Zero Option

37

They hiked only as far as the first waterfall this time, mindful of the setting sun. Along the way, Gwen made her case for Stafford’s not going back to Atlanta. Her biggest fear was for the little kids, coming as they often did from horrific circumstances. The prospect of government interrogation teams, or, worse, the media, might set them back for years. Jessamine, she said, was particularly vulnerable. She was a teenager, with all the emotional baggage that that entailed, who had witnessed a terrifying event as a very small child.

He remembered her saying that before. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Gwen hesitated, then answered, “I’d rather not, actually. It involved an incident with her mother.” Stafford nodded, then asked about Jess’s speech disability.

“She has been mute from childhood. I know she seems pretty competent now — goes to school, rides her horse, picks up after herself. But underneath, there’s a lot of cracked emotional glass. I just can’t have her exposed to some media feeding frenzy, which is the main reason I’m asking you to stay for a while.”

Stafford didn’t really have to be convinced to stay, but he would have liked to hear some evidence that she wanted him there for a reason besides protecting the kids. He asked her if the sheriff couldn’t protect them from undue public scrutiny. “John Lee would just get himself in trouble, I’m afraid. He’s an old-school Georgia county sheriff. It wouldn’t occur to him that someone might disagree with what he ordered, much less try to run over the top of him.”

“If the FBI comes, they will absolutely run right over the top of him and everybody else,” he said. “They’ll go through the motions, but they’ll do it their way. And the Army? God only knows what those guys will do.”

“John Lee would probably get the deputies out and start shooting or something. He’s a tough old bear.”

They started back toward the house. “You sound like you’re still fond of him, at least a little,” he said.

She turned and smiled. “In a way, I am. Is that such a bad thing? Give me your hand. No, your right hand.” He did, and she took it gently, returning to the path. “John Lee had an affair. He was so sorry for what he did, but once I found out, well …”

“I know that feeling,” he said. “It’s a kick in the teeth, no matter how it’s presented.”

“My very words. I could no longer be married to him, so the only option was divorce. Everyone in Graniteville was pretty upset. At him for doing what he did, and at me, for not forgiving him. ‘Good ole boys make mistakes, Mizz Warren; ain’t nobody perfect.’ “

“Nobody ever promises to be perfect. Just to love, honor, and cherish.”

She squeezed his hand. “So now he comes around,” she said. “Looks after us, does things for the school and the kids, smoothes the way with the state when we need it. He helps. He hopes, I think.”

As she held his right hand in her left, he did not feel like a cripple for the first time in months. “And so he never remarried?” he asked.

“No, he did not. Neither did I. How about you, David Stafford? Will you remarry?” Her question startled him. “Never again,” he said too quickly, but then he wondered if he really meant that. “I mean, hell, I don’t know that.

Just about every aspect of my life has come apart lately — my career, my marriage, this useless damn arm.”

“Not so useless a damn arm right now, is it?”

He grinned. “No, now that you mention it. I rather like holding hands with you, Gwen Warren.”

She stopped, released his hand, and looked over at him. Her face was partially in shadow, and he couldn’t read her expression. “Then please,” she said softly. “Please stay here with us. I’m afraid of your world and what might happen it if it comes here.”

He remembered Ray’s warning. “If I do that, Gwen, I might be an unemployed ex-cop.”

“Would that be so bad? Is your career going all that well right now?”

He looked down at the ground. The lady had a point there. “You know, as unbelievable as this might sound, I’ve never considered leaving the business. Even after all that’s happened. Maybe I should.”

He looked around at the forest. They had walked almost to the edge of the willow grove. The sounds of the little kids at the barn were filtering through the mass of greenery. “It’s just that I feel I didn’t do anything wrong. Politically dumb, maybe, but not wrong. Not up there, nor down here with this Carson thing. I’ve tried to do the right thing.”

“And do your superiors value that ethic?”

“I thought they did, but now I wonder. I guess I’ve never thought that through. Been too busy being sorry for myself.” — ;..

“Think about it now, Dave.”

One of the kids saw them through the willows and began to call her name.

He wanted to continue their little talk, to explain how he felt about her, but the moment had passed, and she was already moving, calling back to them. He still wasn’t sure: Did she feel something for him? Or was it more a case of her needing him to help them with what might be coming toward their little world? He followed after her, exploring in his mind for the first time the prospect of not being a cop, of doing something entirely different with his life.

He had dinner that evening with Gwen, Jessamine, the little kids, and Mrs. Benning in the communal dining room. They had spent the rest of the afternoon watching the afternoon activities at the barn. Later they had another chance to talk, he of his, life and experiences in law enforcement, she of her many years of building up Willow Grove while pursuing knowledge about the way castoff children communicate with a world that has rejected them. He gained the sense that while she was smart enough to fill her days with commitments, at heart she was a lonely person, a woman who had never quite gotten over the hurt, of her husband’s betrayal. He followed her lead in the i-conversation and did not try to steer it toward how he felt about her. Either she had not noticed or there was nothing there but his wishful thinking.

