Zero Option

3

On Monday morning, Carson stood in the baggage-claim area of Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. He closed his eyes and commanded-his tumbling stomach to be still. This is getting scary, he thought. Really scary. Should have quit when I was ahead. Should have gone and put the real cylinder into the derail machine after Lambry had been … Jesus, what was the word for that? Even though Lambry had tried to shake him down. Dumb son of a bitch!

The area was only moderately crowded. Carson was standing between Delta carousels five and six, trying not to attract attention while he waited for the Washington hotshot — correction, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service investigator. Outwardly, he was trying like hell to look calm and collected. Inwardly, his stomach was doing flip-flops.

A cold sweat permeated the back of his undershirt, and his eyes felt sandy from lack of sleep.

He was very conscious of all the security people in the airport. He wondered when one of them was going to detect his nervousness and come over to ask him why he was just standing around here. Waiting for someone, Officer. Plane must have been delayed. That happens, right? But he sensed he was exuding fear, the kind of fear that tickles a cop’s intuition. He’d just about recovered from the horror of Friday night when the call came through first thing this morning from the Defense Logistics Agency headquarters in Washington. A DCIS investigator was inbound to Atlanta at eleven this morning. “D, on’t know exactly what it’s about, but we want you personally to meet him at Hartsfield,” he was told. “He’s to’ be given every cooperation. Call us immediately when you find out why he’s there. Oh, and have a great day, Mr. Carson.”

Now of all times. And just two days after Lambry had … disappeared. He wiped some perspiration off his forehead with the back of his hand. Hot in here, he thought. Was that airport security guy staring at him? He turned away, trying to make the movement casual.

It can’t be about the cylinder, he told himself again. It just can’t be.

There is no way in hell anyone in the DLA could know about that. The fear rose in his throat, a poisonous upwelling of warm bile. Despite his every effort, his heart began to pound again. His face felt flushed. If not the cylinder, then maybe Lambry? Not possible, he thought. Much too soon. He squeezed his eyes shut to make the images go away, but they came anyway, as they had all weekend. Even his wife, Maude, had noticed, and these days, Maude was oblivious to just about everything.

As much as Bud Lambry had pissed him off, he had never meant for anything so god-awful to happen. He looked around the claim area again, trying to focus on something, anything, to erase the memory, but it wasn’t working. He remembered every bloody detail.

“Are you all right, sir?” someone asked from a few feet away. He nearly jumped out of his skin. A handsome woman with a teenage girl at her side was giving him an anxious look. The girl, he noticed, was giving him an altogether-different look. She had dark eyes, and she was staring at him from behind the woman’s arm with an expression of unmistakable horror.

As if she had somehow witnessed what he had just remembered.

He found his voice somewhere back there in his constricted throat.

“Yes, I’m … fine. I have … a really bad headache, that’s all.”

The woman nodded sympathetically. He looked away, scanning the neon numbers on the flight board above the carousel, and then noticing the crowd of people grabbing for bags. He looked anywhere but at the woman and that girl. He realized with a start that the DCIS guy’s flight number was flashing on the board. He glanced around for someone who might be a senior investigator, looking everywhere, desperate to think about something else, to sweep aside the terrible image of Lambry’s skull vibrating like the heel of a loaf of bread in an electric slicing machine. An accident, he told himself again, not supposed to happen, not like that, certainly not like that.

And all because of the cylinder.

He swallowed hard again and concentrated on spotting the DCIS man, but no one looked the part. There were the obvious businessmen chatting on cell phones while they waited for their bags. There were three beefy young men muscling sunburned forearms into the hobbling train of bags on the carousel, hoisting out golf bags, but there was no one who looked like a Washington guy. They had a look, those Washington people.

He tried to compose himself, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw that damned girl still staring at him. He turned his back on her and tried not to think about Lambry or the cylinder, but the image of it bloomed in his mind anyway: a stainless-steel cylinder bearing all those seals and warning labels. The treasure of treasures that sharp eyed Bud Lambry had pulled out of the shipment of supposedly empty weapons containers from Utah.

He tried thinking about the money: A million dollars. Cash. He visualized a small mountain of money. He remembered the phone call to Tangent, his contact in Washington. “I’ve got what looks like the guts of a chemical weapon. Are you interested?” Tangent had asked him to read off the nomenclature printed on the side of the container and then hung up. The offer had come back five minutes later: a million in cash.

Delivery instructions to follow. But it was going to have to be soon.

Very soon.

And what is Tangent going to do with the cylinder? Not my business, Carson thought quickly. In fact, he fervently did not want to know. But of course he did know. Tangent was going to sell it into the international arms market. An image of what had happened on that Tokyo subway flashed through his mind, all those crumpled red faced bodies, throngs of dazed commuters desperately clutching their throats, eyes streaming as their carbonized lungs fought to draw breath; dozens of spastic figures on the ground, surrounded by dozens of helpless cops.

There, was that the guy? No. Well, maybe. And then he had another thought: What if this cop guy is here about the other thing? The auction scam? He felt his heart begin to pound again. Not now, he thought. Jesus Christ, not now. He stared hard at the man heading for carousel five.

Get a grip, he cautioned himself. The cylinder is your ticket to ride.

With that much money, you get a whole new life. This is what you’ve been waiting for and stealing for all your life.

A man who might be the DCIS investigator was definitely coming toward him now. He was wearing a good suit, had a muscular build, and was carrying a large briefcase in his left hand. His right hand was stuck awkwardly down in the pocket of his coat jacket, as if maybe he had been injured. He had a dead-serious cop face on him.

