A Long December (25 page)

“But we’ve sure seen grenades,” I said. “I think they’re still there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I was thinking about that,” he said. “Could those have been a blind, to distract us while they slipped over the bluff?”

“Possible,” I said. “Lamar says there are about fifty cops watching the perimeter, though. Maybe more by now.”

I heard Hester’s voice, but I couldn’t make out the words. “What?”

She stood, took a big swig from her water bottle, and then did sort of a gargle thing that ended in, “Ahh!”

The water had hit one of her broken teeth. She shuddered for a few moments, shaking it off, and then said, “No. They won’t be leaving.”

“How so?”

“They’re protecting something,” she said. “By stayin’ here, distracting us some way.” She made as if to take another swig, thought better of it, and said, very deliberately, “Deception.”

“Okay,” I said. “You want to sit back down?”

She shook her head.

“You’re above the wall,” I said, indicating the limestone foundation. She crouched.

“So, you think they will stay at us, not trying exceptionally hard to take us out, but to keep us here? “George didn’t sound fully convinced.

Hester made an exasperated sound in the back of her throat and said, “Not just us!” She made a sweeping gesture. “Us!”

I got it. “They think we were headed up there. They aren’t trying to
get
out. They’re trying to keep
us
out.”

“Yes!” she said.

Sally, as usual, put her finger right on it. “Why?”

Damned good question.

We didn’t have any sort of a good answer. We all moved back to positions where we thought we could cover the approaches to the barn fairly well, and made that our priority. The whys could wait.

“Hey, George?”

“Yes?”

“Can I have my walkie-talkie back?”

He tossed it to me. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem.” I checked the frequency setting and keyed the mike.

“One, Three?”

There was a momentary wait, and then, “Three, go ahead!”

“Yeah, One, get Marty on the TAC team to call me on my phone, and you try to listen in, okay?”

My phone rang about two minutes later.

“Houseman,” I said.

“Anything new we should know about?”

“Marty, we been thinking up here, and we tend to believe that they’re keeping us out, rather than us keeping them in.”

After about a two-second pause, Marty said, “No shit?”

“Yeah.”

“Hang on for one.”

If we were right, it meant that the allocation of personnel out there could drastically change. Rather than concentrate on preventing the remaining shooters from leaving, they could concentrate on advancing and go at them more aggressively. I hoped.

“Okay, Carl. Could be. We’ll check it out. Okay. Look, about the van…we got the station manager to let us look at all the footage, and we can’t see any van parked up there.” He paused, and then said, “But that really don’t mean shit, because we think it could be parked in one of the sheds.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“We see two, ah, objects, about fifty feet west of you, along a fence. They might be people, we aren’t sure, but they didn’t move.”

“I believe they’re dead,” I said.

“Say again?”

“If those are the two I shot,” I said, “they’re dead.”

“Way to go!” Marty sounded genuinely pleased.

“That’s the location where they toss grenades,” I told him. “You might want to keep an eye on that area.”

“You bet! Okay. We got two choppers headed up: one from CRPD, and the other is a National Guard bird, an OH-58. Both have FLIR, so we can check the heat from the shed and see if we can maybe find that van.”

“Great.”

“And once they get here, we’re gonna be able to see the whole area like it was daylight, so we can keep you advised of movements. And the feds just got here. A whole bunch, and a chunk of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team is already in Cedar Rapids.”

Things were looking up, and I said as much.

“You got that right,” said Marty. “Okay, now, about them bein’ there to keep you out? Is that right?”

“That’s what we think, yeah.”

“Any idea why?”

“Nope. None. But you might ask the feds.”

Ten minutes later, I was concentrating even harder on trying to see in the dark. My eyes were getting used to the shadow, pretty much, and I thought I could discern individual things like rocks and scrub. But try as I might, I couldn’t see that fence where the two dead men were.

I thought about calling Sue. She wasn’t the sort to watch the news all that much, but I thought it might be a good idea to let her know I was okay. Just in case somebody called her and told her there was something up. On the other hand, if she didn’t know anything was going on, and I called, then she’d start watching for TV spots, and God only knew what kind of speculation she’d be hearing then. Well, now was the best opportunity I’d had to do it, and I thought I shouldn’t waste it.

