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

by Miles A. Maxwell

  “No, that’s great, Ben. Thanks.”

  “Sorry to say, Franklin, that’s all I can tell you. Whatever this is, looks like your audit trail disappears here.”

  What Evidence?

  “Director!” urged the voice of Lance Bolini from the speakerphone on the desk of Charles Line. The call was encrypted. “I’m very concerned about the President’s lack of response to information developed by our agents that was handed over to the CIA Joint Task Force more than a day ago. Evidence that strongly points to perpetrators of the New York and Virginia attacks that are not, I repeat, not directly linked to Pakistan. Nor to radical Muslims.”

  Director Line never let himself get too worked up about anything. “What evidence, Lance?”

  Charles Line’s short dark hair and elbow-patched tweed jacket gave him a collegiate air. Like a slim, well-groomed, laid-back Harvard law professor, which was exactly what he’d been before he became a judge and finally appointed director of the FBI. In contrast to the rest of the predominantly Mormon and Catholic staffed Federal Bureau, he was considered a bit of a radical. In blatant contradiction of federal statute, and what many felt was common courtesy, smoke drifted lazily toward the ceiling from his antique meerschaum pipe, a face carved in its ivory bowl that looked suspiciously like a sea-captain version of Line himself.

  “Evidence the bombs were bought, paid for and delivered, by a huge group of white separatists, meeting right now on a farm in upstate New York.”

  “White separatists?” Line shook his head, his voice calm.

  “Director, please, you’ve got to listen to this!”

  “Go ahead.”

  An excited Southern voice bounded from the telephone’s speakers: “New York is the beginning of the final solution. The same as what we ought to rain down on every damned nation-state in the Middle East. Fortunately none of us here have to worry over losing any of our brothers, our sisters. No self-proud white man or woman would ever dwell in that New Sodom of pestilence.”

  “So after the failed attempt on Washington we move on to the next city on the list?”

  “Exactly. Philadelphia!”

  “Okay. Let’s do it!”

  “What the hell?” Line yelled. “The CIA has a copy of this?”

  “They do, sir.” Lance Bolini picked up the evidential thread from there: “We’ve also turned over to the CIA, substantial bank account information. A money trail leading straight from this separatist group to Benoit Kalagi, a major Algiers arms dealer who —”

  “I know who Kalagi is —” Line interrupted.

  “ — who is currently believed to have access to nuclear arms,” Bolini continued without pause.

  This is outrageous, Line thought. I’ve got to bypass Sloat on this. “I’ll get right back to you, Lance!”

  But it was a fifteen-minute wait before Line could get the President’s Chief of Staff on the phone. Line’s own desk phone automatically recorded every sound transmitted through it. He simply pushed a button and played a copy of Agent Bolini’s recording.

  “You’re right to have called me on this, Charles!” Praeger told him. “Don’t worry about a thing. This is excellent work. I’ll see the President gets this right away.”

  The Feather

  As Franklin walked Ben and Melissa out of his office and said goodbye, a man got up from the front couch. A bright yellow toolbox sat on the floor at his feet.

  “Hold on a second!” Marjorie spoke into her headset, pushing a button on her phone. All her lines were flashing, but she turned to Franklin, nodding at the man with the toolbox, a puzzled crease down the middle of her forehead, “Mr. Torentino’s been waiting to talk to you, Reverend. Something about an owl?” She stabbed a finger at her phone and picked up the next call.

  “Dr. — uh, Reverend Reveal — ?” the man began.

  “Just Franklin,” he smiled.

  “Uh, okay — Franklin. I’m Sal Torentino, the lunch manager at the River Café in New York City — or, I was. The place is gone now.” His mouth formed a hard line.

  “I’ve heard of it. Under the Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “That’s right,” Sal said. “On the Brooklyn side. I was lucky. I wasn’t working Monday night. Look, I saw you on television —”

  Franklin frowned, “I’m glad you made it out okay, Sal.”

