Moratorium

by Chuck Sampson

  “How are we going to find out where they’re going to strike?” Max said.

  “We need to get over to their hideout in La Conchita. Hopefully we can find some answers there,” Cyrus said.

  Chapter 18

  Cyrus drove the squad car down the 101 and back towards the oil farm north of La Conchita. Bright, yellow rays of the morning sun burned through floating, fragments of fog and warmed up the air. They hid the cruiser behind the same oil tanker as they had the night before, and then walked through the same orchard and down Ranch Road until they came to Moon’s hideout.

  Entering by the back door, Cyrus was struck by the good condition of the house. If it were not for the bold, inch high, red-lettered sign, which read “CONDEMNED”, he would never have guessed it to be a dangerous place about to collapse around them. The structure of the dwelling was not the problem; the danger lie in the fact that the small building sat only inches from several tons of loose dirt that could shift at any moment and swallow them up at any instant.

  Briana and Cyrus searched the garage, which Moon and Duncan had used as a lab. There were boxes of electrical components, timers, and wires stored in cabinets below the workbench that ran along the edge of the wall next to the back door. They found a box of common blasting caps and instructions on how to set them off. But they couldn’t find high explosives of any kind, which troubled Cyrus.

  “It appears that whatever they are making they are pretty close to finishing. This pile looks like leftovers from a completed project. The DET is more than likely stuffed inside of whatever type of enclosure they plan to use. They probably have already made the fuse. I hope we are not too late. Let’s go upstairs.”

  As they climbed the stairs, Cyrus called Max on his cell, “We’re going to the second story now, Max,” Cyrus said, “We found bomb making parts in the garage. I am keeping the line open. Call us if you see them coming.”

  “O.K. Cyrus, I am covering Rancho Road and Dana is watching the front.”

  “Good.”

  “Cyrus, you realize that they could be letting us see all this because they have booby trapped the house?”

  “Right.” Cyrus replied; beads of sweat shined from his wrinkled forehead.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, they were in the living room. There was a clear view of the Pacific and the pristine white beach of Rincon Point. No wonder people risked being buried alive to live here, Cyrus thought to himself. Before Cyrus could stop her, Briana ran over to the inn table where her purse sat undisturbed since last night. Inspecting the purse’s interior, she pulled out Cyrus’s cell phone,

  “This isn’t mine,” she said. “How did this get in here?”

  “Don’t flip it open, it might be rigged as a bomb.”

  Briana set the phone down on the inn table gently. Picking up her bag, Briana followed him through the bare, wooden floored, living room and into the narrow hallway on the south end leading to the bedrooms.

  With Briana following close behind, Cyrus opened the door to Moon’s bedroom and passed through it cautiously, looking for trip wires or anything unusual. There was a small mattress on a floor and no other furniture. The wall was covered with ocean charts, photos, and a few posters. Hardbound and paperback books covered the floor in several piles four or five books high. The posters were mostly about saving the environment and earth day. A topological map of the ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara caught Cyrus’s attention. It showed all the oil platforms in the Santa Barbara Oil Basin. There was a large red circle around platform A.

  Briana walked up next to Cyrus, who had stepped over to the end of the bed, and looked at the map. “Platform A, off the coast of Summerland, that’s what started it all.”

  “You mean Earth Day?” Cyrus said, “That’s where he’s going to use the DET. The original spill was at Platform A, Rudy told me the spill closed down thirty miles of Santa Barbara County coastline for several weeks.”

  “That’s right, and it cost Moon’s father his life.”

  “How’s that?.”

  “Moon’s father took out a second mortgage on his home to start a restaurant on State Street. Moon told me he heard him tell his mother that he wanted his son to be able to attend Stanford. Guess when his father’s restaurant opened?”

  “The day platform A went up in flames, of course.”

  “Moon’s father lost everything.”

  “So he killed himself.”

  “The paper I read at the library said his father died from a car accident on Casitas Pass Road between here and Ojai. That’s a dangerous stretch of highway that runs across the center of Rincon Mountain, lots of steep, overhanging cliffs and stretches of narrow road winding around blind turns.”

  “Yeah,” Cyrus said rubbing his ear, “I know a lot about Casitas Pass.”

  “Anyway the story I got from Moon was his father tampered with the brakes of the car the day of the accident. He also increased his life insurance policy to a million dollars with a double indemnity clause only a month prior. After his father’s death was declared an accident, Jeff’s mother used the insurance money to send him to Stanford.”

  “So that’s why he hates oil companies. Why’d he pick physics? Not a very green field is it?”

  “He told me when I first met him he became a physicist so he could replace oil with a cleaner and cheaper source of energy. He nearly succeeded.”

  “Really? A cleaner source of energy than oil, that would be a great achievement. What was it?”

  “I don’t know the details, but it was some miraculous thing he perfected with solar panel efficiency.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “When Moon’s paper describing how his method reduced the cost of solar power was published, the oil companies slashed their oil prices. Moon’s investor’s panicked and withdrew their investments and the University cancelled his grant.”

  “The oil companies strike again.”

  “He was one of the most gifted physicists at Stanford. He could have changed the world if he had stayed there and kept working.”