I dialed home.

“Hello?”

“Hi, there.”

“Carl, oh my God, what’s going on? Oh, I’m so glad you called. Are you all right? We’re watching the news…are the officers in the barn all right?”

It all came out in a rush.

“Well, yeah, I’m fine. Really good, in fact. Who’s the ‘we’ watching TV?”

“Phyllis came over about ten minutes ago, and told me that Nation County was on CNN.”

“Oh, okay.” Phyllis is our next-door neighbor.

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. Really.” Maybe, I thought, she won’t ask about the barn again.

“Who’s in the barn? Lamar?”

“Well, no, actually. Ah, it’s George, and Hester, and Sally, and, well, me.”

“You!!!!”

“Yeah, but I’m fine. Really.”

“My God!”

“Now look, I didn’t call to worry you. I’m really sorry about that. We’re going to be fine.” Now would be about the worst time for one of those damned grenades, I thought. All I needed was a loud bang in the background.

“Can’t you get out?” A reasonable question.

How to put it. “Well, we probably could. But Hester’s been hurt a little, and we think we’re much safer in here. Mostly we’re going to wait for an ambulance…”

“Hester? Oh, Lord.”

“Hey, don’t tell anybody anything about that. Nobody knows that except us folks, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I called to tell you that everything is going to be just fine. Really.”

“Okay.”

“I’m gonna have to go in a sec, but I just wanted you to know.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you called,” she said.

“Me, too. Look, don’t worry. If I thought I was in really serious shit, I wouldn’t call. You know that.”

She didn’t. But she said she did. “Yes.”

“Okay, well…”

“I love you.”

“And I love you, too. I’ll be home as soon as I can.” That, for sure, was absolutely true.

Now, however, I had an additional problem. Prior to talking with Sue, it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I might not be going home after this one. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind, but the new awareness was now there. Damn.

Sally was back at her lookout. “Can you see anything, Carl?”

“Nope.”

“Me, either,” said George.

After a second of unnatural silence, I glanced back at Hester. She was just taking a good swig from a water bottle. When she finished, she said, “No!”

Well, that had been enlightening. Either there was truly nothing moving, or it was just too damned murky out there to see anything.

“Where’s the Mr. Heater?”

George turned. “I’ll get it, Hester. You’re right, it’s getting cold in here.” He went to his heap of luggage, turned on a pocket light, and hustled the portable heater over to Hester. “I’ll have it lit in just a second,” he said. “How are you getting along?”

As the two of them talked, I kept peering into the gloom. Ah. Over by the left edge of the shed, just where the fence started, and where the two dead men were, I thought I caught movement.

“Left of the shed!” I said.

George was back at the wall in a second. There was a moment, then, “I don’t have it.”

“Where the fence starts. Nothing moving there, but there’s a really dark spot right next to the shed…”

“Yeah….” From the tone of his voice, I could tell George still hadn’t located the object.

“Just wait. If it’s really something, it’ll move again.”

We waited. When you stare at an area in the dark, if there are variations in the shadow, you’re eventually going to see something move. Whether it does or not. I was just beginning to get the feeling that my eyes had been playing tricks, when a figure suddenly stood, right where I’d seen the movement, and a very loud voice called out.

“Fuck you! Fuck every one of you!”

Then he was gone. Just like that.

We in the barn looked at each other. “What the hell,” said Sally, “did he do that for?”

“They’re trying to provoke us,” said George.

I laughed. “Too fuckin’ late.”

SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE EVENING
isn’t a really good time to start a meeting. Nonetheless, there we were, once again crammed into the kitchen of the Nation County Jail. The attendees of this second meeting of the day were considerably more upscale than the first. There were people representing the FBI, DOJ, CDC, FDA, DEA, ATF, OSHA, and the NSA. Iowa had sent command level people from the DCI and DNE, as well as the EMD. I felt like I was watching CNN.

It all hardly seemed real, the unreality enhanced by the faint strains of Christmas music coming from the adjacent dispatch center.

