Gone Dark (A Grale Thriller Book 2)

by Kirk Russell

  “We were asking about your and Croft’s views and what you share.”

  “I’d shut down immigration until we get it figured out. I’m not such a doofus I second-guess scientists on climate change. They’re saying it’s happening, so we need to prepare. There’ll be wave after wave of immigrants. We’ve got to turn them back. If that doesn’t work, we sink boats and blow up tunnels. That sounds harsh, but it’ll save more lives later.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “I’d move the capital out of Washington and put it out west. That way we get rid of half of the deep state.” He frowned, exhaled hard, and then said, “We’ve got to take a stand against the globalists.”

  He was getting ready to go further into that theory until Jace asked, “Race?”

  “That was the real problem with Croft. Hell, I’m Army, we’re equals. Not all the same but all equal. A lot of what they talked about turned my stomach, so I quit.”

  “They let you?”

  “They showed up here several times. My last pickup burned in a parking lot outside a bar in Boise. After that, several of them had trouble with their vehicles, including Croft. I heard someone shot some heavyweight slugs through his new truck engine and tires from a long way away. I don’t know if that’s true, but things settled down around here.

  “They’ve made it as hard for me as they can, but I’ve got work with a local contractor, and I pull wire for an electrician too. I’ve got a son almost five years old. He and my ex are down in Missoula. I had a girlfriend here. I made a big mistake with her, but I’d just gotten a medical diagnosis.”

  He saw me looking at his hand, and his gaze fixed on me. Gray-blue eyes. Some of the best shooters had them. I was putting it together. He’d tripped carrying the water. His hand had a tremor.

  “Reach around to that little chest behind you and open the top drawer,” he said. “There’ll be some papers clipped together there. Pull those out. You’re both welcome to read them. Do you know what a young Parkie is?”

  “I do,” Jace said.

  I didn’t, and pulled the papers out and read about a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. I handed them to Jace.

  “Whatever it is you’re here about, I couldn’t do it if I wanted to, but maybe I can help you.”

  “We flew here because we believed you would,” I said.

  Jace pulled photos from a manila envelope that showed bullet holes made by pairs of steel-jacketed sniper bullets punching through close together. They were close-ups that showed the pattern of the bullets on various metal pieces of cell-tower equipment. She handed them across the makeshift coffee table. Eight photos. He went through them slowly, then asked, “From what distance?”

  “Half a mile,” I said, and then showed him more on my phone.

  “The news reports don’t say anything about this pattern,” he said. “Someone absolutely comes to mind with this one-two, one-two, but it doesn’t feel right just to throw a name out like that.”

  “It must be catching,” I said. “We keep getting that answer.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The country is under assault, but it’s hard to get a name from anybody. Farue didn’t recognize the pattern. Does that make sense to you?”

  “What I would say about Gary Farue is that he should have married himself. There was never going to be anybody he’d love as much. Let me text somebody I know.”

  His index finger trembled as he texted. A response came, and he frowned and texted back and forth a few times.

  He looked at me. “What if you’re wrong? I don’t want to get anybody hurt. This one they’re calling the cell-tower sniper, he hasn’t hurt anybody, right?”

  “He hasn’t.”

  “If you hunt him, it’ll be with guns drawn. Cops are afraid of trained snipers, so if it gets to that point, they’ll shoot first. The FBI is not much better, and as you’ve no doubt figured out, he’s a helluva lot better shot than all of you. No one is going to take a risk once they’ve talked themselves into going after him. He’ll get killed. I don’t want to be responsible for that.” He sighed. “Did they send you here?”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “The Army.”

  “We have two sources on you. Both said you were the guy to ask about this particular cell-tower sniper.”

  “Go back to Farue. You said Farue is in California, and if the news reports are right so is this shooter. The guy I’m thinking about Farue knows plenty well, but if they’re in contact, Gary is getting something out of it. Guaranteed. For Farue, everything is a transaction.”

  “What else on him?”

  “That’s it.”

  “There was a federal judge in Boise shot and killed outside of his house. We’re told members of the Northern Star Freedom Brigade have talked about ‘canceling’ judges. Did you ever hear any talk like that?”

  I could tell the question disturbed him, but he answered without hesitation.

  “Yep, the Obama appointment. The Brigade had their eyes on him a long time, and yes, they did talk about taking him out. It’s hard to sort out what’s drinking talk, but it could have been them. They could have gone through with it. But I’m not saying the one you’re looking for was the shooter.”

  “But it was someone skilled, and you didn’t see a lot of skill when you were active in the Brigade.”

  “That’s right. Most of them are assault-rifle guys. Not much skill but a lot of bullets.”

  “Is respect for him part of why you won’t give us his name?”

  “Ask the Army,” he replied. “They know who he is.”

  “We did ask the Army. They need evidence first.”

  “Okay, say I give you a name and he figures it out when you come for him because he knows the Army rules. Will the FBI be there for my son if something happens to me?”

  “No,” I said. “It definitely won’t. I’d be lying if I said we would.”

  “I’m beginning to like you, Agent Grale, but go back to the Army. They can give you a name.”

