Radiant Dawn (6 page)

"So you're the people who fucked me out of my livelihood. I don't know you, I've never heard your voice, and I couldn't care less about your cause. Please leave me alone."

"Don't hang up, Sgt. Storch. This is a secured line. You have nothing to lose by listening to what we have to say."

"You're the people who were going to buy those weapons from Harley."

"What has happened to Serapion?"

"Who? Is that a code name for Harley?"

"Yes. What is his status?"

"He's dead. Lucky you."

"No money was to change hands. Brother Serapion acted out of true patriotism, expecting no reward in this world. Did you see him killed?"

"No, I heard it on the phone. He shot himself over this whole thing. You assholes have a lot to answer for."

"How many times did he shoot himself?"

"What the hell kind of question is that to ask?" Two shots. Harley could miss the sky with a shotgun when he was sober, which he seldom was in the morning. "You think he was killed?"

"They always shoot twice."

"Who shoots twice?"

"The race-traitors' secret police."

"You mean the federal government? They'd be happy to lock up Harley for a hundred years if he was giving weapons away to Nazis, but they wouldn't execute him. You motherfuckers better hope I never find you."

"Oh, we hope you do find us. Harley was waiting for the right time to approach you about our cause."

"My grandfather died at Normandy. I fucking hate Nazis. And you're giving me a headache. You're so hot to meet, why don't you tell me where you live, shithead?" Let the compartmentalized Kevlar killers sort it out, the crackpot bug-scrambler story smelled like bullshit. He hoped this was going down on tape somewhere.

"You hold us responsible."

"You're fucking-A right I do. And you're gonna pay. I've got about ninety days off to kill before the feds give me back my store, and I'm gonna spend 'em hunting you pencil-neck Nazis down."

"Whether or not he took his own life, Serapion acted in accordance with the highest principles of our mission, and his name will be remembered always among the patriots of our struggle. As for your store: go there now."

The line went dead. Storch breathed deep for awhile, watching his hand lay down the phone, willing it not to smash it. When he knew he wasn't going to break something, he got his keys and his coat and his 9mm automatic and jumped in his truck.

He drove back to Thermopylae, even though he could see the pillar of smoke from a mile away. The payphone across the street was ringing, and he went to answer it.

"If you think we're Nazis, you're mistaken. And if you believe you were raided by the feds, you're almost too stupid to bother with. Are you stupid, Sgt. Storch?"

His head throbbed like he was sweating blood. "No, I can be pretty goddamn clever when I put my mind to it."

"Good. You have to want to know. You have to want to come to us for the right reasons and know who the real enemy is. Go to exit 137 on the northbound I-395, near the Convict Lake junction. Look in the faultline."

"What'll I find there?"

"If you want to hurt the ones who hurt you and yours, go there and hold onto what you find there until we contact you again. And be quick about it. There's going to be an earthquake tomorrow."

He drove there that night, after parking his trailer in a box canyon and covering it in camo tarps. He'd seen enough of his life go up in flames, today. The desert rolled by like a Hanna-Barbara backdrop, features repeating, recycling distance, protracting the hours into infinite spaces Storch filled with questions.

He'd been used by someone, by terrorists fighting a secret war against the government within the United States. A war so radical and so far underground that the rest of the country was kept in the dark. Now, on only their say-so, he was setting himself up again by going out to the middle of nowhere to dig up something. He tried to tell himself it wasn't as crazy as his father's delusion about the Unholy Trinity, couldn't.

More than anything else, Storch would come to wonder why he didn't just call the police that night. He wanted to believe the raid wasn't by his own government, that his friend Harley Pettigrew wasn't a terrorist, that he hadn't killed himself.

And, craziest of all, he found he wanted to believe his father had been right. With only the moon following him, Storch drove to Owens Valley.

He reached the Convict Lake rest stop shortly after midnight. He cruised the parking lot, empty but for a station wagon filled to the windows with dirty laundry and trash. An old woman in a matted frightwig slept against the wheel in a foxhole she'd burrowed out of the scraps of her life. A bumper sticker epitaph: I CRAPPED OUT AT THE SHOWBOAT CASINO-HOTEL, LAS VEGAS.

