Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (27 page)

“What?”

“I said don’t touch anything. Stay away! Do you understand?”

Jacob glanced at the door, thought of his fingers between the boards, ready to yank it open. Somehow Eliza had figured out
what he was doing down here—she must be standing on the plateau at the top of the cliff. What did she know?

“I won’t,” he shouted back. “What is it? What’s going on?”

“How do I get down there?”

“Stay where you are, it’s too dangerous.”

“Don’t argue,” she shouted back. “Tell me how to get down.”

Jacob went back to the edge, craned his head, and looked up the face of the cliff. There was Eliza, waving down at him. His sister was mildly acrophobic—something must have spooked her to make her come to the edge and shout down at him.

He couldn’t see Agent Krantz, but spotted Fayer walking along the edge of the cliff, searching, he guessed, for the handholds. From his vantage point, he spotted the staircase cutting its path up the cliff and figured out why Eliza and Agent Fayer couldn’t find it. It ended and was obscured by a bristlecone pine at the top of the cliff. The tree had the gnarled, twisted look of an overgrown bonsai tree, its trunk desiccated and seemingly dead except for a single pair of living branches that stretched over the edge. It was not a big tree compared to the Douglas firs on the canyon floor, but a bristlecone pine of that size would be at least two thousand years old, maybe twice that. It would have been an old tree already when the Anasazi family built their cliff dwelling and hid the entrance to their stone staircase.

He started to shout directions to Eliza, but a gust carried his voice away and he had to wait for the wind to die. “Do you see the tree with two living branches?” he shouted. “No, keep going. Keep going. Stop! There are some stairs. Right there, do you see them?”

Meanwhile, Abraham, Stephen Paul, and David came up, one by one. Sister Miriam helped them over and into the hidden
alcove. David was pale, sweat pouring down his face, and he lay down on the ground, panting like a dog in a thunderstorm. Sister Miriam sat next to him and stroked his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m holding you back.”

“You’re not holding me back,” Miriam said. “And anyway, would you rather be in rehab with a bunch of addicts, picking at your mental scabs?”

Jacob turned back to look up at Eliza. She’d found the hidden staircase and now crept down one handhold at a time.

“What do we need that girl down here for?” Abraham grumbled.

“I don’t know, Dad, but she’s not out for a hike in the mountains. Can you sit down and be patient for two minutes?”

“Did you hear what she said? She brought the blasted FBI. They’re going to muck things up, keep us from doing what we need to do.”

Jacob clenched his jaw to keep from snapping something at his father. What’s more, his bloodlust was fading. Hearing Miriam’s scream and then looking over to see that she’d been startled by Eliza’s shout and had lost her grip, was about to fall to her death, had shocked him out of the trance he’d been in since the hospital. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. Even after hearing Eliza’s warning, his first thought had been to tear open the door guarding the cliff dwelling to see if he could find anyone to kill. What was wrong with him?

Agent Fayer followed Eliza in a zigzag pattern down the face of the cliff. And finally, Agent Krantz, creeping down, body flattened against the stone. Even from here, Jacob could tell he was terrified.

Eliza looked shaken when she finally angled down into the cliff dwelling, looking doubly cautious on the last few steps. Jacob took her arm and helped her in. She glanced at the stone wall, the door, then asked, “Anasazi?”

“Looks that way,” Jacob said. “Check out the basket with the corncobs.”

“That was a hell of a climb,” she said. “These damn Kimballs—I think I preferred Caleb’s dump to this.”

“Watch your language,” Abraham said. “You swear like a sailor.”

“Have you ever met a sailor?” Eliza said. “Neither have I, but I’ve heard you say
hell
or
damn
a million times, so please don’t lecture me. Apologies for the language, Brother Stephen Paul,” she added.

“It didn’t offend me,” Stephen Paul said with a half smile on his face.

Jacob thought about Stephen Paul’s senior wife, the expert coyote shooter, and suspected the man preferred his women with a little kick. He wondered if Stephen Paul regretted not marrying Eliza when he’d had the chance, or if he still needed his women to be fully committed to the church.

Agent Fayer entered the fissure. She took in the cliff dwelling with a glance, then met Sister Miriam’s gaze, thinned her lips, and gave a quick nod. The current FBI agent and mainstream LDS member, sizing up her former colleague who had turned fundy. Just what they needed, yet
another
personality clash. What a dysfunctional band. There were seven of them on the threshold to the cliff dwelling now, and they stood nearly shoulder to shoulder. The eighth finally arrived, bigger than anyone else, and squeezed his way in.

