The Operative (39 page)

Stratton climbed in, put the key in the ignition and turned it. The heavy old petrol engine cranked over a couple of times before gunning noisily to life. The old man had said that she might sometimes sound as if she’d died in the night but apart from the occasional hangover she was a reliable old gal.

Stratton pulled the heavy door shut and wiggled the loose column gear change until the needle lined up with the ‘D’ and
the vehicle shunted into drive. He released the brake, pressed the accelerator pedal slowly down and the truck jerked forward with surprising power. The wheel turned easily, aided by the power steering and he steered the pick-up out of the parking space, straightened it up in the centre of the narrow road and accelerated noisily between the cars parked on either side.

He turned onto Fourteenth Street heading south and five minutes later was driving east on Highway 10 that joined the 405 North within a couple of miles. On the springy bench seat beside him were the rolls of construction blueprints for Skender’s building, a couple of yellow-page directories and a sheet of notes: names and addresses of shops and warehouses and a long shopping list. Next stop was Bakersfield, 150 miles north of LA. From there, after acquiring the items on his list, Stratton was going to head for a small town called Twin Oaks just beyond Caliente where Vicky had been born and an operations base that he had found on the Internet thanks to something she had told him over dinner.

He had a plan, or at least a broad outline of one, that was going to need a lot of work to turn into reality. It was risky and it was big – and it was the only way he was going to get Skender’s attention. There was one aspect of it that Stratton chose not to think about in too great detail and that was the high risk to him personally. It was a two-part plan, each with several phases, the final one of which he would only implement if it looked as if he had failed to save Josh. He’d examined thoroughly the two choices he had – to go for it or to run – and had chosen the first simply because he knew that he could not spend the rest of his life with the guilt of having failed Jack and his family.

The freeways had not been very congested although the pick-up had struggled to climb the steep and winding southern slope of the Grape Vine, a hilly region of the San Andreas Fault that ran north of LA. Three hours later Stratton was pulling into a massive industrial and commercial complex on the east side of
Bakersfield that was filled with manufactured-goods and materials outlets of almost every kind.

First stop was a hardware superstore where he bought a tengallon drum of quarter-inch ball-bearings, a tarpaulin big enough to cover the inside of the pick-up, four ten-gallon industrial cooking pots, the largest glass bowl he could find, a gas burner and gas bottle, several wooden serving spoons, a large sieve, a thousand-foot reel of thin cord, a packet of heavy-duty freezer bags, several rolls of masking tape, a couple of hundred feet of fine wire and thirty-two plastic sandwich boxes the size of house bricks.

Stratton’s next visit was to an outdoor-adventure store where he bought every camping-fuel stick or hexamine tablet they had in stock, which amounted to around seventy pounds in weight. It was short of the amount he needed but after locating every similar store in the city and clearing them of their stock he had about enough. The next place was hard to find and Stratton drove around the complex for almost ten minutes before he saw a sign advertising Alan’s Chemicals.

He pulled into the building’s forecourt, shut down the engine, stepped out of the truck’s cab and climbed onto the back to make sure that the tarp was neatly covering everything that he had bought so far. Then he jumped down and headed for the reception building, a small prefabricated add-on to the front of an old hangar-like warehouse.

A customer at the counter was being served and Stratton walked over to a small messy table covered in powdered milk and sugar where a coffee pot was brewing beside a sign inviting customers to help themselves.

An old guy in dirty overalls stepped out from the back and adjusted his spectacles on his nose to focus on Stratton. ‘Can I help you, mister?’ he called out.

‘Yeah,’ Stratton said, walking over to the counter while stirring his plastic cup of coffee.

‘What is it you need?’ the old guy said, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

‘You have ninety-per-cent nitric acid?’ Stratton asked.

‘Just a second,’ the oldster said as he punched several keys on a dirty computer keyboard and scrutinised the old monitor screen to check that he had brought up the correct page. ‘I know we got it, I just gotta get an invoice set up fer yer. How much do you need?’ he asked, satisfied.

‘Twenty gallons.’