  “Me too. A bunch of my friends didn’t.” A dark sadness pushed into his eyes. “Anyway,” Sal breathed deeper, “my family and I are on our way from Rochester to a job I found at a restaurant in Chicago. My wife thinks I’m a little nutty stopping by like this but something odd happened and it might be related to you —”

  “To me?”

  “Well I’m not sure . . . the afternoon the bomb hit I was working the lunch shift. Just before it ended, this kind of scruffy-looking guy pulls up in a boat and ties off at our dock. He’s carrying this yellow box.” Sal reached down and lifted the toolbox off the floor.

  “When he doesn’t come inside right away, I go out to see if he wants a table, or what. Occasionally we get people who aren’t patrons trying to leave their boats at our dock.”

  Franklin nodded.

  “Well, when I get out there, this guy’s in the parking lot, and he has the toolbox open, see. He’s moving it up and down.”

  What’s this got to do with me? Franklin wondered.

  “And suddenly out of the box jumps this bird. And it flaps right up into the air!”

  “Bird?” Franklin stared at him, heart beginning to thump in his chest.

  “I know. Weird, right? So this man’s watching the bird climb up, up, laughing like he’s really happy, almost a maniacal kind of laugh — I don’t know, it sounds weird — the way he’s standing there, the way his face looks, tilted back, laughing, like he’s really out of his mind for the bird or something.”

  “What kind of bird was it?” Franklin asked softly.

  “Well, when I saw you on television —” Sal pointed to the copy of People on Marjorie’s desk, “he looked an awful lot like the owl in that picture with you on the cover there.”

  “Pretty unlikely,” Franklin said. “I understand this particular species is exceptionally rare in this part of the world. What did this man look like?”

  “Dark hair. Dark eyes. Medium build. Not too tall I guess. When he came inside, we got him a table. He had this thick accent. Middle Eastern, maybe. You hear a lot of that out in Brooklyn.”

  “Do you remember anything else about him?” Franklin studied Sal, watched his eyes, his breathing.

  “Not much.”

  He’s not making this up. Facial skin relaxed. Pores open. Eyes up and to the right.

  “But the dinner manager called me at home several hours later,” Sal continued. “Apparently the guy walked off and left his boat.”

  Franklin looked at the yellow box, its black plastic handle and clasp, his heart pounding.

  “Here’s the thing,” Sal said, “the man threw this box into our dumpster.” He shrugged sheepishly. “I’m not normally the kind who goes after things like that, dumpster diving and all. But when my shift ended, I just looked in. It was right there on top of some clean food-case cardboard. It looked brand-new. So I just grabbed it and took it home with me.”

  He handed it to Franklin. “You might want to see what my daughter found inside.”

  Franklin flipped the catch, lifted the lid.

  On the bottom was a very familiar-looking dark brown-on-tan striped feather.

  Call To Adlans’

  Two minutes after Sal Torentino walked out the office door, Franklin had Dean Adlan on the phone. But before Franklin could say anything, Dean was apologizing.

  “Sally didn’t tell me she called you, Franklin. I’m so sorry. We tried antibiotics, everything we have.”

  “Sally didn’t call. Why? What happened?”

  “She didn’t? Oh — uh, I’m really sorry. You didn’t know? It’s Harry — he died. About an hour ago.”

&nbs
p; “Oh.” Suddenly Franklin was worried again. Melissa!

  “You remember, Harry was shaking pretty badly when you brought him.”

  Yes, he was, Franklin thought. Dean sounds upset enough for both of us. “It’s okay, Dean. I’m sure you did what you could.”

  “We did. But there’s no way we know of to treat a bird for radiation poisoning. Intravenous methods used on humans can’t work.”

  “So it was radiation?”

  “I had a friend run a test on some of Harry’s blood. Turns out Harry’s cells show indications of tremendous radiation damage.”

  “Melissa was inside my sister’s file cabinet right next to Harry when we found her. The doctor says she’s fine. I had him inside my shirt too, and I feel fine. Could Harry have been closer to the bomb when it went off?”

  “No, that’s not really possible. My friend said he would have been destroyed by the pressure blast. The winds would have been several hundred miles per hour. Anyway, there was no radioactive dust in Harry’s feathers.”