  “We came a long way to talk to you. Give us something.”

  “He bought a cabin with Gary.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Outside of Missoula.”

  We left several ways he could get hold of us. After he walked us to the door and was standing on his porch, I turned and asked, “How will we know him?”

  “His boots. He always wears Kelley Zipper Tactical Boots. They’re kick-ass boots. He loves ’em. We all do.”

  “Show us yours,” I said.

  He did, and we got in the car and wound our way back around the lake to the highway. Back in Spokane, we dropped the car at the Bureau office and moved up our flight.

  After we landed and were walking out of the terminal in Oakland, I checked my messages. I read and reread a text from an unknown number with an Idaho prefix. It wasn’t Nikki. It was two words.

  “Jacob Corti,” I said. Jace stopped and turned.

  I handed her my phone. When she handed it back I typed thank you and sent the text. That night I left a message for Roy Anders. The next morning he confirmed the Army had discharged a Jacob Corti, a highly trained sniper, six years ago after five tours in Afghanistan. Current whereabouts unknown. Corti was a three-time top sniper. It was a team award, but he was the guy.

  I called the Salt Lake FBI from the San Francisco field office late morning the next day. The investigation into the judge’s killing ran from that office. They hadn’t talked to Corti but had wanted to. They still did and wanted to be in the loop if we found him.

  Not the Army, though. Anders wrote me back and I told Jace, “They’re saying he’s been out long enough that he’s ours to deal with, not theirs. They’ll help in any way they can. They’re telegraphing concerns about him.”

  I looked at her and said, “I can’t figure this out. We’re ninety-nine percent certain it’s a foreign enemy behind the cyberattacks, so why is an ex-Army sniper shooting up cell towers? How does a guy with Corti’
s background fit into that? After what we just heard in Idaho about the Northern Brigade, you can’t tell me he’s working for a foreign enemy. That makes no sense.”

  I was just thinking aloud. This was nothing Jace or I could answer today, and her response was practical. “You’ve got the bombers on your plate, I’ll work on Corti.”

  “We’ll both work on Corti.”

  We talked through our next moves in a conference room until the door opened and an agent leaned in and said, “Hey, you may want to take a look at this. They’re talking about evacuating Phoenix.”

  15

  San Francisco FBI Field Office, April 25th

  The Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona lacks the bragging rights of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. The Grand Coulee has the largest rated capacity in the United States at 6,809 megawatts, but that’s somewhat misleading. That’s a measurement derived by measuring output under more or less ideal conditions for a reasonable duration. It doesn’t account for the less-than-ideal conditions, the repairs, the dry years, and off-season. It’s nuclear plants that consistently produce the most power year after year. The top producer of electrical power in America is Palo Verde.

  But nuclear plants also top the nightmare list. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Things happen.

  “When did they pick up on the virus?” I asked an agent who seemed to know.

  “Five days ago they moved into a slowdown. It had already rewritten the code for the operation of the cooling system. Two pumps started operating at unsustainable speeds. When they tried to bring the pumps back under control, they had to deal with additional pressure as well. We’re hearing they need to shut everything down to wipe the computers clean but are afraid they’ll lose the pumps and risk a meltdown. Don’t ask me how that all goes together.”

  On the TV screen, CNN went to an aerial shot of bumper-to-bumper traffic leaving Phoenix.

  “Voting with their tires,” the agent said. “As soon as the plant went public with their problem, the cars lined up.” He turned and looked at me. “The virus is replicating itself and may be hiding in a piece of smart equipment that talks to the main computer system.”

  I watched for another ten minutes, then stepped out to take a call from Hofter. Jace, Hofter, and I couldn’t do anything about Phoenix or the large blackouts occurring elsewhere.

  “What did you get from Idaho?” Hofter asked.

  “The name of a top Army marksman named Jacob Corti with some current or past connection to an Idaho militia called the Northern Brigade. I’ll see you in LA in a few hours and catch you up. I’m about to head to the airport.”

  “We’ve got another bomb threat called in and a vehicle parked outside a substation. It’s not an Edison truck, it’s an RV.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “North Hollywood, with the same booby-trapped threat, but this time we’ve got robots and drones on it. There’s also a report of something going on at Mount Lee. Two men. Suspicious activity. LAPD is all over that and not asking for help, but we’ve asked to be in the loop. You and I have a tip to check on in Newport Beach, then we’ll head to Hollywood.”

  We have thousands of tips. Why wouldn’t we go straight to North Hollywood and the bomb vehicle and learn everything we can there? It sounded like the same approach but with a different vehicle, so good chance it’s the same terror cell. But Hofter is a very competent investigator and I was in no position, with the cell-tower sniper expeditions, to be arguing priorities in LA. So I didn’t say anything and caught my flight.

  Hofter picked me up at the airport and we drove an hour and change to meet eighty-three-year-old Ed Harris in Newport Beach. Harris lived on a comfortable street above the coast highway. His wife had passed six years ago. He’d had a second knee-replacement operation last year and was thinking about doing his right hip. He asked where I was from. I said Las Vegas and he frowned and pointed out a window at a neighbor’s house across the street.

