Authors: John Gilstrap
At All Costs (29 page)
Nick caught the look and smiled. “Well, Travis, we don’t know for sure. Depends on what was in there to begin with and how it mixed during the fire. I’d expect some pretty severe respiratory distress. Maybe some systemic problems, too. Liver and kidneys, probably. Virtually everything affects them.”
“That means you’d have trouble breathing and get really sick,” Carolyn translated, earning herself a look that said,
I’m not stupid.
I’m not stupid.
“What about security?” Jake asked. “How big a problem will that be?”
Nick ruffled through his papers until he came up with the one he needed: an aerial photograph of the magazine and the surrounding area. “Actually, it shouldn’t be too big a deal,” he explained. “There’s a general philosophy within the agency that people are not inherently suicidal. By putting up two concentric fences, here and here”—he pointed with the tip of his pencil—“and by posting signs every ten feet that say something like, ‘Extremely Hazardous Area, You’ll Die if You Go in Here,’ we thought we’d pretty much discourage people from entering.”
Everybody smiled.
“So, that in mind, no one saw a compelling need to have a resident security guard. Not only would it be a waste of time, but over twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, who knows? Maybe he’d pick up an unmonitored exposure to something.”
Carolyn was incredulous. “You mean, no one even watches the fence line?”
Nick shook his head. “Not exactly. If you look here on the map, you’ll see that the old access road system—built in God knows when—still exists.”
Clearly, Nick saw far more on the photograph than Jake did. Even as he followed the pencil, he still couldn’t see what he was talking about.
“This road here is the closest one to the exclusion zone, about a hundred yards away, while this one here”—he moved the pencil—“is farthest away at about a half mile. We decided early on that it made sense to use the roadways as natural barriers and to build the outermost fences alongside them. Thus, three times a day, a rent-a-cop buzzes the place to look for any problems.”
Carolyn interrupted. “Problems like . . . ?”
Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything, I guess. Holes in the fences? Birds falling out of the sky?”
The bird imagery made Travis giggle in the background.
Jake turned in his chair to face his son. “You’re welcome to come on up here and join us, pal,” he said with a grin. “Hate to have you straining your ears.”
Travis flashed a sheepish smile, then returned to his cutting. “No, that’s okay. I’m fine.”
“I don’t suppose you have a schedule for when those guards come?” Carolyn wanted to know.
Nick shot her his coyest smirk and held up another piece of paper from the stack. “Suppose again, Mrs. Donovan,” he said. “So what time is it now?” He looked at his watch. “Two o’clockish. Next patrol is at three, and the one after that isn’t till nine. I say we make our entry at three-thirty, do what we have to do, then be on our way back to Little Rock before dark.”
Jake looked over to Carolyn, who met his eyes with an uneasy glare. So this was it. All the years, all the running, all the new identities, and all the lies ultimately came down to a simple decision just to go for it. Could it possibly be this easy?
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jake said.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE
As Irene watched the West Virginia countryside speed by, five thousand feet below, she tried to figure out why the Donovans would return to Arkansas—to the “scene of the crime” as it were. It sounded so cliched, she hated even to think the words. These fugitives had worked so hard for so long to stay invisible, how could they possibly profit by stepping into the open like that? It didn’t make sense.
But Frankel was convinced, and when you sat in the big office, your hunches carried the weight of law. What he didn’t say was how he knew. Something about a hit on a computer field by some staffer at EPA, but between the sputtering cell phone connection and Frankel’s clipped, pompous way of speaking, she couldn’t get half the details she wanted. That was okay, though. She had staff back in Charleston to piece all that together for her.
Ironically, her team had just discovered the Donovans’ white van, stashed in a dilapidated old barn, when word came from Frankel. It had taken a cool head and strong nerves for the Donovans to stay put like that in the middle of a full-scale search. Fact was, they’d done exactly the right thing. Had they tried to bolt, they’d have been caught for sure.
They always do the right thing,
Irene mused.
It’s really beginning to piss me off.
Irene mused.
It’s really beginning to piss me off.
Judging by the equipment and supplies they left behind in the van, they hadn’t anticipated being caught in West Virginia. She figured that to be good news. The farther she could knock them off their plan, the more likely she’d be to force a mistake.
Best she could tell, they’d been planning an extended camping trip. The van was loaded down with sleeping bags, lanterns, lamp oil, and canned goods—everything they’d need to hide out from civilization for weeks at a time, even with the approach of winter. Even more interesting, they’d abandoned an arsenal of weapons: three hunting rifles, a shotgun, and enough ammunition to invade Mexico. Frankly, the weapons confused her. Should she be relieved they hadn’t taken them along, or concerned that there were even more lethal weapons in the Donovans’ possession?
Always better to err on the safe side. That’s why the flyers on the Donovans read “armed and extremely dangerous.”
