ZERO OPTION

THURSDAY, THE DEFENSE REUTILIZATION AND MARKETING OFFICE (DRMO), ATLANTA, GEORGIA, 9:00 P.M.

Wendell Carson sat at his desk in the manager’s office wondering if he should go out to his truck and get his gun. He just knew Lambry was coming in to shake him down for more money. Should he confront Lambry, see if he could scare him into backing off? Or just play along and figure some way out of it later?

He swiveled around in his chair. Bud Lambry was an Alabama hillbilly: a long, lanky, tobacco-chewing, mush mouthed, mean-eyed sumbitch. He’d been Carson’s spotter in the warehouses for eight years, and Andy White’s before that. Let’s face it, he thought, Bud Lambry isn’t going to scare so good, so use your damn brains: Play along’with whatever he wants, then run some kind of con on ‘“him. Lambry can’t know what the cylinder is worth, so keep him in the dark. Agree to more money—anything—to keep him quiet for just a few more days until the deal goes through. After that, he didn’t care what Lambry might say, think, or do. Wendell Carson, erstwhile manager of the Atlanta DRMO, would have a million bucks in his pocket and would be down the road and gone. That said, he wouldn’t mind having his .38 in his middle drawer just now.

He looked at his watch and then heard someone coming down the main hallway of the admin building. A moment later, Bud Lambry let himself in, his suspicious eyes sweeping the office to make sure they were alone.

“Evening, Bud,” Carson said, not getting up. “You said we needed to talk?”

“Yeah, we do,” Lambry said, going over to the window and taking a quick look through the Venetian blinds into the parking lot. Then he turned around and gave Carson a hard look.’ ‘That thang,4hat red thang, how much they gonna give fer it?”

“I don’t know yet, Bud,” Carson lied. “They’re excited about it, but they’re a little antsy, too, seeing what it is.”

“But they gonna deal?”

“Oh, I think so. If they don’t, I’m not sure what the hell we can do with it. But what’s the problem now?”

“Problem’s money,” Bud said, a crafty gleam in his eye. He walked over to the desk and shook his arms out, as if he were preparing to take some kind of physical action. He leaned down, putting both his hands on the desk. Carson could smell him, an amalgam of sweat and tobacco. “That thang’s gotta be worth a whole shitpot full a money.”

Carson smiled. “And let me guess—you want a bigger cut, seeing this thing’s special. And you’re the one who found it.”

“Damn straight. We ain’t never lifted nothin’ like this’n before.”

Carson nodded, pretending to think about it. Then he nodded again. “I agree, Bud. This thing’s going to be worth a small fortune. In fact, it’s so big that I’m thinking about just clearing the hell out of here once the deal goes through. First, because the money is going to be major, and second, because the heat is going to be major once the Army finds out it’s missing.” “Yeah,” Bud said, relaxing a little. “Reckon I might do likewise.”

“How’s half sound, Bud? After all, you were the one who found it.”

Lambry blinked. He had obviously planned to ask for -half and settle for whatever he could get. Carson had surprised him. But then Lambry’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Okay,” he said. “An’ I wanna be there, it goes down.”

“No problem, Bud. In fact, I need you there. For the money this thing’s going to bring, I wouldn’t mind some backup, you know what I mean?”

Bud straightened back up. “All right, then,” he said. “You lemme know.

Them boys give us enny bullshit, I’ll fixer asses good. I got me some guns.”

“They’ve never stiffed us before. No reason to think they will now.”

Lambry looked at him, trying to figure out what Carson’s angle was. I’ve been too agreeable, Carson thought. Should have haggled a little. Lambry looked down at the floor for a second, and then back at Carson, a hard look in his eyes.

“And yew,” he said, “don’t yew be thinkin’ you cin run enny damn tricks, Carson. I want whut’s mine.”

“I’m going to make the arrangements tomorrow,” Carson said as smoothly as he could. Lambry had a violent streak that had gotten him in trouble twice before down in the warehouses. He was known to carry a knife, and he wasn’t shy about pulling it.

Carson got up to indicate this little farce was, over. He already had an idea of how to dupe Lambry. “I’ll catch you on the late shift in demil tomorrow night. Let you know what they decide. But remember now, not a word to anyone.”

Lambry snorted. “Ain’t never run my mouth, and that’s a damn fact.” Then he left, slamming the door.

Carson exhaled and sat back down. Fucking Lambry had been getting bolder and bolder lately. He would have to do something, although he wasn’t sure what that would be. Wendell Carson was no Andy White. Big Andy would have ambushed Lambry with a two-by-four down in the warehouses one afternoon and beat the shit out of him.

He gave Lambry ten minutes to clear the building, and then he got up and locked his office door. He adjusted the blinds and checked the parking lot, but his truck was the only vehicle left out there. Then he walked over to the wall-length bookcase and reached up behind the three-ring binders on the top shelf. He withdrew the prize: a heavy red plastic tube, four feet long, about four inches in diameter, and covered with stenciled lettering, all U. S. Army alphabet soup. There were four stainless-steel snaps at each end of the tube. Inside was the actual cylinder, itself also stainless steel, and sealed at each end with wide knurled caps. The whole assembly weighed about fifteen pounds.

Carson stared down at it. He had no idea what all the nomenclature meant, specifically, but when he’d read it over the phone to Tangent, his client in Washington, and told him where the cylinder had come from, Tangent had reacted as if he’d been hit by a brick. Tangent had gotten back to him in literally five minutes, offering $1 million in cash. Just like that. And now Brother Bud thought he was going to get half.

In your dreams, Cracker, Carson thought. This thing right here is the holy grail. Wendell Carson’s main chance. Who’d have thought it? he mused as he put the red tube carefully back up on the bookcase. After all these years of skimming the surplus auctions, he’d hit the jackpot with a cylinder of nerve gas.

FRIDAY, HEADQUARTERS OF THE DEFENSE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICE (DCIS), WASHINGTON, D. C., NOON

Senior Investigator David Stafford stood out in the hallway with his boss, Colonel Parsons, and listened impassively to the sentence of exile.

“Atlanta, Georgia, Dave. There are worse places in this world.”

Stafford nodded his head. slowly, not looking at Parsons or at any of the people passing them in the busy hallway.

“And you know I’m doing this to save your ass, don’t you? Ray Sparks is the southeastern regional supervisor. You and he go back. He’s willing to stash you there, no questions, no bullshit. You go down there, you work this DRMO auction thing, and you keep a low profile. Get your arm well, get Alice and the divorce off your mind, and then we’ll bring you back once everybody up here calms down.”

Stafford nodded again, not really listening. This hallway meeting was the culmination of the worst eighteen months of his life. He felt like telling the colonel, Thanks, but why don’t I just resign, make it easier on everybody? Except that, at the moment, he had nowhere to go, a mortgage and car loans to pay, a resume with political feces all over it, a useless right arm, a wrecked marriage, and some serious enemies in high places right here in River City. It wasn’t like he had a lot of options … The colonel was watching him, waiting for some kind of reply.

“I appreciate it, boss,” Stafford said, still staring down at the floor.

“I hate it, of course. I hate every bit of it.” Then he looked up at the colonel. “But I really do appreciate it. Where the hell is Georgia, anyway?”

Parsons grinned. “That’s the ticket. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. But remember, no bomb throwing. No making big deals out of a little deals.

This DRMO case has been around for a while, and there’s probably less there than meets the eye. So once you get there, take your time. Your TDY orders are ready down at Travel. Get ‘em and get gone, before the Communists find out about it.”

The colonel clapped him once, forcefully, on his left shoulder, thank God, and then he was alone in the hallway, conscious of the stares and the muted comments. He took a deep breath and headed down to get his travel orders. The sooner the better, the colonel-had said. Well, what the hell, he thought. It might be a nice change to go someplace where his first name wasn’t Goddamn.

FRIDAY, THE DRMO, ATLANTA, 8:30 P.M. On Friday evening, Carson returned to the DRMO parking lot after getting dinner at a local restaurant. He parked his green Army-issue pickup truck in his reserved spot in front of the building, then lowered his window. He could hear over the soft purr of the truck’s engine the demil line running, the sound of rending metal clearly audible behind the admin building. He rolled the window back up and shut the truck down.

Eight-thirty. About thirty minutes more process time on the evening shift. The assembly teams would have left hours ago, after lining up at the feed conveyor belt with stuff to be shredded. Then it would be just the demil operator left to run the line until the conveyor came up empty, after which he would secure the plant. Carson, as manager, controlled the shift assignments. He had made sure Bud Lambry would be on this evening’s shift.

Carson had stopped by a metal shop out on State Road 42 and had a machinist cut a section of pipe about three inches in diameter, shine it up on a lathe, and fit two threaded caps over the ends. The size had been right, but the weight was wrong, so he’d had them fill it with sand. The lathe operator had made a joke of asking Carson if he was making a pipe bomb. Carson played along, told him he was going to blow up the IRS building in Chamblee, just outside of Atlanta. The lathe operator had asked if he wanted some help.

His plan was to take the sand-filled cylinder to his office, switch it with the real one in the red tube, and then carry the thing across to the demil building and explain to Bud that the operation was” blown, that they were going to have to destroy the cylinder. The only problem would come if Bud insisted on opening the red packing tube, at which point he would see that the Army warning labels were missing from the substitute cylinder. Carson didn’t know whether or not Lambry had ever opened the outer tube, but he was going to have to take that chance. He had tried peeling one of the labels off the actual cylinder and it had immediately torn, probably by design, to indicate tampering. The way to do this was to go fast, to go in there looking all hot and bothered, glancing over his shoulder for cops, and pitch the thing onto the demil line before Lambry had time to think about it. Lambry was a dumb ass; it should work.

He looked again at his watch and then pulled a portable cell phone out of his briefcase and punched in the DRMO number, followed by the extension for the demil control room. The phone rang five times before it was picked up. Lambry’s voice came over the line, barely audible over the shattering noise of the machine. “Demil. Lambry.”

“It’s me. How much longer on the run?”

“Thirty minnits, mebbe. You got sumpthin’?”

“We’ve got us a big problem. I’m driving in. I’ll come over there.

Nobody around, is there?”

‘ ‘Naw. Whut kinda big problem?”

“Tell you when I get there, Bud,” Carson replied, then hung up. Five .minutes later, he was walking across the tarmac, carrying the red packing tube with the fake cylinder inside. The outside lay-down area was lighted with large rose quartz halogen security lights. He walked confidently across the tarmac, the noise of the demil machine, which the crew all called “the Monster,” getting louder -as he approached. Then he stopped. There would be no way to talk in there, not with the Monster going full bore. Instead, he went over to the adjacent warehouse, the one from which the Monster was fed, and let himself in through the keypad lock system.

The lights were on in the feed-assembly area. He checked to make sure no one else was in the building. The feed belt was running, and he could see that there were about sixty feet of material left on this shift’s demil run. The belt was crawling forward at about two miles per hour, slowly enough to give the machine in the next building time to chew.

Even with the rubber noise-barrier strips in the opening between the two buildings, the racket from the Monster was crashingly loud.

He walked over to the steel door connecting the warehouse and the demil building. He looked through the small window in the door, but it revealed only the business end of the Monster, with its gaping maw at the end of the belt, and those seven huge band-saw blades descending voraciously into the materials consigned to destruction. He couldn’t go through, for only the demil operator had the keys. Mounted just to the right of the door was a telephone. Looking around again to make sure no one else was in the warehouse, he punched in the control console number.

“Demil. Lambry.”

“Leave it running and come next door, Bud,” he said, almost shouting.

“We’ve gotta talk. And we don’t have much time.”

He hung up before Lambry could protest. He stepped away from the connecting door and walked -back over to the conveyor line near the screened opening of the inter building aperture. A minute later, there .was a shadow of movement in the small window in the door, and Bud Lamdry stepped through, wearing his hearing protectors and hard hat above his long-nosed face. He saw Carson and paused, as if unsure of what was going on; then he came over, his eyes widening at the sight of the red tube.

Carson hastily explained that the sale was off, that the client had backed out. They were saying the thing was much too hot, too dangerous.

“They said we’d better destroy the damn thing before the Army finds out.

They suggested we put it through the demil machine. They also told me not to be there when it goes into the Monster.” “Why?” Bud said, an anguished expression on his face. “That thang’s gotta be worth some money some wheres!” Carson shook his head. “They said no way. Too hot. Too dangerous. Said there’d be hell to pay when the Army found out it was missing. That they’d execute someone for losing it, much less for .trying to sell it.

I had no idea, Bud. I don’t think we have any choice. We have to put it on the line here. There’s no other place to dispose of it.”

Without giving Bud any more time to argue, he dropped the red tube down on the conveyor belt, about ten feet upstream of the aperture between the two buildings. Bud just stood there for a minute as the red tube advanced down the line, his piggish little eyes following. Then, to Carson’s dismay, Lambry stepped forward and snatched the tube off the line.

“Now you wait jist a damn minnit,” he said. He put it down on the floor.

Keeping one eye on Carson, he knelt down and started to undo the snaps on the packing tube.

Carson thought fast. Jesus Christ, now what do I do? He’ll know I switched it! He looked around desperately for some kind of weapon, but there was nothing close, and Bud now had the last snap undone. He opened the case, pulled out the fake, and pitched the red tube back onto the belt. He stared at the cylinder for a moment, and then, still in a crouch, whirled on Carson.

“You sumbitch!” he yelled, dropping the fake on the floor. “This ain’t it! You done switched it, you sumbitch!” Eyes wild, he straightened up, snatched a folding knife out of his pocket, and, in one practiced motion, opened it, and swiped furiously at Carson’s stomach. Carson, already recoiling, felt the blade tip just touch his jacket. There was no mistaking the killing fire in Lambry’s eyes. Without really thinking, he kicked out at Lambry, hitting him in the groin. Lambry grabbed himself, shrieking in pain, dropped the knife, and stumbled backward, tripping over the edge of the conveyor belt. He was so tall that he ended up sprawling across the belt, on his backside, his hard hat flying. Almost immediately, the moving belt dragged him up against a support stanchion and turned him parallel. Lambry, flailing wildly, inadvertently stuck his right hand between the belt and one of the rollers. As Carson watched in horror, the belt roller mangled Bud’s right hand. Bud screamed anew while he thrashed around on the belt, trying to extract his hand, until he fainted from the excruciating pain.

Carson just stood there, even when he realized that Bud had passed out.

But the belt never stopped moving, carrying Lambry’s limp form into the steel safety cage enclosure flanking the interbuilding aperture. By the time Carson realized what was going to happen, he could no longer reach Lambry through the screens.

He had to stop the belt.

He ran over to the connecting door, then remembered it was locked. He looked back over at the belt, where Lambry’s inert body, the key ring visible on his belt, was pushing aside the rubber sound strips in the aperture.

Jesus Christ, Carson thought, he’ll be carried into the Monster! I’ve got to find the emergency button!

He ran frantically toward the back of the room, trying to remember where the control panel for the belt was, then saw it in the back corner. By the time he reached the console, Lambry was no longer in sight. The sound of the Monster tearing into steel boxes next door was very loud in his ears.

Have to stop the damned belt! He found the emergency button and smashed down on it.

Nothing happened.

Frantically, he did it again. Still nothing.

He snapped his head around to look at the belt, but it was still moving.

Then he saw the problem. On the upper right of the console, a red indicator light stared triumphantly back at him: system lockout.

Oh my God, he thought. Because the Monster was running, control of the belt was locked out except at the demil operator’s console—in the next building, which he couldn’t get into. He stared at the belt as it cranked inexorably forward with its cargo of military components— and Bud Lambry. He did not want to think about what was going to happen, even as his feet propelled him unwillingly back. toward the connecting door, where the small window drew his gaze the way a cobra mesmerizes its victim, closer and closer. Don’t want to look. You must. Don’t want to. Maybe he’ll wake up in time. Can’t watch this; can’t watch this … He closed his eyes as he reached the window, hoping he would hear something—anything—but heard only the roar of the blades and the shriek of disintegrating metal, which stopped for a moment. When at last he did look, it was about one second too soon. He was just in time to see the seven whipping blades emerge from the top of Bud’s skull as it disappeared into the now-bloody waterfall of cooling oil.

He reeled backward from the window, fighting to control a wave of nausea. He closed his eyes again, then looked up into the overhead beams and pipes of the warehouse. One of the ventilation pipes looked exactly like the cylinder. Jesus Christ, what had he done! It was an accident, he told himself. It was self-defense. He pulled a knife, for Chrissakes!

But he couldn’t get that final image out of his mind.

He staggered out of the assembly room to the tarmac area outside, where he lit a desperately needed cigarette with trembling fingers. He sucked down half of it in one tremendous inhalation. Get a hold of yourself, he thought. You’ve still got to go through with it, despite what’s just happened. You don’t need Lambry anymore. Concentrate on the money. Then get out of here.

But first, he realized with a queasy feeling, he had to figure out how to shut down the Monster when it was done with the run. Reluctantly, he went back into the warehouse. He retrieved the fake cylinder. There was only one way: He would have to ride through the aperture on the belt. He swallowed hard.

MONDAY, HARTSFIELD INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, 11:00 A.M. On Monday morning, Carson stood in the baggage-claim area of Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. He closed his eyes and commanded-his tumbling stomach to be still. This is getting scary, he thought. Really scary. Should have quit when I was ahead. Should have gone and put the real cylinder into the derail machine after Lambry had been … Jesus, what was the word for that? Even though Lambry had tried to shake him down. Dumb son of a bitch!

The area was only moderately crowded. Carson was standing between Delta carousels five and six, trying not to attract attention while he waited for the Washington hotshot—correction, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service investigator. Outwardly, he was trying like hell to look calm and collected. Inwardly, his stomach was doing flip-flops.

A cold sweat permeated the back of his undershirt, and his eyes felt sandy from lack of sleep.

He was very conscious of all the security people in the airport. He wondered when one of them was going to detect his nervousness and come over to ask him why he was just standing around here. Waiting for someone, Officer. Plane must have been delayed. That happens, right? But he sensed he was exuding fear, the kind of fear that tickles a cop’s intuition. He’d just about recovered from the horror of Friday night when the call came through first thing this morning from the Defense Logistics Agency headquarters in Washington. A DCIS investigator was inbound to Atlanta at eleven this morning. “D, on’t know exactly what it’s about, but we want you personally to meet him at Hartsfield,” he was told. “He’s to’ be given every cooperation. Call us immediately when you find out why he’s there. Oh, and have a great day, Mr. Carson.”

Now of all times. And just two days after Lambry had … disappeared. He wiped some perspiration off his forehead with the back of his hand. Hot in here, he thought. Was that airport security guy staring at him? He turned away, trying to make the movement casual.

It can’t be about the cylinder, he told himself again. It just can’t be.

There is no way in hell anyone in the DLA could know about that. The fear rose in his throat, a poisonous upwelling of warm bile. Despite his every effort, his heart began to pound again. His face felt flushed. If not the cylinder, then maybe Lambry? Not possible, he thought. Much too soon. He squeezed his eyes shut to make the images go away, but they came anyway, as they had all weekend. Even his wife, Maude, had noticed, and these days, Maude was oblivious to just about everything.

As much as Bud Lambry had pissed him off, he had never meant for anything so god-awful to happen. He looked around the claim area again, trying to focus on something, anything, to erase the memory, but it wasn’t working. He remembered every bloody detail.

