Dead Simple (21 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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“
I
said don’t move or I’ll kill you right here! Stop you from telling the world!”
“Telling the world
what
?” Blaine asked the man who was the exact image of William Henry Stratton.
“The gold! You’re bringing it all back, doing everything you can to destroy my family name!”
“Who are you?” Liz demanded.
“I won’t let you,” the man said, instead of responding. “I’ve worked too hard to bury the past to let anyone dig it up now!”
“The traps!” Blaine realized. “The barbed wire under the lake—it was
you
who planted it!”
“And it worked! For years it kept everyone from pulling up the treasure! … Until you showed up.”
“You wasted your time: there’s no treasure under that lake.”
“Bullshit! It’s there, and if someone finds it—”
“They’re not going to find it, because William Henry Stratton and his convoy got away,” Blaine said, as much to Liz as to the stranger.
“No! He was never heard from again! He stole the gold and died on that farm!”
“He didn’t steal the gold at all,” Blaine insisted, “and I can prove it.”
 
 
 
“
Y
ou, drive!” Stratton’s replica ordered Liz when they reached the corner of Fourteenth Street and Constitution Avenue, where his car was parked. Then he gestured for Blaine to join him in the back seat, his old Colt .44 still aimed dead-on.
Liz waited for both doors to close behind her before starting the engine and shifting into gear. She pulled out into the street and then jammed on the brake in the same instant Blaine’s right hand knocked the pistol aside. The Colt roared and a flash illuminated the interior. The window behind the stranger exploded as Blaine cracked his free hand into the man’s face, catching him in the nose. Before the man could respond, Blaine snatched the revolver from his grasp.
The man’s watering eyes regarded it fearfully.
“All right,” McCracken said, dropping the Colt into the front seat next to Liz. “Who are you?”
The man was holding his nose, his fingers red with blood. “Farley Stratton,” he said in a nasal tone. “The colonel’s great-great-grandson.”
“Okay, Farley, what would you say if I told you I could clear the colonel’s name?”
The man pulled his hands from his nose and let the blood drop freely. “That you’re crazy. My family has lived with the disgrace of Stratton’s Folly for a hundred and thirty-five years. The legend nearly destroyed us, but so long as it stayed a legend we could at least live in peace.”
“That’s why you booby-trapped the lake,” Liz said from the driver’s seat.
“Yes! Where the gold ended up after he stole it.”
“Wrong,” said McCracken. “Everything William Henry Stratton did complied with the orders of President Lincoln himself.”
“Lincoln
ordered
him to steal the gold?”
“No. Lincoln
gave
him the gold as a settlement he was supposed to deliver to representatives from the South.”
“What kind of settlement?” Liz asked before Stratton had a chance to.
“The kind you make when you’re suing for peace, ready to accede to your enemy’s demands.”
“Lincoln was
surrendering
?” Stratton asked incredulously.
“He ordered a quarter-million gold coins minted in secret just days after a meeting with representatives of the Northern industrialists who were actually running the war effort. Ten-dollar gold pieces missing the ‘United States of America’ on their tail because they had been minted
for the Confederacy
. As a
payoff,
since the gold in the Northern treasury must not have been enough. That gold was loaded in its own strong boxes in the heavy load wagons, along with the four keg chests containing the freshly minted coins.” Blaine tightened his gaze, looking at Liz briefly before turning back toward Stratton. “Your great-great-grandfather was sent to deliver the gold and the coins, along with the official surrender documents, to representatives of the South.”
“What’s the difference? He still stole it!”
“No, he didn’t. Stratton’s Folly was all a ruse, a plot hatched by Lincoln to get the Northern business leaders off his back. Your ancestor was never supposed to make that rendezvous in the South at all. His orders were to make it seem like he had stolen the treasure, so Lincoln would have no choice but to continue the war effort. Those orders included murdering the civilian detachment that was bringing along the accession papers.”
Farley Stratton’s mouth had dropped in shock. He was trembling slightly. “Prove it.”
“Help me.”
“How?”
“The route he was supposed to take. You must know
something.”
“It doesn’t matter. He never got there. He never left that farm.”
“He did, I tell you. The convoy—and the treasure—were lost somewhere else.”
Stratton blinked his eyes rapidly. “But I don’t know where he could have gone! The storm would have made him change his route, deviate from the original plans.”
“Give me a ballpark destination.”
“Pennsylvania,” Farley Stratton said, after a pause. “He planned on heading north through Pennsylvania. It was in a letter he wrote. Just that much.”
“Good.”
“What now?”
“Get out.”
“But—”
“Do as I say!” Blaine ordered, reaching across Stratton to throw open the door.
Stratton slipped out reluctantly, still holding his nose.
“If I’m right,” Blaine told him, “there’ll be proof, and I’ll bring it to you.”
“How will you find—”
“Don’t worry.” Blaine swung back toward Liz. “Go!”
She screeched away from the curb. “Where we going?”
“To pick up my friend Johnny. Then to have a talk with the last man your father saw before he disappeared.”
