Endangered Species (22 page)

9/25

1139

D
EPUTY
S
HERIFF
L
OFTING
was the man Wager was told to see. He was only slightly taller than Wager and had straight black hair combed back to hide a bald spot. Like a lot of sheriffs’ officers Wager knew, the man had a mustache wide enough to droop around the corners of his mouth. Some SOs in mountain towns required their deputies to grow mustaches to please the tourists, and it was one reason Wager had been tempted to shave off his own.

“You think the suspect’s up here, Detective Wager?” Their Ford Bronco swung off the Boulder Canyon highway at the Magnolia Road junction. The steep, rocky walls lining the two-lane highway were marked with a cluster of houses that perched on every near-level spot of land. Magnolia Road was narrower than the canyon road, and steeper, and lurched up an incline bitten into the side of the cliff.

Wager felt himself pressed against his seat back as the car ground skyward through a series of hairpin turns. “Maybe. The FBI didn’t find him there, though.”

“Special Agent Shackleton’s already been out here, has he?”

“That’s the Boulder FBI rep?”

“One of them. Son of a bitch thinks he’s God’s gift to local law enforcement.”

Federal warrants didn’t need local approval, and federal officers had jurisdiction everywhere. But the wise ones kept the local agencies informed when they were running a search or a bust. Wager understood the sting of resentment in Deputy Lofting’s voice; nobody liked to be told they couldn’t be trusted. “As I understand it, he only had a pickup; I’ve got a search-and-seize warrant.”

“What are we searching and seizing for?”

“Anything. Everything.”

This region was Lofting’s patrol area. Boulder County was divided into quadrants, and usually the sheriff’s officers lived in their own district. Wager figured Lofting was one of those, because he showed pride of ownership and was eager to point out items of scenic interest. Of course, the interest was from his perspective: “Had a sniper up on that knob, two, three years ago. Didn’t kill anybody—just drunk and dumb and shooting at tires.”

Wager eyed the outcropping of gray rock that thrust like a ragged thumb above the pines. “How’d you get to him?”

“Came in from behind—off the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Scared the living fire out of me, I tell you: creeping through the goddamn bushes where I couldn’t see more’n six feet ahead, and some maniac with a rifle up in front of me.”

“Put up a fight?”

“Naw. Dumb shit had passed out. Had the cuffs on him before he even woke up.”

A large log home set back from the road in an open field was one of the district’s frequent domestic calls—“One of them’s going to kill the other one of these days. Sure as the sun comes up tomorrow, one of them’s going to kill the other”—and another, smaller frame home was pointed to as the site of a dope bust a couple of years back. “The SO made a little money when we auctioned off that property.”

The paved road wound across a wide saddle toward a ridge that led farther up the mountain. Through a notch formed by a valley to the east, Wager could see the flat line of yellow prairie that stretched to Kansas. West, the snowy peaks of the Continental Divide were glimpsed behind a steady rise of wooded land. Here and there sat a home, usually log, silent and distant.

Finally, the deputy geared down, and they paused at a dirt road that led through a flower-studded meadow toward a stand of dark lodgepole pines. The thick grass was speckled with orange and red, yellow and white flowers. “Here we are.” Lofting nodded at a fence post bearing an orange plastic tag with black figures. “That’s the cabin’s fire number.”

“It’s peaceful,” said Wager.

Lofting nodded. “Too bad people have to fuck it up.”

That could be said about a lot of things, Wager thought, including life itself. But somehow the foolishness and waste seemed especially sharp up here. “Let’s get this done.”

Simon’s home was less a log house than a cabin. Small, with a tacked-on bathroom and a shed leaning against one side, the building was old, a summer vacation cabin that had been remodeled slightly for year-round use. An open porch surrounded it on three sides. In the close, hot sun of midday, Wager could see the heat radiate off its green tar-paper roof and could smell the tangy dust of pines. The squawk of a blue jay from somewhere down the steep slope on the other side of the cabin made the silence feel deeper.

No cars were parked where the grass had been worn thin by tires. A set of fresh tread marks wrinkled the sandy earth, and Wager assumed they were from the previous day’s FBI visit. But the two men went through the motions anyway, their shoes loud on the dusty porch boards, their knuckles rattling even louder against the loose screen door.

