John Gilstrap - At all costs

Nick’s eyes softened, clearly moved. “I should have made this happen a long time ago,” he said. “I can’t compete with the hell you two must have been living, but that day ruined my life, too.”

“We didn’t do it, you know,” Jake said abruptly. Then he looked embarrassed. “You never asked, but I thought I should tell you, anyway.”

Nick smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. Actually, I never thought otherwise.” The comment hung in the air for a moment. Clearly, there was more, but it would remain unsaid.

Nick smiled. “Well, whoever’s setting you up for this has done one hell of a job.” He turned to Jake. “Tell me about this body in the magazine.”

Jake explained.

“You heard him mention the body, too?” Nick asked Carolyn.

She nodded. “Absolutely. You mean you didn’t?”

Nick shook his head. “We weren’t allowed on the ops channel, remember? Sean Foley was project manager, and he didn’t want me interfering. Said if he wanted my input, he’d ask for it.” The story stirred some old emotions, but Nick still found his way back to the task at hand.

“So do you think someone was monitoring the radio?” he went on. “That he heard you find the skeleton, and he just started shooting?”

Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he planned from the very beginning to kill everyone there.”

Carolyn cut the chat session short. “Okay, guys, speculate on your own time. We’ve got a job here. Nick, you’re the techno wizard. How likely are we to live till tomorrow if we go through with this?”

Jake shot her a disapproving look, then nodded toward Travis, who seemed oblivious to it all, lost in a sea of cardboard. The kid had enough to worry about without her posing questions in those terms.

“Actually, I think this’ll be a fairly safe entry,” Nick said cheerily. “But then again, I thought it could be done safely back in ’83, too. We’ve got Level A gear just for the hell of it, but the real hazard this time is particulate, I think. No gas hangs around intact for fourteen years, and whatever liquids might have survived have long since evaporated; maybe even biodegraded. But that still leaves a shitload of really nasty dust, dirt, and soot. We sure as hell don’t want to breathe any of that.”

“Why?” Travis asked, looking up from his boxes. “What’ll happen?”

So much for being oblivious, Jake thought.

Nick caught the look and smiled. “Well, Travis, we don’t know for sure. Depends on what was in there to begin with and how it mixed during the fire. I’d expect some pretty severe respiratory distress. Maybe some systemic problems, too. Liver and kidneys, probably. Virtually everything affects them.”

“That means you’d have trouble breathing and get really sick,” Carolyn translated, earning herself a look that said, I’m not stupid.

“What about security?” Jake asked. “How big a problem will that be?”

Nick ruffled through his papers until he came up with the one he needed: an aerial photograph of the magazine and the surrounding area. “Actually, it shouldn’t be too big a deal,” he explained. “There’s a general philosophy within the agency that people are not inherently suicidal. By putting up two concentric fences, here and here”-he pointed with the tip of his pencil-“and by posting signs every ten feet that say something like, ‘Extremely Hazardous Area, You’ll Die if You Go in Here,’ we thought we’d pretty much discourage people from entering.”

Everybody smiled.

“So, that in mind, no one saw a compelling need to have a resident security guard. Not only would it be a waste of time, but over twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, who knows? Maybe he’d pick up an unmonitored exposure to something.”

Carolyn was incredulous. “You mean, no one even watches the fence line?”

Nick shook his head. “Not exactly. If you look here on the map, you’ll see that the old access road system-built in God knows when-still exists.”

Clearly, Nick saw far more on the photograph than Jake did. Even as he followed the pencil, he still couldn’t see what he was talking about.

“This road here is the closest one to the exclusion zone, about a hundred yards away, while this one here”-he moved the pencil-“is farthest away at about a half mile. We decided early on that it made sense to use the roadways as natural barriers and to build the outermost fences alongside them. Thus, three times a day, a rent-a-cop buzzes the place to look for any problems.”

Carolyn interrupted. “Problems like…?”

Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything, I guess. Holes in the fences? Birds falling out of the sky?”

The bird imagery made Travis giggle in the background.

Jake turned in his chair to face his son. “You’re welcome to come on up here and join us, pal,” he said with a grin. “Hate to have you straining your ears.”

Travis flashed a sheepish smile, then returned to his cutting. “No, that’s okay. I’m fine.”

“I don’t suppose you have a schedule for when those guards come?” Carolyn wanted to know.

Nick shot her his coyest smirk and held up another piece of paper from the stack. “Suppose again, Mrs. Donovan,” he said. “So what time is it now?” He looked at his watch. “Two o’clockish. Next patrol is at three, and the one after that isn’t till nine. I say we make our entry at three-thirty, do what we have to do, then be on our way back to Little Rock before dark.”

Jake looked over to Carolyn, who met his eyes with an uneasy glare. So this was it. All the years, all the running, all the new identities, and all the lies ultimately came down to a simple decision just to go for it. Could it possibly be this easy?

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jake said.

As Irene watched the West Virginia countryside speed by, five thousand feet below, she tried to figure out why the Donovans would return to Arkansas-to the “scene of the crime” as it were. It sounded so cliched, she hated even to think the words. These fugitives had worked so hard for so long to stay invisible, how could they possibly profit by stepping into the open like that? It didn’t make sense.

But Frankel was convinced, and when you sat in the big office, your hunches carried the weight of law. What he didn’t say was how he knew. Something about a hit on a computer field by some staffer at EPA, but between the sputtering cell phone connection and Frankel’s clipped, pompous way of speaking, she couldn’t get half the details she wanted. That was okay, though. She had staff back in Charleston to piece all that together for her.

Ironically, her team had just discovered the Donovans’ white van, stashed in a dilapidated old barn, when word came from Frankel. It had taken a cool head and strong nerves for the Donovans to stay put like that in the middle of a full-scale search. Fact was, they’d done exactly the right thing. Had they tried to bolt, they’d have been caught for sure.

They always do the right thing, Irene mused. It’s really beginning to piss me off.

Judging by the equipment and supplies they left behind in the van, they hadn’t anticipated being caught in West Virginia. She figured that to be good news. The farther she could knock them off their plan, the more likely she’d be to force a mistake.

Best she could tell, they’d been planning an extended camping trip. The van was loaded down with sleeping bags, lanterns, lamp oil, and canned goods-everything they’d need to hide out from civilization for weeks at a time, even with the approach of winter. Even more interesting, they’d abandoned an arsenal of weapons: three hunting rifles, a shotgun, and enough ammunition to invade Mexico. Frankly, the weapons confused her. Should she be relieved they hadn’t taken them along, or concerned that there were even more lethal weapons in the Donovans’ possession?