Gone Dark (A Grale Thriller Book 2)

by Kirk Russell

She froze upon hearing that, and I said, “I don’t know when we’ll see each other next. Most likely at trial, unlikely before. I’ll find the LA County detective now and tell him. Start a fund for the children of those officers after this is over, after the trials. After everything, Sam. Do it for them. Do it for yourself.”

  “I might do that.”

  We left it there. Outside, it was hot with a wind blowing. Human nature is a contradiction.

  60

  Corti was dead and the Long Beach cell dismantled. Fourteen people associated with the Long Beach house were arrested, Julia among them. Yes, Julia. I still couldn’t accept that. None were allowed to post bail. When I saw Julia next, she was in an orange jumpsuit with her hair cut and her face looking much older. There was nothing I could do to help.

  After she was arrested, I worked alone more. In western states, attacks dwindled to near zero. More arrests were made, and more would be made, but physical attacks on infrastructure had all but ended by Memorial Day. On June 3, an American surveillance plane and a Russian fighter jet collided, and it felt as if we came close to war. Cyberattacks resumed, but tapered off within a week. Not in Russia, though—they continued there, some doing serious damage, then stopped altogether in the third week of July.

  There was never an “official” end, just an end. Maybe that means something about future war, though I couldn’t tell you what. That a cell of fourteen young people in the Los Angeles area was able to go undetected also means something. To me it suggests sympathizers. In that, what I hear is that we need to get it together as a country, and I don’t mean just security. We’re getting factionalized, too tribal. We need to talk more.

  I kept my contact with the Vegas office to a minimum. I volunteered for the investigations that kept me out on the street. I resented Mara—he had known Julia would be arrested and charged and hadn’t told me, though I knew he couldn’t. It wasn’t rational to resent him, but it’s how I felt. I’m not saying I was sullen or hard to work with, and Mara and I never said a word about it, but there was an unspoken undercurrent in every conversation we had.

  Few of the domestic-terror-cell cases were as strong as Long Beach, yet the trial was still months away. I was told to plan for three to four days of testimony. I stayed in close touch with Erica Roberts, Julia’s lawyer, although Roberts didn’t need me. She was driven and vocal. She knew courts favor those who keep up the fight. At any media opportunity she raked the prosecutors for delay and for cynically charging her client with crimes she didn’t commit. But for the public, I think that talk is just noise, and common sense seemed to say Julia Kern should have known better and gotten herself away from them.

  An image of my niece I like is her straight-backed on a hard chair after her escape and night in the orchard, facing down Mara, answering his questions. I take comfort in that memory. I see my sister in her. I see her father. What I see tells me she’ll survive and endure. She’s got the fire.

  Jo and I kept each other close. We made time. We took small trips and found some peace in the quiet together. In late June, I checked out keys and returned alone to the bomb factory at the farm in Tulare County. Mara and Fuentes knew I was going. No one else did. Ostensibly, it was to make notes and prepare myself for trial.

  I walked the outbuildings and the bomb factory, with its sheet-metal bins that had stored up to five tons of ammonium nitrate. At least two tons were still here. The smell was strong when I came in the door. I smelled that as well as a damp that must have come from a spring or welling from the creek, now dry, or the pond. I thought of the bomb at the Olin substation, weakened by moisture content.

  I videotaped and took photos I’d review before I testified. A rat or squirrel scurried somewhere in the back of the bomb factory as I left and relocked the door. Then I walked the farm, the rows of dead tomato plants, dried shrunken bush beans, a small dope grow field that was doing just fine on its own. The sun was hot on the porch, and the house smelled musty and unused inside. I tried the lights. The power was off. I thought about the two others who’d lived here and were facing terror charges yet claimed they knew nothing about the bomb making. But the question again, how could they not?

  With Hofter I’d made a last visit to the Long Beach house, which was about being clear on what we’d investigated together, no collusion, but a necessary talking through as we prepared for trial. Inevitably, we got to Julia, or I made sure we did.

  “Should we even have that conversation?” he asked.

  “No prosecutor is going to call me to testify about her role. They already know where I stand. It’ll be you and others. What do you think the charges against her hang on?”

  “Testimony from the others.”

  “I agree.”

  “And they’re all trying to make deals through their attorneys, so you know where that leads.”

  I did. It leads to trying to please the prosecutors by providing damning testimony. With Julia I believed it would come down to the night of the move and whether she had any active role in negotiating storing her car to make it seem she’d disappeared. That would work against her with a jury, and yet, blood is blood, I simply believed Julia.

  Jace and I keep a banter going. We’re simpatico that way. It’s our way of dealing with the dark places. Casewise, we had less and less to talk about. I did go to Missoula and, with an agent out of Helena and a locksmith, got into Farue’s cabin. I talked to Jace from there as the Missoula agent worked from his car.

  Unlike the sterile house in California, the cabin had mementos. I sifted through those and learned more about Farue, though nothing that clarified his association with the Northern Brigade. The teenage boy who killed him had never met him, nor had his father, but Croft had made Farue into an immediate threat to the Brigade after the media reported him as the suspected killer of Corti.

  In a leather album, Farue had photos of himself and what looked like a girlfriend in Santiago, Chile. He looked tanned and happy. She looked young and vibrant as they toasted with two glasses of champagne.

