Radiant Dawn (8 page)

"Share, Atherton?" Rear Admiral Meinsen growled.

Atherton shrugged. "On the off-chance that a foreign power is involved, I'd like to bring in a team of my people to put out feelers. Also, I'd like to brief the inspector in charge of international liaison, and our legat in Mexico City, and prepare something for the INS, in case they cross the border." Meinsen and several others scowling, he added, "I think the crime's proximity to the border merits at least that much."

"Fine, fine," Meinsen answered, "as soon as the President weighs in, you can do what you want. But not yet. I know how fast rumors spread in that sewing circle of yours."

"Anything else we can get for you, Admiral?" Wyler's facetious tone was lost on Meinsen.

"I want an exhaustive dossier on everyone with a grudge and a military background and one or more friends with same, prioritized by region and service. I want a fucking Bible, Carl. How long will that take?"

"It's already done, sir," Cundieffe said, looking sidewise at an approving Wyler. "I can broaden the field, but the most likely candidates are all in this file." The Marine from the door swept by and scooped it up.

"And in return," Wyler spoke up, "I'd like an FBI forensics team to have full access to China Lake, immediately."

"Outstanding. Send 'em on out. Be glad to have 'em. Ted, Carl, I'll get back with you." He hiked a thumb at the door. "Screw."

Wyler and Atherton confabbed for a few minutes in the corridor while Cundieffe watched. Atherton sped off to find a phone as Wyler approached his junior agent. "What do you think happened here, sir?" Cundieffe asked.

"I think all they wanted us for was exactly what they're taking, and they wouldn't let us in if we didn't have it. They want to turn this into a military conflict before the President is even briefed."

"I don't think we're in at all, sir. I think the real meeting's just getting started, and we're getting sent to the little kid's table while the grown-ups carve the turkey. Whatever the outcome, I sincerely doubt that we'll know what it was, unless the FBI is their target."

Wyler nodded and laid a hand on Cundieffe's shoulder. "That's not going to happen, Martin. The President's going to give them some token authority on this because it was their screw-up, but it's our case. While they're playing wargames out in the desert, you're going to come in the back door and identify the perpetrators. They want to treat this like a war on domestic soil, but on paper, it's a simple theft of federal property. You're going to name them, and the FBI's going to bring them in."

"But sir, I just keep track of these people. I never—"

"Don't worry, Martin, you're not going out door-to-door. Hunt'll be coordinating our efforts in the field. I'm going to get you a selective temp Top Secret clearance."

"The softkill weapons project." Cundieffe's eyes went wide. He had to resist saying Gee whiz or Jiminy, the kind of thing that made Lane Hunt laugh, but would probably stun pottymouth Wyler into puzzled silence.

"Exactly. The people who did this deed have access to weapons that don't exist. That should narrow the search considerably, for anyone who's smart enough, and likes to read."

"I'm your bookworm, sir."

Wyler nodded, Yes I know, turned smartly and headed for the elevator.

Cundieffe felt so wound up he could spin in circles. He felt like whistling. A major breach of military security, and he'd been one of the first to hear about it. He was there! His father had worked car thefts and audited telephone taps his whole career, and look at him. He couldn't wait to tell Mom. He went looking for a phone.

He turned down the next bend in the corridor, where he thought there was a phone booth he could use, and saw Sibley standing there, just Sibley alone, whispering into a cellular phone. His lips moving so fast he seemed to be stuttering, his face contorting like he was having a seizure. Cundieffe caught only a snippet: "Now? You tell us now? What kind of a relationship do you expect to build on a fuckup like that?" and Sibley saw him and threw him a look that seized his motor controls and propelled him back down the corridor and out of earshot.

Cundieffe stopped and leaned against the wall. His heart hammering, his breath in short, sharp bursts. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his handkerchief. Secrets within secrets. It was like he'd stumbled through an enchanted wardrobe and into his wildest dreams.