That’s him, Carson thought. Senior Investigator David Stafford, looking right at him, and not necessarily in a very friendly way, either. Carson glanced around involuntarily, wondering if he was sweating visibly, and half-expecting to see a phalanx of uniforms closing in on him, but there was only the crowd milling around the carousels. And that damned girl.

Still watching him.

Look away, he thought.

Can’t look away.

He stared back at her, unable’ to disengage those dark eyes fastened on his like little lasers, and then, suddenly, despite himself, he saw once again the top of Bud Lam bry’s head disintegrating in a cascade of cooling oil and bright red blood, all to protect the deadly secret of the cylinder, gleaming now in his mind’s eye like some alien artifact, suspended in the air between himself and the girl. He tried to tear his eyes away from hers, to see where that agent was, but then his vision tunneled down until all he could see was the cylinder, and beyond that, the girl’s pupils glittering at him, boring into his brain; and then he heard a roaring noise in his ears and found himself immersed in a sudden wet darkness.

Stafford swore out loud, startling the people around him. He had spotted Wendell Carson just as soon as he’d come into the baggage-claim area.

The Atlanta DRMO manager’s ID picture and a brief bio had been in the case file he had studied on the airplane. Fifty-five-year-old white male, five-eight, receding hairline, roundish face, glasses, paunchier than his file photo. Stafford had been about twenty feet away when he saw Carson lock eyes with a teenage girl standing near the baggage carousel, then saw him collapse like a sack of potatoes onto the floor, all in the space of about two seconds. Some of the people standing near him were backing away while others moved in to help.

Stafford pushed his way through the crowd to see what the hell had happened. By the time he got to Carson, a striking black-baked woman had her arm around Carson’s shoulder and was helping him to sit up. The teenager was standing a few feet back from Carson, still staring down at him, an expression of either extreme distaste or fear on her pinched face. Now what the hell is this all about? Stafford wondered as he knelt down on one knee and put his left hand on Carson’s right shoulder.

Carson’s head was up, but he looked dazed as he pushed his glasses back on his face.:-. “Wendell Carson? I’m David Stafford. Can you hear me?

Are you okay?”

“He didn’t look well a moment ago,” the woman offered, speaking over Carson’s head. Stafford had a quick impression of bright green eyes, a milky white complexion, and almost blue-black hair. “He said he had a bad headache.”

Stafford started to reply, but Carson was trying to stand up. “Okay,” he was mumbling. “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy there. Not sure …”

Two black men in suits arrived at that moment and helped Carson to get back up. One was looking Carson over while the other spoke into a small handheld radio. The woman and the teenager began to back away.

“Do you need medical attention, sir?” the first security man asked.

Carson shook his head. “No, I’m okay. Just got dizzy. Hot in here.”

Stafford showed the cop his DCIS credentials. “Mr. Carson was here to meet me,” he explained. “I’ll stay with him. I don’t think we’ll need paramedics.”

The security men backed off, and Stafford helped Carson over to one of the benches near the line of baggage carousels. Carson sat down heavily, then put his head in his hands for a moment. Eventually, he looked back up. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Had a touch of the flu the past couple of days. Must not be over it. Are you Stafford?”

Stafford nodded. “Right,” he replied. “Dave Stafford. DCIS Washington.

If you’re okay, let me go get my bag. You stay here and rest a minute.”

Stafford left his briefcase with Carson before walking back into the crowd by the baggage carousel to look for his suitcase. He. kept an eye on Carson, who looked like someone who had just been seasick, all pasty-faced and with shaking hands. The woman and the girl walked by him just then, each pulling a suitcase. The woman gave him a quick look of recognition but kept going. The girl stared straight ahead as she struggled with what appeared to be a very heavy suitcase. There was a sticker on the side of her suitcase that proclaimed graniteville, georgia, an all-american town. On impulse, Stafford called after the woman. She stopped, a look of mild apprehension on her face. He checked to make sure that Carson couldn’t see them talking.

“I’m David Stafford,” he said, flashing his credentials. “I’m a federal investigator. Do you know that man who fainted back there?” “No,” she said immediately, looking around for the girl in the crowd.

The girl had kept going for a moment, but now she had stopped a few feet away and was looking back in their direction.

“Does your daughter there know him, by chance?”

The woman frowned. She was almost as tall as he was. Her luminous eyes flashed a hint of impatience. “She’s not my daughter, and, no, she does not know him. Please, we must go.” Her voice was husky and had a hint of a southern accent.

Stafford was almost positive that Carson and the girl had been staring at each other just before Carson fainted. “It’s just that—” he began.

“Well, look, ma’am, here’s my card, in case you think of some reason why that happened back there. Will you call me if you do? It might be important.”

She took the card, frowned at it for a moment, and then closed her hand over it. He noticed she wore no rings or jewelry of any sort. Her hands and fingers were long, with the same smooth complexion of her face. She was his age — maybe a year or so either way.

“Thank you,” he said before she could come up with a reason to hand back his card. He turned back toward the baggage carousel, watching them out of the corner of his eye as they made their way to the exit doors and stopped to have their claim tags checked. The girl glanced back once in his direction, but the woman took her arm and propelled her out of the baggage claim area. That’s an unusual-looking woman, he thought, and there’s something very strange about that girl. He thought again about what he had seen just before Carson collapsed, but then he noticed his bag coming around the carousel and, for the moment, put the two of them out of his mind.

