I went back to my desk, where I could use my ATTF password to access internal files on the ACS—the Automated Case System, the FBI’s version of Google.
The Custer Hill Club came up, but apparently I had no need to know about this file, and below the title was row after row of Xs. Usually you get something, even on restricted files, such as the date the file was opened, or who to see about getting access to the file, or at least the classification level of the file. But this file was completely Xed out.
So all I managed to do was alert the security goons that I’d been inquiring about a restricted file that had nothing to do with what I was working on, which was Iraqis at the moment. But just to mess with their heads, I typed in, “Iraqi Camel Club Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
No hits.
I shut down my computer, secured my desk, grabbed my coat, and walked over to Kate’s desk.
Kate Mayfield and I met on the job when we both worked the case of the aforementioned Asad Khalil, a nasty little shit who came to America to kill a lot of people. He did that, then tried to kill me and Kate, then escaped. Not one of my better cases, but it brought Kate and me together, so the next time I see him, I’ll thank him for that before I gut-shoot him and watch him die slowly.
I asked Kate, “Can I buy you a drink?”
She looked up at me and smiled—“That would be nice”—then went back to her computer.
Ms. Mayfield is a Midwestern girl, posted to New York from Washington, and originally unhappy about the assignment, but now deliriously happy to live in the greatest city on Earth with the greatest man in the universe. I asked her, “Why are we going away for the weekend?”
“Because this place drives me crazy.”
Great cities can do that. I asked her, “What are you working on?”
“I’m trying to find a B and B on the North Fork.”
“They’re probably all booked up for the holiday weekend, and don’t forget I have to work Monday.”
“How could I forget? You’ve been complaining about it all week.”
“I never complain.”
She thought that was funny for some reason.
I studied Kate’s face in the glow of the computer screen. She was as beautiful as the day I met her nearly three years ago. Usually, women I’m with age fast. My first wife, Robin, said our one-year starter marriage seemed like ten years. I said to Kate, “I’ll meet you at Ecco’s.”
“Don’t get picked up.”
I walked through the cube farm, which was nearly empty now, and entered the elevator lobby, where colleagues were piling up.
I made small talk with a few people, then noticed Harry and went over to him. He was carrying a big metal suitcase, which I assumed contained cameras and lenses. I said to him, “Let me buy you a drink.”
“Sorry, I need to get on the road ASAP.”
“You driving up tonight?”
“I am. I need to be at this place at first light. Some kind of meeting going down, and I need to photograph car plates and people as they arrive.”
“Sounds like the mob surveillance we used to do at weddings and funerals.”
“Yeah. Same shit.”
We crowded into an elevator and rode down to the lobby.
Harry asked, “Where’s Kate?”
“On her way.” Harry was divorced, but he was seeing a woman, so I asked, “How’s Lori?”
“She’s great.”
“She looked good in her photo on Match.com.”
He laughed. “You’re an asshole.”
“What’s your point? Hey, where is this place?”
“What place? Oh . . . it’s up near Saranac Lake.”
We walked out onto Broadway. It was a cool autumn day, and the streets and sidewalks had that Thank-God-It’s-Friday feeling.
Harry and I bid each other farewell, and I walked south on Broadway.
Lower Manhattan is a tight cluster of skyscrapers and narrow streets, which insures minimum sunlight and maximum stress.
The area includes the Lower East Side, where I was born and raised, plus Chinatown, Little Italy, Tribeca, and Soho. The major industries down here are diametrically opposed: business and finance, represented by Wall Street, and government, represented by Federal, state, and municipal courthouses; City Hall; prisons; Federal Plaza; Police Plaza; and so forth. A necessary adjunct to all of the above are law firms, one of which employs my ex-wife, a defense attorney who represents only the best class of criminal scum. This was one of the reasons we got divorced. The other was that she thought cooking and fucking were two cities in China.
Up ahead was a big patch of empty sky where the Twin Towers once stood. To most Americans, and even to most New Yorkers, the absence of the towers is noted only as a gap in the distant skyline. But if you live or work downtown, and were used to seeing those behemoths every day, then their absence still comes as a surprise when you walk down the street and they’re not there.
As I walked, I thought about my conversation with Harry Muller.
On the one hand, there was absolutely nothing unusual or remarkable about his weekend assignment. On the other hand, it didn’t compute. I mean, here we are on the brink of war with Iraq, waging war in Afghanistan, paranoid about another Islamic terrorist attack, and Harry gets sent upstate to snoop on some gathering of rich right-wingers whose threat level to national security is probably somewhere between low and non-existent at the moment.
And then there was Tom Walsh’s nonsense to Harry about file building in case anyone in Congress or the media wanted to know if the ATTF was on top of the homegrown terrorists. This may have made sense a few years ago, but since 9/11, the neo-Nazis, militias, and that bunch have been quiet and actually thrilled that we got attacked and that the country was shaping up pretty good, killing bad guys and arresting people and so forth. Then there was the holiday Monday debriefing.
