Death Angel (17 page)

The door on the right-hand side of the corridor connected to the attached garage. No cars were parked there, but it contained two more bodies.

Two short, narrow stairs descended to a gray cement floor. A man in his thirties lay near the stairs. Long coal-black hair was pulled straight back from his forehead and face and tied behind the back of his neck in a ponytail. His eyebrows were inverted “Vs,” pointed in the centers of the arches. He wore a T-shirt with a fancy print pattern, jeans, and expensive sneakers.

A 9mm Beretta semi-automatic pistol lay on the floor where it had fallen from his dead hand. A bullet hole gaped where a round had tagged him in the middle of the face.

Across from him on the other side of the garage lay Harvey Kling. Kling was turned away from the gunman, sprawled in the opposite direction. He lay on his left side with his left arm extended in front of him. The side of his head rested on his left arm. His right side was uppermost. His right arm lay along his right side, still clutching his snub-nosed .38.

He had died hard. His middle had been shot to pieces; it was a welter of gore that had soaked into his clothes and pooled on the floor.

Jack went through the motions, crouching down beside the body, fingertips probing Kling’s neck for a faint throbbing pulse of life, knowing all the while it was an exercise in futility. Kling had bled out a while ago. Jack straightened up and took a step back, studying the scene, puzzling over the layout of the bodies.

This was no ordinary suburban garage. It might have started out that way, but sometime in the not too distant past it had been converted into some kind of a sophisticated listening post.

Its centerpiece was a communications console, an array of intricate electronic hardware housed in a heavy-duty wooden cabinet. Its function was not immediately apparent. Adjacent to it was a gray metal desk and swivel chair. A flat-screen monitor and portable keyboard sat on the desktop.

Broad smeared blood tracks on the floor showed where Kling had turned himself around, using the last reserves of the life fading in him to position himself so that he faced away from his assailants. His head was cradled on his arm, that extended left arm.

The hand of which was pointing a finger at the electronics console.

Jack crossed to it for a closer look. The main piece of equipment was built into the top of the bulky wooden framework. It was a suitcase-sized piece of hardware inset
with its broad side face up. It featured mini-monitor screens, gauges, dials, and banks of switches.

Below it, installed on a lower shelf of the cabinet, was what looked like a customized, amped-up computer tower. Tower and suitcase were cable-interconnected. Other connecting cables ran from the back of the console to the desktop flat-screen monitor and keyboard.

A figure loomed in the doorway: Deputy Ross. He stuck his head in the garage and looked around.

He stepped down to the floor, circling the corpse of the ponytailed man to look him in the face.

“Like I figured—Chino Valdosta,” he said, nodding solemnly. “I knew it was him when I saw Tommy Burke out in the hall. Had to be. Chino wouldn’t have left Burke behind; he’d have carried away the body if he could. The same applied with Burke.”

“Who were they?” Jack asked.

“Two bad ’uns. A couple of no-account, piece-of-trash killers for hire. They’ve been a burr under the saddle of law enforcement in these parts for a long time. Too long. They were a team. We used to call them the Ball Brothers—they hung together, get it?

“Did everything together: lived together, got drunk and raised hell together, ran whores together, killed together. Got killed together, too. And good riddance.”

Ross indicated Kling. “That your man?”

“He was. That’s Harvey Kling,” Jack said.

“He done good. Chino and Burke were stone killers. Tough to take down,” Ross said. “There’s another deader in the den—a civilian. The missus, I reckon. She got it the same way as the fellow in the front hall. A bullet in the head from Burke’s Colt. He always was the marksman of the two.

“I cleared the upstairs rooms. Empty—no more bodies, thank the Lord.”

“Where’s Hickman?” Jack asked.

“He must still be outside keeping watch. Talk about locking the barn door after the horse is stolen…I’ll go get him.”

Ross went back in the house, down the corridor, and into the kitchen. He unlocked and opened the back door and let Hickman in. Presently the two of them joined Jack in the garage.

Hickman surveyed the carnage without flinching. “This is what the tabloid TV shows call a House of Death.”

