Darkness Falls, page 17
Beamon continued to stir his coffee absently. This wasn't any of his business. He should just pick up his boxes and get the hell out of here. And he would. In just a few minutes.
"What then?"
"They took off in a silver Toyota."
"Where to?"
"Not a clue. And nobody got a plate number."
"What about the APB?"
"Nothing. We sent descriptions of Teague and the Metzger brothers, saying they're wanted for something unrelated, but honestly the cops have their hands full right now and they're reducing their patrol miles to conserve fuel."
Beamon nodded silently.
"What now, Mark?"
He looked into Hirst's expectant face. "Look, Terry, the idea of handing Jenna Kalin and everything else over to Oberman is killing me. But this isn't a game. Are you reading the paper? The world's economy is falling apart, the Middle East is set to implode, and everyone seems to think that's just the beginning. I saw some guy on TV yesterday saying we're going to lead the world into a depression that makes the thirties look cushy. Unless someone decides to start World War Three first."
"You're making my point for me, Mark. We can't just walk away and leave Oberman to spin his wheels and kiss the president's ass. We have to --"
The door was thrown open and the same thirty-something who'd spoken to him earlier looked around the room suspiciously. "I thought I was clear that you were to wait in Bob's office until he has time for you."
Chapter 31.
Jenna Kalin bolted awake and grabbed for the gun next to the sleeping bag she'd wrapped herself in. The only light in the building was provided by the narrow crack beneath the door, and it cast everything into deep shadow, twisting the outlines of the lab equipment around her into shapes that threatened to come to life and attack.
She released the gun and stared into the sliver of light, looking for movement that might indicate someone outside. It remained steady and her breathing slowly returned to normal. Just like it did every morning.
She threw off the sleeping bag and picked her way through the semidarkness to the room at the back. A few blind jabs at the remote and the surviving television set illuminated the room.
It was almost always the same few stories now: The government had captured Erin Neal, the "terrorist" behind the bacteria, and was making "significant progress" in unraveling his network. The generally peaceful demonstrations that had been going on in front of the Canadian embassy had finally turned violent and yesterday the police had used tear gas to disperse the crowd. The National Guard had posted people at gas stations to stop glutting -- the latest slang word for filling your tank with more gas than your ration card allowed. The practice, now under control, had been starving critical vehicles, like fire engines and police cars.
Not that fuel availability had much of an effect on her now that her primary mode of transportation was the wildly overpriced bicycle and trailer she'd managed to buy. It wasn't the most convenient replacement for Jonas's car, but it was more practical than running around trying to buy black-market fuel in a vehicle that the police were probably looking for.
She flipped on the lights and wandered through the lab looking dejectedly at the makeshift equipment she'd been wasting her time with. Her improvised incubators had produced plenty of bacteria to work with, but so far she hadn't found a significant change in the way it behaved. It ate hydrocarbons and multiplied faster than she'd designed, but that was a relatively minor change that would be easy to bring about with selective breeding. Maybe she was being paranoid and this was nothing more than a production facility to supply bacteria for Teague's psychotic plans.
No, that couldn't be true. The facility was clearly not set up for production -- it had been a platform for research. But research into what?
She opened the door to the refrigerator and stared at the half-empty containers of cottage cheese and lemonade. She'd put off the twenty-five-mile bike ride into town as long as she could. Although the idea of pedaling endlessly through the heat and using her credit card when her getaway vehicle had a top speed of fifteen miles an hour wasn't particularly appealing, the alternative was starvation.
Jenna pulled on a pair of shorts, filled a couple of water bottles, and swallowed the rest of the cottage cheese as she pushed through the door and into the sunlight.
The stack of debris leaning against the outside wall had continued to grow as she tossed the remnants of her finished experiments out into the elements to die. She stopped for a moment to balance the empty cheese container on top of a Tupperware dish full of hardened reddish sludge and thought of Erin.
She needed him back. Not only for his brilliance, but so that she could think clearly again. The not knowing was killing her, making it impossible to concentrate on anything but elaborate fantasies about the horrible things that could have happened to him.
But pretty soon it would be over. There were only a few more days' worth of tests she could do with her Wal-Mart lab. Hopefully, she'd hear from him, but if not, it would be time to start making her own decisions. To take responsibility.
She started toward the bicycle she'd left leaning against a boulder, mentally calculating her day. If she averaged ten miles an hour she'd be back in a little more than five hours -- leaving her plenty of time to get some work done. Assuming she wasn't so tired she just passed out in her sleeping bag.
When Jenna got to within a few feet of the bike, she started to slow, her eyes fixed on the reddish reflection of the sun off the chain. She knelt, finding it difficult to breathe as she ran a hand across the hardened gunk that had clogged her gears.
A glance over her shoulder confirmed that the containers full of dried bacteria were more than forty feet away and burning beneath the full force of the Texas sun.
The bacteria weren't dead. They were airborne.
Chapter 32.
"At least you work for the government and I work for a hospital. A lot of other people are just out of work," Carrie said, her voice muffled by her fidgeting daughter, who was too big to be sitting on her lap in small car.
"Em, sit still for God's sake!"