“Are you all right, sir?” someone asked from a few feet away. He nearly jumped out of his skin. A handsome woman with a teenage girl at her side was giving him an anxious look. The girl, he noticed, was giving him an altogether-different look. She had dark eyes, and she was staring at him from behind the woman’s arm with an expression of unmistakable horror.

As if she had somehow witnessed what he had just remembered.

He found his voice somewhere back there in his constricted throat.

“Yes, I’m … fine. I have … a really bad headache, that’s all.”

The woman nodded sympathetically. He looked away, scanning the neon numbers on the flight board above the carousel, and then noticing the crowd of people grabbing for bags. He looked anywhere but at the woman and that girl. He realized with a start that the DCIS guy’s flight number was flashing on the board. He glanced around for someone who might be a senior investigator, looking everywhere, desperate to think about something else, to sweep aside the terrible image of Lambry’s skull vibrating like the heel of a loaf of bread in an electric slicing machine. An accident, he told himself again, not supposed to happen, not like that, certainly not like that.

And all because of the cylinder.

He swallowed hard again and concentrated on spotting the DCIS man, but no one looked the part. There were the obvious businessmen chatting on cell phones while they waited for their bags. There were three beefy young men muscling sunburned forearms into the hobbling train of bags on the carousel, hoisting out golf bags, but there was no one who looked like a Washington guy. They had a look, those Washington people.

He tried to compose himself, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw that damned girl still staring at him. He turned his back on her and tried not to think about Lambry or the cylinder, but the image of it bloomed in his mind anyway: a stainless-steel cylinder bearing all those seals and warning labels. The treasure of treasures that sharp eyed Bud Lambry had pulled out of the shipment of supposedly empty weapons containers from Utah.

He tried thinking about the money: A million dollars. Cash. He visualized a small mountain of money. He remembered the phone call to Tangent, his contact in Washington. “I’ve got what looks like the guts of a chemical weapon. Are you interested?” Tangent had asked him to read off the nomenclature printed on the side of the container and then hung up. The offer had come back five minutes later: a million in cash.

Delivery instructions to follow. But it was going to have to be soon.

Very soon.

And what is Tangent going to do with the cylinder? Not my business, Carson thought quickly. In fact, he fervently did not want to know. But of course he did know. Tangent was going to sell it into the international arms market. An image of what had happened on that Tokyo subway flashed through his mind, all those crumpled red faced bodies, throngs of dazed commuters desperately clutching their throats, eyes streaming as their carbonized lungs fought to draw breath; dozens of spastic figures on the ground, surrounded by dozens of helpless cops.

There, was that the guy? No. Well, maybe. And then he had another thought: What if this cop guy is here about the other thing? The auction scam? He felt his heart begin to pound again. Not now, he thought. Jesus Christ, not now. He stared hard at the man heading for carousel five.

Get a grip, he cautioned himself. The cylinder is your ticket to ride.

With that much money, you get a whole new life. This is what you’ve been waiting for and stealing for all your life.

A man who might be the DCIS investigator was definitely coming toward him now. He was wearing a good suit, had a muscular build, and was carrying a large briefcase in his left hand. His right hand was stuck awkwardly down in the pocket of his coat jacket, as if maybe he had been injured. He had a dead-serious cop face on him.

That’s him, Carson thought. Senior Investigator David Stafford, looking right at him, and not necessarily in a very friendly way, either. Carson glanced around involuntarily, wondering if he was sweating visibly, and half-expecting to see a phalanx of uniforms closing in on him, but there was only the crowd milling around the carousels. And that damned girl.

Still watching him.

Look away, he thought.

Can’t look away.

He stared back at her, unable’ to disengage those dark eyes fastened on his like little lasers, and then, suddenly, despite himself, he saw once again the top of Bud Lam bry’s head disintegrating in a cascade of cooling oil and bright red blood, all to protect the deadly secret of the cylinder, gleaming now in his mind’s eye like some alien artifact, suspended in the air between himself and the girl. He tried to tear his eyes away from hers, to see where that agent was, but then his vision tunneled down until all he could see was the cylinder, and beyond that, the girl’s pupils glittering at him, boring into his brain; and then he heard a roaring noise in his ears and found himself immersed in a sudden wet darkness.

Stafford swore out loud, startling the people around him. He had spotted Wendell Carson just as soon as he’d come into the baggage-claim area.

The Atlanta DRMO manager’s ID picture and a brief bio had been in the case file he had studied on the airplane. Fifty-five-year-old white male, five-eight, receding hairline, roundish face, glasses, paunchier than his file photo. Stafford had been about twenty feet away when he saw Carson lock eyes with a teenage girl standing near the baggage carousel, then saw him collapse like a sack of potatoes onto the floor, all in the space of about two seconds. Some of the people standing near him were backing away while others moved in to help.

Stafford pushed his way through the crowd to see what the hell had happened. By the time he got to Carson, a striking black-baked woman had her arm around Carson’s shoulder and was helping him to sit up. The teenager was standing a few feet back from Carson, still staring down at him, an expression of either extreme distaste or fear on her pinched face. Now what the hell is this all about? Stafford wondered as he knelt down on one knee and put his left hand on Carson’s right shoulder.

Carson’s head was up, but he looked dazed as he pushed his glasses back on his face. :- . “Wendell Carson? I’m David Stafford. Can you hear me?

Are you okay?”

“He didn’t look well a moment ago,” the woman offered, speaking over Carson’s head. Stafford had a quick impression of bright green eyes, a milky white complexion, and almost blue-black hair. “He said he had a bad headache.”

Stafford started to reply, but Carson was trying to stand up. “Okay,” he was mumbling. “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy there. Not sure …”

Two black men in suits arrived at that moment and helped Carson to get back up. One was looking Carson over while the other spoke into a small handheld radio. The woman and the teenager began to back away.

“Do you need medical attention, sir?” the first security man asked.

Carson shook his head. “No, I’m okay. Just got dizzy. Hot in here.”

Stafford showed the cop his DCIS credentials. “Mr. Carson was here to meet me,” he explained. “I’ll stay with him. I don’t think we’ll need paramedics.”

The security men backed off, and Stafford helped Carson over to one of the benches near the line of baggage carousels. Carson sat down heavily, then put his head in his hands for a moment. Eventually, he looked back up. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Had a touch of the flu the past couple of days. Must not be over it. Are you Stafford?”

Stafford nodded. “Right,” he replied. “Dave Stafford. DCIS Washington.

If you’re okay, let me go get my bag. You stay here and rest a minute.”

Stafford left his briefcase with Carson before walking back into the crowd by the baggage carousel to look for his suitcase. He. kept an eye on Carson, who looked like someone who had just been seasick, all pasty-faced and with shaking hands. The woman and the girl walked by him just then, each pulling a suitcase. The woman gave him a quick look of recognition but kept going. The girl stared straight ahead as she struggled with what appeared to be a very heavy suitcase. There was a sticker on the side of her suitcase that proclaimed graniteville, georgia, an all-american town. On impulse, Stafford called after the woman. She stopped, a look of mild apprehension on her face. He checked to make sure that Carson couldn’t see them talking.

“I’m David Stafford,” he said, flashing his credentials. “I’m a federal investigator. Do you know that man who fainted back there?” “No,” she said immediately, looking around for the girl in the crowd.

The girl had kept going for a moment,, but now she had stopped a few feet away and was looking back in their direction.

“Does your daughter there know him, by chance?”

The woman frowned. She was almost as tall as he was. Her luminous eyes flashed a hint of impatience. “She’s not my daughter, and, no, she does not know him. Please, we must go.” Her voice was husky and had a hint of a southern accent.

Stafford was almost positive that Carson and the girl had been staring at each other just before Carson fainted. “It’s just that—” he began.

“Well, look, ma’am, here’s my card, in case you think of some reason why that happened back there. Will you call me if you do? It might be important.”

She took the card, frowned at it for a moment, and then closed her hand over it. He noticed she wore no rings or jewelry of any sort. Her hands and fingers were long, with the same smooth complexion of her face. She was his age—maybe a year or so either way.

“Thank you,” he said before she could come up with a reason to hand back his card. He turned back toward the baggage carousel, watching them out of the corner of his eye as they made their way to the exit doors and stopped to have their claim tags checked. The girl glanced back once in his direction, but the woman took her arm and propelled her out of the baggage claim area. That’s an unusual-looking woman, he thought, and there’s something very strange about that girl. He thought again about what he had seen just before Carson collapsed, but then he noticed his bag coming around the carousel and, for the moment, put the two of them out of his mind.

Carson had recovered, at least outwardly, by the time he swung the government sedan in alongside the curb outside. He had had a shaky five minutes there on the bench while Stafford went for his bag. It was bad enough to have a Defense Department cop showing up like this on short notice, but to faint dead away in a public place? Jesus, what was happening to him? He shook his head as his heart started to race again.

He tried deep breathing to calm himself down. Then he saw Stafford coming toward the car.

Stafford opened the back door with his left hand, struggled to get his bags in, and then climbed in front with Carson.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Stafford asked. “You want, I can drive, and you can navigate.”

“Thanks, but I’m okay. You hurt your arm?”

“Yeah, gunshot,” Stafford replied. “Took out some nerves. Most of the time it sort of just hangs there. I’m doing physical therapy, but it’s slow going. By the way, who was that girl? Was that someone you knew?”

Carson thought fast. “What girl was that?” he said, making a show of concentrating on traffic.

“I was on the other side of the carousel when you keeled over. I thought you and that girl standing near you were looking at each other.”

Carson made a left at the end of the overpass and accelerated into the eastbound lanes of the Atlanta Perimeter. “It was pretty crowded in there,” he said. “I don’t remember any girl, or anybody else, for that matter. I was just standing there, waiting for you, then woke up on the floor. Probably forgot to breathe or something. Like I said, I haven’t been feeling well the past couple of days.”

Stafford nodded absently, seeming to accept Carson’s explanation. “Her bag had a sticker on itsomething about Graniteville. I thought maybe you knew her.”

“Nope.” Carson concentrated on his driving, desperately willing Stafford to get off the subject of the girl.

“Where is the Atlanta DRMO?” Stafford asked.

“Aren’t they usually on a base of some kind?”

“That’s right, although Fort Gillem isn’t really a base. It’s a small Army post. A lot of it is shut down. Kind of a hodgepodge of stuff there now: the local Army bomb squad, several Army transport repair shops, an Army-Air Force Exchange Service distribution center. That kind of stuff.

Army’s trying to hang on to it. Developers are drooling over the fence while they work out which congressman to bribe.”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” Stafford replied as they crossed over 1-75.

“How big is the Atlanta DRMQ?”

“Forty employees, ten warehouses. We move maybe twenty, thirty million dollars worth of material a year through the reutilization and public auction process. Are you familiar with the DRMO system?”

“Barely,” Stafford said.

Carson thought, If Stafford is down here on a DLA matter, surely he has been briefed. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “Isn’t there a DCIS office right here in Atlanta?” he asked. He already knew the answer.

He’d looked it up in the DOD phone book when the call from Washington had come through.

“Yes, there is,” Stafford answered, still looking out the window. Carson took the State Road 42 exit and continued east, driving through wall-to-wall trucking terminals. “Look, I’ll give you a full brief once I see your DRMO. That way, you can answer my questions untainted by knowing why I’m down here.” Carson said okay and continued the rest of the drive in silence.

Untainted. Right. Bastard knows I’m dying of curiosity. But to be safe, he knew he’d better play it Stafford’s way until he had some idea of what this was all about. Please, God, not the cylinder. And damn that business at the airport! Graniteville—maybe I need to remember that name.

They drove through the unguarded entrance gates of Fort Gillem, then went about two miles through the post to the edge of what looked like an abandoned airfield, where they turned left into a warehouse complex. The buildings had been there a long time and showed their age. They parked next to a railroad siding, where a dozen rail cars carrying truck trailers were parked. An elderly yard engine sat rumbling by itself on a second siding, gracing the air with dirty diesel exhaust. In front of them was a single-story brick building. A sign above the door proclaimed it the home of the Atlanta Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office.

Behind the brick building was a warehouse complex. Carson took Stafford to his office in the administrative area. The first thing Stafford asked for was a vehicle. Carson told one of the secretaries to requisition a sedan from the base motor pool. Carson offered coffee, but Stafford declined. The investigator stood by the window for a moment, looking out at the rail sidings. Carson confirmed his initial physical impression: medium-big guy, big shoulders, good suit, large, purposeful-looking hands—or one of them was, anyway—short military-style haircut. He wondered if DCIS investigators carried guns.

“Okay,” Stafford said, turning around. “I know this is short notice and somewhat mysterious. But here’s what I need first: a tour of this place.

Conducted by you, if you can spare the time.”

As if I have a choice, Carson thought. “Sure,” he said.

“Second, I’d prefer that the staff not know who I am, or, more specifically, what I am.”

He had dark blue eyes, a faintly ruddy Nordic face, and a prominent chin. He looked right at you. Carson was determined to meet Stafford’s eyes. He willed all thoughts of the cylinder—which was hidden, at the moment, all of eight feet away—right out of his mind.

“Once we’ve done the walkabout,” Stafford continued, “I’ll need to make a couple of calls, then maybe we can go to lunch somewhere and I’ll fill you in. Right now I suggest you tell people I’m from DLA headquarters, which, in a sense, is true. Maybe say I’m an auditor. And if there’s a spare empty office, I’d appreciate being able to camp out there.”

Every cooperation, DLA had ordered. Carson nodded, punched the intercom, and told the secretary that he would be taking Mr. Stafford out into the material bays for about an hour. He asked her to set up the assistant manager’s office, which was empty, for Mr. Stafford’s use. She asked whose name she should put on the sedan requisition, since Carson already had a Fort Gillem motor-pool vehicle. Carson told her that Stafford was an auditor from DLA headquarters. She needed Stafford’s grade, and Carson raised his eyebrows at Stafford.

‘ ‘Fifteen” was the reply. Carson passed that to the secretary.

OS-Fifteen, Carson thought. Three grades senior to him. He knew all about grade creep in Washington, but this guy was no midlevel gumshoe.

He felt the familiar grab in his stomach, but he suppressed it with a deep breath. There was no way they could know.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s walk around a bit.”

When they stepped into the cavernous warehouse, Stafford was glad he had kept his coat on; it was almost cold. The injured tendons in his right arm duly protested.

“Okay,” Carson began. “DRMO stands for Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office. Basically what we do here is collect all sorts of stuff from a variety of organizations in the Defense Department.

Technically, surplus defense material, but the word stuff really covers it better. The material is anything the Defense Department no longer needs—surplus raw materials, obsolete repair parts, broken equipment components, or even the equipment itself, office furniture, general supplies. Anything that a DOD agency or military service deems surplus to its operations is supposed to end up in a DRMO.”

“Where you guys auction it off, right?”

“Well, not initially. Remember the R in DRMO. It stands for reutilization. The first thing we do after initial classification is to advertise in-house to all the government agencies what we’ve got here.

“Government’ includes both federal and state agencies, by the way. That way, for example, if an agency is looking for some replacement desks, or maybe a window air conditioner, they can come to the DRMO and see if we have one. They can then requisition it, and get it basically at no cost.

Saves the agency money, and the stuff gets recycled.”

“I had a surplused desk in the Pentagon once,” Stafforrj said. “But as I recall, it was brand-new.”

“That happens,” Carson replied. “The surplused material doesn’t have to be worn-out or even used to come here, although it usually is. It might be a case where an agency buys ten new desks but then loses a fight over office space with another organization, so they can only use eight of them. We’d get two brand-new desks to put out for reutilization. But most of the stuff that comes here of that nature, especially office furniture, is very used and pretty dilapidated, as you’re going to see.”

Two warehouse workers came by on a forklift, forcing Carson to wait for a moment for the noise to subside. Stafford noticed that they didn’t wave to Carson or greet him, which he thought was odd. Workers in a forty-man organization would normally at least acknowledge the boss. On the other hand, Wendell Carson was about as plain vanilla a civil servant as one could find, almost a caricature of a government bean counter.

. “The important items, monetarily,” Carson was saying, “are the material that comes in designated to go through the demil process. Demil is short for demilitarization. I guess I need to back up a little. When material first comes in, it has to be classified. Some is going to go directly to the general public auctions: building supplies, pipe, wire, bricks, lumber, cans of roofing tar, barrels of lubricating oil, things like that. But some of it’s fully serviceable military equipment.

Obsolete maybe, but functional. Things like tank gun sights, machine-gun barrels, radar components, fire-control computers, components that’ve been re placed by a new weapons system acquisition but which still work or could be made to work.”

“Who classifies it?” Stafford asked. His arm was aching and he was ready to start walking.

“The organization that sends it down to us is supposed to classify it.

But we are supposed to double-check it. Especially after that helicopter gunship flap in Texas—remember that?”

Stafford did remember. Some guys in Texas had been able to buy enough helicopter parts at a DRMO public auction to reassemble completely a fully operational Army attack helicopter. The press had had a field day with it.

“So anyway, if it comes with a demil tag, or if we determine that it should be demilitarized, we have a separate facility that handles that.

We’ll see that after we see some more warehouses.”

They started walking. The first warehouse was filled with steel racks that went from floor to ceiling. On them was every kind of thing the government bought. Stuff, Stafford thought. Stuff was exactly the right word.

“This is one of the public auction areas,” Carson said. “This material has been through initial categorization and the reutilization process.”

Stafford was amazed at the variety: typewriters, coils of wire, boxes of bolts, ancient computers, adding machines, mattresses, chairs, rolls of printing paper, black-and-white televisions, a box of fluorescent lightbulbs, some of which looked used, new and used airplane tires, and a military vehicle’s olive drab fueling hose.

“This is the junk man, flea market end of the spectrum,” Carson said as they walked down an aisle between the racks. “It’s been available for viewing for five days, and the public auction will be held Tuesday.” He looked at his watch. “I guess that’s tomorrow. The bigger items are outside in the lay-down area.”

“And the high-value military components?”

“That begins in the next warehouse. In a way, the DRMO is set up as an assembly line. Material comes in all the time, sometimes by the freight-car load. Goes into the receiving and general storage area for cataloging and classification. High-value, serviceable, but nondemil material goes into warehouses one and two.

Large, high-value components that have to be derailed go to warehouse five, which is attached to the demil facility. Intrinsically lethal, or HAZMAT, demil materials go to warehouse four, which is right next to five. The warehouses have different levels of security depending on what’s in them. TV cameras, that sort of thing.”

” ‘Intrinsically lethal’? ‘HAZMAT’?”

“Hazardous materials—cannons, denatured ordnance, drums of toxic chemicals or chemical waste, missile front ends, bomb cases, rocket bodies. Weapons, primarily. The military service generating the surplus takes the high explosives out, but then we get the iron.”

They walked out of the warehouse and into the bright sunlight of the lay-down area. Carson seized the opportunity to light a cigarette. He offered one to Stafford, who shook his head.

“Thanks. Quit five years ago.” Stafford thought he saw Carson’s hands shaking. “What on earth can you do with bombs and rockets?” he asked.

‘ ‘Bomb and rocket casings, remember. Not supposed to hold nigh explosives. They become monster feed.”

” ‘Monster feed’?”

Carson grinned through a cloud of blue smoke. “Show you in a bit.

Basically, we cut them up in the demil facility. Turn ‘em into shredded metal and various liquid products, and then auction off the by-products to scrap dealers. This here is the general lay-down area. Mostly just bigger stuff.”

