Dead Simple (25 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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“
Y
ou’re here because of the Monument,” Blaine said to Will
Thatch in the highway patrol’s Johnstown barracks interrogation room.
“Monument?”
“The man you’re after is the same man who nearly blew up the Washington Monument seven months ago. I figured that explains the FBI’s interest.”
“And what about yours?”
“For starters, I’m the one who stopped him.”
“For starters,” Thatch echoed. “There’s more?”
“Plenty. Better explained in the presence of your superiors.”
“That’s going to be difficult, since, well, I haven’t been with the Bureau for twenty years.”
Blaine glanced at Johnny Wareagle. The three of them were alone in the room, Liz having gone with her father by helicopter to the nearest trauma center.
“We haven’t got much time,” Thatch added, nervously.
“Do you know this man or not?”
Thatch nodded. “I know him, all right. You may not have run into the devil today, but it’s as close as you’re ever going to come on this earth … .”
 
 
 
L
iz sat at her father’s side in the hospital. According to the doctors, his condition was guarded. Surgery to repair the internal damage done by the bullet was required, once he was stable enough. But Buck was on his second blood transfusion, and his color remained sickly pale.
Liz’s mind drifted back to her eleventh birthday, one of the happiest she could remember.
“You can open your eyes now,” Buck had said.
Liz opened them.
“Here you go, girl.” And he handed her his rifle after removing all but a single bullet.
She had already grown bored with the .22 he’d taught her how to shoot with. Ready for a real gun to aim at the cardboard target he’d wedged against the thick bales of hay.
“You know what to do,” was all he said for advice, and Liz trembled excitedly, even though the big rifle was tough and heavy to hold, never mind aim.
But she got it steady enough to pretend she was aiming. Squeezed one eye closed and fired before her arms grew too tired to handle the weight.
The big gun’s barrel jerked upward, the force pitching Liz backward. She staggered, trying to get her balance, but the grade of the land betrayed her. She fell right on her butt and slid downhill as if she were riding a sled.
But she clung fast to Buck’s big rifle the whole time. He stood looking at her from the rise for a few seconds before, grinning, he traced her slide down.
“Not a speck of dirt on the barrel,” he said, taking the rifle gently from her grasp. “I’m impressed. You wanna go back to the twenty-two?”
Grimly determined, Liz shook her head.
But it hadn’t gotten much better the rest of the afternoon, Buck letting her have at it until, exhausted, she handed his rifle back to him and sank to her knees.
“Someday,” he said, “this gun’ll feel feather light in your hands. When the time’s right, you won’t believe this day ever happened, ’cause everything’s about time. Waiting for the good to show up and being ready when the bad comes in its place.”
Now, twenty years later, Liz gazed down at her father and thought about stormy nights spent sleeping on the farm, with his old rifle in easy reach. Seeing the shapeless form of the tentacled Bad Thing that lived in the lake sloshing up to claim her after her parents’ divorce had taken Buck away from her. That old rifle wasn’t all he had left Liz, but it was the most important.
Except the Bad Thing hadn’t lived in the lake, after all; it had shown up amidst the ridges and valleys of Pennsylvania and had long tangled hair
instead of tentacles. Left a trail of blood behind it, not slime. And it had come upon Buck on a night when he hadn’t been ready enough.
Liz was ready. She thought about tracking down the old hunting rifle that had spilled her down the hillside. She had never gotten the hang of firing it, not even in later years when strength was no longer the problem. Go find it now and finish this in fitting fashion. Aim down the gun’s ancient bore-mounted sight and get the Bad Thing centered.
All those years, Buck had protected her from all the Bad Things; the time had come to return the favor.
Buck’s eyes opened groggily. “Couldn’t happen,” he rasped through dry lips.
Liz had started to lean closer to him, when Buck continued.
“No way a round-nosed hardball chews through a skull on a ricochet. You hear me, girl?”
Liz nodded, confused.
Buck’s eyes swept the room. “Get me a phone. I wanna call Ballistics at the goddamn FBI.”
 
H
ank Belgrade arrived by helicopter from Washington an hour after Will Thatch had finished his story. He exited the chopper and met Blaine halfway across the field adjacent to the state police barracks.
“I’ve already dispatched a forensics team to the area you gave me. State police units are cordoning it off until they arrive.”
“They won’t find anything that can help us,” Blaine told him. “The person who took your Devil’s Brew is long gone.”
Belgrade’s jowls wavered. “I miss something in your message?”
“Only what I didn’t know yet when I left it.”
“Sounds bad.”
“Worse,” said McCracken.
 
