By the time they’d reached the straight run on Highway 113 from Davis to Woodland, Dan had finished his hamburger, and he glanced at Nicole. “Is this a ‘need-to-know’ only mission?” He grinned.
“No-well, maybe, but in your case, you do need to know. Is the name Richard Clarke Stevenson familiar to you?”
Dan thought a moment before responding. “I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“He was recently appointed Director of Elections in the California Elections Office. He was deputy to Ann Macintosh. She’s the former director who was murdered. Anyway, he held the acting post for awhile and then received the appointment. We’ve had him under surveillance.”
“A suspect?”
“No, but in light of the previous deaths in that office, we thought it best to keep an eye on him. We discovered that the brigade has occasionally kept an eye on him, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Not steadily, but on occasion, as if they wanted to make sure that he was still in place. They’ve discreetly entered his apartment.”
Dan looked questioningly at Nicole.
“All right, Counselor, we’ve got a mike in his place. It happens, and it’s legal. Anyway, the Shasta boys have had him under surveillance, probably to determine if he has any knowledge of the past elections.”
“And?”
“And they haven’t found anything.” She paused for a moment, taking a sip of Coke. “But we have. We finally contacted him directly several days ago, outside his office, of course. He’s scared, Dan. Very scared. He knows he’s being watched, although I don’t think he knows it’s us as well as the brigade. Over the past six months, he’s been to the Missouri and Oregon elections offices to obtain election data from their prior election results, especially from the Home Telephone Voting System. What he’s turned up has scared him, and after what happened to Macintosh, and Phelps before her, he didn’t know who he could trust.”
After filling up with fuel and clearing Woodland, Dan headed up Highway 16, driving through a concentration of almond orchards and eventually passing the small airport located near the Yolo Country Club golf course, where Dan’s thoughts flitted through the recent ambush. It was full dark by eight-thirty, and they encountered only an occasional car on the road.
“How did you convince Stevenson to trust you?”
“He was out of options. I told him we’d been keeping a watch on him, and he was even more confused. I didn’t tell him about the brigade. He wants out of California and out of the whole problem. We said the bureau would help relocate him-if he agreed to assist with the case. That’s when he told me about the disks.”
Dan’s eyes widened. “Ah, secret disks.”
“It’s not quite James Bond, but if they contain what he says, they’re what we’re looking for, all right. He said that during the last general election, he’d stayed through the night, making complete backups every hour. That’s not the standard procedure, and he did it without permission. The interim tally printouts, which he burned, bore absolutely no resemblance to the final election results. But the last backup-now get this-taken just over an hour after the polls closed, showed a whole different set of numbers. The tally wasn’t even close to what had been happening and there was no record of the previous results.”
“Erased?” Dan asked.
“As if they never existed. Stevenson then knew he was on to something. Someone had obviously managed to compromise the system and manipulate the final count. He knew he needed to tell someone, but he didn’t know who to trust. He was scared. So he hid the disks.”
“And they’re at Clear Lake?”
“Stevenson’s family has a cabin up there. His father built it in the sixties as kind of a hippie retreat. No electricity and only a small wood-burning stove. He gave me directions to where he buried the disks-out behind the cabin.”
“Uh, oh. I forgot the shovel,” Dan blurted. “Oh, well-we can pick one up at Jack’s place in Rumsey,” he added. Ten minutes later, as they made the wide sweep around the west end of Esparto, Dan was silent. He thought of Jack as they passed the turnoff to the cemetery, where, only weeks earlier, they had laid Jack to rest. Leaving Esparto, they began the run up Rumsey Valley and reached Jack’s house about twenty-five minutes later.
“C’mon in, Nicole. I think we can find an old pair of jeans that’ll fit, and you can get out of your pants suit.”
Once they were back on the road, Dan advised that the turnoff through the foothills was located only a couple of miles up the road.
“What’s Stevenson going to do?” Dan asked, hitting a button on the dash and changing into four-wheel drive.
“He wanted the surveillance pulled and asked us to relocate him. He’s going to quietly gather his important stuff and meet two of our agents in Reno tomorrow.”
“Where will you move him?”
“How far up this road, Dan?” Nicole asked, sidestepping his question.
“A little over an hour to intersect with State Road 53, unless there’s a tree down or some other obstacle,” he said, dropping his inquiry. “Have you relayed this to Connor?”
“He wasn’t available. I left word on his voicemail that I’d contact him as soon as we were back from the field. Man, it’s dark up here at night,” Nicole exclaimed.
“If you hadn’t been there when I filled up, I’d try the old ‘ran out of gas’ routine.”
“Keep driving, Mr. Rawlings,” she said, smiling.
Richard Clarke Stevenson, the third director of administration in less than eighteen months for the California Elections Office, left the Bank of America lobby, glad that they stayed open until six on Fridays. An enormous sense of relief had swept over him since his two-hour talk with Agent Bentley. If it was the FBI that had been tailing him, then maybe he’d worried for nothing and nobody was really looking for him after all. Bentley had said they’d pull the tail and meet him tomorrow in Reno. Drawing out $17,000 in traveler’s checks made him feel a bit more secure. His VersaTeller card was limited to a daily withdrawal of five hundred, and he couldn’t get far on that.
Pulling into his apartment complex in Roseville shortly before seven, he climbed the flight of stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment. “Pack enough for a few days and we’ll send the rest.” That’s what she’d said. As he closed the door and set the dead bolt, he flicked on the lights, simultaneously noticing the smell of cigarette smoke.
“Mr. Stevenson?”
Stevenson jerked around, startled by the voice. “Who’re you?”
“No need to worry, Mr. Stevenson. We’re with the FBI, and we have a few questions.”
“But I just answered all your questions,” he blurted, startled to see a second man who was standing in the corner of the room. “Hey, you’re not FBI. I’m calling the police, and-”
“You’re calling nobody,” the second man said, stepping forward, his heavily tattooed arms now visible in the lamp light. He brandished a pistol in Stevenson’s face. “Have a seat. We’d still like to ask you a few questions. Since you’ve already had a jabber with the Feds, it shouldn’t be hard for you to repeat the message.”
Stevenson’s face blanched, and his legs felt weak. Shoved hard in the chest, he fell into a chair behind him. “Now, Mr. Stevenson,” his antagonist said in a calm drone, “this will be a rather unusual question-and-answer session, I’m afraid. You’ll have to respond by nodding your head, yes or no,” he said, slapping a piece of duct tape across Stevenson’s mouth. “If your answer needs talkin’,” he said to the terrified man, “you’ll have to write the answer on this here clipboard. Just to be sure it don’t slip off your lap, we’ll just lock it down,” he snarled, revealing a construction-type staple gun, which he used to drive a double-pronged staple through the clipboard into Stevenson’s knee, causing the terrified man to jerk upright in the chair, eyes blazing with pain.