Stafford looked, wishing he’d brought his sunglasses. There were long rows of palletized material, containing such things as industrial-size drill presses and lathes, a clutch of old refrigerators, a firefighting vehicle from a military airfield, skip boxes of scrap metal, industrial air conditioning units, several rusty-looking water heaters, and mounds of used truck tires.

“Bigger stuff,” Stafford said. He really was interested in the high-value components, but he was satisfied to let Carson to do his thing.

“That’s right. This is more of the general auction inventory. That’s warehouse two over there; number one’s right behind it. They contain the small, high-value items. The hundred-thousand-dollar radar amplifier tubes that happen to be obsolete, by military standards.”

“Who buys those?”

“Usually the FAA. They’re still using a lot of old, tube driven radars.”

, “That’s a comforting thought.”

 

“

 

Carson nodded as they walked across the lay-down area. Stafford realized they were crossing tarmac and wondered if this area had been part of the abandoned airfield. There were forklifts chugging around the area, moving pallets in and out of the warehouses, which were arranged in two lines on either side. He asked Carson about it.

‘ ‘This area used to be the main hangar and maintenance facility for an Army helicopter base. It was shut down a long time ago, before I got here. They knocked down most of the actual hangars except for one. That contains the demil facility. That one, over there.”

They changed course slightly to avoid a backing forklift and headed toward the ex-hangar building. One warehouse in the line backed right up to the hangar building. Stafford could hear a loud tearing noise from inside. Carson stopped about fifty feet from the doorway.

“Normally, we run demil in the evening, but there’s a backlog. Demil is a hazardous industrial area. We’ll pick up hearing protection, hard hats, and safety glasses in the vestibule inside that doorway. Then we’ll sign in.”

“What’s the noise?” Stafford asked. v “The Monster,” Carson said.

“Basically, it’s a really big shredding machine. The process starts with seven diamond-tipped saw blades, followed by a bank of chipping hammers, then a grinder. Turns anything that goes in there into fragments.

“Monster feed,’ the guys call it. Then there’s a bank of electromagnets to separate ferrous material from nonferrous, an acid bath to dissolve electronics insulation, a centrifuge for separating the liquid products, and some further screen separators. At the very end are collection modules for the resulting scrap, and those streams are led to compactors. This is the place where those rocket and bomb casings come, as well as any classified design stuff, like military radar klystrons, antenna arrays, things like that.”

“Take a big crew to run it?”

“Nope. Takes three, four guys to set up the run—that whole warehouse back there houses the feed-assembly system. But once the belt starts, it takes one guy to sit in the control room and basically watch. The machine chews up anything—metal, wood, plastic, organic substances.

Liquids are separated, filtered, centrifuged, broken down with acids, centrifuged again to separate water from organic liquids, and then pumped to the toxic-waste tanks for settling and further processing.

Anything solid and nonmetallic is consumed in the acid wash, and anything that survived that is compressed into blocks of scrap metal for, sale to the metal merchants, who in turn sell the blocks as feedstock for steel or aluminum reprocessing. When the run’s done, another crew empties the compaction modules, usually the next morning.

Let’s go on in.”

Carson pushed a call button by the door, which clicked, allowing them into a vestibule area. Even in the vestibule, the noise level was very high, and Stafford reached gratefully for the ear” protectors. They signed the access log, although Stafford noticed that there was no one in the vestibule to supervise access. He assumed the operator’s control of the door took care of that.

Carson led the way through the next set of doors and into a large industrial bay where a huge locomotive-sized steel machine hunkered down on the concrete floor. The top of the machine reached almost all the way to the ceiling girders of the hangar, some sixty feet up. The bulk of it measured about eighty feet long and twenty wide. A I five-foot-wide conveyor belt emerged from safety-caged double doors on the left side of the bay. It was traveling at about waist height, carrying plastic boxes filled with all sorts of military equipment. The belt approached the’ maw of the machine from left to right, then folded under itself and returned back into the feed-assembly warehouse. There was a glass-enclosed control booth to one side of the room, where an ear-muffed operator was visible at a console. :’.’ “

Carson led Stafford over toward the opening of the de mil machine. There were safety screens and yellow hazard markings on the floor all along the route of the conveyor belt. The business end of the machine was impressive. Several wicked-looking band-saw blades came down vertically across the five-foot square of the machine’s mouth. The blades appeared to be about ten inches wide, spaced about an inch apart, and bathed in silky sheets of cooling oil. Anything hitting the blades was immediately engaged and cut into segments in a fiery shower of sparks and smoke from the rending metal. The process produced a hideous tearing sound. A large hood above the entry gobbled up all the smoke and metal vapors. The other components of the maceration process were apparently contained out of sight within the machine. Behind and below was a complex nest of large pipes coiled under and around its foundations, leading to large boxlike components marked

MAGNETIC SEPARATION, AIR FILTRATION, PARTICULATE scrubber, and neutralizing scrubber. Three enclosed conveyor systems led into the next building, where, Stafford assumed, the resulting rubble was compacted or contained for movement to the auction warehouses.

It was clearly impossible to hold a conversation in the presence of such noise, so Stafford indicated he’d seen enough and they went back out into the vestibule. Three men were there looking at clipboards and discussing the current run. This time the workers nodded at Carson, but their greetings appeared to be entirely official. Stafford noticed that Carson returned their greetings in similar fashion. No love lost between the DRMO boss and his employees here, he thought, confirming his earlier impression. They went back outside to the relative quiettof the tarmac.

For some reason, Carson looked relieved to be out of the building. He lit up another cigarette. Stafford confirmed that Carson’s hands were definitely shaking.

“You can see why they call it ‘the Monster,’ ” Carson said. “It cost eleven million dollars, but it does the job. You get a compacted mixture of very clean metallic dust and bits out the back end, and a variety of fluids. That building over there is devoted to fluid separation, detox, and recovery. We sell the output of that, too. The employees call that “Monster piss,’ naturally. There’s a plan to put up a generating system where we’ll burn the volatile xproducts and make our own electricity.

There’s nothing in the fluid-processing area but a control room and a few miles of piping systems, but we can go see it if you’d like.”

“That’s okay,” Stafford said, still assimilating the idea of Monster piss. ‘ ‘Does every DRMO have one of these derail machines?”

“No, which is why we tend to get a lot of the military equipment that’s still serviceable.” Stafford nodded. “Right,” he said. “What’s in the rest of the warehouses?”

“More stuff,” Carson replied. “If the trucks stopped coming today, we’d have a six-month workload here.”

“Okay, thanks for the tour. Let’s go get something to eat, and I’ll ten you what this is all about.” Sort of, he reminded himself silently.

They took their sandwiches to a table at the back of the officers club’s tiny dining room. Carson noticed that Stafford was pretty adept with his one good arm.

“As I said, most of Fort Gillem is in cadre status,” he explained.

“That’s Army speak for being shut down and tffc waiting hopefully for the next war.” He was trying hard not to appear anxious. There is no way they could know about the cylinder, he kept telling himself. That just happened. Or about Lambry. No way in hell.

Keep cool. Show him that you’re interested in why he’s here, but that, whatever it is, it does not affect you personally.

Stafford had started in on his sandwich, eating it awkwardly with one hand. Carson waited for a moment and then did the same, although he had still not recovered his appetite after Friday night. The big man across the table was obviously hungry and dedicated to doing something about it. The dining room was almost empty, with only a few other civil servants gossiping about the latest base c!6sings and layoffs in the Defense Department.

Stafford finished his sandwich quickly, keeping his right hand out of sight below the table. “Okay,” he said, wiping his mouth with a clutch of paper napkins. “You know the difference between the DIS and the DCIS?”

“Uh—” -

Stafford cut him off. “DIS, the Defense Investigative Service, does security clearance background checks on military and civilian employees ,of the Department of Defense. The DOS, that’s the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, investigates cases of fraud against the government. One’s admin, one’s criminal work. I’m a senior investigator with the DCIS. The Defense Logistics Agency, which owns all the DRMOs, called us with a problem. They think someone has been rigging the auctions.”

Shit, Carson thought. It is the auction scam. He forced his face into an expression of mild surprise. “Rigging the auctions?” he said. “I’m surprised. You saw that stuff. What’s to rig?”

Stafford gave him a cool look. “Actually, I didn’t. Not the stuff we’re talking about here. I saw the bedpans and pipe-rack stuff. The DLA is talking about the high-priced items. Avionics components. Electronic repair parts. Non demil but high-value radar and communication equipment. Satellite transponders. The gold foil in magnetron power amplifiers. Not materials that’re hazardous, but items that have value in a secondary market. Like those radar components the FA A depends on.”

Carson was suddenly paying close attention. Stafford’s casual use of the word nondemil indicated he might know more about the DRMO business than he had let on. He put the remains of his own sandwich down and wiped his hands, trying not to look at Stafford. He had been wondering when this day would come ever since he had taken over the scam. He would have to very careful here.

“The auction process is pretty straightforward,” Carson said. “I don’t know how it could be rigged. I mean, it’s a regular call auction. The bids are called right there on the floor. If the auctioneer gave it to someone else, the rest of the bidders would protest.”

“DLA thinks this scam has been going on in the sealed bid system,” Stafford said, still looking at him.

“But who would gain from that?” Carson responded, shaking his head. ‘ “Maybe way back when, but the way it works now, if there is a sealed bid, the auctioneer starts with that bid amount. If he gets no takers from the floor, then by definition, that’s the winning bid.”

Stafford nodded patiently. “Way I understand it,” he said, ‘ ‘DLA thinks the scam comes after that. They think the so-called winning bid is altered, after the fact, by someone inside the process, so that the winning bidder doesn’t pay what he said he would. That way he gets a really good deal. Anyhow, that’s the theory. That’s what I’ve come down here for. I want to make a reality check. I want to do an audit on the paper trail of some high-value, nondemil stuff that’s been to auction. I want to know what was sold, to whom, and how much the winning bid was supposed to be, and then I want to see proof that that’s what the guy paid for it.”

Carson nodded slowly, keeping his expression neutral as he asked the all-important question. “Why the Atlanta DRMO, specifically?”

Stafford seemed to have an answer ready for that one.

“Because you’re one of the bigger ones, with a good-sized monetary volume. And you get a large spectrum of surplus stuff coming from the whole Southeast.” Then he smiled disarmingly. “And because I’ve never been to Atlanta.”

Carson managed a laugh at that. To a civil servant, the last reason rang true. He thought about it for a minute. DLA was getting close. There certainly was a scam running, but they were not quite correct about how it worked. But if this was all that Stafford pulled the string on, there were enough cutouts in place to keep Carson reasonably safe. On the auction scam, anyway. The cylinder was something else. Not to mention the little matter of Lam bry’s death.

“Not a problem,” Carson said. “Although it might be tough to get the proof on how much the winning bidders actually paid, because they don’t pay us. They do for the “flea-market stuff, but for the high-value items, they pay the local Defense Contracts Administrations Office.

You’ll have to talk to them and the people who actually bought the stuff.” He shook his head. “But given that outside loop, I’m still not sure how anyone could scam the system. Or why. What kicked this off?”

Stafford finished his coffee. “To tell the truth, I’m not sure what it was. They often don’t tell the field investigator, because they want us to look at a problem with a clear filter. If I knew what alerted DLA, I might restrict my investigation to just that and miss a bigger picture.

You know, go out and try to prove them right. This way, I take a fresh look at the process, and see if all the numbers jibe. If they do, I go home. If they don’t, we’ll either work it or call in the FBI.”

Carson nodded again. The FBI. The last thing he needed right now was that bunch of anals poking around the DRMO. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go see if that car’s ready. Then we’ll find you a hotel. You want to stay out here in the sticks or go downtown?”

At five-thirty that afternoon, Carson closed up his office. After they left the officers club, he’d taken Stafford back

- to the admin building, where the secretary had his temporary office ready. There’d been the usual hassle about the car, but eventually the motor pool turned loose a General Services Administration Crown Vie.

Stafford had elected to stay in downtown Atlanta at the Peach tree Center. Carson had his secretary dump binders of the relevant . rules and procedures for DRMO sales on Stafford’s desk, along with the auction reports for the past six months and a personnel roster. Stafford had left at three-thirty to check in at his hotel, and he said he’d be back at eight-thirty the next morning. An hour later, the rest of the staff had left for the day, Demil’s backload had been cleared, so there I was no evening shift. The Monster was quiet. Digesting, no doubt.

Carson lit up a cigarette and walked through the suite of offices and cubicles to make sure everyone was gone. He checked Stafford’s office, but there was nothing there , except the reports and binders. He turned off the overhead lights and walked back down the hall. There were two sets of windows in his office, one that looked out at the parking lot by the railroad siding, the other that looked into the flea-market warehouse. He opened the elderly Venetian blinds and peered into the semidarkness of the warehouse.

Wendell Carson had grown up poor in New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman with a drinking problem. His mother had been a waitress, and there had been three unhappy children stuffed into one room of a dingy, crowded . ‘ apartment in beautiful downtown Newark. From his early teenage years on, he had dreamed of escape, and he joined the Army in 1960, on the day after he graduated from high school. He went first into the infantry and then, after bribing the company clerk, engineered a lateral transfer into the Quartermasters Corps. He had been smart enough to advance to buck sergeant by 1966. Sensing that Army duty was about to turn serious, he elected to get out just before Vietnam blew up, but not before learning the ropes about petty larceny from some of the older NCOs. He’d used his veteran’s preference to get a civil service job at Fort Bel voir, near Washington, D. C., in the personal property shipping office. After mastering his own job, which took about two weeks, he had begun sniffing around the household goods warehouses, looking for what he knew had to be there—namely, a ring of thieves who pilfered the shipments bound for Army posts all over the world.

Carson was no street thug. He had neither the physique nor the stomach for the physical side of crime. He had always been a paper-pusher, and it was at Belvoir that he first established his strategy for life: Don’t steal anything yourself. The trick was to make the guys who did the actual stealing pay him for top cover, such as protection from the inspectors, adjustments to shipping invoices, prompt payment for the claims that inevitably came back from the military people at the new destination, judicious assignment of work crews to particular shipments, all in return for a piece of the action. It had never been big money, but . it had been steady.

Over the years, he had parlayed his sideline into increasingly larger-scale situations as he moved around from job to job within the organization that eventually became the Defense Logistics Agency, until finally he landed in the central office that administered the sale of surplus defense materials throughout the country. Surplus sales was the mother lode of opportunity for a paper-pusher with the inclination to jigger the system to his own benefit, and Carson had burrowed deep into the system. In 1983, the entire surplus sales auction system was decentralized, forcing him to evaluate which of the several DRMOs around the country might offer the best situation. He had come to Atlanta in 1983, then moved up to the head job eight years later. Tangent had contacted him in 1994, and he had been a reliable buyer. Carson now had almost thirty years in the civil service. He had been ‘Spending a lot of time lately figuring out how and when he was going to retire, and then the cylinder had fallen into his lap.

One million dollars. A life-changer.

He reset the blinds, locked his office door just to be sure, and then went over to his desk to sit down. He stretched his hands out and confirmed that they were still trembling. He thought about Lambry. Was he now a rriurderer? He kept coming back to it: Bud had attacked him, after all, not the other way around. So really, it had been self-defense. Yeah, self-defense necessitated by the fact that the both of you stole something: a million-dollar something. And then there was the dream.

He had begun having the dream Friday night. Something about being swept along in a river at night, together with many other people. Somehow he knew they were all dead. The river was black and cold, and he was having trouble staying afloat because he was carrying the cylinder. They moved downstream in total silence until the rolling thunder of an enormous waterfall became audible. The dream ended with him sailing over the edge, with all those dead faces staring at him as they plunged down into oblivion.

He opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, the same dream. Tonight he was going to take a damn pill.

He got up and walked over to the steel bookcase. He removed two fat binders from the top shelf. He reached through the space to grasp the cylinder with both hands. There was no red plastic tube now, just the heavy stainless steel cylinder, covered with decals and seals bearing dire warnings. He held it in his hands for a moment, caressing it. A million-dollar stainless-steel log. The metal was cold. He put it back.

He’d been in a state as to where to hide it after Bud had brought it to him. At first, he’d thought somewhere out in one of the warehouses, where he, as manager, had unrestricted access. But so did everyone who worked out there, and one of them might find it. He’d then thought about the demil facility, but other than the self-contained Monster, there were no hiding places in that building, no nooks, crannies, or hidey-holes. He’d been afraid to break his ironclad rule about never taking anything physically out of the DRMO complex. He looked up at the gleaming cylinder, noting its steely perfection while trying to put its deadly contents out of his mind. It was as safe here as anywhere in the facility, unless he received an indication that the Army had learned it was missing.

He pulled the binders together and returned to his desk chair. The building was silent except for the sounds of the big vent fans running out in the warehouse. He thought again about that girl in the airport, and the strange way she had looked at him. What had Stafford said?

Granite ville, that was it. He pulled a state map out of his desk and looked that name up in the grid index. B-9. North Georgia mountains.

That figured: The girl had that pinch faced, hillbilly look to her.

Everyone knew that a lot of those people up there were dumber than stumps, so why did Wendell Carson faint in the middle of Baggage Claim, out of a clear blue sky, not having had the flu, as he’d told Stafford?

He could not forget her eyes, locked onto his, or how he had been unable to tear his own eyes away.

He fingered the coordinates on the map, and found it. Graniteville. A tiny dot at the edge of the federal wilderness areas up along the northern border. It had to be one of those depressing little side-of-the-mountain towns, where the children occasionally came with six fingers per hand and not too many branches in their family tree. It wouldn’t be hard to find a girl like that in a small town, but was she even a threat? How could she be? He sat there for a moment, drawing the name Graniteville on his desk blotter and circling it idly with a ballpoint.

He put the map back in the drawer. No, he thought. Wendell Carson’s only problem is this policeman—investigator —whatever he was. Forget about the girl, he told himself. All you have to do is keep Stafford in the dark. Long enough to work out the delivery arrangements, and how you’ll get your money without getting bumped off in the process. Wendell Carson wasn’t a criminal, really, not in the case-hardened, street-tough sense of the word, but he knew that for a million in cash, his normally casual relationship with Tangent might change. And there was the obvious time bind: All of this had to happen before the Army found out the cylinder was gone, assuming they would. Tangent seemed to think they would, and Tangent was a Washington guy.

The scam had evolved to a specific system. He dealt with only one buyer, Tangent, who had a standing wish list consisting of general military material but who occasionally requested specific items. Carson maintained the wish list, instructing his “eyes” down in the warehouses, Bud Lambry, to be on the lookout for the required items, especially in the high-value area. When something on the wish list showed up, Lambry would notify Carson, who would call the client and confirm his interest.

Then Lambry would ensure that the items of interest were put in selected lots for auction. Carson, as manager of the DRMO, would ensure the items did not appear on the reutilization lists. Then Carson would rig the sealed-bid process so that his client “won” the auction, except that he would hold the winning bid until after the auction, reduce it, and then submit it to the contracts people. The client would pay the new “winning” bid. Carson’s fee was a small percentage of the value of the item, based on how much he had saved the client. From the kickback, Carson paid Lambry, in cash. :f-‘:

The key was to do it infrequently, never actually touch anything himself, and keep the money within reasonable bounds. Most of the fraud cases he read about arose because the perpetrators got too greedy. It had been a very nice, quiet, and unobtrusively profitable scam, one that he had planned to work until his retirement—about twenty thousand a year, in cash. He had it stashed in safe-deposit boxes in banks all around Atlanta. If Maude ever discovered it, he would say that he had been dabbling in the stock market and doing pretty well. Once a year, he would tell her that he had a government trip somewhere, to a conference, say, and then take a week’s leave and go to Vegas for some high living.