The restrooms were murkily lit by flickering fluorescents filled with dead and dying moths and flies, casting spastic, fluttering wing and leg shadows on the slimy walls. All the toilets were blocked with a heady primordial stew that looked to be on the verge of birthing a whole new ecosystem. His gorge rising in his throat, Storch reconned the place thoroughly, then wandered out into the desert behind the visitor's center.

He would have missed the faultline if not for the plaque. Peering into the moonlit sands, he made it out, like a zipper in the earth, running to the San Francisco Bay to the north and Riverside to the south. He walked along the faultline, kicking rocks into it and beginning to feel stupid. Then he saw it: a lily blooming out of the fault, a perfect flower basking in the lunar glow. It was a girls' hand.

He went back to his truck and got a shovel.

People often observed that Special Agent Martin Cundieffe bore an uncanny resemblance to the nerdy, bespectacled character actor Wally Cox, if Wally Cox had gone bald before age twenty-five. He looked like the kind of guy who never gets laid, who has no friends excepting other geeks on the Internet, and who still lives with his parents. All of which was true, and all of which made Cundieffe the kind of FBI agent Hoover would've been proud to have in his service. Cundieffe never tired of being treated like a naive weakling, because he never tired of being underestimated. It opened doors that stayed closed to those who looked like they knew what they were doing. Opening doors, learning secrets, made Martin Cundieffe tingle. It was all he knew or needed of physical pleasure.

Right now, as he was passing through the third of five checkpoints in the nearly deserted corridors of the Federal Building in Los Angeles, on his way to an emergency briefing with officers of the Navy at five in the morning, he felt an especially strong tingle that zapped through his mind, undiminished by the hour, let alone by his section chief's order that he sit in on the meeting, and do nothing else. Deputy Assistant Director Wyler, head of the counterterrorism section, at least did not underestimate Martin. Lane Hunt, the special agent in charge of the LA field office's counterterrorism squad, was in Riverside, following up on a bank robbery by Aryan militiamen, but Wyler had asked for him, Martin Cundieffe, the unit's resident bookworm.

In the half-hour since he'd received the call to go in, he'd compiled a file of all recent suspected anti-government activity in the western United States, cross-referenced by military service, as per Wyler's instructions. It wasn't as complete or as updated as Martin would've liked—he'd simply printed out the thirty-six dossiers he'd had activity on in the last six months—but it would more than suffice for scaring the Navy brass out of their shorts, if that was what they wanted.

Cundieffe reached the fourth checkpoint and presented his photobadge. A guard in dress blues took it, scanned it through a reader and held it up to his face like a bar bouncer. Cundieffe obligingly smiled the lopsided, squinty grin that matched the photo and was rewarded with a wave-through.

Although he'd never had occasion to deal directly with the Navy himself, Cundieffe could read sailors as well as he could anyone else, which was extremely well. These checkpoints were more cobbled together than his report; this sudden case of paranoia, on top of the emergency meeting itself, painted a picture of a fat old man waking in the night on his soft mattress in his big bed in his sprawling mansion, convulsing with terror at finding its veil of security penetrated—and something missing. Cundieffe had a good idea of what he'd be hearing this morning by the time he reached the fifth checkpoint, where he presented the sealed envelope delivered by special courier four minutes after the call. The secrecy agreement within it was more Byzantine by half than anything he'd seen before, and the ink on it smeared under his hand. He'd found five glaring typos just glancing at it.

When he saw who else was waiting at the door to the briefing room, it snapped into place. Ted Atherton, the Assistant Deputy Director of Investigations leaned against the door frame, sharing a whispered joke with Wyler. Behind them stood an irritable-looking man whose ID tag marked him as CIA. A craggy older man with a silver beard and a black military uniform regarded him with biblical contempt, and scowled blackly at Cundieffe's hapless grin. Cundieffe fell in behind this last man after wordlessly passing a copy of his report to his boss. One by one, they passed the Marine at the door.

