He heard the sound of glass breaking from down the hall. Goldfarb heard a crash and more gunshots. Jackson’s voice was loud but in cool control. “Drop it, now! You heard me — surrender your weapon!” He must have run around the side of the old trailer and broken the sliding glass door into the bedroom.
The shooting stopped, but the man Goldfarb had trapped still struggled to get free, spewing a string of curses laced with anger and pain. Goldfarb finally got his head inside the door to peer down at a broad-shouldered man with close-cropped dark hair and a swarthy complexion, showing the heavy shadow of beard stubble.
“Why, Mr. Bryce Connors! How good it is to see you again!” Goldfarb smiled. “I see you’ve given up hanging out in libraries to take up a new career as a house cleaner.”
Using his weight, Goldfarb smashed against the bathroom door, jamming Connors inside against the sink and wall. “Oww! You’re breaking my ribs!”
Jamming his handgun into the back of his prisoner, Jackson marched out of the bedroom. The sniper was a thin, leather-faced man with a crewcut. He wore the outfit of a deputy sheriff. His eyes were small, dark, and darting in panic.
As Jackson and the sniper clumped down the hallway, their heavy shoes caused the flimsy trailer to reverberate. “You all right?” Jackson asked Goldfarb, looking from side to side.
“I’m just dandy,” he said. “I believe the other prisoner’s secure. I’d like you to meet Mr. Connors, up close and personal.”
He drew his handgun from the shoulder holster and squeezed into the tiny bathroom. But Connors crumpled over in pain and nausea, caught between the sink and the bathroom door, where a corner of the vanity had pushed into his testicles. His face had been pressed like a vise against the medicine cabinet that jutted from the wall. His can of disinfectant spray lay next to three blue rags on the floor. The place had been thoroughly scrubbed — not only of dirt, but of fingerprints, bloodstains, or any other evidence.
“Looks like somebody’s been doing a clean-up job,” Jackson said, still keeping his weapon on the dark-haired gunman.
“Not the kind of work I’d expect a deputy to be doing at a crime scene,” Goldfarb said. “We’d better get the sheriff on the line.”
When Goldfarb released the door, Bryce Connors slumped to the linoleum floor. He closed his eyes as his face contorted in a grimace. He cradled his genitals, but offered no resistance as Goldfarb cuffed him. Then, while Jackson held the handgun on the sniper, Goldfarb used the handcuffs on the man in the deputy’s uniform.
Goldfarb pulled a wallet from the man’s back pocket. “Deputy Sheriff Mahon. Hey, Jackson, I bet if you look closely enough, you’ll spot his ugly mug in one of Jorgenson’s photos on the wall.”
Jackson turned the sniper around. “Let’s make a phone call. The real sheriff should be interested to know one of his deputies is engaged in extra-curricular activities.”
With the two handcuffed men lying on the living room floor, Goldfarb frisked them for other identification. Unfortunately, from his tense conversation with Bryce Connors yesterday, Goldfarb suspected that the militia bomber did not know exactly what the Eagle’s Claw intended to do on October 24. But he supposed they would enjoy interrogating him anyway.
Jackson came down the hall, where he had found a box of materials the sniper had been trying to remove from behind a false wall in the bedroom closet. “Look at this.”
Goldfarb glanced at one of the self-published pamphlets, all bearing the image of an eagle with an upraised claw. “Don’t you just hate junk mail?”
CHAPTER 31
After Goldfarb and Jackson telephoned him about the arrests at Jorgenson’s trailer, Craig tried to get his mind into the dizzying paperwork Nevsky had left behind — but now the problem had been magnified immensely.
Although Bryce Connors had been involved in the Hoover Dam threat and had burned down his own home to destroy evidence, the Eagle’s Claw kept its members isolated in individual cells. Neither Connors nor Mahon seemed to know many details about the “main event” set for the following day.
And that made Craig even more nervous — the threat must be something spectacularly destructive indeed. If June Atwood wasn’t pushing so hard for the President to keep his schedule, he’d recommend calling it off.
And why had Ambassador Nevsky been murdered in the first place, even before the Hoover Dam incident? What did the militia have to gain by the Russian’s death? What had he found?
Perhaps Nevsky had stumbled onto something related to their plans for the UN anniversary. Jorgenson had needed to silence the Russian before he could sound the alarm, and now someone had silenced Jorgenson as well. Had the forklift driver and PK Dirks killed the ambassador together, then staged the accident? That still left Dirks…
It was late afternoon already, Craig had lost most of a day down at the railroad bridge. He had to gamble that the bearded technician was involved, because that gave him a chance to put the pieces together… if he could just figure out what Nevsky might have seen.
And that answer lay buried somewhere in these papers.
For the past hour he had studied logbook after logbook, looking for some connection. Sally Montry kept track of his work, answering questions, making photocopies, bringing him a cold soda when he asked for it.
Paige sat beside him, her eyes red from too little sleep and too much migraine-causing concentration on the complex accountability forms. “I never thought I’d prefer spending time with General Ursov to anything, but I’m beginning to wonder.”
As he sat staring at the mess of forms, logbooks, and accountability sheets, Paige handed him a new report. “You might find this interesting.”
Craig studied the paper, saw the stamped words CLOSE HOLD. He scanned the sheet. “An old background dossier on PK Dirks? I thought you already checked him out.”
“This time I dug all the way back in his files, not just from his last security reinvestigation. These background checks go pretty deep, especially for anyone with hands-on responsibility for nuclear weapons. Still clean as a whistle, though. You’d think something about the militia would show up.”
Around them the DAF high bay hummed and echoed with intercom announcements and growling forklift engines. Two technicians lounged by the side of a two-story concrete wall; a worker pushed a metal cart into one of the small vaults. Craig lowered his voice. “Unless the people they interviewed are also mixed up in the militia.”
Paige raised her eyebrows. “You’re starting to sound paranoid.”
Craig shook his head. “It’s not paranoia if you have good reason to suspect something. We’ve already got the deaths of an FBI undercover man, a Russian ambassador, a DAF forklift driver, and the suicide of another NTS contractor — not to mention the arrests of a Hoover Dam worker and a deputy sheriff.” He glanced at his watch. “With the President showing up in less than twenty-four hours, I’d say I’m entitled to a little paranoia.”
Attempting some method of organization, Paige started stacking Nevsky’s papers into piles. She drew a long, deep breath, then scanned the top sheet of one pile before moving to the next.
Craig picked up a stack of sheets bearing a series of arrows and serial numbers, seemingly a timeline for warhead dismantling. It showed delivery dates for various components, manufacturing sites, cross-correlated code numbers, reliability figures, and shipping destinations. “Remember that old saying — if you can’t give them the facts, baffle them with paperwork?” he said with a laugh. “I’m certainly baffled.”