The Blackbird Papers

by Ian Smith

  The train slowed as it entered the perimeter of the station's wooded property. Uniformed officers, many with their guns drawn, lined the tracks in a two-hundred-yard, elbow-to-elbow show of force that impressed even Dumars. The pilot landed the chopper in an area that had been cleared in the parking lot. The conductor had been extensively briefed on the plan. All the doors were to be kept locked until Dumars and the other agents appeared at the door of the first car, where they would enter the train and work their way car by car until Bledsoe had been located. Freshman called in again and confirmed that the signal had stopped and the satellite tracking matched the coordinates of the station. Bledsoe was definitely on the train.

  The two photographers had already been selected and stood ready to join Dumars and his team of agents. A tall, gangly man in ripped jeans and a stained T-shirt already had his camera slung over his shoulder. Next to him, a young, petite woman with eager bright blue eyes and golden-blond hair stuffed several rolls of film into her fanny pack and waited patiently for instructions.

  “He's armed and dangerous,” Dumars said to the gathering. The sense of urgency in his voice seemed rehearsed. “I want two lead agents, myself, then two trailers.” He pointed at the photojournalists. “You two on last. For your own safety. And don't roll any film till I give you the go-ahead. Is everyone clear?” His words were met with a chorus of “yups” and head nods. Dumars pulled out his own gun and plodded his way through the empty station as stranded passengers stood behind police barricades, pointing and yapping into cell phones. Moments later the team was on the platform swarming with barking dogs and a rainbow of uniforms. They made their way to the first car and radioed for the door to be opened.

  The leads boarded first—two young, athletic agents who looked like they spent way too much time curling dumbbells. Dumars followed with the trailers behind him, then the photographers. Many of the passengers were standing in the aisle trying to exit the train, confused and scared. The agents calmly asked everyone to remain seated and quiet as they methodically carried out their search. A group of nuns had their heads bowed in prayer, gripping their rosary beads and making the sign of the cross. The beating sounds of footsteps could be heard walking along the roof as the officers outside staked their positions.

  They searched each car, under the seats, behind the luggage compartments, but no sign of Sterling. Dumars called Freshman.

  “Are you still getting his signal?” Dumars asked.

  “It's still strong and not moving.”

  They searched the café car and the small outside standing areas between the cars. Dumars took out the electronic grid, pulled out the antenna, and called the command center. “Position us,” he demanded.

  Seconds later the response was clear. “You're less than thirty feet away.”

  “He's in the rear car,” Dumars radioed to the team outside. “We're going to enter the car now. Remember, no one fires unless I give the command.”

  They entered the last car slowly, their guns drawn. Four passengers returned fearful stares: a woman with a small child, an old man sitting by himself, and a young woman wearing a college sweatshirt. The lead agents motioned for them to stand and walk toward the door, which they did quietly and slowly with the trailing agents escorting them to the adjacent car. When the car was empty, the team moved slowly down the aisle calling Sterling's name, offering him a peaceful resolution. No response. They walked the entire length of the car and stopped at the rest room. Dumars gave the photographers the signal before the lead agents tapped on the door. When it went unanswered, they tested the handle and discovered it was unlocked. On Dumars's count they stood back and kicked the door wide open. Nothing.

  Dumars pulled out the electronic grid and called command. “Position us!” he barked.

  “Can't you see him? You're only two feet away.”

  Dumars snapped shut the phone and walked to the paper-towel dispenser. He punched the lid with the side of his fist and watched as it flipped open.

  He stood there for a brief moment, then clawed at the paper towels until he uncovered a sleeve of newspaper that had been taped to the back wall of the dispenser. The camera's flash popped just as Dumars unwrapped his grand capture—the cell phone of Special Agent Sterling Bledsoe.

  Sterling pulled the silver Lexus SC 430 convertible into the parking lot of the Mountaineers Motel on Route 10A in Lebanon, just fifteen minutes from the Dartmouth campus. He knew that the hard evidence needed to nail Mortimer and his accomplices was somewhere in these mountains. His instincts told him that he had probably seen it a hundred times earlier in the investigation, but had simply overlooked it. Though it was risky, he needed to be back where it all happened, breathing the air and taking another look at the crime scene. With the Mustang burned out in an abandoned lot in New Jersey and his Carrera sitting somewhere in an FBI garage, Reverend Briggs had once again come to the rescue. His oldest daughter was off on spring break, and he had let Sterling borrow her car.

  Sterling kept the baseball cap he had bought pulled over his eyes and registered with the old woman behind the counter. She wore a hearing aid in each ear and her glasses were thick enough to be bulletproof. The chances of her recognizing him and sounding an alarm were between none and none. He requested lodging in the back of the short strip of rooms, telling her he needed as much quiet as possible for all the reading he had to do. She offered him a pair of foam earplugs, which he politely declined, but he asked her to make sure no one disturbed him until the morning.

  Sterling parked around the back, completely out of view from the road. He quickly unloaded all of the papers and his two guns into the room. After a shower and a couple of granola bars he had snatched from the lobby vending machine, he went to work. First came a phone call to Special Agent Mickey Strahan in surveillance.

