Dead Simple (19 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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B
laine turned the delivery van off Fourteenth Street onto the ramp accessing the National Museum of American History’s after-hours underground entrance. He and Liz were both aware of the surveillance camera that followed them as they passed inside the complex through a garage-size door, along with the metal detectors waiting inside, which had led Blaine to stow his pistol under the seat.
“Nervous?” he asked her, working a wad of gum around in his mouth and holding a well-wrapped package under one arm.
“This uniform is way too tight.” Liz had pinned her hair into a bun, so she could fit the delivery service’s required cap over it.
“Best I could do on short notice.”
Blaine tipped his cap lower over his eyes and drew the van to a halt just beyond the service entrance. With Liz at his side, he rang the buzzer and pretended to wait nonchalantly for it to be answered. A buzz sounded and then a click, as the door snapped unlocked. Blaine pulled it open and trailed Liz inside, clutching the box tightly. They moved through the metal detector toward a desk where a security guard eyed them with disinterest.
“Got some more additions for the new Lincoln Archives.” It had been Evan who informed them about the recent discovery of bundles of correspondence to and from Lincoln hidden amidst boxed documents from that era.
“That a sign only?” the guard asked.
Blaine shook his head. “Sorry. Vault placement.” Evan had educated him on that procedure too.
“Shit.” The guard lumbered out of his chair. “You know the routine?”
“My first time.”
“Sign here.”
He handed a clipboard over. Blaine’s was the first signature of the night.
The guard fished the proper key from his belt. “Now let’s go pop your cherry,” he said, paying no attention to Liz.
The guard keyed in the code to open the steel door behind his desk, then watched as Blaine and Liz passed through ahead of him. He resealed the door and then led the way to an elevator door with a key slot. The guard worked a strangely shaped key around until it seated, turned it left and then right.
The elevator opened.
Evan had told them that the National Museum of American History maintains a climate-controlled underground repository to retard deterioration of stored documents. Many of the documents, already in varying states of disrepair, are slated for restoration or analysis to reconstruct their contents. Others are placed on display and then returned to the stable air of the subbasement storage levels at closing time. According to Evan, the Lincoln documents might not be made public for years, until restoration was complete.
The elevator whisked them down quickly, the door opening to reveal a depository that was the antithesis of the ancient Tombs at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Everything was bright and sleek, the floors polished tile and the walls dull steel. The air had an antiseptic scent to it. The humidity-free confines made it seem colder than it was, and the touch of the air made Blaine’s skin feel clammy.
The guard reached a set of steel doors and keyed a combination into the pad, turning back toward them when the door opened with a
whooooooosh
. “This is the overnight storage—”
Blaine yanked the guard’s pistol from its holster and spun him back around.
The guard’s eyes bulged incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”
“We want to see the stacks.”
“The new Lincoln Archives,” Liz added.
The guard looked at the gun, shaking his head. “What is this, a robbery?”
“Lead on,” Blaine said.
The guard started moving. “Because if you take this stuff back to the surface, most of it will be dust before you can sell a single page.”
“We just want to do a little reading,” Liz told him.
The guard led the way to an airtight, vacuum-sealed door labeled MAIN DEPOSITORY. A keypad rested just to the left of it.
“I hope you don’t think I’ve got the combo to this one.”
Liz reached past him and keyed in the same code he had used to access the overnight holding room. The door to the Main Depository slid softly open.
The door closed automatically after all three of them had entered the gymnasium-size, partitioned facility, lined with steel drawers that were built into the walls.
Blaine stuck the guard’s gun in his own belt. “Keep leading.”
“This way,” the man relented.
The brief walk ended at a vaultlike door that opened with a simple latch.
“You want me to go in, give you a hand finding what you want?”
“I think we can handle things from here,” Blaine said. “Gonna have to tie you up while we’re inside.”
The guard extended his wrists. “Just observe the handling rules inside. There’s a checklist on the wall.”
“We’ll be careful.”
 