“
W
e’d like you to move away from the window, sir,” one of his bodyguards told Maxwell Rentz as he surveyed the view of Paradise Village from his penthouse apartment.
But Rentz had more important things on his mind than worrying about his safety.
“Still nothing from Dobbler?” he asked a second bodyguard, trying to hide his concern when the man shook his head.
Rentz had come to think of the three bodyguards Dobbler had hired to supplement his own security force as the Three Bears. He had secured himself with them in the high-tech confines of Paradise Village. Until he could make more permanent arrangements tomorrow, holing up here was the best he could come up with. He even began to think he might be writing the best commercial for the facility yet: based on what he had learned in the past day, if these walls could keep Blaine McCracken out, then maybe there was hope for him to revitalize the project. The irony was striking. Even his father would have approved of his grit. Refusing to give up in the face of utter failure.
It all came down to how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted. After Dobbler finished with McCracken, the plan was for him to “borrow” Liz Halprin’s son for as long as it took the woman to come to her senses. Now Rentz was beginning to fear that it was McCracken who
had finished Dobbler, in which case he had come to the right place to get through the night.
Rentz had managed to get twenty men to Paradise Village, a combination of the private force that patrolled the facility and the company that handled security for his office building. Additionally, all gates had been sealed, Paradise Village closed off behind the ten-foot brick-andcobblestone wall that enclosed it. Electronic surveillance kept a constant watch on every inch of space, alerted by any stray movement. Armed patrols crisscrossed the streets in Jeeps, their firepower increased for the night.
Rentz had chosen for himself and the Three Bears an eighth-floor, fully furnished model penthouse where he could look out over half the community. The steel-core doors were outfitted with cobalt locks programmed for keypad entry only. The windows could withstand anything up to a shotgun shell and, with the hurricane shutters in place, a forty-millimeter grenade.
Since this had always been intended as his personal residence, the king living amongst his people, the penthouse was also equipped with a miniature version of the main security deck: a converted closet containing a built-in console featuring three closed-circuit monitor screens that provided a rotating view of the grounds. Rentz had stationed one of the Bears behind the console to be his eyes as the long evening wound down.
In spite of the other Bear’s warning, he remained by the window, gazing out over his domain, refusing to concede anything within its confines.
Come and get me,
he urged McCracken, as he stared out into the night.
Just try it … .
Bear Number One swung from behind the monitoring station. “Security reports a couple of vagrants just outside the main entrance.”
Rentz headed over. “Bring it up on-screen.”
The middle screen of the three built into the console showed the vagrants seated against the high wall, their clothes tattered and stiff with soil.
“Get them out of here. Last thing we need tonight is distractions.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And after you’ve done that, run another status check. Anything seems out of place, no matter how small, I want to know about it.”
Rentz moved back to the window, reviewing his options if Dobbler had been removed from the picture for good. The Three Bears were good men, certainly capable enough to handle the simple kidnapping of a child. But Rentz questioned if they were good enough to deal with McCracken.
“Mr. Rentz!” Bear Number One called a few minutes later. “There’s a problem in sector one.”
“What is it?” Rentz asked, hustling over.
“An intrusion of some kind, but I’ve got nothing on my screen.”
“Small animals set the motion sensors off sometimes. That’s probably it.”
The man touched a hand to his headpiece. “Wait a minute—we got a report of a man down.”
“Where?”
“Same sector.”
“Find it, goddamn it!”
Rentz grabbed a second headset and fitted it over his ears, watching tensely as Bear Number One searched through the camera views of sector one without success.
“A mobile patrol is responding.”
“I can hear for myself!” Rentz snapped at him.
On screen number three, a Jeep with two men inside streaked toward the scene. Rentz followed the Jeep’s progress on screen number two, but then it vanished from sight.
“Patrol Two approaching coordinates,”
Rentz heard in his headset. “
Patrol One, do you copy?”
Silence.
“Patrol One, do you copy?”
Rentz and the Bear behind the console looked blankly at each other.
“Er, Central, I’m having trouble raising Patrol One.”
“We had Patrol One on visual just a few minutes ago,”
the central monitor in Paradise Village’s security headquarters told Patrol Two.
“Where?”
“Returning from main entrance.”
“Wait a minute, there he is! There’s our downed man!”
“Where?” Rentz demanded. “Where?”
“Patrol Two, this is Central. We don’t show you on-screen. State your locale.”
Silence again.
“Patrol Two, this is Central. Do you copy?”
“Central, this is Rentz. Converge on and close off that area.”
“Roger th
—”
“Central, are you there? Central, come in.”
Rentz felt something icy grip his insides. His legs felt heavy. The floor of the penthouse seemed to waver. Two Bears remained by the windows, peering outward.
“Get away from those fucking windows!” Rentz ordered them.
“Jesus fucking Christ …”
“What is it, Central? What do you see?”
“Bring up camera eighteen. Repeat, the view from camera eighteen!”
Rentz watched as his Bear behind the console complied. All three screens filled with a shot of a Jeep in flames against the security wall, two of his men still inside it, slumped toward the dashboard.
“That’s Patrol Two!”
the monitor reported, his voice panic-stricken.
