Heat (21 page)

J
esse went back to the office and spent the morning with Herman Muller, going over the production schedule on the New York plywood order. At lunchtime the plant emptied, and Muller, as usual, went into town for a hot lunch.

Jesse got Coldwater's blueprints from his truck and spread them out on his desk. He adjusted his gooseneck desk lamp for the best light and, one by one, photographed the pages with the Zippo camera. When he was done he went into Muller's private bathroom, got his telephone from his lunchbox and called Kip.

“What's up, buddy?” Kip asked

“Two things: first, Charley Bottoms showed up this morning and nearly caused me to clutch my chest and turn blue.”

“Sorry about that; if you'd called in I could have warned you.”

“Second, I've photographed a good chunk of Coldwater's fortifications and all of the blueprints.”

“Holy shit! You really came through for me, Jesse!”

“You bet I did, buddy; now, how am I going to get the camera to you?”

“Got a pencil? I'll give you an address, and you can Federal Express it. Here we go, send it to John Withers, Nashua Building Supply, 1010 Parkway, College Park, Maryland.” He added the zip code and phone number. “It's a drop I've set up. Can you get the camera off today?”

Jesse glanced through his glass wall toward the reception desk and the out box. “Yes, they haven't picked up yet today.”

“Great, I'll look forward to your shots.”

“Charley is my backup on this, Kip. Now you have all the evidence you need, right?”

“If all goes well, we'll be in there inside a week. I'll need a few days to plan and assemble a force.”

“All right. The next time I talk to you, I want to hear that you're on your way.”

“Over and out.”

Jesse broke the connection, then went to the reception desk, found a FedEx form and envelope and addressed it as instructed. He inserted the envelope into a pile of a dozen waiting for pickup, then took the plans back to his truck. He spent the rest of his lunch hour eating a sandwich and leafing through the blueprints, and what he saw confirmed his suspicions about the bookcase in Coldwater's underground suite. When he got back to his desk, the phone was ringing.

“It's Jack Gene,” a deep voice said. “What happened to that roll of blueprints I asked you to carry?”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Pastor; they're in my truck; I forgot all about them. I'll run them by your house after work.”

“Run them by my house now,” Jack Gene said and hung up.

Jesse scribbled a note to Herman, then left the plant. He drove up to Coldwater's house, noting that
the visiting cars had left, and rang the bell. Yet another beautiful young woman, this one pregnant, showed him to Coldwater's study. The room was empty.

“The pastor is on the phone in the kitchen,” she said to Jesse. “He'll be with you in a few minutes.” She left, closing the door behind her.

Jesse glanced at the telephone on the coffee table; a single red light glowed; Coldwater was on line one. Quickly he set the blueprints aside and went to the bookcase. He was surprised that the hinged false front yielded to only a slight tug; not even locked. Behind it sat a large red safe, a reproduction of a nineteenth-century model. Jesse had seen it offered in mail order catalogs. He knelt and put an ear to the safe, first glancing at the phone to be sure the red light was still on, then he slowly twirled the combination knob, listening to the tumblers. The mechanics of this safe had not changed for a hundred years, and Jesse believed he could open it in a couple of minutes.

He had once had a short course in safecracking from a snitch of his in Miami, an old-time thief who had turned to drug running for easier and bigger money, and he could open, he reckoned, about half of the safes he'd ever met. His snitch would have thought this one to be a piece of cake. Jesse looked at the telephone, and the light was out.

Quickly, he closed the cabinet and leaned on it, and one second later, Coldwater entered the room.

“There you are, Jesse,” he said. “Take a seat; would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you, sir, yes,” Jesse replied. He handed over the blueprints. “I'm sorry I took these with me; I just forgot they were in the truck.”

“Don't worry about it,” Coldwater said, lifting the telephone and pressing the intercom button, “I just don't want them out of the house. Bring us coffee for two,” he said into the phone.

The two men settled into chairs before the fireplace, and Coldwater gazed sleepily at him. “What did you think of Charley Bottoms?” he asked.

“Big fellow,” Jesse replied. “I wouldn't want him mad at me.”

“Quite right,” Coldwater said, smiling. “Did you think he was bright?”

“I didn't have much of a chance to form an impression,” Jesse said. “Is he important to you?”

“He could be; any of those men here this morning could be, in the right circumstances. They and their followers have a lot of combat experience among them.”

“Are you anticipating combat?”

“I've learned to anticipate every eventuality,” Coldwater replied. “I'm always ready for anything.” The coffee arrived, and Coldwater poured for them.

“This is a beautiful house,” Jesse said, looking around. “Did you build it?”

“I did, and I designed it, too. Tell me, have you spotted the safe yet?”

“I beg your pardon?” Jesse said. His heart was beating faster now. Maybe Coldwater did have some sort of weird sixth sense.

“There's a safe somewhere in this room. Can you find it?”

Jesse looked around. “Behind a picture?”

“Nothing as obvious as that. Come on, you're a builder; where would you hide it?”

“May I look around?”

“Go right ahead.”

