THE OVERTON WINDOW (25 page)

The gathering got right down to business. It had been all talk up to this point, Danny told them, but now this thing had gotten real. Stuart Kearns had what they wanted, so the only question that remained was whether he’d truly found the right men for the job. There would be only one shot at this, a strike that had been years in the planning, so a lot was riding on the proper makeup of this team.

Danny took a printout from his pocket, a transcript of the most recent chat room conversation, and matched up the four men with their screen names. The fifth, he was told, a guy named Elmer, had taken an unexpected trip to Kingman, Arizona, on a related matter and wouldn’t return until well after midnight Monday morning.

At his request they’d each given a bit of background on themselves, sticking to first names only. The one interesting thing about this part was the seamless transition each managed to place between the sane and the insane things they’d said.
I’m Ron, I grew up down near Laughlin and worked out here in the mines since I was a teenager. Married at one time, two beautiful kids, and I’ve been wise to those Zionist bankers and
the good-for-nothing queen of England ever since I saw what they did to us on 9/11.

The four who were present had known one another for years, and they’d first met this man Elmer, the one who was missing tonight, through the chat room on Stuart Kearns’s website. All of them agreed, though, that Elmer was a serious player and absolutely a man to be trusted.

One of them had asked about the bruises and other battle damage on Danny’s face, and that gave him an opening to explain his own recent part in all this. He’d been picked up by the cops after a patriot meeting in New York City, he told them, and then they’d beaten him within an inch of his life while he was in custody. Everyone has their breaking point, and this had been his. He knew then that there wasn’t going to be any peaceful end to this conflict; the enemy had finally made that clear. So he’d called his old friend Stuart Kearns to come and bail him out so he could be a part of this plan. He was here now to help with whatever he could, and then to get the story out to true believers around the world when all of this was over.

When Danny gave him the all-clear sign, Kearns opened his door and motioned for them to come out to the van. As they gathered around he opened up the sliding side panel, hung a work light by a hook in the ceiling, clicked it on, and showed the men the weapon he’d brought for their mission.

As the men looked on with a mix of awe and anticipation, Kearns began to provide a guided tour of the device. The yield would be about on par with the Hiroshima bomb, he explained, though the pattern of destruction would be different with a ground-level explosion. The device was sophisticated but easy to use, employing an idiotproof suicide detonator tied to an off-the-shelf GPS unit mounted on top of the housing. With the bomb hidden in their vehicle and armed, all they’d have to do is drive to the target. No codes to remember, no James Bond BS, no Hollywoodesque countdown timers—just set it and forget it. The instant
they reached any point within a hundred yards of the preset destination the detonator would fire, and the blast would level everything for a mile in all directions.

Kearns took two small keys from his pocket, inserted them in the sheet-metal control panel, twisted them both at once a quarter turn, and pressed the square red central button labeled arm. A line of tiny yellow bulbs illuminated, winking to green one by one as a soft whine from the charging electronics ascended up the scale.

The GPS soon found its satellites and its wide-screen display split into halves, one showing their current position and the other showing the ground-zero objective they’d all decided on: the home-state office of the current U.S. Senate majority leader, the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse, 333 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada.

CHAPTER 26
 

On the face of it the meeting had been civil, even friendly, but it had ended with an uneasy good-bye, and the tension was still lingering.

Neither Bailey nor Kearns spoke until they’d driven almost a mile down the rutted dirt road, away from that house and toward the relative safety of the interstate.

“Tell me what was wrong back there,” Danny said.

“A lot of things were wrong.” Kearns’s attention was split about evenly between the road ahead and the darkness in the rearview mirror.

The plan, plainly agreed upon, had been to leave the dummy bomb with their five co-conspirators in exchange for twenty thousand dollars the men had agreed to pay to cover Kearns’s expenses. Tomorrow the men would make the eight-hour drive to Las Vegas and pull up to the target address. Instead of achieving martyrdom they’d be met by a SWAT team and a dragnet of federal agents who’d be waiting there to arrest them. None of these guys seemed the type to allow themselves to be taken alive, so FEMA would be running a local terror drill at the same time. With the area evacuated for blocks around there’d be less chance of any innocent bystanders being caught in the anticipated cross fire.

But tonight’s meeting hadn’t ended as expected and that could mean a lot of things—none of them ideal.

At best, the problem had been an innocent misunderstanding that would simply lead to a day’s delay in getting this over with. At worst, the would-be domestic terrorists had smelled a rat, and were huddling back there now deciding what to do about it. If that was the case—and Danny assumed this to be the source of his companion’s fixation on the road behind them—a set of fast-moving headlights might suddenly appear in a surprise hostile pursuit that this old van was in no shape to participate in. If that happened, the odds would be excellent that he and Agent Kearns would end their evening buried together in a shallow, sandy grave.

“Can you handle a gun?” Kearns asked.

“I’m no expert, but yeah.”

“If things go bad, there’s a pistol in the glove box. The safety’s off but there’s a long twelve-pound pull on that first round. After the first shot the trigger’s really light.”

