Criss Cross

Chapter 35

I’d heard of doomsday preppers going to extremes so they’d be ready to meet the coming apocalypse. People spent minor fortunes on food, fuel, and crop seeds to be used to eke out a life after Communists or zombies or whatever future plague they expected had laid waste to society.

But according to the dossier Mahoney had shared with us, few of them had spent as much on their preparations as Dwight Rivers had. He’d apparently made big money in the sale of TRUAX, a global security firm that had been founded by a group of seasoned ex-military men and women. He’d been the company’s business brain.

Based on FBI interviews with local machine operators and builders, on UPS and FedEx delivery records, and on multiple eyewitness accounts, Rivers had gone on a mind-boggling spending spree from the moment he bought the estate. During the first two years, he’d overseen the excavation and placement of the subterranean container cars and the construction of the upper anthill. The third year, a steady parade of contractors, electricians, and plumbers had finished the interior.

That’s when the supplies started rolling in, enough for Rivers and a small army to survive for a long time after the apocalypse. He had three thousand-gallon gasoline tanks buried in the field near the anthill, and the solar panels fed big battery banks somewhere inside it.

All of this had gone on below the FBI’s radar initially. Then Rivers began buying assault rifles, scores of them. He filled an underground armory with the weapons and enough ammunition to defend himself for a long, long time. But even that did not catch the federal government’s attention.

That happened when Rivers’s name came up in the course of a joint FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms investigation into a ring of former soldiers and mercenaries selling contraband weapons, including grenades, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, and claymore mines.

When BATF and FBI agents interviewed Rivers, he denied knowing anything about those kinds of weapons. When they’d asked to inspect the anthill, however, he’d refused, citing his constitutional rights.

Without cause, the Feds could do nothing but wait for Rivers to make a mistake. And Sampson, Mahoney, and I couldn’t do much but survey the area with a drone.

Mahoney saw no activity inside the property and turned the drone around. I scanned the rest of the dossier. A few facts caught my attention.

Rivers had been divorced twice. The records of those proceedings were sealed, but FBI agents had contacted his ex-wives. They said he had a violent streak and that he liked to read about and pontificate on big murder cases, especially those involving serial killers.

His ex-wives said that he often made fun of police, said most of them were idiots who could be manipulated and fooled by a clever criminal.

Rivers had come to the attention of law enforcement prior to the weapons investigation only twice, both times for accusations of sexual assault. The victims said Rivers had drugged and raped them. But tests were inconclusive, and the multimillionaire denied everything, even provided alibis for his whereabouts during the alleged assaults.

Rivers was in his late forties when he bought the estate, and he had spent much of his time there with a steady string of younger girlfriends. One of them, Cora James, twenty-seven, had spoken to an FBI agent.

She said Rivers was a manic-depressive who could be charming and brilliant one moment and vicious and paranoid the next. He was also ultra-secretive, especially about the anthill.

“It gave me the creeps how he’d go out there from the house,” she’d said. “Like, okay, it could have been just like Dwight said, a place to be safe if things got out of control. But I couldn’t help thinking that it could have been a prison, you know?”

When asked why she would say that, Cora James said she had gone down by the anthill one night when Rivers was inside. There were air vents in the side of the bunker.

“I thought I heard a woman crying in there,” she said.

James said she became frightened and confronted Rivers about it. He’d laughed and said she’d heard the squealing of a dumbwaiter he’d installed.

He’d even volunteered to take her on a tour of the bunker, but something about his body language had made her uneasy, and she’d declined. Rivers tried to monitor and restrict her movements after that.

“I waited until he went to town for groceries a couple of days later, and then I got the heck out of there on foot,” she’d told her interviewer.

The drone landed and Mahoney picked it up and took it back to his vehicle.

I closed the file and stared off into the distance.

“What are you thinking, Alex?” Sampson asked.

I struggled a moment, then said, “If Rawlins’s algorithm is right, if Dwight Rivers is M, then I would love to see exactly what he’s got going on inside of his anthill.”