For a few minutes there—before Frankel’s call—Irene felt certain she’d figured it all out. Clearly, the Donovans were experienced woodsmen—a suspicion backed up by the magazines and literature found in their trailer back in Phoenix—so she’d have bet a pretty penny they’d be making a Von Trapp–style march over the mountaintops. In fact, she’d been in the process of mobilizing a search, in cooperation with the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the Park Service, when she got yanked away by her boss’s hunch.
So how did they get to Arkansas? Answer: they had help. Paul could barely contain himself. He’d been first to suspect a connection with Harry Sinclair—the mystery man who’d yet to resurface—and sure as hell, it looked like he was right.
She closed her eyes against the din of the chopper and rested her head against the bulkhead, trying to figure out if she’d done everything she needed to do. Why was it that she could never get ahead of this case? Normally, investigations took on a rhythm, and once you caught it, you could put together a plan to catch the bad guy. Here she found herself arriving perpetually too late, only to find out that the Donovans continued to be slippery. This whole thing was taking on the bumbling quality of a Keystone Kops adventure. Assuming that Frankel was right—that the Donovans were in fact returning to the Newark site—then she could only assume they’d get in and out quickly.
But what do they have to gain by going back there?
She ran through the details of the case, ticking them off one at a time, and couldn’t think of a single one she’d missed. The Little Rock field office had agents en route to Newark, and she’d notified the local police chief—a guy named Lundsford—to keep an eye on the site. If the numbers she ran in her head were correct, it would be another hour and a half, two hours, before any feds got on the scene out there, which made her exceptionally dependent on the abilities of the local cops. Remembering the bumbling antics of Sherwood and his crew back in Phoenix, the thought brought her little comfort.
Officially, the Newark Hazardous Waste Site was only about a hundred acres in area. Unofficially, the site extended to virtually all 75,000 acres. Some addresses just didn’t lend themselves to corporate business cards. Of the few companies remaining in the business park, all were fly-by-nighters, representing new technologies in an industry known to vaporize inventors right along with their mistakes.
For Jake, it was like reentering a nightmare. Everything was close to the way he remembered it, but nothing was exact. Areas that had been so carefully cleared during the park’s boom years had largely been reclaimed by the aggressive Arkansas undergrowth. Entire buildings had been swallowed up by field grasses, roads erupted by surging tree roots.
The big Cadillac looked comically out of place, dodging potholes and throwing gravel on its way toward the middle southwest section of the park. On this trip, the protective gear took priority over passenger comfort, forcing everyone but the driver—Nick—to sit at impossible angles and hang on for dear life to keep from getting launched through the roof or crushed by a falling box.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” Carolyn asked hesitantly.
“As sure as I can be.” Nick shouted to be heard over the clatter of shifting equipment. “I studied the site maps pretty closely while I was waiting for you guys to arrive. So far, everything looks as it should.”
“How much longer?” Travis wanted to know. His voice sounded strained against the weight of the breathing apparatus boxes.
Nick shrugged. “Two minutes maybe? Ten? No way to be sure.”
Actually, it was four. The access road dead-ended at a chain-link fence, which stretched left to right in front of them for as far as they could see. Every few feet, at shoulder height, red-and-white signs had been posted on the fence, reading:
DANGER
HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY LIKELY TO CAUSE DEATH
DANGER
“We’re here,” Nick said simply. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, the latex gloves making his hands look oddly artificial. If there was one stupid mistake he didn’t need to make, it was to leave fingerprints.
No one replied for a long moment as they took in the message from the sign. Carolyn grasped her son’s hand and squeezed.
“I’d feel a lot better if that guy Thorne was here,” Travis grumbled. The stinging no-confidence vote drew a look from Jake, but Travis held his ground. “No offense.”
Jake let it go.
“So what do we do now?” Carolyn asked. “We can’t drag this equipment a mile into the woods.”
“There’s a gate right here on the fence,” Travis observed.
Nick shook his head. “No, they’ve got an alarm on the gate. We need to snip our way through.”
Jake twisted his face incredulously. “They alarm the gate, but nothing happens if you cut the chain-link?”
Nick laughed. “Who in their right mind would want to break in, Jake? It’s not like there’s anything to steal, you know. The alarm just makes sure that the gate gets locked back up in case somebody has to come in to do something.”
Amid the pile of equipment sent ahead by Harry Sinclair’s New Jersey connections were two long-handled bolt cutters, which made quick work of what people with right minds purportedly would never do. When they were finished, the hole was just barely big enough for the car.
Jake winced at the sound of metal dragging along the paint.
Once through the hole, Nick steered the car back onto the roadway, which continued on the other side of the gate. Half a mile later, as advertised, they arrived at another fence and another gate. Nick threw the transmission into park and turned in his seat to face the rest. “Here we are,” he announced. “Just your garden-variety certified hazardous waste exclusion zone.”
