John Gilstrap - At all costs

Always better to err on the safe side. That’s why the flyers on the Donovans read “armed and extremely dangerous.”

For a few minutes there-before Frankel’s call-Irene felt certain she’d figured it all out. Clearly, the Donovans were experienced woodsmen-a suspicion backed up by the magazines and literature found in their trailer back in Phoenix-so she’d have bet a pretty penny they’d be making a Von Trapp-style march over the mountaintops. In fact, she’d been in the process of mobilizing a search, in cooperation with the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the Park Service, when she got yanked away by her boss’s hunch.

So how did they get to Arkansas? Answer: they had help. Paul could barely contain himself. He’d been first to suspect a connection with Harry Sinclair-the mystery man who’d yet to resurface-and sure as hell, it looked like he was right.

She closed her eyes against the din of the chopper and rested her head against the bulkhead, trying to figure out if she’d done everything she needed to do. Why was it that she could never get ahead of this case? Normally, investigations took on a rhythm, and once you caught it, you could put together a plan to catch the bad guy. Here she found herself arriving perpetually too late, only to find out that the Donovans continued to be slippery. This whole thing was taking on the bumbling quality of a Keystone Kops adventure. Assuming that Frankel was right-that the Donovans were in fact returning to the Newark site-then she could only assume they’d get in and out quickly.

But what do they have to gain by going back there?

She ran through the details of the case, ticking them off one at a time, and couldn’t think of a single one she’d missed. The Little Rock field office had agents en route to Newark, and she’d notified the local police chief-a guy named Lundsford-to keep an eye on the site. If the numbers she ran in her head were correct, it would be another hour and a half, two hours, before any feds got on the scene out there, which made her exceptionally dependent on the abilities of the local cops. Remembering the bumbling antics of Sherwood and his crew back in Phoenix, the thought brought her little comfort.

Officially, the Newark Hazardous Waste Site was only about a hundred acres in area. Unofficially, the site extended to virtually all 75,000 acres. Some addresses just didn’t lend themselves to corporate business cards. Of the few companies remaining in the business park, all were fly-by-nighters, representing new technologies in an industry known to vaporize inventors right along with their mistakes.

For Jake, it was like reentering a nightmare. Everything was close to the way he remembered it, but nothing was exact. Areas that had been so carefully cleared during the park’s boom years had largely been reclaimed by the aggressive Arkansas undergrowth. Entire buildings had been swallowed up by field grasses, roads erupted by surging tree roots.

The big Cadillac looked comically out of place, dodging potholes and throwing gravel on its way toward the middle southwest section of the park. On this trip, the protective gear took priority over passenger comfort, forcing everyone but the driver-Nick-to sit at impossible angles and hang on for dear life to keep from getting launched through the roof or crushed by a falling box.

“You sure you know where you’re going?” Carolyn asked hesitantly.

“As sure as I can be.” Nick shouted to be heard over the clatter of shifting equipment. “I studied the site maps pretty closely while I was waiting for you guys to arrive. So far, everything looks as it should.”

“How much longer?” Travis wanted to know. His voice sounded strained against the weight of the breathing apparatus boxes.

Nick shrugged. “Two minutes maybe? Ten? No way to be sure.”

Actually, it was four. The access road dead-ended at a chain-link fence, which stretched left to right in front of them for as far as they could see. Every few feet, at shoulder height, red-and-white signs had been posted on the fence, reading:

DANGER HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY LIKELY TO CAUSE DEATH DANGER

“We’re here,” Nick said simply. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, the latex gloves making his hands look oddly artificial. If there was one stupid mistake he didn’t need to make, it was to leave fingerprints.

No one replied for a long moment as they took in the message from the sign. Carolyn grasped her son’s hand and squeezed.

“I’d feel a lot better if that guy Thorne was here,” Travis grumbled. The stinging no-confidence vote drew a look from Jake, but Travis held his ground. “No offense.”

Jake let it go.

“So what do we do now?” Carolyn asked. “We can’t drag this equipment a mile into the woods.”

“There’s a gate right here on the fence,” Travis observed.

Nick shook his head. “No, they’ve got an alarm on the gate. We need to snip our way through.”

Jake twisted his face incredulously. “They alarm the gate, but nothing happens if you cut the chain-link?”

Nick laughed. “Who in their right mind would want to break in, Jake? It’s not like there’s anything to steal, you know. The alarm just makes sure that the gate gets locked back up in case somebody has to come in to do something.”

Amid the pile of equipment sent ahead by Harry Sinclair’s New Jersey connections were two long-handled bolt cutters, which made quick work of what people with right minds purportedly would never do. When they were finished, the hole was just barely big enough for the car.

Jake winced at the sound of metal dragging along the paint.

Once through the hole, Nick steered the car back onto the roadway, which continued on the other side of the gate. Half a mile later, as advertised, they arrived at another fence and another gate. Nick threw the transmission into park and turned in his seat to face the rest. “Here we are,” he announced. “Just your garden-variety certified hazardous waste exclusion zone.”

“We’re in the middle of the woods,” Travis objected. “I thought there were supposed to be a bunch of storage buildings.”

“Look again,” Carolyn told him, pointing. “They’re here. They’re just overgrown.”

At its heyday, this part of Arkansas had been mowed flat, turned into a grassy flatland extending from horizon to horizon; perfectly level but for endless rows of storage magazines which arose from the ground like so many swells in a grassy green sea. From the air, back then, the place would have looked like a mogul field on a ski slope, only green; and constructed at intervals that were far too precise and with lines too straight to have been a random creation of nature.

Today, from the ground, this part of the facility was so overgrown that nature had camouflaged everything. Trees now grew where roadways used to be, and thick undergrowth-kudzu, mainly, cohabitating with countless other varieties of the region’s most hearty bushes, vines, and creepers-had long ago choked out any ground cover as fragile as grass. To the casual observer, these woods might have been around since the beginning of time, untouched by any human. On closer examination, though, beyond the thick tapestry of leaves and the random angles of the foliage, the repeating pattern of the land became obvious, rising and falling at precisely the same height and precisely the same interval. Like staring at one of those computer-generated 3-D art creations, the longer Travis examined his surroundings, the more the place began to look like the explosives storage facility it once had been.

The image solidified in his mind the instant he saw the first of the concrete-filled steel blast doors, set back in an overgrown tunnel, precisely in the center of one of the earthen mounds. Having seen one, it became easy to see others; dozens of them just by pivoting his head.