Anyway, I shouldn’t make too much of this, though it was a little odd. Basically, it is none of my business, and every time I ask too many questions about things that seem odd at 26 Federal Plaza, I get into trouble. Or, as my mother used to say, “John, Trouble is your middle name.” And I believed her until I saw my birth certificate, which said Aloysius. I’ll take Trouble over Aloysius any day.
CHAPTER TWO
I turned onto Chambers Street and entered Ecco’s, an Italian restaurant with a saloon atmosphere—the best of both worlds.
The bar was crowded with suited gentlemen and ladies in business attire. I recognized a lot of faces and said a few hellos.
Even if I didn’t know anybody there, being a good detective and an observer of New York life, I could pick out the high-paid attorneys, the civil servants, the law enforcement people, and the financial guys. I bump into my ex here sometimes, so one of us has to stop coming here.
I ordered a Dewar’s and soda and made small talk with a few people around me.
Kate arrived, and I ordered her a white wine, which reminded me of my weekend problem. I asked, “Did you hear about the grape blight?”
“What grape blight?”
“The one on the North Fork. All the grapes are infected with this weird fungus that can be transmitted to human beings.”
She apparently didn’t hear me and said, “I found us a nice B and B in Mattituck.” She described the place based on some tourist website and informed me, “It sounds really charming.”
So does Dracula’s Castle on the Transylvanian website. I asked her, “Did you ever hear of the Custer Hill Club?”
“No . . . I didn’t see it on the North Fork website. What town is it in?”
“It’s actually upstate New York.”
“Oh . . . is it nice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to go there next weekend?”
“I’ll check it out first.”
Apparently, this name didn’t ring any bells with Ms. Mayfield, who sometimes knows things she doesn’t share with me. I mean, we’re married, but she’s FBI, and
I have a limited need-to-know, lower security clearance than she does. On that note, I wondered why Ms. Mayfield thought that the words “Custer Hill Club” referred to a place to stay, and not, for instance, a historical society, or a country club, or whatever. Maybe it was the context. Or maybe she knew exactly what I was talking about.
I changed the subject to the memos about Iraq, and we discussed the geopolitical situation for a while. It was Special Agent Mayfield’s opinion that war with Iraq was not only inevitable, but also necessary.
Twenty-six Federal Plaza is an Orwellian Ministry, and the government workers there are very attuned to any slight change in the party line. When political correctness was the order of the day, you would have thought the Anti-Terrorist Task Force was a social service agency for psychopaths with low self-esteem. Now, everyone talks about killing Islamic fundamentalists and winning the war on terror—grammatical correctness would be “the war on terrorism,” but this is a newspeak word. Ms. Mayfield, a good government employee, has few politics of her own, so she has no problem hating the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and UBL one day, then hating Saddam Hussein even more when a directive comes out telling her who to hate that day.
But perhaps I’m not being fair. And I’m not totally rational on the subject of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. I lost a lot of friends on 9/11, and but for the grace of God and heavy traffic, Kate and I would have been in the North Tower when it went down.
I had been on my way to a breakfast meeting there in Windows on the World on the 107th floor. I was late, and Kate waited in the lobby for me. David Stein, Jack Koenig, and my former partner and maybe best friend in the world, Dom Fanelli, were on time, as were a lot of other good people and some bad people, like Ted Nash. No one in that restaurant survived.
I don’t get shaken up very easily—even getting shot three times and nearly bleeding to death on a city street didn’t have any lasting effect on my mental health, such as it is—but that day shook me up more than I realized at the time. I mean, I was standing right under the plane when it hit, and now, when I see a low-flying plane overhead—
“John?”
I turned to Kate. “What . . . ?”
“I asked you if you wanted another drink.”
I looked down into my empty glass.
She ordered me another.
I was vaguely aware that the news was on the TV at the end of the bar, and the reporter was covering the congressional vote on Iraq.
Back in my head, it was 9/11 again. I had tried to make myself useful by helping the firemen and cops evacuate people from the lobby, and at the same time, I was searching for Kate.
Then, I was outside the building carrying a stretcher, and I happened to look up and see these people jumping from the windows and I thought Kate was up there and I thought I saw her falling. . . . I glanced at her standing beside me, and she looked at me and asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
And then the second plane hit, and later I could hear this odd rumbling sound of collapsing concrete and steel, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and I can still feel the ground shaking under my feet as the building fell and shards of glass rained down from the sky. And like everyone else, I ran like hell. I still can’t remember if I dropped the stretcher, or if the other guy dropped it first, or if I was actually carrying a stretcher at all.
I don’t think I’ll ever remember.
In the weeks following 9/11, Kate became withdrawn, couldn’t sleep, cried a lot, and rarely smiled. I was reminded of rape victims I’d dealt with who lost not only their innocence but part of their soul.
The sensitive bureaucrats in Washington urged anyone who’d been involved with this tragedy to seek counseling. I’m not the type to talk about my problems to strangers, professional or otherwise, but at Kate’s insistence, I did go see one of the shrinks hired by the Feds to handle the large demand. The guy was a little nuts himself, so we didn’t make much progress in the first session.