  Cyrus noticed her voice tremble and get louder as she spoke; her eyes were filled with tears.

  “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  “I loved what he was, a kind person who truly cared about people as well as the Earth. That person is gone now.”

  “People can be hard to figure out. What do you think it was that changed him?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he didn’t change. Maybe I did. Or least I changed the way I thought of him. I started noticing how much time he spent talking about much he hated things instead of talking about how much he loved nature and the earth. It was like he forgot the true purpose of what he was doing.”

  “When did you decide to break away from him?”

  “As I said before, just after I learned of my parent’s real identity. I went to his evening physics for non-engineering students class. He had a quote from Edward Abbey written in large letters across the board. It said ‘Civilization is a youth with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or the L.A. cop that guns him down’. I did not like the reference to cops. I knew then and there I had to make a choice.”

  Cyrus nodded his head. He stepped around to the side of the mattress and stumbled over a small book. He caught his balance before he fell and let out a gasp.

  Briana picked up the dog-eared paperback, flipped it over, and said, “The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad. That is no surprise.”

  “What’s that?” Cyrus asked. He looked at the cover of the book she was holding. “Ted Kaczynski’s favorite author, his favorite story was The Secret Agent. He said he had read so often he could recite it.”

  “Moon told me he admired Kaczynski.”

  “Kaczynski was a pretty good mathematician, but he couldn’t make bombs that worked. Thank God.”

  “Moon is no Unabomber.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Moon knows how to make bombs that will work
and work well every time.”

  Cyrus nodded his head, “I have some first hand experience with that, too.”

  Briana said, “If he had put a bomb on American Airlines flight 444, instead of Kaczynski, those 240 people on board would have died.”

  “He didn’t look too much like a genius that day.” Cyrus paused, took the book from Briana and continued, “But then again, he threw the FBI off with those primitive bombs. They got his profile all wrong. For many years they thought he was an airplane mechanic. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb-”

  Cyrus froze and his face paled. Pointing to the empty closet across from the empty bed he whispered to Briana, “What could be in that box?”

  “What box?”

  “The box on the shelf there. Stand still.”

  Cyrus walked with slow, measured steps over to the shelf where the box sat. He reached up and firmly grasped its sides. He brought it down from its perch slowly, holding his breath all the while. The box was more of a small, wooden, crate -like the ones the military keeps ammo in. There were wide slits in the top of it. He took out his spare LED flashlight and shined it through the crack.

  “Look at that,” Cyrus said.

  “Is it a bomb?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t see anything that looks like plastique or DET. My guess is this is a very elaborate fuse.”

  Briana laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Did you ever read The Secret Agent?”

  “No.”

  “The Secret Agent is about an anarchist in England. However this agent has no enthusiasm and only does the bidding of a foreign ambassador for easy money. He is supposed to make a bomb and set it off in the town square, but he does not know the first thing about bombs. He goes to a comrade nicknamed “Professor” for help. The Professor’s quest in life was to make the perfect fuse. I guess Professor has succeeded.”

  “So that’s why Moon calls himself Professor?”

  “I believe that is true.”

  “Interesting, this guy thinks he’s a book character,” Cyrus said. He brought the box out of the closet and set it down on the bed. Then he said to Briana, “I don’t think we have much time to stop him. Get Max for me.”

  Briana frowned and started to object, but Cyrus cut her off, “Briana, I will call you when they get here. My cell has a speaker phone option. Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything.”

  “Get Dana too, he’s a scientist, he may be able to help us understand how this fuse works.”

  “Maybe I should report in and take this to the FBI lab.”

  “Don’t be frightened, Briana, we don’t need an FBI lab, believe me. If we call your boss and get them involved we’ll never find Moon. They’ll screw it up, get everybody killed, and then leave us holding the bag, just like they did the local police in Waco and Seattle.”

  “Well, I hope you have a higher opinion of me. Have you forgot? I am the FBI agent who saved your life.”

  Cyrus realized he had pontificated one time too many. He gave Briana the sincerest look of humility he could muster and said meekly, “I am sorry Briana, you’re right. But do you want to tell your boss that you blew your cover and you lost the bad guys? What if we can catch them first? Think of it, we get the bad guys and I give you the credit for it. Then we will be even. Sound good?”

  “How are we going to do that Cyrus? Moon is never com-”

  Cyrus was holding out the box to her as she spoke.

  “Oh yes, he’s coming back to get the fuse,” she said.

  “We can follow them to their new base and then stop them before they can set off the oil rigs.”

  Briana went outside to explain their plan to Max and Dana. Cyrus reassured himself that they had a good look out position on Ranch Road up the side of Rincon Mountain. From there you could see just about anyone trying to get to the abandoned house. When Max and Dana entered the room, Cyrus was sitting on the bed reading. He had worked the top of the box off and found a few sheets of paper with diagrams and notes on them.

  “That was very thoughtful of the Professor,” Cyrus said, “He even left us an instruction manual.”

  It only took Max a few minutes to work out how Moon’s fuse worked.

  “It’s ingenious, but not perfect,” Max said folding the notes back up and putting them into the box, “It’s three fuses really. He’s using spark gaps and tesla coils to create the spark.”

