Dead Simple (22 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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Pfffffft … pfffffft … pfffffft …
The soft spits were barely audible but still enough to make Rentz twist around. His two Bears, still grasping their submachine guns, lay on the carpet with blood already pooling beneath their heads. The third Bear, closest to him behind the desk, was sitting upright against the wall, eyes glazed over and seeming to stare at the jagged hole centered in his forehead.
“So much for the ultimate in high-security complexes.”
Rentz turned toward the speaker and saw the man he recognized only from a picture standing just inside the door he had neglected to seal, a still-smoking silenced pistol held dead on him. A much larger shape loomed outside on the balcony, visible only in the splashes of light filtering through the jagged holes in the hurricane shutters.
“Nice to meet you finally, Max,” Blaine greeted, gazing down at him.
Rentz stumbled to his feet and backed up against the wall. He could barely breathe.
“I’ve got a question for you, Max. Ready?”
Rentz nodded.
“Do you want to live or die? Come on, the clock’s ticking … .”
“Live.”
“Very good. Now tell me what happened to Buck Torrey.”
Rentz regarded him quizzically.
“Liz Halprin’s father,” Blaine continued. “I believe he paid you a visit too.”
“He forced his way into my office, broke my assistant’s arm.”
“Then what?”
“He left.”
“Alive?”
“He warned me what would happen if I didn’t leave his daughter alone.”
“Obviously you didn’t listen.”
Rentz stiffened, clenched his jaw.
“And you know what? It’s all for nothing, because the gold’s not under that lake.”
Rentz’s mouth dropped. “That can’t be right. I spent tens of thousands of dollars following the trail. It’s
got
to be there, I tell you!”
“You tell that to Buck Torrey?”
“He didn’t care. He wanted to know about Stratton’s Folly, the entire legend, the route Stratton was taking when the blizzard hit.”
“Tell me what you told him,” Blaine ordered.
“There was a train waiting in a small town in western Pennsylvania. I’ve got a map of Stratton’s planned route through the center of the state—”
“
Central
Pennsylvania?” Blaine asked, something fluttering inside him. Something Hank Belgrade had said months before on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, minutes before Blaine’s life had changed forever at the Washington Monument.
Belgrade’s missing tanker of Devil’s Brew had been heading through central Pennsylvania too!
“From the farm that would have been the most direct route, but I’m telling you he never took it!” Rentz insisted. “He couldn’t have, because he never got to the station. I’ve got the records. The train never departed.”
“No,” Blaine said softly. “Because something else happened to Stratton along the way.”
“
I
ask you a question, Indian?” Blaine asked Johnny Wareagle after they had settled back into their car.
For Wareagle, that wasn’t always a simple task. Car interiors weren’t designed with men of seven-foot, three-hundred-pound proportions in mind. But amazingly Johnny never seemed to have to squeeze, as if he could enable his body to conform to whatever the specs allowed.
“Go ahead, Blainey.”
McCracken gazed down at the ring he hadn’t taken off since leaving Condor Key. “Dead Simple. You ever think about what it means?”
“Different things to different people.”
“Buck told me I had it wrong.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The obvious. I always took the words at face value.”
“How simple it was for us to kill …”
“Because it had to be.”
“A convenient explanation, because the times required it.”
“You saying the definition changed?”
“Not changed so much as evolved, Blainey. The words were what we needed them to be in the Hellfire. They became what we needed them to be after.” Johnny’s owl-like eyes bored into Blaine’s. “What you needed them to be recently.”
“Such as?”
“In the Hellfire, it was killing that had to be simple for us. Now it’s living we must make simple.”
“Living,” Blaine echoed, not exactly sure what Johnny meant.
“When did Buck Torrey give us the rings?”
“After our final tours were up.”
“After the slogan in its most basic meaning would have no further use …”
“Right.”
“And we were returning to a world against which we could not possibly measure the one we had left. The only way we could endure was to learn to live as simply as we had learned to kill. With the same detachment, patience, and skill. Trim all the fat aside and be left with only that which matters.”
