The Minoan Cipher

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Uncle Gowdy was talking to Molly from the grave.

She pictured him in a rocking chair on the sagging porch, with his children and their cousin Molly at his feet, telling what it was like to mine coal. From time to time the narrative would be interrupted by a coughing fit brought on by the coal dust irritating his lungs.

“Diggin’ coal is easier’n making pie,” he said in his soft West Virginia accent. “You ride down a shaft a coupla hundred feet, careful you don’t go too deep ‘cause you’d come out in China. Then you blast the seam out with dynamite, bust the big hunks to bitty pieces.” He wrapped his coal-stained fingers around the hammer of an invisible pick handle. “Pickety-pick, pickety-pick. Then you go on to the next seam.”

Molly sat in front of her computer, thinking how digging coal wasn’t much different from mining the internet. She’d blasted out the Auroch Industries seam and had picked her way through the hunks of data. The company’s deplorable behavior as an international corporate citizen. Its disdain for public opinion. The damage caused by its mining and drilling operations. The lawsuits filed against anyone or anything in its way. And most troubling, the strange deaths associated with its mergers and acquisitions.

Yet, Salazar, the CEO who presumably orchestrated all this bad behavior, came out smelling as sweet as yam pie. He served on charitable boards and contributed heavily to the arts. Most puzzling, was not only his support, but his leadership of a consortium focused on alternative energy research. He had even funded a foundation that was backing an important conference to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within a few days.

Molly’s life experiences had taught her that people like Salazar could back all the concerts and lectures money could buy, but the halos over their heads still wouldn’t take a polish. She asked herself why Salazar would invest in research that might put him out of business. Maybe he actually wanted to do something to help the planet, but she doubted it. She read the Wall Street Journal headline again:

The article described the excitement over a revolutionary energy source to be demonstrated at the conference organized by the Salazar Foundation. The presenters were the world’s best-known experts in the fields of physics and energy distribution. It was a stellar scientific line-up and the first time all the leaders in new technologies would be in the same place at the same time. The Journal speculated on turmoil in the markets. Energy stocks would plummet.

Guys like Salazar stood to lose a bundle, but here he was, saying Auroch was well-positioned to embrace cleaner technologies that would reduce the carbon footprint. She shook her head. Salazar was a skunk. Plain and simple. You could clean him up but he’d still stink to high heaven. There was no way he would back something that was bound to put him out of business. Yet here he was giving people the shovel that would bury him. Why?

Thinking made her hungry. She put the computer in sleep mode and went into the kitchen. Her shelves and refrigerator were filled with gluten-free products. She didn’t have celiac disease, with its intolerance to grain, but eating gluten-free food sounded healthy. She cooked up a gluten-free pizza and ate half of it, washed down with a couple of cans of diet soda. Time to feed Wheeling. She got some calves liver pieces out of the fridge and put them in a dish.

The big bird clucked his beak in anticipation when she entered the shed. She watched him chow down, knowing it was wrong to pamper this magnificent wild creature. Being accustomed to gourmet meals would hamper him when he had to hunt for his own food. Heck. Maybe that’s why she was doing it, trying to come up with a reason to postpone Freedom Day.

The chirp of her cell phone was a welcome diversion from her guilty wallowing. She checked the screen. The alert had been transmitted by a motion-activated camera at the front of the house.

Molly had decided not to install a fence, a safe room and full-fledged camera and alarm system like the one she had in Arizona. After all, her house burned down in spite of all her precautions. But she had placed four cameras around the property, each capable of transmitting photos to her cell phone. Mostly, the cameras snapped photos of bats and owls, but the image on her phone now was that of a man who’d triggered the automated flood light.

He was walking toward her house, slightly crouched over. Cradled in his arms was a short-barreled automatic weapon. He wore a baseball cap with a B on it, like the one on the man who’d been bent over his laptop in the Portland coffee shop.

Another camera picked up the man walking along the side of the house. He may have found the front door locked and was making his way around to the back. She turned out the shed light, went to the door and pushed it almost shut, leaving it open just a crack to allow her a glimpse of the man as he turned the corner. He glanced at the shed, then headed for the kitchen door, which she’d left unlocked, and went inside.

She could see him through the windows. He paused to examine the partially-eaten pizza on the table, then went from room to room on the first floor. The second floor lights clicked on. She felt a rush of anger at having the privacy of her bedroom violated by this stranger. She thought of trying to break out of the shed, but Sutherland was in no shape to run for it, even without the pizza sitting like gluten-free lead in her stomach.

