Day of the Delphi (16 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Day of the Delphi
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She shrank back in her seat transfixed by the sight of him, flailing desperately for the pistol she had discarded after it had killed Samantha Jordan. But her mind went numb before she could find it, and Kristen could do nothing but watch with open-mouthed horror as the man monster wearing David’s hair reached her door.
The President fixed his gaze on the tape recorder placed atop the desk in his private office. Listening to the tape obtained by FBI director Ben Samuelson had become an addiction for him. A mostly sleepless Saturday night had been
spent playing it over and over again, a process that had dragged long into Sunday as well. This time, the President fast-forwarded to a precise spot on the counter before pressing the play button.
“It never stopped, sir. It redefined itself and kept pursuing its agenda underground.”
“And suddenly it resurfaces. Why now, Mr. Daniels?”
“Dodd, sir. He was the missing variable and the most important one … . Dodd’s the one who will finally allow them to bring this off.”
“Bring what off exactly? Your report seems to skirt that issue.”
“The overthrow of the United States government.”
The President reached out and pressed STOP. The words chilled him just as they had the previous times he had listened. It was unthinkable. Not here, not in the United States. The safeguards of democracy aside, power was too decentralized. No cadre or cell was in a position to transcend the levels and tiers. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights existed to assure orderly transitions of power and a fair say for all opponents.
The President ran his hands over his face and held them there. The opposition had gotten around all that, an opposition led by a man whose popularity was equaled only by the extent of his power: Samuel Jackson Dodd. Until now, Tom Daniels and Clifton Jardine had been the only men outside his sinister cadre who had glimpsed what was coming, and both had died for possessing that knowledge.
The President fast-forwarded again, keeping a close eye on the counter until the time came to hit STOP and then PLAY. Daniels’s voice filled his ears once more.
“The smaller we keep the scale of our response, the better our chances of finding out how the subjects of my report intend to accomplish their goal.”
“How small, Mr. Daniels?”
“One man.”
The President stopped the tape there and gazed at the
photograph the FBI director had brought last night along with the tape. The shot was a poorly cropped one in blurred black and white. But the face it pictured was clear in its intensity and intimidation. The President felt the eyes reach out from the picture and grasp his own. He had to shake off the feeling that Blaine McCracken was studying him just as intently as he was studying the photo. According to the card clipped to the photo’s top, those eyes were black. A scruffy, close-cropped beard hid the balance of what appeared to be a ruddy complexion. A nasty scar cut through McCracken’s left eyebrow. His hair was thick and wavy, dark as the eyes. The profile card listed Blaine McCracken as six-foot-one and 200 pounds. Based on his neck and the part of his shoulders that were visible, the President figured all of it was muscle. Something about this man made him want to turn away. Something else made him want to reach through the glossy paper and bring Blaine McCracken into the room.
“Just who is this McCracken, Ben?” he had asked.
“Ex-Special Forces, ex-Phoenix Project, ex-Company—ex-just about everything. Works rogue now, outside the system, and nobody gets in his way.”
“And just why is that?”
“Because they’ve seen what happens to those that do. McCracken once blew out the groin area of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square because he thought that was what the British were missing after they failed to heed his warnings and a plane load of hostages got blown up as a result. That’s how he got his nickname.”
“Nickname?”
“McCrackenballs.”
“Daniels thought he was the right man for this job.”
“He might well be.”
“You’re missing my point, Ben. Daniels discusses setting up a meeting with McCracken and then shows up in Rock Creek Park the next night, where he’s murdered. I read the autopsy report you sent over. He didn’t die right away, did he?”
“No, sir, he didn’t.”
“Then maybe he was there to meet with McCracken. Maybe he stayed alive long enough to share information not included on this tape. That would mean McCracken might have the answers we don’t. And he hasn’t come forward because he doesn’t know who to trust.”
“Just like we don’t.”
“Find Blaine McCracken, Ben. Find him fast.”
Samuelson had been about to take his leave when the President spoke again.
“One more thing, Ben.”
“Sir?”
“What do you think of the job I’ve done in the office? Straight answer, please.”