For my next session and subsequent sessions, I went to my neighborhood bar, Dresner’s, where Aidan the bartender gave me sage counsel. “Life’s a bitch,” said Aidan. “Have another drink.”
Kate, on the other hand, stuck to her counseling for about six months, and she’s much better now.
But something had happened to her that was not going to completely heal. And whatever it was, it might have been for the better.
Since I’ve known her, she has always been a good company girl, following the rules and rarely criticizing the Bureau or its methods. In fact, she used to criticize me for criticizing the Bureau.
Outwardly, she’s still a loyal soldier, as I said, and she goes along with the party line, but inwardly, she realizes that the party line has done a 180-degree turn, and this realization has made her a little more cynical, critical, and questioning. To me, this is a good thing, and we now have something in common.
Sometimes I miss the starry-eyed team cheerleader I fell in love with. But I also like this tougher and more experienced woman, who, like me, has seen the face of evil, and is ready to meet it again.
And now, a year and a month later, we are living in a state of perpetual color-coded anxiety. Today is Alert Level Orange. Tomorrow, who knows? For damn sure, it’s not going to be Green again in my lifetime.
PART II
Saturday
UPSTATE NEW YORK
It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
—J.R.R. Tolkien
CHAPTER THREE
Detective Harry Muller parked his camper on the side of an old logging road and gathered his gear from the front seat, then got out, checked his compass, and headed northwest through the woods, wearing an autumn camouflage outfit and a black knit cap.
The terrain was easy to navigate, with well-spaced pine trees and ground cover of moss and dewy ferns. As he walked, daylight began filtering through the pines, revealing a thick ground mist. Birds sang and small animals scurried through the undergrowth.
It was cold, and Harry could see his breath, but the pristine forest was spectacular, so he was slightly more happy than miserable.
Slung over his shoulders were binoculars, a Handycam, and an expensive Nikon 12-megapixel camera with a long 300mm lens. He also carried a Sibley Guide to Birds in case anyone asked him what he was doing there, and a 9mm Glock in case they didn’t like his answer.
He’d been briefed by a guy known as Ed From Tech, who’d told him that the Custer Hill Club property was about four miles long on each side, for a total of sixteen square miles of private land. Incredibly, the entire property was enclosed within a high chain-link fence, which was why the Tech guy had also handed him the wire cutters that Harry now carried in his side pocket.
Within ten minutes, he came to the fence. It was about twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. Metal signs, about every ten feet, read: PRIVATE PROPERTY—TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Another sign read: DANGER—DO NOT ENTER—PROPERTY PATROLLED BY ARMED GUARDS AND DOGS.
From long experience, Harry knew that warning signs like these were usually more bullshit than reality. In this case, however, he’d take the signs seriously. Also, it troubled him that Walsh either didn’t know about the dogs and armed guards or knew and didn’t tell him. In either case, he would have a few words for Tom Walsh on Monday morning.
He took out his cell phone and switched it from ringer to vibrate. He noticed that his phone had good signal strength, which was a little strange up in the mountains. Impulsively, he dialed his girlfriend Lori’s cell phone. After five rings, his call went into voice mail.
Harry said softly into the phone, “Hi, babe. It’s your one and only. I’m up here in the mountains, so maybe I won’t have good reception for very long. But I wanted to say hi, I got up here last night about midnight, slept in the camper, and now I’m on-duty, near the right-wing loony lodge. So don’t call back, but I’ll call you later from a landline if I can’t reach you by c
ell phone. Okay? I still need to do something at the local airport later today or tomorrow morning, so I might need to stay overnight. I’ll let you know when I know. Speak to you later. Love you.”
He hung up, took the wire cutters, sliced a gap in the chain-link, and squeezed through onto the property. He stood motionless, looked, listened, then put the wire cutters back in his pocket. He continued on, through the woods.
After about five minutes, he noticed a telephone pole rising between the pine trees, and he approached it. Mounted on the pole was a telephone call box, which was locked.
He looked up and saw that the pole was about thirty feet high. Approximately twenty feet up the pole were four floodlights, and above that were five strands of wire running along a crossbeam. One wire obviously powered the telephone and another powered the floodlights. The other three were actually thick cables that could carry lots of juice.
Harry noticed something unusual and focused his binoculars toward the top of the pole. What he’d thought were evergreen boughs from surrounding trees were actually boughs protruding from the telephone pole. But these boughs, he knew, were the plastic kind that cell-phone companies used to camouflage or beautify cell-phone towers in populated areas. Why, he wondered, were they here in the middle of the woods?
He lowered his binoculars, raised his Nikon, and snapped a few shots of the pole, recalling that Tom Walsh had said to him, “In addition to cars, faces, and plate numbers, photograph anything else that looks interesting.”
Harry thought this seemed interesting and good for the files, so he took his Handycam and shot ten seconds of tape, then moved on.
The terrain began to rise gradually, and the pines gave way to big oaks, elms, and maples whose remaining foliage were brilliant hues of red, orange, and yellow. A carpet of fallen leaves covered the ground, and they rustled when Harry passed over them.
Harry did a quick map-and-compass check and determined that the lodge was straight ahead, less than half a mile away.