  Franklin closed his eyes a moment. And there was fire again, everywhere to the south of Cynthia.

  “I found Harry on the side of the cabinet away from the bomb blast. It was a long way — miles from ground zero. And the cabinet was protected by part of a brick apartment wall. But when we got there the wind was blowing from the west. Back toward the bomb’s center.”

  “Well that’s what’s odd. My friend’s pretty sure that at some point Harry would have had to be near a really strong radioactive source — Say, if Sally didn’t call you, why are you calling?”

  “Check something for me, will you, Dean? Someone from New York brought me a feather,” Franklin held it up, rotated its shaft between thumb and forefinger. “That same striping pattern — it looks an awful lot like one of Harry’s.”

  “An owl feather? Where’d your guy get it?”

  “At a restaurant under the Brooklyn Bridge. Monday afternoon.”

  “Monday! The Brooklyn Bridge? That’s not far from where the New York bomb went off! How did —”

  “It’s a little complicated. Could you take a look, Dean? How many feathers is Harry missing?”

  “Uh, okay, hold on.”

  On their way to Spring Valley, Franklin remembered watching Harry drop a feather into the bottom of his soup box. How many did he lose?

  Dean came back on the phone. “Two missing on the left wing, one on the right. But there’s a feather in the cage that matches the left side. The patterns are all a little different from each other. It’s easy to tell them apart. The other two would have been just under ten inches long.”

  Franklin held up his feather. About ten inches. He tried to picture Harry’s wing.

  “Would you mind me coming down there this afternoon, Dean? Can you keep Harry’s body around ’til I get there?”

  “I guess. But why?”

  Franklin twisted the feather and hesitated. “I’m not exactly sure.”

  Deposit Slip

  Franklin twirled the toolbox feather between a thumb and forefinger again. He set the feather on his desk next to Cyn’s report and put on his leather jacket. Ben Espy’s explanation still left him wondering. Where did Cyn’s money go?

  He picked up the feather and for the twentieth time flipped through pages in his sister’s report. Those same two accounts. He rubbed a hand across his forehead. Numbers! What he needed was to show this to Everon.

  Dean was waiting for him, but his eyes found a faint, tiny scribble in the lower right corner of page three he hadn’t really seen before:

  A note for Cynthia to talk to me? He remembered — Everon at breakfast. Cynthia told him she wanted to talk to me about some report. Was this the report?

  He couldn’t make it out too well. Col. Plates? UWOC? F-1st B of E? What is — 1st B of E? Erie? First Bank of Erie? Could . . .

  He looked at the rest. UWOC? The church was a member of a larger organization of churches. United World of Christ? He shook his head. Has to be something else.

  Col. Plates? That sounds an awful lot like Collection Plates. What is going on here?

  “Marj?” Franklin called, walking up the hall. Her chair was empty.

  “Marjorie?” There was no answer. She wasn’t in reception.

  A yellow post-it was stuck in the middle of her desk:

  Franklin yanked open the drawer. Inside, a stack of large white business-style deposit slips were rubber-banded together. There! 04337777-933022316!

  He compared the top slip to one of the numbers on Cynthia’s page three. The same account? It’s ours? Call Marj! She must know about these deposits . . .

  Franklin picked up her desk phone, punched the first line. There was no dial tone. “Hello?” said a voice. Somebody was already on the line.

  “Hello?” Franklin said.

  “Franklin?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  “It’s Chip — Chip Beckett. At the mine.”

  “Oh! Chip — hello!”

  “I’ve got some pretty weird news on that sample Mano brought over a few days ago. Glad he warned me it was highly radioactive. I had to clean out the spec pretty good after I ran it.”

  “I appreciate it, Chip.”

  “It’s okay. That stuff came from New York?”

  “It did.”

