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Authors: John Gilstrap

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BOOK: At All Costs
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C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
Nick Thomas’s day had already been a bruiser, and it wasn’t yet two. Mesmerized by this whole business of the Donovans’ renewed flight from the law, he’d been unable to pull himself away from the early morning talk shows, thus destroying any chance he had of getting to work on time.
By the time he finally got on the road, forty-five minutes behind schedule, his mood had soured enormously. Then, to top it all off, a tractor-trailer had overturned on Route 66 at Gainesville, closing down all but the shoulder lane of traffic into the city.
It was already past eleven when he finally staggered into EPA headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue at 13th Street, and his boss spent fifteen minutes pointing out that had he left on time, the traffic jam would never have been an issue.
Sometimes Nick wished he worked for the Postal Service, where people accepted homicide as a routine part of the job. As it was, he suffered his ass-chewing quietly and with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed.
As the story of the Donovans’ capture and second escape unfolded on the news, Nick found himself entering corners of his mind where he hadn’t ventured in years. What was startling was the clarity with which it all came back: the faintly sulfuric odor of the burning munitions, the fear that the odor had brought, even five miles from ground zero, and later, the persistent questions regarding why Nick had ever endorsed hiring such “unstable people.”
The truth is, his close relationship with Jake and Carolyn Donovan had cost him a decent career. Had it not been for that miserable morning in 1983, Nick would undoubtedly have been in the Senior Executive Service by now; or better still, a lofty executive in the private sector. But things hadn’t played out that way, and here he was, a GS-12 program specialist, manning a cubicle surrounded by up-and-comers, many of whom hadn’t yet been born when he was graduating from college.
Some of those kids looked up to him as the experienced old hand, but the savvier ones avoided him like the plague. Ambitious careerists were wise to stay away from people like Nick. At this stage of the game, there were only a few reasons why someone with his background and education would be stuck in bureaucratic hell, and none of them were good.
He knew what the secretaries and the whiz-kid engineers had to say about him, and the names didn’t vary all that much from the epithets he’d heard in his youth. By the time the term “nerd” had fallen out of fashion, the new and popular word “dweeb” had fallen right in to take its place. Over time, Nick had come to write the name-calling off as the price one must pay for being smarter than most of the population.
Such was life when you put your name on paper as the safety engineer at a hazardous waste site that killed sixteen people.
This morning in the shower, Nick tried to calculate the net cost of that single act of terrorism, and he realized no equation could handle it. In many respects, the corpses were the lucky ones. They merely died—relatively quickly, by most estimations. The courts then decided the value of their deaths, in the form of seven-figure settlements, and life went on. Even the loss of stockholder equity in Enviro-Kleen, and in their customer, Newark Industrial Park, Inc., could be measured in finite terms, albeit in nine digits when all was said and done.
The emotional costs, on the other hand, were incalculable. The violence of that afternoon had cost Nick his marriage. At least that was how he saw it. For the sake of the kids, they still lived in the same house, but they hadn’t shared a bed or a civil word in years. He’d told Melissa from the very beginning that his name was tarnished in his industry, but she chose to believe otherwise. When the truth of that assertion was ultimately borne out, and she realized she’d never have all the trinkets her friends thought were important, she’d written him off as a loser.
Then there were the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income from jobs for which he’d easily have been the best candidate, had it not been for the dirt associated with his name. At an intellectual level, he knew it was useless to feel sorry for himself, but sometimes he just didn’t have the strength to rise above self-pity.
Nick never believed for a minute that the entire story of the Newark Incident had been reported. Everyone had been so damned anxious to bring the incident to a close and to seal off the site from further leakage that evidence had been gathered way too quickly and way too sloppily. He’d expected more from the FBI. They considered only one option: that the entire nightmare was a wild-eyed tyrannical act by two people whom Nick knew personally to be very ordinary. Rationally, he supposed their flight from the scene represented a de facto admission of guilt, but still, someone should have considered an alternative.
