Pyramid Lake

by Draker, Paul

  I almost asked Frankenstein to display a panorama of those images now, but I caught myself just in time. Displaying Googled images would reveal to Cassie the existence of the Trevornet. She was smart enough to have probably guessed that I had enabled Internet access somehow, in violation of security. But I didn’t want to force her into the awkward position of having to acknowledge it.

  “According to Dante, Bennett was punished for betrayal,” I added lamely.

  Cassie looked thoughtful. “So tell me, who would consider Ronald Bennett, a deputy director of Homeland Security, guilty of betrayal?”

  I would, I thought, but didn’t say. Bennett had betrayed both Frankenstein and me. He and his colleagues had made Frankenstein an operational part of Pyramid Lake’s rendition and detainment camp for suspected terrorists, without even informing me, the principal investigator for the MADRID project.

  Once again, the Dante interpretation seemed to point a finger at me, the way it had in McNulty’s case. Just like the planting of my keys, it felt deliberate. But questioning Roger and Kate hadn’t brought us any closer to an answer.

  We were still missing something. Or someone.

  Shrugging off my co-lead’s question, I thought about my discussion with Garmin. According to him, during the time window when Bennett died last night, security key-card records had placed all of the DARPA leads on base.

  I turned to Cassie.

  “When’s the last time you saw Blake?”

  CHAPTER 61

  When Cassie’s Prius pulled away from the guard post at the base gate, just ahead of my Mustang, a tribal police car made a U-turn on the dusty shoulder and fell in behind her. I was pleased to see it because our MP escorts had stayed behind to await our return tomorrow morning. The tribal police would keep Cassie safe on her way down to Wadsworth, where she would stay overnight at her uncle’s place.

  I was less happy to see my own escort waiting a hundred yards down the road. Peterson and Zajicek hadn’t gone far after Garmin and I sent them packing. Their presence was an annoyance I didn’t need right now, because I planned to track Blake down myself and ask him some very pointed questions.

  The two Washoe County sheriff’s deputies stayed visible in my rearview mirror all the way back to Flanigan, even following me into the drive-through lane of a Starbucks.

  At the window, I ordered a selection of four dozen doughnuts and dessert pastries, going heavy on starches, sugars, and fats. Checking an imaginary text message on my phone, I leaned out the window and gave Peterson and Zajicek, behind me, an exaggerated thumbs-up for the barista’s benefit.

  Both officers kept their faces impassive beneath the mirrored sunglasses.

  I added another two dozen muffins for the imaginary Sheriff’s Department fund-raiser I was supposed to be helping set up. Then, pretending I’d forgotten my wallet, I apologized to the barista and sent a text to myself. I waited for a nonexistent reply, then gave the squad car behind me another thumbs-up.

  “Cool, no worries,” I told the barista, pointing back at the deputies. “They’ve got this.”

  Looking in the rearview mirror as I pulled away, I was gratified to see a frustrated-looking Evan Peterson climb out of the car, wallet in hand, to accept the oversize pastry boxes, which were too big to fit through the squad car window.

  I grinned watching him hand them through the open door to a pissed-off looking Zajicek. Neither of them wanted to make the Washoe Sheriff’s department the laughingstock of Flanigan’s café crowd, though, so they were playing along.

  Turning the wheel, I rounded the corner, and they were lost to sight.

  Five minutes later, I was sitting on my couch with my MacBook in my lap. I looked out the window and watched the Sheriff’s Department car pull up across the street from my house. But they didn’t get out.

  At least they wouldn’t get hungry now. Chuckling, I considered ordering them a dozen pizzas just to be sure, and maybe some flowers, and a singing telegram and a birthday-party balloon clown, followed by a tow truck… Then I sobered. No more fun and games—I didn’t have time to waste.