Blaine sighed. “Doesn’t sound like either of us got that message.”
“At least not right away. My understanding came when I finally left the world for the woods.”
“And mine?”
“What did you go to Buck Torrey seeking?”
“Another chance.”
“Because your life had been trimmed to the bare bones, ready to be rebuilt, remade.”
“Starting from scratch—that’s what it felt like.”
“You went down there to face your greatest challenge: to overcome the one person who could destroy you.”
“Like the warrior you told me about in the hospital, who lost to his own reflection.”
“He didn’t lose, Blainey; he survived and became even stronger as a result and more ready to face battle.”
“You forget to tell me that part of the story?”
“I waited.”
Blaine felt his mind drifting a little. “This battle’s different for me.”
“They are all different.”
“This time I’ve got something to prove, Indian. Buck gave me this chance, and unless I find him I’ve wasted it.”
“Even the greatest hunter is lost without a trail, Blainey.”
“I think I’ve got one now.”
T
hree hours later, just after eight A.M., Blaine rose when Hank Belgrade wearily approached his stone bench set in the center of the FDR Memorial.
“You shouldn’t have,” Hank said, noticing the box of doughnuts waiting by Blaine’s feet.
“I brought coffee too, but it got cold. Not like you to be late.”
“I forgot you said FDR. Went to the Lincoln Memorial by mistake. Out of habit.”
“I figured it was time for a change.”
“For both of us.”
They sat down together on the bench. An elegant statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to be studying them intently from his chair nestled comfortably in a wall formed of polished granite that matched the bench. Another granite wall directly ahead featured a fountain perpetually cascading water into a small pool. After walking up to the FDR Memorial by way of the Tidal Basin, Blaine had tossed a half-dozen pennies into the pool, but he had stopped short of making a wish. This was one of several individual displays composing the memorial, arranged chronologically, with each representing a different stage of FDR’s life and presidency.
“Seven months we don’t see each other, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”
Belgrade frowned, his jowls more bulbous than ever. “You wanna check my schedule, see where I can squeeze in more social calls, be my guest.”
“That what you think this is?”
“Word is you’re out.”
“Word also is I’m dead.”
Belgrade raised the box of doughnuts to his lap and opened the box to check the selection. “No jelly?”
“Not very forgiving on the suit.”
“I appreciate the consideration.” Belgrade crossed his legs. “I’m glad you asked to meet here. We left too many memories on the steps of the Lincoln. All the information you asked me to get for you, all the deliveries I made.”
“You sound nostalgic.”
“I know how bad it was for you, that’s all. Daily conference calls with your doctors. I sent specialists over there, don’t forget. Candy too.”
“Exactly why I want to return the favor. How’d you like your Devil’s Brew back?”
“Why, you got it?” Hank smiled.
“Not yet.”
Belgrade caught the look in Blaine’s eyes and nearly let the doughnuts spill from his lap. “Am I hearing you right?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea where to find it, Hank.”
“Reminds me of the good old days back at the Lincoln … .”
“You have a map of your rig’s planned route?”
Belgrade looked disappointed. “I got a hundred of them, complete with a detailed schema of every area we searched.”
“I only need one.”
“I’m telling you you’re wasting your time on that count, MacNuts.”
“You also told me the tanker fell off the face of the earth.”
“So it seemed at the time.”
“Because maybe that’s exactly what happened,” Blaine told him. “How much do you know about the Civil War, Hank?”
“The North won.”
“There’s more.”
 
“
H
ow we gonna get that tanker out of this mine, Othell?” Jack Tyrell asked.
They both looked over as Lem Trumble slammed the hood closed. “Smooth working order,” he said softly. “No damage from the fire.”
“Well, we can’t just drive it out of here,” said Othell Vance. “Not unless we want to spend a half day digging it out.”
The entrance they had found to the mine was concealed by brush and overhanging vegetation that almost totally camouflaged it. Only during a
storm, with the brush and vines soaked and blowing, would the entrance be visible at all.