  “Talk to me,” Strahan said when he picked up. That's how he always answered his phone. He was probably sitting at his desk in Quantico. He always had his cell phone nearby, hoping the next call would be an invitation to a round of golf.

  “Stray, it's me,” Sterling said. “You alone?”

  “No, there are lots of papers around my desk.”

  Sterling got the message. “I need you to get outside where no one can hear you.”

  “Hold on,” Stray said. “Let me run out to the car. I think I left that box of papers in my trunk.”

  Sterling heard a chair scraping against tile, footsteps, and then a series of doors open and close. The sound of rustling wind came through the receiver and he knew Strahan had made it outside.

  “What the hell are you doing, Doc?” Strahan was the only one at the Bureau who called him that. Strahan reasoned that anyone who had put up with the school bullshit long enough to earn a Ph.D. at the very least deserved to be called by his proper title. Even if he worked as an agent.

  “I need your help in a big way.”

  “You need more than my help,” Strahan said. “From what I'm hearing, Murph is gonna fry your ass if the New York boys don't kill you first. What the hell kind of mess have you gotten yourself into now?”

  “It's all bullshit,” Sterling said. “I don't know what kind of lies you've heard, but I'm clean. Somebody's setting me up.”

  There was only silence on the other end.

  “What the hell, Stray!” Sterling yelled into the phone. “Don't leave me hanging out here like this. They've gotten to you, too?”

  “Easy, Doc. Of course I don't believe you did this. At least most of it. But shooting at Dumars is gonna take a lot of explaining to the people upstairs.”

  Sterling sighed. His temples were vibrating. He searched his bag for the bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength. “Okay, that was true, but not what people are probably making it out to be. If I wanted to kill Dumars, I could've. He was fifty yards away from me. He was coming after me and I needed some time. So I fired at a car window across the street to stall him. That's it. Anything else you've heard is total bullshit. The body count is climbing. Only three dea
d right now because the fourth person survived. I need your help. I wouldn't get you involved in something like this, Stray, if I wasn't so sure I was being set up by some powerful people.”

  “I don't know what I can do,” Stray said. “It's not like giving you a goddamn mulligan on the first tee or letting you take a drop without a stroke penalty. We're talking some serious shit. They're piling a list of charges on you a mile long. The only thing they haven't done is put you on America's Most Wanted.”

  “None of those charges will wash if I can get a little more time to piece this together. What I need from you isn't complicated and won't take much of your time.”

  “What is it?”

  “Phone records. I think whoever's behind this might've left a phone trail.”

  Stray blew out a long breath and Sterling knew he was torn. Stray was one of those fiercely loyal types—he'd dive in front of a bullet for a friend without thinking twice. He was an ex–college football player who would have been a star in the NFL had he not blown out both knees and ripped a disk in his back. Instead of tossing around quarterbacks and slamming helmets, he spent most of his days slumming in surveillance. But like most ex-jocks who once thought golf was for pansies, he was now in love with the manicured fairways where he could take out his aggression on the tiny white balls that at times reduced his raucous laughter to frustrated whimpers.

  “I don't know, Doc,” he said. “Maybe you should come clean with the boys upstairs and lay out what you have. If they get to you before you get to them, who knows what will happen in the field?”

  Sterling knew Strahan was right. The Bureau had a way of handling their internal problems in a much more permanent and less civil way than they did the crimes of ordinary citizens. Big politics were always at work, especially when there was the potential that the Bureau's image could be compromised. Fairness in these matters was merely an afterthought.

  “I gotta take my chances, Stray. All I need you to do is check some phone records. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Sterling heard that same infamous low groan that Strahan had let out countless times on the golf course when negotiating a difficult shot. More often than not when the shot was completed, the groan turned into a string of expletives.

  “I wouldn't do this for anyone else but you, Doc,” Strahan relented. “What's the number?”

  Sterling gave him Wilson's home number. “I need to know all the incoming and outgoing calls on March twenty-third.”

  “Just that day?”

  “That's it. The numbers and the times of the calls.”

  “Give me a few hours. I have to finish writing this open report. Records is climbing up my ass. Where are you right now? Aw, forget it. That was a stupid question. Call my cell in a few hours.”

  “I owe you one, partner.”

  “Yeah. Just dig yourself out of this hole so I can take out my long irons when you get back and kick your ass on the course.”

  “Too bad your swing isn't as good as your imagination.”

  Sterling pored over the Mortimer articles. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he felt that if he just looked long enough, he'd find it staring right at him. The cramped, moldy room was exactly what you'd expect for $79.99 a night with a bottle of White Mountains water included. The back rooms were the quietest, mostly because they didn't have windows. So Sterling occasionally opened the door to get some fresh air circulating. Darkness had started to fall, which meant soon he could move around the small town with less chance of being noticed. The Lexus was still there, hidden underneath a large pine. It wasn't a bad little ride, definitely a woman's sports car. It must've set Reverend back a little, which made Sterling laugh. As tough as Reverend Briggs tried to be, he was a pussycat when it came to his children. Sterling closed the door and went back to the bed where he had laid everything out, including a replica of the time line they had constructed in the pit.