By limiting the scale and dealing only in cash and with only one buyer, he’d managed to keep the whole thing off the DLA auditors’ radar screens. He smiled as he thought about it. It was just about a perfect little scam.

Only very rarely had he taken operational military equipment from the demil list, because that had to be done practically on the conveyor belt in front of the Monster. From time to time, he had done this though, because he had been able to arrange for Bud Lambry to be the demil operator anytime there was a requirement for an evening shift in the demil facility. The beauty of that was that once something had been certified by the demil assembly crew as having been destroyed, it was virtually untraceable. The only vulnerability he had ever had was with Bud Lambry, ace spotter, and now that vulnerability was dissolving in the nontoxic hydrocarbon holding tank. Carson quickly banished that image.

Lambry’s supervisor had reported him absent this morning, which was not entirely unusual for a Monday. He would have to explain Lambry’s continued absence somehow. With Lambry gone, the problem now was to keep Inspector Stafford in the mushroom mode while Wendell Carson executed the cylinder deal. Either way, he thought, he needed to tell Tangent about Stafford. He pulled out his phone list and looked up the 800 number and dialed it. He got the machine and left the callback message.

He gave a time of one hour from now, which would allow him time to get home. Tangent wouldn’t be happy about the DCIS development, but Carson was pretty sure they could still pull it off. Stafford wasn’t here about the cylinder, and that’s all that counted right now.

THE PEACHTREE CENTER HOTEL AND CONVENTION CENTER, ATLANTA, 4:25 P.M. In his hotel room, Stafford put his clothes away, raided the minibar for a beer, and took a look out the window. The room cost more than his whole day’s per diem allowance, but at this moment, he didn’t give a damn. The skyline of Atlanta gleamed indifferently back at him. He was surprised at all the high-rise buildings. The place had grown a lot in the ten years since he’d last been here. Careful, he thought. You told Carson this was your first time in the city.

Dave Stafford was forty-three. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, he had lived on the outskirts of the city, near the sprawling Naval Operating Base, where his father worked as a security guard and his mother as a telephone operator. Growing up around the Navy and the base, he had gravitated naturally to the Navy upon graduation from high ) school, especially since there was no money for college. He left the Navy after one hitch and joined the Norfolk Police Department, advancing from rookie cop to the detective bureau in five short years. But the cop’s life wore him down, and he began thinking about college. Then one weekend, fae attended a government job fair and learned that the Naval Investigative Service was hiring. He took a job at the NIS, and transferred to the Defense Investigative Service, later the DCIS, in 1988. He’d met Alice that same year, and they had married after a four-month courtship.

Savvy, sexy, ambitious Alice. She had been almost his own age and had never married. She had money in the bank, a good government job as an office manager in the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was as determined as he was to get ahead. For the first two years, he couldn’t believe she was his wife. Now she wasn’t.

He sat down heavily in one of the overstaffed chairs, his right arm hanging straight down, pointing at the floor until he remembered to drape it on the armrest. He had regained almost all of the feeling in his hand and ringers, which the docs said was a good sign, but the big motor muscles were a long way from home. The orthopedist at Walter Reed had said that with proper rehab exercise he should get his arm back to about 50, 60 percent, but so far, it was at about 2 percent. Maybe the docs were just wrong, or maybe they wanted to let him down easy. Either way, the virtual paralysis of his right arm was just the topping on the cake of disasters he’d been through in the past two years.

You knew, he thought. You knew what happens to whistle-blowers. What always happens to whistle-blowers in Washington. You’re just a damn fool, that’s all, Mr. Straight Arrow—by the book, full speed ahead and damn the consequences—David Stafford, ace investigator. Yeah, right.

He’d spent about a year investigating a senior DCIS bureaucrat named Bernstein, who had been selling inside information to a major Defense contractor whom the DCIS had been investigating for contract fraud. When the DCIS upper management dragged its heels on prosecuting Bernstein, Stafford had talked to a reporter, after which life had become interesting. To his utter surprise, the eighteen months following his disclosures about Bernstein had been absolute hell, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the extent of his naivete. Instead of giving him a commendation for rooting out evil, a wounded bureaucracy had reacted angrily to the exposure of one of its more senior officials. As everyone told him in the corridor, “Sure, Bernstein needed exposing, but, man, did you have to do it quite so publicly?” And did he understand that he was going to pay for it professionally? In fact, his entire division in DCIS had suffered as senior management retaliated under the cover of budget cuts and interference in case assignments. Worse, an FBI agent implicated by Bernstein had been shit-canned, so now the Bureau was after his ass, too. He acquired a new first name when people began saying “Goddamn Stafford”—a lot.

His marital problems predated the Bernstein incident.

He and Alice had been living the comfortable, if somewhat frenetic, lifestyle typical of career Washington bureaucrats with joint incomes.

They had their individual schedules of commuting and working, and if one included their separate car pools, both of theih spent more close time with other people on a day-by-day basis than they did with each other.

Their respective jobs took them away on travel routinely, but with the conceit of husbandly trust, Stafford had assumed she wasn’t playing around just because he never did. But a year before the Bernstein flap erupted, he had begun to suspect that she might be having an affair.

With her boss, no less, an Air Force colonel with whom she often traveled on business. It wouldn’t have been that hard to find out, one way or another: He was an investigator, after all. Later, much later, he had realized that he must not really have wanted to know. When she finally announced that she had found someone else, he had been hurt but not totally surprised.

The arm came last, like some sick cosmic joke. His career was on the skids, Alice had kicked him out, and one night, as he waited for change at a gas station, a couple of kids tried a holdup and then panicked.

They pulled out automatics and started blasting everything in sight. The attendant had been killed and Stafford had been shot in the arm.

He sighed and looked at his watch. Now that he was finished feeling sorry for himself, maybe he should get back to business. DCIS procedures required that he check in with Ray Sparks, the DCIS supervisor for the southeastern region, upon arrival. Well, arrival had been this morning.

He went over to the desk phone and disconnected the line. He set up the portable PC on the desk, then hooked the phone line into the PC’s X jack. He worked on the beer while the PC booted up. Using the encrypted telephony program, he placed a call to the Atlanta DCIS office out in Smyrna, a suburb north of Atlanta. He appreciated modern technology, but it still felt weird to be talking to I a computer. The office manager got Sparks on the line.

“Ray, this is Dave Stafford. Go secure. I’m encrypted on my portable.”

There was a noise over the line. “I’m secure, Dave. Welcome to Atlanta.

I think.”

. “Yeah, I suppose I’m persona not so freaking grata just now, huh?”

“Yeah, something like that. We were told you were coming. How’s the broken wing?”

“Still broken.” He and Ray Sparks had been partners 1 on a case some years ago and had become pretty good friends. Sparks was also probably the only regional supervisor who would accept him at the moment. There was a moment of silence on the line.

” So what do you plan to do down here?” Sparks asked. {- “Not your normal ‘throw in a grenade and see what evidence comes back at you’ routine, I hope?”

“Nope. I’ve decided to leave the eternal search for truth and justice to Batman and Robin. Right now I plan to just roll with the punches, keep my head down, try to get my arm back, do this job, whatever it is, and try not to cause you or anyone else any problems. After these past eighteen months, I’m a born-again believer.” I .-7. “Bernstein had it coming,” Sparks said. “He was an I officious prick, as everyone in the whole DOS would be happy to admit. From the safety of the sidelines, of course.”

“Well I know, compadre. Those sidelines got pretty far away there for a while. My first name has been changed to Goddamn, especially after that FBI guy got reprimanded. But, yes, I promised the colonel no grenades.”

“That’s the smart way, Dave. The colonel knows how to work the web.

He’ll get you rehabilitated if anyone can.”

“Isn’t it fascinating that I need rehabilitation after exposing corruption?”

“It’s your career that needs rehabilitation, Dave. You embarrassed DCIS.”

“I would have thought it was Bernstein’s corrupt behavior that embarrassed DCIS, but never mind. I know what you’re saying.”

There was a fractional pause. “Well, good, Dave,” Sparks said. “That’s great. Barb said to invite you out, once you’re settled in. Maybe we’ll burn some beef.”

Stafford could hear the effort in Sparks’s voice, and wondered if that mythical barbecue would ever really happen. They both knew damned well that a DCIS supervisor socialized with a DCIS pariah at his professional peril. But it was nice of him to make the offer.

“I appreciate that, Ray, as well as the friendly reception. But look, you feel you have to shut the door on me to keep your own ass warm and dry, you just do it, okay? I’m told that I smell a lot like ozone these days. I don’t want to take anyone down with me.”

“Screw that noise,” Sparks protested. “Besides, we’re too far from Washington for anyone to care. So what’s with this DRMO thing?”

Stafford gave him a summary of the case file. Another investigator had been working the DRMO auction fraud case for two years, but it had deteriorated into one of those seemingly hopeless muddles. It had begun when a Lebanese arms broker in New York had been caught exporting some surplused Air Force missile-guidance radars. The components had been purchased at auction from a New Jersey DRMO. The Defense Logistics Agency headquarters had called in the DCIS, who promptly asked for the audit records on that particular DRMO. It turned out that serious audits were conducted only every five years, and, naturally, it had been four years since the last one. So of course the DCIS effort was stopped while DLA conducted an audit..

The DCIS investigation had revealed what looked like a perfectly legitimate auction, but there were aspects that smelled wrong. The first was, in fact, clearly wrong: Those components should all have gone through the derail process. The consigning agency had marked them improperly, or the receiving DRMO had screwed up, or someone deliberately knew what he was after and had removed the derail paperwork.

The second was what the indomitable Colonel Parsons called “a pattern problem.” Parsons maintained that fraud perpetrated by smart bad guys inside the system often manifested itself in patterns as opposed to single, discernible incidents. The supposedly obsolete missile components had been shipped to the DRMO in five different shipment lots, but they had been auctioned off as a single block of components, almost as if someone had arranged that whoever won the bid on that block got all the guidance assemblies. That was where the trail had ended. There was no evidence tying any identifiable persons definitively to the New Jersey DRMO’s auction process. The guy who had caught the New Jersey case reported back to his boss that he’d come up empty. Colonel Parsons had been less than sympathetic, and he had told the guy that if he couldn’t break the specific case, then he should examine the whole system for that specific pattern.

After three months of ploughing through mind-numbing DLA back records of DRMO auctions and audits, they had uncovered another sale manifesting the same pattern as the one in New Jersey, which is when they’d realized that the auction had been a sealed-bid auction, controlled from Washington—within the DLA headquarters. Checking back on the New Jersey case, they’d found it was a sealed bid auction as well. They’d been looking at the wrong target: Whatever was being scammed was being orchestrated in Washington by someone involved in the sealed-bid process. Another three months of going back into prior years had turned up intermittent evidence of the same pattern, going back several years, but in each case, it was impossible to determine precisely how the thing was being done in Washington.

Stafford pointed out to Sparks that the investigation had stalled right about the time the Bernstein corruption flap reached a crescendo, which was why Colonel Parsons, realizing that Stafford was probably not going to survive the political heat, had seized on the DRMO problem as a pretext for getting him out of town. So here he was.

He gave Sparks a debrief of the day’s events, including Carson’s fainting spell at the airport. Sparks was silent for a moment. “That’s medium weird,” he said finally. “Do you suppose Carson and that woman are involved with each other? And maybe the girl resents it or something? Some deal like that?”

“Don’t know. Probably can’t know, at this stage. Carson claims he didn’t even remember seeing them. Said he was feeling woozy, just getting over the flu. Like I said, I don’t know. The girl’s suitcase had a sticker that said graniteville on it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even know where to start to find them, assuming I ever had to. I did give the woman my card.”

“Which she’ll probably shit-can. You say Graniteville? I think that’s a small burg up in the mountains of north Georgia. Black hats, long beards, moonshine country. Not friendly to federal anything. Although now it’s all marijuana: There’s no money in ‘shine anymore. And you say they were talking?”

“Not exactly. More like looking at each other. Carson and the girl, not the woman. The girl was looking at Carson like she’d seen a snake, and then he fell down.”

“Is there any reason for Carson to suspect you’re after him?”

“Don’t think so. I inherited this case very much on the fly.”

“Maybe just plain old nerves: A senior DCIS guy coming in unannounced would make anybody nervous. What’d you tell him about us local hicks?”

“He did ask, now that you mention it. Gave him some BS about this being a headquarters pattern-of-fraud probe. Told him I didn’t want to stir up the locals. That kind of stuff. He seemed to buy it.”

“Okay. If he pulls the string, we’ll be appropriately ignorant. Our normal posture anyway.”

Stafford laughed. “Okay, Ray, I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll try not to rock any boats.” “That’s the ticket,” Sparks said. “Call us if you need anything.”

They both hung up, and Stafford unhooked the computer and restored the hotel’s phone line. He picked up his beer and went back to the window.

What he wanted right now was to go down to one of the fancy bars he had seen in the lobby and get reacquainted with Mr. Tanqueray’s oblivion potiog, but he’d done enough of that after Alice bailed out and the reality of his disability penetrated. Colonel Parsons, a whipcord, buzz-cut retired Army officer ten years his senior, had cured of him of incipient alcoholism as only he could. He’d invited Stafford to join him for lunch one badly hungover day at the colonel’s downtown athletic club. The dining room had turned out to be a boxing ring, where the colonel proceeded to beat the hangover out of him with sixteen-ounce gloves. The colonel had kept it fair by tying his own right hand behind his back. He still had beaten the shit out of Stafford. Parsons then informed him he could start drinking again just as soon as he could defend himself at the skill level of a Girl Scout. From his supine vantage point on the canvas floor, Stafford had decided that, arm or no arm, agreeing .with the six or so colonels swimming in his bloody vision was probably the best course of action. Since then, he had become a workout convert, having discovered that intense physical exercise was an excellent stress-eater, not to mention his only chance to regain a normal set of wings.

He finished his beer and pitched the can left-handed at the trash can.

And missed, as usual. For $169 a night, he thought, they ought to have bigger trash cans.

TUESDAY, ANNISTON ARMY WEAPONS DEPOT, ANNISTON, ALABAMA, 11:45 A.M. SP4c Latonya Mayfield pushed the calculator to one side of her cluttered desk and rubbed her eyes It was almost lunchtime, and she had been running these numbers for the entire morning. The dreaded destruction inventory match audit. It had to be done on every shipment that went out to the Army’s large-scale destruction facility at Tooele, Utah. It was dreaded because it was a three-way line-byline audit: The entire shipping manifest was compared with the receiving manifest report from Tooele, and then those numbers were compared with the inventory of the surplu sed storage containers.

My own damn fault I got tagged with this, she thought wearily. I just had to bring up the fact that the platoon’s Human Relations Council hadn’t met in over two months. The sergeant reacted with a bland smile, and then this lovely little assignment, a task normally done by a Spec3.

Not that she could make a legitimate gripe: She was, after all, a chemical warfare weapons accountability specialist, wasn’t she?

After three and a half hours, all those rows and columns produced by the high-speed line printer were beginning to run together, and if she didn’t have a number mismatch, she would have filed the whole thing with a “no discrepancies” report. She’d never heard of there ever being a discrepancy in the two years she’d been assigned to the control office.

Movement control and security procedures for chemical weapons materials were just about as tight as they were for nuclear weapons materials.

She rubbed her eyes again, and thought about coffee, and then thought about lunch. The other clerks in the office were already shuffling around as they prepared to break for the chow hall, but she knew there was no way she’d be able to stay awake doing this shit after lunch. And, Houston, baby, we do appear to have us a problem here. She pulled the printouts back to the center of her desk, shuffling back through them to find page one of fifty seven. The mismatch was one number. Just a single error, and she couldn’t find it. The grand totals did not add up, but each of the three various reports did add up.

Something had not been shipped, or had been shipped and not received, or there was one more storage container—lovingly called “coffins” in the CW business—than there were chemical cylinders involved. The thought crossed her mind that the last possibility had better be the answer, or the mother of all flaps was going to erupt right here in Toxic Town.

Hell with it, she decided. I’m going to lunch, and then I’m going to look for the discrepancy one more time, and then I’m going to do what I should have done an hour ago—take it to the staff sergeant. So there.

TUESDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 9:20 A.M. On Tuesday morning, Carson checked in with Stafford to make sure he had everything he needed. Stafford was sitting at the desk, surrounded by open binders, and making notes on a legal pad.

“Coffee mess is two doors down the hall,” he said. “Feel free to help yourself.”

“Thanks. I did,” Stafford replied. “You feeling better today? No more fainting spells?”

“Much. Still don’t know what the hell that was yesterday.”

Stafford nodded, gave him a thin smile, and went back to his paperwork.

But then, as Carson was turning away, Stafford asked another question.

“Do you have any significant personnel problems here?

Anybody who’s a known trouble maker? Anyone who quit on you with no notice recently?”

Carson stopped in the doorway. First the questions about that weird girl. Now what was this! Lambry, maybe? “Not really,” he said, thinking fast. “There are personnel problems from time to time, of course. But they’re mostly my Monday-morning alcoholics, or people fooling around with time sheets or sick leave, or workmen’s comp stuff. But do I have any real bad actors? I’d have to say no.. Why?”

Stafford shrugged. “Standard procedure when we’re chasing possible fraud. Sudden departures sometimes indicate a bad guy who got antsy. Or if there’ve been calls made to the DOD fraud hot line—malcontents sometimes do that just to cause trouble. We check that out as a matter of routine. Oh, I have the personnel roster. Can I have access to your actual personnel files, please?”

“Sure. See Mrs. Johnson in Human Resources. I’ll tell her to get you anything you need. Anything else?”

“Nope. That ought to do it.” Stafford smiled again. “For now.”

For now, Carson thought as he went back to his office. He wondered if Stafford had learned of Lambry’s disappearance. He’d put the word out Monday that Lambry had quit Friday night after getting mad about something. He’d planned to construct the covering paperwork this week, but after Stafford’s question, he’d have to get something down in writing, and quickly. But then he stopped: Based on what he’d just said, Stafford would probably want to follow that up. Oh, shit, maybe he’d even go out to Lambry’s house, snoop around. Who knew what that idiot might have left in his house? He hurried to his office, placed a quick phone call to personnel, and asked for some termination forms. Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Johnson, a large black lady, brought the forms and last week’s time sheets into Carson’s office.

“You get Mr. Stafford what he needed?” he asked without preamble. He did not like Mrs. Johnson, and she did not like him.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “Who is that man, anyway? Nobody can figure him out.”

“He’s an auditor from DLA,” Carson said. “It’s nothing special to do with us. DLA’s looking for a pattern on some old fraud cases, apparently. Which files did he want, exactly?”

“He wanted all the personnel files. Well, not actually— he wanted access to all the files. Including yours, by the way.”

Carson kept his expression neutral “That’s fine. There’s nothing here that DLA doesn’t already have on file in Washington. Give him whatever he needs. And bring me Mr. Lambry’s file. He apparently was serious about quitting, so we need to start the termination paperwork on him.”

He looked back down at his own paperwork as she started to leave. Then she stopped in the doorway. “Oh,” she said. “He wanted a map of Georgia.

Ella Mae had one in her car.”

Carson looked up again, perplexed. “He say what for?”

