The Brea File (41 page)

“I hope this is important, Stearns.”

“It is, Director. Mr. Macimer wanted me to give you this personally—”

“Macimer! You’ve seen him?”

“Yes, sir. About… forty minutes ago. He knew you’d want to have this.”

“Never mind that, where is he now?”

“I don’t know, Director.” The young agent’s hands were shaking but there was a resoluteness in his eyes.

Slowly John Landers held out his hand and took the thick envelope from Stearns. He undid the clasp and removed a yellow folder. Landers’ glance flicked up at Stearns. “What’s this?”

“It’s the Brea file, sir.”

The FBI Director studied the agent’s face. Determination, he thought, not defiance. “All right, Stearns,” he said quietly. “Suppose you tell us everything you know.”

* * * *

Two hours after leaving the Washington area, Paul Macimer stopped for gasoline and coffee on the outskirts of Hagerstown, Maryland. He was hungry but knew that he wouldn’t be able to eat. Besides, a hungry man was more alert, able to think and move faster.

After another brief phone message from Brea he drove north again for fifteen miles. He turned west along a two-lane paved road that climbed quickly into the Appalachians.

By now, he thought, the Director would have heard the full story of the Brea file from Harrison Stearns. And the search for Gordon Ruhle—and Macimer himself—would pull out all stops. He was glad to get off the main highway. Borrowing an FBI vehicle had been a calculated risk, but renting a car would have taken extra time and provided only minimal delay once scores of agents hit the streets.

Ruhle would have evaluated Macimer’s skills in evading surveillance and making his run northward undetected. His calculations had been close, even daring. Macimer knew he would not have been able to travel much farther on the main highway without being spotted.

Macimer had five minutes to spare when he reached the outskirts of Wheeler, a small mountain community where Gordon Ruhle’s next call would come at noon. The town was one of those forgotten by progress, little changed from what it had been a century ago. Steep-roofed brick and frame houses with snow catchers protruding from the roofs. Wide porches. A turn-of-the-century ice cream parlor, crowded on this Saturday. Red’s Diner, just off the road at the west end of town, looked as if it had been there from the beginning.

A phone booth stood by itself at one corner of the diner. Macimer stepped inside, relieved to find the booth unoccupied. He had been there only a few seconds when the phone rang.

Gordon Ruhle, his voice still disguised, wasted no time as usual. His final directions were terse and specific. Without waiting for Macimer to acknowledge them, he hung up.

Macimer stepped out of the booth. He stood there for a long moment at the side of the road, aware of a tingling sensation. He was being watched.

There were three people visible at window tables in the diner. All of them were staring at him. Local people, he judged, curious about any stranger. Macimer shrugged. It was possible that Gordon had had him take the last call from this telephone because it was one he could watch—and make certain that Macimer had come alone.

As he drove west out of the tiny town, he watched the car’s speedometer, clocking the mileage. He found a one-lane dirt road precisely where Ruhle had told him to look for it. The narrow track climbed through a stand of pines and emerged onto a long, narrow shelf.

Macimer drove slowly across this flat meadow, a turgid cloud of dust drifting behind him in the hot, still air. The colors of the scene were vivid, primary. The dense green of the grassy meadow, enriched by recent rains. A mass of brown, sculptured bluffs rising to a knife-edge ridge. The black trunks of blue-green pines spaced tightly behind the line of the ridge. The piercing blue of the cloudless sky, draining toward the land like thin paint, lighter as it ran toward the horizon.

And, alone in all this color-saturated space, the bleached starkness of a cabin on the ridge, like a solitary abandoned house in a Wyeth painting.

A safe place to keep a hostage, Macimer thought, staring up at the cabin. Isolated, and so situated that there was no way to approach it without being seen from a long way off.

Completely isolated. There were no telephone lines visible. Ruhle could not have made his calls from the cabin. The sensation of being watched back at the diner was not a case of nerves, then. Ruhle had been in town, stationed where he could watch the booth outside Red’s Diner.

Macimer’s heart raced faster. If Ruhle was behind him, Linda was alone in the cabin.

Was there another route to the cabin on the ridge? A back road shorter than the one he had been directed to take? A shortcut that would put Gordon at the cabin ahead of him?