Nick was no cop, but as a safety engineer, he’d done more than his share of accident investigation work, and he knew from experience how persuasively and effectively hypotheses can drive investigations. Instead of allowing accumulating evidence to lead naturally to a conclusion, investigators locked onto a pet theory, then set out to prove it. In the process, they ignored contradictory evidence, mentally discounting it as irrelevant. It happened all the time in the media, but he expected more from the police.
In Nick’s view, the Newark investigation had been driven by politics; and as with all things political, the investigation had an agenda. Publicly, that agenda was to render the area as safe as possible, as quickly as possible. Privately, Nick had always suspected something more. The president of the United States at the time had staked his entire reputation on the reconstruction of the country’s defenses. The last thing he needed was for the public to be distracted by the horrendous consequences of an accidental “special weapons” release. If accidents like that were truly possible, then the dangers inherent in such weapons would overshadow everything else. On the other hand, if a release could be written off as the senseless ravings of a couple of lunatics, then the issue would not be the weapons themselves, but rather the people who abused them.
Nerve agents don’t kill people. People kill people.
The bodies recovered from the exterior of the magazine most definitely had been shot to death, with a precision that simply was not possible via the random spray of small-arms munitions as they cooked off. And certainly, the one worker who was sick that morning—Tony Bernard—was murdered. Shot at point-blank range in his motel room. Terrible thing.
But why? Why would Jake and Carolyn Donovan go on such a rampage? And why on that
particular
day? Why not the day before or the day after? Or the month after, for that matter? Christ, they were scheduled to be there for half a year. Then again, such questions could be asked of any act of violence, he supposed. Why didn’t Lizzie Borden wait another day? Or the Menendez boys?
And the note. By far the most damaging and inexplicable bit of evidence, it just never made sense to Nick. It seemed too pat. These two terrorists blow away over a dozen people, and then they go by to pick off Tony Bernard—they shot him in the face, for heaven’s sake—and they top off the day by leaving a typewritten note in his room, confessing to the whole thing and ranting on about governments who choose to play God.
Puh-leeze.
Nick told the FBI agent in charge of the investigation—an arrogant control freak named Frankel—that Jake and Carolyn were not the sort to do such a thing, but the safety officer’s protests were written off as the frantic pleas of a friend who simply refused to believe he’d been duped. The agent’s condescending words rang clear in Nick’s mind as he revisited those days:
Ted Bundy’s friends were shocked as hell, too.
The Donovans hadn’t even
signed
the note they supposedly left! Their names at the end of the manifesto were typewritten. For Christ’s sake, anybody could have pecked out the damned thing on their portable typewriter. But almost instantaneously, the sheet of paper became another piece in the “incontrovertible case” against the Donovans. To Nick, it all had the odor of a fish market on a hot day.
Still, the FBI was the FBI, and back then, he was merely Nick Thomas, suddenly unemployed and unemployable. If the Donovans were innocent, they were on their own. He sure as hell wasn’t going to fall on his sword on their behalf.
So he’d pushed it all behind him. Or tried to, anyway; with growing success, until the Big Story broke yesterday. The stock footage shown on the news of the fire and the evacuation and the body recovery operation brought everything back with disturbing clarity.
And to think that there were still bodies sealed up in there . . .
His phone chirped twice, an inside call. Nick considered ignoring it but decided that his boss hated him enough as it was. He pushed the speaker phone button. “Yes?”
“Call for you on line seven,” informed Maura, the group secretary. Says it’s really important.”
He moaned. “Does it sound like a salesman?”
“Well, he spoke in complete sentences, if that helps.”
Always the joker.
“All right,” he obliged with a sigh. “I’ll take it.” He thought he knew who it was. He’d made the mistake of expressing interest in a new computer system that his group couldn’t afford and that he hadn’t the authority to buy, anyway. He’d been dodging the guy for weeks. It was time to come clean.