FBI was represented not only by George Pollard, but also by our old acquaintance Special Agent in Charge Volont. We’d had some, well, difficult times with him in the past, but nothing horrible. Volont was a good agent, just a bit Bureau-centric, as they say. This time, he seemed genuinely happy to see us. With him were two others: Special Agent Gwen Thurgood, a counterterrorism specialist, and one super special sort named Special Agent Milton Hawse. Hawse was younger than Volont, but obviously someone of great importance in the Bureau. All the other federal employees deferred to him. It wasn’t a respect sort of thing, so much as just really lots of rank. Well, that’s the way it looked to me.

The Department of Justice had sent a deputy U.S. attorney from Cedar Rapids, named Harriet Glee. She’d been working out of the Cedar Rapids office long enough to be known to most of us as “Dirty Harriet.” It was a compliment, and a heartfelt one at that. She was hell on wheels, and one of the best prosecutors in the business.

The Centers for Disease Control had sent a team of three; the Food and Drug Administration, one.

The Drug Enforcement Agency had hustled two of our old friends up from Cedar Rapids, one of whom was Katie Martinez. I was particularly glad to see Katie, as she had worked both L.A. and San Diego for DEA, and we were going to be in dire need of a Spanish-speaker we could trust absolutely.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had also sent somebody I knew and respected, Agent Brian Chase. I didn’t know the two Occupational Safety and Health Administration people, but they both looked pretty intense. I like to see that in somebody who’s been sent to help on a case.

The National Security Agency was just so far from my experience, I wasn’t even really sure what they did. They’d sent two people, though, both of whom were about as un-spy-looking as anybody I’d ever seen. All the feds treated them with great deference, though. Unlike the FBI’s Hawse, these two were treated that way from pure respect. One of the NSA men was introduced to me as Edward Peasley, an expert in biological warfare. Cool. The other was Herb, no last name, who simply said he did “some code work.”

Present from Iowa’s Division of Criminal Investigation was Hester’s boss’s boss, Special Agent Barney England. Iowa’s Division of Narcotics Enforcement had sent Bob Dahl, who’d worked closely with us when one of his fellow agents had been killed on a dope stakeout back in 1996. Sitting next to him was a guy from Iowa’s Emergency Management Division. He was going to be a critical player, as all requests and demands for emergency management were going to have to go through him. I thought that, with the rather bizarre health hazard that was being revealed, he was going to be one busy man.

Present from Nation County was County Attorney Carson Hilgenberg, along with Deputy Mike Connors and Dispatcher Sally Wells. Sally was key, as most of the communications were going to have to be coordinated by her.

I tried to count heads, and got at least twenty-one people in a room that should have held ten. With only sixteen chairs, including the ones from Dispatch, all the Nation County personnel were seated on the kitchen counter. We were the hosts, after all. George gave Hester his chair, and joined us.

Lamar and Volont threaded their way over to the refrigerator, where they called the meeting to order and made brief statements about cooperation and common goals. Volont explained that those present were part of a newly constituted team that had been assembled at very short notice by Special Agent Hawse, under the new multiagency mandate that had occurred after 9/11. Volont told the assemblage that Hester, Lamar, Sally, and I had worked with him before, on a fairly well-known case against an extremist called “Gabriel.” He said that we were to be trusted. Thank you, Agent Volont. Then he tossed me a real curve.

“I’ve checked, and the ricin didn’t come from our U.S.-based right-wing extremists.”

The “What? “just sort of came out of my mouth unbidden. “I never knew that they were into that.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Volont. “It was my assigned area when we worked our last case together. The extreme right had a strong interest in ricin at that time.” He shrugged. “You just didn’t have a need to know.”

That sort of pissed me off, since the case he referred to had been a major terrorism investigation we’d worked. Together, supposedly. “I sure could have come up with one, if you’d asked me,” I said. I shrugged. Volont was a bit of a jerk sometimes.

Hester and I briefly outlined our cases to date, Hester doing Cueva, and then me with Gonzales. Sally’d made copies of the case file, and passed them out to everybody present. We’d managed to wangle the use of the super-copier at the
Nation County Bulletin
, and were therefore able to pass out good copies of the photos from Linda and Rudy’s album. As I got to those, we got two instant hits.