Killer Dust (17 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Killer Dust
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“Wait,” he said. He sounded sad.
I turned back toward him, fists balled. “Make it good, Tom.”
“I was looking for something Jack told me about.”
“What?”
“Something … pretty dangerous.”
“
What?
”
He stared at the floor.
My willingness to wait and trust Tom had vanished. Seething mad, I sassed, “Is it bigger than a bread box?”
Tom gave me a dirty look, but the anger in it quickly faded.
Suddenly, I realized that Tom’s silence on the return trip had come not from his usual introspection, but from intense preoccupation. I forced myself to exhale. “Let’s not play twenty questions, Tom. Jack’s overdue. Time to give.”
He sat leaning forward in the low chair, his head hanging, holding the cold bottle to his forehead as if to relieve a fever. His lips writhed like he was fighting off tears. For the first time in my acquaintance with him, he seemed inadequate and rather pitiful.
I said, “You gave him forty-eight hours. That deadline passed three hours ago. So why are you just sitting there?”
“I couldn’t find it,” he said.
“Find what?”
“On his map. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t even see a damned mark in the sand!” He stood up abruptly. He began to pace. “Hell, it wasn’t much of a map. What was I thinking? I can’t believe this! I let him go without first making him take me there and show me where the damned thing is!”
A surge of fear began to work its way up my spine. What thing? “Tom, show me the map, okay? I’m a geologist, remember? I have special training in reading such things.”
He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket, stared at it a while.
I took it from his hand. I unfolded it. There, in Jack’s narrow handwriting slanting here and there as if applied
from varying angles, all capital letters, was a jumble of notes quickly drawn, with just a few lines to indicate geographic features. Notations identified a few structures and geographical locations, like COCOA, ATLANTIC AVENUE, HOLIDAY INN, and STORM SWASH. Tom was correct, it was a pathetically crude map, but it had feeling to it, a sense of intent and geometry that drew me inward. I searched for an indication of orientation, and found a quickly scrawled N next to an arrow pointing toward the top of the page. I unfolded a bent corner, and found a little scribble shaped like the space shuttle. Suddenly, I knew that two of the lines marked the intercoastal waterway and a third the Atlantic shore, and that the kink in the shoreline to the east of the little shuttle must be Cape Canaveral itself. And, next to a rough box drawn in what must be the sand, a notation that turned my bowels to ice: SAM-7 BURIED HERE.
My arms sagged to my side. SAM stood for “Surface to Air Missile,” with which one solitary man could shoot down an aircraft, even a shuttle. And a SAM-7 was not one of ours.
Lucy sat at her desk watching the digital clock pulse the seconds, willing the time to pass more quickly. On her desk lay the proposal from the man at the USGS, asking her help with a project on desert dust. With a dull ache, she realized that she had failed to follow up on it, just as many things seemed to be slipping from her of late.
She began her mantra again.
In just thirty-six hours,
she told herself
, I will climb into a T-38 and fly to the Cape. All my worry has been just foolishness. At the Cape I will be on protected territory. He can’t make good his threats. He’s only trying to scare me. On the Cape I will be completely safe. There is no reason to fear. The target is my mind, not the shuttle. He can’t do anything to me, and I have no obligation to tell the others, because it’s all just a mind game, and I am holding the ace.
Suddenly, she felt the hair stand up at the back of her neck. She whirled around in her seat and jumped uncontrollably. Somehow, Len Schwartz had managed to come in the door without being heard and had placed himself directly behind her. His hand hovered in the air, fingers only inches from her. He had been about to touch her. His face was tight with an expression of worry and perplexity. She said, “Why did you come in so quietly? You … scared me.”
Len withdrew his hand and continued to watch her. “At
least you know that what you are feeling is fear,” he said. Then he reached out again and cradled her cheek in his hand, a gentle caress, rubbing her cheekbone with his thumb. “Get some sleep tonight. We’ve got a long way to go in the very near future.” Then, just as quietly, he turned and left the room.
Lucy hung her head to hide the hot tears of agony that slid down her face.
I told Tom, “It will be dark by the time we get there, unless we have Faye fly us.”
Tom’s face was so flushed with emotion that veins stood out in his forehead. He made a fist of his hand and pressed it to his lips. “I can’t involve her in this,” he said. “I shouldn’t involve
you
.”
“But I
am
involved! And you said yourself that you were going to go after Jack if he didn’t bring the thing in—this
thing
, Tom; this
antiaircraft missile!
You gave him forty-eight hours. I heard you. So what are we waiting for?”
“Okay. Okay, we’ll go. But we’re driving. You and me. Faye stays here.” I had never seen him in such a state of agitation. He couldn’t meet my eyes.
Regardless of what he had said, Tom seemed rooted to the spot, so I got moving instead. I raced to my room and got a jacket and the flashlight I always carry in my luggage. It seemed a flimsy bit of equipment considering what we were looking for, but it was something to grab. I kicked off the sandals I’d been wearing and put on a pair of socks and my running shoes, and rolled a change of clothes up in one of the pink-and-turquoise towels from the guest bathroom.