“They will,” Jack agreed.

“That closes the files on Burke and Valdosta.”

“You know them, too?”

“Oh, everybody knows them. Two major league pains in the butt. Or at least they were,” Hickman said. “This make any sense to you, Bauer?”

“I think so. The dead couple is probably Mr. and Mrs. Parkhurst. They were part of some operation Kling was running. Burke and Valdosta came here to clean house. Burke shot Parkhurst with the silenced pistol and then took care of Mrs. Parkhurst. Valdosta surprised Kling here in the garage and cut loose on him. Kling was mortally wounded but still managed to finish off Valdosta. Burke came to see what happened and Kling nailed him, too.”

Ross pushed his hat back on his forehead. “That was some mighty sweet shooting.”

“Kling was a top man in his field once. I guess he still had enough left when it counted,” Jack said.

“Here’s something that might help round out the picture,” Hickman said. “Burke and Valdosta were freelancers, unaffiliated with any mob. But the word is that lately they’ve been doing jobs for the Blancos.”

“One thing’s for sure, the Blancos wanted Kling out of the picture. They tried for him at Rhee’s apartment and when that didn’t work they sent another hit team here,” Jack said.

“Who were the Parkhursts and where did they fit in?” Ross asked. He gestured at the electronics console. “And what’s all that junk, some kind of fancy bugging device?”

“Good question,” Hickman said. He went to the console and examined it. “Looks like some kind of broadband scanner…”

“It meant something to Kling,” Jack said. “Something so important that he had to point it out even though he was dying. You can see by the way the blood is smeared on the floor that he turned himself around to draw attention to the console. Why? It’s not something an investigator who came after would overlook or ignore. It’s the first thing you’d see after the bodies. So why go to the trouble of underlining it?”

“He was dying,” Hickman said. “Dying men don’t necessarily think straight. With the life running out of him, consciousness fading fast, it might have made some kind of crazy sense to him.”

“Maybe. But suppose he knew what he was doing. In which case—what exactly was he pointing at?” Jack followed the direction of Kling’s pointing finger, extending an imaginary straight line from the dead man’s fingertip. The line ran across the floor to the bottom right-hand corner of the console cabinet.

Jack went down on one knee beside it. The cabinet had four short, squat feet and a heavy base. The top of the base served as the bottom shelf supporting the computer tower. The base itself was five inches tall. It did not fully extend to the floor; between base and floor was a gap of about four inches of empty space.

Jack rapped a knuckle against the base. It was well constructed but not necessarily solid all the way through. He reached underneath it, feeling around. On the underside, out of sight, was a row of dime-sized studs projecting from the framework. Jack began pressing them one at a time.

When he pressed the fifth stud, it moved under his finger,
sinking into a hole. There was a faint but unmistakable clicking sound from somewhere inside the base of the cabinet. Part of its vertical front face separated itself from the rest of the wooden block.

Hickman and Ross crowded around, craning for a better view. Hickman said, “What’s that? A hidden compartment—?”

“A secret drawer,” Jack said. The drawer’s leading edge projected several inches beyond the base of the cabinet. Jack hooked his fingertips over the top edge and pulled it out, opening it. The drawer was mounted on well-oiled metal tracks that operated noiselessly.

Inside it was a black leather-bound book and a manila folder. The book was the size and shape of an appointment book. The manila folder held a sheaf of printed documents.

Jack opened the black book to the first page. It was filled with neat cursive script that he recognized as the handwriting of Peter Rhee. He began thumbing through the pages, noting that they contained a series of dated entries.

“What is it?” Hickman asked.

“It’s the operational diary of an investigation done by Kling and Rhee for OCI Chief Morrow,” Jack Bauer said. “I’ll need some time with this.”

10:11
P.M
. MDT
97 Meadow Lane, Shady Grove,
Los Alamos County

“Interference—that’s what triggered this bloodbath,” Jack Bauer said.