“Nick Thomas,” he said sharply, snapping the telephone off its cradle.
“Hello, Mr. Thomas,” said an older voice he didn’t recognize. “My name’s Fox. I need to meet with you as soon as possible.”
Yep, it was a salesman. Different one, but same technique. “I’m really bogged down at the moment,” he said flatly. “Why don’t you call me next week?”
Why can’t you just say, “Thanks, but no thanks”?
The voice remained calm but took on a very distinct edge. “Actually, Mr. Thomas, this is something of an emergency. We need to meet right away. Now. I don’t mean to frighten you, and you’re certainly not in any danger.”
“Danger?”
“At least not right now,” the mysterious Mr. Fox went on. “And neither are little Nicky and Joshua. In fact, they’re still tucked away in their classrooms at Stephen Foster Elementary School. When they walk home at three-ten, I’m equally confident that they’ll still be just fine.”
A sense of horror drenched Nick like a bucket of ice water. This asshole was threatening his children! “Listen here,” he said, raising his voice. “I don’t know who—”
“If you raise your voice to me, Mr. Thomas, I will hang up the telephone, and then you’ll never know what I wanted to talk about.” The stranger paused for effect. “Am I making my point?”
As his fear peaked, Nick’s will to fight drained right out of him; as if someone had pulled a plug. This guy knew his children’s names. He knew their school . . .
“Mr. Thomas, are you still there?
The voice startled him. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Good,” said Mr. Fox, a smile suddenly materializing in his voice. “Really, I assure you that you’re in no danger. But I need to meet with you. Right now. Look for a white Lincoln out in front of your building—on the 13th Street side. I’ll wait exactly five minutes.” The line went dead.
Shit!
Nick stared at the handset for a long moment, wasting a good half minute of valuable time. He considered calling Security but instantly dismissed the notion. Whoever this guy was, he’d done his research. And whatever he was up to, he’d have planned a countermove if Nick did the obvious.
Besides, there was no time. That thought shot him out of his seat.
Time.
He said five minutes! God, if the elevator was cranky, it’d take him that long to get down to the lobby.
The handset bounced off the cradle as he tossed it down and headed for the door. His boss saw him tear out of his bull pen, and made a move to block his path, but then shrank away from whatever he saw. Even opened the door for him.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE
Irene placed the call from her car, on her way to catch the plane that would take her to West Virginia. She’d been dreading the deed all day, and once Frankel picked up on his end, she realized she hadn’t been dreading it quite enough. As she took her drubbing, Paul Boersky sat quietly in the shotgun seat, pretending to be interested in the passing scenery.
“I’ve got to tell you, Irene, just how disappointed I am in your handling of this case.”
Like you did it so much better in ’83
, she shot back silently. This was a call of atonement, not one of conflict—well, at least from her point of view. From the other side of the line, every call was an excuse for conflict.
“You have him and then you lose him, and then you have him again. Jesus, I need a scorecard just to keep up. What have our redneck friends been able to turn up?”
Irene checked over her shoulder and changed lanes, following the signs to Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. “Not much, I’m afraid. Nobody seems to remember seeing them, but a waitress remembers a kid spending a long time on the telephone. Didn’t hear any of the conversation, though.”
“Damn,” Frankel spat. “So have the troopers given up?”
What a ridiculous question.
“No, sir, not that I know of. In fact, the last time I talked to the guy in charge down there, he said he had every available trooper on the case. I called Les Janier in the Charlestown office, and he said he’d get some agents down there to help out. I’m on my way there myself, in fact.”
“What about the surveillance we put on old man Sinclair out in Chicago?” Frankel asked, changing subjects. “Last report I got, they were following him out of the state.”
Irene took a deep breath.
He’s going to go ballistic.