“
I
understand where you’re coming from, Jackie, I do,” said Othell Vance, trying to sound compassionate. “But you gotta look at the bigger picture. I’m just not sure this is so smart under the circumstances.”
“She always loved the water, Othell. I owe her this much.”
Othell felt the boat rock slightly as Earl, the surviving Yost twin, eased the covered body of Queen Mary on board. “It’s just that the tanker’s up there in the parking lot, where anybody could see it.”
Jack Tyrell turned the key in the cabin cruiser’s ignition and eased the throttle forward. “I want her to be at peace, where the things she sees can’t hurt her anymore.”
Othell swallowed hard. “On the same subject, I figure I’ve done my part, Jackie. I think it’s time you let me go home.”
“To your family?”
“That’s right.”
“Good thing to have. You only get so many shots, I guess. You were smart to take yours as soon as it came.”
“Jackie—”
“Let me finish, Othell. If Mary was by my side to finish this, I’d be dropping you off at your front door right now. Tell you to give your wife and kid a kiss for me. But Mary’s gone, and I can’t let anything get in the way of what I promised her I’d do.”
Othell looked at him, saw that glint in his eyes and cringed.
“Last couple of days, I actually started thinking she and I might try getting what you got. Give this country a big kick in the ass, some payback, and then go live on a beach somewhere together. Get me one of those metal detectors to sift through the sand, looking for coins. You know the kind?”
Othell nodded.
“Man like that doesn’t really expect to find anything, so he’s not surprised when life fucks him. That’s the problem with me, Othell: I expect too much. I tried to change things for a while, and now I see I was wasting my time. I see that waking this goddamn country up isn’t going to do any good, ’cause she’ll just go back to sleep. That’s what I told Mary I was going to stop, Othell. That’s what I promised her I was going to do, no matter how many people I’ve got to hurt along the way.”
Satisfied they were far enough out, Tyrell slowed the cabin cruiser’s speed, then cut the engine altogether.
“But—”
“Take off your cap, Othell,” Tyrell said, as he leaned over Mary’s covered corpse, speaking to her. “It’s gonna be a helluva ride tomorrow, babe. Sorry you’re gonna miss it.”
 
“
Y
ou’re sure this Jack Tyrell was the one from the Monument?” Hank Belgrade asked, when they were all on board the chopper and strapped in, wearing headsets that enabled them to converse above the engine sounds.
Blaine didn’t respond, didn’t even nod, just pictured the messy scar on Tyrell’s right hand.
His expression must have been enough for Belgrade. “All right, just how the hell did he even find out Devil’s Brew existed?”
“One of his old gang is currently employed at Brookhaven National Labs,” responded Will Thatch. “At least he used to be until he disappeared last week. Goes by the name of Harrison Conroy now, but used to be known as Othell Vance. An original member of Midnight Run.”
“And just how many other original members has Tyrell managed to round up?”
“I can’t be sure. A dozen, at least. Maybe two.”
“Thing is, Hank,” said Blaine, “those weren’t Midnight Run people Tyrell had with him at the Monument.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he was in disguise. Didn’t want anyone to know he was involved.”
“And now he’s got my Devil’s Brew … .”
“You started telling me about it seven months ago, Hank,” said Blaine. “It’s time to finish.”
 
I
t took Hank Belgrade a few moments to get his thoughts settled, as the helicopter continued onward through the fading late-afternoon sunlight.
“Okay, follow me close now. Devil’s Brew is manufactured in the form of an aerosol. But once it’s released into the air, it changes into a foam, sucking up oxygen and using it to expand to upwards of a thousand times its normal volume.”
Blaine remembered the floor of the mine rippling, as the Devil’s Brew seemed to chase him and Johnny down.
“The foam is then absorbed into matter,” Hank continued, “seeking out structural weaknesses.”
“Where cracks form,” Blaine concluded.
“Including those that aren’t visible to the naked eye, all the way down to the microscopic level. Devil’s Brew fills them the same way household foam insulation fills gaps in walls, or anywhere else you spray it. As a matter of fact, that’s where the idea originated.”
“Then once it ignites, since it has all that oxygen available to it …”
“You get a huge bang, on the order of a fuel-air bomb, but in a containable arena. The effects are just short of a nuke, with none of the lingering radiation problems. Nothing left of whatever the Devil’s Brew soaked into.”
“Active destablization,” Blaine recalled from their initial discussion about it months before.
“Aimed at infrastructure. Urban arenas, MacNuts, where the entanglements of the future will be centered.”
“I can’t wait. How can it be detonated?”
“Same as more standard explosives: using a radio transmitter tuned to a frequency that sends a signal to a capacitor to ignite the spark.”
“Tyrell used a match today.”
“Crude, not quite as effective.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Blaine said, recalling the effects the explosive had had on the old mine. “How much Devil’s Brew is that tanker carrying, Hank?”
Belgrade gazed blankly out the window. “Fifty thousand gallons.”
McCracken felt his mouth drop, as he recalled the madness he had seen in Jack Tyrell’s eyes on the Washington Monument and then again today.
“What you’re telling me is that a man who wanted to blow up the world in the sixties has what he needs to do it now.”
“A big chunk anyway.”
“It gets worse,” said Will Thatch. “He was alone back then. He’s not alone anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” raised Belgrade.
“Somebody’s protecting Tyrell. Somebody in the government …”
Thatch told them about the men who had taken the bodies from the cemetery and later appeared in his hotel room, where he had killed them when they tried to kill him. In the seat across from him, Blaine accepted the story grimly, eyes latching onto Belgrade when Thatch was finished.
“What else can you tell us about them?” McCracken asked him.
“All I’ve got is that license plate number, but it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
“Maybe not for you or your friend; Hank here’s a different story,” Blaine said. “We find who owns that license plate, we find who sent Tyrell to the Monument seven months ago. Right, Hank?”
Belgrade looked as if he didn’t appreciate the prospects of that. “Might be something we’d be better off
not
finding.”
“And why would that be?”
Belgrade fidgeted in his seat. “You don’t want to know, MacNuts.” And then he looked back toward Will Thatch. “You said you figured Tyrell was at that cemetery for a funeral. Any idea whose?”
Instead of his stapled set of obituaries, Will drew out the article he’d ripped from his memory wall after shooting the two strangers in his hotel room. He unfolded the tear sheet carefully and spread it out on his lap, before holding it up for Blaine and Hank to see.

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