  “You should have stayed there,” I said in the empty cabin.

  In July, Julia and two of the others were released on bail with the condition they wear ankle bracelets. That system was modernized recently, and bracelets were now tracked by satellite. The bail was backed by her inheritance, an outcome Jim and Melissa could never have seen. To my surprise, a judge allowed Julia to accept an invitation to move to red rock country in Utah, to an old town some young people were trying to reinvigorate. They were growing crops and Julia said many of them also had online jobs, part time or otherwise.

  Recently they’d bought inexpensive solar panels at a Home Depot, along with other components, and storage batteries from the new Tesla factory in Nevada. A welder in the community used scrap aluminum to put together frames for the panels after a young guy studying electrical engineering at an online school and a local retired astronomer figured out the best orientation and the most efficient system.

  They installed the panels on a Saturday, then had a barbecue and drank craft beer from a new microbrewery in town. That all happened the day after a decision was made at the Justice Department that would forever affect Julia’s life. Mara called me in. He got it from way up the chain, and they left it for him to tell me. It wouldn’t be official until next week, but she could be told. Not just told, but a judge had allowed another step.

  “You get to be the one,” Mara said. “It should come from you, not her attorney, and Erica Roberts, her attorney, agrees. She called me. She feels the same.”

  From Vegas, it was a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Saint George then east to red rock country. Julia had invited me out for a Saturday “power party,” as they called their solar-installation celebration. I arrived late as usual. Julia exuded energy. Her face was lit up. Gone was the pale, anxious blinking into bright sunlight when she first walked out of jail. She wore shorts and a white cotton top, and the heavy ankle bracelet like it was a piece of jewelry.

  Blu
e smoke rose from the barbecuing underway, with chicken and burgers grilling on oil drums sliced lengthwise then fitted with grills and welded-on legs. They were cooking over sustainable mesquite charcoal someone in the community had made.

  “I’m so glad you came, Uncle Grale. I wanted to let you know I signed up for that online school. No matter what happens, I’ll get my degree. Want to take a walk? I’ll show you the solar panels. Almost everything is sustainable here. It’s so cool.”

  “Yeah, let’s go see them and talk.”

  The panels were bright in the sun.

  “You wouldn’t believe how cheap they’ve become,” Julia said.

  “I’ve read about it. How are you doing?”

  “Much better. It’ll be very hard, but I’ll deal with it.”

  She was talking about trial and prison, and a surge of emotion flowed through me. When you’re young, you don’t quite see how short it all is, how precious. I had to look away at the line of the mountains. That’s me, the old hard-bitten FBI agent getting soft. Or maybe it’s just that as we age we know more.

  “I’ve got news from the Justice Department, Julia.”

  “Don’t tell me yet.”

  She frowned and bowed her head. I knew she was thinking good news would be lesser charges, but she also knew even those would carry a ten-year minimum sentence. I watched her take a deep breath and look out at the mountains studded with pine and fir and strung with red rock. She turned, faced me, and said, “Okay, tell me. I’m ready.”

  “Charges have been dropped against you and two others.”

  “I’m not going to prison?”

  “You’re not going.”

  They’d given me the key to the ankle bracelet. “Put your right foot on that rock.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  She did so and I leaned over and unlocked the bracelet. It was heavy, but she’d made a point of walking like it wasn’t there.

  “I’ve got to take this back with me,” I said.

  “I’m really not going back to jail?”

  “You’re not going back.”

  Her eyes clouded with tears, and emotion rose again in me. All I could do was nod. She closed her eyes and tears ran down her cheeks, then a smile started and got larger.

  “UG, really?”

  “Yeah, so take it like a second chance. Make the world a little better.”

  “I will. You know I will.”

  I put the ankle bracelet in my car and we sat in the shade and ate burgers, and I drank the beer they made in town. It was pretty good, but nothing was as good as hearing Julia laugh again.

  Acknowledgments

  Once more, many thanks are owed former FBI supervisory special agent George Fong. Check out his crime novel, Fragmented. Thanks go to Rick Jackson, longtime LAPD homicide detective, now retired, and Elvis Chan, FBI supervisory special agent on Squad CY-1, where the focus is cybercrime and national security. When you embark on writing a crime novel, it’s very lucky to be able to reach out to those who’ve lived law enforcement.

  Thank you, Megha Parekh, my editor at Thomas & Mercer, and to all at T&M for easy communication and openness. Thanks to Philip Spitzer and Lukas Ortiz of the Spitzer Literary Agency—let’s go to a baseball game sometime. Thank you to Kevin Smith for that first look, and many thanks to Peggy Hageman for a keen eye and knowing insight.

  About the Author

  Photo © 2016 Shoey Sindel Photography

  Kirk Russell is the author of numerous thrillers and crime novels, including Shell Games, Redback, One Through the Heart, and Signature Wounds, his first book in the Paul Grale series. His book Dead Game was named one of the top ten crime novels of 2005 by the American Library Association. Russell’s novels have garnered many starred reviews. Among them, Library Journal referred to his Counterfeit Road as “an addictive police procedural on speed.” Russell lives in Berkeley, California.