“Nope. That man don’t exactly talk it up, you know what I’m sayin’?” .

“Okay. Close that door on your way out, please.”

After she left, Carson swiveled around in his chair. He thought about the Georgia map in his own desk. She hadn’t said city map. She’d said state map. Hadn’t she? He picked up the phone and called her back.

“Did Mr. Stafford want an Atlanta map or a state map?” he asked.

“State of Georgia. Said he had an Atlanta map. I believe the motor pool provides a city map in all their cars.,” Mrs. Johnson sounded a little hurry.

He hung up without replying. So it was a state map. Now why in the hell would Stafford want a state map?

And what was that bit about the fraud hot line? The more he thought about it, the more uncertain he was about what Stafford was doing here.

The buyer hadn’t been thrilled, either. Tangent had called him from home, using the usual code, but Maude had been across the street visiting a sick neighbor, so Carson didn’t have to go find a pay phone.

He’d told Tangent why Stafford was there, and expressed the opinion that he wouldn’t be there very long. Tangent had requested Stafford’s full name, civil service grade, and home organization.

“Why?” Carson had asked after giving Tangent the information.

“We’ll check him out. See if he’s telling the truth about why he’s there.”

“You can do that?”

“In our business, Carson, we always do that. Lots of people say they’re one thing, turn out to be quite another. It doesn’t take long, which is good, because we don’t have all that much time.”

Carson was alarmed by that last. “Has something happened? Is the Army—”

“No, nothing yet,” Tangent . “But we have to operate on the assumption that they’ll discover it’s missing. If they don’t, great. If they do, a sale might become very tough to pull off. You do understand that, right?” Carson had said that he did, and Tangent said he’d call in the next day or so with a reading on Stafford.

Now Carson thought about his million-dollar prize. This damned Stafford was definitely not a complication he needed right now, especially if he pulled the string on Bud Lambry’s sudden disappearance. Carson knew he should be doing something about that, but he wasn’t at all sure what to do.

Stafford closed the oversized three-ring binder and plopped it back onto the desk. He’d been skimming through the DRMO reference binders for the past hour and a half, doo VJ dling on the blotter pad as he thought about the case. Most of the people who had been caught fiddling the surplus material system had been tripped up by their own runaway greed: GS-us and GS-12s who suddenly sported Cadillacs or second homes on a mid-five-figure salary. Coworkers would always notice, always.

Eventually, someone would call into the Defense Department fraud hot line. The usual pattern was a small scam that got bigger and bigger, until the scammer attracted attention by overreaching..

But headquarters knew that there had to be guys out there who were smart bad guys. Tap the honey pot, but do it infrequently, with lots of cutouts between you and the actual stuff, and make your money after the fact through kickbacks from the people who were getting an unfair bidding advantage, not from stealing or selling stuff directly.

He’d been telling the truth when he told Carson that he’d picked the Atlanta DRMO partly because of its size. But now that he was here, he wasn’t sure about what to do next. Carson was a potentially interesting guy, but that alone didn’t make him a suspect. He shuffled through the personnel folders to find Carson’s file. He went immediately to the DD-398 form, the security personal-history questionnaire, and read it.

If there was an auction scam in place here, Carson would just about have to know about it. If Carson was running something, Stafford’s request for access to the personnel files and that throw-away mention of the DOD fraud hot line should have seemed like opening shots. He thought he’d seen the man’s face tighten up when he’d asked those questions, although it was hard to tell. Carson had perfected one of those civil-servant masks of workday insouciance, an expression of blandness of which dirt would be proud.

He decided to get some early lunch, then spend the rest of the day walking around by himself through the DRMO industrial areas to see what he could learn by getting people to talk to him. Maybe stir up the employees a little bit, see if there were some grudges out there. It wouldn’t be long before that action got back to Carson, and maybe that would shake something loose. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

He started his walking tour an hour and a half later, beginning in the outside lay-down area. Talking to the employees wasn’t as easy as he had thought it would be, since most of them were driving forklifts in and around the warehouse complex. He did notice that no one seemed interested in challenging him when he went into areas clearly marked with restricted access signs. He finally came upon the employee lunch room in warehouse two and went in for a cup of coffee, but his efforts at conversation with the half a dozen or so people in there were politely rebuffed. He left after a half hour of getting nowhere, then remembered his cover story: He was a DLA auditor. Auditors brought only trouble, so of course the employees weren’t going to invite him to their coffee breaks. They might even be afraid of him.

He wandered through some more of the warehouses, which by this time had all begun to look alike. He ended up in the warehouse immediately adjacent to the demil machine. The Monster apparently was not running.

The feed-assembly area contained both the feed and back loop of the demil machine’s conveyor system, which snaked around this warehouse’s floor, surrounded by a pair of waist-level safety railings that paralleled the course of the belt. The belt-loading area was in the back of the warehouse, where three heavy steel doors admitted forklifts from other warehouses. The belt, carrying the material to be destroyed, exited this warehouse through the connecting wall, entering the demil building through a screen-shielded aperture that was draped with stiff strips of rubber in front of two steel flap doors. There was a normal walk through door with a small window in it just to the right of the interbuilding aperture.

A crew of foifr men was loading the conveyor belt with material as it was brought in by roaring, smoky forklifts. Three of them were black; the fourth, a stupid-looking man of indeterminate age, was white. They would pile the components into plastic cartons on the belt, and then one of them would advance the belt a few feet to make room for the next pile. Stafford walked to the back of the room and watched for a few minutes. The crew ignored him except for the white man. Finally the last forklift backed out and the warehouse was silent. The three black men walked toward the back, where there was a small coffeepot on a table.

The white man ambled over to Stafford.

“Yew the auder fella?”

Auder? “Auditor,” Stafford replied.

“S’what I jist said. You him?” The man was eyeing Stafford with visible suspicion.

“Yup. But I won’t bite.”

His attempt at humor was apparently lost, as the man appeared to consider his chances of being bitten. Finally he nodded as if he’d come to a momentous decision. “Heard about you. Folks here get stirred up, auder’s come aroun’. What you want here?” ;, Stafford thought about that question, and how to play it. He could turn on his cop face and bust this guy’s balls a little, or he could play it down. The guy was obviously some kind of serious hick. “Routine checks,” he said. “We go around to the DRMOs to make sure everything’s being done by the book and nobody’s stealing anything. That kind of stuff.” He must be about six feet tall, Stafford thought, but skinny as a rail. It was wonderful what a childhood diet of Twinkies and soda pop could do.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The tall man peered down his long, bony nose and thought about that for a moment. “Corey,” he replied finally. ‘ ‘Corey Dillard. What’s yours?”

“I’m David Stafford. How long have you worked here, Mr. Dillard?”

“Fifteen years and some.”

“And what do you do here?”

Dillard appeared to be puzzled by the question, as if no one had ever asked him that before. He bent down a little; to talk directly into Stafford’s face exuding an aroma of tobacco and decaying teeth. Stafford blinked, forcing himself not to step back.

“Ah do what Boss Hisley tells me to,” Dillard answered. “Mostly, Ah feed the Monstuh. Load up’n this here belt, then we feed that thing. Looka heunh, you ain’t a cop? I seen auders, and you don’t look like no auder.

Boss Hisley, he’s sayin’ you’s a govmint cop.”

Stafford grinned at him. “Boss Hisley worried about cops, is he? Should I go talk to him, you think?”

Dillard straightened up, a look of alarm flashing across his face. “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about Boss Hisley.”

“Okay. I won’t tell him that you did. So what do you want to talk about?”

Dillard looked over his shoulder at the three men standing by the table in the corner of the building. They were well out of earshot, but they were definitely watching him.

“Looka heunh,” he said, bending forward again, “if’n somebody had something’ to tell you, he gonna git hisself in trouble, he tellin’ it?”

Well, well, well, Stafford thought. “I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Dillard,” he replied wanting to see where this was going.

“I seen it on the TV. Man had something’ to say, them cops done give him ‘munity.”

Better and better, Stafford thought. “Absolutely, Mr. Dillard. Although I’m not a cop, you understand. But I do know that cops offer immunity all the time. For the right kind of information. Long as it’s done right.” “Done right? How’s that?” Dillard asked, his eyes narrowing. He had put his hands in the pockets of his overalls. He was standing in front of Stafford, looking like a nervous stork.

“Two things. First, the man wanting immunity has to tell what he knows before the cops find it out for themselves.

Dillard blinked, then nodded his understanding.

“The second is that if more than one man knows something, the first man to do the telling gets the immunity.

Everybody else takes their chances. Like that.”

Dillard absorbed that and nodded again, and once more he looked over his shoulder before replying. The largest of the men at the coffee table was staring openly at them. That would be Boss Hisley, Stafford thought.

“How long you gonna be heunh?” Dillard asked.

“Don’t know, Mr. Dillard. A little while, probably. Like I said, though, I’m an auditor, not a cop. Is there something you want to talk about?”

Dillard started to say something, but then he shook his head after glancing back over at the big black man. “Reckon not,” he replied.

“Later, mebbe.” With that he started to shuffle back over toward the conveyor belt just as another forklift came bursting through the double doors at the back of the warehouse. Dillard stopped, and, turning his head, said something that Stafford couldn’t hear over the forklift’s engine noise.

“What?” Stafford called, cupping his left ear.

“Lambry,” Dillard shouted, keeping his back to the others. “Y’all need to find Bud Lambry.”

Stafford watched as the loading team went back to work, then he tried the walk-through door connecting the feed-assembly room to the demil building. It was locked, so he went outside. So much for his cover story about being an auditor, he thought. The collective blue-collar antenna had sensed already that something was up and there was a Washington cop of some kind here. Still, now he had something to do: Find some guy named Bud Lambry.

He went into the demil building after finding that door unlocked. There was nobody in the control booth when he entered the demil chamber. The empty conveyor belt led straight to the now-silent shredding bank. There were steel screens up on either side of the injection point, as well as plastic spray shields. With all the piping and other ancillary machinery coiled on either side of the shredding bank, the huge machine looked like a crouching steel dinosaur. The vertical band-saw blades glinted dangerously in the fluorescent light. He jumped when the conveyor belt started arid then stopped, but then he realized the men next door had advanced it to fit the next load.

So maybe there’s something going on here after all, he mused as he stood looking at the Monster. The working stiffs knew he wasn’t a DLA auditor.

The one man who had been williag to get anywhere near him, Dillard, had started talking about immunity. Saw that ‘munity stuff on the TV. I love it. But immunity for what? He couldn’t imagine that rocket scientist being capable of knowing anything really significant. So what was the next step? Ask Carson about this Bud Lambry? Or maybe get back to Dillard, in the cop mode this time, and ask Dillard about Carson? Maybe that’s why everybody here seemed to have a hate-on for the manager.

Maybe they knew he was running a scam of some kind. And—what? Not sharing? Probably.

He decided he would casually drop Lambry’s name the next time he talked to Carson. Say somebody he’d met out in the industrial area had mentioned the man’s name. See if Carson had any particular reaction.

Then he would put a call into the local DCIS office and ask them to run a NCIC check on Lambry. Careful, he reminded himself as he walked across the tarmac to see some more warehouses. You’re not supposed to go stirring things up. Heaven forbid you go do your job and uncover some actual crime here. He rubbed his aching right bicep as he walked back.

TUESDAY, ANNiston ARMY WEAPONS DEPOT, ANNISTON, ALABAMA, 3:45 P.M. Sergeant Mccallister was not pleased. “Forty-five minutes before we secure the area for the day, and you’re bringing me this shit? I do not need this, Mayfield. I do not need this.”

Latonya Mayfield stared down at the pile of reports she bad put on the sergeant’s desk, but she said nothing. The sergeant was not one of her favorite people on this planet, and he was also not one of the world’s great listeners.

“Well?” he said. “Are you completely sure of these numbers? You’ve run ‘em more than once? You’ve checked them?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she said patiently. “Even had Spec Three Luper run them.” Luper was the clerk who was supposed to do this audit. “There’s a discrepancy.”

Mccallister stared down at the report as his face got red. “Where’s a discrepancy, for Chrissakes? This is the destruction inventory match audit, goddamn it. There can not be a discrepancy in the destruction inventory match audit. You know that I know that. The whole fucking Army knows that. This thing has to match up. If there’s a discrepancy, it has to be in your paperwork, not in this report.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she said in a “if you say so” tone of voice.

“Damn right, yes, Sergeant,” he said. “All right Tell Henderson I want to see him. Don’t tell him why.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Mayfield replied, and went out to find Spec-5 Henderson. It took her a few minutes because Henderson, getting a little jump on four-thirty secure, had been in the men’s locker room changing into civvies.

“It’s sixteen-ten, Mayfield. What is this shit, anyway?” “Man said for me to tell you to go see him,” she said. “Said he’d tell you when you got there.”

“Aw, man! Shit!” He looked at his watch. “All right I gotta get back in the bag first.” He went back into the locker room.

Mayfield went back to her cubicle, wondering what to do next. Henderson was a weapons safety specialist, not a clerk. He would be seriously pissed when he found out that he had to do the destruction inventory match audit. She had to decide in the next five minutes whether to hit the road, Jack, or stay to help him. She thought about it. Henderson was an okay guy for a white man, but he’d hate her forever if he thought he was having to pick up after her. On the other hand, she had discovered the discrepancy; for a clean audit, he would have to do it by himself to catch her mistake.

Fifteen minutes later, Henderson solved it for her. He came by her desk with the report in his hands and gave her a black look. “Thanks a fucking heap, Mayfield.”

“I’ll stay and help you with it, you want,” she offered.

He shook’his head. “Man said I had to do it by myself. Said you’d fucked it up. Shit, I’ve never done a goddamn audit. This’ll take fucking hours.”

“I didn’t mess it up,” she said. “I found a discrepancy. That’s why he’s pissed. I’D show you how it’s done. Maybe you can find it.”

“You serious? There really is a discrepancy?”

“I think there is. Spec Three Luper says there is, but he couldn’t find it, either.”

Henderson’s anger evaporated. He looked back across the room, but Mccallister’s door was closed

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t let old Shit for Brains see us.”

TUESDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 5:30 P.M. Carson sat as his desk and considered the word that had reached him thirty minutes earlier.

That the Washington guy had been seen talking to people out in the warehouse.’ That the DRMO’s pet rock, Corey Dillard, had said something to Stafford about Bud Lambry. What, or in what context, had not been overheard. Or the blue-collar guys weren’t willing to say.

Great, he thought. Just fucking great. Dillard had been Bud Lambry’s helper from time to time, but Bud had assured Carson that Dillard knew nothing about the scam. But what might genius Lambry have told genius Dillard about the magical cylinder and all the money that might be coming Bud’s way? He got up and looked out into the flea-market warehouse. The auction had been today, and the bidders had been carting out the spoils to the loading dock all day.

He turned away from the window and walked slowly around his office, feeling uneasy as he relived what had happened to Lambry. He repeated to himself his new mantra: It was an accident. Wendell Carson is not a murderer. But there was no getting around the enormity of what he had gotten himself into: stealing the cylinder in the first place, and now the death of Bud Lambry. He went over to the bookcase and put his hands between the binders. He felt with his fingers the smooth steel, cold and deadly to the touch.

Before Stafford had begun nosing around, it would have been sufficient for him simply to announce that Lambry had quit and disappeared. Now he might have to think of something more elaborate. And then a scary thought occurred to him: If Stafford really started looking into Lam bry’s disappearance, what loose ends had Lambry left?

TUESDAY, ANNISTON ARMY WEAPONS DEPOT, ANNISTON, ALABAMA, 9:15 P.M. Spec-5 Henderson threw his pencil across the darkened office. Mayfield, sitting in a chair at another desk, watched him with a small smile of satisfaction on her face. She had gone into the women’s locker room at 4:30, until one of the other girls told her that Mccallister had left for the day. Then she’d rejoined Henderson and helped him crunch the numbers. He’d gotten the hang of it during the first hour and then run the report audit himself.

“I give up,” he said. “I get the same thing you did. One number off. One fucking number.” She nodded. “Now what?” she asked.

“We tell Mccallister, that’s what. He’s the sergeant”

“He gonna go hermantile.”

He looked over at her. “Lenime get this straight: This discrepancy means one of three things, right? More shit went out of here than got there, or more shit got there than went out of here, or something’s missing, right?”

“That’s it.”

He shuffled back through the fifty-seven page destruction report and frowned.

She really wanted to go home, although this might get interesting very soon. “What?” she asked.

“I’m looking to see what was shipped.”

“Buncha alfa-bravo-charlie gobbledygook,” she said.

Henderson didn’t say anything while he studied the report. He’d been focusing on numbers. Now he was looking at the alpha-numeric ammunition designator codes down the left side of the printouts. He rubbed his eyes. Then he stopped.

“Whoa,” he said softly.

“What?”

“At first I couldn’t recognize this designator code. But now I remember what this shipment was. This is fucking Wet Eye.”

“Wet Eye. Now that sounds like some lovely shit.”

He looked back over at her, and something in his eyes made her straighten up.

“We need to call Mccallister,” he said, “Like right fucking now.” ‘

After a half hour of trying unsuccessfully to find Sergeant Mccallister, and then Lieutenant Biers, Mccallister’s boss, Henderson had taken it upon himself to call the depot’s command duty officer. He explained that he had a problem and couldn’t find either the sergeant or the platoon’s lieutenant, then asked if the CDO could come over to the control office.

The CDO, a first lieutenant who was an instructor at the Chemical Warfare School, wanted to know why Spec-5 Henderson wouldn’t come over to the duty office. Lieutenants did not go to see E-5s.

“Sir, it’s complicated. And it may turn into a really, really big deal.

That’s all I can say over an unsecure phone, sir.”

“We need MPs here, Henderson? This isn’t some sexual harassment shit, is it?”

‘ ‘No, sir. Nothing like that. You just need to come over here. Please?”

Although he was just a first lieutenant, the CDO had been in the Army long enough to recognize what that “please” meant: An enlisted man thought he was looking at some serious trouble and now wanted an officer folded into it before whatever it was got worse.

“Okay, I’m on my way, Henderson. Tell me again where that office is.”

Ten minutes later, a green Ford sedan pulled up in front of the control office. Specialist Mayfield escorted the CDO in. She was pleased to see that he was black and, a Chemical Corps officer. Once they were hi the office, Henderson explained what he’d been doing, with Mayfield’s assistance. At first the CDO did not understand what the problem was.

Henderson laid out the bottom line for him.

“A cylinder of Wet Eye may be unaccounted for.” , The CDO stared at him.

“No shit? You sure of this, you two?”

Henderson shook his head. “The destruction inventory audit doesn’t add up,” he said. “Mayfield here worked it all day, then another guy did it, and then Mayfield here told the sergeant, who had me do it again. We’ve been here since sixteen-thirty. It still doesn’t add up.” He paused. “It could be a fuckup at the other end, at Tooele,” he said hopefully.

“Let’s hope and pray it is. When was the shipment?”

“It left here by train not quite a month ago,” Mayfield said. “This report came in last Thursday.”

The lieutenant stared down at the report for a long moment. “Okay,” he said. “You two come with me. I’m going to call the CO.” “How about our chain of command?” Henderson asked. “Sergeant Mccallister is gonna kick our asses, we jump the. chain and go right to the CO.”

“You didn’t jump it. I did. And I’m the command duty officer. This looks like a possible shit storm to me, so I’m calling the CO. He’s always telling us, when in doubt, call, him. So I’m gonna call his ass, if it’s all the same to you, Specialist.”