T
hey were searching through the boxes lifted out of cabinets vacuum-sealed to keep unwanted air away from them, when Liz spotted a neat stack of eight pieces of correspondence clipped together. “That’s strange. These were in the January 1863 drawer, but they’re from October of ’62.”
“That must have been when Lincoln sent them.”
She scanned the letters as quickly as she could, given the clumsiness of the powdery surgical gloves they wore in keeping with document-handling procedure. “No, they’re letters to Lincoln, not from him. The authors are expressing their satisfaction with Lincoln’s acceptance of their suggestions pertaining to the war effort.”
“When was the meeting held?”
“Let me see … October 6.”
“Interesting,” Blaine said, as he gingerly grasped the stack and began to page through them gently.
“Why?”
“It would take about two months to ship gold from San Francisco to Washington by water, the most viable route in those days by far. Remember when the gold shipments used in our mysterious coins arrived at the mint?”
“Not exact—”
“The fourteenth, seventeenth, and twenty-first of December. Do the math.”
“Are you drawing a connection between this meeting Lincoln held in October and the coins that went missing with the rest of Stratton’s convoy?”
“Absolutely.”
“Care to tell me why?”
Blaine tapped the pile of letters. “If we researched the men who signed these, I’ll bet we’d find they were from the pool of Northern industrialists who wanted the war effort ended there and then—October 1862.”
“So they go to Lincoln, leave satisfied, and then he orders the minting of a coin no one’s ever heard of.”
“He had his reasons.”
“Like what?”
Blaine checked his watch. “Later. Let’s put this stuff away.”
 
B
laine and Liz left the guard bound in the stacks, gun back in his holster, and rode the elevator up to the ground floor. The door had just started to open when Blaine glimpsed the shadows looming in the hallway beyond. He shoved Liz behind him and pressed the Close Door and Up buttons in the same instant. As the doors closed again, a volley of shots poured through the slit between them. Blaine and Liz twisted together against the compartment’s side wall to avoid a stitch of bullets that tore into the rear of the elevator’s cab.
Bullets were still slamming into the elevator after it sealed tight and the compartment began to rise. They dashed out when the doors slid open again on the third floor, sped beneath a sign patriotically proclaiming a “We the People” exhibit and into the museum’s military wing. Together, they slammed and locked a set of double doors to buy time.
“What now?” Liz asked.
Escape was still a possibility via a set of stalled escalators near the rear of the wing’s foyer, which had been embellished with Civil War memorabilia. Paintings of famous men and battles hung from the walls. A huge selection of ordnance and weaponry and lifelike models wearing full uniforms were on display in glass cases. A pair of cannon faced them from opposite sides of the room, bracketing a Gatling gun that had been set back behind them. Unlike the cannon, the Gatling looked to be in operational condition, except for the empty slot in the top of the shaft, meant for a rectangular magazine of cartridges.
Blaine moved to one of the cases and broke the glass with his elbow, then reached in and snatched a full clip of .58-caliber rimfire cartridges for the Gatling from the display. He eased the clip into the gun’s slot until it clicked home. Liz readied the hand crank, but it flopped around in her grasp.
“We need a pin to attach this to the shaft,” she said.
“Not anymore,” Blaine told her, plucking one of the bobby pins that held her hair up, as the first of the gunfire slammed into the doors before them.
B
uck Torrey hobbled through the cave, gun in hand, and listened for the murderous group that was in pursuit. He was certain at least one of them had noticed him in the cave door before the state trooper’s arrival.
Buck could judge a person lots of different ways, but no way was better than how that person handled a gun. These men had done so with cold, brutal efficiency rather than practiced precision, the trooper’s life clearly meaning no more to them than a cardboard target. These were killers, all right, though not men who made their living from it. It was just something they did when they needed to and would not hesitate to do again. The trooper might have been a tad slow, yet he was a pro, and still they had cut him down like a rank amateur.
And now they were coming after Buck, even more intent to find him since he was a witness to a cold-blooded murder. In ironic counterpoint, Buck figured, the trooper had likely saved him from the identical fate.
He continued on through the darkness of the cave, a key-chain penlight providing the only breaks in the blackness, and then only occasionally, so he wouldn’t give his position away. The trail sloped downward for a time, the passageway narrowing and shrinking, his descent underground measured by the drop in air temperature.
He had sixteen bullets to use on them, and a bum leg guaranteed to cut down dramatically on his mobility. That against a force of six, five men
and a woman. His best bet under the circumstances might be to lay an ambush. Wait for them to pass and come out blasting. But Buck had the feeling these men were too good to fall for that.
So he limped on, using the wall for support now, hoping to find a route through the cave back to ground level. Put as much distance between them and him, and then—
The ground dropped away, and Buck went tumbling. He tried to relax into the fall as he thumped down what felt like a straight drop, engulfed by darkness, until he at last struck bottom. His bad leg had been bent beneath him, doubling his agony and stitching a grimace across his face. He willed himself not to cry out.
He lay there gasping for air and trying to get past the pain. After what felt like a few seconds—though Buck was too disoriented to be sure—he rose in wobbly fashion, needing desperately to get his bearings, switched on his penlight, and shone it about.
He found himself in a symmetrical underground chamber, which must have been an old coal mine carved out of a mountain. There were piles of debris and rocks everywhere, clumps that looked like mounds in the ground’s surface.
Lots of hiding places, Buck thought, turning his penlight off when he heard voices approaching.
 
