Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2)

by Miles A. Maxwell

  Slowly, he lowered the shotgun, switched it to his left hand and stuck out his right, which Everon shook. “Ken Flagler,” he said. “Live just over there,” pointing diagonally, back across the road.

  “I knocked on your door,” Scrounge said.

  “Too dangerous answerin’ after dark right now. There are vandals everywhere. Our neighbor got robbed last night.” Flagler pulled the bathrobe tighter. “So, what are you offering?”

  “We have cash. Or, like I said —” Everon looked at Scrounge, “we should be getting several tankerfulls from Ocean City in a couple days.”

  Scrounge nodded.

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Flagler shot back. “Nobody knows for sure when, or if, a delivery’s gonna come through. And cash ain’t what it was a week ago. Not if there’s not much to buy with it.”

  Unfortunately it was the same way Everon saw things.

  “We’re taking our portable with us. You won’t be on one of our working lines for a few days.” So much depends on this one man’s decision. “But I’ve got some solar film, some batteries in the truck over there. I can mount a set of films up on your roof — hook up the batteries and install a DC-AC inverter to run your pumps. No matter what happens, you’ll be independent power-wise. If you do get fuel, you’ll be able to pump it. All day, and all night long off the batteries.”

  Flagler thought for a moment. “How long to set it all up?”

  “An hour or so.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Flagler said. “But not enough. What if the fuel doesn’t come? What fuel I got left here I can burn in my home furnace if I have to.”

  “How’s that furnace running without power?”

  “It’s not. But we got a stinky little kerosene heater that’s better than nothing.”

  Everon hesitated, Flagler staring at him. He’s right. Nobody knows for sure when the next tanker will make it out here. For the moment, fuel is a lot more valuable than cash. What will he take? It will have to be something good.

  “Free power for the rest of your life,” Everon said. “As long as you own this service station.”

  Flagler didn’t miss a beat. “And my wife? She’ll probably outlive me.”

  Everon didn’t hesitate. “And for however long she owns it.”

  “And my house?”

  Everon studied Flagler, stifling a laugh and a smile. “And your house. As long as either of you own it.”

  “And replace the fuel you take when yours gets in. We’ll call it even.”

  Everon’s eyebrows rose. “That’s all? Sure you don’t want my right arm too?”

  Flagler chuckled. “I’ll let you take all but the last 250 gallons of gasoline, the last 250 gallons of diesel. There’s a big wood dipstick you can measure the tanks with settin’ up inside the left garage door there.” The shotgun arced sideways.

  “Now, I got plenty a’ car batteries in the garage racks — you can save your own for something else ’n use mine for the solar setup. Probably don’t have much of a charge on ’em by now but they’re brand new. You’re authorized to do this, to make this deal?”

  Scrounge was already climbing on top of the fuel truck, a four-foot funnel in his hand. He handed down Hunt’s signed authorization.

  “I guess this looks legit,” Flagler said doubtfully. “Bound to be a lotta forgeries a’ stuff around these days.”

  But Everon already had the portable radio to his lips. Nothing could be allowed to slow them down.

  “Toni?”

  “This is Toni.”

  “Everon Student here. Please get me Mr. Williams.”

  London Gold

  Goldman-Sachs clearing agent Robert Billings read the text three more times. It was signed with a code number. One that could not be ignored. He knew it well.

  It belonged to a man known as the Architect.

  He stood there shaking. Six feet ten in his size seventeen shoes. His dark brown eyes oblivious to the London skyline — Big Ben and the Millennium Wheel through his office windows, his focus tunneled in to the single sheet of paper wavering in his hand.

  Beneath the acid-gut terror he felt each time he read the wire instructions, a subtle low-level thrill of fear cut through. Just as he would verify the values on any draft, he checked the numbers against the amount spelled out in words.

  A match. It was no mistake.

  He would have to buy from every market-maker in the UK: Bank of Nova Scotia. Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada. Even JP Morgan.