  “I called the FBI about the RV with the bomb on TV. It’s the same damn truck that was here for two days. A blond girl, good-looking, and a young man about six foot with dark hair. He was fiddling inside it all day yesterday instead of being down at the beach with the girl.”

  “What have you got for us, Mr. Harris?” I asked.

  “Photos. What did you think I had?”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  He took three steps toward a little room we could see was his office, then turned back and asked, “Why does it take two of you to come here?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer and returned with photos he handed to Hofter. I saw puzzlement on Hofter’s face and watched him pull out his phone. His eyes went from phone to photo.

  He said, “Grale, take a look,” and stepped around Harris.

  And so it goes sometimes, a confluence of the unexpected and the randomness of the universe. An eighty-three-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watchman with time on his hands and anger as it turned out at a neighboring couple who rented their house via AirBnB. He’d captured the license plate of the bomb vehicle parked at Station H Hollywood and had one very important photo of the couple staying there.

  Neighbors guessed the blond Caucasian female was twenty-five to thirty years old, the male’s age similar. The female’s hair fell to her shoulders. She was approximately five foot nine, one hundred forty pounds. The male was taller, closer to six feet. One neighbor said he looked Italian. Another said he was a mix of Caucasian and Hispanic and Jewish, whatever that is. He was dark haired. Descriptions of him varied widely, but the FBI was out to the public with artist’s sketches before Mark and I reached the Hollywood substation.

  With binoculars from the roof of a building, I got a look at the rented RV. It was big enough to carry a large bomb. If it was a “shaped charge,” so that the blast was directed toward the substation, it would do substantial damage. Edison, the utility provider, was already rerouting power.

  A robot on the ground under the RV plus two drones overhead were trying to determine if it really was booby-trapped. So far they weren’t coming up with anything, and the threat warning that motion sensors would trigger an explosion did not appear true. The caller warned of a detonation near midnight. It was 10:07 now, and a debate was underway whether to approach and attempt to defuse.

  “I’m okay with walking up to check it out,” I said to Hofter.

  He looked at me in disbelief, then asked, “Have you got a will?”

  “Yes, with most of my vast estate left to my niece.”

  “Nothing for me?”

  “Next time.”

  “That’s hard, Grale. I would have thought there’d be something for me. How about that watch of yours? I like that watch. I’ll hold it for you while you’re up looking for the sensor that sets the bomb off.”

  I smiled but said, “I’m halfway serious. If it’s another ANFO, we could disarm the detonator, and I’m getting the strong signal these bombers don’t want to kill people.”

  “Yeah, but it’s also the first we’ve heard of motion sensors. Fuck them. Can’t wait until we get them.”

  I did make the offer to approach and look for a way to defuse. A “no” came down twenty minutes later, and the bomb detonated at 11:59 p.m., which said to me we were looking for the same terror cell as the first three bombings. It was an arrogant and cocky signature to detonate at the same hour and minute.

  It made for great TV. An ANFO explosion expands faster than the speed of sound. The flash of light was visible across the LA Basin. It killed no one but destroyed fifty percent of the substation largely because of how well the charge was shaped. There was the roar of the blast, debris falling over and over on CNN.

  But it was a local TV station that was the first to run “Blond Bomber Strikes Hollywood.”

  16

  On Amazon you can buy a copy of the National Research Council of the National Academies report titled “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System,” but it won’t be the same
as the one I have. Mine is pre–Homeland Security review and redaction, and includes all of the warnings and recommendations. In 2004, experts assembled to assess grid vulnerabilities. They finished in 2007. But not until 2012 did Homeland Security allow a heavily redacted version to be published.

  My opinion: the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, in its effort to keep critical information from terrorists, has inadvertently hidden the truth from Americans.

  I thought of that as I pulled on another HAZMAT suit. We worked the warm night in Hollywood with the thrum of rented generators forcing everybody to talk louder or less. The air smelled of diesel, blast burn, and oils seeping from torn transformers. This was yet another bombing we didn’t stop, but we did have two suspects, and were learning the bomb maker’s methods.

  At dawn I stripped the suit, filled a large paper cup with coffee, and picked up a sandwich from an open cardboard box as I talked with an Edison manager who’d been allowed inside the tape. He was solidly built, midforties, alert, a little on the hyper side, an engineer with some business school and management ambitions, here to assess.

  “How long to rebuild?” I asked.

  “Two years.”

  “That long?”

  “Or longer.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Around here they’ll already want us to move it to a new location. There’ll be hearings and neighborhood committees. Might be more like three or four years.”

  “You’re not going to move it?”

  “Christ, no, that would quintuple the cost. And where would we move it? No neighborhood wants it. They just want the power.”

  We drank more coffee and chatted. Then I got a call from Julia and stepped away.

  “You working the bombing?” she asked.

  “We’re wrapping up. I’m close to heading to the LA office. Where are you?”

  “Long Beach. Want to come see? I met with them last night. I’m moving in here. I like all of them and Sam came over. It was great to see her and catch up. She wants to do a joint posting on Witness1, a reaffirmation of statement of purpose. Millions of people will see it with both of our names as authors. Pretty cool, huh?”