Carson had recovered, at least outwardly, by the time he swung the government sedan in alongside the curb outside. He had had a shaky five minutes there on the bench while Stafford went for his bag. It was bad enough to have a Defense Department cop showing up like this on short notice, but to faint dead away in a public place? Jesus, what was happening to him? He shook his head as his heart started to race again.

He tried deep breathing to calm himself down. Then he saw Stafford coming toward the car.

Stafford opened the back door with his left hand, struggled to get his bags in, and then climbed in front with Carson.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Stafford asked. “You want, I can drive, and you can navigate.”

“Thanks, but I’m okay. You hurt your arm?”

“Yeah, gunshot,” Stafford replied. “Took out some nerves. Most of the time it sort of just hangs there. I’m doing physical therapy, but it’s slow going. By the way, who was that girl? Was that someone you knew?”

Carson thought fast. “What girl was that?” he said, making a show of concentrating on traffic.

“I was on the other side of the carousel when you keeled over. I thought you and that girl standing near you were looking at each other.”

Carson made a left at the end of the overpass and accelerated into the eastbound lanes of the Atlanta Perimeter. “It was pretty crowded in there,” he said. “I don’t remember any girl, or anybody else, for that matter. I was just standing there, waiting for you, then woke up on the floor. Probably forgot to breathe or something. Like I said, I haven’t been feeling well the past couple of days.”

Stafford nodded absently, seeming to accept Carson’s explanation. “Her bag had a sticker on itsomething about Graniteville. I thought maybe you knew her.”

“Nope.” Carson concentrated on his driving, desperately willing Stafford to get off the subject of the girl.

“Where is the Atlanta DRMO?” Stafford asked.

“Aren’t they usually on a base of some kind?”

“That’s right, although Fort Gillem isn’t really a base. It’s a small Army post. A lot of it is shut down. Kind of a hodgepodge of stuff there now: the local Army bomb squad, several Army transport repair shops, an Army-Air Force Exchange Service distribution center. That kind of stuff.

Army’s trying to hang on to it. Developers are drooling over the fence while they work out which congressman to bribe.”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” Stafford replied as they crossed over 1-75.

“How big is the Atlanta DRMQ?”

“Forty employees, ten warehouses. We move maybe twenty, thirty million dollars worth of material a year through the reutilization and public auction process. Are you familiar with the DRMO system?”

“Barely,” Stafford said.

Carson thought, If Stafford is down here on a DLA matter, surely he has been briefed. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “Isn’t there a DCIS office right here in Atlanta?” he asked. He already knew the answer.

He’d looked it up in the DOD phone book when the call from Washington had come through.

“Yes, there is,” Stafford answered, still looking out the window. Carson took the State Road 42 exit and continued east, driving through wall-to-wall trucking terminals. “Look, I’ll give you a full brief once I see your DRMO. That way, you can answer my questions untainted by knowing why I’m down here.” Carson said okay and continued the rest of the drive in silence.

Untainted. Right. Bastard knows I’m dying of curiosity. But to be safe, he knew he’d better play it Stafford’s way until he had some idea of what this was all about. Please, God, not the cylinder. And damn that business at the airport! Graniteville — maybe I need to remember that name.

They drove through the unguarded entrance gates of Fort Gillem, then went about two miles through the post to the edge of what looked like an abandoned airfield, where they turned left into a warehouse complex. The buildings had been there a long time and showed their age. They parked next to a railroad siding, where a dozen rail cars carrying truck trailers were parked. An elderly yard engine sat rumbling by itself on a second siding, gracing the air with dirty diesel exhaust. In front of them was a single-story brick building. A sign above the door proclaimed it the home of the Atlanta Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office.

Behind the brick building was a warehouse complex. Carson took Stafford to his office in the administrative area. The first thing Stafford asked for was a vehicle. Carson told one of the secretaries to requisition a sedan from the base motor pool. Carson offered coffee, but Stafford declined. The investigator stood by the window for a moment, looking out at the rail sidings. Carson confirmed his initial physical impression: medium-big guy, big shoulders, good suit, large, purposeful-looking hands — or one of them was, anyway — short military-style haircut. He wondered if DCIS investigators carried guns.

“Okay,” Stafford said, turning around. “I know this is short notice and somewhat mysterious. But here’s what I need first: a tour of this place.

Conducted by you, if you can spare the time.”

As if I have a choice, Carson thought. “Sure,” he said.

“Second, I’d prefer that the staff not know who I am, or, more specifically, what I am.”

He had dark blue eyes, a faintly ruddy Nordic face, and a prominent chin. He looked right at you. Carson was determined to meet Stafford’s eyes. He willed all thoughts of the cylinder — which was hidden, at the moment, all of eight feet away — right out of his mind.

“Once we’ve done the walkabout,” Stafford continued, “I’ll need to make a couple of calls, then maybe we can go to lunch somewhere and I’ll fill you in. Right now I suggest you tell people I’m from DLA headquarters, which, in a sense, is true. Maybe say I’m an auditor. And if there’s a spare empty office, I’d appreciate being able to camp out there.”

Every cooperation, DLA had ordered. Carson nodded, punched the intercom, and told the secretary that he would be taking Mr. Stafford out into the material bays for about an hour. He asked her to set up the assistant manager’s office, which was empty, for Mr. Stafford’s use. She asked whose name she should put on the sedan requisition, since Carson already had a Fort Gillem motor-pool vehicle. Carson told her that Stafford was an auditor from DLA headquarters. She needed Stafford’s grade, and Carson raised his eyebrows at Stafford.

