The Bitter Past, page 5
Sana takes a peek at the speedometer, which has just passed 120. She grabs onto the bitch bar above her door, as if it will somehow help her survive in the event I hit something at this speed. “How can you be sure he didn’t find them?”
“Because the man lived out in the boonies. You’ve been there. Nobody around for miles. The killer would have gone through anything he found on-site. He would have left the files there after combing through them. It’s years of work, right? Research. Tons of paper, probably. Our guy wasn’t in a hurry. He would go through it all right there, not cart it all out to his car.”
Sana looks at me in a kind of horror. “The files are still there?”
“Yep,” I say, as my truck tops 130.
CHAPTER 5
It’s mostly a barren stretch of two-lane highway and a steady climb in elevation back to Big Rocks, but on a lazy Saturday afternoon, I’m covering the distance at a personal speed record, Agent Sana Locke hanging on for dear life the whole way. It isn’t like I’m being reckless, and the few cars we pass are all humming along at ninety-plus, well above the posted limit. As I explain to my terrified passenger, “This is Nevada. Fast is relative.”
“How can you stand it out here?” she asks. “It’s so … barren.”
It’s not an unfair question. I thought long and hard on it before coming back here after getting a medical retirement from the Army. When you’ve been all over the world, Lincoln County, Nevada, is typically not going to make your Top Ten List of Places to Live. In my case, my father was ailing, and there are times in life you just have to do the right thing. And while there are no big cities out here, there are bright lights like you’ve never seen anywhere else. They belong to the Milky Way, and they are truly something to behold in the high desert. Also, life here is of a more honest nature. People are pretty much what they seem, a far cry from my life in the military-industrial complex. There’s something to be said for that.
Sana and I are not at the point in our relationship where I would feel comfortable sharing all that, so I just say, “Barren? How do you figure?”
Arriving back at Atterbury’s, the house is still a crime scene, still taped off, but none of my deputies are standing post any longer. “We simply don’t have the manpower,” I tell her as we pull up. “We’re covering 11,000 square miles with a combined force about the size of a Boy Scout troop.” It’s probably a good thing anyway, I think, because that pit in my stomach is still there, and while my people are excellent at local law enforcement, they are not trained to deal with Russian assassins, so I’m happy it’s just me and the FBI handling this part of the investigation for now.
My pulse is pumping in my ears, though. This happens a lot when you’re a cop, of course, especially when you respond to a domestic disturbance or a call that is emotionally charged in some way. But the kind of edginess I’m feeling right now I haven’t felt since my days in Moscow when I was frequently trying to meet with potential Russian military or intelligence sources without being arrested by the Federal Security Service, their version of the FBI. As we approach the house, I realize it’s been five years since I’ve had this sense that everything is about to go terribly wrong. Hopefully, I’m overthinking this whole thing.
“I still think you might be overthinking this whole thing,” Sana says on cue, seeing me draw my Glock as we enter the house. “It’s pretty obvious there’s no one here.”
My eyes sweep the front room. “That’s not clear to me at all.” She’s rolling her eyes behind me, I’m sure, but as we enter the hallway that leads to the bedrooms, I’m relieved to see she has her gun out and ready. It’s barely bigger than her hand, but I’m not complaining. That’s why God made extra magazines.
As it turns out, she’s right. The house is empty, and everything appears as we left it earlier in the day. We holster our sidearms and end up in Atterbury’s den, the only room in the house where it appears the man kept any important papers. In my gut, which is where I keep all my important stuff, I know the answer is right in front of me. “Come on,” I say to Atterbury’s ghost, “where would you have kept these files?”
“Why are you assuming he would have hidden them?” Sana asks.
“It’s the logical conclusion, isn’t it?”
“How so? You said it yourself, the guy lived out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Because they’re not here, and there is no sign of them.” I crouch down, leafing through the items littering the floor. Bank and retirement statements, utility and medical bills, old correspondence, nothing related to his FBI days. “Let’s assume the files were here. This is the only room in the house where there are any papers, right?”
Sana nods. “Okay.”
“And based on everything you’ve told me so far, finding the illegal was something of an obsession for Agent Atterbury, correct?”
Sana takes a seat at Atterbury’s desk. “Correct.”
“So, he’s collected everything he can. He’s got copies of phone transcripts he and the other handlers had with the illegal over the years. He has operational reports perhaps of the Bureau’s search for this guy. He’s got information on the people who worked at the test site and people who had access to them. Photos, personnel files probably. We’re talking a lot of paper here.”
She runs a hand through her splendid hair. “You’re losing me again.”
“If those files were here and the killer found them and took them with him, he leaves not one single scrap behind?”
Sana bends down from her chair close to me, smiling. “Maybe they were in nice file boxes and he just loaded them up.”
Exactly. “Shit, that’s it.”
“What?”
“File boxes. There aren’t any.”
She looks confused again. “Hence my point. He loads them up and drives away.”
My head is already shaking before she finishes. “Nope, nope, nope. Again, if they had been lying around in file boxes, there would have been no need to rip up the house like this.”