“I wouldn’t want your chair, Mr. President.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Samuelson swallowed hard. “I’m disappointed.”
The President smiled. “Thank you, Ben. So am I. Now tell me why.”
“I think you’ve chosen to fight the wrong battles at inopportune times.”
“I’ve won some, lost more.”
Samuelson shrugged an acknowledgment.
“But now we’ve got ourselves a battle we have to win, don’t we? Samuel Jackson Dodd isn’t going to wait until the ’96 election to take that chair you want no part of.” A resolve unseen since the campaign and his early days in office filled the President’s eyes. “Well, I’m not going to let him. If it’s a fight he wants, we’ll give it to him. Bring this government down and the country falls with it. Not on my watch, Ben. Whatever it takes, we’re going to stop him.”
And now, a day later, the President held the photograph of Blaine McCracken away from him at arm’s length and pressed PLAY again. When the words he was waiting for began, he turned up the volume and leaned closer to the machine.
“They’re planning something that makes it all possible,
sir, something that we aren’t considering because we can’t. And unless we find out what it is, how they intend to pull this off, we won’t be able to stop them.”
“But McCracken will …”
“It’s what he does, sir.”
“For God’s sake, I hope so,” the President said out loud.
The big truck wobbled slightly as McCracken drove it through the entrance of the stockyard late Sunday afternoon. The choice of this locale by Arlo Cleese as his weapons storehouse seemed oddly appropriate.
Commandeering the meatpacking truck from a stop fifty miles back had provided Blaine’s means of access to the stockyard. Its real driver would be able to work his binds free by nightfall, and by then Blaine would be long gone from the area.
Manuel Alvarez had traced the stockpiled weapons he had supplied to Arlo Cleese to this location in central Oklahoma, and McCracken had come here hoping to find a clue to where Cleese himself could be found. His Midnight Riders had been the most militant of all the radical cells of the sixties. They avoided the mundane kidnappings, bank robberies, and small bombings in favor of large-scale destruction. A courthouse, an office building rising out of what had once been a block of tenements, and a church frequented by top members of the Washington establishment were all counted among their successful targets. A dozen people had died in those three bombings alone. Another ten had perished in several shootouts with FBI agents when Midnight Rider lairs were compromised, during which Cleese had been left with a bullet in his thigh and a permanent limp.
Cleese had surfaced occasionally until 1970, when he
vanished into the underground, along with a substantial portion of the lunatic fringe, without a trace. He managed to elude capture, despite spending three consecutive years in the early seventies on the FBI’s most wanted list and remaining thereafter a much-sought-after fugitive. McCracken knew that Cleese and others like him operated in an entire sublayer of American society. The underground was a world unto itself and would have provided the ideal breeding ground for Cleese to expand the revolutionary furor he had helped foster in the sixties.
There were three other trucks ahead of McCracken’s being loaded with sides of beef fresh from the slaughterhouse building. Blaine parked his truck in the appropriate slot and climbed down, engine left on to keep the refrigerator going in the hold. The stockyard workers were dressed in long white coats. All wore gloves. A few donned masks outside the building, while inside the slaughterhouse all undoubtedly wore them to block out the stench. Get himself into an outfit like that and Blaine would be able to check out the grounds at will, as well as walk to the main office in search of some indication of Arlo Cleese’s present whereabouts.
Blaine ambled away from his truck and walked around the back of the death-filled building. There was a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was locked from the inside, but half a minute later he had it open and had slipped into a dark hallway. A number of rooms lay along it. In the fourth one several pairs of white coveralls hung from pegs on the walls.
McCracken needed less than a minute to don one of the standard stockyard uniforms. He located a mask that covered most of his face and strapped it into place. The pair of gloves came last, after he had tucked his SIG-Sauer inside the white overalls.
The corridor continued directly into the slaughterhouse itself. The mask did little to quell the scent and nothing to stanch the sound. Blaine hated everything about it, revolted by the process required to put food on plates all across the
country. He stayed to the outer perimeter of the line, well away from the frightened clutter of animals and from clear view of any of the other workers. He took the first door marked EXIT and found himself on a platform overlooking the stockyard complex.
