77
It wasn’t until the third day that Mark was allowed to see Lynn Deschaine. He’d been moved to a hotel in Billings that still had power. It was called the Northern, and it was a fine hotel if you didn’t mind the police watch outside your bedroom door. His uncle wasn’t as fortunate. Larry was still in a Wyoming jail, and by then it had become clear that the authorities intended to keep him there to ensure Mark’s full and continued cooperation.
Lynn came by in the evening, wearing her badge for the first time.
“Are you ready to get out of here?” she said.
He was struck by how good she looked, how confident. She didn’t have the shell-shocked expression of Sabrina. Only if she let her eyes linger on his could he see the imprint of Eli Pate and Garland Webb.
“You kidding? I didn’t want to show up in the first place. But I don’t think they’re quite done with me.”
“They’re not, but they’ll let you leave Montana, at least. You’ll even be allowed to travel with me, if you’re willing to try that again.”
He was sitting in a chair beside a window that looked out on the refineries and railroads of Billings, and she was leaning against the wall. Loose, confident. Until her eyes lingered on his.
“Where would we be headed?” he asked.
“Virginia.”
“There are some serious agencies headquartered in Virginia. The Pinkertons aren’t one of them.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was my cover story. It was all I had clearance to-”
“Of course. I’m sure I’ll hear plenty of explanations in Virginia as to why nobody from your agency ever bothered to consult with the homicide detectives on my wife’s case. But I’m not leaving without my uncle.”
“You’re going to have to.”
Mark shook his head. “After what he did for me, Lynn? I’ll sit in a cell if I need to, but he’s not taking the fall for anything that happened.”
“If you care so much about him, then you definitely want to go to Virginia. That’s the only way I can speed things along, Mark. Help me, and I can help him. I was able to negotiate you out of here, but they’ll spend a little longer with him, just because they don’t need him to move forward.”
“I don’t see the difference between Larry and me in all this.”
“He never met Janell Cole. That’s one difference.”
“She hasn’t surfaced yet?”
Lynn shook her head. “And we want her. Badly.”
“Badly enough to make a deal for my uncle?”
“They want the right fish, Mark. Not the other ones who got caught in the nets.”
He hoped she was right. The idea of sitting down with anyone in Langley or Quantico wasn’t appealing, but it was also the very least he owed Larry.
“What we need are people who can explain Eli Pate to us,” Lynn said. “Where this attack started and where it ends.”
“You seemed to know plenty about Eli, and Janell. Or was the story from Amsterdam all bullshit?”
“That was true,” she said. “It’s the first time he came on the international radar. He was in the Netherlands studying, and so was she, and he was arrested but she wasn’t. When he walked out of prison after years of bizarre and intensive research, he seemed to fall off the map, but he clearly found his way back to her.”
“Bizarre and intensive research?”
“He went into prison immersed in the work of Nikola Tesla. He emerged with several hundred pages of writings about the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, and Charles Manson. It seems he decided to reverse-engineer things-where Tesla wondered how the world might look with electricity, Pate became curious how it might look without it. The only constant presence in his life seems to be Janell Cole.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to help,” Mark said. “Despite what you might believe, you really did hear all I know about Janell.”
“All I’m asking for is your cooperation.”
“And I ask the same for my uncle.”
“You’ll get it. The faster we get to Virginia, the faster I can get him out of jail.”
He took a deep breath. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow at one,” she said. “Police escort to the airport, but we get to fly all by ourselves.”
“Hey, that’ll be fun.” He remembered the way she’d slept on his shoulder on the flight out. It felt like something from another life, the way Lauren did now. He looked away from her and out the window at the refineries. Her reflection was ghosted across the glass.
“I don’t know if it matters to you, but I’d asked for clearance to talk more honestly with you the night it all happened,” she said. “I trusted you by then.”
He let a few seconds pass, and when he spoke, he was still facing the window. “Clearance,” he said. “Sure.”
“You’re right to be angry with me. I lied to you. For whatever it’s worth, I also thought you might be lying to me. Especially after you were right there with me, and then gone in the middle of the night, and they came to the door.”
“I don’t blame you a bit. Let’s call it the cost of business, right? Neither of us trades much in trust.”
“I disagree.”
He looked back at her. Her confidence was wavering. Her posture hadn’t changed, but something in her face had.
“What you don’t know,” she said carefully, “is the way I actually felt that night. And sometime, I’d like to tell you. If you want to listen.”
He leaned forward, braced his elbows on his knees, and held her eyes. She didn’t look away. At length, he nodded and said, “Down the road, if it works out, we could go somewhere by the water and have a couple drinks. We could talk there, the way we did the first time. But a little differently.”
“I hope it works out,” she said softly. “Somewhere down the road, as you say.”
She seemed to want to say more, but didn’t.
Mark rose. “Hell, it was my fault, anyhow.”
“How’s that?”
“I should have known you were full of shit. You’re not a good enough detective to work with the Pinkertons. But for the government…that seems right.”
A ghost of a smile crossed her face. “I’m building my résumé for the Pinkertons.”
78
It had been five days on the road and she had slept only three hours per day. Speed was critical, because they had to travel a great distance, and as panic gripped the nation and rumors of new attacks spread, roadblocks went up in unpredictable locations.
Police were everywhere. Police, and the military. In Missouri, a militia group had taken control of a national forest campground, and a standoff with the FBI was building. In Kentucky, seven were killed in an attack on an army base. In New Hampshire, a husband and wife drove a van loaded with explosives into the statehouse and blew themselves up, wounding a dozen. For every incident there were a hundred threats; for every threat, a thousand rumors. Worldwide, terrorism alerts were raised to their highest levels, and police presence increased around the globe. More than twenty groups had claimed a role in the attack on the American electrical grid; a dozen more had been accused.
The fear virus was flowering, and if Eli had been alive to see it, he’d have reveled in the moment.
She avoided the interstates, sticking to back roads and using her map of the electrical grid as much as her GPS, because she knew the areas where they would be hearing the worst of the rumors. She was disappointed in the lack of action but held out hope. The seeds of fear had been planted and carefully tended and soon they would flourish.
In occasional breaks, she sent e-mails and posted on forums and social networks and then destroyed the devices, leaving a trail of shattered iPads and cell phones from west to east.
It was important that people heard from Eli. Important that they understood all the news they were being offered was a lie.
The only truth ever spoken had been between Eli and Janell.