Chapter Eighteen
It was nearly seven before the daylight was noticeable through the window. Dave lay in the bed, staring at the thin curtain, wondering what the day would bring, if anything. He had not slept well and had, in fact, imagined that a bear was trying to get into to the cabin in the night. He spent a few anxious moments wishing he had a gun before it occurred to him that the black bears in the mountains were hibernating during the winter and were no threat. He reasoned that the wind must have pushed branches from the pine tree against the house. Still, it had not comforted him. He wished he had a cigarette, then he wished he had a joint and some sweet wine. He occupied his mind by listing his vices and weaknesses, trying to organize them by their self-destructive capacities. In his heart, his deepest desire was to be a cub street reporter who indulged himself in anything he felt like, chasing fire engines and bank robbers, drug dealers and whores, street bums and the insane. He was a sucker for adrenaline. He wished he had the guts to be one of those guys who parachute off of cliffs and high buildings.
He rubbed his face and considered showering and shaving, but then what? A walk in the woods? The world was going about its merry way, with its schemes and plots, while he sat on a mountaintop and saw no joy in his day. He heard footsteps outside and banging on the door.
“Dave? It’s Frank. I got breakfast damn near ready. Come on down to the house.” There was a pause. “Dave?”
“Yeah, Frank. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be right down.” He pulled his legs over the side of the bed and shook his head. At least it would give him something to do for an hour or so. Fifteen minutes later he was sitting at Frank’s table, eating eggs and bacon and drinking excellent coffee.
“Anything you’d like to do?” Frank asked, sitting back with an amused look on his face.
“What’re my options?”
“When’s your gal coming down?”
“Not for a few days, if she comes. She’s working. She might be down when she gets a day off.”
“Can’t she get a day off? I’d think your boss would go easy on her, given the circumstances.”
“The news business goes on and we’re short-handed with me away. It’s kind of like police work. Somebody has to be there.”
“Sometimes I think the world would be better off with less police work, but that’s just my opinion. I’m going into Warrenton to do some shopping but I think you should stay here. I’ll only be gone a couple of hours. Feel free to make yourself at home. I wouldn’t leave the farm if I were you. Just a precaution.” Frank appeared to be trying to put a twinkle in his eye but it wasn’t working and he had a demented look for a moment before he broke into a grin.
“Let me ask you a stupid question. Are there any bears out this time of year?”
“You see a bear?”
“No, but I thought I heard something last night and I thought it was a bear but then I remembered that they hibernate this time of year.” Dave displayed a shy smile.
“As cold as it’s been, they’re in their dens now. They don’t actually hibernate. They go into a torpor and if something bothers them they can wake up and be real nasty, but if you leave them alone, they’ll just sort of sleep until its get warmer and there’s something to eat. I don’t think you had one outside the cabin. It was probably something else that the wind moved. If you see one outside this time of year he’s probably in a bad mood, so I’d leave him alone. Ain’t that right, Bob?” Frank raised his coffee mug to the stuffed Bob the Bear.
The sun was warm by the time Frank drove his truck down the mountain to his shopping in Warrenton, the nearest community with a decent supermarket. It was a half-hour drive each way, but Warrenton was another world, an edge suburb of McMansions, townhouses, mini “estates.” car dealers, strip malls, and chain restaurants. It was an easy place to blend in and not be noticed. Khakis, a sweater, and a good quality leather jacket put Frank in the ranks of the other older men who sat in a chain bookstore coffee shop, chatting.
Dave decided to go exploring and stepped onto the road that Frank had carved into the mountain and headed up. He walked past the pond, now half-covered with thin, slushy ice. A pair of ducks paddled on the far side near the shore where the trees grew thick against the mountainside. The melting snow trickled into the pond, which was fed by a small stream that burbled over rocks on the far end where the water was clear of ice. Frank had placed two large pipes into the berm that dammed the stream, allowing the stream to continue its way down the mountain after the desired pond level had been achieved.
He stepped onto the berm and gazed into the water, looking for fish or anything that lived there. He gazed up at the trees at a crow that had landed a hundred feet away, cawing and making a racket. He recalled his youth in East Tennessee when a crow in a tree was considered a target for any boy with a .22 rifle. Crows are smart and seem to know when someone aims at them, so they’re hard to hit. At least that’s what Dave believed, even as he fantasized about shooting this one. He had been a good shot as a boy and could hit a starling on a branch at a good distance, but he wasn’t as good as his best friend Willis, who could pick up a running squirrel at a hundred yards. Willis’s family saw squirrels as food and both of the boys in the family were expected to put something on the table.
The sunshine felt good on his face and he walked up to the top of the mountain and found himself at the cliff where Frank had taken him. He sat on the rock ledge and gazed down on the valley. Frank’s cattle were grazing, as usual. A few pickups and cars moved along the paved road. A farmer on a tractor was moving a wheel of hay in a distant field. The tree-covered hills in the county had once been clear-cut and apple and pear orchards had been tended on them by slaves and later by small farmers. The orchards had disappeared along with those who tended them and the woods returned, maples and oaks and dogwoods and sumacs. Creation of Shenandoah National Park had removed many of the farm families from the area and drought and economics many others. Left behind was a treasure of nature and a snapshot of how things used to be.
