Killer Dust (21 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Killer Dust
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Suddenly I realized what was missing: Jack’s father.
I got off the bed and toured the room, searching for anything that would point toward whoever Mr. Sampler had been. Finding nothing, I headed down the hall past several more pictures of Jack, and into the living room. Jack’s face appeared again and again, but he was the only male present. I walked into the kitchen to check for candid snaps on the refrigerator door. Nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact. Just like Jack’s room, the rest of the house was beginning to strike me as lost in time, out of sync with the present moment.
I heard a step behind me and turned to see Leah just coming to rest, leaning against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest. “You’re not sleeping,” she observed.
“No.”
She smiled guardedly. “What is it you are trying to discover ?”
There was no point in denying that I had been snooping. “I was just trying to glean a younger Tom from the photographs,” I said lamely.
“Glean,” she said. Her eyes narrowed as she mulled my choice of words.
My stomach shrank to the size of a baseball. “I’m sorry to be skulking around. I’m just realizing that I don’t know much about Jack. He doesn’t offer many details about himself.”
Leah’s eyes went to slits, and her lips tightened to a thin, straight line. After a moment she closed her eyes the rest
of the way, as if in meditation. When she opened them again, she said simply, “That’s probably for the best. The past is just the past, after all.”
“But Tom said you were the person to ask.”
She shook her head. “Not today.” She sighed, then said again, “Not today.” She straightened up. “Well then, you’ll be on your way I suppose.”
“Yeah.” My heart was busy joining my stomach in its little nut-sized packet.
“Let me give you my cell phone number. If you discover anything about where Jack is, will you please let me know? We both know we can’t trust Tom to do that.”
“Certainly.”
She wrote the number on a piece of paper and held it out to me, then gave me a very stern look. “You will give this to no one else?”
“If you say not.”
“I say not.”
“Then I shall simply memorize it.”
“That depth of care won’t be necessary. I can always change it if necessary. Well, it’s time to go.” She glanced at the door, an indication of where I was to go.
I passed through it to the carport. Leah followed me, carrying the suitcase. She closed the door behind me and put the case in the trunk of her car. “I hope we meet again, under better circumstances,” she said. Then she bent suddenly and gave me a light kiss on my temple, got into her car, and drove away.
Tom had the car up above eighty. My brain was cooking with fatigue, but the rate Tom was driving had me wide-awake. “Okay,” I said. “Time to fill me in on a few things, Tom.”
“Speak.”
“Why aren’t we just calling the cops, or the FBI, or the CIA, or the fucking armed services?”
“The police wouldn’t know how to deal with this. Jack and I
are
the FBI. This is on our shores, so not CIA. And we
are
using the fucking armed services.”
“No, Tom, you are retired from the FBI, and Jack is on leave, remember? This missile came from somewhere else, so that makes it a job for CIA. And Brad and Walt are obviously very highly trained, but they are not on active duty.”
Tom shook his head. “It’s better to keep this tight. If we run a crew of FBI or CIA or big army in there right now, we could lose all the connections.”
“What connections?”
“The connection that got that thing into the hands of whoever put it there. This is high-stakes poker we’re playing, Em.”
“I know that, Tom. But don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid? Don’t you think there’s maybe
somebody
out there in your profession who has an ounce of integrity?”
“Yes. But I don’t know which ones anymore. They’ve all started to look and act alike.”
I flopped back against the seat. “Then it’s a good thing you retired.”
“I agree.”
“And Jack should, too.”
“Same again.”
“What are you talking about, Tom?”
“I asked him to go into consulting with me. He is considering it. He figures when you two get more committed, you’ll want—”
“What?”
Tom glanced sideways at me. “Wait a minute, hasn’t he talked to you about this?”
“No!”
“Sorry.”
I kicked the dashboard. “You sons of bitches!”
“Watch it there. You don’t want to set off the air bag. It could break your leg if—”
“
Fuck
the airbag! And fuck your idea of security!”
“Em, your language is getting—”
“Fuck my language! There’s some funny business going on here. Try this: Why did Jack’s mother take off like that?”
“She’s a smart woman. She knows that whoever buried that thing may have been watching. Might have followed us to her house. And people who do that kind of thing aren’t nice people,” he said, sarcasm beginning to make his tone crisp. “So she went somewhere else where they won’t know to look for her.”
“But she had that bag packed and waiting! And it looked like it had been waiting for years!”
Tom did not reply.
I kicked the dashboard again. “So now you’re into ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ You
have
to tell me, Tom! There’s too much riding on this! I love Jack, truly I do, but that’s the space shuttle we’re talking about. Seven people will be on board that thing, and hundreds of millions will be watching.
It was
bad
when those jets hit the World Trade Center. Let’s not let them knock out the space program, too. It’s the thing we still get to feel good about.”
“Yes.”
“So let’s tell NASA. Get them to scrub the launch. They can say it’s another malfunction, or the hurricane winds again. Anything. I’m sure they’re masters at that kind of bullshit.”
Tom was suddenly spitting mad. “Yes, they are. But do you want to tell them? Hey, here’s a cell phone. Give them a call. Tell them what you want to tell them. Who do you ask for? And how are you going to get them to believe you?”
“We’ve got the missile. All we have to do is show it to them.”
“And where did you get this missile, Ms. Hansen?”
“In the …” I stopped and stared. I couldn’t believe what Tom was saying to me. “You’re extorting silence from me. You have all the connections it takes. You could stop that launch with one phone call.”
“And I will if I deem it necessary. But right now, it is not. We still have time. We have to find Jack and know what he knows. Because for once, my dear Em, you know exactly what I know. We are
both
in the dark.”
“Oh my God.”
“Right. So let’s analyze your samples and find out where our friend has gone.”
“But how would he know where it came from?” I asked, for the moment forgetting that I had ever suspected him of having put it there himself. It was simply too difficult to keep both thoughts in my head at once: that Jack was a good man who did the right thing, and that Jack was a psychotic shit head who aimed killing weapons at space shuttles. And why did I even think the latter?
“All he’d have to do is follow the son of a bitch home.”
“You’re still thinking it’s just
one
son of a bitch. That means that you do know something you haven’t told me. Jack could be wrong.”
Tom gritted his teeth with exasperation. “I have all but put it in neon for you: Jack told me it’s just one man.”
“But how did he
know
that?”
Tom clenched his teeth. His knuckles grew white. “Because he has a friend going up on that shuttle, and that person knows this man.”
 
