BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers) (26 page)

He thought of the funeral he’d have to attend tomorrow. He thought of Annie, and his need to talk to her again tonight about all of this. He didn’t look forward to either prospect.

He returned to the desk. Using a fresh burner phone and a spoofing website, he keyed in the private cell number of the
Inquirer e
ditor. It rang a few times before he heard the familiar growl.

“Listen, whoever you are, I don’t know how you got this number, but I’m not buying whatever you’re selling.”

“That’s too bad, Bill. I guess I’ll have to peddle my next article elsewhere.”

“Hunter!” Bronowski barked. “You’ve taken your sweet time returning yesterday’s call.”

“Sorry. I didn’t check in with my answering service till just a few minutes ago.”

“Oh yeah—I forgot. Your
answering service.
I suppose it’s out of the question for His Royal Majesty to use voicemail and a phone number that shows up on Caller ID, like the rest of us mere peasants.”

“I told you before, Bill: I piss off the wrong people. I get lower insurance rates if they can’t track me down.”

“Well, plenty of the wrong people had no trouble finding
me s
ince I ran your piece yesterday. Gavin Lockwood of Nature Legal Advocacy called first thing this morning to say they’re considering a defamation lawsuit. The EPA’s press office issued a statement around noon accusing us of ‘groundless and irresponsible speculation.’ Then Senator Conn’s chief of staff—some snotty piece of work name of Kaplan—phoned to demand a retraction and apology. And all that before Addison chewed me out for half an hour this afternoon. He told me Conn himself had just called
him
to bust his balls
.”

“Oh my. Have I provoked our dear publisher again?”

“He’s not the only person you provoked.” Something changed in the newspaperman’s rough voice. “You also got a threatening email.”

Hunter watched a low cloud scudding over the marsh. “How threatening?”

“Threatening enough for me to call the FBI.”

“Okay, you’d better forward a copy to me at the file storage site.”

“Already did … You know, reading this message, the language sounds like it could be one of those crazies up there in the woods that you wrote about. But whoever it is sounds really pissed off at you.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

After the call, he logged into his folder at the online cloud site, through a chain of “backdoor” computers that included a netbook that he’d stashed at a distant public wi-fi hot spot. He downloaded and printed out the message, then spent another half-hour pondering it.

Its author had to be Boggs. He’d been reading the man’s past writings, and the style was too similar to be coincidental. Most of it was a long rant against fracking and the “falsehoods and half-truths” in Hunter’s article. He skimmed through the turgid ideological prose—but paused when he saw the name of CarboNot:

“You insult the millions of us who cherish the Earth when you falsely align our interests with those of so-called ‘green energy’ corporations, such as CarboNot. We reject entirely, on moral principle, their manipulative abuse of nature and their empty claims of environmental sensitivity. To us, the horrifying holocaust of birds perpetrated by windmills erected by such rapacious companies is no moral ‘alternative’ to the use of fossil fuels. Neither is their desecration of miles of pristine landscape with ugly solar panels …”

It sounded sincere. So, maybe he was wrong to assume there was an alliance between WildJustice and the rest of the anti-fracking crowd.

He read on. A few paragraphs later, Boggs got personal:

“Mr. Hunter, your very name gives unapologetic voice to the arrogant human impulse that has so long defiled and disrupted our fragile ecosystem. In rationalizing that destruction, you prove yourself to be far more dangerous than the developers and drillers like Adair, whom you champion. Your perverse anthropocentric ‘values’ have damned you. That is why you must be—and will be—stopped.”

The following paragraph, also curiously personal, caught his attention:

“I can tell from your past articles that, in a strange way, you are a lot like me. You believe in a black-and-white morality—except that yours is the inverse of mine. To you, black is white. But you and I both make binary moral choices. Things are ‘either/or’ for us. That makes you predictable—and that is your Achilles’s heel.”

He read and reread it, faintly aware of the rasp of ice crystals whipped against his window by the rising wind.

Luna sat on the kitchen mat watching him pour a glass of wine. He heard the front door open, then the sound of her footsteps approach behind him.