Dave smelled the air and admitted to himself that he felt most at home in a place like this. He felt peaceful and settled. He also admitted that he had a weakness for the smell of a city street and its diesel smoke, fermenting garbage, crowds and odd people. He wondered if he could afford a weekend cabin in the mountains, a place where he could go to ground himself after a week on the streets. He chuckled out loud at the absurdity of it.
In those moments while Dave pondered the grandeur of the mountains, Sid and Captain O’Neil were sizing each other up across a small conference table in Sid’s office. Each man had a hand wrapped around a cup of coffee and each wondered what the other was hiding. Sid believed that O’Neil was holding the better cards and he was correct in that assessment. Sid, in fact, didn’t have much. He had played his best hand by turning over the items that had been delivered to Dave after the killings and was now pinning his hopes on something new and important coming over the transom, possibly from the member station in Chicago. With Dave on ice, his ace reporter was out of commission and in no position to add anything to what was already known. The fact that Dave’s life was in danger was not at the front of Sid’s thinking at that moment.
O’Neil was aware that Sid didn’t trust him but he knew enough about human nature to feel in control of his relationship with Sid. There was no way Sid could know what was going on unless someone told him, which was unlikely, given how things were playing out. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s more going on here than you’ve let on. I’m not asking you to give me an interview we can use on the air but if there’s more to this than I know I think you should come clean. It’s my guy who’s in danger here.”
“He’s in good hands.” O’Neil softened his voice.
“Do you think the guy who killed the priests plans to kill him?”
O’Neil decided to reveal another card. “Th
ere may be more than one person involved in those killings.”
Sid was quiet for a moment. Dave had told him about the F.B.I. source’s hints at more than one killer, so he was not surprised by O’Neil’s statement. “Do you know who they are?”
“We have some leads.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“We are confident we will arrest those who are involved in this.”
“So where does Dave fit in?”
“We’re still putting that together.” O’Neil was becoming uncomfortable.
“You’re using him as the goat aren’t you? You’re got him out as bait.”
“As I said, he’s safe. He’s with people who know how to protect him and he’s in a place where he can be isolated. He’s in good hands. I hear he wants his girlfriend to visit and we have no problem with that as long as it’s kept under wraps and nobody decides to make a public story out of it.”
“Do you think it’s wise for her or me, for that matter, to see him?”
“Like I said, keep it quiet and be discreet. You don’t have to wear a disguise or anything. Just don’t put out a memo that you’re off to see Dave in hiding and directions where to find you.”
“Okay. We need to move and advance the story here. Can we get a quick interview on tape about how you’re confident this thing will end? As you’ve heard, every media outlet in this city is on this all day and we need something from our end or we’ll look like we’re behind our own story.”
O’Neil knew this was coming and he had already prepared a statement so general in nature that there would be no real news in it, but it would be “fresh” tape for Now News. They could tout it to their audience and he would not make himself available to other news outlets, so Sid would have something that could be called cooperation.
Elena took him to a studio where she asked him several questions which he answered in the news-speak that contains no news, sort of like junk food contains no nutrients, but offers a food-like experience. Twenty minutes later, as O’Neil was sitting in traffic on L Street, Now News offered its stations a “special report” with “exclusive” information about the threat against Dave Haggard and the investigation into the serial murders of Catholic priests.
Within an hour other news organizations had jumped on it and O’Neil’s non-news was being analyzed on cable television channels as “the latest developments in the unbelievable story of journalist Dave Haggard.” Sid sat at his desk watching the television coverage and had what he told Elena was an “out of news” experience, “something like an out of body experience only worse.”
He called O’Neil. “How do I get to this place where you have Dave?”
O’Neil gave him directions and Frank’s phone number, suggesting that he call ahead. The number was the land line in Frank’s house, not his cell phone, and it went unanswered. Frank never bothered with voicemail. Sid got his car out of the parking garage where the attendant had assumed it would be all day, so it was up against a wall on a lower level and several other cars had to be moved to free it. Half an hour later he was on Constitution Avenue, heading for the Roosevelt Bridge where he picked up Interstate 66 and drove west to Route 29, which took him to Warrenton, where he turned onto Route 211 to Rappahannock County. The winter sun was low in the sky when he pulled up to the sign for Spring Farm and turned onto a dirt and gravel drive that took him over the creek and up into the woods.
Dave was waiting at the door to Frank’s house when Sid pulled in. Sid was wearing his usual cheap suit, bargain basement white shirt, and a tie given on a long-ago holiday. He was a walking example of another era, a time when reporters wore suits that were suitable for fist fights and dirty alleys. Dave looked like an ad for an outdoor magazine.
“Nice view,” Sid said, gazing down into the valley.
“Yeah, if you like trees and hay. How was the drive?”
“Anything to drink around here?”
“Frank should be back soon. He’ll have something. Come up to the cabin and we can talk.”