Sometimes there was no possibility of a clandestine approach, Ruhle had once told Macimer. All you can do is bore right in and deal with what you find when you get there. If a man in a hideout is smart, Gordon had pointed out, that’s the way he’ll set it up. He’ll make sure you’re out front where he can see you, and if there’s an escape hole out back he’ll take it if he doesn’t like what he sees. Maybe you won’t like going in that way, naked, but that’s what you’ll do.

The narrow dirt lane left the meadow and began to climb slowly toward the ridge, cutting through a thin line of spruce that thickened toward the top of the climb. Detouring around a huge rock shoulder, the road abruptly tunneled through a pine forest as solid to the eye as a wall. The track was rough, hardly more than two ruts cut into the soft earth, its span so narrow that pine branches slapped at both sides of the car.

Macimer drove suddenly into a clearing and braked hard.

The old cabin, sun-dried and gray as an unpainted barn, stood alone near the rim. The view to the south across stepped, tree-covered spines of the mountain range was spectacular. And strangely desolate. Except for the narrow ribbon of road below the ridge, there was no evidence of human habitation or activity.

He swung the blue Fairmont in a circle, leaving the tracks of the approach road and coming about until the car faced down the road at the edge of the woods. He was not sure exactly what lay ahead, but he wanted the car ready for a fast escape if needed.

Macimer turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, carrying his black vinyl briefcase. The thump of the car door was loud in the stillness.

He walked slowly toward the cabin. No other car was in sight. There was no sign of life. No sound came from the cabin. It had a neglected, abandoned air, grass and weeds grown knee high across the entire clearing right up to the foundations of the cabin. On three sides, dense pine woods framed the clearing. Only the ridgeline was open.

He paused at the cabin door. He thought he heard a faint sound from within but could not be sure. He reached out and turned the rusty knob. The door was not locked.

Unoiled hinges creaked as the door swung inward. Macimer’s sun-drenched eyes saw only dim shadows as he stepped over the threshold.

That was when Linda screamed.

“Daddy—don’t come any closer! It… it’s booby-trapped—the whole place!”

Her voice quavered. Macimer heard both the fear and the struggle to control it. A feeling of wonder filled him. This was his child, his daughter. Battered physically and psychologically in these recent weeks, she had not come apart. Instead she crouched in terror at the edge of a loft overlooking the main room of the cabin—and her thought was not for herself, but for him.

“I’m all right,” she called out. “I just can’t move.”

A fierce pride stung his eyes.

As if she wanted to make certain that Macimer understood, she explained that she had tried to climb down from the loft after she was left alone. A ladder provided the only access. When her foot touched the first rung she heard a wire snap. She looked down anxiously. Dangling in the open space a few inches from her foot, attached somehow to the rungs of the ladder by wires, its familiar pineapple shape ugly and menacing, was a hand grenade.

She had remained frozen in place for long, terrified minutes, too scared to go up or down. “I… I don’t know how long I stayed there. I couldn’t move. Like a fly stuck on paper.”

Macimer peered across the room as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. The grenade was suspended in midair, attached by a network of fine wires to the rungs of the ladder and to a wooden beam underneath the loft. The web of wires was so arranged that another careless step would pull the pin of the grenade. The wire broken by Linda’s first step had been a warning signal.

“Don’t touch anything, Daddy,” Linda warned him. “He told me there are bombs and things all over—in the radio, in the light switch, maybe inside the toaster or the clock or anywhere. He wouldn’t tell me where they all were, so I… I was afraid to touch anything.”

Macimer nodded, still unable to speak. The dangling grenade had been designed to frighten and immobilize the girl when she had to be left alone in the cabin. Why not simply tie her up? Was her panic meant to impress Macimer? Or was the threat of other bombs meant to deny him access to her?

“He didn’t hurt me,” Linda said anxiously, as if she were defending her gallant kidnapper.

“No, he wouldn’t hurt you,” Macimer said, finding his voice at last.