“Hey, you,” she said. The sound of a smile in her voice.

He pulled out the cork and turned. “Hey, you.”

The smile vanished. “Your face! What happened?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I fell out of bed?”

“I’d believe you if you told me the truth!”

“Oh. That. Well, the CEO of CarboNot invited me to meet him at their offices. He sent a reception committee to wait for me in the garage.”

“Damn it, Dylan! You said they wouldn’t go after you, because you were too famous.”

“Clearly, I need to fire my publicist.”

“Stop it! Look what they did to you.”

“You oughta see the other guys.”

She stalked off into the den.

The cat looked after her, then back at him.

“Well,
I
thought it was funny.”

They rose early on Saturday morning for the flight to Adam Silva’s funeral. He drove them out to the Bay Bridge Airport on Kent Island, where he kept his Cessna 400. It was the first time she had seen it or flown with him, so he could tell that she was a little nervous when she buckled in. But in a few moments, after he made the loop north, he saw her unclench her hands and relax.

“You fly well,” she said. “And this is a gorgeous little plane.”

“Thanks. It’s the fastest single-prop on the market.”

“You haven’t radioed any towers yet.”

“I don’t have to. The airport here doesn’t have one, and it’s just far enough out from D.C. that I can stay on Visual Flight Rules. That means I don’t have to file a flight plan or call any towers—not if I don’t climb above 3500 feet for a while.” He nudged the outboard side stick a little to compensate for a bit of turbulence. “But we don’t have to stay down here forever. Once we get farther north, I’ll be able to climb to just below 18,000 and push it to about 220 knots. That should get us to Tidioute in about an hour.”

“How convenient to live near an airport so close to D.C., but where you can come and go without having to file a flight plan. I suppose you considered that when you bought the house out here?”

“Remember what you said about Wonk’s apartment over the doughnut shop? ‘Location, location, location.’”

Smooth engine noise filled the comfortable breaks in their conversation. Conversation had not been so comfortable the evening before. It took a long time and two large glasses of Syrah to calm her. He didn’t bring up that he had anticipated, and could have avoided, the confrontation in the garage. Not only would that have infuriated her; in retrospect, his actions were too embarrassing to mention. It was grossly unprofessional to walk into a trap like that, let alone unarmed. It easily could have turned into a disaster—and almost did.

Instead, he reassured her that the failed assault had probably discouraged his enemies and scared them off. He didn’t believe that, though, and vowed to himself that he would never again take such stupid, impulsive actions. He had let anger overwhelm reason, something he never did in the field. Against superior forces, a lone operator’s only advantages lay in asymmetrical tactics: staying on the offensive, careful planning, using stealth, surprise, and technology as force-multipliers, and—above all—maintaining icy mental control during ops.

Fifty-five minutes later he put the plane down on a private paved landing strip just west of the small town of Tidioute. He explained to Annie that, for an annual fee, he had arranged with its owner several years earlier to use the strip for visits to his cabin, and also to leave a locally purchased Subaru Forester on the airfield lot.

“It gives me travel flexibility, especially when I don’t need to transport Luna or supplies up here.”

“And an emergency escape option, I suppose,” she said as she unbuckled herself.

“There’s that.”

This time, though, he didn’t have to use his car. Dan Adair, who didn’t live far away, had offered to meet them and drive over to Warren. He stood waiting outside his Nissan pickup while Hunter swung around the Cessna next to the field’s small hangar.

Annie was shocked at the change in Adair’s appearance. In little over two weeks, he looked as if he had added five years and lost ten pounds.

“Sorry Nan couldn’t join us,” he said to her over his shoulder as she settled into the rear seat. “She was looking forward to seeing you again. But it’s Will’s twenty-second birthday today, and she has a party planned for the afternoon. He had a hissy fit when he thought Adam’s funeral might interrupt it.”

“I understand,” she said.

“You couldn’t. Not really.” In the mirror his eyes looked dull. “It’s complicated. Will was Nan’s only child with her late husband. He was thirteen when his dad died. He took it hard. And he didn’t like it much when his mother remarried. Especially to somebody like me.”

