"What are the odds this Kessler guy is right?" Peggy asked. They were sitting in the back booth at Gorman's, overlooking the dock and the flat, bright white of the lake ice, turning gold now with the fading light of the winter sun. The iceboats were drawn up in a row, their sails furled, the roaring wind off the lake sending up a strange, cicadalike hum through their taut rigging.
Holliday sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the bleak, frozen scene. In the summer the docks and the lake probably looked about their best at this time of day. "Pretty good," he said, feeling as bleak as the frigid scenery. "He seemed pretty convincing."
"He sounded convincing in his living room at the Dakota in New York," said Peggy. "Reality is a little different." She lifted her shoulders. "It could just be coincidence. There's nothing going on here, I swear."
"Kessler doesn't believe in coincidence any more than I do," answered Holliday. "He believes in synchronicity." He put down the coffee and began to tick off points on his fingers. "A president is coming to visit. Conveniently assigned to the event is Mike Harris, who's also a direct relation of Kate Sinclair. The timing is right-these days it's a short news cycle, and our new, distinguished vice president, Richard Pierce Sinclair, is soon to go off the radar. Winter Falls was voted the safest place in America, which makes it a perfect target. Easy to crack and shocking to see destroyed. If Sinclair and Rex Deus want to make a statement, this is the moment and this is the place."
"And if we're wrong?"
"Then we're wrong and we look somewhere else. Nothing wasted."
"Except time," muttered Peggy. "Time we could have spent elsewhere."
"JFK said something about assassination: 'If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's.'"
"What's your point?"
"This country has spent a trillion dollars on antiterrorism since 9/11 and yet we couldn't stop a guy with a bomb in his crotch on a flight to Detroit. You just have to do your best. Nobody appointed us the president's saviors; that's what the damned Secret Service is for."
"And what if Kate Sinclair and Rex Deus have infiltrated the Secret Service? It's not impossible, you know. She seems to have wormed her way into everything else in Washington. Why not the Presidential Detail?"
"Does that make it our responsibility?" Holliday said.
"Officially, no. Morally, maybe."
"I'm not the nation's moral arbiter," said Holliday, a note of bitterness in his voice.
"Maybe you should be," said Peggy. "We certainly need one. And even a voice in the wilderness eventually gets heard."
"Kessler's given us a bit of an edge-believe me, Peg, he knows more than he's telling. Max Kessler's manipulated his way through every administration since Reagan. He wants us to be here. He knows something's going to happen in Winter Falls tonight and he's hoping we can stop it."
"How? What are we looking for?"
"Tritt. He'll be here somewhere-I guarantee it. And this time it won't be just an assassination. If Kessler's right he'll amp it up. Kate Sinclair needs something big enough to trigger Matoon and all the rest of it."
"I think we're both nuts. I feel like I'm in the middle of one of those conspiracy theories you read about on the Internet," said Peggy. "It's like… this can't be real and we can't be in the middle of it. Why us? A couple of ordinary people in the middle of a military coup, here, in the United States? It's crazy."
"Tell that to John Wilkes Booth," said Holliday. "He was a second-rate actor who changed the course of American history when he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Adolf Hitler was a failed artist and a lowly corporal in World War One, but he was eventually the driving force behind the death of fifty million people. Sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right, kiddo." Holliday glanced at his watch. Two more hours to the face-off. They were running out of time. Holliday touched Peggy on the arm. "Come on," he said quietly. "Time we were on our way."
32
Chief Randy Lockwood sat in his small office in the Municipal Building, hemmed in by the three mongooselike agents who'd been glued to him since eight o'clock that morning. Dotty had told him to wear the dress uniform out of respect for the president, but he felt a little ridiculous. Besides the fact that typically it only came out for cop funerals in other towns, it also happened to be freezing cold outside and beginning to snow, and the wind blew through every stupid brass buttonhole. If that weren't enough to make him extremely uncomfortable, he found all the medals and citation bars a little embarrassing.