“Fifteen” was the reply. Carson passed that to the secretary.

OS-Fifteen, Carson thought. Three grades senior to him. He knew all about grade creep in Washington, but this guy was no midlevel gumshoe.

He felt the familiar grab in his stomach, but he suppressed it with a deep breath. There was no way they could know.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s walk around a bit.”

When they stepped into the cavernous warehouse, Stafford was glad he had kept his coat on; it was almost cold. The injured tendons in his right arm duly protested.

“Okay,” Carson began. “DRMO stands for Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office. Basically what we do here is collect all sorts of stuff from a variety of organizations in the Defense Department.

Technically, surplus defense material, but the word stuff really covers it better. The material is anything the Defense Department no longer needs — surplus raw materials, obsolete repair parts, broken equipment components, or even the equipment itself, office furniture, general supplies. Anything that a DOD agency or military service deems surplus to its operations is supposed to end up in a DRMO.”

“Where you guys auction it off, right?”

“Well, not initially. Remember the R in DRMO. It stands for reutilization. The first thing we do after initial classification is to advertise in-house to all the government agencies what we’ve got here.

“Government’ includes both federal and state agencies, by the way. That way, for example, if an agency is looking for some replacement desks, or maybe a window air conditioner, they can come to the DRMO and see if we have one. They can then requisition it, and get it basically at no cost.

Saves the agency money, and the stuff gets recycled.”

“I had a surplused desk in the Pentagon once,” Stafforrj said. “But as I recall, it was brand-new.”

“That happens,” Carson replied. “The surplused material doesn’t have to be worn-out or even used to come here, although it usually is. It might be a case where an agency buys ten new desks but then loses a fight over office space with another organization, so they can only use eight of them. We’d get two brand-new desks to put out for reutilization. But most of the stuff that comes here of that nature, especially office furniture, is very used and pretty dilapidated, as you’re going to see.”

Two warehouse workers came by on a forklift, forcing Carson to wait for a moment for the noise to subside. Stafford noticed that they didn’t wave to Carson or greet him, which he thought was odd. Workers in a forty-man organization would normally at least acknowledge the boss. On the other hand, Wendell Carson was about as plain vanilla a civil servant as one could find, almost a caricature of a government bean counter.

“The important items, monetarily,” Carson was saying, “are the material that comes in designated to go through the demil process. Demil is short for demilitarization. I guess I need to back up a little. When material first comes in, it has to be classified. Some is going to go directly to the general public auctions: building supplies, pipe, wire, bricks, lumber, cans of roofing tar, barrels of lubricating oil, things like that. But some of it’s fully serviceable military equipment.

Obsolete maybe, but functional. Things like tank gun sights, machine-gun barrels, radar components, fire-control computers, components that’ve been re placed by a new weapons system acquisition but which still work or could be made to work.”

“Who classifies it?” Stafford asked. His arm was aching and he was ready to start walking.

“The organization that sends it down to us is supposed to classify it.

But we are supposed to double-check it. Especially after that helicopter gunship flap in Texas — remember that?”

Stafford did remember. Some guys in Texas had been able to buy enough helicopter parts at a DRMO public auction to reassemble completely a fully operational Army attack helicopter. The press had had a field day with it.

“So anyway, if it comes with a demil tag, or if we determine that it should be demilitarized, we have a separate facility that handles that.

We’ll see that after we see some more warehouses.”

They started walking. The first warehouse was filled with steel racks that went from floor to ceiling. On them was every kind of thing the government bought. Stuff, Stafford thought. Stuff was exactly the right word.

“This is one of the public auction areas,” Carson said. “This material has been through initial categorization and the reutilization process.”

Stafford was amazed at the variety: typewriters, coils of wire, boxes of bolts, ancient computers, adding machines, mattresses, chairs, rolls of printing paper, black-and-white televisions, a box of fluorescent lightbulbs, some of which looked used, new and used airplane tires, and a military vehicle’s olive drab fueling hose.

“This is the junk man, flea market end of the spectrum,” Carson said as they walked down an aisle between the racks. “It’s been available for viewing for five days, and the public auction will be held Tuesday.” He looked at his watch. “I guess that’s tomorrow. The bigger items are outside in the lay-down area.”

“And the high-value military components?”

“That begins in the next warehouse. In a way, the DRMO is set up as an assembly line. Material comes in all the time, sometimes by the freight-car load. Goes into the receiving and general storage area for cataloging and classification. High-value, serviceable, but nondemil material goes into warehouses one and two.

Large, high-value components that have to be derailed go to warehouse five, which is attached to the demil facility. Intrinsically lethal, or HAZMAT, demil materials go to warehouse four, which is right next to five. The warehouses have different levels of security depending on what’s in them. TV cameras, that sort of thing.”

” ‘Intrinsically lethal’? ‘HAZMAT’?”

“Hazardous materials — cannons, denatured ordnance, drums of toxic chemicals or chemical waste, missile front ends, bomb cases, rocket bodies. Weapons, primarily. The military service generating the surplus takes the high explosives out, but then we get the iron.”

They walked out of the warehouse and into the bright sunlight of the lay-down area. Carson seized the opportunity to light a cigarette. He offered one to Stafford, who shook his head.

“Thanks. Quit five years ago.” Stafford thought he saw Carson’s hands shaking. “What on earth can you do with bombs and rockets?” he asked.