“Well, there’s a problem there, too, sir,” she said. “Seems he was onto us somehow. He sent one of his associates on a ride, wearing a look-alike costume. Then, while we were distracted, he sneaked out another entrance to his compound and disappeared.” There, she’d said it. At least the primary heat from this one would be focused on someone else. Ted Greenberg, probably—her Chicago counterpart.
Frankel remained quiet for a long time. She’d met the man only twice, but she knew he tended to turn crimson red when he was upset. In her mind, he was purple now. When he finally spoke, he seemed beyond anger, tipping the scale more toward fury. Hatred maybe. But he maintained perfect control of his voice.
“You realize, don’t you, Irene, that we are the FBI? The most advanced investigative organization in the world. And these Donovans and their relatives are making you look like a complete idiot. A laughingstock for the entire world! Christ, I’ve seen Barney Fife turn out better police work than you!”
Why, thank you for the inspiration, Peter,
Irene didn’t say.
“You’ve got two days, Irene,” Frankel concluded. “Two more days, and then I yank you off the case and bust you down to border guard. Are you understanding me here?”
“Yes, sir,” Irene said.
Translation: I’ve got my confirmation hearings in six weeks, and you better not screw them up.
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Now, go out and act like an FBI agent!”
Nick saw the line at the elevators and said to hell with it. He flew down the stairs—six floors, twelve flights—passing two cliques of smokers huddled in the stairwell like high school students, sneaking their forbidden puffs where no supervisors were likely to catch them. Both groups looked startled at first, until they saw he was no one, then went on about their gossiping.
As he crashed out of the stairwell into the lobby, a security guard looked even more startled than the smokers, and he instinctively moved his hand toward his side arm. For the briefest moment, Nick considered blurting out the story—that some madman had been threatening his children—but he pushed the thought out of the way. In response to the inquisitive look, he flashed the ID badge dangling from his neck.
“Late for an appointment,” he said hurriedly. He didn’t wait for a reply.
As promised, a white Lincoln was parked illegally, immediately outside the 13th Street entrance. He hurried toward the vehicle, then slowed his approach. How was he supposed to know if it was
the
white Lincoln?
As if to answer his question, the driver’s door popped open, and a bull-headed man with white hair beckoned him over. “Mr. Thomas?” the man called.
Nick’s breath caught in his throat. The voice was the same, minus the electronic distortion. He slowed even more. “Yes.”
“Please climb in,” the man offered with a smile. “Truly, you are in no danger.”
No, just my children,
Nick thought. He approached haltingly, like a dog obeying an order to come and be beaten for eating a sock. The man gestured to the passenger side, and the instant Nick’s butt was in the seat, the vehicle started to move, even before the door was completely closed.
“Hello,” the driver said, extending his hand across the seat hump. “I’m afraid we started off on the wrong foot. My name is not Fox. It’s Sinclair. Harry Sinclair. Harry to my friends. May I call you Nick?”
Nick didn’t bother to smile as he hesitantly shook the old man’s hand. At first, the name didn’t mean anything. Looking at his face, though, it came back to him. This was the man he’d seen on the cover of
Business Week,
with a headline like “Mr. Connection.” In the photo, the tycoon was awash in money, with cartoon politicians bulging out of his pockets.
“You can call me whatever you want,” Nick said, still tight as a bowstring. “Where are my children?”
Harry scoffed and waved off Nick’s concerns. “They are as I said to you on the phone. Perfectly safe at their school. I mean it, Nick, they’re in no jeopardy. I’m afraid that in my zeal to meet with you, I may have led you to believe otherwise. I apologize.”
The hell you do.
Nick didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, concentrating his energies on an effort to keep his body from trembling as Harry piloted the Lincoln toward the Virginia suburbs. For the first time in a very long while, he felt real fear.
“You’re on edge,” Harry said. He flashed a smile that seemed to hold a genuine kindness. “I’ll get right to the point, then. I have a niece who’s in a bit of trouble right now, and she seems to think you can help her out. Her name is Carolyn Donovan. Ring any bells?”