Based on the way the tanker’s tires had sunk into the ground inside the cavern, Tyrell figured the driver must have taken refuge in there during just such a storm. But why hadn’t he driven the tanker out again when the storm broke?
“What do we need?” Tyrell asked Vance.
“I don’t know. A crane, I guess.”
“Or a winch, maybe?”
“Yeah, that’ll do.”
Jack Tyrell smiled as he slid his hand down the length of the huge tanker. It was like a standard oil truck, but it had catwalks on either side and all kind of spigots and bleeder valves he couldn’t quite identify. Tapping it with a rock drew a dull clang instead of a metallic ping, evidence of a heavily armored shell that could withstand anything up to a full rocket attack. That explained why the brief fire had caused no damage whatsoever and why the Devil’s Brew within remained intact. The extra-wide tires, as near as he could tell, were solid rubber; no flats or blowouts to slow the rig down.
Tyrell tapped it almost tenderly and started down the tunnel toward the opening they had found that led to a plateau atop a ridge.
“Where you going?” Vance asked him.
“To get you that winch you need.”
 
“
Y
ou wanna back up, give me this again?” Belgrade asked, fidgeting on his side of the bench now. A few tourists had arrived at the FDR Memorial and were snapping pictures. But he seemed not to notice them.
“All right,” Blaine started. “Stratton’s convoy waits out the blizzard on the Halprin farm and heads north the next morning when the storm breaks, to make their train. Trouble is, in Pennsylvania they run into a
second
storm, the one in which Bull Run flooded the valley and created the lake on Liz Halprin’s farm. So Stratton has no choice but to look for shelter again.”
“In the middle of nowhere.” Belgrade nodded.
“In the middle of central Pennsylvania,” Blaine corrected. “Now fast-forward a hundred and thirty-five years. An almost identical storm comes up when it’s too late for your Red Dog crew in the tanker to turn back. They take a wrong turn somewhere, get lost, and end up diverting from their planned route, in the same area of Pennsylvania where Stratton’s convoy found itself.”
“And you’re saying they’d want to find shelter too. Problem is where.”
“You nod off during geography class, Hank?”
“What did I miss?”
“The lesson about this part of Pennsylvania being loaded with coal
mines, specifically anthracite coal, which means deep veins that have helped turn the landscape into a wasteland. Severe storms like the ones we’re talking about can cause severe erosion, enough maybe to expose the opening to one of those abandoned mines. Make a pretty inviting sight for anybody desperately in need of shelter. And all that ore mixed in with the topsoil would also explain why your satellite reconnaissance and flyovers never found a thing.”
Belgrade weighed the ramifications of Blaine’s theory. “The trouble with all this is that nobody ever saw Stratton again, and now the same thing has happened to my tanker of Devil’s Brew. You mind telling me what happened after both came in from the rain to stop them from coming out again?”
“Get me that map of Red Dog’s route,” Blaine said, “and I’ll find out for you.”
 
J
ack Tyrell and Othell Vance watched the trio of Pennsylvania State Police cars tear across the hillside, closely followed by a heavy-framed tow truck with a winch visible in its rear.
“I told you I’d get you one.”
“I don’t know. It’s awful risky.”
“Relax: I got everything thought out.”
Tyrell had called 911 from the now camouflaged cruiser belonging to the dead trooper, claimed he was a trucker who just saw a state police car down a steep grade, all busted up. Three cruisers was one more than he expected, but still easily dealt with. The Yost brothers and Tremble could easily silence them before they could summon additional reinforcements. Tyrell intended to keep at least one of the troopers alive well into the morning, long enough to fabricate reports at the right intervals. He figured that would buy him the few hours he needed to get the tanker winched up and be on his way.
“Where’d you tell him you saw the cruiser?” Othell Vance asked him.
“Right about there,” Tyrell replied, as the highway patrol cars slowed in unison, beginning a slow crawl along the edge of the road.
“Any second now,” Jack said to Othell, waiting for Tremble and the Yost twins to make their move.

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