The best she could do would be to keep watch and hope that he’d give up and leave. She waited. Moments later she glimpsed him again through the kitchen window. Then he stepped out the back door, stared thoughtfully at the shed, and walked slowly toward it. She moved away from the door, loosened the overhead light bulb and crawled under the shelf in front of Wheeling’s perch to the back wall of the shed.

The unexpected intrusion into his space made the eagle nervous. He spread his wings slightly, shifted from claw to claw and made a soft ‘wonk’ sound.

The crunch of footsteps stopped outside. A man’s voice said, “You in there, sweetheart? Come out, come out, or I’ll huff and puff and blow the place down. Okay. Guess you’re shy. Maybe I’ll just burn the place down.”

A chill went down her spine. She would be trapped. She stayed silent.

“No answer? Hey, girl, maybe I won’t burn you. They said you were in the Army. So you know what a machine pistol can do. I can just riddle that little hen coop full of holes with you in it. So why don’t you come out and we’ll talk?”

The voice was closer. Molly figured the stranger was moving in as he talked, and that he’d kick the door in when he got close enough. The eagle was even more nervous after hearing the stranger’s voice. She placed her hands on the bird’s wings and felt it shudder.

Then she yelled, “Changed my mind about coming out, you stupid man. I called 911. Cops are on their way. You’d better get your sorry ass out of here.”

That did it. He kicked the door open. He was holding a flashlight against the machine pistol, which was raised to his shoulder. He stepped inside.

Molly stood up suddenly and launched Wheeling at the intruder. The bird flapped its wings. The man stood in the way of the only avenue of escape. The eagle landed on his head, sinking its sharp talons into his scalp through the thin fabric of the baseball cap. He tried to knock the bird off with the short barrel of the machine pistol. This only frightened Wheeling more, and it dug in deeper, wings beating furiously.

The stranger dropped the weapon and staggered out of the shed, the eagle still clutching his head. The noise was awful. The stranger was screaming in pain. The eagle screeched in fright and then spread its wings and flew off into the night. The man wiped away the blood streaming down his face and turned to go back for his weapon. Molly was standing in the shed doorway, machine pistol in hand. He spun around and drunkenly staggered off away from the shed and around the corner of the house.

Cautiously, she followed in his tracks. The stranger might have gone to his car for another gun. She was relieved when she heard a car engine start. Headlights snapped on from the woods off to one side of her driveway where the stranger had parked his car in the trees. The car accelerated, its tires kicking up gravel, and pulled out onto the road, but instead of navigating the curve, it went straight. There was a horrendous crump sound. Then silence. She trotted down a couple of hundred feet to where the car had hit a tree.

The headlights were still on. The windshield was cracked from the impact of the stranger’s head. He was slumped over the steering wheel. She pushed him back into the seat and felt for a pulse in his neck. He was dead. His eye sockets were filled with pools of blood from his head wounds. He must have been blinded and not seen the bad curve in time. She went through his pockets and pulled out a wallet and cell phone. She used a corner of his jacket to wipe the blood away, turned his head to face her, and took a photograph with her phone. She hid the machine pistol in the shed. Then she called 911 to report the accident.

Molly was waiting next to the wreck when the police and rescue squad arrived. She said she heard the noise of the crash and went out to see what it was. After giving her account, she went back to her house and sat at her computer table. She took out the wallet and spread its contents on the table. The man’s name was William Thomas and his home address was in Nebraska.

She remembered the words the man spoke when she was hiding in the shed.

“They said you were in the Army.”

Who were they? And why was this man sent to kill her?

She woke up her computer and started piecing together a biography of the late Mr. Thomas. She didn’t find much until she got into the FBI file. The facial recognition program identified the dead man as Tommy Lee Crimmins from Fort Collins, Colorado. Going back from the present, she saw that he had been released from prison where he’d served a term for assault and battery. Before that, he’d worked for a couple of security companies. And his training for those jobs came in Afghanistan where he worked in demolition with the Marines.

Using his credit card number, she hacked into his account. Crimmins, or Thomas, had only arrived in Oregon early that morning, when she had seen him at the café. Pickety-pick. She worked back and saw that he had flown in from Boston. He’d stayed at an expensive Boston hotel, which suggested someone else must be paying the bill. And he had several dinners that ran more than five hundred dollars, which indicated he was not dining alone. Boston is across the Charles River from Cambridge, home to MIT.

Molly stared at a list of credit card charges on the screen.

Something was to going to happen. And it involved explosives, and the energy conference.