"What took you so long? You had me worried for a minute."
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe I had a little trouble finding the phone you had buried between the cushions. What's up?"
"Don't bother stopping for water. The stores are mobbed. I couldn't even get close to Wegmans. I can't imagine Giant will be any better," she said.
"Give it a try. I don't want to take any from the house if you can't find more," he said.
"You'll need it if you're staying in a hotel. Take what you need. I can boil water from the creek if I have to."
"All right. Let me get moving here. I'm anticipating a mess trying to get through D.C."
"Business as usual. Drive safe. I love you," she said.
"I love you too. I'll give you a call from the road."
BLACK AND WHITE
Chapter 41
Special Agent Dana O'Reilly disconnected the phone call and removed her headset.
"Well, fuck you too, Deputy Dawg," she mumbled.
"What was that?" Hesterman said from his new napping position at their workstation.
"Nothing. Just some uncooperative dickhead."
She had placed a call to Laurel, Maryland's chief of police, following up on a hunch. Something about the shootout in the forest didn't make sense to her. She couldn't put her finger on it, but it triggered her need to apply "Occam's Razor" to the situation in an attempt to try and make sense of her inexplicable discomfort with Sergeant Bryan Osborne's report.
"Occam's Razor" was a principle designed to urge one to select the hypothesis or theory that made the fewest assumptions. Though on the surface it favored parsimony and economy, the principle didn't assert that the simplest available theory should be applied. The "razor" wasn't an arbiter between theories. In scientific circles it served as a guide. For O'Reilly, it was an interesting way to approach competing theories, especially at 8:15 in the morning, when the stimulant effect of coffee had ceased to have any impact.
Maybe it wasn't something specific in Osborne's preliminary report that triggered her hunch. Perhaps it was the entire situation that didn't appear to make sense to her. Occam's Razor in reverse. Sergeant Osborne had chosen today of all days to ride with one of his newest police officers. Officer Donahue had taken him on a ride through the winding, gravel roads of a large park east of urban Laurel, which happened to be part of the officer's patrol. Osborne spotted a vehicle parked deep in the woods from an intersection nearly one hundred feet from the dirt turnoff. Officers responding to their call for backup saw Donahue's SUV parked on Combat Road, but had trouble finding the right path at first. Somehow, Osborne had spotted the vehicle from the intersection. Finally, Osborne called in backup, but decided to investigate with a rookie.
He said they stumbled into the group, and the men reached for their rifles, but one of the men had been shot in the back. Backup officers said the generator was running when they arrived, which made it difficult to believe that the two officers had simply stumbled into the group and got the drop on them. There were too many coincidences and discrepancies to take Osborne's report as gospel, which left her wondering. What had really happened out in the North Tract?
She believed that Osborne had heard the drilling equipment, possibly spied the three men, and decided to play Rambo with his partner. Osborne would have realized this error in judgment as soon as his partner fell to the ground sans intact skull. The discrepancies in the forest could be explained by Osborne's need to present a slightly different version of events, one in which he didn't get his partner killed with backup officers a few minutes out. But this still left O'Reilly pondering the rest of the coincidences leading them deep into the forest.
She was working too hard to explain Osborne's actions, which led her back to Occam's Razor. Was there a theory that cleared most of these assumptions and put Osborne in the forest with his partner, on the path to a deadly engagement with domestic terrorists? There was only one. Sergeant Osborne had known they would be there. Just the thought sent a chill down her spine. If true, this theory had far-reaching implications that could undermine their current investigative efforts.
The questions spun around her head like a vortex and called into question everything they had uncovered. What else had been staged for them and why? This epiphany had led her to place a call to Laurel's chief of police moments ago, kindly requesting Sergeant Osborne's vacation schedule for the past two years.
The conversation had started kindly enough, but quickly tanked when she disclosed the request. The chief didn't give her an earful as she expected, but very firmly expressed his distaste. She sat there and listened to his speech about loyalty, their code of honor and the difficulty of making daily life and death decisions under pressure. She didn't bother to remind him that she was a sworn law enforcement officer, just like him, and had been shot through the forearm by a .223-caliber bullet making one of these pressured decisions. She was a woman, calling from a desk, muddying the waters. No point in pressing the issue.
She'd bring it up with Sharpe a little later and see if he could apply a little downward pressure on the Laurel Police Department. It was worth checking. Until she eliminated this theory, Occam's Razor would never be satisfied. Osborne's forest shootout wasn't the only thing bothering her.
"Eric?"
"Yes," Hesterman said, not bothering to open his eyes.
"Anything new on the guys in the compound?"
"Two more died at Scranton Regional, leaving eighteen. Of those eighteen, only six are conscious. Other than that, there's not much to report. Only one of the regulars appears to have survived the assault. Jake Skelly. He's the guy they grabbed in the communications room. He hasn't said a word to Carlisle or anyone."
"He checks out clean, right?'
"Yep. Just like the operatives in Brooklyn. Clean record. Current driver's license from Missouri. Nothing in the system. We'll know more about him in a few hours."
"And the rest?"
"This is the interesting part. We've identified sixty-three of the remaining suspects from personal identification located on the bodies or in the barracks buildings. It looks like True America was in the midst of a recruitment drive. I found eleven of them on our own list of 'persons of interest to the government.' A few others have overt ties to extremist websites and blogs, posting regularly. I imagine we'll find more links once we start issuing warrants and start digging."
This was one of the other big issues bothering her. None of the True America operatives identified by Task Force Scorpion had any recent connections to anti-government websites.
"This group's profile doesn't match up with the operatives killed or captured so far. Something's off here."
"Maybe not. If you took a trip back in time two or three years, this is exactly the kind of group you might find hanging around the compound. If we hadn't hit the compound when we did, this group would have been instructed to cut all extremist ties and devote all of their upcoming vacation time to training sessions in Hacker Valley."
"I don't know. Why would they start training a new cadre of operatives in the middle of a major operation?"
Hesterman finally opened his eyes and rubbed them with the back of his hands. "What are you thinking?" he said, inching his chair over to O'Reilly's.