After all, he was her “Uncle Gordon.” So he wouldn’t hurt her. He would only stake her out as bait in a trap. The grenade and other bombs were necessary to keep her there, like the bars on a child’s crib. It would not be Gordon Ruhle’s fault if she didn’t stay put, if she tried to escape and triggered an explosion that blew off an arm or half a face. If she did what she was told, she wouldn’t be harmed.

Gordon would have worked that all out. He was doing what had to be done.

Like setting up the People’s Revolutionary Committee for a wipe-out because they were the enemy, using the unwitting police to function as his booby trap. Not nice, Gordon would say, but necessary. We’re not here to be nice.

“Stay where you are,” Macimer told Linda quietly. “I’ll see what I can do to get you down.”

First he had to get safely across the cabin. It was possible that the grenade was a dud, the warning of other bombs a ruse. Macimer thought about Gordon Ruhle and decided that one or more on the threats were real. Gordon didn’t fight only with blanks.

He examined the cabin cautiously. It was essentially a single large room with a bedroom alcove at the back on the left, a small bathroom—its door was open—sandwiched between the sleeping area and a tiny kitchenette on the right. The simple furnishings of unfinished pine were minimal but appeared comfortable enough.

The air smelled musty and stale, and dust lay thick where it had not been disturbed. The comfortable interior of the cabin belied its exterior neglect. It was either a summer house, unoccupied during the long winter, or it was an unobtrusive hideaway.

In the center of the main room was an oval multicolored rug. Macimer knelt and cautiously lifted one edge of the rug. Slowly he lowered it again. There was a pressure mat beneath the rug. A relay could be used to ignite a bomb either by opening or closing a switch. No way of telling whether the pressure mat would react to the weight of a footstep bearing down on it or, conversely, to the release of pressure if the rug were lifted from the mat. A bomb might be triggered either way.

Gordon Ruhle was challenging him, Macimer thought. He still thought of it as a kind of game, even when the stakes were life and death. In some ways Ruhle, with his rigid code on the one hand, his reckless disregard of rules on the other, was like a boy playing a man’s game.

Macimer carefully circled the floor rug, using hands as well as eyes to search out any stray thread of nylon or wire. He sidled past a chair and a small table rather than move either. It took him five minutes to reach the foot of the ladder that led to the loft.

The ladder was attached to the wall and climbed straight up. With the tips of his fingers Macimer lightly traced the network of wires supporting the grenade. To distract Linda he talked as he worked. “Do you know where Gordon is now?”

“No. He… he left about two hours ago.”

Macimer nodded thoughtfully. “Has anyone else been here?”

“No.”

Not a conspiracy, Macimer thought. A lone killer.

“Tell me what happened at the airport.”

While she talked he gently separated two wires leading to the pin of the grenade. He didn’t have to listen closely to what Linda said. He knew fairly well what had occurred at the airport. Linda had been surprised but not alarmed when Gordon Ruhle appeared a moment after Macimer was called away. She had followed Gordon unquestioningly to his car in the parking lot, believing that Macimer was there and plans for her flight had had to be changed. Once in Gordon’s car, she was helpless. Ruhle had driven directly to the mountain cabin, where she had been kept overnight.

With a sigh of relief Macimer disengaged the last wire supporting the grenade. “You can come down now. Just watch your step—and don’t touch anything but the ladder. I’ll help you.”

He caught her in his arms before she reached the bottom rung and swung her clear, holding her. Her arms tightened around his neck and a sob burst from her throat. “Oh, Daddy, I was so… so scared!”

“You had reason to be. But you’re not alone anymore.”

“What… what’s going to happen?”

“We’re going to get you out of here. Come on.”

As they turned toward the door a sharp crackling stopped them. Macimer gripped Linda tightly by the arm so she would not move. All of his senses were acutely alive, quivering and sniffing and listening for some signal that would identify the scratching sound.

Then Gordon Ruhle’s voice, harsh and metallic over an open intercom, said, “I wouldn’t try it, son. I got a bead on that door. No way anyone’s gonna come through it whole.”

* * * *

John L. Landers glanced at the wall clock, a century-old Seth Thomas, as it slowly chimed the noon hour. As the last chime died away he looked at Russ Halbig, seated in the green leather chair facing Landers’ big desk. The two men were alone.