“Bomb and rocket casings, remember. Not supposed to hold nigh explosives. They become monster feed.”

” ‘Monster feed’?”

Carson grinned through a cloud of blue smoke. “Show you in a bit.

Basically, we cut them up in the demil facility. Turn ‘em into shredded metal and various liquid products, and then auction off the by-products to scrap dealers. This here is the general lay-down area. Mostly just bigger stuff.”

Stafford looked, wishing he’d brought his sunglasses. There were long rows of palletized material, containing such things as industrial-size drill presses and lathes, a clutch of old refrigerators, a firefighting vehicle from a military airfield, skip boxes of scrap metal, industrial air conditioning units, several rusty-looking water heaters, and mounds of used truck tires.

“Bigger stuff,” Stafford said. He really was interested in the high-value components, but he was satisfied to let Carson to do his thing.

“That’s right. This is more of the general auction inventory. That’s warehouse two over there; number one’s right behind it. They contain the small, high-value items. The hundred-thousand-dollar radar amplifier tubes that happen to be obsolete, by military standards.”

“Who buys those?”

“Usually the FAA. They’re still using a lot of old, tube driven radars.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

Carson nodded as they walked across the lay-down area. Stafford realized they were crossing tarmac and wondered if this area had been part of the abandoned airfield. There were forklifts chugging around the area, moving pallets in and out of the warehouses, which were arranged in two lines on either side. He asked Carson about it.

“This area used to be the main hangar and maintenance facility for an Army helicopter base. It was shut down a long time ago, before I got here. They knocked down most of the actual hangars except for one. That contains the demil facility. That one, over there.”

They changed course slightly to avoid a backing forklift and headed toward the ex-hangar building. One warehouse in the line backed right up to the hangar building. Stafford could hear a loud tearing noise from inside. Carson stopped about fifty feet from the doorway.

“Normally, we run demil in the evening, but there’s a backlog. Demil is a hazardous industrial area. We’ll pick up hearing protection, hard hats, and safety glasses in the vestibule inside that doorway. Then we’ll sign in.”

“What’s the noise?” Stafford asked. v “The Monster,” Carson said.

“Basically, it’s a really big shredding machine. The process starts with seven diamond-tipped saw blades, followed by a bank of chipping hammers, then a grinder. Turns anything that goes in there into fragments.

“Monster feed,’ the guys call it. Then there’s a bank of electromagnets to separate ferrous material from nonferrous, an acid bath to dissolve electronics insulation, a centrifuge for separating the liquid products, and some further screen separators. At the very end are collection modules for the resulting scrap, and those streams are led to compactors. This is the place where those rocket and bomb casings come, as well as any classified design stuff, like military radar klystrons, antenna arrays, things like that.”

“Take a big crew to run it?”

“Nope. Takes three, four guys to set up the run — that whole warehouse back there houses the feed-assembly system. But once the belt starts, it takes one guy to sit in the control room and basically watch. The machine chews up anything — metal, wood, plastic, organic substances.

Liquids are separated, filtered, centrifuged, broken down with acids, centrifuged again to separate water from organic liquids, and then pumped to the toxic-waste tanks for settling and further processing.

Anything solid and nonmetallic is consumed in the acid wash, and anything that survived that is compressed into blocks of scrap metal for, sale to the metal merchants, who in turn sell the blocks as feedstock for steel or aluminum reprocessing. When the run’s done, another crew empties the compaction modules, usually the next morning.

Let’s go on in.”

Carson pushed a call button by the door, which clicked, allowing them into a vestibule area. Even in the vestibule, the noise level was very high, and Stafford reached gratefully for the ear” protectors. They signed the access log, although Stafford noticed that there was no one in the vestibule to supervise access. He assumed the operator’s control of the door took care of that.

Carson led the way through the next set of doors and into a large industrial bay where a huge locomotive-sized steel machine hunkered down on the concrete floor. The top of the machine reached almost all the way to the ceiling girders of the hangar, some sixty feet up. The bulk of it measured about eighty feet long and twenty wide. A I five-foot-wide conveyor belt emerged from safety-caged double doors on the left side of the bay. It was traveling at about waist height, carrying plastic boxes filled with all sorts of military equipment. The belt approached the’ maw of the machine from left to right, then folded under itself and returned back into the feed-assembly warehouse. There was a glass-enclosed control booth to one side of the room, where an ear-muffed operator was visible at a console.

Carson led Stafford over toward the opening of the de mil machine. There were safety screens and yellow hazard markings on the floor all along the route of the conveyor belt. The business end of the machine was impressive. Several wicked-looking band-saw blades came down vertically across the five-foot square of the machine’s mouth. The blades appeared to be about ten inches wide, spaced about an inch apart, and bathed in silky sheets of cooling oil. Anything hitting the blades was immediately engaged and cut into segments in a fiery shower of sparks and smoke from the rending metal. The process produced a hideous tearing sound. A large hood above the entry gobbled up all the smoke and metal vapors. The other components of the maceration process were apparently contained out of sight within the machine. Behind and below was a complex nest of large pipes coiled under and around its foundations, leading to large boxlike components marked MAGNETIC SEPARATION, AIR FILTRATION, PARTICULATE SCRUBBER, and NEUTRALIZING SCRUBBER. Three enclosed conveyor systems led into the next building, where, Stafford assumed, the resulting rubble was compacted or contained for movement to the auction warehouses.