Jesse walked slowly around the room, pretending to search, and he saw something he hadn't noticed before; there was another false bookcase that matched the one in Coldwater's underground study. He kept moving, then stopped in front of the bookcase that hid the safe. He fingered a book spine, determined it to be fake, then ran his fingers along the shelf. It opened easily.

“Well done,” Coldwater said. “Do you know you're the first person to find it in under a minute? Pat Casey, as good as he is, took nearly ten.”

“I guess Pat has never built a bookcase,” Jesse said, sitting down again and picking up his coffee.

“You know anything about finance, Jesse?” Coldwater asked out of the blue.

“Just that part of it that pertains to running a small business. I've never been in the stock market or had any investment more complicated than a CD.”

“Pity,” Coldwater said. He seemed suddenly discouraged. “I've begun to think that Kurt Ruger, as talented as he is, as long as he's been with me, might no longer be the right man for his job.”

“He certainly seems very competent,” Jesse said.

“Yes, but suspicious to the point of paranoia. That's a good trait, up to a point, but Kurt went past the point a long time ago, and he's beginning to make a nuisance of himself. You saw the way he behaved over George Little's death.”

“Well, yes; I did find that surprising. Flabbergasting might be a better word.”

“Yes, flabbergasting. Pat Casey was furious with him.” He looked up. “Jesse, is there anything you want?”

“How do you mean?”

“Anything. Anything that you don't already have, I mean.”

“Not at the moment. I'm very content with my lot.”

“If there's anything you ever want, you come to me,” Coldwater said. “Doesn't matter how difficult it might be. You just come to me, and it's yours.”

“Why, thank you, Pastor,” Jesse said. “I'm very grateful.”

“Well, you'd better get back to work,” he said. “Anything to report on Wood Products?”

“Well, no sir; I haven't spent a great deal of time there since we talked about it.”

“Of course not; you let me know when you have something.”

They shook hands, and Jesse left. Driving back to the plant, he reflected on how he might get his hands on that safe. When the feds launched their raid, he had to get to that safe before anybody else.

J
esse waited until the end of the week before he called Kip. It was hard to wait, and he had grown very tense. He was having a hard time sleeping, and when he did his dreams were confusing and disturbing. He was always back in New York, walking down Fifth Avenue, window shopping, and what he saw had an awful effect on him. He would wake up, shaking and bathed in sweat, and not be able to remember what he had dreamed. His appetite diminished and he didn't feel well. Herman Muller had commented on how pale he looked.

On Friday at lunchtime, when the office was empty, he called Washington. He no longer felt comfortable doing this on the mountain, so he did it from his desk, from where he could see anyone who came up the office stairs.

“This is Fuller.”

“Kip, it's Jesse.”

“Hi.” He didn't sound happy about the call.

“What's going on? What was the reaction to the photographs?”

“Well, the shots weren't what we hoped they'd be; all we could see was hallways and boxes; hard to tell what was in the boxes.”

“I did what you asked with the equipment you gave me.”

“I know, Jesse, and it's not your fault.”

“Haven't you heard from Charley Bottoms?”

“Yeah, but Barker—”

“Barker what?”

“Barker is getting paranoid about this, I think. He seems to believe that you and Charley are somehow colluding to make an ass of him.”

“What about the shots of the blueprints?”

“The shots are a little washed out. The camera was loaded with a special, low-light film, and you lit the plans too brightly when you photographed them.”

“All I used was a desk lamp.”

“It was too much; you'd have been better off just using ambient light.”

“Listen to me, Kip: our deal was that I would get evidence to indict Coldwater and his partners. I've done that; I've provided you with both testimony and documentary evidence, and Charley's testimony confirms it. Now I'm at the end of my tether, and you're going to have to move your ass if you want my testimony in court.”

Kip ignored this. “Let me ask you, since you know the territory, how many men are we going to need, and how should we come in?”

Jesse thought for a minute. “First of all, the best cops in the world are not going to be enough; you're going to need soldiers, and I don't mean the Idaho National Guard. I would get the attorney general to go to the president and request crack troops, trained in urban tactics, street fighting.”

“That's not going to be easy,” Kip replied.

“You're going to have to do a lot of things
simultaneously; you're going to have to put troop-carrying choppers on top of that mountain, establish a perimeter and hold it, to keep Coldwater and his people from getting into that underground system. Unless you can do that right off, a siege situation will develop and you'll look like idiots.

“Simultaneously, you're going to have to take Coldwater, Casey and Ruger; otherwise they'll rally their followers, and you'll have a pitched battle on your hands. Cut off the head of the snake, and the rest will be easier.

“Third, you're going to have to seal off the town to prevent anyone from getting in. Coldwater now has alliances with other groups, like the one that Charley Bottoms is in, and they might well come to his aid. Also, you can't let any of Coldwater's people get out. The nasty part of this is that, even if you capture the mountain and arrest Coldwater and his principal aides, you're going to have to round up the rest of the church congregation from wherever they are, and they may fight on an individual basis.”

“How many people are we talking about?”

“Judging from what I've seen at the church, I'd estimate somewhere between five hundred and a thousand men, and three or four times that many women and children. They seem to have a lot of kids.”

“Will the women fight?”