“
S
tay back!” Jack Tyrell had ordered Mary at the entrance they had found to the mine.
“No!” she resisted adamantly. “It’s
here
, in this mine! I’ve got to show you!”
He planted his hands against her shoulders. “We’ll find it!”
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“Never doubted you for an instant,” he assured, which wasn’t enough to keep Mary from following slightly behind them along the trail.
“I’ll stay back with her,” Othell Vance offered.
“Sorry. We’ll need you when we get there, tell us if it’s the Devil’s Brew or not that’s waiting.”
“Jesus,” Vance returned fearfully. “How could it have ended up in a goddamn mine?”
“Left for safekeeping, maybe,” Jack Tyrell suggested. “Somebody beating us to the punch.”
“No! I’m telling you it wasn’t like that! And who was that guy we saw?”
“A witness—that’s all that matters.”
And then the gunfire began blazing at them.
 
B
uck fired into the advancing streams of light, hoping he’d get lucky. The return fire came almost immediately, kicking up dust in all directions. Buck
grabbed his pistol and rolled, ignoring the raging pain in his leg and firing back into the darkness with only muzzle flashes to indicate his targets.
He fired judiciously, trying to conserve his bullets, until he found cover behind one of the raised mounds of dirt, the result of a miner’s hard labors long ago. Eight bullets left now, which he had to make enough.
 
“
I
s anyone hit?” Jack Tyrell whispered hoarsely. “Is everyone all right? Mary!”
“I’m okay, I’m okay!”
“Who is this guy, Jack?” Othell Vance whined. “Who the fuck is he?”
Jack knew the man was good, something special, even. About as far from the yokel cop they had cut down as it got.
“Othell, you told me the government pulled its people out, gave up the search.”
“You think he’s one of ours? Jesus, our guys carry metal detectors, not guns.”
Jack shrugged. In the darkness he couldn’t see Tremble or the twins, but he could feel them nearby all the same; they’d closed protectively around him at the first sign of fire. Then he sensed Mary coming up close against him, could hear her rapid breathing and smell the lilac scent of her hair.
“We should leave, Jackie. We should go.” Mary tugged at him, pulling in the direction of the path she had found that led down here.
“I thought you said we were close.”
“We are.”
“Then what—”
A second burst of gunshots sent Jack diving to the ground, taking Mary down under him.
 
B
uck had aimed this time at the sounds of muttering drifting out from the darkness, four irreplaceable bullets expended toward very uncertain results. He had burrowed under the dirt and debris to get closer to the grouping of voices, stifling his urge to cough and contriving to leave himself the widest possible escape route.
The walls and the ceiling were shedding veils of dust and dirt. He could feel it stinging his eyes and lodging in his scalp before he started pulling himself through the camouflage.
Buck remembered the tunnels of Vietnam, remembered the way scout teams known as “tunnel rats” described how it looked like nothing was holding those tunnels up and the feeling when small-arms fire made one collapse. The dirt piling up, burying you alive.
He continued to move slowly, barely ruffling even the dirt beneath him when the anguished scream pierced the silence of the cave.
 
 
“
O
thell!” Jack Tyrell wailed. “Othell, where the fuck are you?”
Unable to still his shaking, Othell Vance shuffled out from behind the dirt mound he was using for cover and moved toward the flashlight that had suddenly switched on.
“Mary’s hurt, Othell! Mary’s hurt bad!”
Othell wanted to ask him what he was supposed to do, since all he knew about medicine came from a couple of biology courses way back in college. But that would be pointless now, and Jack in his panicked state might well kill him if he said anything at all.
Othell Vance reached Tyrell as he lowered Mary gingerly to the ground. Even in the near darkness Othell could see the desperate plea in his eyes.
“Do something! You’ve got to do something!”
Othell lowered his ear against the woman’s chest. There was no movement, no breath sounds.
“Give me your flashlight.”
Jack Tyrell handed it over. “She wanted to leave. She told me we should go. She must have seen this.”
Othell was cocking Mary’s head upward to check her pupils when he felt the thin ooze of blood near her temple.
Tyrell had sunk to his knees, as helpless as a baby. “Why didn’t I listen to her?
Why didn’t I goddamn listen!”
“There’s nothing we can do, Jackie,” Othell said, trying to sound more compassionate than terrified.
But Jack Tyrell had already gotten that mad look in his eyes, brushing the long stringy hair from his face as if to clear a path for his stare to reach outward in the darkness. Jackie Terror.
“Yes, there is.”
 