He’d skimmed the notebook and the documents in the folder. The information they contained allowed him to piece together the backstory. He now ran it down to Hickman and Ross. Not all of it, but as much as they needed to know. He needed their help and goodwill. Hickman was Sabito’s savviest operative in Jack’s estimation, and Ross was Sabito’s key contact in the County Sheriff’s Department.

Jack went on. “It started with interference, electrical interference, the kind that screws up the picture on your TV. More specifically, Gene Parkhurst’s TV. That’s what brought him to Ironwood’s OCI. He came in about a month
ago. As far as OCI was concerned, he dropped in out of the blue. McCoy’s people had never heard of him, had no professional interest in him. He was a walk-in.

“Walk-ins are the wild cards of the intelligence game. A citizen comes into the shop unsolicited. He might be there to pass along a hot tip, make a complaint, or make a deal. You don’t know his motivation. Maybe he’s what he seems, acting in good faith.

“Maybe he’s got a hidden agenda. Maybe he’s a crank, a nutcase. There’s no way of telling until you hear out what he’s got to say and evaluate it.”

“It’s pretty much the same in my business,” Ross said.

“Of course an ordinary civilian can’t just walk into OCI. Parkhurst phoned first, saying he wanted to report something suspicious. He wouldn’t say what it was over the phone except that it was confidential. Maybe he had something worth telling; it wouldn’t do any harm to hear him out. He was given an appointment to come in on a weekday morning. Kling drew the assignment to interview him. He pulled a lot of those kinds of chores. Routine security and background checks, mostly. Stuff that nobody else wanted to handle fell to the low man on the totem pole, and the lowest man on the OCI totem pole was Harvey Kling.

“Kling did a routine background check on Gene Parkhurst prior to the interview. Parkhurst was a retired master machinist who’d spent most of his professional life working in various capacities for LANL at South Mesa. He came up clean: a respected career professional in his line, solid security rating, ditto on the credit rating, no black marks on his record, good marriage. No suspicious contacts or associates, no substance abuse problems, no involvement with the law beyond a few parking tickets. He seemed like a normal, competent, levelheaded guy.

“But Parkhurst had a complaint: interference. For the last six weeks or so, he’d noticed a peculiar pattern of in
terference on his TV. Every now and then, for no particular rhyme or reason, the sound and picture on his set would get knocked out of whack and become a jumble of chaos and static. The disruptions lasted from one to two minutes, tops. They ended as suddenly as they began. They never came at the same time. They happened in the day and in the night. Sometimes several days would go by with no disruptions, other times there’d be a couple of them in one day or night.”

“Kling must have been thrilled to have to interview what was basically a guy complaining about a bum TV set,” Hickman said.

“He got more interested as Parkhurst told his tale,” Jack said. “Parkhurst was a machinist by trade and a tinkerer by nature. The inexplicable interference irritated him, offended his problem-solving nature. The disruptions weren’t reserved to a single TV set. They affected every TV in the house the same way. He ran diagnostic tests on the TVs—nothing wrong with them. He asked his neighbors if they’d been bothered by similar problems—none of them had.

“That introduced an interesting variable. Parkhurst subscribed to a satellite TV distribution network. A dish antenna on his roof received the signals. The neighborhood—this neighborhood and all the rest of Shady Grove—had recently been wired for fiber optic cable. Most of his neighbors had gone with the new system and got their TV off the wire. Parkhurst was one of the few to still have a satellite dish. Maybe that was the key to the problem.

“He had the satellite TV company repairmen come out to his house to inspect the setup. He asked if they’d had any problems like his. There weren’t many sat-TV customers left in the neighborhood. One of the repairmen thought he remembered a couple of similar complaints from subscribers a couple of blocks away, but the interference was far less serious. Of course the disruptions weren’t so obliging as to occur when the repairmen were there so they could see them
in action. They found nothing out of order in Parkhurst’s setup. Hardware and software checked out okay. ‘Static,’ the repairmen called it and let it go at that. These things happened some times, nobody knows why. Minor glitches somewhere in the system. They’d work themselves out sooner or later and go away.