It was clearly impossible to hold a conversation in the presence of such noise, so Stafford indicated he’d seen enough and they went back out into the vestibule. Three men were there looking at clipboards and discussing the current run. This time the workers nodded at Carson, but their greetings appeared to be entirely official. Stafford noticed that Carson returned their greetings in similar fashion. No love lost between the DRMO boss and his employees here, he thought, confirming his earlier impression. They went back outside to the relative quiettof the tarmac.

For some reason, Carson looked relieved to be out of the building. He lit up another cigarette. Stafford confirmed that Carson’s hands were definitely shaking.

“You can see why they call it ‘the Monster,’ ” Carson said. “It cost eleven million dollars, but it does the job. You get a compacted mixture of very clean metallic dust and bits out the back end, and a variety of fluids. That building over there is devoted to fluid separation, detox, and recovery. We sell the output of that, too. The employees call that “Monster piss,’ naturally. There’s a plan to put up a generating system where we’ll burn the volatile xproducts and make our own electricity.

There’s nothing in the fluid-processing area but a control room and a few miles of piping systems, but we can go see it if you’d like.”

“That’s okay,” Stafford said, still assimilating the idea of Monster piss. “Does every DRMO have one of these derail machines?”

“No, which is why we tend to get a lot of the military equipment that’s still serviceable.” Stafford nodded. “Right,” he said. “What’s in the rest of the warehouses?”

“More stuff,” Carson replied. “If the trucks stopped coming today, we’d have a six-month workload here.”

“Okay, thanks for the tour. Let’s go get something to eat, and I’ll ten you what this is all about.” Sort of, he reminded himself silently.

They took their sandwiches to a table at the back of the officers club’s tiny dining room. Carson noticed that Stafford was pretty adept with his one good arm.

“As I said, most of Fort Gillem is in cadre status,” he explained.

“That’s Army speak for being shut down and tffc waiting hopefully for the next war.” He was trying hard not to appear anxious. There is no way they could know about the cylinder, he kept telling himself. That just happened. Or about Lambry. No way in hell.

Keep cool. Show him that you’re interested in why he’s here, but that, whatever it is, it does not affect you personally.

Stafford had started in on his sandwich, eating it awkwardly with one hand. Carson waited for a moment and then did the same, although he had still not recovered his appetite after Friday night. The big man across the table was obviously hungry and dedicated to doing something about it. The dining room was almost empty, with only a few other civil servants gossiping about the latest base c!6sings and layoffs in the Defense Department.

Stafford finished his sandwich quickly, keeping his right hand out of sight below the table. “Okay,” he said, wiping his mouth with a clutch of paper napkins. “You know the difference between the DIS and the DCIS?”

“Uh—” -

Stafford cut him off. “DIS, the Defense Investigative Service, does security clearance background checks on military and civilian employees,of the Department of Defense. The DOS, that’s the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, investigates cases of fraud against the government. One’s admin, one’s criminal work. I’m a senior investigator with the DCIS. The Defense Logistics Agency, which owns all the DRMOs, called us with a problem. They think someone has been rigging the auctions.”

Shit, Carson thought. It is the auction scam. He forced his face into an expression of mild surprise. “Rigging the auctions?” he said. “I’m surprised. You saw that stuff. What’s to rig?”

Stafford gave him a cool look. “Actually, I didn’t. Not the stuff we’re talking about here. I saw the bedpans and pipe-rack stuff. The DLA is talking about the high-priced items. Avionics components. Electronic repair parts. Non demil but high-value radar and communication equipment. Satellite transponders. The gold foil in magnetron power amplifiers. Not materials that’re hazardous, but items that have value in a secondary market. Like those radar components the FA A depends on.”

Carson was suddenly paying close attention. Stafford’s casual use of the word nondemil indicated he might know more about the DRMO business than he had let on. He put the remains of his own sandwich down and wiped his hands, trying not to look at Stafford. He had been wondering when this day would come ever since he had taken over the scam. He would have to very careful here.

“The auction process is pretty straightforward,” Carson said. “I don’t know how it could be rigged. I mean, it’s a regular call auction. The bids are called right there on the floor. If the auctioneer gave it to someone else, the rest of the bidders would protest.”

“DLA thinks this scam has been going on in the sealed bid system,” Stafford said, still looking at him.

“But who would gain from that?” Carson responded, shaking his head. ‘ “Maybe way back when, but the way it works now, if there is a sealed bid, the auctioneer starts with that bid amount. If he gets no takers from the floor, then by definition, that’s the winning bid.”

Stafford nodded patiently. “Way I understand it,” he said, “DLA thinks the scam comes after that. They think the so-called winning bid is altered, after the fact, by someone inside the process, so that the winning bidder doesn’t pay what he said he would. That way he gets a really good deal. Anyhow, that’s the theory. That’s what I’ve come down here for. I want to make a reality check. I want to do an audit on the paper trail of some high-value, nondemil stuff that’s been to auction. I want to know what was sold, to whom, and how much the winning bid was supposed to be, and then I want to see proof that that’s what the guy paid for it.”

Carson nodded slowly, keeping his expression neutral as he asked the all-important question. “Why the Atlanta DRMO, specifically?”

Stafford seemed to have an answer ready for that one.

“Because you’re one of the bigger ones, with a good-sized monetary volume. And you get a large spectrum of surplus stuff coming from the whole Southeast.” Then he smiled disarmingly. “And because I’ve never been to Atlanta.”