“Well,” Krantz huffed, his face pale. “This is cozy.”

“What’s going on?” Jacob asked his sister. “Why did you yell down like that?”

Eliza shared what Charity had told them about Taylor Junior setting up a trap.

Jacob’s mouth went dry as he thought about how close he’d been to opening the door. And he thought about that peculiar smell of flowers. He couldn’t smell it now, but was certain he hadn’t imagined it. “Anyone have any ideas?”

“Is there another way in?” Fayer asked.

Jacob looked. Brush grew along the outer wall of the ancient house, which ran directly parallel to the cliff, filling in the natural fissure in the sandstone. As the branches of the scrubby trees bent to meet the sunlight, they left a small gap where one could wedge oneself between the curving tree trunks and the bricks of the cliff dwelling. There were two windows halfway across the front of the building.

“Miriam, do you still have that penlight?”

He took it, tucked it into his pocket, and started across the front face of the building, moving between the wall and the screen of trees. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, as the trees, each trunk only three or four inches across, provided a springy, but secure railing of a sort, between the edge of the building and the drop-off to his right.

There was one scary moment when he had to stretch across a gap in the trees—the exposed cut stones he’d first spotted from below—grab a thin trunk on the other side, and shift his weight across the void. The weight of the smaller, farther branch bent as it took his weight. The tree groaned and he heard the roots shifting
where they gripped the crumbling outer wall of the cliff dwelling. And then he was across and squirming through the first window and into the cliff dwelling.

He turned on the penlight and looked around. It was a single room, no more than ten feet wide and twenty feet long. The floor was hard-packed earth, and there was a bed of dry grass in one corner. It smelled faintly of venison and of the musty odor of human bodies too rarely washed, and then that smell of geraniums again. He couldn’t see any flowers. Jacob turned the light toward the door and spotted Taylor Junior’s trap.

A nail protruded from each of the planks, held together with a wire loop. The loop was one end of a taut wire that dropped to the ground, where it met an artillery shell. Someone had duct-taped a hand grenade to the top of the shell, with the other end of the wire tied off on the grenade’s pin. It looked clumsy, but the intent was obvious.

Jacob sucked in his breath. If he’d yanked open the planks, he’d have jerked out the pin on the grenade. It would have detonated the artillery shell and blown him to pieces. And if he screwed up now, seven other people would die as well.

“Are you okay in there?” came Agent Fayer’s voice from the other side.

“One second.”

He took a closer look around the room to make sure there weren’t any other traps set to spring, then bent and gingerly lifted the artillery shell. With the slack released on the wire, he was able to slip the loop off the end of the two nails and disarm the trap. He set down the shell.

Jacob pushed aside the planks and blinked at the light that flooded into the room. The others stood in silhouettes, framed by
the doorway. As Sister Miriam and Agent Fayer stepped into the room, Jacob’s eyes began to adjust.

“The rest of you stay back,” Fayer said. “You too, Krantz. You won’t fit.”

The two women examined the room. Fayer had a hand on her gun, but lowered it after the first glance. They settled first on the artillery shell, then on a wooden crate in one corner.

“Is that what I think it is?” Fayer asked in a low voice as she looked back to the shell. “Where did it come from?”

Sister Miriam said, “There’s an army depot at Dugway. Maybe he got it from there.”

“So it’s some kind of high explosive,” Fayer said. “Just what we need. And the grenade is a detonator. What is it exactly?” She took the penlight and examined the crate, then turned to Miriam with a frown. “LWST. Do you know what that means?”

“No clue.”

But as soon as Jacob heard Dugway his mind started to make connections. “Lewisite. It’s a vesicant.”

“A what?” Sister Miriam asked.

“A blister agent,” he said. “After the Cold War, the army shipped their old chemical munitions to an incinerator at the army proving ground at Dugway. Mustard gas, nerve gas, Lewisite, all sorts of nasty stuff. They’re still destroying it.”

“How do you know all this?” Agent Fayer asked, a touch of suspicion in her voice.

