Blowout Page 17

  “Good suggestion, Sheriff,” Egan said. “I’ll think we’ll take you up on it. In San Francisco, we don’t know from snow.”

  Osborne nodded. “Have a good evening then,” he said, and he turned to go.

  “Perhaps we could buy you and Ms. Borden an after-dinner drink?” Egan said. “We know nothing about North Dakota.”

  “Thanks, but it’ll have to be tomorrow. I’m busy tonight. But if you stay you won’t make Vegas.”

  Egan shrugged. “They’re friends, they’ll understand.”

  “You work out?”

  “Absolute fanatic.”

  “Gym membership, I suppose.”

  “I’m too lazy for something like that. I have a few machines at our apartment. Go at my own pace, you know.”

  Osborne nodded again then left the dining room.

  “The son of a bitch is suspicious,” Mattson said. “We need to get out of here right now. Go back to Regina before we get stuck.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until we get what we came for,” Egan said.

  Two couples came in from the bar and sat at a table across the room. They were dressed in jeans, boots, and cowboy shirts with bolo ties. Egan nodded pleasantly, and one of them said something and they all laughed.

  Someday they’d find out that it was a tough old world, Egan thought.

  “Goddamnit, I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

  “Well, you’re here now. Go get us a room, for tonight at least, but tell them that if the snow hits tomorrow we’ll need it for as long as we have to stay.”

  “You’re fucking out of your gourd.”

  “And you’re a fucking dead man walking unless you get your head out of your ass,” Egan said, his voice low but menacing. “We’ll grab her tonight. The good sheriff won’t suspect a thing until morning.”

  “What if they’re together tonight?”

  “Obviously not. She left first and he got a phone call while they were at the table. Be my guess that he’s got work to do. You gotta really learn to open your eyes if you’re going to survive for long.”

  “So we grab her and head back up to Regina. Dump her body on the way.”

  Egan shook his head. “It has to be here. Right out of this hotel.”

  “Why, for Christ’s sake? Are you completely nuts?”

  “We’re sending a message that no one’s safe here, no matter how much security they put in place. Even the sheriff’s girlfriend isn’t safe.”

  Mattson started to object, but Egan held him off.

  “You gotta take chances in our world. It’s the price of admission. But they sure as hell aren’t lovers. Not yet leastways. They’re still sleeping in separate beds, I’d take even money on it.”

  Mattson got up and walked out to the front desk, as Egan called Toby Trela, who was waiting for them down at the Roundup Lodge about twenty-five miles southwest. The kid was only nineteen, six feet, less than a hundred and fifty pounds, but wiry, strong, and as mean, according to him, as Billy the Kid, his hero. He’d been a champion rodeo cowboy out of Missoula since he was fourteen, a Dodge National Circuit Finalist when he was seventeen and eighteen, his events bull riding, saddle bronc, and all around. And in those few years he’d broken just about every bone in his body, learned all about arrogance, fathered four children, squandered all of his purse money, and in the end got some good old-time religion at which time the Posse roped him in.

  Toby answered his cell phone after three rings. He sounded drunk. “What the fuck y’all want?” A girl was saying something in the background.

  “You’re not alone,” Egan said, his anger rising.

  “Numb nuts, ya think?” Toby said.

  At least Moose and the others were professionals, but he needed Mattson as part of his cover, and Toby’s reputation as a cowboy to pull off the diversion even though both of them were loose cannons.

  “Looks like we’re on for tonight. I’ll call and let you know when to come.”

  “I’ve been helping feed horses all afternoon. Could be shut down here by tonight.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You dumb bastard, didn’t you hear me? We’ll probably be snowed in.”

  “Let’s hope so, it’ll provide perfect cover.”

  Toby was silent for a long moment. “Horses don’t get stuck in the snow.”

  “That’s right,” Egan said, and neither do all-wheel drive Cadillac Escalades. “I’ll talk to you if something changes.”

  Mattson came back and sat down. He was flustered. “She left.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just saw her drive off. I say we follow her right now. Could be she’s headed back to Bismarck.”

  “Could be she’ll be back,” Egan said. “We’ll wait.”

  31

  JIM CAMERON WAS waiting in one of the Hummers when Whitney came out of the Administration and Research-and-Development Center, hunching up her parka against the bitterly sharp wind. He reached over and popped open the passenger door. “I’ll take you over,” he called to her.

  She hesitated for just a moment, as if she were surprised that anyone else was left alive in the complex, but then came over and climbed up into the cab, slamming the door once she was in. “And this is just December,” she said, all out of breath.

  Cameron studied her face in the harsh glare from the light poles and roofline security spots. She looked beat-up, as if she hadn’t slept in a week and had the weight of the world on her shoulders. A sort of lady Hercules.

  “Jesus wept,” his grandmother used to say when she was so bone-tired from taking care of an invalid husband, a teenage son, a daughter who’d had a baby out of wedlock, and two jobs—one of them as a cook at the steel plant cafeteria and the other as the hat check girl at the Moose Club down the block—that she couldn’t walk upstairs to bed, and instead laid fully dressed on the couch to fret about how she could possibly manage until a hour or more later she finally passed out.