“I’ll be okay with the gun. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

Kearns took the ramp onto I-80 and visibly began to relax as the van picked up speed. “First,” he said, “we still have their bomb, because they didn’t have our money. It might be that they just couldn’t get it together until tomorrow, like they said, or it might have been a test of some kind.”

“A test of what?”

“Of us. Maybe they wanted to see if we’d leave the goods with them anyway, without the payment. If we are who we say we are they’d know we wouldn’t stand for that. But if we were a couple of feds trying to set them up then we might, just so they’d be in possession of the evidence for a bust tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Second, how would you describe the intellectual level of those four guys we just left?”

“I don’t know.” Danny thought for a moment. “More like sheep than shepherds.”

“Right. And do you know who’d established himself all along as the brains on their side of this operation?”

“Let me guess,” Danny sighed. “The one who wasn’t there tonight.”

“Exactly. I’m not saying those boys we just met are harmless, but they’re followers, and this guy Elmer is their leader. If they were lying about his whereabouts then he was probably back there somewhere checking us out, maybe through the scope of a deer rifle. And if he’s really up in Arizona like they said then I’ve gotta wonder what he’s doing there.”

“So what’s next?” Danny asked. “Am I done? Can you cut me loose now?”

“Not yet. I told them to e-mail me when our friend Elmer gets back in town later tonight, and we’ll have to arrange another meet-up tomorrow. Meanwhile I’ll check in with my contact, and we’ll have to play it by ear from there.”

They drove on, and as the quiet minutes passed, the glances to the rear became less frequent until finally it seemed the immediate threat of trouble was left behind. Kearns tapped on the radio and worked the dial until he found some golden oldies. He settled back into his seat, just listening to the words and music from his past, as though the particular song that was playing might somehow be a final sign that his worries were over, at least for tonight.

When the chorus arrived Kearns chimed in softly, singing to himself in a private, off-key falsetto.

Danny looked across the seat to him.

“Hey, Stuart?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something personal?”

“Sure. You can ask, but I don’t have to answer.”

“A career in the FBI is what, twenty or twenty-five years?”

“Usually, yeah. About that.”

“So don’t take this the wrong way, but shouldn’t a man your age be retired by now?”

Kearns glanced over at him, turned down the radio, and then returned his attention to his driving. “You mean, why is a sixty-three-year-old man still doing street duty, instead of running a field office or enjoying his government pension.”

“I was just wondering.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well,” Danny said, “it’s a long drive.”

CHAPTER 27
 

Stuart Kearns, it turned out, had been in quite a different position a decade before. He’d worked in the top levels of counterterrorism with a man named John O’Neill, the agent who’d been one of the most persistent voices of concern over the grave danger posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s. Rather than being rewarded for his foresight, however, it was thought by many that his warnings, and his way of delivering them, had eventually cost O’Neill his career.

John O’Neill had seen a woeful lack of preparation for the twenty-first-century threat of stateside terrorism, and he hadn’t been shy about expressing his opinions. The people upstairs, meanwhile, didn’t appreciate all the vocal criticisms of the Bureau specifically and the government in general, especially coming from one of their own.

O’Neill had finally seen the writing on the wall after several missed promotions and a few not-so-subtle smear campaigns directed at him, and he’d left the Bureau in the late summer of his twenty-fifth year on the job. That’s when he’d taken his new position as head of security at the World Trade Center in New York City. His first day on the job was about three weeks before the day he died a hero: September 11, 2001.

Stuart Kearns’s FBI career had likewise been derailed by his outspokenness and his association with O’Neill, but he’d stubbornly chosen to try to ride out the storm rather than quitting. A bureaucracy never forgets, though, and they’d kept pushing him further and further out toward the pasture until finally, for the last several years, he’d been banished so far undercover that he sometimes wondered if anyone even remembered he was still an agent at all.

“Slow down, slow down,” Danny said.

Kearns let his foot off the gas and looked over. “What is it?”

“Do me a favor and take this exit here, right up ahead.”

At the top of the off-ramp there was little indication of anything of interest beyond advertisements for nearby food, gas, and lodging. Oh, and an eye-catching billboard for the Pussycat Ranch.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kearns said.

“We’ve had a rough night, Stuart, and I’d like to have a beer.”

“I’ve got beer at home.”

“A beer in a can in a house trailer with another dude and a beer in a Nevada brothel are two totally different things, and right now I need the second one.”

Surprisingly enough, Kearns didn’t put up a fight. He followed the signs along the circuitous route to the place without complaining, and pulled up into a parking spot near the end of the lot in front.

Danny got out of the van, straightened his clothes, and looked back. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“No, I don’t think so. Fake or not, I’m not going to leave an atomic bomb unattended in the parking lot of a roadhouse.”

“Okay, your loss. Can you spot me a hundred until payday?”

“I don’t have a hundred.” Kearns took out his wallet, removed a bill, and handed it to Danny through the open door. “I’ve got twenty. I’m
going to try to make a phone call while I’m waiting out here, but don’t take all night. We’re getting up early in the morning.”

“With twenty dollars I doubt if I’ll be ten minutes.”