“Like you?” Annie prompted.

He eased the truck out of the lot and onto the road.

“See, Will’s dad was a college professor. Sociology. About as different from me as anyone can be, from what Nan tells me. And as Will loves to remind me.” His voice held a tinge of bitterness.

“Then why is he willing to work for you?” Dylan asked.

“Beats me,” Adair said. “It’s certainly not the kind of work I would’ve expected he would want to do. He went to school at the same place his dad taught—University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He majored in—what the hell was it?—oh yeah, ‘Social Thought and Political Economy.’ I had to write it down once, just to remember. And after school last year, he just seemed … I don’t know. Rootless. I offered him a job till he could sort things out. At first he just sneered at me. Which pissed me off. But then a few months later he came back to me, all apologetic, and asked if the offer was still open.” Adair sighed. “So you see how it is. How could I refuse a job to my wife’s kid?”

“I see how it is,” Dylan said.

They exchanged few more words during the somber twenty-minute drive along the Allegheny River to Warren. It was ten-thirty when Adair pulled into the lot of a large Methodist church.

Inside, family members and friends milled at the rear of the sanctuary prior to the funeral service. Annie held Dylan’s arm as they followed Adair in the queue leading to a blonde woman in black; two teenagers stood on either side. She recalled their names:
Sharon. Martin. Naomi.

When Dan Adair reached them, she noticed that his shoulders were trembling.

“Mrs. Silva,” he began. “I’m … Dan Adair …” He stopped. Swallowed. The trembling became shaking. “I …” His next words were a whispered sob. “I am
so sorry.
”

Sharon Silva’s vacant, reddened eyes offered no response. Her cheeks were hollow pits, and the black dress she wore seemed a size too large. She only nodded, not releasing the hands of her two children. Annie realized that she was probably sedated. Martin, whose forehead bore a long scratch, was struggling to hold back tears, while Naomi wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

Dylan rested his free hand on Adair’s shoulder. The man took a shaky breath and moved on.

Then they were face to face with the family.

“Mrs. Silva, I’m Dylan Hunter, and this is my fiancée, Ann Woods. We met your husband a few weeks ago, for a newspaper story I’m working on. We came to express—”

She blinked. “You’re the reporter he talked about.”

“Yes.”

“The one investigating this.”

“That’s right.”

Something awakened in her eyes. She released her son’s hand and seized Dylan’s.

“Find out who did this!”
she hissed between clenched teeth.

He nodded slowly. “I will.”

Her eyes began to fill. She looked at each of her children, then back at him.

“They have to pay.”

He raised her hand. Pressed it to his chest.

“They will.”

They remained through the service, then the luncheon reception that followed in the fellowship hall. Church members brought an abundance of home-cooked comfort food and desserts, served on paper plates with plastic utensils. Everyone tried to be cheery and friendly. At most funerals, that helped.

Adair sat on Dylan’s far side, away from Annie, at a long folding table, chatting with him quietly. She gave the men their space. She knew Dylan was trying to reassure him, restore his confidence. She picked at her salad, drank a few sips of lukewarm coffee with powdered creamer that floated on the top. It tasted like it looked.

After a while, Adair drove them back to the airstrip, where they said their goodbyes.

“Be strong, Dan,” she said, hugging him.

He nodded. It seemed only out of courtesy.

Once airborne, she expected him to speak first. He didn’t.

“Dylan?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t like the way you look right now.”

“How do I look?”

“Like you did in the diner. Before the fight.”

He remained silent, eyes on the distant horizon.

“What do you plan to do now?”

His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Let’s operate on the basis of ‘Don’t ask—don’t tell.’”

“Please. For me. For
us.
Don’t cross the line again.”

“I didn’t cross it. They did. They think they’re untouchable. They expect everyone to obey laws—except themselves. And they’re right. They’re getting away with it. That’s not supposed to be our system. We’re supposed to be a government of laws, not of men. But these days, those kind of men
are
the law.”

“I know. But—”