At dinner the kids were cute, but hardly angels, and the supervising adults had their hands full. He watched Jessamine covertly during dinner, wondering if she could really read minds, if she was reading his mind now. But then he remembered that the person being probed supposedly had to be extremely agitated. He still found it tough to believe. And yet the police literature was full of documented cases where so-called psychics and profilers had led an investigation right to the perpetrator’s front door, and usually after the cops had run into what seemed like a stone wall. This girl looked like every fourteen-year-old girl he had ever seen — a bit awkward, insecure, feigning utter indifference to what was going on around her while simultaneously being keenly interested in how she was being perceived. He wondered what it might be like to peer into someone else’s thoughts, emotions, or memories, and he decided that it might not be so terrific. Such an ability would be the ultimate infraction of the old Washington rule: Don’t formally ask a question if you can’t stand all the possible answers.

After dinner, he found himself alone at the table with Jess while the two women took the little kids upstairs for the nightly battle of getting them to bed. He was finishing a cup of coffee and wondering when Sparks would call. She made a pretense of reading a book, but she was watching him when she thought he wasn’t looking. On an impulse, he asked her how she liked school, forgetting for a moment that she did not speak. She signed briefly, then pulled over a pad of paper and a pen and began writing. “Boring,” she wrote. “They think I’m stupid.” “The kids, or the teachers?” he asked.

“Some of both,” she wrote. “I’m not dumb.” He almost asked her why she did not speak, but then he remembered what Gwen had said about her background. It occurred to him that here was his chance to ask her something he really did want to know.

“Jess,” he said, “do you remember the man at the airport?”

She frowned and did not immediately respond. But then she nodded.

“Gwen told me you sensed that he was a bad man. That he frightened you.”

She was watching him very carefully now. Another slow nod.;..

“Can you write down for me why you think he was a bad man? Did he do something bad?”

She began signing to him, then stopped when she remembered he could not understand. She picked up the pen, put it down, and then picked it up again. The sounds from upstairs were diminishing. Dave wondered what Gwen would do or say if she knew this conversation was going on.

“Killed someone,” she wrote. Then she shivered.

Lambry? He wondered. “Is that the only thing he did?”

She shook her head, and started to write a reply, then stopped. She took out another sheet of paper, scrunched up her face in concentration, and then began to draw instead. From across the table, he was able to recognize the cylinder immediately. She drew confidently, quickly, almost expertly. It was as if the image on the monitor in the Army trailer was reappearing right here on the dining room table. She pushed the drawing across to him, then signed again.

He took the piece of paper and looked at it. This drawing was a hell of a lot better than the one Gwen had shown him. She tapped the pen on the table, and he pushed the paper back across to her. “Very bad thing,” she wrote, and then underlined that several times.

“Yes, you’re absolutely right, Jess,” he said. “It’s a weapon. An Army weapon. I think that man stole it. I’m trying to get it back.” This drawing is almost perfect, he thought. So where the hell had that crude drawing come from? Jess was already scribbling another question.

“Is something coming?” she wrote.

He felt a chill when he read that question, but he was saved by the sounds of Gwen coming back down the stairs. The girl put a finger to her lips, grabbed the piece of paper, and hid it in her book. She had turned around in her chair by the time Gwen came back into the room.

Stafford finished his coffee while trying to clamp down on a feeling of apprehension. He didn’t know which bothered him more: her question—”Is something coming?”— or the fact that she had asked it. Damn!

Carson sat at the control booth in the security control room. He was wearing slacks, a business shirt without a tie, tennis shoes, and a light windbreaker. He hadn’t been able to wait any longer, and he had gone ahead and made the call. The man at the other end of the line had obviously been waiting. Carson had given Tangent’s man directions to the DRMO, then told him to park out front and look for an envelope on the front door of the admin building.

He warned the man about watching for patrolling MP cars. He suggested they come just after midnight.

Now he had to wait. He reviewed the rest of the plan in his mind: The envelope on the door would direct them to drive back through the truck alley, where he had unlocked and opened the main gates into the area of the receiving bay. They were to drive out into the middle of the tarmac and look for a pallet of airplane propellers, which should be distinctive enough. There would be a second envelope there, which would direct them to warehouse four, where they would find a third envelope, taped to the side of the building. This one would instruct them to go to the feed-assembly building. To get each envelope, they would have to stand in a cone of light, at which he had aimed one of the surveillance cameras. He wanted to get a good look at these people before proceeding.