I stand and look at the west wall of the room where there is a bookcase and a comfortable recliner for reading. The bookcase has been largely emptied, and Atterbury’s books are scattered on the floor. My head cocks automatically.
“What is it?”
“Follow me, please.” I move quickly through the house to the dining room and out the sliding glass door that opens onto an expansive redwood deck. The sun is setting and we only have a few minutes of decent light left. We move around the house until we’re on the west side. “What would you say the width of Atterbury’s office is?”
I can see her visualizing the room in her head. “Ten feet maybe.”
“Yeah, that would be my guess, too.”
“But?”
“But,” I say, pacing off the exterior from where the bathroom ends to the edge of the house, “it’s at least fifteen feet on the outside of the house.”
Sana’s eyes go big. “Shit.”
“And did you notice where the window was in that room?” Her eyes say no. “Too close to the east wall. Not centered like most windows.” We race back into the house. I scan the west wall of the office again from left to right. “Notice anything?”
Sana shakes her head.
I turn on the light switch to illuminate my point. “What about now?”
She studies the wall again and then the rest of the room. “Paint is newer on that wall.”
I nod like a teacher who has just found his pet student. “Yes,” I say and start tapping the drywall with a closed fist. “If this were an exterior wall like it should be, the sound would be denser. This sounds hollow.”
“The bookcase,” Sana says.
We examine the long, heavy shelving unit that could easily hold 150 books. It’s more than five feet in height and made of good, sturdy pine that is firmly attached to the wall.
Sana asks, “Why secure this to the wall?”
“There’s only one reason,” I say. I try unsuccessfully to pull it away from the wall and then run my fingers along the top and sides, feeling for a switch. “Hmm, nothing.” I step back, nearly tripping in the pile of books on the floor.
“Careful,” Sana says, catching me by the arm.
I look around the room again and then back at the west wall, where my eyes land on an electrical outlet just up from the baseboard a few feet away from the bookcase. “Hello.”
“It’s an electrical outlet,” Sana says.
“No, it’s an electrical outlet with a GFCI.”
“A GFCI?”
“A ground fault circuit interrupter,” I answer, dropping to my knees on the carpet.
“So?”
“So GFCIs are normally placed in the vicinity of water lines. They’re designed to prevent someone from receiving an electrical shock caused by faults in devices we use around the house, and they’re installed in places where there might be water or moisture because water conducts electricity and makes a shock much more dangerous.”
“Thanks for the science lesson.”
“My point is this little baby is not serving any practical purpose.” I take a shot and push the red reset button on the outlet. Click. The right side of bookcase disconnects from its mooring to the wall and swings slightly open.
Sana and I stare at each other. “Well, Aunt Gladys in a blender,” she says as only the well-educated can. “How about that?”
I get back to my feet and Sana approaches slowly. I stop just as I’m about to pull it open farther, knowing what has to be on the other side. “So Atterbury knew of the intelligence leak, I’m assuming?”
Sana nods. “We told him as soon as we found out. We told everyone who was named in any of the files. Standard procedure. Just in case.”
“He had reason to think someone might come to look for the illegal.”
“I have no idea. We told him, that’s all I know.”
I sense that’s not completely true. But I understand need-to-know, and right now I’m more interested in seeing what’s on the other side of the wall. I pull on the bookcase and it moves easily.
“Eureka,” I say, entering the small hidden office. It’s as I expected, about five feet wide and running the full length of the real office. There’s a light switch on the near wall, and Sana flips it. A fluorescent light zaps to life. Three large four-drawer file cabinets line the west wall, but that’s not the most interesting thing.
“Christ, look at this,” Sana says.
I turn around and see dozens of photographs taped and stapled to the other three walls. Most are pictures of men, but there are a few shots of women, too. Most are old photos, very old, I think. Fifty years plus probably. “A bit of an obsession was right.”
Sana moves to the filing cabinets. They’re not locked. She thumbs through some of the files while I take a seat at the small desk. I have to assume those are FBI files and no doubt contain sensitive information I’m not cleared for. Sana nods appreciatively. I’m nothing if not discreet. She takes out her cell phone and begins taking pictures.
“Jesus, he has copies of very sensitive documents here. A lot of this stuff has no business being outside FBI headquarters.”
I notice she’s not dialing any numbers. “You’re not calling this in?”
She replaces some of the files and closes the cabinet drawer, turning to me. “We haven’t identified the source of the leak to the Russians yet. If I call in the cavalry now, this might land on the wrong person’s desk. I can’t risk that.”
“Good. First rule of intelligence work. Trust no one. What do you want to do?”
She shrugs. “Your instincts have been spot-on so far. What would you do?”
Sure, ask me tough questions while I’m staring at your beautiful face. I rise from the little rolling chair. “Well, the killer didn’t get what he wanted, right? We know that because we just found it, and it hasn’t been disturbed.”
Sana slides along the west wall, examining the photos. “No question about it,” she purrs, deep in concentration.
“So, if I were him—”
“Or them,” she says.
“Or them. I would keep my eyes on this house to see if anyone else might find what I was looking for.”