  He reviewed his notes from Windsor McGovern. Something Mack had said was bothering him, but he couldn't put a finger on it. He looked over the Mortimer papers a third time.

  Then he stopped.

  He picked up the article from Forbes and focused on the third paragraph. It was only one sentence, but a sentence that wrapped a smile around Sterling's face.

  President Wallace Mortimer has made lasting friends with his college roommates, Cooper who went on to build a computer software empire, and Allistor Guyton, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture.

  ———

  Sterling flipped through the pages of his black book so quickly that he almost ripped out an entire section. He stopped at the first conversation with McGovern. He had written several questions, but it was the last one that jumped off the page. Why was APHIS so dead set on poisoning the blackbirds when it had no hard proof it would save crops? Now the pieces fit together perfectly. APHIS was largely funded by the National Sunflower Association but was also part of the USDA from which it ultimately took its orders. McGovern had mentioned that the head of the USDA was Allistor Guyton, who turns out to be a close friend of Wallace A. Mortimer III, the managerial beneficiary of the Mortimer Family Trust, which not so coincidentally owned the largest sunflower company in the country. Sterling shook his head. Just as he had suspected all along, the answer had been there right in front of him, scattered in bits and pieces.

  Sterling dialed the Dartmouth College operator.

  “Carlos Sandoza,” he said, wondering why all operators had that nasal voice.

  “One moment, please.”

  It wasn't Carlos who answered. “He's not here right now,” the man said. Sterling assumed he was a roommate. He had a similar Bronx accent.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Grubbin' at Shabazz. Who's this?”

  “I'm calling about a job he applied for. It's pretty important I speak with him as soon as possible. Does he have a cell phone?”

  Sterling wrote down the number. “Thanks a lot.” He dialed Sandoza's cell. It rang four times, then kicked into voice mail. Sterling tried again. This time it stopped on the second ring.

  “What up?” It was Sandoza, still full of attitude.

  “Carlos, it's Sterling Bledsoe.”

  “Professor's brother?”

  “Yeah. I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “We already talked.”

  “I know, but I thought of one thing I forgot to ask you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did President Mortimer walk Professor Bledsoe to his car?”

  “Not to his car, just to the porch.”

  “Did Mortimer go back inside once Wilson had pulled off?”

  “Hmm. After a few minutes.”

  “Not right away?”

  “No. He stood outside and lit a cigar. He smoked a little, then pulled out his cell phone and walked around to the side of the house.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Positive. I thought it was strange he'd be making a call when he had all those people partying inside.”

  “Did he make the call or did someone call him?”

  Sandoza took his time before answering. “I'm not sure. I was too far away to hear the phone ring. If it did ring.”

  Sterling paced through the tiny room, trying to keep up with the thoughts speeding through his mind. “How long did he talk?”

  “Not too long. Maybe a few minutes, not much more. I was getting into another car when he walked back inside.”

  “Thanks, Carlos. You've been a big help.”

  “I don't know what I did, but sure.”

  Sterling dialed Strahan's cell. It was time for confirmation.

  “Got it?” Sterling asked.

  “What phone are you on?” Strahan said. “A different number showed up from the last time you called.”

  “Let's just call it a borrowed phone.” These burners were a work of genius, Sterling thought. Worth a lot more than the $50 the dealers charged.

  “Hold on. I'm in the car. Let me pull over.”
The radio fell silent and Sterling could hear the rustling of papers. “You have a pen?”

  “Yup.”

  “There were four incoming calls that day.” Sterling checked off the numbers in his book as Strahan read them. Two came from Wilson's phone, matching the times Kay had said he called home. Sterling already knew that. The third call came from the Norwich Police Department, while the fourth number matched the Hanover Police Department.

  “Are you sure there were only four incoming?” Sterling said. “No cell phones?”

  “March twenty-third, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then that's it.”

  Sterling exhaled slowly. Not what he wanted to hear. He figured Mortimer had placed a call to Kay. He wasn't sure why he thought that, but now the theory had just been blown to hell.

  “What about the outgoing?” Sterling asked.

  “Five going out.” Once again Strahan read the numbers and times and Sterling followed along in his book. The second and third were to Wilson's cell phone. The fourth and fifth calls had been placed to the Norwich Police Department and the Hanover Police. But the first call didn't match any numbers in Sterling's book.

  “You sure about that first one?” Sterling asked.

  “Positive. These logs are straight from the phone company's computers.” Strahan repeated the number to be sure.

  Sterling lowered his head and massaged the tangled muscles in the back of his neck. Every time he thought he found an opening, it suddenly closed. “That's it, I guess,” he resigned. “Thanks for your help, Stray.”

  “Wherever you are, Doc, be careful. I was talking with someone in the New York office about another case. Dumars is all over your ass. He's out for blood.”

  “Yeah, I'm not surprised.” Sterling smiled to himself, thinking how foolish Dumars must be looking. “Don't worry, Stray. When I wrap this baby up, I'll give you a couple of strokes on the golf course for all your efforts.”