Large pens of animals filled the horizon. Beyond them rose a number of buildings and what looked like small houses that gave the outskirts of the stockyard the look of an old-fashioned commune. This appearance was further supported by the fields of crops stretching out as far as he could see.
In the nearby corrals workers dressed in similar garb were busy spreading out feed in long bins. The doomed cattle fought each other for what might be their final meal, occasionally perking up their ears at the sounds coming from the building all would enter eventually.
Blaine’s eyes were drawn to the corral nearest the slaughterhouse, where a man wearing a hip-length denim jacket over his white uniform was shoveling out feed. The man had combed his brown hair back into a ponytail that could not hide the streaks of gray. His skin had the dark, creased look of someone who had spent a good portion of his life outdoors. His shoulders were narrow, but firm layers of muscle were evident even beneath his jacket. He moved backward to grab another bag of feed and Blaine noticed his limp. Judging from his apparent age and long-injured leg, McCracken realized that, incredibly, he was looking at Arlo Cleese himself!
His shock was tempered somewhat by the realities posed by this unexpected stroke of fortune. Now that he had found Cleese, what should his next move be? Blaine had never considered himself a simple assassin, and executing Cleese would leave him without a viable escape route in any event. Additionally there was the problem of how far all this extended
beyond
Cleese. If what was coming could go on without him, than killing the leader of the Midnight Riders was pointless. A thorough interrogation was called for, after
which Blaine could turn Cleese over to Manuel Alvarez for his just rewards.
McCracken descended from the platform and headed toward the corral, crossing into the view of a pair of rifle-wielding guards en route. He kept moving forward as if he were doing exactly what he was supposed to. He’d noticed no one out here was wearing a mask, so he had brought his to neck level before leaving the platform.
The harsh stench of the animals grew stronger as he neared the corral. The ground within it was wet and oozing with mud and cow dung. Blaine noticed that the muck covered Arlo Cleese’s high rubber boots up to the ankles. A number of additional pairs of boots had been placed on a sill outside the corral. Still wary of the guards, Blaine leaned against the fence to steady himself and pulled the rubber boots over his shoes. His feet felt awkward, but at least now he would be able to walk freely about through the ooze.
Blaine pulled open the gate, scattering the cattle nearest it as he entered. He moved through the maze of snorting beasts straight for Cleese, who continued to seem oblivious to him, shoveling more feed into the trough without missing a beat. A door had opened at the far side of the corral and several of the animals were disappearing through it to their deaths. McCracken grabbed a stray shovel to further disguise the last stretch of his approach. He was barely two yards away when Cleese finally started to turn.
“Take the south end. I’ll finish up he—” Cleese interrupted himself when his eyes finally rested on McCracken. “Don’t think I know you.”
“You don’t.”
Cleese’s eyes lowered for the gun Blaine held concealed from view by his hip. “You come here to kill me, I’d be dead already.”
“We’re going to take a walk.”
“My guards wouldn’t like that.”
McCracken followed Cleese’s gaze toward the pair of
armed guards perched fifty yards away. “No reason for them to be any the wiser.”
“Been expecting somebody like you.”
“Really?”
“Surprised it took so long,” Cleese continued, pulling another feed bag toward him and tearing open its top. “I guess it means you fuckers are getting close.” He stood up straight and rigid. “You wanna dance, we do it here and now. I ain’t going anywhere with you.”
The SIG felt suddenly heavy by Blaine’s side. Something was all wrong here. Six feet before him a militant leader he thought was on the verge of launching a revolution was standing knee-deep in muck, sounding more like a victim.
The indecision must have shown up on Blaine’s expression.
“Wait a minute,” Cleese muttered, “wait a minute … I’ll be fucked! You ain’t one of them at all!” Looking suspicious now, wary instead of resigned. “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”
“I thought I was trying to save the country from an old asshole who can’t let go.”
Cleese tossed the first shovel full of feed from the fresh bag into the trough. The animals that had bunched together further up the line spread out to reach it.
“You’re way off base, man.”
“Not way off in figuring Manual Alvarez was your weapons pipeline. Not way off in figuring you’re finally well enough stocked to finish what you started twenty-five years ago with the Midnight Riders and the rest of the lunatic fringe.”