He was even more stunned by who wasn't here. Over two-thirds of the seats in the briefing room were empty. The Special Agent in Charge of LA was absent, likewise his assistant, likewise anybody else Cundieffe recognized from the field office. Each of the players present sat alone, sans the inevitable delegation that accreted around them. Dark suits meshed with the murky shadows, pale faces and winking insignia floated like a banquet of ghosts, feasting on secrets.

Cundieffe took a seat beside Wyler, who slid the report back to him and nodded gravely. "Marty," he whispered, "have you ever heard of a criminal investigation being run by the victim?"

"Excuse me, sir? No—I haven't."

"You have now."

The last few filed in and took their places at the two long tables spanning the conference room, and the Marine shut the door. There were only six civilians to the military's nine. Rear Admiral Wayne Meinsen leaned on the podium, his wattled jaw propped on one hand.

"What you're about to hear has been passed on to the Joint Chiefs and Pentagon Intelligence only an hour ago, gentlemen. The SAC of this field office has been briefed, and is en route to Washington to sit in on the executive conference with the FBI director. The President hasn't been notified yet, and, God willing, he'll never have to tell the people about it, because we're going to fix it.

"Four hours ago, a security breach occurred at our China Lake Weapons Station. Due to the, ah, unorthodox nature of the incident and the limited intelligence gathered so far, this briefing will be more rumor control than anything else. Here are the facts, such as they are.

"At oh-one hundred hours exactly, station radar picked up a MH-60 Seahawk helicopter on approach. The pilot correctly identified itself to security at the storage quadrant of the station, and proceeded to instruct for an impromptu inspection. The duty officer logged the request, as well as the order that the senior CO not be notified. Five minutes later, he logged a visual on
two
helicopters on final approach: a Black Hawk and another that he identified only as 'Russian'. That is his last entry. Shortly thereafter, the security measures and monitors and the entire staff of the station were incapacitated by a weapon of undetermined nature. For the next hour, we have only deductive intelligence about what went on inside."

Chatter boiled up among the officers, hardened career military and intelligence men all. Cundieffe kept his mouth shut, but his mind was spinning several feet above his poker-faced skull. Hostile invasion of a domestic military base. It exceeded the most audacious scheme ever cooked up by the militia-prone braggarts he monitored.

Wyler surprised him by interrupting the already aggravated Admiral. "No corroborative visual fix on the helicopters. No security video. And they used your own codes to get in."

Oliver Froud, Naval Intelligence, cut the Admiral off, this time. "The second helicopter did not register on radar at all, and neither of them showed up when they took off. We haven't determined the cause of that. No active satellites were over the base during the occupation, and nothing showed up on the shots taken just after we knew something was wrong. All internal security measures were disabled in the security center, and incoming security checks were intercepted. All the tapes were bulk-erased. The clearance codes used to approach the base were previously thought to be uncompromised."

More mumbling. Cundieffe caught the smile behind his boss's hand. "No casualties, either?" Wyler asked. "I thought softkill technology—"

"Please, please, hold your questions. No, there were no direct casualties. As near as we can tell, the base was saturated with some kind of electromagnetic field which disabled the entire garrison of eighty men, and all electronic equipment in a two square mile area. All of them experienced seizures and unconsciousness, but no other ill effects. One man fell down a flight of stairs and broke his leg. Another man bit off his tongue. The first response team on the scene swept the area for chemical and bioweapons agents, and came up clean."

Nervous laughter all around. This was thrilling. The Navy, a Delta Force Commander, even the CIA were scared. The harder they were, the more disturbed they looked, he noted; the act violated their most deeply cherished rules of engagement. Whoever the thieves were, they played by a totally different field manual. Cundieffe thought of the peculiar custom of the Plains Indians, called
counting coup
. Bands of warriors would steal into forts and mark their white enemies' heads with charcoal or paint, to show them how safe they really were. He doubted the Admiral would appreciate the anthropological precedent, however, and so kept it to himself.