Douglas Preston - White Fire

This seemed to be a hideout of some sort. A lair— Ted’s lair. But why should he need one? And what were all these things for?

An old woodstove was burning to one side, the light shining between the cracks in the cast iron, throwing out heat. And now she noticed an odor in the air — a vile odor.

Ted pulled up a chair, turned it around, and straddled it, balancing his arms on the chair back. “So here we are,” he said.

Something was terribly wrong with him. And yet the furious, violent, half-demented Ted of the last few minutes had changed. Now he was calm, mocking. Corrie swallowed, unable to take all this in. Maybe if she talked to him, she could learn what was troubling him, bring him back from whatever dark place he was in. But when she tried, all that came out was a pathetic garble of sound.

“When you first arrived in town, I thought maybe you were different from the others around here,” he said. His voice had changed again, as if his rage had buried itself deep in ice. It was remote, cold, detached, like someone speaking to himself — or, perhaps, to a corpse. “Roaring Fork. Back when I was young, it used to be a real town. Now the ultra-high-net-worth bastards have taken over, the assholes with their social-climbing bimbos, the movie stars and CEOs and Masters of the Universe. Raping the mountains, clear-cutting the forests. Oh, they talk a good line about the environment! About going organic, about reducing their carbon footprints by buying offsets for their Gulfstream jets, about how ‘green’ their ten-thousand-square-foot mansions are. Mother fuckers . That’s just sick. They’re parasites on our society. Roaring Fork is where they all gather, flattering each other, grooming each other of their lice like fucking chimpanzees. And they treat the rest of us — the real folk, the native-born residents — as scum fit only to sweep their palaces and stroke their egos. There’s only one cure for all that: fire. This place should burn. It needs to burn. And it is burning.” He grinned, another fleshy, demonic distortion, frighteningly close to the face he’d shown her before.

Kerosene. Handcuffs. Rope. It needs to burn . Now, through the fog in her head, Corrie understood: Ted was the arsonist. A huge shudder of fear coursed through her, and she struggled against the cuffs despite the pain that racked her body.

But then, as soon as she started to struggle, she stopped again. He cared for her — she knew he did. Somehow, she had to reach him.

“Ted,” she croaked, managing to speak. “Ted. You know I’m not one of them.”

“ Oh, yes you are! ” he screamed, leaning toward her, the white scum flying off his lips in droplets. As quickly as it had come, the icy, methodical veneer fell away, replaced by a mad, bestial rage. “You faked it for a while, but no — you’re just like them! You’re here for the same reasons they are: money .”

His eyes were so bloodshot, they were almost red. His hands were trembling with rage. His whole body was trembling. And his voice was so strange, so different. Looking at him was like looking into the maw of hell. It was so awful, so inhuman an expression, Corrie had to avert her eyes.

“But I don’t have any money,” she said.

“Exactly! Why are you here? To find some rich asshole. I wasn’t rich enough for you! That’s why you played with me. Leading me on the way you did.”

“No, no, that wasn’t it at all…”

“ Shut the fuck up!” he screamed at a larynx-shredding volume, so loud that Corrie felt her eardrums tremble at the pressure.

And then, just as abruptly as it had left, the icy control returned. The fluctuation — from homicidal, brutish, barely controlled rants to a cold and calculating distance — was unbearable. “You should be grateful,” he said, turning away, sounding for a minute like the Ted of old. “I have conferred wisdom onto you. Now you understand. The others — the others that I’ve taught — they learned nothing.”

Then, suddenly, he spun back, staring at her with a hideous, speculative grin. “You ever read Robert Frost?”

Corrie couldn’t bring herself to speak.

He began to recite:

He reached out, grasped a long, dry stick of old lumber from the many that littered the floor, and used the end of it to toggle the latch on the woodstove door open. The flames inside threw a flickering yellow light about the room. He shoved the stick into the fire and waited.

“Ted, please .” Corrie took a deep breath. “You don’t have to do this.”

He began to whistle a tuneless melody.

“We’re friends. I didn’t reject you.” She sobbed a moment, gathered her wits as best she could. “I just didn’t want to rush things, that’s all…”

“Good. That’s very good. I haven’t rejected you, either. And — I won’t rush things. We’ll just let nature take its course.”

He withdrew the stick, the end burning brightly now, dropping sparks. His eyes, reflecting the dancing light of the fire, rolled slowly toward her, their bloodshot whites shockingly large. And Corrie, looking from him to the burning brand and back again, realized what was about to happen.

“Oh, my God!” she said, voice rising into a shriek. “Please don’t. Ted! ”

He took a step toward her, waving the burning stick before her face. Another step closer. Corrie could feel the heat of the flaming brand. “No,” was all she could manage.

For a minute, he just stared at her, the stick sparking and glowing in his hand. And when he spoke, his voice was so quiet, so controlled, it nearly drove her mad.

“It’s time to burn,” he said simply.

Pendergast arrived in his office in the basement of the police station and placed the accordion file on his desk. It contained the documents he had earlier sought in the town’s public records office but which had, according to the archivist, mysteriously disappeared some years back. As he expected, he found them — or copies of them — in the filing cabinet in the home office of Henry Montebello, the architect who had prepared them in the first place. The file contained all the records relating to the original development of The Heights — documents that, by law, were supposed to be a matter of public record: plats, surveys, permit applications, subdivision maps, and terrain management plans.

Delving into the accordion file, Pendergast removed several manila folders and laid them out in rows, their tabs lined up. He knew exactly what he was looking for. The first documents he perused involved the original survey of the land, done in the mid-1970s, with corresponding photographs. They included a detailed topographic survey of the terrain, along with a sheaf of photos depicting exactly how the valley and ridges looked before the development began.

It was most revealing.

The original valley had been much narrower and tighter, almost a ravine. Along its length, carved into a benchland a hundred feet above the stream known as Silver Queen Creek, stood the remains of an extensive ore-processing complex first built by the Staffords in the 1870s — the fountainhead of much of their wealth. The first building to be erected housed the “sampler” operation, to test the richness of the ore as it came from the mine; next came a much larger “concentrator” building, containing three steam-powered stamp mills, which crushed the ore and concentrated the silver tenfold; and finally, the smelter itself. All three operations generated tailings, or waste piles of rock, and those tailings were clearly visible on the survey as enormous piles and heaps of rubble and grit. The tailings from all of the operations contained toxic minerals and compounds that leached out into the water table. But it was the last set of tailings — from the smelter — that were truly deadly.