"Hi? Hi, it's Zane! Come down and let me in, you mean old bastard!" There was no door to Hiram Hansen's cave, but anyone who truly knew him knew better than to barge in uninvited. Hansen had forgotten more about booby-traps than Storch would ever know. He waited at the mouth of the mine, casting nervous glances at his truck. Best he get his cargo into the cave before sunrise, and the rosy fingers of another scorching summer day were reaching even now into the box canyon.

The location of Hansen's cave itself was a closely guarded secret, known only to a few in Thermopylae. The hills within the square mile around his home were swiss-cheesed with twenty-nine other abandoned borax mines, with nearly a hundred entrances. Hansen parked his truck in another canyon a mile away, and threaded a labyrinth to reach his subterranean home.

He heard footsteps crunching gravel for several minutes before Hansen skulked out into the light. Wearing only thongs and a wrestling singlet, Hansen gave Storch unpleasant flashes of Pop Sickle. Hiram Hansen was not what you'd call a fat man, but only because it didn't do him justice. He had an enormous, bloated sac for a torso, with a belly like a flaccid tongue and pendulous teats that sometimes wept blue-gray milk. His knurled limbs resembled prostheses sculpted of sinewy leather, as if they detached and partook of some dreadfully strenuous labor while Hansen slept. He was like some aborted prototype for a vehicle for boneless alien monstrosities to infiltrate humanity. A breeze from deep inside the mountain washed over him, smelling of mold and his herbal taxidermy formula.

"So pleased to see you, son. Always welcome, always welcome." He scanned Storch with a metal detector and patted down his chest and armpits. Hansen was in an unnaturally good mood. Strange as he was, Hansen succumbed to the common human inclination to derive giddy joy from other people's trouble. He usually met visitors with tear gas. Storch had built up an immunity to tear gas in the army, and it bothered him about as much as a good-sized blob of wasabi. Why he felt like crying now was quite beyond him.

"What seems to be the trouble? I would've thought you'd be in Mexicali by now."

"Something came up. I found something I want you to take a look at."

"Well, I'd be delighted. Do you have it on you?"

"It's out in my truck. Come on, I want to get her inside before the sun gets up."

"I'm liking this more and more, Zane."

Hansen led Storch through the mines to a spot within fifty feet of his truck, wheeling a hospital gurney down tunnels preternaturally free of gravel. Hansen was a medical doctor, sort of. Studied the books himself, picked up wetwork experience wherever he could pose as a doctor. Kept moving around the country, one step ahead of a labcoated AMA death squad, to hear him tell it. For practicality's sake, Hansen turned to M.E. work and taxidermy, and found his life's true pursuit. The dead didn't piss him off nearly as much as the living. Storch was too much a man of the world not to suspect Hansen's penchant for rooting around in dead things, but he knew the world was probably a lot better off that way. He radiated an amoral zeal for the mysteries beneath the skin that could just as easily have made him a killer of killers.

They climbed out into blinding sunlight from a narrow crevice in the sheer rock wall of the box canyon, not ten feet from his truck. With all his training at spotting ambushes and troop tunnels, he never would have noticed the cave. Hansen smiled wickedly at Storch as if to say, for this one secret pried out of him, there were a hundred more he would never reveal.

The razor edge of dawn crept over the cab of the truck like the line of a phosphorus fuse, licking at the fluttering nylon dropcloth wrapped round the bundle. He was restless looking at it, still more unsure whether Hansen wasn't the worst possible person with whom to entrust his secret. He'd gone out there hoping to find closure, the last piece in the puzzle of what had happened in his store yesterday. Instead, he'd found a hitherto unimaginable piece to a whole other puzzle, or a larger conundrum of which the ruin of his life was only one remote corner.

Storch climbed into the bed and gingerly hefted one end of the bundle as Hansen eased the other end onto the tailgate, then down onto the gurney. As he strapped her down, he sighed and studied Storch's evasive stance. "I think I'm entitled to ask you a very stupid question, Zane."

"Go ahead."

"Was this girl a friend of yours?"

"I didn't know her. I found her—it—like this. Somebody called me on the phone, told me where to go. Swear." The sun edged closer to the gurney, eager to burn what lay on it. Storch couldn't face Hansen, couldn't look at the gurney, so he faced the rising sun.