Only one of the agents, Special Agent in Charge Saxby, spoke to him. The other two were apparently there to watch Saxby, or maybe even Lockwood himself; he still wasn't sure. "It's all unnecessary," snapped Saxby. "Someone should talk to them."
"I didn't have anything to do with it," said Lockwood. "The headmaster at the Abbey School suggested it to the principal at the high school and they extended the invitation jointly to the president."
"Nobody checked with us, no one checked with Homeland and no one said a word to the Secret Service," Saxby grumbled. "The stupid son of a bitch drops a puck and the operation costs the taxpayers over a million dollars and takes us away from what we should be doing, which is tracking terrorists, not escorting lame ducks on junkets into the damned bush."
"Don't blame me," said Lockwood. "I didn't vote for him."
"After the attack in Virginia the current threat level is Orange. You know what that means?"
"Sure," said Lockwood dryly. "It's like ordering a Venti White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks. Defcon One and Broken Arrow and Bent Spear and all that James Bond-coded bull puckie terminology you guys throw around. It's a big deal, right?"
"You can call it what you want, Chief Lockwood, but it means there is a high risk of terrorist activity in the homeland at the moment. That's something we take very seriously. You should, too."
"I'm old-fashioned, Agent Saxby. What my dad used to call a bonehead, a practical guy. So listen up when you're in my town, all right? I was a quarterback in football because I wanted to impress the girls. When I went to Vietnam I realized the idea wasn't to kill Vietcong; it was to survive the tour. When I went back for the second tour it was to get rank and up my pension.
"When I came back here it was to give out parking tickets and go fishing. The last murder we had in Winter Falls was twenty-five years ago when one of the cottagers found out her husband was screwing a girlfriend back in New York. She got off with provoked manslaughter and three years' probation. She's one of the school trustees to this day.
"I'm not going to get all hot and bothered about your Code Reds or whatever you call them. The game is being played on the Abbey School rink, not the World Trade Center, and the president will only be here for a couple of hours. If you can't spot a jihadist in this crowd, then you don't deserve your job."
Saxby gave him a sour look. "Do you know why those planes flew into the Trade Center towers, Mr. Practical Policeman?"
"Why don't you tell me, SAC Saxby?"
"They were a target, Chief Lockwood," said Saxby. "And they were easy. The two tallest buildings in New York City. They were also arranged so that when you looked at them from due north or due south, which was how they were attacked, they looked like a solid slab. Even with that the first one almost missed. A practical target. And that's what you are, parking tickets or not, fishing or not. This place, with the president in it, has a target painted on its back whether you like it or not. You're the safest town in America with the President of the United States in the bull's-eye. Osama bin Laden couldn't have had a better wet dream."
"Let's hope you're wrong, Agent Saxby," he said. "I've done the best I could under the circumstances. I've got both shifts of my men out; I've given half of them to the Secret Service guys and your people to pair up with. Everybody knows everybody else in town. Strangers stand out like sore thumbs.
"It's not like its summer, with tourists coming
and going all the time. They brought in sniffer dogs to check out the seats at the rink for bombs; they've put up metal detectors anywhere His Honor will be going. They've cleared a landing spot for the chopper in the park in front of the Municipal Building, there's two Secret Service Escalades waiting that arrived this morning and your guys have had that little helicopter of yours buzzing around all day, looking for snipers on rooftops. I'm not sure there's not a hell of a lot more we can do."
Suddenly Saxby's expression changed. From sour it went to worn and barren. He looked as though the weight of the world was bearing down on him, grinding him down, making him old before his time. "That's always the problem, Chief Lockwood. You always do whatever you can, you cover every base, you look in every nook and cranny but it's never enough. Most of the time this kind of thing is the most boring duty in the world.