  It was the largest order he’d ever seen.

  No!

  It was the largest gold bullion buy in the history of the world.

  Missing

  “This is Ali Hirst with Al Jazeera News, Islamabad!” the reporter spoke into the camera.

  The wall screen behind him changed to a view of three young men outside the Ka’aba Mosque, surrounded by a sea of pilgrims dressed in white. “We go now to Mecca, where this year’s Hajj, just ending, has supposedly produced an astonishing discovery, a priceless tablet of gold, discovered in the desert, unearthed by three pilgrims from London.”

  “Uh —” the reporter glanced down at his desk, “Imran? You’re actually the one who found this object?”

  “I saw it first — but we all found it together.”

  “Praise Allah!” the dour-looking one named Nasir said, leaning into the mic.

  “Was there anything else unusual about this tablet other than it being made of gold?”

  “It looked like some verses of the Qur’an might have been carved into it,” Imran answered.

  “I understand you no longer have the tablet.” It was clear the three men were upset.

  “We handed it over to a highly respected imam, Ghazi al-Hussein, to take to his nearby madrasa — his school, for further study. We were supposed to go with him. We were making our way together through the crowds of the Souq Gaza Market when both the imam and our tablet disappeared.”

  “Ghazi al-Hussein is missing? Did you go to his Madrasa?”

  “We did. No one has seen him all day.”

  The reporter was shocked. Hussein was famous worldwide.

  “And that’s the last anyone has seen or heard of him?”

  Even before the red light on Camera One went out, every phone in the studio was lit. Calls from Pakistan, Iran, Iraq — all over the Middle-East.

  Most with rumors of other missing imams.

  No one was even looking for the Jew, the Baptist, the two Catholics or the Methodist — five well-known and highly-influential American clerics.

  Who knew where they might be?

  For more than a hundred miles surrounding New York City there was far too much confusion to locate anybody. Living or dead.

  Turban Operates

  A screaming silence.

  To his nature it was unbearable to be here, in this huge room, without the usual music — the beautiful melodies to which he was so accustomed. He must act. Could his patient be saved? Or was the patient already dead without hope of resuscitation?

  “Hey you! Get away from there!”

  There it is. Expected. Why was the pain he felt not theirs? Why did the silence not affect them, move them to action? Couldn’t he just ignore them, concentrate on the operation?

  “What are you doing?”

  Turban backed out of his patient’s brain.

  In his flashlight beam his face turned toward the intruders, body still facing his patient. “I was sent here by Williams to see if I can help.”

  Agony. Waiting to see what trouble they would cost. What time they would waste.

  Their eyes went to his lavender head keski. He refused to wear a hard hat. It wouldn’t fit anyway. He would never cut his hair. Off-putting? It is not important.

  The patient! Only the patient is important!

  The big one finally grunted, looked at his short, scruffy-bearded companio
n, who shrugged back. They walked away. He was used to the physically painful lack of respect.

  He ran out into the big main room, bringing the battery-powered right-angle nut driver — something an auto mechanic used to remove car wheels. Whirrr — He hurried out the first of twenty half-inch bolts around the rectangular cover.

  Hunt’s linesman, the boy who’d driven him — Gib? Was that his name? — seemed to want to help. He handed Gib the bolts as they came out. Whirrr — They always stared at him. Rag Head! Their eyes, the set of their lips betraying their thoughts. It did not matter. They are nothing. Saving the patient is everything. Snap! Whirrr — Another bolt, as the old paint broke free.

  The patient was a giant coal-fired turbine, its alternating current generator still and dangerously silent. How much damage was there? For if a hot turbine had not been made to continue turning as it cooled, its own tremendous weight would warp its shaft.

  Whirrr — Whirrrrr . . . The last one. Always the hardest. He hit it again: Whirrrr — There!

