“It is more important for us that we maintain a good working relationship with you, Bennie,” Townsend said with an expression that made the little hairs on the back of Bennie’s neck stand up all over again. “Frankly speaking, you know quite a bit about my organization and recent activities. Since killing you would be akin to killing the golden goose, as it were, I find it better to deal fairly with you rather than go to war. Do we have a deal?”
“I can cook anything I want, anywhere, anytime?”
“Supervised by my men, yes,” Townsend said. “I presume you are not planning to use the hydrogenation method to produce methamphetamine this time?”
“Hell no,” Bennie said. “The law will be all over the dude who tries to buy thionyl chloride or a tank of hydrogen now. If I can get my hands on some five-gallon drums of phosphorus-3-iodide, some condensers, and what’s left of the ephedrine that’s stored out here, I can whip up a couple of dozen pounds in one day. We can restart thionyl chloride synthesization later, when the heat subsides.”
“Do you need a hydrogenator or special apparatus for this method?”
“Nope-just the phosphorus, the ephedrine, some water, and a condensing unit,” Bennie replied. “It’s a faster and much safer process than hydrogenation, but it produces forty percent less meth for the same cost. But if the street price for meth takes a jump like I think it will, it’ll be worth it. This would give us a nest egg to set up a few more labs in just a couple of weeks.”
“Very well,” Townsend said. “But we must be very careful now. I am not so naive as to think that our headquarters, labs, warehouses, and meeting places are free from police scrutiny. I must assume that the ranch and the dozen or so other properties I own throughout the state are under some kind of surveillance. I’ve been fortunate thus far in not encountering any police interrogations, but after this past night all bets are off.
The police may receive some special powers to arrest or conduct investigations in the interest of public safety-but more likely, they’ll simply barge in wherever they like and the Constitution be damned,” Townsend went on. “You are a known methamphetamine cooker. Almost thirty meth labs just blew up all across the state. The police will want to question you. We want to try to avoid all official inquiries on us at this point. If the police find a connection between you, us, and our two men who were just released from custody, and tie us in to the downtown Sacramento shootings, our operation could unravel very quickly. The police will not rest until the ones responsible for killing their own are found and punished-or eliminated.”
Bennie nodded that he understood. “Okay, Colonel, okay. No way they’ll connect me with you,” he assured Townsend. The guy was like a chess master, Bennie thought, always thinking several moves ahead. “And I’ll get to work right away.”
“Very good,” Townsend said. “We’ll get you your chemicals so you can start producing as soon as possible.”
Bennie had that same damn sensation again-the feeling of a long, slow slide into doom. Dealing with a guy like Townsend had to be like dealing with the devil himself. But the money-Jesus, with most all of the Satan’s Brotherhood out of the way, it would be raining and pouring meth money. And the level of fear would be so high that no one, not even the Mexicans, would dare get into the meth trade in California for a few months at least. Bennie would be raking in money. And clearly Townsend and his army weren’t interested in cooking.
Bennie held out his hand. “You got a deal, Colonel,” he said.
Townsend smiled that awful smile again, holding up the Calico as he switched it to his left hand so Bennie could not fail to see it-and shook Bennie’s hand. “Very good. Let’s get to work, shall we?”
As Bennie moved off to supervise the startup of his new lab, Reingruber came over to Townsend. “I am weary of these greedy idiots, Herr Oberst. We risk all we have to transport some chemicals so we can make a few dollars, when the real money is sitting there waiting for us to take it.”
“Patience, Major,” Townsend replied. “The city is not yet in a sufficient panic for our purposes. Continue to monitor the target and report if there is any movement. If the local authorities do not act a bit more decisively soon, we may need to implement Phase Three of our plan. But I have a suspicion that, as the Americans are so fond of saying, ‘The shit will hit the fan’ by itself very soon.”
Special Investigations Division Headquarters,
Bercut Drive, Sacramento, California
Monday, 16 March 1998, 0802 PT
Captain Tom Chandler stepped into the conference room a few minutes after the morning briefing began and took a seat in a corner. Shielding his face behind his FBI National Academy coffee mug, he surveyed the division members present and his heart sank.
His guys and gals looked whipped. After ten days of twelve-hour shifts, weekends included, they were ashen and exhausted. Everyone was chugging coffee to try to stay awake. Personnel assigned to SID could dress casually-it was an all-undercover unit-but most of them looked as if they had been sleeping in their clothes, which was probably not far from the truth. Hats, apparently hiding unwashed hair, were everywhere.
The lieutenant in charge of operations, Deanna Wyler, was giving the morning briefing. She normally dressed like a high-powered executive around the office, emulating the captain; but today she wore black BDU’s, a rangemaster’s cap, and combat boots, and had her sidearm strapped to her waist with a black web belt. Wyler, who was normally responsible for administration, training, and liaison with other divisions in the department, had probably been to more crime scenes and labs in the past week than she had in the entire six months before.
Chandler had heard through the rumor mill that Wyler was a couple of months pregnant. Selfishly, he had not ordered her to stay away from labs or explosion scenes because he desperately needed the manpower out on the street. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant, so officially she wasn’t-which meant that in effect, she was accepting part of the responsibility for any damage, illness, or birth defects…
Fuck that, Chandler yelled at himself. If anything happened to that child because it was exposed in utero to any drugs or precursor chemicals at one of those lab scenes, it would haunt him for the rest of his life. He would never ever forgive himself.
“We have the preliminary investigation report on the explosions ready to go to City Hall and the chief’s office,” Wyler began, distributing folders to each officer with the investigation summaries. “What we had was a total of twenty-five meth-lab explosions, all occurring within eight hours of one another. The labs all appear to be similar: They were all thionyl chloride hydrogenation reactors, approximately twenty to forty gallons’ capacity each.”
“Twenty to forty gallons?” someone exclaimed. “You mean liters, don’t you?”
“I mean gallons,” Wyler repeated. “We’re talking a thionyl chloride reactor capable of producing close to forty pounds of pure crystal meth at a time.” That was probably the one piece of news that could animate this bone-tired audience. The thought of a single lab making that much methamphetamine was astounding all by itself-to think that there were twenty-five of them set up out there at one time, and possibly more, was almost too much to believe.
“Want some more unbelievable stuff?” Wyler went on. “How about very few signs of precursor chemical stores? No chemical dumps, no storage sheds full of chemicals, no hijacked trucks nearby. When those labs went up, the explosion took out all but traces of precursor chemicals. Now with that much pressurized hydrogen in the reactor, you know the fire-ball it produces is going to be big and hot. But in the past we’ve always found huge dumps full of precursors nearby, and an aboveground explosion wouldn’t wipe out a below-ground dump or burial site. Some of the sites had chemical dumps nearby, but they hadn’t been recently used.