  “Hmm. Weird. I called an old buddy who’s retired from Rocky Flats. He used to work in the lab over there in Colorado. He didn’t have access to his book itself anymore — what’s called the Composition List. That’s a list of expected residual post-explosion fallout, a bunch of graphs on every dang reactor worldwide. I guess he would have gotten in big trouble trying to keep a copy —”

  “So he couldn’t tell you anything?” Franklin asked.

  “No, no, that’s the thing. He told me he didn’t need the book. He’s been retired twenty years and still knows pretty much every one of those numbers by heart. He said he recognized the percentages right off.”

  “He did?”

  “Yup. He said the plutonium came out of an old decommissioned reactor in Sokhumi. The Republic of Georgia. Supposedly this Sokhumi lab was missing a few kilos of the stuff and no one knows what happened to it. The problem is though, it doesn’t quite fit. Two bombs like New York and Virginia — we’re talking around twenty times that. Maybe twenty kilos of plutonium — figuring the amount of damage. He said the aerial pictures he’s seen indicate something around a 450-500 kiloton yield. But that much plutonium missing, from a place where there wasn’t supposed to have been enough left there to build any of the mid-size bombs . . .”

  “So then, what —”

  “I know our government’s saying Pakistan. But look, the bomb was basically Russian. When the uranium was enriched, the Georgian Republic was part of the U.S.S.R.!”

  Franklin thanked Chip and hung up. Russian? What the heck does that mean? He’d think about it later. Dean Adlan was waiting.

  He left Marj a quick note and ran out the door. They could talk about account numbers and deposits when he got back.

  Mercer’s Mystery

  A lot of people still didn’t have power. More showed up at Juniata, wanting to know when theirs would be reconnected. But Big Hot Dick’s was back on the air and more popular than ever — broadcasting the updated Williams schedule of area turn-ons.

  The hospital had power. So did Whitpain Prison, the fire stations, Trenton and Whitpain water companies. Their employees were going door-to-door, advising people to boil their water. It was okay for washing. Things were getting better.

  Enya was hanging in there, recovering in the now fully powered ICU with her new heart.

  That afternoon, despite the five inches of fresh snow settled across the parking lot, Two-State Solar’s 18-wheeler arrived from Nevada.

  Scrounge and Holmes, still tired, staggered into the semi and drove the two electric pickup trucks down its ramp. There’d be less worry over fuel for ground transportation. Metalhead, Bryce, Rani, Ortega and Rig
ht joined in, unloading solar panels and other supplies. Nick and Lama arrived. Ewing, some other Williams people.

  “So where’s Everon, Right?” Holmes yawned, arms filled with rolls of solar film. “Di’ you let him sleep in?”

  “Everon and Nan went off an hour ago in the MD-900.” The shop manager’s old hound-dog face was so tired out it seemed to waggle.

  “Everon thinks the phase imbalance Thursday morning was caused by someone siphoning power,” Rani said. “He and Nan are looking into it.”

  “That wasn’t wing sauce on his face yesterday, was it?” Scrounge asked. “It was blood, wasn’t it?”

  They all stopped unloading. Rani and Holmes recounted Everon’s story — his journey through the woods, bullets slicing up trees as he ran like hell for his life.

  “Behind Mercer?” Ortega asked.

  Lama pulled a wrinkled printout from his pocket. “This is the event-log Ewing printed. Mr. Williams gave it to Everon when he picked us up at the airport Wednesday.”

  “The one that says Mercer was taken off line minutes before the New York bomb?” Ortega asked.

  “Yup. But I can’t find the original disk.”

  “The records are gone,” Ewing said. “That paper is the only evidence we have left.”

  “Why would someone do that?” asked Rani.

  “It’s like somebody knew. The bomb . . .” Lama’s high voice trailing away.

  “I hate to say this . . . but Lama’s got a point,” Nick agreed, surprising Lama. “Why would someone pull those systems off-grid with power usage near peak Monday night?” Nick looked at Right. “Restarting Mercer was a whole lot easier than it should have been.”

  Right let out a long sigh, turned to Lama, “Everon muttered something about having to apologize to you.”

  Lama stared back. “I’ve never heard of E apologizing to anybody.”

  “I know. He’s completely turned around on it.”