetic waves into the oceans around the world. Every ocean that the subs patrolled was covered by the signals.

  Every ocean.

  Every route.

  Every sub.

  I found it impressive that this technology was developed in the eighties, but when I read on I saw that it had actually been pioneered in the 1950s, which was even more astonishing. The original proposal was to build a deep underground system in Wisconsin called SHELF-Super Hard ELF.

  The Navy had given the development of this original extremely low frequency system the name Project Sanguine and had debated using dozens of underground bunkers with buried electrical wires running thousands of square miles, but in the end decided it was more feasible and cost effective to use the aboveground wires, and Project Sanguine had been scrapped.

  However, according to some reports, they’d actually started work on Project Sanguine, constructing more than two dozen miles of tunnels and even an underground bunker in the years before the environmentalists caught wind of what they were doing.

  I could see where this might be going, and I hoped my hypothesis was wrong.

  I read on.

  The Wisconsin ELF station officially began operating on October 1, 1989, but even a decade before that there was vigorous debate about the environmental effects of the program and the resultant magnetic fields created by the station. Environmentalists claimed there would be wide-ranging and disastrous consequences-that the signals would cause leukemia in humans and all sorts of maladies to the wildlife of the region.

  At the time, the Navy studied the problem and concluded that the risk of any adverse effects was minimal.

  But in the 1984 case of Wisconsin v. Weinberger, the Seventh District Court disagreed-stating that there was substantial evidence of serious health hazards-and halted construction, but in the end the national security threat posed by Russia superseded the ruling, and the station was completed and commissioned.

  Despite numerous subsequent studies over the next decade, no conclusive evidence was found to substantiate the activists’ claims.

  But the environmentalists hadn’t given up.

  Over the ELF station’s operational years, socially progressive and environmentally conscious groups held regular protests at the base, cut down the telephone poles that supported the electrical lines, and filed relentless federal lawsuits to close the Wisconsin station. State senators Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold even got into the act, demanding that the ELF site be shut down.

  So.

  A few threads came together.

  All Ohio Class subs are equipped with antennas to receive the extremely low frequency waves and have onboard instruments that decode the ELF signals. However, since the subs don’t have miles of radio transmission wires, the communication between the station and the subs was one-way.

  For that reason, the ELF orders were typically requests for the sub to surface to receive further communication, or to remain at depth and at immediate battle readiness.

  Typically.

  In 2004, the Navy, without warning, announced that they were closing the stations because they were outdated and no longer needed. The Michigan site was completely razed. Then, the military dismantled the communications array here in Wisconsin, taking down all the telephone poles as well as more than twenty-eight miles of transmission wires that had surrounded the station.

  Naval personnel had bulldozed the station, removed all the rubble, and reseeded the field so that now all that remained was a looming maintenance building that was apparently left for the forest service to use.

  I found myself wondering if the Navy would really invest nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and fifty years of research and then abandon a project just because it seemed dated.

  Actually, they might.

  But still, why then? Why 2004?

  As all of this was circling through my head, I scrolled to the final PDF file and found a footnote that gave me pause.

  According to some protestors, the ELF signal could be used to issue first-strike orders, although the Navy maintained that the signals could never be used in that way.

  But in the 1996 case of Wisconsin v. Donna and Tom Howard, a former commander of a US nuclear submarine, Captain James Bush, testified that the primary purpose of ELF signals was to give go-codes to launch kinetic attacks against foreign adversaries.

  In other words, to initiate nuclear war.

  I felt a palpable chill.

  A biometric ID card.

  Above top secret access.

  The preliminary Project Sanguine work was done in Wisconsin, possibly including tunnels being constructed.

  Though I’m hesitant to make investigative assumptions, it was looking more and more likely that something still remained out there in the middle of the national forest.

  Using my laptop, I pulled up the topo maps of the area and overlaid the snowmobile trails Donnie Pickron might have used to get to the sawmill.

  The GPS coordinates showed that the site of the old ELF station lay just off the Birch Trail, one of the three routes that would’ve made sense for him to use. The Schoenberg Inn and the sawmill lie in northeasterly and southeasterly directions, respectively. Although much farther by road, the site was geographically relatively close to them both-a little over five miles as the crow flies.

  As I was considering the implications, I heard a knock at the door. After drying my foot, I hobbled across the room and peered through the peephole, a habit formed from too many years of tracking people who want to kill you. Amber stood outside the room.

  I cracked it open, letting in a gust of arctic air. “Hey, is everything all right?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Um, well, that might not be-”

  “Please.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped aside, and she entered my motel room and shut the door softly behind her.

  42

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Good. I’m doing good.”

  “Your ankle?” She was eyeing the two buckets.

  “Well,” I said, repositioning myself so I was putting less weight on it. “It’s okay.”

  Amber looked at my swollen foot but refrained from comment.

  Being alone in a motel room with her like this brought back memories, sharp, vivid. The three nights we’d spent together talking, sharing-a fire of intimacy born of common interests, goals, dreams. The memories made
me uneasy, and I waited anxiously for her to explain her visit, all the while, the information I’d read about the ELF station kept itching away at my attention.

  Quietly, and before I realized what she was doing, Amber approached me, then brushed her hand across my arm. “I was so worried about you when they brought you in to the hospital.”

  I took a faltering step backward. “Don’t be concerned. Really, I’m all right.”

  “When you were lying there unconscious, it made me think…” She took in a small breath. “I realized some things.”

  I couldn’t see any way that this conversation was a good one for us to be having. Especially not here. Not now. “Amber, maybe you should go.”

  “I came here to talk to you about me and Sean.”

  “Amber, I’m not sure-”

  “You know we’ve had our ups and downs.”

  Actually, I hadn’t known about any problems the two of them were having, which was just further evidence of how superficially I knew my brother. And from past experience I was all too aware that when people use the phrase “we’ve had our ups and downs” it’s just a euphemistic way of saying “we’ve had our downs.”

  “Things haven’t been good between us,” she said candidly.

  I moved toward the door. “It’s not my place to hear this, Amber.”

  Rather than reply, she abruptly changed the direction of the conversation. “Why did you end things, Pat?”

  “Please, I’m not-”

  “You never told me.”

  “It wouldn’t have been right for us to keep going.”

  “Just when things were…” She paused, searched for the right words. “Moving forward.”

  “You were engaged to my brother.”

  “You can’t tell me you didn’t feel it, though.”

  “I’m with Lien-hua now.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re with Sean.”

  A small pause. “Yes.”

  “What we had, Amber, it’s over.”

  She turned her back to me, and I wished she hadn’t. I wanted to see her face so I could try to read her, decipher what she might be thinking.

  “I know there’s more, Pat. All this time I’ve known. Was it something I did? I just need to know.”