TUESDAY, SOUTHEAST ATLANTA, 11:45 P.M. Carson eased his government pickup truck down the street on which Bud Lambry lived. Used to live, he reminded himself. The dilapidated neighborhood was an enclave of old houses cornered by the airport rail lines on one side, a phalanx of trucking terminals on another, and Interstate 285. At this hour, the street was dark and empty.

Lambry’s house lay at the dead end of the last street, nestled under a fifty-foot-high embankment carrying the rail line. It wasn’t much more than a one-story shack, with sagging front and back porches, a few dying trees on either side, a rusty propane tank, and a dirt front yard containing three junked cars. There were some small outbuildings in various states of collapse out back at the base of the railroad embankment. The house across the street appeared to be abandoned; the house next door looked possibly occupied, but darkened for the night.

There was a mound of trash at the dead end of the badly potholed street, and one rusting car nosed into the embankment like some burrowing animal.

Carson rolled to a quiet stop in front of Lambry’s house and switched off the engine. He took a final drag on his cigarette and then mashed it out. It had taken him a few hours and a visit to the officers club’s bar to muster up the courage to come out here, and another hour to find the house. But if Stafford was going to start poking around into Bud Lambry’s sudden disappearance, then Wendell Carson” had better take a look inside Lambry’s house to see if he had stashed any sort of incriminating evidence. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do here. Given “

Lambry’s Alabama hillbilly antecedents, he could just imagine what it was like in there.

After waiting fifteen minutes to see if anything was stirring, he stepped out of the truck. He paused again to make sure there were no dogs. A quick scan of the street revealed nothing moving but a single gray cat skulking through the cone of light produced by the one remaining streetlight, which was about a hundred feet away. He walked as casually as he could to the side of the house, trying not to act like some kind of burglar.

A lot of things had changed since Friday night. He had the advantage of knowing that the owner would be out forever, so there should be no surprises here, unless Lam bry had a wife or someone else in the house.

That thought stopped him as he approached the trash-littered back porch.

No, no wife. Lambry had no dependents listed in his personnel file. But then again, Lambry, ever the secretive hillbilly, might not have bothered to tell anyone.

He took a deep breath and stepped up onto the back porch. The porch boards felt soft and spongy. He tried the back door, which was not locked. It appeared to be warped. He let himself into a kitchen area, where his nose told him instantly that this place was going to be every bit as bad as he’d expected. All the windows appeared to be closed, and the air was warm and fetid. He stood there for a moment in the dark kitchen, almost afraid to go farther into the house. It didn’t feel like there was anyone in the house, but he would have to make sure. He realized he hadn’t even brought a flashlight; some burglar he’d make.

Okay, he would have to depend on the dun streetlight filtering through dirty windows. ‘ ‘

The rest of the house was as cluttered and smelly as the kitchen area, but there was no one there. After a quick survey, he realized that he would never find anything that Lambry had purposefully hidden. More important, Lambry’s house definitely did not look like he’d left the area, but, rather, like he had just gone to work one day and not come back.

That was a problem. If Stafford or the cops came out here, they’d conclude at once that something had happened to Lambry. With a sinking feeling, Carson also understood there was no way he could make this place look like the owner had made a planned, orderly departure. Not in less than three days, anyway.

He looked around in despair. Then he had an idea. What if I could start a fire? Burn the damn thing down and then there’d be nothing to search.

But how, without triggering an arson investigation? He walked back out into the kitchen area and saw the flickering blue light under the hot-water heater in what looked like a laundry room. Gas. Propane gas—he’d seen the tank outside, now that he thought about it. He went over and checked the stove. Also gas. Well, hell, there it was. Leave a burner cracked on the stove, make sure all the windows were closed, and then let the pilot light of that water heater ignite the pooled propane.

He could be miles away when it happened.

He turned a stove burner on full blast to see if it had an automatic pilot, but it was an old stove that required matches. He reduced the gas to low, then went out the back door. And right back in, to wipe his fingerprints off the burner switch. Jesus, he thought. You make a pretty shitty criminal. Then he stepped back outside, wiped off the door handle on both sides, and went back to his truck. He stood by the truck for a moment, shook his head, and went back. He crossed the creaking porch carefully and reentered the kitchen, where he shut off the stove burner.

The stink of propane was already strong in the kitchen, so he cracked open a window.

He sat down at the kitchen table, careful not to touch anything. He wasn’t thinking too clearly here, he realized. Maybe too much of Mr. Beam’s liquid courage. Any decent arson investigator would catch the stove burner trick and ask why the house hadn’t gone up four days ago, if Friday was when its owner presumably last used the stove? Shit! It couldn’t be so blatant as leaving a burner on. He thought he heard a noise out front and rose to peer out a window, afraid that he might see a cop car out there by his truck. But there was still nothing stirring.

He commanded his heart to slow down.

A fire was the obvious answer, but how to ignite it and not arouse suspicion? He got up and started going through kitchen drawers, looking for a flashlight. He finally found one in a drawer with some hand tools.

He crouched down at the back of the stove and examined the gas line’s connection. It seemed to be a threaded coupling of some kind. He went back to the tool drawer and got out a pair of pliers. He was about to grab the coupling when he realized the tube and the coupling were copper. Soft metal. Which would show tool marks. He got back up and found a greasy dish towel, which he wrapped around the coupling. Then he unscrewed it until he heard and smelled propane.’He removed the rag and saw no tool marks. Good. This would do it. A leaky coupling—that might take a few days for propane to accumulate.

He sat back on his haunches. Destroying the house wouldn’t change the fact that Lambry had just disappeared. But it would remove evidence that, he might not have disappeared of his own volition. It would leave a mystery surrounding Lambry, but unless there was a woman or some other relative who cared a lot, it should be a mystery without interest to the cops. The guy was gone, his house burned up, but no one at his place of employment would be looking for him. Except Stafford, maybe, but so what? And if Stafford did uncover the auction scam, the missing Lambry might become the suspect. Perfect.

He cleaned up after himself, wiping down anything he might have touched in the house, closed the kitchen window, and took a sniff. He wasn’t sure he could smell the gas, but he knew propane was heavier than air and would gather along the floor before filling the room. He let himself out the kitchen door and pulled it as shut as it would go, wiping the door handle with the dishrag. He turned to leave and plunged right through the rotten floorboards, pitching forward onto his stomach, his knees bent awkwardly. His head hit something hard and he saw stars for a moment.

He tried to right himself, but his right foot was stuck, jammed by something under the porch. He tried to get his left foot back onto the porch for leverage, but the boards continued to disintegrate, leaving him nothing to grab. His right knee hurt like hell every time he tried to move. He swore and pulled again on his right foot, but it was jammed tight; it felt like maybe his foot was stuck in a cinder block.

This is fucking ridiculous, he thought as he began to perspire. He tried turning around in the hole, balancing on his hands, but it didn’t quite work. The distance from the porch to the ground underneath was about six inches more than he could effectively reach. He was stuck, and everything he tried to use for leverage crumbled under his hands. And then he smelled the propane.

Oh, shit, he thought. The propane. A faint whiff was coming through the partially closed door. He imagined he could hear the opened coupling hissing in the kitchen. How fast would that stuff leak out? How long before it got to the pilot light in the alcove? He struggled hard then, but all he did was to break off more rotten wood and get his foot jammed even tighter. There was a broom parked next to the kitchen door. He grabbed that, tried to pry his foot out, but succeeded only in pinching the hell out of it. He laid the broom down across the opening and tried to lever himself bodily up out of the hole. That almost worked, until the broom handle cracked and then broke under his weight. He was stuck, and there was definitely propane in the air.

He tried the opposite tack, beating at the edges of the hole, breaking off rotten wood to enlarge it. Finally he had it big enough that he could bend down partially and feel around by his stuck foot. His hand encountered a thick, sticky spiderweb, conjuring up visions of black widows about to bite his fingers, which he pulled the hell out of there.

But he had felt the cinder block, and his right foot was jammed hard into one of the holes. It felt like there fcfcv.

“Wat?- p>

was space under the cinder block, but it was cemented into some kind of structure under there. He looked around the yard to see if anyone was coming, but there were only shadowy piles of junk looking back.

Somewhere nearby a dog had begun to bark.

The propane, he kept thinking. It won’t happen right away, but I have got to get out of here. Then he had an idea. Instead of pulling, he tried pushing, jamming his foot as hard as he could downward, forcing it through the hole. After a minute or so of grunting effort, he felt his foot go all the way through, the edge of the block skinning his shin.

Now there was no way around it: He had to put his hands back down there.

He reached down, hit the webs again and shook them off, and then got his fingers under the block and onto his shoe, which he pried off his foot With that, he was able to extract his foot, stand on the cinder block, and lever himself out of the hole in the porch. He sprawled on his belly and crawled to the steps, where he was able to roll over, get up, and hop down to the solid ground of the backyard.

He glanced back at the warped back door, behind which the kitchen was tilling with explosive gas. He thought about retrieving his shoe, said to hell with it, and hopped across the yard to his truck, hoping and praying he still had time to get out of there before the house went up.

Once in the truck, he was careful to make no noise when he pulled the driver’s door shut. How much tune? he wondered. And will it burn or explode? Probably explode in the kitchen, and then the rest of the place will go up. How much time—minutes? Seconds? He tried to think if there was anything else he should have done. Had he left anything behind? He was more frightened now than he had been going in.

Finally, he started up the track and made a creeping U turn at the end of the street, keeping the engine as quiet as he could so as to not wake anyone up. He then drove back by the house, afraid to look right at it in case it blew up. He concentrated on just getting up the deserted street and away from there. He saw no signs of life in any of the darkened houses as he made his way out of the neighborhood.

When he reached the state road, almost a mile from Lambry’s house, he pulled over onto the parking apron of a closed gas station. He backed the truck up against the building to make it look as if it was just parked there for the night. He watched the dark horizon in the direction of Lambry’s house and waited. He wondered if the thing would let go before gas. filled the whole house, with that pilot light right there in the kitchen. Jesus, he’d get a lot more than just a house fire if the whole thing filled up with gas first. Then he worried that it might not work at all. Shit! Had he closed that window? He couldn’t remember. He could remember only the feel of those spiderwebs.

When a car came past, he slumped down in the seat to avoid being seen.

After another half hour or so, he was starting to panic. Suppose it didn’t work? Suppose the cops went there, found the hole, found his shoe? Christ! He looked at his watch; it was now two-fifteen in the morning. He began to wonder if he should go back. But how could he do that, when he knew there was propane accumulating in there? And then there was a sudden orange glare through the distant trees, followed by a powerful thump. A very powerful thump, considering he was at least a mile away. Damn, just how big had that explosion been?

He started up the truck and pulled back out on the state road, pointing toward Atlanta, driving awkwardly with just a sock on his right foot. He could see a red glare in his rearview mirror. That had to be a big fire.

He hoped like hell that none of the surrounding houses had been damaged.

The good news was that if the explosion had been big enough, the arson squad would have nothing to work with. But then he worried again. What had he missed? And what kind of monster was he turning into?

TUESDAY, ANNISTON ARMY WEAPONS DEPOT, ANNISTON, ALABAMA, 11:30 P.M. Col. Tom Franklin, commanding officer of the Anniston Army Weapons Depot, smelled of scotch when he arrived at the headquarters building.

He had been driven over by his wife. The Franklins had been hosting a dinner party at their quarters, but it had ended when the call from the CDO came in at eleven p.m. The colonel was still in his civilian clothes when he arrived, circumspectly carrying a mug of coffee with him. He went directly to his own office, accompanied by the CDO. The two enlisted people from the control office were told to wait hi the duty office while the colonel listened patiently to the CDO’s report. The colonel had been mildly disturbed at being called out hi the middle of his party, and he was a bit embarrassed to show up with whiskey on his breath, but he was not drunk, and after he heard the lieutenant’s report, he was very damned glad he’d been called.

“Good job, calling me,” he said. “It was absolutely the right thing to do. Are we sure beyond any doubt that these troops have done the audit correctly?”

“Sir, I don’t know that. But three different people have done the audit, and from the sounds-of it, more than once. They were concerned enough to be looking for then-chain of command at night. When I heard Wet Eye, well …”

“Right. Wet Eye. I’m having that same sinking feeling. Okay, get the G-Three in here right now. And get me the number for the Army Command Center in Washington. I’m going to make a voice report on the secure phone, and that’s going to provoke a million questions.”

The CDO was writing fast in his notebook.

“Tell the G-Three that I want Tooele’s duty office notified right away, and tell him that I want commanding officer Tooele to call me ASAP. Then I want everyone between me and the clerk who found this standing tall in my office in one hour. I’m going home to change as soon as I’ve made this call. Got it?” “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” the CDO said.

WEDNESDAY, THE U.S. ARMY COMMAND CENTER, THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D.

C., 1:15A. M. Brig. Gen. Lee Carrothers, deputy commander of the Army Chemical Corps, waited for the satellite conference call to be patched through. He had been awakened in his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, by the duty officer at the Army Command Center and asked to come down to the Pentagon right away, with subject to be revealed upon arrival. Now the Command Center was setting up a conference call with Maj. Gen. Myer Waddell, commander of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, who was presently in Stuttgart, Germany, on official travel. It would be 7:15 in Germany.

The third party in the conference call was going to be the Army deputy chief of staff for Operations, Plans, and Policy, It. Gen. Peter Roman.

The three-star was currently airborne in an Army Learjet over the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii. Brigadier General Carrothers had a headache, which he knew was going to get worse before it got better.

“All stations, this is the Command Center. I am confirming a secure satellite link with three stations. I will go offline when the third principal confirms. General Carrothers, sir?”

“Present.”

‘ ‘General Waddell, sir?”

“Present.”

“And General Roman, sir?”

“I’m here. What’s this all about, Myer?”

“Yes, sir, General,” Waddell said. “We have a potentially major flap in the making. I’m going to let my deputy, Lee Carrothers, brief you, but basically, we may have some chemical weapons material missing.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Carrothers jumped in at that juncture and told the three star what they knew so far, that they were not positive the material was missing but that the audit system had detected a possible problem and that the Tooele destruction facility was checking their end of it.

“So we don’t actually know that some stuff is missing? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yes, sir,” Carrothers replied. “We’re trying to be proactive here, General.”

“When will we know?”

“Tooele will have to reinventory its receipt assets at the large-scale destruction facility. That will take at least twenty-four hours, because it will require a sight inventory of every cylinder, by serial number.

And since the cylinders are no longer in their coffins, it will all have to be done MOPPed up. Full suits.”

” ‘Coffins’?”

General Waddell broke in. “That’s Chemical Corps slang for the environmental containment systems. These cylinders aren’t warheads.

They’re the containers used to fill warheads. And unlike our modern warheads, they’re not binary-safe.”

“Refresh me, Myer. CW is something I try to forget about.”

“Yes, sir. American chemical weapons are designed to be safe. We use a binary design—that is, the warheads do not contain chemical weapons.

They contain the two main ingredients for the weapon hi question in two physically separated containers within the warhead. The warhead has to be fired, or subjected to the forces of being launched, or detonated, to rupture the internal containers. Once the projectile is spinning in flight, the two ingredients mix. From that mixing action comes the chemical weapon itself. That’s what binary-safe means.”

“And what you’re telling me is that these cylinders are i not binary-safe?” i

“That’s correct, sir. There was one weapon, which we retired a long time ago precisely because it was not safe, which used a high-speed aerosol-dispenser system slung under the belly of a jet aircraft.

These cylinders were in-f serted in the dispenser pod, and then the dispersal mechanism was armed in flight. They contained the real stuff, not just constituents.”

“And what hellish brew is in these missing cylinders?”

“Only one cylinder, General,” Carrothers reminded him. “It’s a substance called Wet Eye.”

“With a name like that, I think that’s all I want to know, General Carrothers,” Roman said. “Okay, I assume the Chemical Corps is going balls-to-the-wall to find out if there really is a problem. I will inform the chief of staff. You two make sure that you get a lid clamped down hard at both Anniston and Tooele until Army headquarters can get a spin package put together. First indication that this stuff really is missing, you need to get back to Fort Fumble, Myer. You’re going to be on the hook to brief the Secdef and maybe even the White House. I say again, that’s if indeed a cy Under of this Wet Eye is really missing.

And we all better hope and pray that it isn’t. Keep me advised on developments. Roman off net.”

There was long silence on the net, which Carrothers did not interrupt.

General Waddell liked time to think before he made decisions.

“Lee, there’s one more call I want you to make,” Wad dell said finally.

“Yes, sir?”

“First, let’s make sure we really do have a problem. Those rail shipments are long and involved logistical processes, and it’s entirely possible we’ll all get to stand down shortly when they find a clerical error. But I want you to touch base with Fort Dietrick. Just to be safe.

I just wish -it wasn’t Wet Eye. Anything but damned Wet Eye.”

“Fort Dietrick, General? USAMRIID?”

“That’s right. You’re looking for a Col. Ambrose Fuller. He’s an Army veterinarian, of all things, but he’s my guy at Dietrick. He’s smart and he’s very discreet. Tell him what’s happened, or what may have happened.

He’s not to do anything, and above all, he’s not to say anything to anybody. I just want him aware of the problem.”

“Got it, General.”

“Okay, and remember, this little bombshell stays in house, Chemical Corps eyes only, uritil we’ve figured out how to handle it. A mistake like this could finish the Chemical Corps forever. Make sure Anniston rolls up everyone who’s been involved to date. Enlisted restricted to barracks. Officers restricted to quarters. No one running his yap.

Understand, Lee? That’s important.”

“Yes, sir. Got it.”

“Okay. Keep me advised by secure means. Waddell off net.” Carroqiers a key to alert the link operator they were finished, then hung up the handset. He looked at his watch. One twenty-five in die morning. No point in getting this Fuller guy up at this hour just to put his thinking cap on. He’d call him first thing tomorrow. Today, he realized.

He called the Command Center duty officer and asked him for the number of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, Fort Dietrick, Maryland. As he waited, he wondered why in the hell General Waddell would want a USAMRTID guy notified. Those people dealt in biologic toxins, not chemicals.

WEDNESDAY, PEACHTREE CENTER HOTEL, I ATLANTA, 7:45 A.M. Stafford saw it on the morning news as he was getting dressed in his hotel room: a presumed propane gas explosion in southeast Atlanta. There were some long-range TV news shots of a smoldering crater and small knots of curious people milling around behind fluttering yellow police tape.

Blackened debris littered the street and the sides of what looked like a railroad embankment at the end of the street. A couple of junked cars near the crater were still smoking. Spindly trees next to the house had been snapped off at midtrunk. The camera panned to the house next door, which had also been flattened. An ambulance was backed up to that house. A lime green fire truck was parked across the street, and two firemen were playing a desultory stream [ on the grass of the railroad embankment.

B Stafford hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to it all until the announcer identified the house as belonging to a B. Lambry, reportedly a government worker at nearby Fort Gillem. It was not known if Lambry or anyone else had been in the house; the police and the county Arson Unit were still investigating. According to police, the blast had occurred just after two hi the morning. An elderly man in the house next door had been severely injured when the wall facing Lambry’s house had caved in.