“I was writing a paper on the Bhopal disaster when a professor saw my work and asked me to collaborate on a project testing chemical weapons on mice and rats. I know it sounds horrible, but when you grow up castrating sheep and processing
turkeys—slicing off their heads in a machine, I mean—you don’t get sentimental about rodents.”

But neither of the two women looked squeamish at the thought. “But what’s it do?” Fayer asked. “What do you mean by a blister agent?”

“It attacks the mucous membranes—nostrils, lips, mouth, ears. Your eyes, too. Eventually, bullae—blisters, I mean—will cover any exposed part of the body. It’s a horrible way to die.”

“Do you smell that?” Agent Fayer asked. In spite of Fayer’s warning, Abraham had started to push into the cliff dwelling to listen to what Jacob had to say.

“Everyone move back,” he said. “That flower smell is the chemicals leaking out. You don’t want it in your lungs.”

They crowded the ledge outside the cliff dwelling. Fayer took Jacob’s arm and gestured for her partner to come over. Krantz had pulled Abraham from the dwelling, and Jacob’s father was now glaring at him and exchanging glances with Stephen Paul.

After Krantz approached, Fayer turned to Jacob. “Tell it to me straight. You can recover from a chemical burn, right? If it’s a short exposure, I mean.”

“I guess. It’s a burn, but it’s not radioactive or anything. Chemical weapons are weapons of terror, really. You want to clear out a trench, you bombard it with mustard gas. You want to empty a Kurdish village, you shell it with chemical weapons. You kill a bunch, you maim a bunch, and you render the place uninhabitable.”

“Hold on,” Krantz said to Fayer in a low voice. “What are you thinking?”

“You know what I’m thinking.”

“The shell is evidence,” Krantz said. “You want to take it with us.”

“Are you serious?” Abraham demanded.

“Stay out of this,” Fayer said. “Let us make the decision.”

“You bet it’s my business. This filth is of the devil. It’s poison from the very belly of the beast. It—”

Jacob turned to say something, but Eliza had her hand on Father’s arm. “Dad, please. Let Jacob handle this.”

“My father may be blunt, but he’s right,” Jacob said. “You don’t want to mess with this stuff. Get a good dose and you’re in trouble. One minute your skin is burning. The next minute you’re screaming and clawing at your skin. A rat will chew off its own legs to get away from the pain. You’ll die coughing up a bloody mass of your own lungs.”

“See,” Father said. “You see, don’t you? Let’s leave this place. It’s got a dark aura.”

Fayer ignored him and said to Jacob, “Sounds delightful. All the more reason we’ve got to get that shell out of here. They’ll come back for it.”

“We could throw it over the edge and destroy it.”

“Not good enough, Jacob. You know this isn’t the only one. He might have a hundred of the damn things. If we get this back to the lab, they can tell us exactly where it comes from, figure out if Taylor Junior has a pipeline. Now how do we get this out of here safely? Will the backpack stop it, absorb the leak, I mean?”

“No. Not even plastic or rubber will stop it.” He gave it some thought. “It’s old and leaky, but a short exposure should be fine. Once we get to the top we could make a sling from some sticks so no one has to touch it.”

“Good thinking,” Fayer said.

“But we need a volunteer to haul it up to the plateau,” Jacob said.

“I could do it,” Krantz offered.

“No, I’ll carry it,” Fayer said. “You worry about getting yourself up the cliff without falling to your death. You too, Miriam. No arguing.”

Nobody else volunteered. Fayer took a deep breath and went back into the dwelling. She emerged a second later holding the shell by the tips. It looked even uglier in the full light outside the cliff dwelling, squat and sinister with its letters stenciled across the surface like a curse in some ancient language. Krantz took her backpack and held it open so she could ease it in.

Jacob joined the others in crowding the ledge as far from the two FBI agents as possible, but he happened to glance at the shell as it dropped. Something seemed off. His stomach lurched.

There was something wrong with Taylor Junior’s booby trap. In the full light outside the cliff dwelling he saw that what he’d taken for an unsophisticated mass of duct tape over and around the grenade to hold it to the artillery shell was something else entirely. There was coiled wire taped near the pin, something that looked like the spring of a rat trap.

The first trap had been a feint. Maybe it would work, maybe not. But if Taylor Junior’s enemies proved too clever, if they came in through the windows or cut away the boards rather than pulling them open, he’d give his weapon a second chance.