The Omega Command (18 page)

“Thanks, Steve.”

“Just make sure I don’t regret this.”

As it turned out, Sandy might have felt better if Shay had pulled her off the story. Her flight from Billings was airborne only forty minutes Saturday afternoon when a snowstorm forced it to land in Wyoming. She spent four miserable hours in a miniature airport eating prepackaged vending machine food with smudged expiration dates.

She finally made it to Dallas early Saturday night only to find that Simon Terrell was no longer at the address T.J. had given her. His new one meant a drive up Route 35 toward Denton in a rented car which overheated twenty miles down the highway. It was replaced by the rental company quickly enough with a sub-compact that changed lanes based on the whims of the wind.

Things got no better in Denton. Simon Terrell had vacated his apartment there nearly six months before and had left yet another forwarding address, this time hundreds of miles away in Seminole, Oklahoma.

Sandy spent the night in a roadside motel and left for Seminole early Sunday morning. She stopped for breakfast at a diner and bought a road map of Oklahoma at the gas station where she filled up the car. It was already blistering hot as she headed north. The air conditioner was a blessing for a while, but then the car’s temperature needle climbed dangerously toward the red and forced Sandy to use the windows instead. The hot breeze gave her a headache, drowned out the weak radio, and drenched her back with sweat to the point where she felt herself sticking to the vinyl upholstery.

Incredibly, though, she found Seminole with little trouble and quickly located Simon Terrell’s latest forwarding address.

“You’re sure this is the address you’re looking for?”

“Absolutely,” Sandy told the caretaker of the Green-leaves Cemetery.

A wry smile crossed the man’s face. “Then you’re gonna find it mighty tough to get yourself an interview. Most of our tenants don’t have much to say.” And he laughed.

With that lead behind her, Sandy would have to find Terrell, if he was among the 7,500 people of Seminole, through good old-fashioned legwork.

The heat had evaporated as she drew farther into Oklahoma, and Seminole was comfortably cool. The radio predicted a chance of showers. Sandy stopped first at a bar and grill and started asking questions. The people inside seemed suspicious of her, their answers abrupt and terse. None of them had ever heard of Simon Terrell.

“You that woman on TV, ain’t ya?” one of them asked her.

“Yes,” Sandy replied, glad for once at the recognition.

“Oh,” was all the man said before he went back to his beer.

Sandy went through three cups of coffee trying to figure out her next step. If Simon Terrell had come to Seminole, he would have used a different name. She moved from her booth and settled down at the bar next to the man who had recognized her. His hair was graying, his eyes tired, and he wore a patched-up down vest.

“Has any man moved into town in the last few months, say a man about forty?”

“Lots of people pass through,” the man told her, looking up from his beer.

“I mean somebody who settled down.”

The man churned his mug until suds formed on the top. “You lookin’ for a husband?”

“Just a story.”

The man raised his bushy eyebrows. “This guy you’re after, he do somethin’ wrong?”

“No, he’s connected to someone else I’m doing a story on. I need his help.”

“Any chance of me gettin’ on your show if I help ya too?”

“Nope,” Sandy said frankly, and they both smiled.

The man downed his beer and signaled for another. “Only one man I seen ’round here fits your boy, but his name ain’t Terrell. I deliver stuff to all the Indian reservations in these parts and he showed up at one a few months back. A teacher or somethin’.”

“Around forty?”

“I ain’t too good judgin’ ages, but I’d say yeah, give or take a few years. Got long hair, though.”

“You remember the man’s name?” Sandy asked, flipping the bartender a bill for the beer before the man could get his hand into his worn-out pants.

“Trask, I think,” he told her. “Steve Trask.”

The man’s directions to the Indian reservation were easy to follow, the roads straight, and the turns well marked. Sandy knew she had finally found Terrell. Men on the run often changed their names but kept the same initials to avoid questions about labels on luggage, books, towels, and other possessions. Simon Terrell was running, all right. Denton hadn’t been right for him, nor had Greenville, so he was trying Seminole with the same initials but a different name.