  The side-by-side icons of two encrypted folders stared out from my screen: the contents of McNulty’s and Blake’s hard drives. Although I was more interested in Blake’s, I started with McNulty’s. Hearing Kate’s drunken ramble about getting HR involved had gotten me thinking. The “nice guy” she had railroaded with a phony sexual assault claim: had he worked at Pyramid Lake?

  A quick Spotlight search for “criminal,” “rape,” “assault,” “sexual,” and similar terms turned up nothing that related to Kate. But I did find something else that made my eyes narrow.

  A three-year-old bulletin to department administrators informed McNulty of a prison parolee—a sex offender—recently hired by the civilian food service concession that ran our on-base cafeteria. The routine announcement to management, which was required under Nevada law, included the ex-con’s name, Douglas Hensley, and his home address. There was a photograph, too. It was blurry, but I recognized the teardrop tattoos descending from the corner of one eye. Doug was the guy who worked the cafeteria grill, whom I’d gotten into it with a month ago. He had gotten into a snit because I took one look at the half-raw chicken breast he’d given me and tossed it back at him, bouncing it off his chest.

  He had pointed at his tattoo. “Do you know what this means, punk?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “It means you’re stupid. Only an idiot would think it’s a good idea to advertise to the world how much time he spent grabbing his ankles or bobbing on his knees in a lockup shower stall.”

  The cafeteria shift supervisor had stepped in front of Doug before he got his grill apron off. Holding him back with two hands, the supervisor whispered something to restrain him, while I laughed.

  Doug glared at me and clenched and unclenched his fists. “We aren’t done.”

  “Neither was my chicken,” I told him. “Get it right next time.”

  Bringing up a browser window alongside Doug’s picture now, I checked his name against Nevada’s sex offender registry, which told me more than I wanted to know about why he had done time: sexual assault on a 9-year-old girl.

  I angrily closed the browser, remembering Cassie’s story about the 1860 Pony Express station-keepers who had abducted and molested two Paiute children.

  Her great-times-four grand-uncle Natchez had known how to deal with that kind of human garbage. The five of them hadn’t been serving half-raw chicken to anyone afterward; that was for goddamn sure. Glancing at the picture of Doug Hensley and his teardrop tattoos again, I shook my head in disgust.

  Somewhere in the past 154 years, civilization had taken a wrong turn. Now a lump of dog shit like Doug got a couple of years’ free room and board, courtesy of taxpayers like me, while he worked out and watched TV. Then they cut him loose so he could smirk at me while he undercooked my lunches and spent his weekends trolling for his next victim.

  And yet, the same civilized people who thought it was a good idea to let Doug walk around free would take one look at my daughter’s real psych evaluation and label her a monster. They would want my sweet little 7-year-old girl, who had never hurt anyone, locked up forever and drugged senseless because of a brain abnormality she couldn’t help.

  Fuck them and fuck their “civilized.”

  Slamming the laptop shut, I jumped up and stalked off to the kitchen. I grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge, twisted the top off, and gulped half the contents. I hadn’t eaten for thirty hours, and I was starting to feel lightheaded, so I threw some spinach, egg whites, and fruit into the Vitamix and blended it into a smoothie.

  Somewhat calmer now, I took my smoothie and water bottle to the counter. I grabbed the laptop off the couch and slid onto a barstool, searching McNulty’s hard drive for “human resources” as I drained the glass.

  The first document I opened was a draft termination letter that McNulty had prepared. My own name jumped out at me from the text. I smiled humorlessly, no
ting the planned termination date: last Friday.

  I was already living on borrowed time, then.

  Uncertain whether it had been Cassie’s threat or McNulty’s death that had temporarily saved my job, I scanned the letter for the reason McNulty planned to give for firing me.

  “Early termination of DARPA sub-lease.” What the fuck?

  The implications stopped me cold. Then I went back to the search results, already knowing what I would find. I brought up the next item in the list and stared at it: a document identical to the one I had been reading, except for one small difference.

  This one was a termination letter for Kate.

  The one after that was for Roger.