“My guess—and it's only a guess—is that Coldwater doesn't invest enough confidence in women to train them, and that you'll have to deal mostly with men and boys. I'd count on being opposed by teenagers with assault rifles, if I were you.”

“What you're saying, essentially, is that, no matter how we do this, it's going to be a mess.”

“I think you have a choice between a mess and a godawful, mind-boggling tragedy that could shake this country to its roots, that could make the attorney gen
eral, the president and the military look like bumbling idiots who can't be trusted to keep order. I think that if you screw this up you have the chance of having the biggest pitched battle in this country since the Civil War.”

Kip was silent for a long moment. “We're going to need armor, aren't we?” he asked finally.

“You're going to need it, but how the hell will you get it here without alerting Coldwater? If you fill up the roads of northern Idaho with tanks and armored personnel carriers, it'll be on radio and television a long time before they can get here, and Coldwater is going to be ready. Your best bet is choppers, a lot of them, and enough men to mop up the town on a house-to-house basis.”

“Is there an airport?”

“Yes. I've seen a sign pointing to it, but I've never been out there.”

“You better take a look at it and get back to me.”

“That's a good idea; I'll do it.”

“How many troops are we talking about?”

“What was it they called Field Marshal Montgomery in World War Two? Something like Martini Monty, because he wouldn't attack unless he had a six-to-one advantage. I think you'll need that, if you fail to cut off the head of the serpent first.”

“So we're talking five, six thousand men with full field gear, assault weapons, flak jackets, the works.”

“I think you better bring in heavy weapons, too, in case Coldwater makes it to his fortress. You'll want to be at least as well armed as he is.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of this country,” Kip said, sounding disconsolate. “At least, not since the Civil War, as you pointed out. American troops carrying out a full-scale assault on an American town? It's insane.”

“Maybe so, but comparatively speaking, it's even
more insane to do nothing, not to mention negligent. Something else, Kip, and I hate to bring this up: you'd better be ready for casualties. This could be bloody, so you'd better have both the medics and the PR people on alert to handle the dead and wounded and to break it to the public.”

“Barker wants to round up a thousand federal agents from the FBI, from the U.S. marshals, from Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco and the Treasury Department and send them in there on the ground, in APCs, with bullhorns, telling everybody to surrender.”

“You tell Barker for me that, if he does that, he's going to lose half of them, and the other half will have to run, if they're not surrounded.
Then
he'll have to bring in the military to pull it out of the fire, and he'll have to destroy this town to win.”

“I don't know if he's going to buy your recommendation.”

“Then, Kip, you have to go over his head; you have to go outside the Justice Department, if necessary, straight to the White House.”

“If I do that, they'll hang me out to dry, my career will be over, and I'll have a wife and two kids that I can't support.”

“If you don't do it, Kip, the press will hang the whole thing on you and Barker. After all, you're the official contact with Bottoms and me. When this is over, and the president appoints a commission to investigate why such a huge tragedy occurred, you'll not only be hung out to dry, you might end up in prison, and where will your family be then?” Jesse was trying hard to scare Kip to death; he had the feeling that if he didn't, nothing was going to happen. He played his last card. “You tell Barker I'm going to give him fourteen days to act, and in force. If he doesn't, I'm getting out, and if I'm arrested by your people I'll see the whole business on the front page of the
New York
Times
and the
Washington Post
. I'll write a book about it; I'll sell it for a TV movie; and I'll never
ever
shut up. Do I make myself clear?”

“Jesse, don't even think about doing that.”

“I've already thought about it, Kip, and as God is my witness, I'll do it. Your only other choice is to get me a presidential pardon
now
, and let me and my family get out of here. That'll shut me up.”

“Call me Monday.”

Jesse had a desperate thought. “Wait a minute, Kip.”

“Yeah?”

“I want to come to Washington and make a presentation to your people, the military and somebody from the White House.”

“That's crazy, Jess; an escaped convict standing up in front of that kind of meeting? What kind of credibility would you have?”

“The credibility of an eyewitness who knows what he's talking about.”

“How would you get out of town without Coldwater knowing about it?”

“This drop of yours that I sent the camera to—is that a real building supply company?”

“Yes, and a big one, out in College Park.”

“Do this: call St. Clair Wood Products, ask them for their fax number, then fax Herman Muller a request for a presentation by a salesman. Say that you're looking for a major new source of plywood and chipboard, and you'd heard good things about his company. Tell him your need is urgent, and you want to see somebody right away; he'll send me. Coldwater will know about it, but it won't worry him, because I did the same thing in New York.”

“I'll do what I can, Jess, but I can't promise. Barker will have to approve this, and I think it's unlikely. If Muller gets the fax, then you'll know you're on. I won't
contact you again, just go directly to Nashua Building Supply, 1010 Parkway, in College Park, and ask for John Withers; he'll take it from there.”

“Just remember that I might be followed.”

“I'll plan for that.”

“Something else, Kip; call somebody at the National Security Agency and get some satellite shots of the St. Clair area; they'll help me make my case, and they'll help you when you go in.”

“I'll see about that.”

“Thanks, Kip.”

“Thank me when I make it work.” Kip hung up.