Cleese smiled. “You figure I offed the two Alvarezes?”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah, for somebody else trying to make it look like I was responsible, for that and plenty more. Hey, I got the men and the materials to move, but what the fuck for? Me and all the other old assholes kinda settled down now. The
lunatic fringe is still fringe, oh yeah, but we’re not very lunatic no more.”
“Two of you were. In Miami. The Coconut Grove.”
“If I’d sent them, I’d’ve made sure they had links to no one. Like you would.” Cleese stared hard at McCracken, shovel held like a spear before him. “And, don’t tell me, guns that were used in the Grove were part of one of my shipments.”
Blaine didn’t bother to confirm Cleese’s assumption.
“You got a name?” Cleese asked him.
“McCracken.”
Cleese stuck his shovel in the feed but didn’t hoist it. “We got ourselves a bunch of nice little communities like this all over the country. I keep myself on the move between them. I’d ask you if you wanted to hitch on, but I get the feeling you’re not the type.”
“Part of your stockpile from Alvarez stored in each?”
“Damn right.”
“For the revolution that’s not coming anymore?”
“Just to stay alive now.”
“Daddy!”
A child’s gleeful cry stopped Cleese before he could go on. From McCracken’s rear, a boy of about six was charging through the muck, adult boots reaching nearly up to his waist. He slid past Blaine and jumped into Arlo Cleese’s arms.
“You said you’d be done in ten minutes, Daddy. You said you’d be home.”
Cleese set the boy down. “I got a guest.”
The boy looked at Blaine. “Is he staying?”
“Nope.”
“Lot’s of people stay, you know,” the boy said to McCracken.
“Run along. Wait for me on the porch,” Cleese told his son, and quick as that the boy was gone.
“His mother left here three years ago,” he continued to
Blaine. “I got a few other kids, too, but he’s the only one with me now.”
“Seems like you’re settling down.”
“Ain’t got it so bad, far as things go. I had a lifetime’s worth of complications already. Be a good idea to avoid them for a while.”
“Then why the need for all the firepower?”
“We got to be ready, that’s why. You’re here ’cause somebody filled your mind with some thick shit, Mac. People who want you and everyone else to think I’m behind what’s gonna go down. That’s who I thought sent you. All part of the plan.”
“What plan?”
“You standing there, you must know it.”
“’Long as I’m here, why don’t you give me your version?”
Cleese pulled the shovel from the feed bag and leaned against it. Around him animals began to cluster impatiently.
“Got a feeling you weren’t around much for the sixties, Mac. Two tours maybe?”
“Close.”
“No record you was ever there?”
“Close again.”
Cleese stuck his shovel back in the feed. “You and me, Mac, we both went to war and we’re both survivors. ’Cept back in the sixties, surviving didn’t seem to matter much. War’s all that mattered, and I’m not talking about where you shipped out to. I’m talking about the homeland. While you were fighting for freedom, I was watching it being threatened in the good old U.S. of A. Subtle but concerted effort to make sure everybody toed the mark. Got scary for a time and we did what we could to fight it, till they turned up the heat and we went away. Fringe wasn’t lunatic enough to stick around for the finish. But the real bad guys were. They never stopped. They never
will
stop till they get what they want.”
“Which is?”
“Nothing’ll satisfy ’em short of the country itself. That’s what they been planning for. That’s what they wanted us out of the way for way back in the beginning.”
McCracken’s thoughts were swimming. Conceivably Tom Daniels’s dying mention of Operation Yellow Rose might not have been meant to point him to the Midnight Riders at all, but at the force
behind
Yellow Rose: William Carlisle’s shadowy Trilateral Commission subcommittee. Carlisle had intimated that the current crisis was due to the failure of that subcommittee to wipe out men like Cleese when they had the chance. But what if that failure had led to another stage of development, a more complex plan to gain the control they sought? In that event, the former residents of the lunatic fringe were being set up, the blame cast upon them for the plot Daniels had uncovered by its true perpetrators.
“Operation Yellow Rose,” Blaine muttered.

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