  “How’s the work coming?” he asked.

  “Coming,” she said. “But it was a damned close thing, Jim. The bastards knew just how to hit us. Could have been a disaster.” She managed a slight smile. “Except for you.”

  Cameron had to turn away, the image of the carnage in the trailer burned in his head. “I wasn’t quick enough, and anyway I had help.”

  Whitney touched his arm. “I don’t know what we—I—would have done without you.”

  “Well, you have another issue coming your way,” Cameron said, and he headed for the gravel road down to Donna Marie.

  “If you’re talking about the bureau, Rausch’s people were all over the place this afternoon. Pulled our computers apart, actually grilled my people—scared the hell out of Susie until I put a stop to it. Now everything’s on some sort of administrative hold, except for the rebuild, which the Air Force has taken over. And she wouldn’t tell me what she wanted to talk about tonight.”

  Whitney was an egghead, but in Cameron’s estimation she was a woman who didn’t have her head in the clouds; she was practical, pretty understanding of the way politics worked—had to have been working at the CDC—and above all strong with a solid sense of herself and what she could and did bring to the table in the real world. But after all that, she still carried a little of the naïveté that burdened most scientists.

  “They’re looking for the leak.”

  Whitney nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve been going over that myself. We’ve got a leak, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. No other way that Kemal could have tailor-made his bioweapon to do the most damage here. And it has to be on the science side. Could be back at CDC. I did a lot of my preliminary quorum-sensing work on their mainframe.”

  “Password protected, I’m guessing.”

  “Of course.”

  “Any idea who’d have access?”

  Whitney seemed to shrink a little into her parka, her shoulders slumping. It was pitch-black outside, and the first few flakes of snow were showing
up in the headlights, isolating them. “Someone could have broken into the file. But I don’t personally know anyone with that skill. My password is eleven random characters that have no intrinsic meaning.”

  It was about what Cameron figured, and it deepened his depressed mood. “Anyone over there with a motive?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Well, these sorts of things usually come from left field. Blindsides us.”

  Whitney turned to look at him. “What are you getting at?” she asked.

  “Kemal got your blueprints from the science side. And the most likely candidates are on your staff.”

  “Impossible,” Whitney said, but then she was stopped in her tracks and her eyes widened. “Or me,” she said.

  “That’s the conclusion Deb Rausch came to last night. She’s flown in her own expert to ask you a few questions.”

  “Fine, because the sooner we get this over with the sooner I can get back to work.”

  “You’re temporarily off the project as of now.”

  “Absurd. This is my work, and no one knows it better than I do. Did this come from General Forester, or is it just politics as usual?” She was angry, all traces of her weariness gone. “Sounds like they’re trying to find a scapegoat. Did they say who their expert was?”

  “Dr. William Cargo, but I haven’t met him yet.”

  Whitney reacted as if she’d been hit by a cattle prod.

  “Do you know him?”

  “He was my boss for about six months over at the CDC. He got his doctorate at Yale, and for a long time he was one of the top minds in the field, but then something happened and he went stale. Didn’t publish, couldn’t do the lab work, so they promoted him.”

  “Sounds dumb.”

  “SOP in science. When you can’t do the work, they give you the responsibilities for administering the scientists who can. And like a lot of people who get to that position, Bill Cargo resented the people he supervised.”

  “Including you?”

  “Especially me. I took this job, which because of his seniority, he figured was his.”

  “Will he understand what you’re trying to do here?”

  Whitney was even angrier, and her voice rose. “In broad strokes he will. But he pooh-poohed my work from the start, so if he can get me to take the fall for this, or at least sling a little mud my way, he won’t hesitate to do it.”

  “Sorry to tell you this, but if you go into this meeting with that attitude he’ll have an easy time of it.”

  “What do you suggest I do?” she demanded.

  “Fight back.”

  “How?”

  “Come on, Whitney. This is your project, your discovery. And time is on your side. If they’re going to pull an Oppenheimer on you it won’t be until after the experiment.” Robert Oppenheimer had been the chief scientist on the World War II atomic bomb project. But he’d toyed around with the idea of communism when he was younger and according to the FBI he still had connections. But he wasn’t bounced from the project until after the first test. And then he lost his clearances so that he couldn’t even read the scientific papers that he himself had written.

  “I’m not going to end up that way,” she cried. “This test is just the first. There’s a lot more to come. Christ.”

  They rode for the next few minutes in silence. The snow had stopped for a moment and they could see the glow of the lights on Donna Marie. Reconstruction was coming along ahead of schedule and sometime just after Christmas the operation would be up and running. An experienced fossil fuel plant crew from the Saint Clair facility in Michigan was being briefed now and would be in place, and no one from her science staff was taking off for the holidays. They were sticking with their doc, no matter what, though as a group they were pretty frightened. “Waiting for you to make the first move,” Cameron had told her earlier today.

  “Who hired you in the first place?” he asked, and she turned to him.

  “Bob Forester.”