“But they didn’t. Parkhurst put his brain to work wondering what made his TVs go blooey. He had a thought: If the problem wasn’t internal, maybe it was external. What causes interference? Competing wavelengths crosscutting each other. It could be that some powerful outside signal was causing the disruptions, a broadcast or transmission or some sort. A frequency that was close enough to that of the satellite TV’s to override it and cancel it out.

“What was generating the signal? No other satellite TV companies were operating in the area. There hadn’t been any over-the-air broadcast TV thereabouts for decades. He toyed with the thought that some facility at the lab was experimenting with some new kind of powerful transmitter whose frequency caused the disruptions. Then he realized that a signal powerful enough to reach out from South Mesa would have affected satellite TVs all over the Hill and caused a public uproar. That hadn’t happened so he ruled LANL out as the source.

“Other satellite TV subscribers who lived several blocks away had experienced minor versions of the disruptions. That indicated that the source was a local phenomenon emanating from somewhere nearby. Amateur radio operators—hams—operated in a different part of the waveband too distant to interfere with the satellite signal, so it couldn’t be one of them. Parkhurst concluded that someone was operating some kind of powerful new transceiver in the neighborhood.

“That’s when Gene Parkhurst’s gadgeteer hat came off and his patriot hat came on. He’d spent most of his life
working in Los Alamos, steeped in the lab’s national security culture. He was a true believer in security regulations and classified tradecraft.

“Who was most likely to have a sophisticated transceiver sending and receiving clandestine broadcasts? An enemy agent. A spy. ‘If you see something suspicious, report it.’ That’s been the watchword of LANL’s security-conscious culture since World War II, long before 9/11 imprinted the motto on the national consciousness. Retiree or not, Parkhurst knew where his duty lay. Patriotism for him was something from which you don’t retire. He’d seen something suspicious and it was his duty to report it to the proper authorities.

“He’d worked at a lot of places on South Mesa but never Ironwood, so why did he choose to report his findings to OCI? He’d followed the Sayeed case closely from start to finish. He thought Sayeed was guilty as hell and the collapse of the case was a national disgrace. He’d been a big fan of OCI’s then-head Seaton Hotchkiss during the trial, liked the way he’d fought for a conviction. That decided him on going to Ironwood. He didn’t know that in the years since the trial Hotchkiss had gone into early retirement and died. He did recognize Kling from the trial, though, and was thrilled to be interviewed by him. It proved he was right in going to OCI.

“And he was right, though not for the reasons he thought. It was a fateful encounter, his meeting with Kling. Ultimately it resulted in the deaths of both of them and a lot more. Of all the people in the world, Kling was one of the few most likely to take Parkhurst’s complaint seriously. The others were Peter Rhee and OCI Director Rhodes Morrow, for reasons I’ll get to directly.

“Kling told Parkhurst that he’d come to the right place and that his tip would be looked into. He cautioned him to keep the information to himself and his wife and not to
discuss it or his visit to OCI with anyone else. He complimented him on his good citizenship, and assured him he’d be receiving a follow-up visit in the near future.”

Here Jack paused for a moment. For security reasons he now had to give his two allies the redacted version of the rest of the truth. Hickman knew some of the background of the Ironwood kills; Ross, virtually none. Ross’s presence made Jack more circumspect than he would have been had he been reviewing the case with Hickman alone. Even then he would not have told all.

“Most of what you’ve just heard comes from Kling’s initial reports, copies of which were in the folder files, and from his and Rhee’s handwritten entries in the operational diary,” Jack said. “What follows is directly involved with an investigation I’m working on now. It’s sensitive material, classified top secret.

“I can tell you that OCI Director Rhodes Morrow had Kling and fellow agent Peter Rhee investigating a possible long-term security breach at Ironwood. The probe was a closely held secret, so close that only the three of them knew about it. It was insulated from the rest of the office to keep it confidential. The probe had been operational for about two months previous to Parkhurst’s interview.