  The next was for Blake.

  The last was Cassie’s.

  • • •

  McNulty had planned to fire us all. I needed to think this through.

  Lowering myself to the hardwood floor, I hooked my toes beneath the couch frame, placed my fingertips behind my ears, and started knocking out rapid sit-ups. Things were starting to make sense now. Because the Pyramid Lake Navy base had a sensitive new mission, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security.

  Pyramid Lake was the United States’ new, ultrasecret rendition and detainment camp, and it was now ramping up to an operational phase. It was time to streamline other base operations to protect the secrecy and security of the mission. That meant getting rid of unrelated activities like the DARPA projects that Kate, Roger, and Blake ran.

  Frankenstein, however, was already a key component of the rendition camp—an infallible interrogator to extract every secret the detainees might try to hide. I grunted and increased the pace of my sit-ups, incensed again at the smug arrogance of their plan. McNulty, Bennett, Linebaugh, and the base commander—they had taken it on themselves to decide the fate of my project, without my approval—without even consulting me. I was barely an afterthought to them—Bennett hadn’t even known who I was.

  What they had done to Cassie was even worse.

  Linebaugh had used an inoffensive-sounding DARPA research project to lure her back to Pyramid Lake and promised her contingent funding for her school. But he had known all along that her new role would be terminated a week later. He had lied to Cassie, counting on her unwillingness to abandon her dream of a computer-literacy program to help her people. He knew she would have no choice but to accept the alternative role that Homeland Security would offer her: managing technical interrogations at the Pyramid Lake detainment camp.

  Her own natural face-reading talent would make her ruthlessly effective in the prosecution of that role, even as it destroyed her soul.

  Well, Frankenstein and I would save her from that heartbreak. But helping Cassie was actually the easy part. First we had to find a way to save my daughter from her own sort of rendition and lifelong detainment—an undeserved living nightmare that would make whatever happened to terror suspects inside the little building-within-a-warehouse here at Pyramid Lake look gentle and kind by comparison.

  I thought back on that two-story structure and how I had dragged my fingers against the windowless concrete walls as I circumnavigated it. At roughly fifty feet square, it was too small for a prison camp… unless there was more to it than met the eye.

  I shot to my feet. Returning to my laptop, I searched the files I had copied for the words “floor plan,” “blueprint,” and “map.” Two documents popped up—one from Blake’s directory and one from McNulty’s.

  The one from Blake’s was a bathymetric survey of Pyramid Lake, with notes annotating subsurface features of interest: “ballast,” “target barge,” “torpedo,” “steel barrels,” “PT boat hull,” “small aircraft.” It was the copy he had gotten of the Navy’s ten-year-old survey, from the abandoned cleanup of the Pyramid Lake bombing range.

  Looking at the prominent feature marked “torpedo,” I had to smirk. Blake had been serious about going scuba diving for naval artifacts. That wasn’t a real bright idea: the lake-bottom ordnance was sixty years old, but it might still hold a nasty surprise.

  The document from McNulty’s directory was more interesting. It was a 3-D rendering of what looked like five stacked circuit boards, separated by a spiraling interlink: smaller CPU and GPU boards on top, two larger memory boards on the bottom. It looked like a computer architecture diagram. But it had nothing to do with computers at all.

  It was a three-dimensional cutaway view of the little building Cassie and I had found in the warehouse, and it confirmed exactly what I had suspected: the bulk of the hidden construction was underground. The building we had seen was merely the entrance to a long series of ramping tunnels that spiraled downward at a gentle slope, making ninety-degree turns every few hundred feet.

  Every four turns, a network of other tunnels radiated out to form a sizable underground level. The three upper levels were divided into a network of rectangular chambers of different sizes. The bottom two levels were larger than the others. Each was a grid of parallel tunnels, flanked on each side by uniform rows of square chambers—no doubt prison cells.

