“What about the big dogs?” another man asked.
“The Daemons will be in the ceremonial room with the Priors.”
“What’s the time table, sir?” the man asked.
Salazar looked at his watch. “The ceremony is set for tomorrow night. I’ll deliver the second bull’s head personally. You will accompany me. Your loyalty will soon be rewarded. As soon as I’m in power, I’ll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He glanced toward the empty bomb test platform and in an uncharacteristic display of humor, added, “And that’s no bull.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Uncle Gowdy was talking to Molly from the grave.
She pictured him in a rocking chair on the sagging porch, with his children and their cousin Molly at his feet, telling what it was like to mine coal. From time to time the narrative would be interrupted by a coughing fit brought on by the coal dust irritating his lungs.
“Diggin’ coal is easier’n making pie,” he said in his soft West Virginia accent. “You ride down a shaft a coupla hundred feet, careful you don’t go too deep ‘cause you’d come out in China. Then you blast the seam out with dynamite, bust the big hunks to bitty pieces.” He wrapped his coal-stained fingers around the hammer of an invisible pick handle. “Pickety-pick, pickety-pick. Then you go on to the next seam.”
Molly sat in front of her computer, thinking how digging coal wasn’t much different from mining the internet. She’d blasted out the Auroch Industries seam and had picked her way through the hunks of data. The company’s deplorable behavior as an international corporate citizen. Its disdain for public opinion. The damage caused by its mining and drilling operations. The lawsuits filed against anyone or anything in its way. And most troubling, the strange deaths associated with its mergers and acquisitions.
Yet, Salazar, the CEO who presumably orchestrated all this bad behavior, came out smelling as sweet as yam pie. He served on charitable boards and contributed heavily to the arts. Most puzzling, was not only his support, but his leadership of a consortium focused on alternative energy research. He had even funded a foundation that was backing an important conference to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within a few days.
Molly’s life experiences had taught her that people like Salazar could back all the concerts and lectures money could buy, but the halos over their heads still wouldn’t take a polish. She asked herself why Salazar would invest in research that might put him out of business. Maybe he actually wanted to do something to help the planet, but she doubted it. She read the Wall Street Journal headline again:
Experts to Unveil Important Energy News at MIT Conference
The article described the excitement over a revolutionary energy source to be demonstrated at the conference organized by the Salazar Foundation. The presenters were the world’s best-known experts in the fields of physics and energy distribution. It was a stellar scientific line-up and the first time all the leaders in new technologies would be in the same place at the same time. The Journal speculated on turmoil in the markets. Energy stocks would plummet.
Guys like Salazar stood to lose a bundle, but here he was, saying Auroch was well-positioned to embrace cleaner technologies that would reduce the carbon footprint. She shook her head. Salazar was a skunk. Plain and simple. You could clean him up but he’d still stink to high heaven. There was no way he would back something that was bound to put him out of business. Yet here he was giving people the shovel that would bury him. Why?
Thinking made her hungry. She put the computer in sleep mode and went into the kitchen. Her shelves and refrigerator were filled with gluten-free products. She didn’t have celiac disease, with its intolerance to grain, but eating gluten-free food sounded healthy. She cooked up a gluten-free pizza and ate half of it, washed down with a couple of cans of diet soda. Time to feed Wheeling. She got some calves liver pieces out of the fridge and put them in a dish.
The big bird clucked his beak in anticipation when she entered the shed. She watched him chow down, knowing it was wrong to pamper this magnificent wild creature. Being accustomed to gourmet meals would hamper him when he had to hunt for his own food. Heck. Maybe that’s why she was doing it, trying to come up with a reason to postpone Freedom Day.
The chirp of her cell phone was a welcome diversion from her guilty wallowing. She checked the screen. The alert had been transmitted by a motion-activated camera at the front of the house.
Molly had decided not to install a fence, a safe room and full-fledged camera and alarm system like the one she had in Arizona. After all, her house burned down in spite of all her precautions. But she had placed four cameras around the property, each capable of transmitting photos to her cell phone. Mostly, the cameras snapped photos of bats and owls, but the image on her phone now was that of a man who’d triggered the automated flood light.
He was walking toward her house, slightly crouched over. Cradled in his arms was a short-barreled automatic weapon. He wore a baseball cap with a B on it, like the one on the man who’d been bent over his laptop in the Portland coffee shop.
Another camera picked up the man walking along the side of the house. He may have found the front door locked and was making his way around to the back. She turned out the shed light, went to the door and pushed it almost shut, leaving it open just a crack to allow her a glimpse of the man as he turned the corner. He glanced at the shed, then headed for the kitchen door, which she’d left unlocked, and went inside.
She could see him through the windows. He paused to examine the partially-eaten pizza on the table, then went from room to room on the first floor. The second floor lights clicked on. She felt a rush of anger at having the privacy of her bedroom violated by this stranger. She thought of trying to break out of the shed, but Sutherland was in no shape to run for it, even without the pizza sitting like gluten-free lead in her stomach.
The best she could do would be to keep watch and hope that he’d give up and leave. She waited. Moments later she glimpsed him again through the kitchen window. Then he stepped out the back door, stared thoughtfully at the shed, and walked slowly toward it. She moved away from the door, loosened the overhead light bulb and crawled under the shelf in front of Wheeling’s perch to the back wall of the shed.
The unexpected intrusion into his space made the eagle nervous. He spread his wings slightly, shifted from claw to claw and made a soft ‘wonk’ sound.
The crunch of footsteps stopped outside. A man’s voice said, “You in there, sweetheart? Come out, come out, or I’ll huff and puff and blow the place down. Okay. Guess you’re shy. Maybe I’ll just burn the place down.”
A chill went down her spine. She would be trapped. She stayed silent.
“No answer? Hey, girl, maybe I won’t burn you. They said you were in the Army. So you know what a machine pistol can do. I can just riddle that little hen coop full of holes with you in it. So why don’t you come out and we’ll talk?”
The voice was closer. Molly figured the stranger was moving in as he talked, and that he’d kick the door in when he got close enough. The eagle was even more nervous after hearing the stranger’s voice. She placed her hands on the bird’s wings and felt it shudder.
Then she yelled, “Changed my mind about coming out, you stupid man. I called 911. Cops are on their way. You’d better get your sorry ass out of here.”
That did it. He kicked the door open. He was holding a flashlight against the machine pistol, which was raised to his shoulder. He stepped inside.