Gordon Ryan - State of Rebellion

“Erased?” Dan asked.

“As if they never existed. Stevenson then knew he was on to something. Someone had obviously managed to compromise the system and manipulate the final count. He knew he needed to tell someone, but he didn’t know who to trust. He was scared. So he hid the disks.”

“And they’re at Clear Lake?”

“Stevenson’s family has a cabin up there. His father built it in the sixties as kind of a hippie retreat. No electricity and only a small wood-burning stove. He gave me directions to where he buried the disks-out behind the cabin.”

“Uh, oh. I forgot the shovel,” Dan blurted. “Oh, well-we can pick one up at Jack’s place in Rumsey,” he added. Ten minutes later, as they made the wide sweep around the west end of Esparto, Dan was silent. He thought of Jack as they passed the turnoff to the cemetery, where, only weeks earlier, they had laid Jack to rest. Leaving Esparto, they began the run up Rumsey Valley and reached Jack’s house about twenty-five minutes later.

“C’mon in, Nicole. I think we can find an old pair of jeans that’ll fit, and you can get out of your pants suit.”

Once they were back on the road, Dan advised that the turnoff through the foothills was located only a couple of miles up the road.

“What’s Stevenson going to do?” Dan asked, hitting a button on the dash and changing into four-wheel drive.

“He wanted the surveillance pulled and asked us to relocate him. He’s going to quietly gather his important stuff and meet two of our agents in Reno tomorrow.”

“Where will you move him?”

“How far up this road, Dan?” Nicole asked, sidestepping his question.

“A little over an hour to intersect with State Road 53, unless there’s a tree down or some other obstacle,” he said, dropping his inquiry. “Have you relayed this to Connor?”

“He wasn’t available. I left word on his voicemail that I’d contact him as soon as we were back from the field. Man, it’s dark up here at night,” Nicole exclaimed.

“If you hadn’t been there when I filled up, I’d try the old ‘ran out of gas’ routine.”

“Keep driving, Mr. Rawlings,” she said, smiling.

Richard Clarke Stevenson, the third director of administration in less than eighteen months for the California Elections Office, left the Bank of America lobby, glad that they stayed open until six on Fridays. An enormous sense of relief had swept over him since his two-hour talk with Agent Bentley. If it was the FBI that had been tailing him, then maybe he’d worried for nothing and nobody was really looking for him after all. Bentley had said they’d pull the tail and meet him tomorrow in Reno. Drawing out $17,000 in traveler’s checks made him feel a bit more secure. His VersaTeller card was limited to a daily withdrawal of five hundred, and he couldn’t get far on that.

Pulling into his apartment complex in Roseville shortly before seven, he climbed the flight of stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment. “ Pack enough for a few days and we’ll send the rest.” That’s what she’d said. As he closed the door and set the dead bolt, he flicked on the lights, simultaneously noticing the smell of cigarette smoke.

“Mr. Stevenson?”

Stevenson jerked around, startled by the voice. “Who’re you?”

“No need to worry, Mr. Stevenson. We’re with the FBI, and we have a few questions.”

“But I just answered all your questions,” he blurted, startled to see a second man who was standing in the corner of the room. “Hey, you’re not FBI. I’m calling the police, and-”

“You’re calling nobody,” the second man said, stepping forward, his heavily tattooed arms now visible in the lamp light. He brandished a pistol in Stevenson’s face. “Have a seat. We’d still like to ask you a few questions. Since you’ve already had a jabber with the Feds, it shouldn’t be hard for you to repeat the message.”

Stevenson’s face blanched, and his legs felt weak. Shoved hard in the chest, he fell into a chair behind him. “Now, Mr. Stevenson,” his antagonist said in a calm drone, “this will be a rather unusual question-and-answer session, I’m afraid. You’ll have to respond by nodding your head, yes or no,” he said, slapping a piece of duct tape across Stevenson’s mouth. “If your answer needs talkin’,” he said to the terrified man, “you’ll have to write the answer on this here clipboard. Just to be sure it don’t slip off your lap, we’ll just lock it down,” he snarled, revealing a construction-type staple gun, which he used to drive a double-pronged staple through the clipboard into Stevenson’s knee, causing the terrified man to jerk upright in the chair, eyes blazing with pain.

The pain increased over the next hour to the point where Stevenson’s mind could no longer react to the repeated demands for information. The crude map he’d drawn on the clipboard was barely recognizable. Even Captain Roger Dahlgren, who accompanied First Sergeant Otto Krueger, had, at times, been forced to look away from Stevenson’s agony.

“I’m tellin’ ya, he told us everything he knew.”

“That’s what you hope,” Dahlgren said. “By the time you finished with him, he couldn’t have remembered his mother’s name. I told you to ease up. What if he knew more, or if he lied?”

“No chance, Captain. You haven’t got the stomach for what’s necessary,” Krueger scoffed. “He didn’t lie, and he got what he deserved.”

“Yeah, right,” Dahlgren said. “Tell that to the commander when you try to explain that the computer data disks are in some cabin near Clear Lake, and you don’t know what’s on ’em, and just in case they’re not there, that the informant’s dead.”

Shorter than Dahlgren by nearly a foot, and burly, Krueger replied, “We’ll find ’em, Captain. We’ll call the commander, and he can still get there before that useless female agent.”

Dahlgren looked once more at the slumped, bloody body and turned to leave, pausing at the door.

“If I remember right, this useless female agent is the same woman who put one between the eyes of your bank-withdrawal associate. Let’s get out of here before the neighbors smell the stench and call the cops.”

“Let’s call the commander. If he can get there before her, she’ll come up empty and think this guy lied to her .”

“Yeah, that’s a big if. Leave the message.”

Otto picked up the staple gun, blood still oozing from the handle, and stepped over to the now-silent body. He placed a small California bear flag against the dead man’s chest and fired the stapler once more. “Death to Traitors” was scribbled across the flag, affixed to what once had been the living, breathing body of Richard Clarke Stevenson. Newly appointed to his long-sought career position, Stevenson now sat lifeless in his apartment, his bloody head slumped to his chest. Surveying the room once more before leaving, Otto pulled off his rubber gloves and threw them on the floor.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Stevenson.” He spat at Stevenson’s lifeless body as he closed the door.

Dan and Nicole were lost in their own thoughts during much of the steep, uphill climb. The quiet and darkness were almost welcome in the growing tension of the hunt. Reaching the crest, Dan stopped the Blazer and turned off the headlights and engine, plunging Nicole and himself into silence and near total darkness.

“Sorry, but nature’s call waits for no man,” he said, stepping out of the car and disappearing off the dirt road.

There was an overcast sky, completely hiding the moon, and only an occasional star shone through the growing cloud cover. Nicole stood outside the vehicle for a moment, and when Dan returned to the car, she gathered the courage to ask him about the voices of his ancestors he always spoke about. He laughed at first, but quickly understood the seriousness of her question.