Tangent disagreed. “You can’t know that, either. If Lambry caught on to what this thing might be worth, he could have told his buddy everything, or enough to cover his ass if you tried to stiff him. It was Dillard who talked to Stafford?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hell, there it is, then. You pulled the string with Dillard?”
“No. I figured let sleeping dogs lie. If I talk to Dillard, he’ll know something’s up. This way, everything just subsides. Nobody who works here has seen the Army teams.”
“You’re probably right; you know the guy and I don’t, although I’m getting a little more concerned about this Lambry’s unexplained disappearance. You sure he didn’t go to Baby Jesus when his house blew up?”
Carson gripped the phone harder. He had forgotten telling Tangent about that.
“I guess that’s possible,” he replied carefully. “Except the arson people said no one was in the house when it went.” Eager to get off this line of conversation, he asked Tangent what he was doing about Stafford.
“We’re working that. Why, you got something new?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Carson said. “We need to get all this heat off the DRMO, at least long enough to do the deal, you know what I mean? This shit is beginning to spook me. I just want to do the deal, turn this damned thing over, get my money.”
“My client doesn’t know squat. Yet So I’m all ears, you got some ideas.”
“Yeah, well, is there some way you can make the Army think Stafford’s got this thing? Which is why he’s running off his chain?”
There was a moment of silence on the line. “That’s rucking brilliant,” Tangent said. “It doesn’t even have to hold up for very long.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. By the time the Army convinces itself he doesn’t have it, or even know where it is, we can be down the road and gone.”
“I like that. And, yes, I know just how to do that. The Army’s working this thing way offline. They have to be in a fucking panic. This fits hi with what we were going to do anyway, only this is much better. Look, you go back to your daily routine. Everything normal. No more night visits to the DRMO. Be thinking of how we’ll do the swap. How you want your money. Keep it simple. Think next forty-eight hours, max, okay?”
“I hear you.”
The line went silent as Tangent hung up. Carson put the phone back and looked around the exchange parking lot to see if anyone had been watching him, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Stafford with the cylinder, he mused. He smiled then. “Beautiful,” he announced to the ah-as he got in his truck. “Fucking beautiful.”
The Army Learjet touched down with two bruising puffs of blue smoke from its tires at almost exactly six pm. On board were Brigadier General Carrothers, Major Mason, and an FBI polygraph operator named W. Layon Smith. The plane had been delayed getting out of Andrews due to a movement of the presidential 747; Carrothers’s single star had not been enough to get them a ramp time before the field was locked up while Air Force One landed after a maintenance stint in California. Then they had been stacked up over Atlanta by the Sunday-afternoon business travelers’ rush hour, followed by more delays in getting Smith’s gear through airport security. None of this had unproved Carrothers’s attitude.
The jet pulled up to the ops building and shut down. Carrothers emerged first, where he was met by the depot’s commanding officer and his operations officer. They went directly to an Army staff car. Major Mason and Smith followed in a Suburban. The commanding officer, a full colonel, looked tired and drawn. Carrothers afforded him little sympathy. The investigation had narrowed the cause for this fiasco down to two possibilities: Either Tooele had screwed up the arrival transfer of the special weapons shipment in Utah or Anniston had screwed up the outgoing shipment here in Alabama. Until one or the other was proved, both commanding officers were good prospects for a general court-martial. The staff cars proceeded to the commanding officer’s office. Once there, Carrothers held a quick conference.
“You have this man Stafford in isolation?”
“Yes, sir, General,” the colonel replied. “Since this morning.” The operations officer nodded eagerly in confirmation.
“Okay, I have a one-hour-stay time here. We’re going to stage a little drama out in the tombs. Here’s what I want to do.”
They came for Stafford at 6:30. There were three of them, fully dressed out in Army chemical warfare protective gear: camouflaged full body suits, sealed gloves and black rubber boots, hoods and respirators. They did not speak, just motioned for him to follow them. They were not armed, but they were big enough for that not to matter very much.
It was dark when they took him outside, through a different door this time, to a waiting Humvee transport. They motioned for him to get in, one actually helping him; then two of them got in back with him, one on either side. The third got in on the driver’s side, and they rumbled off into the evening. They went down a long, straight two-lane road for about ten minutes before turning off onto another road, which had a rail line running down the middle of it. Stafford could see fairly well out the windows, but there wasn’t much to see other than the endless pine forest.
They finally arrived at a gate complex, which consisted of two gate towers flanking a fifty-foot-wide sliding double-gate assembly set into a thirty-foot-high double chain-link fence with razor wire at the base and on the top; there was a dog run in between the fences. Insulators on the wire strands indicated that the fence was electrified. There were sodium-vapor light fixtures mounted beneath the guard towers and every fifty feet along the fence, turning the dark green of the trees an ominous black where the fences curved into the forest. The rail line went under the gate and then turned to the right behind one of the guard towers. Stafford thought he could see what looked like a machine-gun barrel protruding from each guard tower.
The Humvee stopped at the gate and the driver communicated with someone in one of the towers. His voice sounded strangely clipped from inside the hood. Stafford could not hear a reply, but the outside gate rolled back, allowing the Humvee into the space between the fences. Then the outer gate closed behind them, and the inner gate opened. The Humvee drove over a vehicle-trap mechanism buried in the roadway, then turned carefully through four enormous concrete tetrahedrons planted in the road as crash barriers. The road continued straight through some more trees, with the rail line running right alongside.
They went about a half mile before turning off onto a cinder road. A spur from the rail line turned with them. They passed through about a hundred more yards of trees before coming upon the first of the bunkers.
Stafford sat up when he saw them; this didn’t look like a place where interviews would be held. Not polite ones, anyway. All his imaginative plans for righteous defrance looked less and less like a medium for success here.
The Humvee drove down between two lanes of bunkers, which were much bigger than he had expected. They were nearly a hundred feet long and about thirty feet in width. They looked like concrete Quonset huts that had been partially submerged in the red Alabama clay. There were sodium-vapor lights mounted at each end of the bunkers, illuminating concrete ramps descending to steel doors. Branches from the rail spur went down the ramps to the steel doors of each bunker. He looked out both sides of the vehicle. The bunkers stretched in endless rows and lanes, looking like some kind of industrial mausoleum. This depot must be enormous, he thought.