  “No,” Cameron said. “Your boss is President Thompson. This is just as much his initiative as the Manhattan District Project was F.D.R.’s. You carry some weight. Don’t you think it’s time to start using it?”

  “What am I supposed to do? Fly out to Washington and knock on his door?”

  “Exactly. And General Forester is just the man to drive you over. Thompson won’t say no to the pair of you.”

  32

  IT WAS AFTER eight when Ashley pulled off the interstate at Dickinson, and stopped at the Citgo station. She didn’t really need gas, she had more than a half a tank in the truck, but she filled up anyway, and afterwards parked over by the restaurant and went in for a cup of coffee.

  What she really needed was time to think, because ever since Nate Osborne had told someone on the phone—Cameron, she’d guessed—that he was having dinner with a pretty woman, her stomach had been doing strange things. It was just like when she’d been a kid in sixth grade at the American elementary school at Landsthul in Germany where her father had been stationed at the time, and she had developed a nearly overwhelming crush on Joseph Lieberman who sat right in front of her. Now, like then, she had no idea what to do, what to say, or how to react.

  Her first urge then was to get the boy alone on the playground after school and kick the shit out of him for making her crazy. Instead she had just stared at him whenever he was around, and had wild dreams about running away with him to some village in the mountains south of Munich where a kindly old couple would adopt them and they could live happily after. Luckily she’d never said a word to him, because three weeks later she’d fallen out of love and had no earthly idea what she could ever had seen in him.

  Only a half-dozen people were in the restaurant, most of them at the counter, so she took a booth by a window, and watching the occasional car or truck pass on the interstate, she got an almost overwhelming sense of loneliness. It was crunch time, as her father used to say when he had to make a tough decision. And so far as she’d known he’d always stepped up to the plate and at least took a swing. It’s why he’d gone over to the new ARPA-E and why the president had tapped him to head the Initiative.

  So right now it was her own personal crunch time, and she turned the thought, more like a concept, over in her head. She was an independent person, always had been. And she always guarded her personal space. Except there was no one inside with her, and she was starting to get damned tired of going home to an empty apartment and taking something out of the freezer to nuke, and watching only the television shows she wanted to watch, and going to bed alone and waking up alone. No one to pick up after, no one to nag, to cook for, to laugh with. No one to watch her back, prop her up when she was down, pass her a handkerchief when she cried, or kick her butt when it needed to be kicked.

  Like now.

  The waitress was there with the coffee. “You doin’ okay, sweetie?”

  Ashley looked up, ready to bite the woman’s head off, but she shrugged instead. “Things have been better.”

  “The bastard dumped you?”

  “No. He thinks I’m pretty.”

  The waitress, a woman with a horse face but a kindly smile, laughed. “Hells bells, girl, what are you so down in the dumps about? I’d just love to have your problem, if that’s what it is.”

  Ashley started to cry despite herself, and hating herself for it; all of a sudden she was more frightened and unsure of herself than she’d ever been in her entire life. And ashamed, she turned away, trying to hide her anguish.

  But the waitress didn’t make a fuss, she just handed Ashley a napkin from the holder. “A good cry is worth its weight in gold, I’ve always said. And when you’re done, fix your pretty face—he’s right, you’re a pretty woman—and go to wherever he is, and tell him how you feel. Makes no sense otherwise.”

  Ashley looked at her. “What?”

  “Don’t be a dope, girl. You love him, that’s obvious from across the room.”

  “I can’t go to him right
now.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “You don’t understand. By now he’s behind a big fence with guards all over the place.”

  The waitress smiled again and patted Ashley on the shoulder. “Believe me, they all are,” she said, and she walked off.

  Ashley cupped her hands around the coffee mug, suddenly a little chilly. She’d never much cared for women as buddies. She’d never trusted them. She’d grown up in the man’s world, just her and her father, and if she wanted solace or advice she always turned to a man. But the waitress made sense.

  When she finished her coffee, she laid a ten-dollar bill on the table and walked out to her car. For just a brief moment she hesitated before she pulled out and got on the interstate heading west back toward Medora.

  33

  JIM CAMERON, DRIVING a utility golf cart, met Osborne at the heavily guarded Donna Marie gate a few minutes before eight thirty, still a lot of heavy repair work going on, big trucks moving back and forth, dumping the twisted metal debris a half mile away near the antenna farm, and the noise of cutters and grinders and drills loud, out of place in the Badlands, as were the sputtering, unnaturally bright welding torches.

  “Glad you could make it out on such short notice,” Cameron said. “Leave your car here, I’ll drive you over.”

  Osborne rode with him over to the big double-wide trailer, one of three new ones that had replaced the ones that had been shot all to hell. A couple of new tents had also been set up on the north side of the power station, one of which the Bureau’s forensics people were using to dissect the Newell’s electronic equipment.

  “What’s the urgency? You sounded like there was more trouble.”

  “Where’s Ms. Borden?”

  “On her way to Bismarck. But she’s coming back tomorrow.”

  “Good enough. We’ll try to get you back here as early as possible, though I can’t guarantee how long it’s going to take us.”