“Sounds vacant to me.” Lofting eyed the door’s dead-bolt lock. “Got a passkey? Or do we gotta bust in?”

Wager took out the collection of small, rippled blades that Chief Doyle would have been upset to know about. Lofting watched with close attention as he used a filed Allen wrench to give torsion to the pick and carefully lifted the tumblers in the lock’s cylinder.

“You pretty good with that?”

“Out of practice.” Wager would have felt better about picking the lock in a couple of minutes, but the time dragged out to almost five. Finally, the cylinder turned, and he opened the door a few inches. Lofting leaned past him. “Anybody home? Hey-o—anybody home?”

The law satisfied by the warrant, courtesy satisfied by the call, they went in. The two men made an initial quick tour of the three rooms formed by varnished plywood partitions without doors—kitchen, large living area, smaller bedroom with bath. Heavily insulated drapes framed the thick thermal glass of picture windows, and a well-used fireplace was situated to throw heat into both the living room and the bedroom. Bookshelves filled the wall over a sagging sofa that was long enough to use as a bed, and posters tacked here and there celebrated animals and forests. Framed on a wall, an ornate handwriting read: “Practicing Deep Ecology means recognizing the War on Nature. In Nazi Germany there were resistance groups who fought without the assurance that the Allies would win the war. They fought without assuming they would win. They fought because it was right to fight. We must continue that dedication to fight!” A scattering of magazines—
Earth First!
,
Greenpeace
—lay on the large table that served for work and dining. An Ansel Adams calendar with striking black-and-white mountain photographs hung beside the clattering refrigerator. A heavy red circle surrounded September 26, the next day.

“Want me to toss the bedroom?” asked Lofting.

Wager nodded. “Any papers, letters, notebooks—anything that might lead to King.”

“Gotcha.”

Wager took the living room table, with its stack of newspapers and its rolltop mini-desk containing a variety of pigeonholes and tiny drawers. His hands moved quickly, but surely and methodically, through the drawers, pulling each one entirely free of the desk for any secret compartment or taped papers behind the wood. The desk chair had a cushion, and he folded that at his ear, listening for the crinkle of paper.

“Got some clothes and linens in here. He might be planning on coming back.”

“Any papers or letters?”

“Not yet.”

Wager grunted and found a locked drawer. This time, since Lofting wasn’t watching him, the pick took only a few seconds. He slid the drawer open, to reveal an empty brown envelope and a scattering of tacks, paper clips, ballpoint pens, a couple of stamps.

“Here’s something kinda curious, Detective Wager.” Lofting’s voice drew Wager to the bedroom. “I found these in the bottom drawer, under some jeans.”

Wager looked at three glossy black-and-white photographs. They were eight-by-ten blowups taken from the air, looking down at an angle on a patch of scrubby and road-scarred ground. A cluster of buildings showed some kind of installation—a manufacturing site, a small military base, perhaps. It looked vaguely familiar, and Wager turned the photographs first one way, then another, to orient them.

Lofting looked over his shoulder. “Make sense to you?”

“No …. But it looks familiar.”

Lofting studied the photos for a moment, then turned one around. “Well, sure! Here’s Highway 93, and this here’s a corner of the Broomfield airport. And this is Highway 72—runs up Coal Creek Canyon.” His slightly dirty fingernail traced a fragment of road across one corner of the glossy page. “You know that place where they make parts for the atom bombs? Just south of the Boulder county line and at the mouth of Coal Creek Canyon? That’s what this is—Rocky Flats.” Wager felt the flesh along his spine crawl with a sudden chill.

9/25

1427

M
ALLORY’S VOICE, TOO
, revealed a chill. “Rocky Flats? Photographs of the Rocky Flats atomic weapons plant?”

Wager nodded over the telephone receiver. “And a date circled on his wall calendar—the twenty-sixth. Tomorrow.”

Moving through the cabin with exaggerated care to show how quiet he could be while Wager was on the phone, Lofting began pulling books from the shelves over the couch to riffle the pages for any hidden notes or slips of paper.

“I’ll have a search team up there as soon as possible. Don’t touch anything else. Can you bring the photos down to the Denver office?”