For a moment, Nick could think of nothing to say. Then the words tumbled out: “I, um . . . I knew her a while ago, yes.”
Harry smiled broadly at the recognition that was so plainly displayed on Nick’s face. “I’m guessing you don’t play a lot of poker, Nick,” he said with a laugh. “Since you know her, I’ll assume you know the nature of her problem as well.”
Nick nodded, abandoning all efforts to be coy or elusive.
“Well, according to her son—they have a
son
now, by the way—whom I talked to this morning, Carolyn and her husband, Jack . . . do you know Jack?”
Nick scowled. “You mean Jake? Yes, certainly.”
Harry stood corrected. “Jake, then. Whatever. Do you think they’re guilty of the crimes they stand accused of?”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. Obviously, there was only one right answer for this one. Happily, it doubled as his honest take on it all. “No,” he said at length. “No, I never have. In fact, I told the FBI at the time . . .” He shut himself up abruptly. The time had come to answer the question, and nothing more.
“That’s good,” Harry said. “Because they vehemently deny any wrongdoing. In fact, confidentially, I must tell you that they wanted to turn themselves in from the very beginning; to prove their innocence. Alas, my faith in the judicial system was weaker than theirs, and I prevailed on them to disappear for a while. It’s the sort of decision that can’t be unmade. Now that events have taken this unfortunate turn, they feel that they can prove their innocence in this hazardous waste mess if they could just regain access to the site in Newark where it all happened.”
Nick’s jaw dropped. “No way,” he said without hesitation. “You mean
inside
the magazine?”
Harry shrugged. “Presumably.”
“No way. Absolutely not. The toxicity levels in there would knock down an elephant. They wouldn’t even let me recover the bodies, for crying out loud.”
“They?” Harry seemed suddenly intrigued.
Nick rolled his eyes. “The FBI jerks. And the EPA. They were so anxious to seal everything—”
“So, given the chance, you would have reentered?” Harry interrupted.
Nick paused, recognizing he’d just wandered into a trap. “Well, not without significant precautions. I mean, the protective equipment alone would . . .” He saw it. He saw what Harry wanted him to do. “I can’t just requisition a bunch of remediation equipment!” he said. “That stuff costs thousands of dollars. They’d fire me in a heartbeat.”
Deep wrinkles materialized in Harry’s forehead. “Much as they would throw my niece in prison for a crime she didn’t commit,” he said. “She and her husband were hoping you’d be willing to help. That’s why they called me. To see if I could talk you into assisting them in their efforts to exonerate themselves.”
Nick’s sense of dread bottomed out as he realized the choice he faced. One of the most powerful businessmen in the country—hell, in the
world,
for all he knew—had just confessed to committing a felony and had shared in detail the plans hatched by his own family to vandalize federal property. If he said yes, he’d become a part of the plot—a fellow felon.
“What if I say no?” Nick asked cautiously.
Harry gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Then I’d be very disappointed,” he said. This time the smile seemed slightly less genuine.
Nick searched the old man’s face for the hidden threat, for some sign of what might befall him and his family if he refused to cooperate. All he got for his effort, though, was the smile. If Harry read the fear in his passenger’s eyes, he did nothing to dissuade it. He just smiled.
Men as powerful as Harry Sinclair didn’t climb the ladder one step at a time; they knocked people out of the way, broke the ladder, then rebuilt it under themselves with no rungs on the bottom. A person like Nick meant nothing to a man like Sinclair—just another bug to crush if he got in the way.
This old man was too sharp ever to make an overt threat, and way too savvy to ever let Nick relax. So now Nick had a decision to make, and in the balance lay his entire future. He could fight or he could cave in; no middle ground. Truth be told, Nick was never much of a fighter, anyway.
When he finally renewed eye contact with Harry, he looked every bit as whipped as he felt. “What do you want me to do?”
BOOK: At All Costs
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