“Where’s Patrol One? Have you sealed off the area? … Central, goddamn it, is sector one sealed off? …
Central, where the fuck are you?”
“They’re not responding, Mr. Rentz,” the Bear behind his console told him.
“I can fucking well hear that for myself. What’s going on?”
“Everybody’s talking to everybody else, sir. Could be the circuits are overloaded.”
“Bullshit!” Rentz jammed himself against the back of the Bear’s chair. “Bring up the main entrance again!”
A few clicks on the keyboard and it replaced the burning Jeep on screen, showing the shabbily dressed vagrants still in place.
“Patrol One got rid of them. That was the report. What happened?”
Rentz was still staring at the screen seconds later when one of the vagrants slumped against the other, not drunk but unconscious. The second vagrant didn’t respond at all, obviously unconscious too.
“Close in!” Rentz ordered the Bear behind the console.
The Bear worked the zoom command, and the faces of the two vagrants filled the screen.
They weren’t the same men he had glimpsed earlier! They were—
“Oh my God,” Rentz muttered. “Those are my men!”
“Patrol One,” said the Bear.
Rentz backed away from the console, straying as far as the cord of his headset allowed. “He’s inside the complex! McCracken’s inside the complex! Close the hurricane shutters,” he ordered the Bear nearest the control panel.
The man flicked a button, and the steel-colored slats unfolded downward from the ceiling, turning the room into a well-lit vault.
“Put me on-line,” he ordered the Bear behind the console. “I want to talk to everyone we’ve got down there.”
The Bear worked his keyboard, stopped, then tried again. “I can’t raise them, sir,” he said tentatively.
“What do you mean, you can’t raise them?”
“They’re gone.”
“All
of them?”
“Or cut off. Like someone shut down the system.”
“Turn it back on.”
“I can’t, sir. It can only be changed from the operations center.”
“One of you has to head over there, then. That’s all.”
The Bears looked at each other.
“That wouldn’t be advisable, sir,” one of them said.
“It might be exactly what the intruder
wants,”
added another.
“What about the guards downstairs in
this
building?” Rentz raised.
The third Bear showed him a walkie-talkie clipped to his waist. “They’re the only ones on this channel.”
“We could send one of them out into the complex,” suggested the second. “Have him round up as many of the other guards as he can find.”
“What if there aren’t any others left?” Rentz shot back.
“Wait a minute,” said Bear Number One, eyeing the console. “One of our Jeeps just turned onto this street.”
“Christ, are those our guys inside?” another of his Bears wondered, as Rentz got close enough to study the screen.
Suddenly the Jeep picked up speed. It screeched forward, screaming toward the building lobby and crashing through the glass. The guards inside opened fire, riddling the Jeep’s frame with bullets, not a speck of glass left in its windows when they finally approached the vehicle.
Bear Number One tightened the camera angle on the inside of the cab, as the guards neared it warily. “Christ, I think those are our guys. I think they just shot our own people!”
A shape popped up from the ruined husk of the Jeep and opened fire through the shot-out windshield, mowing down the three guards who strayed into his path before turning his weapon on the camera. The scene on-screen died.
Rentz stared at each of the Three Bears in turn. “One of you take the elevator, another the stairs. The third stays with me.”
Bears Two and Three rushed to the door and keyed in the proper combo to activate the cobalt locks. They spun out into the hall and then rushed toward the end where the elevator and stairs were located. Rentz peered out briefly to watch them, then resealed the door. The final Bear stood protectively near him.
Seconds later, Rentz heard from one of the Bears through the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “The elevator’s coming up.”
Rentz snatched the walkie-talkie to his lips. “What about the stairs?”
“I’m right outside the door,” reported the final Bear. “All’s quiet.”
“The elevator’s stopping.”
“Christ,” Rentz muttered, and jammed the walkie-talkie against his face hard enough to make his ear sting.
“The door’s opening. If anyone’s in there, I’ll—”
A noose knotted around Rentz’s insides. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“The compartment’s empty.”
“What about the roof over it?”
“No signs of alteration,” the Bear reported. “Do you want me to check it?”
“No, just shut it down. What about the stairs?”
“Still nothing,” came the voice of the Bear posted there.
“Lock the door. I want both of you back here!”
Rentz moved to the monitor screen and followed their progress back down the hall. As soon as they had reached the door, he moved to the pad and keyed in the proper combo to release the inner cobalt seals. Rentz heard a hollow metallic snap and then the door clicked open.
As Rentz turned to watch the two Bears enter, the hurricane shutters blew inward. It was the loudest sound he had ever heard, the percussion enough to yank his legs out and send him crashing to the thick carpet. He clutched his ears as jagged holes appeared in the space-age titanium.
The two Bears, still holding their submachine guns, had gone down too, but still managed to open up with dual sprays at the chasms where the scorched and smoking metal had been peeled away. The bullets that didn’t find the chasms pinged off the steel; dull flashes spilled backwards. The night air flooded into the room, drenching the penthouse with a stiff breeze.
Ears still ringing, Rentz crawled across the debris-strewn carpet to a toppled desk for cover.

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