The two men walked up the dirt and slush road in silence. Unknown to them their short journey was captured by a small tree-mounted camera that Frank had activated hours earlier. It was motion sensitive and would go to sleep thirty seconds after the men entered the cabin. An audio bug in the cabin was voice-activated and what Dave and Sid did and said would be captured in a digital file to be reviewed at a later time.
Sid walked in and looked around. He had two reactions. The first was that the cabin was a nice place to spend a night on a weekend in the country. The second was that he would go crazy spending more than one night in the place. He walked over to a small table and sat in one of two chairs that had been placed there. He took out a reporter’s notebook and a mechanical pencil and wrote the words “Are we bugged?”
Dave had wondered the same thing but it had not been an issue because the only person who had been up to the cabin was Frank who, presumably, would have been the man who bugged the place. He shrugged.
Sid wrote “Let’s go for a walk” and said out loud, “I’d like to see the view from higher up. Can we walk up there?”
Frank’s tree camera could not capture the men on the other side of the cabin, so their conversation would be private. Frank was an expert at analyzing audio recordings and voice patterns, so, when he got around to reviewing the recording, he would know that the monitoring was no secret. He could tell by the tone in Sid’s voice that the man was suspicious.
“So, tell me about this guy Frank,” Sid said, feeling water soaking his wingtips.
“Hard to say. He’s no jolly old farmer. He’s part of some kind of organization that’s involved in tracking the priest killers. I think they’re looking for more than one guy. There’s a CIA-type monitoring center in a silo at the base of the mountain. He took me there to show it to me and made me promise to keep quiet about it. I took that to mean he wanted me to tell somebody, probably you. They’re listening in on calls and maybe other things. He says he’s in the security business, whatever that means. I don’t know what his connection is to O’Neil. These guys seem to know who they’re after.”
Sid was not surprised that the “farm” was a front for something else and he felt better knowing that there was a monitoring station on the place if only because it justified his paranoia about bugs in the cabin. “I think we’re ass deep in something here but I don’t know what it is. My guess is you being up here is more than a way to protect you from the bad guys. I think they’re using you for bait. I know it sounds like some spy novel thing but my guess is they want to lure the bad guys out here.”
“Frank’s got a lot of guns around.” Dave was trying to make himself feel better.
“Aside from your tour of the silo, anything else odd happen?”
“No. We went to lunch at a place in Sperryville. Not very exciting. Since then I’ve been up here. Frank went to Warrenton to do some shopping.”
“Did you see anyone in the diner who looked suspicious?”
“Now you are sounding like a dime novel. How would I know what someone suspicious looks like? They all looked like farmers or people from D.C. out on a day trip.”
It was getting dark and there were no lights on the mountain. Sid was cold and his feet were wet. “Let’s go back. Maybe Frank will have some hospitality for us.”
Frank was sitting at his desk when the two men knocked on his door. He closed his laptop and put a smile on his face as he welcomed Sid to the mountain. “Well, come on in! I’m Frank and my guess is you could use a little something to warm you up.” He was wearing his best salesman’s face. He led the men into the living area and gave Sid the story of Bob the Bear, even placing a drink in Bob’s paw.
“Damn! This is good bourbon,” Sid said. “Do you mind if I take off my shoes? They’re wet.”
“Hell, no. Put them over there by the fire and let them dry out while you enjoy your drink.” Frank was beaming like a school boy.
“How’d the shop
ping go? Get what you need?” Dave asked, wondering what Frank had really been doing in Warrenton, if that’s where he went.
“Great. I got everything I went for.” Frank took a deep pull on his bourbon.
“So, how’s my boy?” Sid glanced at Dave, who felt uncomfortable at the suggestion that he was Sid’s son.
“He’s behaving himself. I think he’ll feel better when he gets settled in.”
“I had a little chat with Captain O’Neil today. I think there’s more to this than what we’re being told and I’d appreciate it if you could bring me up to date.”
“What’d O’Neil tell you?” Frank’s smile was forced.
“Depends how you look at it, I suppose, but it’s my feeling that Dave here is bait and you all are waiting for someone, maybe more than one someone, to come after him.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Just a feeling. What is this place, really?”
“It’s what it looks like. A farm in the mountains.”
“Where you have electronic monitoring devices?”
Frank looked at Dave. “I thought that was confidential.”
“I share things with my boss. I agreed not to do a story about it but my safety is at risk here.”
“We’re looking after your safety, Dave. We are in the security business, Sid, and I’ll leave it at that.”
“Is Dave safe here?”
“We’ll do our best, which is very good.”
“And will you brief us on what’s happening in a timely manner?”
“That’s not my pay grade. Think of me as a caretaker.”
“Who makes that decision?”
“He’s not here. That’s all I can say. Maybe O’Neil can help you out.” He stood up and walked to the window that looked out at the Blue Ridge. “Why don’t you stay the night. I have some spare rooms that will be quite comfortable. You can enjoy more of this fine booze of mine and get a good night’s sleep.”
“I’ll take you up on that but I think I’ll bunk with Dave.” Sid sat back at gazed at the fire, allowing himself to relax. He loved a good story and this was turning into a doozy.