‘Not a problem,’ the storeman said as he hit the keys and consulted his monitor again to make sure that he’d put in the correct order.

‘Ethyl alcohol?’

‘Yep.’

‘Five gallons?’

‘Five gallons,’ the other man repeated as he typed it in.

‘You sell mercury metal?’

‘How much you need?’

‘What’s it cost?’

‘I can sell you a pound for eight hunnerd dollars.’

Stratton had hoped it would be cheaper. He needed four times that amount and didn’t have enough money. ‘Just curious,’ he said. ‘That’ll do it.’

‘Trade or charge?’

‘Cash okay?’

‘Cash is always okay,’ the old man said as he punched several more keys and an aged dot-matrix printer at the other end of the desk came to life and started to spew out a page. ‘Lotta acid. What you makin’ there?’

‘Gotta couple of boilers to strip,’ Stratton said with a smile.

‘That’ll do the trick, I guess,’ the storeman said as he tore the page from the printer roll and placed it in front of Stratton.

Stratton read it as he pulled a wedge of crisp new dollars from
a pocket and counted out the bills. The old guy checked the amount, placed the cash in the till and gave Stratton his change.

‘That your truck?’ the storeman asked.

‘Yep.’

‘See you outside in five minutes.’

Stratton left the reception building, walked to his vehicle and consulted a map to commit the next stage of his journey to memory. A couple of minutes later he heard the small tug and trailer drive out through the hangar entrance and looked up to see the old man at the wheel. Stratton walked to the rear of the pick-up as the storeman pulled to a stop alongside and shut off the engine.

‘Hope you don’t mind me not helpin’ you load this stuff,’ the old man said as Stratton took hold of one of the large bottles. ‘Truth is I’m too goddamned old.’

‘That’s okay,’ Stratton said. ‘I need the exercise.’

‘Gonna be a cool night, I think,’ the storeman said as Stratton placed the last container onto the back of his pick-up, pushed it forward and then climbed onto the truck’s bed to secure the load. As he moved across the bed he accidentally caught the tarp in his foot, pulling it enough to expose some of his previous load which the old man caught sight of as Stratton straightened it out.

‘So where you from?’ the old man asked. ‘English if I had to guess. We get a few a’ them around here.’

‘That’s right,’ Stratton answered as he jumped down, lifted up the heavy tailgate, slammed it home and placed the securing pins in either side. ‘Well, gotta get going,’ he said as he headed for the cab. ‘Oh. Where can I get some dry ice around here?’

‘Pete’s refrigeration. Down that way,’ the old guy said, nodding in the direction.

‘Thanks. You take care now,’ Stratton said as he climbed into his cab.

‘You too,’ the storeman said as he boarded his tug, started the
engine, took a look at the registration number under the pick-up’s tailgate and headed away.

He stopped at the hangar doors as Stratton turned out of the lot and onto the main road. The old man switched off the engine, climbed off the tug’s seat and walked into the reception block. He picked up a pen beside an order book and scribbled down Stratton’s registration number, pausing halfway through to think. Then he crossed it out, started again, studied it some more and shook his head. ‘Damn it all,’ he muttered, cursing his memory.

He dug a notebook from a pocket, found a number, picked up the phone, dialled and waited. He looked out of the window but Stratton was well gone.

‘Hank. It’s Joe, down at Alan’s Chemicals. I got something you might be interested in. You guys sent us a letter some time back about letting the cops know about people buying suspicious combinations of chemi cals and stuff. Well, maybe I got one for yer. Had a guy just bought some nitric acid, a lot of it, and in the back of his truck he had a whole bunch a’ fire tablets. Fire tablets are made out of a chemical called HMT – hexa-methylene-tetramine. Mouthful, ain’t it? When I was in the service I was in EOD so I know a little about explosives. You mix nitric with that stuff and you got somethin’ that’ll go bang, I know that much. The guy was also lookin’ fer mercury metal. Now you mix mercury and nitric and you end up with that stuff kids use in cap guns. Course, you gotta know what you’re doin’. Yeah, he’s gone. Left a couple minutes ago in an old grey GM pick-up. I didn’t get the licence complete – RJ479P, I think. English guy. Paid cash, too. Sure, I’ll be here till five if you wanna send someone down. Not a problem.’