Carson managed a laugh at that. To a civil servant, the last reason rang true. He thought about it for a minute. DLA was getting close. There certainly was a scam running, but they were not quite correct about how it worked. But if this was all that Stafford pulled the string on, there were enough cutouts in place to keep Carson reasonably safe. On the auction scam, anyway. The cylinder was something else. Not to mention the little matter of Lam bry’s death.

“Not a problem,” Carson said. “Although it might be tough to get the proof on how much the winning bidders actually paid, because they don’t pay us. They do for the “flea-market stuff, but for the high-value items, they pay the local Defense Contracts Administrations Office.

You’ll have to talk to them and the people who actually bought the stuff.” He shook his head. “But given that outside loop, I’m still not sure how anyone could scam the system. Or why. What kicked this off?”

Stafford finished his coffee. “To tell the truth, I’m not sure what it was. They often don’t tell the field investigator, because they want us to look at a problem with a clear filter. If I knew what alerted DLA, I might restrict my investigation to just that and miss a bigger picture.

You know, go out and try to prove them right. This way, I take a fresh look at the process, and see if all the numbers jibe. If they do, I go home. If they don’t, we’ll either work it or call in the FBI.”

Carson nodded again. The FBI. The last thing he needed right now was that bunch of anals poking around the DRMO. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go see if that car’s ready. Then we’ll find you a hotel. You want to stay out here in the sticks or go downtown?”

At five-thirty that afternoon, Carson closed up his office. After they left the officers club, he’d taken Stafford back — to the admin building, where the secretary had his temporary office ready. There’d been the usual hassle about the car, but eventually the motor pool turned loose a General Services Administration Crown Vie.

Stafford had elected to stay in downtown Atlanta at the Peach tree Center. Carson had his secretary dump binders of the relevant. rules and procedures for DRMO sales on Stafford’s desk, along with the auction reports for the past six months and a personnel roster. Stafford had left at three-thirty to check in at his hotel, and he said he’d be back at eight-thirty the next morning. An hour later, the rest of the staff had left for the day, Demil’s backload had been cleared, so there I was no evening shift. The Monster was quiet. Digesting, no doubt.

Carson lit up a cigarette and walked through the suite of offices and cubicles to make sure everyone was gone. He checked Stafford’s office, but there was nothing there, except the reports and binders. He turned off the overhead lights and walked back down the hall. There were two sets of windows in his office, one that looked out at the parking lot by the railroad siding, the other that looked into the flea-market warehouse. He opened the elderly Venetian blinds and peered into the semidarkness of the warehouse.

Wendell Carson had grown up poor in New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman with a drinking problem. His mother had been a waitress, and there had been three unhappy children stuffed into one room of a dingy, crowded. ‘ apartment in beautiful downtown Newark. From his early teenage years on, he had dreamed of escape, and he joined the Army in 1960, on the day after he graduated from high school. He went first into the infantry and then, after bribing the company clerk, engineered a lateral transfer into the Quartermasters Corps. He had been smart enough to advance to buck sergeant by 1966. Sensing that Army duty was about to turn serious, he elected to get out just before Vietnam blew up, but not before learning the ropes about petty larceny from some of the older NCOs. He’d used his veteran’s preference to get a civil service job at Fort Bel voir, near Washington, D. C., in the personal property shipping office. After mastering his own job, which took about two weeks, he had begun sniffing around the household goods warehouses, looking for what he knew had to be there — namely, a ring of thieves who pilfered the shipments bound for Army posts all over the world.

Carson was no street thug. He had neither the physique nor the stomach for the physical side of crime. He had always been a paper-pusher, and it was at Belvoir that he first established his strategy for life: Don’t steal anything yourself. The trick was to make the guys who did the actual stealing pay him for top cover, such as protection from the inspectors, adjustments to shipping invoices, prompt payment for the claims that inevitably came back from the military people at the new destination, judicious assignment of work crews to particular shipments, all in return for a piece of the action. It had never been big money, but. it had been steady.

Over the years, he had parlayed his sideline into increasingly larger-scale situations as he moved around from job to job within the organization that eventually became the Defense Logistics Agency, until finally he landed in the central office that administered the sale of surplus defense materials throughout the country. Surplus sales was the mother lode of opportunity for a paper-pusher with the inclination to jigger the system to his own benefit, and Carson had burrowed deep into the system. In 1983, the entire surplus sales auction system was decentralized, forcing him to evaluate which of the several DRMOs around the country might offer the best situation. He had come to Atlanta in 1983, then moved up to the head job eight years later. Tangent had contacted him in 1994, and he had been a reliable buyer. Carson now had almost thirty years in the civil service. He had been ‘Spending a lot of time lately figuring out how and when he was going to retire, and then the cylinder had fallen into his lap.

One million dollars. A life-changer.

He reset the blinds, locked his office door just to be sure, and then went over to his desk to sit down. He stretched his hands out and confirmed that they were still trembling. He thought about Lambry. Was he now a rriurderer? He kept coming back to it: Bud had attacked him, after all, not the other way around. So really, it had been self-defense. Yeah, self-defense necessitated by the fact that the both of you stole something: a million-dollar something. And then there was the dream.

He had begun having the dream Friday night. Something about being swept along in a river at night, together with many other people. Somehow he knew they were all dead. The river was black and cold, and he was having trouble staying afloat because he was carrying the cylinder. They moved downstream in total silence until the rolling thunder of an enormous waterfall became audible. The dream ended with him sailing over the edge, with all those dead faces staring at him as they plunged down into oblivion.

He opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, the same dream. Tonight he was going to take a damn pill.