The reservation was located out on the plains, free of power lines, cables, even telephone poles. If Terrell had wanted to hide, he had certainly come to the right place. But why in Seminole? Why among Indians?

Sandy’s certainty that Trask was Terrell dwindled as she drew closer to the reservation. There were no identifying signs on the fence enclosing rows of small, well-constructed homes. There were larger buildings as well, none of which were identified in any way. She pulled her compact between a pair of pickups and climbed out.

There were few people around, and no one paid much attention to her. In all probability few of the reservation’s inhabitants would recognize her. She moved through the dusty grounds, longing for a pair of boots, and outside the parking lot she approached a plump, middle-aged Indian man.

“Can I help you?” he asked politely.

“I’m looking for Steven Trask.”

“You’ll find him somewhere around the school.” The Indian aimed a callused finger to the left. “About fifty yards that way. He’ll probably be with the kids behind the building.”

Sandy followed the Indian’s directions and found herself walking through a different age. Beneath the clearing sky women sewed and stirred the contents of tall pots over open flames. She didn’t see many men and guessed they were at work in the surrounding fields.

The schoolhouse was not hard to find, and as she drew closer to it, Sandy could hear the giggling of children not far away. She followed a path around to the rear of the building. A group of twenty or so kids was engaged in various games, and another ten sat in a circle around an elaborate arrangement of small stones. The head of a single adult dominated the scene, his back to Sandy. She moved closer and took a deep breath.

“Mr. Trask?”

The man turned around slowly and stood up.

“Hello, Miss Lister, I’ve been expecting you,” said Simon Terrell.

Chapter 15

“HOW DID YOU KNOW—”

“That you were coming?” Terrell asked, his arms on the shoulders of a young boy and a young girl who flanked him. “I have a friend at your network who told me you were on my trail. I knew you’d track me down sooner or later, though I expected you’d have a camera crew along for the ride.”

“Would you have talked before a camera?”

“I’m not sure I have anything to say to you even without one. And you can forget all about that off-the-record crap because with the people you’re looking into, there’s no such thing.”

The wind whipped up and ruffled Terrell’s overlong hair. He looked pretty much like the picture Sandy had of him, except a bit more ragged and less polished. His curly hair fell naturally around his face, styled by the wind. He had a two- or three-day growth of beard and sunburned skin that made his light blue eyes look even icier. His boots clip-clopped on the pebble ground as he moved toward Sandy, the two children still clinging tight to his forearms.

“Go play with the others,” he told them softly. They resisted for a second, then took off with jealous eyes on Sandy.

“This is quite a departure from Krayman Industries, Mr. Terrell,” she said, taking his extended hand.

Terrell glanced around him. “I should have done it years ago. Call me Simon, by the way.”

“How did your contact at my network know how to reach you?”

“I’m not a total recluse, Miss Lister.”

“Sandy.”

“Sandy. There are a few people who know how to reach me in an emergency.”

They walked toward the schoolhouse, until they reached the shade of a big tree.

“This is as good a place as any,” Terrell told her. “As long as you don’t mind getting your pants dirty. I should keep my eye on the kids.”

“This is fine,” Sandy said, and they both sat down on the ground. Her eyes swept over the young children playing. “Are you their teacher?”

“Weekdays, yes. On weekends I become a baby-sitter. The older kids are working with their parents, mostly in the fields. Some are out hunting. I volunteered for this duty.”

“Doing penance for past sins?”

Terrell smiled briefly at that. “No, just trying to forget about them. My whole life had been based on technology for so long that I almost forgot what people were all about. Finally it got to be too much. I felt more like one of the machines I was tending than a man. I had to get out, so I ran away.”

“But you’re still running, aren’t you?” Sandy prodded. “Is someone after you?”

Sandy expected Terrell to hesitate, but his response came immediately. “No one’s after me and I think the running has stopped. For a dozen years I worked for the most powerful man in the world. I saw things I’d rather forget and did things I’d love to blame on somebody else. You could say I’ve been running from myself more than anything. Withdrawing, I guess.”

Sandy thought of Spud Hollins living at his ranch in the hills of Montana. “Randall Krayman seems to have that effect on people. You left Krayman Industries a few years before he dropped out of sight, correct?”