Radiant Dawn

The white glare behind his eyelids only heightened the sense that he was being interrogated.

"You went to the dumping site on the say-so of 'somebody on the phone'?"

"They knew Harley. They were the people he was running guns for."

"And it didn't occur to you that somebody on the phone might be framing you for a murder charge so they can extort more guns out of you? For all you know, it was something like that tied Harley to them in the first place."

"No, Hiram. He believed in what they were doing. They said this was what they're trying to stop. If you're gonna help me, I'll tell you what I know, but let's for Chrissakes get her out of the sun."

They wheeled the gurney back underground, down a dizzying sequence of branching shafts; many blasted out of the raw, living rock, still others crumbling tunnels through damp sand carpeted with bizarre gardens of crystals and pulpy white fungi. After one hairpin turn, Storch heard ghostly strains of music wafting on a powered breeze. They passed through a beaded curtain and into Hiram Hansen's secret domain. A vaguely circular grotto, thirty feet in diameter, supported by ancient wooden beams and lit by green and mauve paper lanterns, the cave was divided by black rubber privacy curtains into something like a hospital ward. Only two of the cubicles were given over to living space; the rest was jammed with avalanches of painstakingly sorted, efficiently catalogued, totally useless, extravagantly weird shit. Four other tunnels opened onto the room at the bottom of a labyrinth: entrances, getaways, probably all booby-trapped. Hansen was nothing if not cautious.

The tropical lounge treacle of Martin Denny's "Quiet Village" was piped in through drive-in speakers mounted around the walls. Storch was glad that it was at least an instrumental. He couldn't abide lyrics; anything with comprehensible, rhyming words poisoned his mind, careening round and round and drowning his train of thought until he had to break something to purge it.

Hansen hefted the bundle onto an examination table, tugged on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and reached for a pair of shears. Storch found himself crowding the foot of the table.

"Are you sure you want to see this?" Hansen asked.

"I—um, I didn't really—I mean I tried not to look before. It was dark, and I was in a hurry."

"You want this to become personal, is that it?"

"No, I just have to know."

"As you wish," he said, and cut away the layers of filthy drop cloth over the face. He peeled it back like the skin of a rotten banana, and for once, his face betrayed more shock than Storch's.

It was a dead girl, Caucasian, aged about sixteen. Her face was intact, and strikingly undecayed, but the frozen expression of agony on that face spoiled its innocence more than a year in a grave would have. Hansenbacked away from the table, his face hooded in shadow.

"What is it?" Storch asked.

"Bless my soul, she's one of my girls," Hansen said.

"What do you mean? What did you have to do with this?" Hansen turned and ducked through the curtains, lumbering off into the labyrinth of his collections. Storch looked at the girl again.

One of my girls

And he remembered that Hiram Hansen was a very good taxidermist.

Hansen grabbed him from behind, spun him around, almost before Storch could palm the scalpel he'd instinctively snatched from the tool tray. "Here, look at this!" He dropped a huge cardboard box full of flattened milk cartons on the foot of the examination table. They appeared to be alphabetized, but not by dairy, for there was no rhyme or reason to the color scheme. Hansen flipped through the carton file excitedly, like a Playboy collector who thinks he just spotted Miss October '75 in church. "I knew I had her somewhere, Zane. I never forget a face. Here!"

He waved a cracking, yellowed carton under Storch's nose. A small girl's portrait sandwiched between coupons for Knott's Berry Farm and a headline—
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

Storch shivered, his muscles snapping taut like sails in a chill wind. The rest stop. How was that for closure? "Why do you keep these, Hiram?"

"Now, don't look at me that way. I never harmed a little child in my whole life. When they started putting these pictures on milk cartons, it just wrung my heart to look at them. And I thought to myself, what if one of those little children were to cross my path months after I'd finished my milk or it went rancid, and me not able to remember their face? So, I just started keeping 'em. Never spotted one, though. Now all you can get are the clear plastic jugs, so—"