Then I glanced out the window down toward the pool. Tom had not moved. I ran back downstairs and out past Tom to the guesthouse, and got Faye to open the door.
Apparently just waking up from a nap, she stretched and yawned and started to say something, but I cut her off. “Faye, give me Tom’s field gear, quick.”
Her face crumpled. “No,” she whimpered. “No, you aren’t really going out on a job, are you?”
“You packed the gear. You knew this could happen.”
“I only packed it because I knew he would insist on coming with us, and if I didn’t pack it, he’d hold us up while he diddled around packing it himself. I had no intention that he should actually
use
the damned stuff!”
I said, “I’m sorry, Faye. And trust me, I had no idea. When Jack took off like that, I thought it was some standard operating procedure. But this is—”
“No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. My imagination is vivid enough as it is. Playing cops and robbers was all very fun and exciting before I got pregnant, but you two are on your own this time. I have a baby to gestate. I am staying here! I am going to work on my tan and get fat as a house and have this baby, whether she gets to have a daddy or not!” With that, she burst into tears.
I reached out to put a hand on her arm, but she turned and dug out Tom’s kit, handed me the keys to the car we had used that day, and told me to get lost.
Suddenly feeling a little panic of my own, I said, “I’ve never seen him lock up like this before. He’s just standing there doing nothing.”
Faye jammed her fingers in her ears. “I do not want to
hear
about it!”
I grabbed one of her arms and tugged it loose. “No, you have to listen. I need your help. Tom went looking for something today and couldn’t find it, and instead of coming to get me, he just drove back here and dove into that beer like the world had ended. Something’s very wrong, Faye, and it’s going to take both Tom and me to make it right, and maybe a whole lot of other people, too. You know him better than I do, at least the deep Tom. Is there anyone else he trusts as much as …” I had been about to say, “As much as Jack.” But Jack had failed him. Was that why Tom had
turned to stone? Or was he afraid that he was failing Jack?
Well, he can trust me,
I decided,
and whatever it is that Jack did or did not do or did wrong, I am not yet done with him, and I am going to find him. I’ll give him help if he needs it, and if he does not, I will whup his sorry ass for messing with the two people he claims to be closest to!
Faye’s eyes had gone vacant, but the tears still slid down her cheeks. “You think he quit the FBI because of me and the baby, and he did. But there’s more to it, Em. He … well, you know the score. There are people in the Bureau who are just plain incompetent, and it was driving him nuts. Some of them were so bad that they weren’t just screwing up; they were actually a danger to those around them. Hell, they’re a danger to us all. They knew about 9/11, or had clues, but they blew it off and now thousands of people are dead.”
“There’s not a professional alive who never screws up,” I said. “I can’t count the mistakes I’ve made as a geologist. And the best physicians are only right eighty-five percent of the time.”
Faye’s lips tightened with anger. “You’re talking about honest mistakes, or learning the hard way. I’m talking about incompetence. And I’m talking about the guys who
fuck
each other because they damn well feel like it, or to climb ahead, or because they’re goddamned working for somebody
else
!”
“You mean a foreign interest? Wouldn’t the CIA get those guys?”
“You are so naïve, Em. Tom wasn’t kidding about the opportunists out there. The people who take advantage of any system. There are people in there who’ll sell themselves to the highest bidder. Or they suck up to some damned shit-heel politician who thinks their personal agenda is more important than the public welfare. It was driving Tom crazy.”
“
Now
you tell me,” I said.
Faye stared at the floor. “Go ahead,” she said. “Go be one of the boys.”
That cut deep. Between my teeth, I said, “You make the baby, Faye. I’ve got another job to do.”
I grabbed Tom by the arm and hauled him out to the Mercedes and loaded our gear. “Who’s driving, you or me?” I asked him.
Tom’s eyes clicked into focus. “I am,” he said.
I gave him a pat on the shoulder, and said, “Good man. Let’s go find this thing.”
 
 
We drove the entire way in silence, Tom still lost in the thoughts and worries that had whittled him down to someone who could accomplish little else than drive a car.
It was dark when we got back to the Atlantic shore, dark and blowing hard. From the Beeline, Tom turned south on Highway 520 to the city of Cocoa. From there we crossed an elevated causeway over the intercoastal waterway onto Merritt Island, and then another that led over another waterway to the outer island and the town of Cocoa Beach. At the junction of Highway A-1-A, locally called Atlantic Avenue, we turned north. Cocoa Beach was a strange place, a mishmash of beach and business with a lot of restaurants and motels jutting starkly from the sand. As the Holiday Inn came into sight, I spied huge docks in the distance, up toward the Cape. PORT CANAVERAL, signs read. Something hazy nudged my memory. Hadn’t this been the place where Calvin Wheat’s cruise liner was due to dock sometime soon?
We parked the car in front of the motel and walked several blocks eastward down to the beach. There, Tom took me to his best guess of where the buried “item” should be. He pointed at the map. “I can’t interpret these five lines accurately,” he said. “I thought they had to be streets dead-ending by the beach. But our
X
that marks the spot should be right between the third and fourth. I’m thinking they must be these streets, but that doesn’t narrow things much.”