“It’ll take me about two hours to get there.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

It took less than two hours—Lofting had run hot down Boulder Canyon, and Wager hadn’t worried about speed limits on the turnpike leading from Boulder to Denver. The Federal Building occupied a full downtown block between Champa and Stout, its granite blocks and Greek pillars guarding the federal courts as well as various agencies. Wager had never been to the FBI offices, and it took him longer than he wanted to find his way up dimly lit stairwells and along echoing corridors that smelled of wax and the stale air of bureaucracy. But he finally found the door Mallory had told him to look for. Empty of any official sign, it bore only the room number. Wager rapped and pushed it open to show a cubicle slightly larger than a closet and almost filled with a blond oak desk of military-surplus design. Mallory sat behind it, freshly shaved; but his eyes, over puffy bags of unhealthy-looking flesh, were bloodshot. A razor nick on his chin had left a tiny red scab. On the desk, a scattering of papers, including Xerox blowups of the plans drawn by Pipkin, lay gleaming in the fluorescent glare of an industrial-size ceiling light. Behind the seated man, another door, this one with a glass panel, led deeper into the maze of offices. From behind that glass came the rustle and murmur of steady business.

Mallory didn’t waste words saying hello. “Let’s see them.”

Wager laid the photographs on the desk, and the FBI agent stared at the glossy prints.

“Have you had a chance to check the diagrams against any of the Rocky Flats buildings?” Wager asked.

Mallory shook his head. “It’s DOE, and I’m still trying to find out who has authority to produce the goddamn things. But I’ve alerted the security force at the plant. They’re sending in the duty commander and one of their senior maintenance engineers—should be here soon.”

“Think they’ll recognize it?”

“I don’t know whether to hope so or hope not.” Mallory’s shoulders rose and fell on a long breath. “And I don’t know how happy they’ll feel about coming here. Our agency conducted a raid at Rocky Flats a couple of years ago, and our relationship hasn’t been exactly harmonious since. Especially as we found a hell of a lot of violations of safety regulations and some pretty serious security lapses.”

Wager thought that over. “They’ve been corrected?”

Mallory shrugged. “That’s what I hear. One of the big changes has been an increase in DOE oversight personnel, from sixty-five to a hundred and seventy-five.”

“That includes more members of the security force?”

“Yes.”

Wager, too, gazed at the photographs. “Then I don’t see how anybody could break into that place. I’ve heard that their security people have everything from Uzis to armored personnel carriers mounting fifty-caliber machine guns.”

The FBI agent agreed. “That’s why I spent my time trying to fit the diagrams to other installations. I thought of Rocky Flats—it did cross my mind. But the security’s been upgraded—it’s been tested by agencies inside and outside DOE. … And I don’t see how King could do anything if he did breach the perimeter.” He added, “Besides, they haven’t produced any plutonium triggers since 1989, and the W-88 program’s been canceled. The place is scheduled to be closed, something Greenpeace has been after for years.”

Wager didn’t understand all of Mallory’s references, but he did remember a small headline he had read lately. “The newspaper said the government was planning to store thousands of tons of plutonium there—‘a plutonium Fort Knox,’ they said.”

Mallory rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It’s already out there in the vaults. Virgin and residue plutonium. Tons of it. Nobody knows what to do with the stuff.”

“What about the—what’d they call it?—the decontamination. There’s talk of using the plant to decontaminate itself.”

A nod. “One scenario has the plant eating itself over the years and finally disappearing. And another has the production building restarted and kept on standby in case we need more triggers in the future. It’s a political question, and it’s still up in the air.”

“Maybe King wants to hit it while it’s still news or to show that no installation’s safe,” said Wager.

Mallory grunted. “And maybe Simon left the photographs to throw us off the real target. But we can’t take that chance, can we?”

The vague shadow of a passing figure showed against the glass panel in the door behind Mallory, and Wager heard muffled telephone bells from that busier room. The white walls of this cubicle were blank, and its single fluorescent light made a steady, high-pitched buzz. “No, we can’t. But if Rocky Flats is the target, King must still be in the area.”

Mallory’s bloodshot eyes lifted from the photographs to Wager. “Any leads on that?”