He got up and walked over to the steel bookcase. He removed two fat binders from the top shelf. He reached through the space to grasp the cylinder with both hands. There was no red plastic tube now, just the heavy stainless steel cylinder, covered with decals and seals bearing dire warnings. He held it in his hands for a moment, caressing it. A million-dollar stainless-steel log. The metal was cold. He put it back.

He’d been in a state as to where to hide it after Bud had brought it to him. At first, he’d thought somewhere out in one of the warehouses, where he, as manager, had unrestricted access. But so did everyone who worked out there, and one of them might find it. He’d then thought about the demil facility, but other than the self-contained Monster, there were no hiding places in that building, no nooks, crannies, or hidey-holes. He’d been afraid to break his ironclad rule about never taking anything physically out of the DRMO complex. He looked up at the gleaming cylinder, noting its steely perfection while trying to put its deadly contents out of his mind. It was as safe here as anywhere in the facility, unless he received an indication that the Army had learned it was missing.

He pulled the binders together and returned to his desk chair. The building was silent except for the sounds of the big vent fans running out in the warehouse. He thought again about that girl in the airport, and the strange way she had looked at him. What had Stafford said?

Granite ville, that was it. He pulled a state map out of his desk and looked that name up in the grid index. B-9. North Georgia mountains.

That figured: The girl had that pinch faced, hillbilly look to her.

Everyone knew that a lot of those people up there were dumber than stumps, so why did Wendell Carson faint in the middle of Baggage Claim, out of a clear blue sky, not having had the flu, as he’d told Stafford?

He could not forget her eyes, locked onto his, or how he had been unable to tear his own eyes away.

He fingered the coordinates on the map, and found it. Graniteville. A tiny dot at the edge of the federal wilderness areas up along the northern border. It had to be one of those depressing little side-of-the-mountain towns, where the children occasionally came with six fingers per hand and not too many branches in their family tree. It wouldn’t be hard to find a girl like that in a small town, but was she even a threat? How could she be? He sat there for a moment, drawing the name Graniteville on his desk blotter and circling it idly with a ballpoint.

He put the map back in the drawer. No, he thought. Wendell Carson’s only problem is this policeman — investigator — whatever he was. Forget about the girl, he told himself. All you have to do is keep Stafford in the dark. Long enough to work out the delivery arrangements, and how you’ll get your money without getting bumped off in the process. Wendell Carson wasn’t a criminal, really, not in the case-hardened, street-tough sense of the word, but he knew that for a million in cash, his normally casual relationship with Tangent might change. And there was the obvious time bind: All of this had to happen before the Army found out the cylinder was gone, assuming they would. Tangent seemed to think they would, and Tangent was a Washington guy.

The scam had evolved to a specific system. He dealt with only one buyer, Tangent, who had a standing wish list consisting of general military material but who occasionally requested specific items. Carson maintained the wish list, instructing his “eyes” down in the warehouses, Bud Lambry, to be on the lookout for the required items, especially in the high-value area. When something on the wish list showed up, Lambry would notify Carson, who would call the client and confirm his interest.

Then Lambry would ensure that the items of interest were put in selected lots for auction. Carson, as manager of the DRMO, would ensure the items did not appear on the reutilization lists. Then Carson would rig the sealed-bid process so that his client “won” the auction, except that he would hold the winning bid until after the auction, reduce it, and then submit it to the contracts people. The client would pay the new “winning” bid. Carson’s fee was a small percentage of the value of the item, based on how much he had saved the client. From the kickback, Carson paid Lambry, in cash.:f-‘:

The key was to do it infrequently, never actually touch anything himself, and keep the money within reasonable bounds. Most of the fraud cases he read about arose because the perpetrators got too greedy. It had been a very nice, quiet, and unobtrusively profitable scam, one that he had planned to work until his retirement — about twenty thousand a year, in cash. He had it stashed in safe-deposit boxes in banks all around Atlanta. If Maude ever discovered it, he would say that he had been dabbling in the stock market and doing pretty well. Once a year, he would tell her that he had a government trip somewhere, to a conference, say, and then take a week’s leave and go to Vegas for some high living.

By limiting the scale and dealing only in cash and with only one buyer, he’d managed to keep the whole thing off the DLA auditors’ radar screens. He smiled as he thought about it. It was just about a perfect little scam.

Only very rarely had he taken operational military equipment from the demil list, because that had to be done practically on the conveyor belt in front of the Monster. From time to time, he had done this though, because he had been able to arrange for Bud Lambry to be the demil operator anytime there was a requirement for an evening shift in the demil facility. The beauty of that was that once something had been certified by the demil assembly crew as having been destroyed, it was virtually untraceable. The only vulnerability he had ever had was with Bud Lambry, ace spotter, and now that vulnerability was dissolving in the nontoxic hydrocarbon holding tank. Carson quickly banished that image.

Lambry’s supervisor had reported him absent this morning, which was not entirely unusual for a Monday. He would have to explain Lambry’s continued absence somehow. With Lambry gone, the problem now was to keep Inspector Stafford in the mushroom mode while Wendell Carson executed the cylinder deal. Either way, he thought, he needed to tell Tangent about Stafford. He pulled out his phone list and looked up the 800 number and dialed it. He got the machine and left the callback message.

He gave a time of one hour from now, which would allow him time to get home. Tangent wouldn’t be happy about the DCIS development, but Carson was pretty sure they could still pull it off. Stafford wasn’t here about the cylinder, and that’s all that counted right now.