“We’re in the middle of the woods,” Travis objected. “I thought there were supposed to be a bunch of storage buildings.”
“Look again,” Carolyn told him, pointing. “They’re here. They’re just overgrown.”
At its heyday, this part of Arkansas had been mowed flat, turned into a grassy flatland extending from horizon to horizon; perfectly level but for endless rows of storage magazines which arose from the ground like so many swells in a grassy green sea. From the air, back then, the place would have looked like a mogul field on a ski slope, only green; and constructed at intervals that were far too precise and with lines too straight to have been a random creation of nature.
Today, from the ground, this part of the facility was so overgrown that nature had camouflaged everything. Trees now grew where roadways used to be, and thick undergrowth—kudzu, mainly, cohabitating with countless other varieties of the region’s most hearty bushes, vines, and creepers—had long ago choked out any ground cover as fragile as grass. To the casual observer, these woods might have been around since the beginning of time, untouched by any human. On closer examination, though, beyond the thick tapestry of leaves and the random angles of the foliage, the repeating pattern of the land became obvious, rising and falling at precisely the same height and precisely the same interval. Like staring at one of those computer-generated 3-D art creations, the longer Travis examined his surroundings, the more the place began to look like the explosives storage facility it once had been.
The image solidified in his mind the instant he saw the first of the concrete-filled steel blast doors, set back in an overgrown tunnel, precisely in the center of one of the earthen mounds. Having seen one, it became easy to see others; dozens of them just by pivoting his head.
“Whoa,” he breathed, his tone alive with wonderment. “This place is unreal.”
“Are we safe, Nick?” Carolyn asked.
Nick’s head bounced noncommittally. “Well, I wouldn’t want to build my dream house here, but it should be pretty safe, yeah. Certainly for the short time we’ll be around.” He opened the door and stepped out. The others followed as he walked up to the fence and cut a hole big enough for people to pass through. That done, they all climbed to the crest of the nearest mound. “See there?” Nick asked when he got to the top. They all followed his finger. Two rows away, they could just make out a brownish black stain against the bright, fall-colored foliage. “That’s where we’re going,” he said.
“God Almighty,” Jake said, clearly overwhelmed. “It’s a moonscape.”
“Pretty close,” Nick agreed. “Won’t get much to grow there for the next hundred years.” He looked first to Carolyn and then to Jake. “Ready to rock and roll?”
“Um, guys?” Travis said, an odd look on his face. “I—I don’t know how to work any of the equipment.”
Jake smiled and rumpled the boy’s hair as he descended the steep hill. “That’s good,” he said. “Because you’re staying here.”
“I am not!”
Jake stopped midway and made his smile disappear. “It’s not because you’re not good enough, Travis, or not smart enough or not strong enough. It’s because we only have three sets of gear. You need to stay back and keep an eye out for the security people. If you hear anything, you’ve got to let us know.”
Travis looked for a moment as if he might argue but ultimately said nothing, choosing instead to help unload the car.
Deputy Sheriff Sherman Quill mumbled audibly to himself as he pulled his nightstick out of his Sam Browne belt and slid it into its spot next to the driver’s seat.
I hate going out to this place.
I hate going out to this place.
Ever since he joined the force, Newark Industrial Park had been the bane of his existence. Every time he turned around, there was some damn thing going on out there, and with only the two of them in the department, he handled fully fifty percent of the calls. For some unfathomable reason, the local teenagers—local, hell, he’d arrested them from as far away as Little Rock—found it to be a romantic spot.
To date, no one had been stupid enough actually to climb the fence and get it on, but they’d come damn close, giving themselves away by jiggling the lock on the gates. But for the coils of razor wire along the top of the fence, he had little doubt that people would be scaling the thing every day. Crazy kids.
Now he was on his way to “check the place out,” whatever the hell that meant. Apparently, some hotshot FBI lady had called the chief and told him to expect some kind of trouble out there. If Sherman had heard correctly—and he must have, else why would the chief have said it twice?—the same people who started it all way back when were returning to do it again.
“Don’t make no sense,” he grumbled, putting his ten-year-old Ford in reverse. “Ain’t nothin’ left out there to burn, for God’s sake.”
Damned entertaining thought, though, getting his hands on the son of a bitches who squeezed all the life out of this town. Sherman’s family had come from these parts for generations; even stuck around during the bad times in the sixties, when Sherman himself was coming up as a teenager. People used to stick around, because sticking around was the thing to do. Now the kids were flying out of Newark as soon as their wings were big enough to support them. The luckier ones got to go to college somewhere and then get decent jobs. For the others—folks like Sherman, who struggled through high school with just enough Cs and Ds to warrant a diploma—it was damned difficult to find something that paid enough money to keep food on the table. As it was, downtown Newark had all but closed up. Places like the health clinic stayed open just because the state said they had to. God knows they had enough business to go around, just none of their patients had any money to pay their bills with.
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