Stafford paused in the delicate task of knotting his tie one-handed and stared at the television set. Well, now, he thought. B. Lambry. Wasn’t that the guy that weird Harold Corey in search of ‘munity had told him to find yesterday? Hey, maybe we have developments here. He finished dressing and placed an unsecure call to the DCIS office in Smyrna. Mr. Sparks wasn’t in yet, he was told. He asked the secretary to have Sparks call him on a secure line at the administrative offices at Fort Gillem in one hour.

WEDNESDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 9:00 A.M. Sparks called right on time. Stafford closed the door to his office, although with its large glass window, the privacy afforded was minimal.

They switched to secure.

“You called, Dave?”

“Yeah. Did you see the morning news? Item about a propane explosion in southeast Atlanta last night.” - .

“Yeah, I think I did. Should I care?” “You might,” Stafford said. He saw Carson’s secretary walk by, gawking at him as he talked into his computer. “The house belonged to a guy who worked here, a guy named Lambry.” He told Sparks about his conversation with Dillard.

“Jesus, Dave, don’t tell me you’ve got something going already.”

“If I do, it’s all feeling and no facts,” Stafford said. “It’s mostly the way people are acting at this place. I’m pretty sure the employees have figured out I’m no auditor, and also that they are not surprised that a cop is here. This hillbilly guy, Dillard, was dancing all around something.”

“Any idea of what?”

“Not a clue. But I spoke to Carson when I got in this morning—he’s the manager down here, remember? And he told me Lambry had quit unexpectedly a few days ago.”

“Interesting. Was he in the house when it blew up?”

“Apparently not. House next door had one victim. But that’s why I called: I need you to introduce me to whatever cops are working that scene. I’d like to talk to them.”

“Okay, I’ll make some calls. You want to go to the scene, or just talk to the people doing the investigation?”

“Either one. Their call.”

There was a pause on the line. “Dave?”

“Yeah, Ray?” Stafford thought he knew what was coming next.

“You be careful now. Remember what you’re really down here for. Don’t go getting involved in a local crime, or stirring up the locals with conspiracy theories. You uncover something hinky at that DRMO, we give it to the Feebies, right?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Stafford said. “It was just the coincidence, okay? Guy talks to me about Lambry, and then Lambry’s house goes into orbit.” Sparks, not sounding entirely convinced, said he’d get back to him, and they hung up. Stafford went down the hall to get some coffee, then decided to walk across the tarmac to the feed-assembly warehouse. You find out something’s going on at the DRMO, we give it to the Bureau.

Don’t make any damn waves, Stafford. You bet, Ray.

He walked through the steel doors to the demil feed assembly room, where he found the same crew as yesterday, minus Corey Dillard, unloading forklifts. He had to wait until the two forklifts in the warehouse had backed out before anyone could hear anything. He approached the large black man Dillard had called Boss Hisley yesterday.

“I’m David Stafford from DLA,” he said. “You Boss Hisley?”

“That’s me,” Hisley said. The other two men walked away toward the table with the coffeepot. “He’p you with something’?”

Carson had to tilt his head back to look Hisley in the eye. “Yeah. I understand from Mr. Carson that a guy named Lambry quit recently. Can you tell me about that?”

“Mr. Carson say he quit?” -

“Yeah.” y ‘ ‘;-“-.

Hisley considered this for a moment. “Mr. Carson say he quit, then that’s what he done.”

V- p>

“But you didn’t know anything about it?” , Hisley shook his head. “He didn’t quit on me, that what you asking’.”

“Did you know that Lambry’s house blew up last night?” Stafford said.

“Yeah, seen that,” Hisley replied. Stafford could read absolutely nothing in Hisley’s broad, impassive face.

“If something had happened to Lambry, would Mr. Carson maybe know about it?”

Hisley’s eyes flashed briefly with some hidden knowledge. “Shit happens here in the DRMO, Carson’s the man, know what I’m sayin’? Nice talkin’ to you.”

He wanted to ask Hisley if he knew where Lambry was now. But he knew if he pursued the matter with any further questions about the explosion, he would absolutely blow his cover as a DLA auditor. And he still didn’t know if Lambry had even been in that house last night. He thanked Hisley and walked away, trying to decipher Hisley’s cryptic comment about Carson.

Sparks got back to him thirty minutes later with a name and the number of the Arson Unit investigating the explosion at Lambry’s house. He also reported that NCIC database had come up dry on Lambry. Stafford contacted the team leader, a woman detective named Mary Haller, and she agreed to talk to him.

“I guess my first question is, Was this arson?”

“Too soon to tell,” she said. “It was definitely a propane gas explosion, and it did what propane usually does— leveled the place.”

“A leak? Pilot light in a stove or something like that?” “Like I said, Mr. Stafford, this was propane. Propane pools on the floor until two things happen: It achieves between a nine and eleven percent mixture with air, and it finds a point of ignition. The vapor then ignites and blows everything up and out. Whatever’s left burns with a very hot fire.

We have a bunch of blackened concrete-block pilings surrounding a hole at the scene, and a neighbor hood full of Kibbles ‘N Bits. We’re still rounding up all the identifiable pieces.”

“No human remains?”

“Doesn’t smell like it.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how we usually tell. There was a geezer next door who was blasted out of his bed when the east wall of his house went west. He’s in the hospital with a concussion. We’re waiting to interview him, but he’s not conscious yet.”

Stafford wondered what age she considered old. She sounded as if she was in her twenties, tops.

“Now, one for you,” she said. “Is whatever you’re working likely to surface a reason for someone to blow up this house deliberately?”

“No, or at least not yet. Look, I appreciate the courtesy of your talking to me, but J don’t really even have anything going here yet. I talked to one Corey Dillard, here at the DRMO yesterday. He was sort of speaking in tongues, and I’m damned if I know what it was all about. My cover is that I’m supposed to be an auditor for the DLA. Anyway, he mentioned Lambry’s name, said I ought to find Lambry. That’s all I’ve got, which is to say, nothing. If there’s a connection between my case and any of that, it’s not visible yet.”

“Well, if you make a connection, we’d appreciate knowing. We’re going to have to go out there to Fort Gillem eventually to do some interviews.”

“Fine. I’ll generate some notes. Just remember, I’m supposed to be an auditor with the Defense Logistics Agency, not a DCIS guy. Only the manager here, a guy named Carson, knows I’m with DCIS.”

“That’s okay with us. We’ll give you any further info if and when we have it, Mr. Stafford.”

He thanked her and they hung up. Stafford wondered what to do next. He had told the arson investigator, the truth: He didn’t really have anything of substance going here at this DRMO, other than the small mystery of what

Dillard had really wanted to tell him, and then the bizarre coincidence of what had happened to Lambry’s house. But he couldn’t just go around here making a big deal about Lambry; everyone in the DRMO would wonder what the hell he was doing, including Carson. And right now, Carson was becoming more interesting than Lambry.

WEDNESDAY, THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D. C., 8:10 A.M. Brig. Gen. Lee Carrothers hung up the secure phone gingerly, as if afraid it would explode in his hand. He had just spoken with Colonel Fuller at Fort Dietriek, and now his headache was back with a vengeance.

Surprisingly, Colonel Fuller had not had much to say about the specific substances in the missing weapon, but he” had been very clear about one thing: “If you guys’ve lost a can of Wet Eye, that’s worth a Soviet-style ‘lock up all the participants in a mental asylum for life, stonewall until the end of time’ cover-up, General. Tell Myer Waddell I said that.”

“That’s really peachy, Colonel. Please remember that all the general wanted you to do was think about it, okay?”

“Trust me, General Carrothers: I’ll be thinking of nothing else. Please call me later and tell me this is an exercise. Soon, okay?”

Carrothers rubbed his eyes and buzzed for more coffee. Colonels didn’t normally talk like that to generals, but, what the hell, this guy was an Army vet. And he’d used General Waddell’s first name. Carrothers had placed a call to General Waddell in Germany after talking to Fuller, and he was waiting for a call back. In the meantime, he called the commanding officer of the Tooele Army Depot in Utah to see how the sight inventory was coming. The CO told him they were conducting a destruction inventory match audit.

Carrothers exploded. That’s what Anniston had done. What the situation needed now was a sight inventory, not another damned paper drill. ‘ ‘We know the paperwork is screwed up. What we need to know now is what you did actually receive in that shipment.

Anniston doesn’t have the shit anymore; you do. So go do the fucking sight inventory right fucking now. And I don’t care if your people have to suit up in the rucking noonday sun. Do it, and do it now!” The CO, properly chastened, would order a sight inventory immediately.

Carrothers slammed down the phone. His clerk buzzed him on the intercom.

General Waddell was on the secure line. This day gets better and better, he thought miserably as he reached for the phone.

WEDNESDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 8:15 A.M. Carson watched through the Venetian blinds as the forklifts brought some more flea-market stuff into the warehouse. He had gotten home at nearly four in the morning, but his wife, her face draped in a sleep mask over some kind of cold cream, had not even budged. What sleep he , did get was fitful, and he was pretty sure he’d been visited by the dream again. He shivered.

He was surprised that he felt absolutely nothing about what he had done the night before. Not guilt, not concern for the old man next door, not fear of being caught, nothing at all. It was as if he had stepped over some psychological threshold back there when Lambry went into the demil machine. His fear in the airport, his apprehension about actually making this sale and getting his money— both were all gone. He didn’t feel invincible exactly—that damn dream was kind of scary—but he felt stronger than he had felt before last night. Doing Lambry’s house had been smart: The blast had reduced any traces of Lambry’s previous life to flinders. He saw his reflection in the glass: Wendell Carson, master criminal. Well, if that’s what it took to grab a million bucks, that’s what it took.

Stafford could still be a problem, of course, but with Lambry truly out of the picture now, Stafford would be on a very cold trail. All Wendell Carson had to do now was tie off the loose ends of Lambry’s quitting: a final paycheck, closing the personnel folder, and rearranging the work assignments. There would be local cops sniffing around, no doubt, after that explosion, but, surprisingly, Carson found he just wasn’t worried about any of that. He needed to focus now on the physical turnover of the cylinder for the money, and on how to make sure he got the money with his skin intact.

He thought about the cylinder, sitting right here in his office. Maybe he needed a better place for it. He lived southwest of Atlanta, on five acres in a semirural area. Take it out there? If someone suspected him and came looking, either the Army or, for that matter, Tangent, they would certainly search his office and his home. So it really should be better hidden, maybe somewhere out there in the DRMO warehouse complex.

He almost wished he had one of those environmental containers—what did the army guys call them? Coffins? But they had all gone through demil.

He Checked his door and then pushed the books apart to make sure the cylinder was still there. It looked even more lethal now without its protective plastic container. He sat back down and thought about where else to hide it. What was the old rule? When you really want to hide something, the best place is “often right out in the open. ‘One of the warehouses, he decided. He sat back down at his desk and doodled idly on his desk blotter. He saw the name Graniteville circled on the blotter.

Another loose end there? Despite all his newfound confidence, the memory of that little episode in the airport was still able to tickle his hackles. Why had that girl looked at him that way? And why in the hell had he fainted?

He looked at his watch. A good time to take a walk through the warehouses, see what struck his fancy as a better hiding place. He took a deep breath. He was safer than he had been twenty-four hours ago. What had happened to Bud had really been an accident; hadn’t he tried every way to stop the belt? But what was done was done.

A million dollars. No more shitty little civil service job. No more sullen employees. No more skulking around for chump change with the auction scam. No more coming home to a crazy old woman whose nighttime mud packs would stroke out a vampire; A new life. Very soon. With that kind of money, well dell Carson could go anywhere, do anything. After everything that had happened, he had no other options: He had to complete the deal.

Stafford was about to go to lunch when Ray Sparks called him. “Got a message from the Washington office,” Sparks reported. “Apparently some woman from Georgia called your number up there; said she needed to talk to you. Got a writing stick?”

Stafford wrote down the message and hung up. He studied the message on the pad: “Gwinette Warren. Calling from Graniteville, Georgia. Wanted, to talk to Mr. Stafford. Please call this number.”

Graniteville, he thought. Then he remembered. The woman in the airport.

Carson and the girl. He reached for the phone but then thought better of it. This one might be better done from a phone outside of the DRMO phone system. It wasn’t that he suspected anyone of eavesdropping, but this call probably involved Mr. Wendell Carson of the shaky hands. Better to do this at his hotel.

WEDNESDAY, PEACHTREE CENTER HOTEL, ATLANTA, 1:05 P.M. Stafford made it to his room at five after one. He planned to talk to this lady, see what she wanted, and then go out to see Ray Sparks and the DCIS crew in Smyrna. He needed to make his courtesy call, and also to get his hands on a car phone. He called the woman’s number, but she was not there. He left a message that he could be reached at his hotel number. She called back fifteen minutes later.

“This is Owen Warren,” she said. “Thank you for returning my call.”

“No problem, Ms. Warren. I’m just glad you kept the card. Is this about the incident at the airport the other day? And I can put this call on my nickel if you’d like.”

There was a moment of hesitation. “Can you possibly come see me, Mr. Stafford? Up here in Graniteville? This isn’t something I want to discuss over the phone.”

“I suppose I can, Ms. Warren. Can you give me a hint?”

Another hesitation. “It involves the girl who was with me in the airport. You said you were a federal investigator, is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am, with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.”

“What is that, exactly?”

“A Department of Defense agency. That’s the Pentagon, in media parlance.

We investigate cases of possible fraud against the government.”

“And why are you there in Atlanta?”

Whoa, wait a minute, he thought. That’s my business. “Ms. Warren, maybe you’re right. I think I should drive up to Graniteville, as you suggested. How about tomorrow? How much of a drive is it from Atlanta?”

“It’s two and a half to three hours, depending on how fast you drive and road conditions in the mountains.”

“Okay, that’s doable. I’ll probably wait until after morning rush hour.

How’s about noontime? Is there a motel there?”

“Yes, there is one motel. It’s called the Mountain View. I’ll make you a reservation. They can give you directions to the Willow Grove Home. I’ll expect you around noon?” “Okay, I’ll be there,” he said, writing the information down in his notebook. “And Ms. Warren, you sound somewhat anxious. Please don’t be.

If this involves a minor, let me assure you we can be very discreet and very careful.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Stafford. You’ll need to be both. Until tomorrow then. Goodbye.” He hung up the phone and sat back in his chair.

Dave Stafford, master of discretion and care—now; there was a joke.

Except this didn’t sound like a joke. He thought back to what had happened at the airport. He had thought all along that there had been some interaction between that girl and Carson, and now this Gwen Warren had just confirmed that hunch. But what could it be? Obviously nothing to do with the DRMO. Some man-woman issue between this Warren woman and Carson? Looking at them, he would not have made that connection. She was a woman who appeared to be way beyond the likes of Wendell Carson—and David Stafford, more than likely. He shook his head and looked at his watch. It was time to take his chances with the Atlanta metre traffic and head out to beautiful downtown Smyrna, Georgia!

WEDNESDAY, THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D. C., 3:30 P.M. Brigadier General Carrothers returned from the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club feeling somewhat better. His one hour workout had left his cheeks bright red when he walked back into his office. Nothing like a small war with the weights to burn off stress, he thought, and he had had plenty to burn off. Lee Carrothers was six four and extremely fit, having never lost the habits of physical training that had helped maintain the desired lean and mean Army officer image. He was a West Point graduate who had steered himself along the conventional career path from second lieutenant to brigadier in twenty-four fast years. He had a narrow hatchet-shaped face, white-blond, buzz-cut hair, a ruddy complexion, a prominently hooked nose, and bright blue eyes under almost white eyebrows. He’d been fortunate enough to marry a general’s daughter, and thereafter he had alternated between specialty tours in the Chemical Corps and front-office aide and executive assistant jobs. Jealous colleagues who groused about Carrothers’s early promotion said he’d done it all on his hawklike good looks and his wife’s connections, but more than a few of them had discovered, often to their discomfiture, that Lee Carrothers was a great deal smarter than the average bear. His image as a lean and mean ambition machine was just icing on the cake. It was assumed among his contemporaries in the Chemical Corps that he would be the next CG of the Chemical Corps.

The clerk hi the front office handed him a message as he walked through the door. General Waddell was returning early from Europe. He would arrive at Andrews Air Force Base at 2300 tonight.

Incoming! Carrothers shouted mentally as he went into his office. The commanding general of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had been predictably furious when he found out that precious hours had been wasted out in Utah doing another inventory audit. ‘What part of sight inventory didn’t those idiots understand?’ he had roared over the satellite link. Good fornicating question, Carrothers thought. Waddell had asked about Fort Dietrick’s reaction to the news, but Carrothers, unsure of what operators might be listening to the satellite call, had sidestepped that question. He’s thinking about it, General, just like you told him to.

Waddell caught on immediately and did not press the issue. Carrothers would brief Waddell on the colonel’s advice about clamping the mother of all lids on this little mess when the general was in a better frame of mind. Yeah, like at 2300, after a seven-hour flight back from Germany, Shee-it.

He called Tooele for a status on the sight inventory. Twenty-five percent complete. Estimated tune of completion, twenty-four hours. As the general was aware, these things were not all stored in one pile.

Several underground bunkers had to be opened and safety-tested.

Since the cylinders were no longer in coffins, they had to be individually unstacked, serial numbers verified, end caps safety-checked, etcetera, etcetera. The general, Car rothers had replied, understood results, and he hoped that was abundantly clear to every swinging dick out there who wanted to keep his present rank and commissary privileges.

He called the commanding officer at Anniston. “Is everybody involved sequestered?” he asked. Everybody was, from the base ops officer down to all the clerks involved. “Anything stirring on the troops’ grapevine?”

“Not yet.”

“Keep it that way. If in doubt, clamp harder. And do that audit again.”

“Already doing it.”

Anniston was conducting a sight inventory of their own, looking to see if there was an extra coffin lying around. “Good move,” he said.

He hung up and reflected on the difference between the two commanding officers. Colonel Franklin at Anniston was obviously trying to think ahead of the problem; the CO at Tooele was behind the power curve. He rubbed his eyes. What should you be doing besides waiting for word, oh proactive one? he thought. You should be anticipating Waddell’s questions, that’s what. The general would be sitting on that airplane thinking up a hundred questions that would come rapid-fire as soon as he stepped off the transport. Carrothers called his clerk and asked him to hit the microfilm archives on Wet Eye. It wasn’t what he wanted to do.

He wanted to go out there to Tooele and kick ass to make things go faster, but he knew from experience that when the general wants it bad, he usually gets it bad. The good news was that they had managed to clamp a lid on this little fiasco until they could find out what had really happened. Wet Eye. His headache was coming back.

WEDNESDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 3:45 P.M. Carson returned to his office and flopped down in his chair. He had found an almost-perfect hiding place for the cylinder —in the demil room, of all places. He had wandered all over the DRMO, ostensibly on a manager’s walk through, aware, as usual, that the walkie-talkies would be in action the moment he was between warehouses, alerting the next crew.

He knew they sneeringly called him “Gwendell” behind his back. That was okay with him; his little walks had an effect analogous to that of the empty cop car parked behind a sign on the freeway. And, as he was fond of reminding them, they filled out time sheets. He could sign them or he could hold them, in which case no checks would be forthcoming, so it was Gwendell, sir, if you don’t mind.