"You read all those Tom Clancy books and watch all those hard-ass shows on TV but it's all a load of crap; looking for terrorists is a lot of crap. I've been doing this job for thirty-two years and seven months. Five months away from mandatory, and from day one it's been nothing but nerves because sometimes it's just never enough, and sometimes you overlook something, and sometimes before you know it, the whole thing blows up in your face and you're half a second too late. You oooh when you should have ahhhed, you go left when you should have gone right, and for thirty-two years and seven months my nerves have been cocked like a loaded gun, just waiting for that one mistake."
He paused. "My insurance agent once told me that everyone has a freight train and a railroad crossing in his or her life and you never see it coming until its too late."
"Nice, uplifting insurance agent you have," said Lockwood, trying to lighten things up. But he knew exactly what the gray-haired FBI man meant. You never knew where the bullet that hit you came from. One of these days he could stop a rowdy summertime DUI and find himself looking down the barrel of some punk's Saturday-night special and wind up in the uniform he was wearing right now, except flat on his back in a satin-lined wooden box. Outside the front of the building a big Sandri Sunoco fuel truck rumbled by on its rounds. The wind was rising and the snow was falling even more heavily. It was going to be a nasty night in Winter Falls.
Saxby gave a twisted little smile. "I just want this whole thing to be over and the ex-president to be on his way, and then, Chief Lockwood, maybe you and I can find a place to have a cold beer and a big steak and tell each other old war stories."
"Amen to that," agreed Lockwood.
33
Malcolm Teeter, who liked his friends to call him Stryker, his favorite character from the video game Mortal Kombat, sat alone at the wheel of the Sunoco oil tanker parked behind the Winter Falls Shopping Center on Crooked Pond Road. The detonator for the nine-thousand-gallon, twenty-eight-ton ANFO bomb that filled the red, white and blue tank was on the dashboard in front of him. Made up of a radio-controlled servo from a toy motorboat purchased at a RadioShack in Portland, the detonator was connected to four six-volt batteries and a PerkinElmer slapper blasting cap like the kind used in antitank rockets.
The new dude had showed them how to order things like that online. He'd even managed to get them all what appeared to be perfect replicas of New Hampshire National Guard uniforms so they'd fit in during the Winter Falls operation.
He called himself Barfield, and he was nice enough but he was too quiet. And, anyway, Malcolm wasn't stupid, was he? In no more than a week, even though nobody said anything, you could tell who was boss now and it sure as hell wasn't Wilmot goddamn DeJean anymore. He had the rank, sure, and walked around the compound with that "I am the principal of this school" look on his face, but it was Barfield who showed them all the new tricks-like getting rid of all that hot-dog stuff, about shooting pistols on the side, like how to mix in and not give people clues like showing your tats or wearing shit-kicker boots, like the difference about looking and actually seeing, and most of all about patience.
Malcolm didn't like driving in the smallest load, but just like this Barfield guy said, it was the most important because it was the first. It would draw away the heat from the real ground zero-the school-and bring it up here, to the north of the town. According to Barfield, there was going to be a lot of heat in town, and driving down Main Street you could almost feel it.
Going by the park in front of the cop shop and fire hall, you could pick them off everywhere. Like, what kind of idiot wears a topcoat and carries an attache case and just stands on the corner in the middle of a snowstorm? Secret Service or a Fed, that's who. Nobody noticed Malcolm, of course, which was the whole point. Sunoco was just about the biggest heating oil distributor in the state and there were Sunoco stations all over the place. Who saw a fuel truck in the middle of winter? They were supposed to be driving around at all hours of the day and night.
But still, he didn't like the waiting around. Of the six trucks his was the only one that wasn't going to be close to the rink. It was fine that he was key man or whatever Barfield called him, but it didn't do much for his-what was it?-his self-esteem. He felt a bit like the odd man out.
Teeter looked out the half-frosted windshield. The parking lot in front of the big P amp;C supermarket. Almost closing time. Teeter picked up the simple little radio control that would detonate the bomb parked next to the side wall of the shopping center. He might be the odd man out, but he knew the stats.