Beamon glanced in the rearview mirror at the four girls in the backseat and pointed at a minivan so crowded that the windows had to be open for everyone to fit inside. "Could be worse."
"Goloco-dot-org," Emory said.
"What?"
She was momentarily distracted by an extraordinarily fat couple coasting down the road on a tandem bicycle, so one of her friends spoke up. "It's a Web site where you can find people to carpool with, Mr. Beamon. You put in, like, your address and the address you're going to and what time and everything. You can even put in what kind of music you like. Then it hooks you up with someone going your way."
Beamon smiled. Were young people really limitless in their adaptability or did they just seem that way to him because he'd become such an old dog? He knew a lot of his friends worried about a world run by the next generation, but it seemed unlikely that they would do worse.
Why couldn't his genius have been in something positive like computers? The Google guys had made themselves billionaires by sitting around dreaming up ideas that made people's lives better, while he'd made himself a thousand-aire getting shot at and stabbed in the back.
"Why didn't you think of that, Em?" "What?"
"Goloco-dot-org."
"Because I'm nine."
"I don't want to hear excuses."
When his cell phone rang for the fourth time in the half hour they'd been in the car, he reached into his pocket and turned it off.
"What did you just do?" Carrie said. "Huh?"
"You just turned off your cell without even looking at who was calling."
He shrugged. "I've hardly seen you at all over the past few weeks and I thought it would be nice to have a couple minutes without the phone."
Quiet snickers and whispers were audible from the backseat as Carrie peered around her daughter's shoulder. "That's nice. Thank you." It came out more like a question.
He'd finally made his decision just after three in the morning, though it hadn't been one of those confident, peaceful decisions that had him nodding off a few seconds later. The bottom line was that although it was certain Bob Oberman wasn't the guy to run this investigation, it was just as certain that trying to do an end-run around the government was going to turn into a disaster for him and the people still loyal to him. So he was on his way to see Jack Reynolds with a briefcase containing everything he knew. And then he was going to go back to his quiet little office at Homeland Security and watch the world fall apart.
Beamon pulled off the highway and negotiated the quiet streets as Carrie did the best she could to twist around in her seat. "Debbie, your mom's picking all of you up after school, right?"
"Yes, Ms. Johnstone."
"And, Em, you're staying over there?"
"Uh huh."
"Okay. You be good and help clean up the dishes after dinner. I'll be home around nine."
"Why so late?" Beamon asked.
"The hospital's changed over to longer shifts for everyone -- the idea being fewer shifts means less driving. I --" She fell silent for a moment. "Oh, for God's sake . . ."
"What?"
She thumbed behind her and Beamon glanced at the flashing lights in the mirror.
The snickers from the back increased in volume as he eased to the side of the road and rolled down the window.
"Shhhhh," Carrie said as the two policemen approached on opposite sides of the vehicle. She wouldn't roll down her window or even look at them, though. Her hippie years at Berkeley had left her with a jaundiced view of law enforcement. Beamon often included.
"Sir, could you step out of the car, please?"
"Come on," Beamon said. "I know we shouldn't have two people in the front seat, but with everything that's going on, couldn't you cut us some slack?"
The cop, who was probably in his early thirties, appeared overly nervous about what was a fairly common infraction these days.
"Sir, I'm asking you to step out of the car."
Beamon did as he was told, sighing quietly and listening to the snickering turn to strangled laughter as the girls slapped hands over each others' mouths.
"Please turn around and face the car."
"Are you kidding me?" Beamon said, pointing to an SUV that looked as if it had an entire high school basketball team in it.
"Turn around," the cop repeated. He looked reluctant, but his hand moved a little closer to his gun.
Beamon frowned and put his hands on the car, looking into the face of the even younger man standing by Carrie's window. He looked downright horrified.
Beamon wasn't frisked; instead, the cop went straight for the pistol beneath his suit jacket and relieved him of it.
"I can explain that. I'm an...
"Yes, sir, Mr. Beamon," the other man said. "You spoke at my graduation from the academy. I want you to know how sorry we are about this."
The handcuffs clicked around Beamon's wrists and he was pulled away from the car as the girls pressed their faces against the window. They looked impressed.
Predictably, the passenger door was suddenly thrown open with enough force that the cop standing by it had to jump back to avoid being hit. Carrie shoved Emory off her lap and leapt from the car.
"Ma'am. You need to --"
"Don't ma'am me. What's going on here? Why have you handcuffed him?"
Beamon remained silent. Now they were in for it.
"Please, ma'am --"
"Don't tell me what to do! Look, this is America and we have rights here. I demand to know why you have him in handcuffs."
There was a brief silence before the man answered. "We don't know, ma'am."
"Carrie," Beamon cut in. "It's okay." He nodded toward the cop slowly backing away from his fiancee. "What's your name?"
"Joseph."
"Carrie, give Joseph the briefcase that was down by your feet and we'll talk later, okay? The girls are going to be late for school."
She glared at him for a moment and then reluctantly reached for the briefcase. "Is there someone I can call?"
He actually laughed at that. "I'm pretty sure there isn't."