  The thick paint looked years old. He had to use a large screwdriver to pry off its round-cornered hatch. He handed down the cover plate to Gib to set on the concrete floor.

  He took a brief moment to carefully wipe the opening’s edge with a clean rag.

  Other mechanics’ clothes collected a sooty film. Turban’s brown jacket, his white shirt, his lavender head wrap — V-peaked at the middle of his forehead — even his facial hair, would remain clean. Even in a coal plant. Crisp and spotless.

  He stuck his right arm and head inside the cavity, looked down into the patient’s guts. Ran fingers across the bright copper coils. Nothing appeared scorched. The copper brush ribbons — undamaged! Perhaps the patient could be saved. Even if the brain was dead — though not if the shaft were bent!

  Quickly he backed out and applied the battery-powered socket to an external lug on the turning gear. The small hand-held motor struggled. He pulled off the heavy lithium battery pack in the tool’s handle. Threw it to the floor and slapped in a fresh one. Hit the trigger.

  It turned!

  “Take this!” he told the boy, squeezing the boy’s hand on the trigger. “Go!”

  Turban moved back to the opening. Each hundred turns of the hand drill rotated the giant shaft an infinitesimal amount.

  “More!” Turban’s echoey voice booming when the boy let off. “Continue!”

  Down inside the machine’s heart, Turban watched the bright coils slowly move. Waiting . . . waiting . . .

  “Stop!”

  No major damage to his shaft? Had his automatic shutdown been complete?

  Turban hurried back over to the control room. To his patient’s brain.

  So odd, he thought, the damage could be so severe that a hundred tiny integrated circuits could be destroyed by a pulse fifty miles distant, yet not be apparent visually? Somewhere? Anywhere?

  As he inspected system after system it became clear. This is nothing like the wreck at Schuylkill!

  It looked as though Mercer had not been affected by the bomb’s electromagnetic pulse; apparently the whole plant had been disconnected from the U.S. grid, shut down somehow before the pulse came through.

  He ran down the metal stairs. There was something else he wanted to see. He’d gone to the Schuylkill plant first. There, had been pure evil as he never imagined. The patient mangled, worse than dead — fractured turbine blades thrown from his body, guts literally shaken to pieces inside out. Resuscitation would take many, many days. A kind of open heart surgery that would be required.

  At the west side of the yard he found it — the reason even Mercer’s delicate electronics had suffered no damage. Someone had used a diamond disk to slice straight through the conduit — where it rose from the ground and ran vertically up a concrete pier.

  The bomb’s pulse could not possibly have arced into the plant. Unlike Thomas, Nicola, Schuylkill and the other Williams yards, Mercer had been without any physical connection to anything.

  By who, to what purpose, Turban could not know.

  Mercer’s telephone lines had been cut.

  Respect

  The Williams techs found Turban on the ground floor inside the metal trailer that was Mercer’s emergency generator.

  He could feel them watching . . . they were operators — used to monitoring gauges, taking readings. They had no effect on the speed and certainty of his movements . . . as he set controls, brought battery packs online. As he verified gauges . . . depressed and held the large red control button. He sensed them — as they felt it through the floor. The tiny (only the size of a motor home) one-million-watt backup generator . . . turning over.

  Starting! Accelerating . . .

  Sometimes Turban felt his machines were people. That the people he knew were more like machines.

  It had happened many times before. Perhaps — he adjusted the generator’s controls . . . yes . . . he could sense the change within them — until, with respect and deference of those who finally recognize skill and knowledge, an odd expression formed on the face of the short scruffy-bearded one in glasses — “Uh, sorry about before, man. Is there anything we can do to help?”

  “You’re the second guy to show up today we didn’t know,” the big one added.

  “Someone else was here?” Turban asked, “Who?”

  “He didn’t say. Thick-necked guy, though. Real short dude with a crew cut.”

  “Brought a little portable power supply,” the scruffy tech added, “Did something with the computer.”

  Turban shook his head. There is no time to consider this now!