“Kling wrote up Parkhurst’s story but didn’t input it on OCI’s computer. He kept it off the office network, just as everything connected with Morrow’s secret probe was kept off it. There were concerns about the integrity of the entire INL computer system. Kling thought Parkhurst’s complaint might directly tie into the line of investigation they’d been following. He reported on it directly to Morrow. Morrow agreed. He wanted it looked into by Kling and Rhee as part of their secret probe.

“Morrow didn’t need human operators on the scene here at the Parkhurst house to monitor the waveband for the mys
tery transmissions that were causing the disruptions. He had something better: a machine. This machine.”

Jack indicated the electronics console. “It’s a signal frequency detector, a kind of wideband scanner designed to search the electromagnetic spectrum. It automatically samples up and down the EM band at ultrahigh speeds. When it finds what it’s looking for it locks in on the signal.

“As OCI Chief, Morrow was able to requisition a detector with no questions asked. He probably did it outside normal channels to avoid leaving a trail. He arranged to have it installed in the Parkhurst house. Gene and Gladys Parkhurst were patriots and eager to cooperate. Kling and Rhee set up the detector in the garage, turning it into an automated listening post.

“The detector soon began picking up the mystery signal that was interfering with the house TVs. It logged in the time, date, and duration of the transmissions. A couple of times a week, Kling or Rhee would come out here to check on the equipment. The hard data was filed on disks which they routinely copied and collected. Where those disks are, I don’t know. There are no copies of the disks here. No doubt Morrow kept them in his possession, but he hid them too well—they haven’t turned up yet. Let’s just hope they haven’t fallen into the hands of the enemy. With any luck the data is buried somewhere on the detector’s hard drive. If so, the experts should be able to retrieve it.

“Kling or Rhee—depending who was on duty—would make notes in the op diary during their visits. They kept it and a file folder on the case hidden in a secret drawer in the cabinet—most likely as a backup in case something happened to them. Which it did, just as it happened to Rhodes Morrow: murder.”

Jack leafed through the pages of the op diary, glancing at entries. “The detector picked up several dozen transmissions this month. They peaked at mid-month, then dropped
off, falling silent in the last week or so. All were of brief duration. The shortest was thirty seconds, the longest two minutes. Most fell somewhere in the middle.

“That indicates the source might be a burst transmitter—spy tech hardware designed for agents in hostile territory to communicate with distant handlers. Messages are digitized, encrypted, and compressed to contain maximum amounts of information in minimal broadcast time. They also randomly jump from frequency to frequency during a transmission to make it more difficult for scanners to get a fix on them.”

Jack withheld the fact that NSA had intercepted Annihilax’s encrypted burst transmission. That was his ultrasecret. He couldn’t help but wonder, though, if Annihilax’s coded message was part of the series of transmissions emanating from Shady Grove. NSA experts should be able to determine if they came from the same source, once they’d had a chance to get to work on the detector.

One thing was sure: Annihilax was no Ironwood weapons scientist. There was no way to make the profile fit. And none of the INL cadre’s Big Mole suspects—Nordquist, Carlson, and McCoy—fit the Annihilax profile. So there were at least two key players in this game of espionage and murder: Annihilax and Big Mole. Were they working together? Maybe yes, maybe no. In any case, a sinister and lethal combination had set its mark on INL.

“Kling and Rhee—did they ever pinpoint the source of the transmissions?” Hickman asked.

“That’s the first thing I checked, after skimming the reports to make sense out of what the assignment was all about,” Jack said. “I looked at the last pages of the diary to see if they’d reached any conclusions. The answer is no, they hadn’t. But they’d definitely determined that the transmissions were coming from this neighborhood. The detector narrowed the source down to a point somewhere within
a circle whose radius is one-fifth of a mile, but no tighter than that.

“Which leads us to a very provocative fact.” Jack opened the folder, glancing down at a document he’d put on top of the pile. “Two key members of the INL cadre happen to live in the neighborhood: Nordquist and Carlson. Carlson lives at one-oh-two Meadow Lane.”

“Hell, that’s right across the street,” Ross said.