The White House conference room was populated by the usual suspects, with the unfortunate addition of Bob Oberman from the CIA. He was standing confidently at the head of the table, his smooth patter stuttering perceptibly when Beamon was led in.
"The timeframe we're concentrating on now is around when Erin Neal originally worked for the Saudis."
"That's when you suspect he was turned?" President Dunn said.
"Yes, sir. We believe he converted to Islam when he was remediating a similar infection at a field called the Hawtaw Trend. So, combined with his well-documented environmental beliefs, we have a clear motivation to go along with all the other evidence against him."
"Who was the al Qaeda operative he said he was working with?"
"Ishmael Fedallah."
Beamon smirked as he took an empty chair at the table.
"Do we have anything on him?"
"Not yet, but we're working on it."
"Obviously, you've learned a lot from your interrogation, but have you gotten anything more practical?" Jack Reynolds asked. "Something we could use to strategize our economic response or stop the spread of the bacteria?"
"No, sir. Honestly, I think it's unlikely that Neal would know exactly what was hit and when -- he was there for scientific knowledge and, as you know, terrorist organizations are fanatics for compartmentalization." He glanced at Beamon. "But, as you said, we've made significant progress in the short time we've been running this operation. We already have a name, a motive, and an organization. It's just a matter of time now before we identify the rest of the people involved."
As Oberman fell silent, Beamon focused on the president, who looked understandably worried. The latest announcement from his administration was that the way people paid for energy was going to be restructured. The first units you bought would be extremely cheap and every successive unit would get more expensive. Great for a poor guy living in a six-hundredsquare-foot trailer, but Dunn's conservative backers lived in large houses that needed serious heating and cooling.
The president studied the notes he'd scribbled before looking up at Beamon. "Bob tells us that some of your people have refused to contribute to what may be the most important investigation in history, and that you've been maneuvering behind his back. Is that correct?"
"Yes, sir. I suppose it is."
Obviously, it wasn't the expected response and the room fell into a church-like silence that Beamon figured he had better use before he found himself sharing a cell with Erin Neal.
"We -- I was continuing a line of investigation that I'd been pursuing before the CIA took over." He lifted his briefcase onto the table. "I was on my way to give it to Jack when I was . . . diverted."
"Are you insane?" Reynolds said in a tone clearly calculated to make everyone understand that he had had nothing to do with Beamon's actions.
The president held up a hand, silencing what would have undoubtedly been a long and overly theatrical protest.
"Mr. Beamon. In light of your reputation, I'm going to give you an opportunity to explain yourself."
In Beamon's mind, that translated to something like "The CIA hasn't given us anything we can use to rescue the people we count on to vote for us and we're getting desperate."
"The truth is, sir, I'm concerned that Bob isn't competent to run this investigation."
"And you are?" The CIA agent said, but was silenced by another wave of the president's hand.
"And what makes you say that, Mr. Beamon?"
"Well, for instance, the fact that Ishmael and Fedallah are characters from Moby Dick."
Everyone looked over at Oberman, but for once he didn't have a response.
"Then you're saying that you don't believe Erin Neal is involved with al Qaeda?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying. In fact, I don't think he has much to do with any of this. I think he came up with the basic structure of that bacteria because he thought he could use it to clean up oil spills."
"Are you trying to tell us that this was an accident?" Oberman said.
"No, Bob. I'm saying he had a girlfriend. A woman who was also a very gifted biologist, but much more radical than he was. She had strong ties to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She's the one who adapted the bacteria --"
"This is the dead one you're talking about?" Oberman said. "I think you need to look at the facts a little harder. We have solid dates on when the contamination was introduced, and it was after she died."
"She's not dead, Bob. She lives in Montana."
"You have proof of that?" the president said.
Beamon nodded. "She supposedly drowned along with a number of other radicals, but I think it's a fair bet that they're all still alive, too. And that they not Erin Neal -- are behind this."
A young woman slipped through the door at the back of the conference room with a telephone in her hand.
"What do you need, Sharon?" the president asked.
"I have a call for Mr. Beamon. It's Terry Hirst."
Beamon looked around him at the faces of some of the most powerful men in the world and then twisted around in his chair. "Could you tell him I'm busy?"
"I tried, but he won't take no for an answer."
"Excuse me a second," Beamon said, accepting the phone and walking as far as the room would allow before putting it to his ear.
"Terry," he said quietly. "I'm in with the goddamned pres--"
"Jenna Kalin's using her phone again." "Can we get a bead on her? Who's she calling?"
"Turn on your cell, Mark. She's calling you."
Chapter 33.
It was hard to believe that outside the relentless Mexican sun had turned the landscape into a burnt-out moonscape. Beamon shoved his hands in his pockets against the chill and dodged around a spray of water coming from a rusted pipe.
The CIA's short-lived control of his investigation was over and they had done their organization proud by disappearing so quickly and completely that it was almost as if they'd never been there. Of course he hadn't had the opportunity to see it with his own eyes and had to rely on reports from Terry Hirst, who had called to thank him for the elaborate cake with the CIA seal and "Good Riddance" printed across it. In the background, the noisemakers that came free with the cake had been clearly audible.