 
Back in St. Petersburg, we drove straight to the USGS and tracked down Miles Guffey. Even as tired and stressed as he was, Tom managed to slow himself down, sink his hands into his pockets, and say, “Hey, thanks again for dinner the other night. That was some stimulating conversation.”
Miles looked back and forth between Tom and me, evaluating us over the tops of his reading glasses, no doubt trying to discern the message embedded in the fact that Tom had come with me to his office. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, like I said, I’m real concerned about all that.”
“Then you might be interested in helping us figure out which island one of these sand samples came from.” He beamed at Miles as if he were an old fraternity brother inviting him to a striptease party. “We’ve made splits of them to send to the lab in Washington, but we thought you might like to have a shot at them first.”
Miles’ eyes went wide with interest, but mine went narrow.
So Tom was misdirecting me again. He’s known all along that we’re looking for an island. So what island would that be?
I looked up at the map of the Caribbean that hung over Miles Guffey’s desk. I located Cocoa Beach, then the islands closest to it.
The Bahamas
…
Following my gaze to the map, Miles said, “Well, there are only 700 islands and 2,400 uninhabited islets and cays in the Bahamas. This shouldn’t be too tough.”
 
 
In no time at all, Miles had someone expressing my matching samples to Washington, and had a specialist examining
my sand sample. Next, Miles turned to the sample from inside the plastic. “What’s the provenance?” he asked.
Tom let his eyelids drop and rise again, his quiet signal that I should keep mum on certain details. I said, “Well, both were collected on an Atlantic shore beach. The first is from the coating of sand outside of an article of evidence, but the other came from inside, presumably transported in with the article from somewhere else. The carbonates looked exotic to the beach, especially those little pink things.”
Miles gave me one of his sloppy grins. “Oh, so y’all been fishing for square grouper, huh? Right ch’ar, them’s forams. We’ll call us in a specialist on those.” He picked up his phone and punched in four digits. “Hey, get me ’Livia, will ya? No, you tell her it’s important. No, this time I am not crying wolf. Aw, shit; tell her I got her some foraminifera from the Bahamas, that’ll get her going.” He hung up without saying good-bye, and, still grinning, turned to me and said, “Sometimes y’ jus’ have to know what trough the pig is feeding at.” He chuckled. “Olivia Rodríguez did her doctoral dissertation on them little thingies. Makes her heart go all pitter-pat.”
Sure enough, in about the time it took for a healthy person to all but sprint from her office to his, Olivia Carmen Rodríguez Garcia arrived at his doorway. Her eyes were little dark holes. “This had better be good.”
“Oh, it is. Y’all’ll like this one! Looky here!” He had used the time since putting the phone back in its cradle to pour half the sample into a little black cardboard tray and shove it underneath a petrographic microscope. “Just to the right of the
Homotrema,
check out that little turdlike one.”
Olivia switched on the light source, bent to the eyepieces, and began to adjust the focus. “Well, yes, that’s
Homotrema rubrum,
” she said. “This other one is more interesting. A
Spiroplectammina,
I think. And here’s a
Quinqueloculina
. Hmm … in order to narrow it from genus to species, I’d need a SEM. Where’d you get this, dear?” She had turned and was looking at me.
I blinked and fed her question back to her. “Well, that’s what we’re trying to understand. And, um, this man’s from the FBI.”
She glanced back and forth between Tom and me, but spoke to Miles. “Get Jane over at the University SEM on this. Have her pick the bugs and get them coated. Call me as soon as the sample is prepared.”
 