He grinned. He could see the estimates and the comparisons in the newspapers. The Oklahoma City bomb had been three thousand pounds; this one was fifty thousand pounds. The Oklahoma City bombing created a thirty-foot-deep crater and took out half an office building, causing damage for blocks around. This one would vaporize the entire supermarket and half a dozen other stores in the shopping center.
He would get a cell phone call from Barfield. That was the signal to climb out of the truck with the detonator, press the switch and then run like hell. He'd have five minutes to get himself out of range and to the rendezvous on Pine Street. He checked his watch again. Twenty minutes. He turned up the Tina Turner cut on his iPod. Now there was an old bitch who could sing.
General Angus Scott Matoon sat in his E Ring office in the Pentagon and fretted. It was eight o'clock in the evening and so far there was no news from Winter Falls. That could mean nothing or anything, but if Crusader was to succeed he needed to take the men of Prairie operational, and soon. He had enough men in place to take over the small but vital command-and-control units of the nation's telecommunications satellites, but to gather the reins of that power into a single fist would take time. Crusader was a tightrope; America had to be briefly thrown into chaos before Vice President Sinclair came to the rescue. As well as being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Chief of Staff of the Army, Matoon also had personal command of the little-known and even less-documented USNORTHCOM, the United States North American Command-a million-member strong homeland defense force controlling the land, sea and air in and around the continental United States, Canada and Mexico, and essentially occupying both the United States and those two sovereign nations under an iron-fisted martial law that came from the Oval Office and the commander in chief. It had been quietly established just after 9/11 and further augmented during the economic crises of 2008 to 2010, with the fear of a banking collapse and the threat of a new civil war.
As soon as word came down that Crusader was in motion, Matoon's main job was to take over the euphemistically named Consequence Management Response Force, a massive, military-manned national police force from USNORTHCOM's headquarters at Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. None of this could be accomplished until he had control of the satellite systems and Rex Deus became the de facto leadership of the nation. He looked at his watch. He couldn't wait any longer. He picked up the red telephone in front of him on the big oak desk that had once belonged to General Robert E. Lee and punched in a number.
"We have a prairie fire."
Everything went off like clockwork. The chopper landed square in the center of the bi
g canvas target that had been pegged out on the snow-covered grass of the little park in front of the Municipal Building on Croppley Street. The smiling president, bounding down the short steps, shook hands with Mayor Dotty Blanchette, and together, before they froze to death, they got into the middle Escalade in the nine-car procession and headed for the Abbey School.
The Abbey School rink, named for the president's late father, was located on the foundations of what had once been the main animal pen for the Abbey's cheese-producing sheep and that had later been converted into what had been pretentiously referred to as the Big End- the main cricket field for the school. Cricket had gone over like a lead balloon and the large area to the east of the main school building had been converted into a baseball diamond. With New Hampshire regularly having as much as five months of winter, hosing down the baseball field in late October or early November and turning it into a skating rink seemed like a natural thing to do, and with the prez's prowess at hammering his opponents blindsided into the boards and making power plays, covering the rink and putting in seating followed equally naturally.
Previously the classic game between Winter Falls High and the Abbey School had taken place on the schoolyard rink at the latter, but that meant the game had to be played in daylight and attendance was usually pretty low. With the covered rink at the Abbey the game changed dramatically; there were cheerleading squads for both schools-all-male for the Abbey, all-female for Winter Falls-and with seating for 2,500 you could get half the population of the town and the faculties and student bodies from both schools into the building.
Marching bands played, programs and hot dogs were sold to raise money for the two schools' favorite charities-in the case of the Abbey School this meant sending twenty dollars a month to a child of indeterminate sex named Sui Sang in Hong Kong, and in the case of Winter Falls High it was twenty dollars a month to the Salvation Army.
The Templar conspiracy t-4 Page 21