  Two doors in tandem—almost certainly air locks—separated each level from the access ramps access ramps leading back up to the surface and down to the level below. Each air lock was a large chamber flanked by other rooms: high-tech security checkpoints, barracks, and guard posts.

  Looking at the scale on the blueprint, I was surprised to see that the bottom levels were more than a thousand feet below the ground’s surface.

  Homeland Security had dug its hidden prison deep into the solid rock.

  I remembered the massive tarp-draped tunnel-boring machine originally used to dig the geothermal plant’s injection and extraction wells.

  The rock-chewing borer had been re-activated sometime in the past four years, it seemed. Before the midnight trains started delivering their sensitive cargo, they had no doubt been used to carry away many thousands of tons of excavated rock.

  But why imprison suspected terrorists so deep underground? To hide the camp from satellite or aerial surveillance, a few feet of dirt would work just as well. Even ground-penetrating radar couldn’t see through more than a few dozen meters of rock.

  Frowning, I read the designations that marked each level on the map:

  L1 - INTAKE PROCESSING

  L2 - SHORT-TERM HOLDING

  L3 - EXTRACTION

  L4 - LONG-TERM INTERNMENT

  L5 - FINAL INTERMENT

  Extraction. What a mealy-mouthed bureaucratic euphemism for forcible interrogation by a machine that could read lies and hidden information off a detainee’s face. I snorted in disgust.

  But it was the designations for the bottom two levels that I found most troubling: “Long-Term Internment” and “Final Interment.”

  The difference in spelling wasn’t a typo. With the second ‘n,’ internment meant confinement for preventative or political reasons. But interment—without the second ‘n’—meant something else altogether.

  It was another word for burial.

  Staring at the diagram now, I felt a chill run down my back. Checking in to Homeland Security’s underground resort at Pyramid Lake, it seemed, was a one-way trip: a Roach Motel for terror suspects.

  Digging it so deep made sense now.

  Because political climates shifted. What passed for borderline legal under one administration could land a politician in front of a Senate Investigative Committee after the next election. Linebaugh had learned his lesson after Iraq, while answering awkward questions about a missing eighteen billion dollars. He wasn’t planning to make the same mistake here.

  And so, one fine day, the order would be given to fill in the tunnels. No news-media photographs of razor wire and claustrophobic cells would come back to haunt Linebaugh and his DHS buddies. The camp and its detainees would simply never have existed.

  A sick feeling spread from the pit of my stomach. And today I had taunted Garmin, daring him to send me down there?

  I dropped to the floor to do some pushu
ps, thinking furiously.

  I didn’t much care what we did to terrorists. Anyone who posed a danger to innocent women and children like my family deserved whatever they got. But I didn’t like this sneaky, dishonest way of dealing with the problem. Dragging people away in the middle of the night—including Americans who were only suspected of terrorism—wasn’t right. Making them disappear wasn’t right.

  I had promised Linebaugh I would step in for Cassie, but I now realized I could never go along with this. What about when we screwed up and grabbed the wrong folks? Our mistakes would get buried a quarter mile below our feet. No one would be accountable.

  The serendipity of Frankenstein’s awakening wouldn’t save just Cassie. It would save me, too. But in the meantime, to make it all work out, I had to stay free. And given what a bungling, incompetent clusterfuck the investigation had become, that meant it was now up to Cassie and me to figure out who killed Bennett and McNulty.

  Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight… The pushups helped clear my head. Hammering up and down, I thought about what McNulty’s termination letters meant for the other DARPA leads. Roger would probably be fine—in addition to his DARPA work, he had other Navy projects cooking, like the Ducrete cylinders he used as targets for his destructive testing. The loss of a DARPA contract wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience for him. Besides, despite the annoying revelation that Roger hated me, Frankenstein had cleared him of the murders. That left Kate and Blake. Both of their projects were scheduled for termination, and they would be out of their jobs with nothing but a three-month severance package. Neither of them would take that news well.