“It was about four,” Terrell said. “A new wave was taking over the company, led by a man named Francis Dolorman. They got Randy’s ear and twisted his thoughts around. He wouldn’t listen to me anymore.”

“You were on a first-name basis with Krayman?”

“We were friends, Sandy, and that made leaving him all the harder. It became one long guilt trip, especially when he dropped out of sight.”

“Have you spoken to him at all in the last five years?”

“I’ve tried to reach him, but either he doesn’t want to hear from me or someone else doesn’t want him to. I think he’s in trouble.” Terrell paused and began toying with the grass near his knees. “I think maybe Dolorman and his cronies ‘arranged’ Randy’s disappearance so they could run his companies as they saw fit.”

Sandy felt her pulse quicken, surprise mixing with excitement. “You’re saying they
kidnapped
him.”

“At the very least.”

“My God … but why? What could they hope to gain?”

“Plenty. I’ll have to backtrack a little for you to understand. I knew Randy Krayman better than anyone. I knew what made him tick, what he loved and what he loathed. And what he loved most of all was America. I know that sounds trite, but it’s true. This guy loved his country obsessively and would literally lose sleep over his fears that it was being mismanaged and mishandled into oblivion. People just didn’t understand what was going on, he thought; they had to be educated, informed, even controlled, if that’s what it took.” Terrell found Sandy’s eyes. “Controlled through the media. This goes back almost twenty years. Krayman started buying television stations, and when cable came along, he got in on the ground floor. He figured if he owned a major affiliate in every state, maybe even a network, he could go a long way toward influencing public opinion and with the help of cable, eventually
create
public opinion.

“It didn’t work, Sandy. Sure, he swayed a few elections his way. Probably won himself a lot of support, too, in addition to making a shitload of money. But what he really wanted was to have his voice be the only one America listened to, sort of an omniscent Paul Harvey telling people to stand by for lots more than just news. When his plan to control television stations and networks didn’t go far enough toward accomplishing this, he began to look elsewhere for the means. We’re going back ten years now, not long before I left.”

“What he ended up finding has something to do with the Krayman Chip, doesn’t it?”

“Everything.”

“And he sold the chip for a fraction of its production costs.”

Terrell looked surprised. “How’d you learn that?”

“Spud Hollins. Remember him?”

Terrell nodded. “Poor bastard. One of the many Krayman Industries chewed up and spit out when Dolorman and his gang first began to assert themselves.”

“Your former boss paid him sixty million for a bankrupt business. Why feel so bad for Hollins?”

“Randy paid him because he felt guilty, because he knew what he had done was wrong but that didn’t make it any less necessary to accomplish what he wanted.”

“Then you’re confirming that COM-U-TECH plagiarized Hollins’s discovery and marketed it as the Krayman Chip.”

“If that’s the scoop you’re looking for, Sandy, your vision is too narrow. It’s old news. Nobody cares anymore.”

“But the chip was part of a bigger plan, wasn’t it, Simon? Krayman wanted his chip in every piece of telecommunications equipment. Why?”

Terrell shrugged. “I wish I could tell you for sure, Sandy, but I can’t. It was around that time that Dolorman grabbed hold of Randy’s ear and convinced him to shut me out. Randy was more obsessed than ever at that point, willing to stop at nothing to have the country running the way he wanted it to. His intentions were good, really they were.”

“You know what they say about the road to hell, Simon.”

“Sure, but it wasn’t Randy who was walking it, it was Dolorman and his cronies. They were pulling the strings and Randy was letting them.” A pained look crossed Terrell’s face. “I saw less and less of Randy in those days. Eventually I was reassigned, but I stuck it out in the hope I could save him from the people around him as well as from himself. I was his friend. I had to try. But Dolorman turned him against me. He caught Randy at his weakest moment and exploited it to the fullest. We didn’t talk much those last few months, and when we did, the things Randy said truly scared me.”

“What kind of things?”

“All vague. I don’t remember any of them clearly. The common theme was that it seemed he had finally found a way to get what he wanted.”