  He gave orders.

  On the metal gantries and staircases, above the switchyard on the corners of poured concrete piers, around the buildings, Gib and the two Mercer techs moved. Closing breakers. Energizing switches.

  All over the plant.

  A Desperate Call For Help

  He felt the change in himself the same way every time. As if putting on a mantle of God. A cloak. Almost a disguise.

  Reverend Franklin Reveal stopped his jeep a moment to look up at the worn outer walls above him. The light gray sandstone had been hauled out of Ohio and shipped along the lake a century before, when this part of the country was new.

  He drove aroundside the church’s modern addition put on only this year and parked in his private space. He carried Harry’s cage through the side entrance.

  He navigated the marble hall, an uncertain path in a mountain wilderness, head down, his tall frame leaning forward, so much weighing on him. It was a whole day their sister’s body had lain in the earth.

  He turned left up the wide stairs, climbing as though on a hill. He could feel each polished tread, a granite step up the steep incline.

  On the second floor, he walked past the newly remodeled Great Room. Turned right, into the dark wood hallway back to the church offices.

  Marjorie Stemple was already in. Bulbous, slightly overweight — nothing life threatening — usually jolly, except for her only morbid habit: reading the obituaries on her computer screen. “Two more bishops,” she muttered, “a Baptist and a female bishop of the Methodist faith, a leading rabbi with a huge constituency and a Lutheran bishop too, all presumed dead,” shaking her head, “How awful!”

  Moving a little beyond the obituaries today, he thought.

  She’d been church secretary since before Franklin’s time. Their two years together had been a happy, professional relationship. He liked Marj and he liked her husband Roger.

  “Oh!” She looked up, then was startled a moment by Harry. “Glad you’re back, Reverend. I’m so sorry about your sister.”

  News travels fast. He lifted his head to look at her, the pain in his eyes felt obvious, the grim smile of his mouth. “Did you lose anyone, Marj?”

  “No,” she shook her head, “praise the Lord. It’s all such a terrible tragedy.” She smiled at the birdcage. “This must be Harry!”

  Before Franklin could ask
how she knew the owl’s name, he spotted the magazine on her desk.

  “What! People?”

  At the bottom, a headline in yellow:

  Frowning, shaking his head, he turned the magazine around in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  It was a picture of him just stepping off the old Sea Pelican, the helicopter Everon had flown them in to Manhattan. Melissa in Franklin’s arms, Harry’s head poking between buttons of Franklin’s white button-down shirt.

  “Looks like you’re famous,” Marj replied, a twinkle in her eyes. She looked proud of him.

  Franklin took a breath, looked into the big wire birdcage, “I tried to leave him at home this morning. He screeched so loud I was worried he’d scare the neighbors. I wonder if I could try setting him out here in reception. He seems to relax around people, but I don’t want him to interrupt anybody I’m seeing in my office.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be a problem. The corner maybe?” Marj suggested.

  “Thanks.”

  He put Harry’s cage on an end table. It looked like part of the furniture. Harry gave a soft “Hup-hup-hup-whoooo —” As if asking, Who’s next? What city . . . will be hit next?

  His own office was a cozy space. Cherry paneling. A nice oak desk, new this year. Two leather chairs and a couch. Built-in bookshelves, also new, filled with religious texts. Behind the door was a tall, framed print of a mountain goat jumping a canyon. A present by a friend.

  He pulled off his leather jacket. The top of Cyn’s papers stuck out of the inside pocket. He slid them out. With a deep breath he flattened them smooth to the top of his desk.

  He’d barely settled in when his desk phone beeped. Quarter to seven. Marjorie letting me know. She kept his appointments.

  As Youth Minister, Franklin expected a pretty heavy lineup. He got up from his desk. Probably a young church member desperate to talk with somebody sympathetic. Frightened by so many deaths so close to home. Somebody to hold a hand and say it will all get better. That everything will be okay.