Wind lashed the palm trees, and sand moved in plumes around our ankles. I saw Tom’s predicament: The map did
not match the scene. Was Jack trying to throw us off? Had I gone to bed with a liar? I said, “Even if we were sure we were in the right spot, this wind would have reworked the sand,” I said. “It would cover the obvious signs of digging and reburial unless the job was really sloppy in the first place.”
Tom stared bleakly up the beach. Clouds rolled past the moon, and the sound of the surf rushed at the sand a hundred feet or more to our right. “Hell, I couldn’t find a damned thing by daylight, and now it’s dark as pitch,” he said bitterly.
I was tempted to say something like,
This isn’t like you, Tom
, but held my criticism. Getting mad at Tom was not going to help us find this dreaded item, or Jack. I said, “You think the thing is going to be used against the space shuttle.”
He nodded.
“Well, then we have time. The launch isn’t for a couple of days.”
“Correct, but whoever buried the damned thing might be watching even now. You get it?”
“So it wasn’t Jack.”
Tom rounded on me. “Are you insane? Jack wouldn’t do that!”
I wanted to say
I’m beginning to have my doubts
, but I decided to keep that notion to myself. Tom was clearly at the end of his rope where it came to whom he could trust. Paranoia was making him all but catatonic. If he locked up on me entirely, then he, Jack, and I were nowhere, and the monstrous thing we were looking for might find its target. “Then who did bury the thing?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t know.”
This time I was pretty sure he was telling me the truth. I said, “Let’s go back to the motel. There was a restaurant there. We can get something to eat and maybe get some other maps from the office, see if we can make a correlation from this one to one that was more formally drawn. I’m
sure we’ll find some clues that will help,” I said, half lying even to myself.
Tom followed me back through the gate and along the wooden walkway that led to the motel. At the front desk, I asked for a map of the immediate environs. The pimply young man behind the desk asked, “Just this motel, or do you want a map that shows all of our hotels in central Florida?”
A little light blinked on in my head. “Both, please.” I took what he handed to me and hustled Tom into the restaurant, where I commandeered a table and laid out all three maps. For the moment ignoring Jack’s scribbles and the map of this motel only, I turned to the map of all Holiday Inns in central Florida. To my immense relief, I saw something that answered a question I had not even known to ask. There were in fact two Holiday Inns in Cocoa Beach; the one we were at, and another a few miles farther south. I stabbed my index finger at it. “How about this, Tom? We’re at the Holiday Inn Express. Could he have meant Holiday Inn Cocoa Beach Resort?”
Tom stared at the map. “Shit,” he said. He grabbed for it.
“No,” I said. “We’ll drive down there, but we both need to eat first—keep our blood sugar up so we can hope to think straight—and you need to tell me more about what’s going on. And before you tell me you’re not going to tell me, think it through carefully: If you continue to keep me in the dark, you’ll endanger the project. We just don’t have time to screw around.”
A waitress came to take our orders. I said, “We’ll each have a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee, and if you can get that inside of ten minutes, I’ll double your tip.”
She smiled and took off like a seared bat.
Tom leaned his elbows on the table and raked his fingers through his short stubble of hair. “Jack got a call. Someone he knows had reason to believe that someone was going to try to take a shot at the next shuttle launch. Just imagine how that would be. Another Christa McAuliffe.”
“You’re talking about terrorism.”
“Not really.”
“How can shooting a space shuttle be anything but an act of terrorism, Tom? Isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant ?”
“It’s a matter of who takes the shot, and why.”
“I disagree.”
“There’s more to it.”
“I’m all ears.”
Tom bared his teeth in exasperation. “What if it doesn’t involve people from another country? Then what do you call it?”
“I still call it terrorism. I call anything designed to scare the shit out of me exactly that, a big fat mind fuck called terrorism.”
“I’ve taught you well, I see, but—”
“‘Terrorism is the foul art of relieving us of our sense of safety,’ you always tell me.”
“Yes. But what if it’s aimed at just one individual? What do you call it then?”
“You think plinking a space shuttle is taking a shot at only one individual? You think maybe no one else would notice?”
“Of course others would notice, but if the
intention
was directed at only one, and the crime is being perpetrated by only one person, then what?”
“Isn’t that still terrorism?”
“No, we call it stalking.”
“What, some wacko’s got a fixation on some astronaut?”
Tom nodded. “Wackos seem to have a particular taste for prominent people. But, no, it doesn’t have to be the astronaut that’s the real target.”
“Oh, you mean like what’s-his-name Hinckley shooting President Reagan in order to impress an actress,” I said. “So it can be done for the visibility, a sort of ‘Look how much attention I can get.’”
“Exactly. Then the game’s called ‘showing the world how powerful you are.’”
“It still sounds like terrorism to me. It’s still extortion of control over others. As you say, stealing their sense of safety.”
Tom pressed the tips of his fingers to his forehead. “There’s a difference between the act of an organization and the act of one individual.”
I said, “Now you’re splitting hairs between terrorism and terrorism à la carte. You’ve got to
hope
this is the act of just one individual, so if you find him, you’ve ended the problem.”

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