B
uck Torrey figured one of the rounds he got off had been fatal, and that was enough to make him stop and rethink what he was doing, sensing the sudden advantage that had swung his way. Chaos had replaced the certainty of the enemy’s stand. They would be expecting him to flee now, figured they could buy themselves some time. Buck decided to cross them up. Circle round the enemy’s rear flank and take out the man farthest out at the earliest possible opportunity. Then appropriate his weapon to change the odds. Defense to offense. When in doubt, attack.
But Buck didn’t rush things. Even as the chaos continued, he clung to the darkness, closing ever so slowly. The circuitous route took him briefly out of view of the enemy camp, and when it returned to eyeshot, he couldn’t tell how many of the small group remained.
A shape moved briefly nearby, the target he had been waiting for. He glimpsed it again and resisted the temptation to fire, the target too obscure for him to risk any shot with only four bullets left.
Buck crawled away on his stomach, pulling himself past the piles of rocks and dirt that looked to have fallen in on themselves. He could almost reach out and touch the shape’s ankle, gazed up to see a face whiter than death itself, oblivious to his presence. He could take this one with his knife, save himself the bullet.
Something crunched behind him.
Buck knew then he had crawled straight into a trap, the other rail-thin ghost closing while this one served as bait. Buck spun onto his back and clacked off two of his last bullets. He hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the searing pain in the leg that had hobbled him.
The staccato burst of submachine-gun fire traced him as he stumbled away. He dove toward the ground to avoid the spray, but something like hot metal touched his side, a match flame against the skin. Buck fell, instantly dizzy and disoriented, yet he maintained the sense to pull himself on. He knew he’d been hit, the warm soak of blood already creeping through his shirt. But his legs and arms were still working, and that was the best he could hope for.
He turned onto his side in the hope of bettering his pace, the angle allowing a glimpse of one of the two ghosts darting through the darkness. Buck pulled the trigger twice more before he heard the
click
. He watched the ghost spin viciously around, howling in agony as he collapsed. The second ghost-man rushed up and grabbed the first, dragging him backward.
If only I had another bullet …
Disgusted, he abandoned his pistol and pushed himself on. Still moving silently and ceaselessly, he was able to pick up speed as wild shots trailed him through the darkness. He’d been here before, at least a place much like it.
Medic!
Buck had to stop himself from shouting the word as he collapsed, imagining he was back in the jungle, rolling through the mud with an M-16 hot against his chest. He took a deep easy breath and closed his eyes, hearing the distant whine of a chopper coming to haul him out.
Come on
, he urged them,
hurry up
… .
He raised his head when they didn’t show, found a huge black hulk fashioned from steel, and crawled toward the cover it promised.
 
W
eeb was the twin who’d been shot, a mean wound that had left a bullet high in his shoulder amidst ruined shards of bone. It was bleeding profusely.
“Jackie,” Othell Vance pleaded, having no idea how to bandage it or even stanch the blood, “we got to get ourselves outta here.”
Tyrell was still cradling Mary in his lap, Tremble hovering protectively nearby, watching the air like a guard dog. “And leave that bastard free to escape?”
“I got him,” Earl insisted from his brother’s side. “I’m telling you I got him.”
“Sure about that, are you?”
“I saw him go down. Put a stitch right in his spine. I don’t need to see the body to know the man’s dead out there.”
“Man shot your brother, killed my Mary.”
Earl snarled, something like a low growl rising in his throat. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Takes a lot to kill a man like that. He’s not some state trooper or FBI agent. Man like this you gotta drive a stake through his heart before turning your back.” Jackie Terror got to his feet. “Now Tremble and I are going after him. Finish this, one way or another. You come or not, I don’t really give a shit.”
 
B
uck Torrey knew they would be coming. Crawling under the huge black tanker truck that had appeared out of nowhere wouldn’t do him any good at all; not without a weapon anyway. Best thing he could do was hunker low, bury himself, and strike with his knife when they drew close enough.
Unless …
Buck stayed low and ducked under the truck, after all. Felt his way about until he found the gas tank. His knife was made to puncture steel, but it had trouble with the tank, ultimately bending under the strain of poking a decent-size hole. The gasoline spilled out and soaked the ground, splashing everywhere.

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