  “Why not a blasting cap?”

  “Not hot enough or powerful enough. Spark gap can snap off a lot of energy in just a few nanoseconds. I can’t be sure, but it looks like each fuse is controlled by the microcomputer chip in such a way that if you tamper with one fuse, the chip can sense it and automatically set off the other two.”

  “So how can you disarm it?” Cyrus asked.

  “Well if I am right about how he’s programmed it, you have to give it a dummy load.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s not hard to do. Don’t worry Cyrus, just leave the details to Dana and me, I’ll show him how to disarm it. Are you expecting we will have to do this sometime soon?”

  “Hopefully we will get to Moon before he can set off his bomb. But it’s good to be prepared don’t you think?”

  Dana and Max nodded at the same time. After Max went over the details of disarming the fuse with Dana, Cyrus took the box from him and placed it back on the closet shelf. He picked up the cell phone with Briana on the other line and asked, “Briana are you there?”

  “Yes I hear you.”

  “Did you get all that?”

  “Yes but it doesn’t do much good if I can’t see what’s going on.”

  “O.K., we’ll have to go over it with you later.”

  As he motioned to Dana and Max to leave, he heard Briana cry out over the cell phone, “Cyrus! I see a black Ford Pickup coming down 101 and they just pulled into the left hand turn lane to the oil farm. I think it might be them.”

  “O.K. Briana we’re on our way out now.”

  When they got to the basement, Cyrus stopped.

  “Max, do you still have that VCIM device?”

  “Yeah, the tracking device, I have it.”

  “Do you think you can place it on their truck without being seen?”

  “I can try. That’s illegal you know.”

  Cyrus shrugged his shoulders. “You got a better idea? I’m not ordering you to do anything.”

  “Forget about it, let’s go.”

  They slipped out the back entrance of the abandoned house and up the side of the hill as fast as they could. Max, Briana, Dana, and Cyrus hid behind a patch of thick brush next to the portion of Ranch Road that dead ends into the land slide.

  Briana had the binoculars and kept her eye on the two men she believed were Moon and Duncan.Being the only one who had ever actually seen Moon, Cyrus gave her the binoculars in hopes that she could identify him. When they were less than a hundred feet from their hiding place, she put down the field glasses,

  “It’s him; it’s Moon, the taller, lanky one on the left.”

  Cyrus motioned for Briana to let him have the glasses,

  “Are you sure that’s Moon?”

  “Well that’s Duncan to the right, I can tell by that stupid cowboy strut. That’s Moon alright. The same stooped shoulders and lumbering gait he had when I knew him in college.”

  The two men they had been watching turned off the road and headed down the slope of Rincon Mountain and the back of the abandoned house.

  “Max, are you-”

  Before Cyrus could finish his question, Max started down Ranch Road to plant the VCIM chip in their pickup truck. Twenty minutes later, the two men reappeared, each carrying a canvas bag strapped on their shoulders. They headed down Ranch Road back toward the oil refinery where they had parked their pickup.

  “Max, are you there?” Cyrus spoke into his cell phone.

  “Yeah, I found the wires I need to cut,” Max said between heavy sighs. “It’s really dirty underneath thi
s truck. This guy actually goes off road with his off road vehicle. How long do I have?” Max asked.

  “They just made it back up the slope of Rincon Mountain, you’d better hurry. You’ve got four or five minutes at the most.” Cyrus replied.

  Cyrus, Dana, and Briana scrambled back down the Rincon Mountain slope and got into the Dodge. Cyrus popped up the LCD screen and activated the VCIM. He waited an agonizing minute or so for the software to settle down. A blinking triangle with a floating waypoint number showed up in the exact spot where Briana had seen them park the pickup.

  “O.K., it’s done.” Cyrus said and then he took out his chief’s special and checked the cylinder. Briana had her nine mike. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a magazine clip and shoved it into the receiver with a loud clack.

  “We’d better get over there and get Max.” Cyrus said as he holstered his gun.

  Cyrus took it easy going through the residential area-too many kids out playing for any high speed maneuvering. Once he arrived at the only intersection to the 101 freeway out of La Conchita, he pushed the Dodge up to full speed, and headed for the oil farm. He picked up Max, who had been waiting for them at the edge of the orange grove, and then checked the GPS to see where Moon and Duncan were going. The triangle marker on the GPS screen pointed them south to Ventura Harbor. Moon and Duncan were ahead of Cyrus by about five minutes. Cyrus took the C Street exit from the 101 and onto East Harbor. The sun shone bright and high in the sky as people walked, jogged and bicycled down the long, palm tree-lined, sidewalk bordering the white sands of Ventura beach. He glanced over to Max and said, “Do you remember the 69 spill Max?”

  “No, I wasn’t even born yet.”

  “I read about it, pretty ugly stuff. I really would hate to let it happen again.”

  The adrenalin from this morning’s activities wore off and Cyrus now he felt how tired and sore he was. Beads of sweat slipped down his face and his mouth was bone dry. Something didn’t seem right. “Why do you think he left the fuse in such an open spot?”