The final envelope instructed them to take the money into that building and wait for instructions, which would come by phone. He felt reasonably confident that he would be able to watch their every move. If one or two of Tangent’s people drifted away into the darkness, possibly to set up on Carson when he tried to leave, he wanted to be able to see that. All these envelopes and the resulting scavenger hunt would probably piss them off, but for a million in cash, too bad. Carson-was a party of one; Tangent could send as many people as he.wanted. Should have specified something about that, he thought.

Once Tangent’s people were in the feed-assembly building, he would remotely disable the front door’s cipher lock from the security control room, which would effectively lock them in. Inside the assembly area, they would find the conveyor belt running. He would call them on the building phone and instruct them to put the money into some demil containers and send them into the demil building, where he had repositioned the surveillance camera there to focus directly down onto the belt. Once he was confident they had put money in the containers, and not newspaper or bricks, he would kill all power to the demil assembly building. This would leave them in the dark, except for the battery-operated fire lights. He would call them again and tell them that he was going to retrieve the money, and that he would call one last time to tell them I where he was leaving the cylinder, which he had already hidden in the outside toolbox on one of the semis parked down in the truck lane. He would then let himself into the demil building, verify that the money was real, pack it into two prepositioned duffel bags, then go out the back fire I door of the demil building, across the alley to the fence, and get to his truck.

He had parked his pickup truck in an old fire lane that ran parallel to the DRMO perimeter fence a hundred yards away. Between the fire lane and the fence was a dense stand of brush, small trees, and high weeds. He had cut a man-sized slit in the chain-link fence at the end of the truck and trailer parking lane. His plan was to drive off the post, I and when he was at least a mile away, call the DRMO automatic exchange from his car phone, dial the extension for the feed-assembly building, and tell them how to bypass the cipher lock to get out and where to find the cylinder. By then he would have disappeared into the streets i of southeast Atlanta, with a million bucks in cash, and with that damned cylinder off his hands once and for all.

After that, well, he was making no plans. Tangent’s team, of course, wouldn’t know any of this until they arrived and began the process of envelope hunting. They might be annoyed at being locked up in the feed-assembly building, but, again, that was tough. He had warned them J he would be taking precautions.

He had also made provisions for the two most serious problems he could think of. The first would be if they m brought counterfeit money. This certainly was a possibility, since it all was going to be in brand-new hundreds. He had obtained four new one-hundred-dollar bills from a bank so he would have something to compare the prize money with. About the only test he had een able to devise was to cart a desktop copier machine into the demil building. If the bills were real, they would not copy properly; he’d tried it with the real ones and certain elements of the engraving had not come through. If Tangent’s bills did make an exact reproduction, then they were probably fakes.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to do if that happened. Probably the safest thing to do would be to go retrieve the cylinder and put it with the fake money back on the conveyor belt, fire up the Monster, and destroy it. If he couldn’t sell this damn thing to Tangent, then he probably couldn’t sell it to anyone, and the game would be over. Let the demil system shred the fake money and the cylinder, and at least there would be no evidence left behind. And if by chance a whiff or two of whatever was in the cylinder made it back into the feed-assembly building — if he cut all the power again just as the Monster was starting to chew things up, for example — well, that would be justice, wouldn’t it?

The second problem would be if Tangent and his crew brought real money but then tried to get it back once the transfer had been made. He assumed that if this was their plan, they probably wouldn’t want to make their move until they knew where the cylinder was, which was why he had set up the transfer in pieces: Unless they brought a whole lot of help, it would — be next to impossible for them to set up some kind of an ambush. But what if they did bring lots of help? Assuming he would be able to detect this fact through all the surveillance cameras, he’d go to plan B, which was to go get the money but not try to leave the DRMO.

Instead he would lock himself in the demil building, call them as planned, tell them how to disable the cipher lock, and give them a false location for the cylinder. When they left the feed-assembly building, he’d go through the interbuilding aperture into the feed assembly room, and from there he’d make his way back through the connecting warehouses to the other end of the DRMO while they scrambled” around outside looking for him. There were many places he could hide in the warehouses until morning, by which time they would have to leave when the employees came back to work. Those semis in the truck park weren’t scheduled to go anywhere for a week, so he could retrieve the cylinder, toss it into the demil run for that day, and leave with the money whenever he wanted to.

And just to be sure, he had positioned forklifts across all the entrance doors in the rest of the high-security warehouses, and more forklifts next to each connecting doorway.

But he knew that, in a sense, plan B was all wishful thinking. This thing had better go right, or life was going to get really complicated.

He looked at his watch: 10:10 p.m. Two more hours. He scanned the bank of televisions screens, but all the gray-and-black images shimmering silently on the monitors were lifeless. There was one other nagging thought hanging just out of reach in his mind, something about the cylinder itself, but he could not summon it. He waited.