She stops cold, whipping her head around. Before our eyes can meet, I see her face lock on the back of the bookcase as it swings farther away from the wall, freezing her. I don’t wait to see what’s coming because my instincts have already told me. I take one step and dive toward her, drawing my Glock at the same time. In midair, I see a tall man with silver hair standing in the adjacent room raising a handgun. It all happens in a microsecond, but in my mind, everything turns in slow motion. Silver hair fires, the bullets pass over my back, the noise suppressed, and I return fire, three loud rounds into the drywall left of where the shooter is standing. Was standing. Sana and I roll to our knees, her Walther coming out while I empty the rest of my magazine into the wall, hoping a round or two catches the guy on his way out.
Sana is on her feet, firing into the bookcase and into the drywall on the right in case he’s moved the other way.
I slam another magazine. “Moving!” I yell, feeling her just behind me, the small room now filled with smoke and the smell of fired gunpowder. We clear the bookcase into the original room, but the shooter is gone.
“Blood,” I say, gun fixed on the door to the hallway where I see a red smear on the wall.
Sana passes me on the left. “Where the hell did that guy come from?”
Down the hallway we go. The back sliding door is open and the blood trail leads outside. We approach the door from opposite sides, and when I do a quick peek outside, the glass explodes, pieces impacting my neck and face. We dive to the floor.
“Are you hit?” Sana yells.
“Just glass. You?”
Sana expels a lungful of air. “Not yet.”
No more than sixty feet from the back of Atterbury’s deck is the Big Rocks Wilderness and the first group of boulders. Beyond that is a forest of giant rocks that stretches for miles. Plenty of places to hide. Sana pumps a few rounds into the first group, figuring our attacker couldn’t have gotten much beyond them yet. Smart. She’s hoping he’ll fire back which will give away his location. I’m already on my cell calling for backup. It’s not really a cell phone. There is no signal this far out, so our phones all transmit via satellite. And while we’ve solved the communications problem, the only problem out here is that backup is rarely close by. When Tuffy answers, I give her a quick recap and some instructions for sealing off 13,000 acres of land in the dark.
Hugging the back wall of the dining room, Sana looks over at me. “Ready?”
“No.”
“Why are we waiting?”
I’m pulling glass shards out of my neck. “Because he has the high ground and knows exactly where we are. And because we have what he wants, so let’s see if he’ll come to us.”
She rises to her feet. “You’re forgetting he’s wounded. He has no shot at getting those files now, and he knows it. He’s running.” She turns toward the opening again, crouched and ready to fire.
“Hold up there, sis,” I say. “We’re not betting our lives on that. We don’t know if I nicked him or something worse. And it’s almost completely dark now. Neither of us is wearing a vest. We wait for backup.”
“Christ, man. You’re the sheriff, aren’t you? You are my backup.”
I shake my head.
“I can’t wait for you. At least cover me.”
I jump to her side of the six-foot opening and push her farther back inside the house, knocking her to the ground. “Listen to me. I know this ground. We need daylight and more people. It’s cold outside. You’ll be hypothermic in thirty minutes out there dressed like that.”
Sana is on her feet again. “Stay if you want. I’m going.”
I grab her by the arm. “This guy is a professional killer.”
She does some sort of jujitsu move on me, cranking my wrist so painfully that I’m suddenly on my knees. “So am I,” she says. Before I can stop her, she’s out the door and firing blindly.
THE PAST
As the weeks passed at the Nevada Testing Site, Georgiy Dudko settled in at his new job, posing as Freddie Meyer and spending the three to midnight shift mostly confined to the small admin building at Delta and answering the phone that seldom rang. So far, he had learned nothing from answering the phone. What he had witnessed was just how secure all operations were here. Badges, gate after gate after gate manned by men and machine guns. It had been easy getting in. Kitty, her father, the Q clearance, all of it easy. Now he wondered if, when circumstances dictated, he would be able to get out.
When he wasn’t in the admin building, he rotated to one of three other sentry posts. His job was to prevent any unauthorized people gaining access, and that included high-level, overly curious military types who wanted to know what the CIA was doing out here. He wanted to tell them there was nothing to see at Delta because there truly was nothing to see. Not once had he seen the large airplane hangar doors open. Not once had he seen any plane land or takeoff.
“We need you in America now,” his KGB commander at the American School in Vinnytsia told him. “In the heart of their scientific community.” They called it Coca-Cola City, the American town in the Ukraine, and they drove American cars and watched American movies. They learned the language and how to gather and communicate intelligence, to detect and elude surveillance, all of which often took five years or more to graduate. Georgiy was rushed through in less than three. He would go to America and learn their atomic secrets, perhaps study under their most brilliant scientists. Now, a year later, he was guarding an empty field.
And while getting the camera concealed in his thermos past the main security at the Mercury gate proved to be no issue, he had seen nothing worth photographing. He began to worry that the men running Directorate S would think him unproductive.
As 1955 ended, Georgiy got even worse news: there would be no more aboveground tests until 1957. An entire year. He was crushed.
