Дэвид Балдаччи - Walk the Wire

“Good point, Alex. I’ll have some security put here to guard against that.”

He got up to leave but then glanced at the nightstand. He picked up Daniels’s ballcap.

Jamison joined him. “Shows the unit in the Air Force he was assigned to,” she said. “Lots of veterans have them.”

“Right, but that’s not all.” Decker pointed to a series of metal pins that were attached to the hat. “Look at these.”

“Places where he worked. Sort of like merit badges he earned,” observed Jamison.

Decker ran his eye over all of them, until they held on one.

He shoved the hat into his pocket. “Let’s get out of here before Daniels comes back and notices his hat is missing.”

“He said he can’t see.”

“He said a lot of things. I don’t believe any of them.”

“So what’s with the hat?”

“A clue. Maybe a really big one.”

“USACC,” said Decker.

They were driving back to London from the nursing home. Decker was holding the hat and looking at the pins. One in particular had drawn his focus.

“USACC? What does that stand for?”

Decker took out his phone and searched for the meaning. “United States Army Chemical Corps,” he said.

“But Daniels was Air Force, not Army.”

“He still has the pin. And that’s not all.” He unclipped several of the pins from the hat and held them up. “Beale Air Force Base, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Camp Detrick, Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Some of them are Army, some Air Force. And Camp Detrick is in Maryland and now it’s Fort Detrick.”

“So he spent time at all of them?”

“Apparently enough time to earn a pin.”

“What do they do at those places?”

“The question is what did they do when Daniels was in the military.” He paused. “And there’s something else. From his service record, I learned that Purdy spent time at Beale and Rocky Mountain Arsenal.”

“Okay, that’s a definite connection.”

“And that’s not all. The printed pages we found in his closet of the military facilities? They’re all places that Daniels has pins from.”

“I would definitely call that a big clue,” replied Jamison.

She saw Decker glancing in the side mirror. She did the same in the rearview. “I don’t see anybody back there,” she said.

“I was just checking, after last time.”

They arrived back in London. Decker and Jamison went immediately to her hotel room, where Jamison logged on to her computer.

Decker had given her Daniels’s hat with all of the pins, and she had searched each of them online.

Twenty minutes later she was finished and sat back. She glanced at Decker, her face pale and her expression one of slight panic. “They all have one common denominator from the time period that Daniels worked there.”

Decker nodded. He had been looking and reading over her shoulder. “Back then all those facilities were involved in developing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.”

“It apparently all began during World War II. We didn’t have those types of weapons, but Germany did. So we started researching and developing them. Both the Army and the Air Force. The programs accelerated from the end of World War II through the Korean War and beyond. During that time the U.S. and the Soviet Union made enough of the stuff to kill everyone on earth. And that doesn’t include nukes,” said Jamison as she scrolled down the screen. “But then Nixon halted all such programs at the end of the sixties. All stores of such weapons were destroyed and the facilities that those programs operated were cleaned up and reassigned.”

“Only maybe some of them weren’t destroyed,” said Decker. “And maybe there was a facility that worked on them that wasn’t included in the list you just researched.”

“Meaning London Air Force Station?”

Decker nodded. “I think it was originally built not for radar array but for production of biochemical weapons. Then the place was converted into a radar installation, even though it duplicated what the other one did near Grand Forks. Hell, maybe they added on to it at that point, to make it look like the other facility. You know, a pyramid with a golf ball on top.”

“Until they started using it for a secret prison. What, do people just wait around to do something secret and illegal and then just plop it here?”

“You’re talking about the government, Alex, so anything is possible.”

“So is that the time bomb we’re all sitting on here? WMDs?”

“It’s a theory, but a good one. We just need to prove that it’s true.”

“And if it is true?”

“We need to find the WMDs.”

“Oh, no sweat. We can wrap this all up by tomorrow.”

When he didn’t respond to her sarcasm she glanced up at him. He was clearly lost in thought.

“Are you thinking of some way to actually do that?”

“We’ll need to alert Robie to what we found. Maybe they can get some people on it. But we have some angles to work, too.”

“Beginning with what?”

“London Air Force Station.”

“If they were making WMDs over there, I’m not sure I want to go there again.”

“But we will anyway,” replied Decker.

It was the next day. Jamison was driving, and Decker was staring out the window at yet another approaching storm.

“Dollar for your thoughts,” said Jamison.

“Not sure they’re worth that much.”

“You seem down. I mean I can understand that, what with our line of work. But you always seem to be able to, I don’t know, rise above it.”

He turned to look at her. “Stan has been my brother-in-law for over two decades. I’ve spoken to him more here than I have in the last twenty years. Same with my sisters.”

“Well, they lived a long way away. And siblings grow up and move on with their own lives.”

“You have siblings. You keep in touch with them all.”

“I’m the oldest. It sort of comes with the territory. And not to stereotype, but girls are a little better at that than guys. At least in my experience.”

“Before what happened to me happened, I did keep in touch. I would call and even write letters, if you can believe that. Before Stan and Renee moved to California, I went to visit them in Colorado. I was still in college. They were pretty much still newlyweds. I helped Stan lay a brick patio in their backyard.”

“That’s really nice, Decker.”

“I wasn’t drafted after my senior year. I was a walk-on with the Browns, worked my tail off and made the team, really just as a special teams player. I was a good athlete. I was big enough and strong enough. But the NFL is a whole other level, the best of the best. I didn’t have the speed or the other intangibles you needed to really be more than a journeyman. Then I was running down the field after the kickoff on opening day. And the next thing I woke up in a hospital. Both my sisters were there. I’d been in a coma for days. Renee was holding one of my hands and Diane the other. I didn’t even notice them at first. I was looking at the weird colors on the monitor and the clock. And I thought I was losing my mind. Then I saw my sisters, and even though I knew they were my sisters, there was just something... gone. I felt nothing for them. I mean nothing.”

He looked away.

Jamison, who had clearly been stunned by this candid out-pouring from her partner, finally found her voice. “You’d been through a terrible trauma, Decker. And then you had some unexpected... challenges.”

“A nice, polite way to describe it.”

“But you’ve changed. Since the first time I met you in that courthouse back in Burlington. You’re different.”