Joe put the phone down and took another look at the registration number. ‘Boiler stripper, my ass,’ he mumbled.

Stratton made two more stops in the industrial complex to buy a large block of dry ice, a flashlight, a couple of petrol lights, a
twenty-foot reel of small-gauge plastic piping, twenty gallons of water, a therm ometer and a large tin of glue. Then he got back onto the highway and headed east out of Bakersfield.

Half an hour later he stopped in the town of Arvin, inhabited totally – or so it appeared – by Mexicans, to fill up his fuel tank and purchase a couple of days’ supply of food. From there it was an easy climb north-east up the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and into the folding hills that hid the small town of Caliente.

As Stratton drove through the sparsely populated settlement he tried to imagine Vicky living there as a little girl. Apart from the occasional modern car the sleepy, arid place looked like an old turn-of-the-century western movie set. There was one liquor store, one general store, a bar, a post office and a railway depot, all well spaced along a broad stretch of road, the only sign of life being a couple of dogs and an old man sitting on a chair outside the depot.

The farming appeared to be strictly arable, the countryside hilly, rocky, parched and dotted with Cali fornian oak trees, a smaller, brittle, less majestic version of its splendid European cousin. Past the town a newly metalled road followed a broad, winding creek that cut deep into the hills, its sides steep and rocky. Where they could get a foothold, pine and oak trees grew.

Twin Oaks, a few miles further on, was even more sparsely settled than Caliente. Stratton consulted his map as he passed a collection of houses that looked abandoned and then a bar set back from the road with a couple of pick-ups parked outside. He had to slow for several cows meandering along the road, then, a mile beyond the last house, he reached a distinct hairpin bend where a dirt track headed towards higher ground and woodland half a mile away. He turned off the metalled road and followed the track to a fork at the entrance to the wood, glanced at the map and took the right-hand route. A couple of hundred yards later he
stopped in front of an old wooden gate that barred his way.

Stratton climbed out to inspect the gate where the wood crowded in on both sides. A bleached wooden sign with barely readable letters and fixed at a jaunty angle to one of the gateposts warned of an abandoned mine ahead and stated that entry was not permitted. A rusty chain looped around a post was all that secured the gate and he unravelled the links, picked up the end and pulled it open.

He drove the truck a few yards past the gate, climbed out, closed it, replaced the chain, and drove on. The wood remained close on both sides and a couple of hundred yards around a gradual bend the track gave way to a large open space tightly packed with derelict old wooden constructions of various sizes.

As Stratton drove slowly in among the buildings he spotted a barn with one of its double doors lying on the ground and what appeared to be rusting machinery of some description inside. The structure had enough room for the pick-up and he eased it in. When he shut off the engine a near-total silence descended.

Stratton pulled the high-powered flashlight from its box, climbed out of the cab and stepped into the sunshine. The air was warm and dry.

He took a walk around, his footsteps clearly audible as his boots crunched on the soft sandy soil. He inspected each building in turn. Most were completely empty with unreliable-looking floors, some had the odd piece of furniture and machinery and one shed contained dozens of rusting spades, picks, hammers and boxes of heavy spike nails. The mine had been closed for a hundred and thirty years, according to the Internet site, abandoned when the cost of extracting the gold had exceeded the value of the yield. There was apparently still a fair amount of the precious metal to be had but it would only become a viable operation again when it reached $1,000 an ounce at today’s money value which was apparently unlikely.

Stratton finally came to the towering wooden derrick that supported aloft the massive wheels that the trolley drag cables looped over before disappearing into the winch house. Near the foot of the derrick was the main entrance shaft itself. A thick metal pipe ran out of the mine into another building close by that contained a couple of rusting water pumps. Flooding had apparently been a problem at the mine’s lower depths and the water had had to be pumped out twenty-four hours a day.