 
A scanning electron microscope is capable of enlarging our view of a sample by thousands of diameters. To do this, a loose sample is first “picked,” or sorted to select preferred grains. This is done by a person with steady hands who holds a fine brush that is wetted against the tongue then touched gently to the grains of interest. They are thus lifted out of the surrounding materials and stuck with gum paste to a backing. The tiny sample is then coated one molecule thick with gold, then set inside the vacuum chamber of the SEM and pummeled with electrons. The returning electrons “read” the sample, and it can be digitally displayed on a TV screen and enlarged to make a pinhead seem the size of an elephant. The machine can also determine mineralogical makeup of target points of the sample, a kind of mini analytical lab at the snap of a finger, or almost that quick.
Olivia brought another woman along to view the samples. “This is Hannah Jenkins. She is a pelagic specialist, I am benthic.”
Tom looked to me for a translation.
I said, “Floating versus bottom dwelling. It makes a difference if you’re trying to pinpoint where something came from. A bottom dweller stays put, while a floater can move around with the currents. It could have come from somewhere else. So the benthic is of more use to us as a positive indicator of source, but either way we need to know what we’re looking at, so we don’t draw the wrong conclusions.”
He nodded.
Olivia said, “The combination we’re finding here suggests a certain overlap of environments.” She opened a
thick book called
Carbonate Depositional Environments
to an article about the Bahama banks written by a man named Robert Halley, and showed us a map that illustrated what she was saying. “Benthic forams tell us a few things. The suite we have found here shows an overlap of these areas in which each would have lived. It’s not very accurate, really, but it’s a best guess.”
Miles looked over her shoulder. “The Berry Islands.”
Tom asked, “Can you narrow it to a specific island?”
“No,” said Olivia. “Foraminifera aren’t that specific. I’m not even certain that it’s the Berry Islands. But I’d say definitely the Western Bahamas.”
Tom nodded. “Excuse me,” he said, as he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and left the room to place his call. I tagged along and did my best to listen in as he reported the island group to Brad. As he listened to what Brad had to say in return, I saw Tom smile for the first time in days. As he signed off, he even turned that smile on me. “He’s got a line on Jack,” he said. “He’s on a sailboat, or at least he borrowed one from an old friend. He took it out of a marina in Stuart, a port town a hundred miles or so south of Cocoa Beach. So it looks like he’s crossed to the Bahamas ahead of us.”
 
 
It was two in the afternoon when Tom steered the Mercedes back into the driveway at Nancy Wallace’s domain. It was, once again, raining cats and dogs, big splashy drops that hit the gravel like something out of Dr. Seuss. We had been gone less than twenty hours, but it felt like a week. I had been up and going hard since half-past six the morning before, and each time I blinked I was afraid my eyes might stick shut.
A question punched through my fatigue. “Tom, why did Jack call it ‘killer dust’? I mean, what are the other associations with the word ‘dust’ ?”
“Look to Miles for that answer.”
“Anthrax.”
“Yes. In its most lethal, highly developed form, it is a fine dust. The doses that came in those letters were finely ground. Less than you’d find in a packet of sugar.”
“But plenty deadly.”
Tom said, “You keep a close eye on Miles and Waltrine and let me know anything that occurs to you. And keep after him. I have a feeling he knows more than he wanted to say about that island group.”

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