He had gone looking for a hiding place that was, first of all, safe. He couldn’t put it in some of the gear waiting to be auctioned, because Murphy’s Law would guarantee that it would be auctioned, and then he’d have some Bubba opening the thing at a flea market and depopulating Atlanta. He couldn’t hide it out there among the dozens of dark nooks and crannies in the warehouses, because that was where a professional search team would start looking. If the Army found out the cylinder was missing, the DRMO would be one of the first places they would look, because this was where the coffins had ended up. The coffins, of course, had all been derailed. Could he prove that? With records, yes. One thousand environmental weapons containers received from the Anniston Army Weapons Depot in Alabama, after they had been returned to Anniston from the Army chemical weapons destruction facility in Tooele, Utah. All marked for demil, no reutilization, no public access. Straight up Monster feed.

In fact, he had realized, the Army might be happy to I hear that. With any luck, they might assume that if the

II cylinder had gone missing, it had probably been derailed with its coffin. Whatever the hell was in it would have been sucked into the Monster, unless it was an explosive , gas of some kind. Then who knows what might have hap I pened? In a twisted sense, Lambry’s find may have prevented a real tragedy right here at the DRMO. Yeah, right. Nice try.

J But if they discovered it was missing they would surely . come looking, and depending on what was in that cylinder, I they would come with some pretty sophisticated chemical weapons detection equipment.

Now, obviously that cylinder wasn’t leaking, or everyone around would have been flopping and twitching by now, but he knew enough about the packaging of special weapons to know that the Army might’have put some kind of tracking device on or in that cylinder.

He had been drawn to the demil room more by a dread I desire to revisit the scene of Lambry’s demolition than from any expectation of finding a hiding place. He was still faintly amazed at himself, that he could be so calm and collected about that. He must have been more afraid of Bud flian he had realized. Once in the demil room, which was inactive as the conveyors were being loaded next door, he had stared at the Monster for several minutes. Was there a way to hide the cylinder inside the Monster? Probably not. Behind the band-saw blades were several other lethal phases of destruction, all of which involved several meaningful moving parts. Beyond that were the chemical treatment phases, so that wouldn’t work. But then he saw the steel rollers of the conveyor belt that fed the Monster. Steel cylinders, about four inches in diameter, spaced every three feet or so. They were partially obscured by the rubber of the belt and the expanded metal screens surrounding the Monster’s maw.

Making sure no one was watching through the small window in the door between demil and feed assembly, he bad walked over to the belt where it entered the safety screens and bent down to take a look. Just as he did so, the belt jumped into motion, startling him. He’d forgotten they were loading the belt in the next building. He bent down again. Inside the safety screens, where the belt turned down toward the floor and then back toward the other building, the rollers were spaced much closer, about eight inches apart.

As he stared at the assembly, the belt , stopped moving. He thought it might just be possible, if - he could get the end cap off of one of those rollers. He’d ; have to take a better look tonight, when the run was finished and the place was empty, but the roller would make ; a very good hiding place.

The next physical problem would be the actual hand over of the cylinder. He hadn’t heard back from Tangent yet, but he knew that this was going to be a far different ‘ transaction from all the previous ones. Before, the “winning” bidder had simply come into the DRMO and picked [ up the stuff he’d bought at an ostensibly legal auction.

That had been one of the advantages of the scam: Wendell I Carson had never physically touched any of the things he

I had diverted to his client.

But this time might be different. He could visualize one I of those drug deals in a dark parking lot where everybody ‘ had one hand on his gun and the other on either the money , or the merchandise. Unlike the drug kingpins, Wendell [ Carson would not be accompanied by a phalanx of beefy guys with wraparound sunglasses and ponytails who sported MAC-10s, whereas Tangent might. So he was going to have to figure something out, something that gave him some advantages, like doing the transaction right here at the DRMO, where he knew the ground.

WEDNESDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 11:15P. M. Carson knelt down by the safety screens encasing the conveyor belt and removed all the nuts holding the side screen onto its frame. He got the screen off, put it to one side, and sat back on his haunches. Tonight’s demil shift had ended at eight-thirty, and he had waited for almost three hours before making his move. The first stage was to take a toolbox over to demil and get the screen off, and then see if he could get the end cap off one of the rollers.

It took him twenty minutes of huffing and puffing before he managed to pry the bearing assembly off of the third roller back from the feed aperture. He then measured the inside diameter of the roller: four inches. The cylinder, feeling Warm in his’ sweaty palms, was about three inches in diameter, and not as long as the roller. This would work. He left everything in pieces and walked back over to his office. He was safe from video-camera surveillance, since all the security cameras except two were inside the warehouses. He had let himself into the security control room and turned the tarmac cameras off. There was never anything of high value stored out on the tarmac, just the flea market stuff that was too big to sit on the shelves inside, but he didn’t want any tapes showing him going into demil at this hour. The only thing he had to watch out for would be an MP car making its rounds. There were no windows in the demil building, so there would be no lights observable from the outside.

By midnight, he had the cylinder inside the roller and the entire assembly buttoned back up. He stood up, satisfied with his work. The only way anyone would ever find that thing would be if it came open, in which case he definitely would not want to be around for the happy occasion. It was time to go home. The next move was Tangent’s. He looked at the silent maw of the demil machine for signs of what had happened to Lambry, but the blade bank gleamed back at him indifferently. As he walked out, he remembered to go back to Security and reenergize those two cameras. He also wondered, Was it just my hands, or was that cylinder getting warm?

WEDNESDAY, ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, WASHINGTON, D. C, 11:45 P.M. The commanding general of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps dropped into the backseat of the sedan with a grunt and a sigh. He was very definitely not in conformance with the required physical image of the modern Army, and a week in Germany had not helped his weight problem. Car rothers got in on the left side, in deference to General Waddelfs seniority. The official sedan drove off the terminal apron and headed for the main gate.

“Jesus, these cars keep getting smaller,” Waddell complained. “Okay, Lee, where are we with that um, situation, at Anniston?”

Carrothers, eyeing the civilian driver, debriefed Wad dell hi oblique language. “The western unit is conducting a sight inventory. Should be done late tomorrow if there are no discrepancies, day after tomorrow if there is a discrepancy. The southern piece of it redid their paperwork, a sight inventory of the empty tombs, and came up with the same results.”

“Let me get this straight: Isn’t the audit done by the sending agency an audit of what the receiving agency end reports it received?”

It was late, and Carrothers had to think about that for a second. “Yes, sir. That’s how they check on each other.”

“And a sight inventory, on the other hand, physically checks to determine what’s there that wasn’t there before the last shipment.”

“Yes, sir. And if that number does not equal what the southern people came up with, then we probably habeas a corpus.” .

“Wonderful,” Waddell grunted. He was silent for a few minutes as the sedan merged onto the Beltway and headed for Alexandria, Virginia, where Waddell had a town house.

“And everyone involved has been, um …”

“Yes, sir. Everyone.”

“Good. That needs to be airtight. If either CO thinks he needs to make it more airtight, he has my permission. Whatever it takes,”

“Yes, sir.” ; . “And I want to see Ambrose Fuller tomorrow first tiling.

What’s the buzz from the E-ring?”

“General Roman briefed the chief of staff. If the CSA went up his tape, I haven’t heard about it. I’ve got his EA primed to give me a heads-up.” “Good. I suspect the CSA has not told our civilian masters yet.”

The general was silent for the rest of the ride, until the .sedan delivered him to his house. While the driver waited in the car, Carrothers got out and walked up to the front door with General Waddell, where he told him what Colonel Fuller had actually said. Waddell’s face sagged.

“I knew it. Damn!” Waddell said. “Okay. We have to be proactive here, Lee. I want people to start thinking about where this thing may have wandered off to. I want a task force set up in my office. Like right now. I want Chemical Corps, intel guys, COMSEC guys, the works. But Army eyes only for now, okay? No outsiders. No JCS staffers. No god damned civilians. If we have to tent this thing, I want people I can trust to keep their mouths shut. I couldn’t say it in the car, but I got a call from the chief of staff.”

“Yes, sir?”

“And he reminded me that all things chemical are in ill repute these days. The whole world wants chemical weapons just to go away, and, by association, the experts who feed and care for chemical weapons. That’s us. The only hook we Yiave to hang our professional hats on now is in the area of defense against chemical weapons. We’re the pros. We know how. But if we lose one, we’re not the pros; we’re the assholes du your.

The Army Chemical Corps as we know and love it will be history.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Can-others said. He hesitated. “But what if we have indeed lost one?”

Waddell pursed his lips and looked out onto the car cluttered street with its faux gas lamps fluttering historically in the night air. Then he looked back into Carrothers’s eyes with all the force of his thirty-five years in the Army and said, “Lose a can of Wet Eye? That just cannot happen, General.” Then he went inside.

THURSDAY, GRANITEVILLE, GEORGIA, 12:10 P.M. If the motel was in Graniteville, Stafford concluded, it would necessarily have a mountain view. The entire town, what there was of it, had nothing but a mountain view, nestled as it was in a deep valley between three green-clad granite peaks. The town itself was small, consisting of one main drag that led the state road north into and around the courthouse square. All the side streets appeared to go for only a few blocks before running into one of the mountains.

He drove the white government Crown Vie carefully along the main street, which was lined with stores typical of small-town America: clothes, hardware, stationery and office supply, most complete with second-story false fronts. The traffic sign at the square directed drivers to circle the square to the right, yield to anyone coming from the left, and to continue all the way around to get to the granite quarry. From the square, there appeared to be three options: one north, one east, and a third, which led up to what looked like a quarry on one of the western slopes. The courthouse itself was a traditional Georgia landmark, red brick with lots of gingerbread, complete with a white clock tower and slant-in parking on three sides. The obligatory white marble soldier monument to the heroic Confederate dead, its back turned pointedly toward the perfidious North, leaned precariously on the eastern lawn of the courthouse.

Stafford drove all the way around the square twice, dodging pickup trucks and looking for signs for the motel.

He finally took a chance on the road leading north up and out of town between the two highest hills. As he left the square, he picked up a cop car in his rearview mirror. He passed a large Baptist church, a closed-up diner called Huddle House, a dilapidated feed store, three vacant lots, and a lumberyard as he left the town square. As he crossed a deep ravine through which a mountain stream cascaded down towards the town, the motel appeared on his right hand side. The cop car stayed with him.

He pulled into the motel parking lot and shut the car down. There was a small Waffle House diner surrounded by pickup trucks in front of the motel. The motel itself was a single line of ten rooms that stretched back toward a creek, with the office on the end nearest the diner. The motel appeared to be at least fifty years old, but the place was clean, at least on the outside. A small red neon light in the office window proclaimed that there were indeed vacancies.

He got out and stretched. It had taken a little longer than he had expected to get to Graniteville, but a brilliantly sunny day and the north Georgia mountain scenery had been worth the drive. The air was fresh and cool after the hazy heat of Atlanta. He had called Carson’s secretary and told her that he would be out for the day, but he had not told her where he was going. The cop car, something of an antique Ford Fairlane, complete with a bubblegum dome on top and a huge chromed spotlight on the driver’s side, pulled into the diner parking row. The lettering on the side of the car proclaimed longstreet county sheriff’s DEPARTMENT.

Stafford got out, put his suit jacket on, and reached back into his car for his briefcase and an overnight bag. Because of his arm, he had to pull them out one at a time. When he straightened back up, a large uniformed man was approaching him. He wore a dove gray Stetson hat and had huge black eyebrows over down-sloping dark, almost black yes, whitish gray sideburns, and a large black handlebar mustache that reminded Stafford of pictures of Wy att Earp. He wore a tan uniform shirt and trousers, brown boots, and a large chrome-plated pistol on his right hip. The expression on his face seemed generally friendly, for which Stafford was suddenly glad.

“Good day, Mr. Stafford. I’m Sheriff John Lee Warren. Welcome to Graniteville, suh.”

Stafford returned the greeting, offering his left hand, which caused an awkward moment, but then the sheriff took it in his own right hand.

He wondered how the sheriff knew his name. The sheriff anticipated his question. “Mrs. Warren told me you’d be comin’ up from the city. Asked if I might show you out to Willow Grove.”

“I’d appreciate that, Sheriff. Should I call Mrs. Warren first?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Mr. Stafford,” the sheriff replied. He had a deep, authoritative voice. “But you might want to grab a bite; the food here isn’t bad. If you’d care to join me?” “My pleasure, Sheriff,” Stafford said. He put his bags back in his car, locked the doors, and followed the sheriff over to the diner. Propriety required he tell the sheriff why he was here. He hadn’t exactly been sneaking into town, not with the big white government sedan. But he knew about the power Georgia county sheriffs exerted within their rural fiefdoms, and he guessed that up here in the mountains, that power was not trivial. He also wondered about the name Warren.

“What happened to the arm?” the sheriff asked as they entered the diner.

“Zigged when I should have zagged,” Stafford said. “Caught a nine through the humerus. I’m working on getting it back again.”

The Waffle House was full of locals, but the sheriff walked confidently to a back corner table, which was evidently his for the lunch hour. A waitress followed them back. He invited Stafford to order and told the waitress he’d have his usual. When she left, he gave Stafford an expansive look and asked what might be bringing a federal officer to Graniteville. He had a southern accent, but it was not very pronounced.

“Not quite sure myself, Sheriff,” Stafford replied. “I got a call from a Ms. Gwen Warren that she would like to talk to me, so here I am.”

“And how might that lady know you, suh?” The sheriff’s expression remained amiable, but those dark eyes never wavered. Stafford was aware that people in the diner, mostly men, were giving the two of them covert glances.

Stafford explained a little bit about the DCIS, then briefly described the incident at the airport. ‘ ‘I’m following up on an ongoing investigation involving possible fraud at one of the Atlanta military bases. I gave her my card that day in the airport. Her call came as a surprise, frankly, but she didn’t want to discuss it over the phone, so here I am. Oh, and here are my credentials.”

The sheriff examined his ID and then handed it back. “Thank you, suh. I knew about the FBI, the CIA, the ATF, and the DBA. I must admit that DCIS is a new one to me. And I apologize for all the questions, but sometimes we have federal officers who come through and, uh …”

“I understand, Sheriff. It’s my agency’s policy to keep local law-enforcement officials informed anytime we operate off the federal reservation. I would have checked in with you in any event, except that I still don’t know what this is about.”

The sheriff nodded as the waitress brought Stafford his hamburger. The sheriff had a platter of scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, biscuits, and hash browns. The sheriff fell to his late breakfast without further conversation, so Stafford did the same. The diner was noisy, with waitresses calling in raucous orders in the code peculiar to Waffle House restaurants throughout the South, acknowledged by ribald comments from the cook amid the clash and clatter of crockery from behind the counter. When they had finished, the waitress brought them both a cup of hot black coffee without their asking, then cleared the plates away.

“So, Mr. Stafford,” the sheriff began. “You think mebbe Mrs. Warren knew this man—what was his name, Carson?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff,” Stafford replied. “Well, actually, when Carson went down, he appeared to be engaged in a staring match with a young girl who was with Mrs. Warren.”

The sheriff paused with his coffee mug in the air and gave Stafford a searching look. “Can you describe the girl, suh?”

Stafford did, and the sheriff began to nod his head slowly. “That there would be Jessamine,” he said. “She’s one of the children at Willow Grove.”

“Jessamine? And Willow Grove is what, an orphanage?” -The sheriff nodded again. “They’re not called that in

” Georgia anymore, of course. Orphanage is no longer politically correct. Now they’re group homes. State-licensed, inspected, and, to a degree, funded. Mrs. Warren is the director.” “Jessamine,” Stafford said. “Interesting name.”

F The sheriff gave him a speculative look. “A jessamine is an Appalachian flower,” he said. “And, yes, she is an interesting child. A very interesting child. And I suspect that’s what Mrs. Warren wants to talk to you about, but I think we should let her do that. When you’re finished, I’ll show you the way up there. The motel will keep you a room.”

They left the diner after paying at the register, and Stafford followed the sheriff in his own car. They drove back into the town center, went around the square, and headed out the eastern road. They crossed what appeared to be that same deep creek that ran by the motel, then began to climb through a narrow canyon, flanked on either side by sloping slabs of dynamited rock. After a few minutes, a small plateau opened up on the left, revealing a large two story farmhouse set back about two hundred feet from the road. The house was an old Victorian with screened porches surrounding all four sides on both floors and a dark green copper roof.

A landscaped driveway led up from the road to a graveled circle at the front of the house. On the left was a large pond surrounded by a dense stand of willow trees; on the right was an orderly grove of old pecan trees. There was a sloping open field with protruding rock ledges to its right. The pond dam, which overlooked the road, was partially obscured by the willows at the lower-left side of the property. A small creek flowed under the road from a deep pool at its base. There was a rambling white picket fence running from the corner of the pond across the front of the property, with drooping double wooden gates at the driveway.

There appeared to be horse paddocks and outbuildings behind the main house, although Stafford did not see any horses in the fields. A tree covered mountain slope on the opposite side of the road loomed close above the road, and the fields’ behind the house were shaded by an even larger hill. The pastures behind the house occupied what little flat land there was on the property.

The sheriff turned in at the drive, drove straight up to the house, and parked. Stafford followed, parking off to one side. The sheriff went up onto the front porch and rang a bell. Stafford waited on the steps until the door opened, and the woman from the airport greeted them. She was wearing a gray dress and had a light sweater draped over her shoulders.

She appeared to be perfectly composed, except that Stafford noticed that she was gripping the edges of the sweater with the fingers of her right hand.

“Gwen, this is Mr. Stafford from Washington,” the sheriff said. “We had lunch down at the Waffle House. Had us a little chat.” He paused for a second, as if suddenly lost for words. Stafford noticed that some of the sheriff’s authority seemed to have deserted him. “Well, I guess I’ll leave y’all to your business, then,” he finished.

“Thank you, John Lee,” the woman murmured, dismissing him with a brief smile as she opened the screen door for Stafford to enter. She did not offer to shake hands, sparing Stafford the embarrassment of the left-handed dance. The sheriff nodded once at Stafford and went back to his car. She looked after John Lee Warren for a moment, long enough to give him a parting wave, which gave Stafford a moment to examine her.

She was indeed tall, almost exactly his own height, but he was fascinated by her face. In profile, she reminded him of a Roman cameo: up swept hair, pronounced high cheekbones framing extraordinary green eyes, full, slightly parted lips.

Her expression was serene, almost regal, enhanced by the composure of a woman who knows she is attractive. She appeared to be in her early forties, and she had an attractive figure, which her workaday clothes did little to flatter. When he finally realized she was looking back at him, her eyes held the barest hint of a smile. He felt himself blushing a little. “Shall we go inside, Mr. Stafford?” ‘

THURSDAY, FORT GILLEM DRMO, ATLANTA, 12:15 P.M. At the agreed time, Carson placed a call to Tangent at the 800 number.

“This is Tangent.”

“Carson.”

“Right. We are ready to proceed.”

Carson stopped to think out what he was going to say. An 800 number from a pay phone would be hard to tap and trace, but not impossible. They both understood that it was prudent to speak somewhat in code.

“All right,” Carson replied. “Do you have a proposed date?”

“We do. This coming Sunday. Time at your convenience.”

“That’ll work. How about here at the DRMO? Say after nine P. M.?”

This tune it was Tangent who hesitated. “I don’t know -// if that will work. We were thinking somewhere off federal property.”

Dammit, Carson thought “But here in Atlanta?”

“Oh, yes. Our pickup team is prepared to go anywhere you want in Atlanta. Within reason, of course.”

Pickup team. An image of the drug deal in a parking lot flashed through his mind again. “All right,” he said. “But I was proposing here at the DRMO so that the item doesn’t have to be moved. For obvious reasons, I should think.”

Another hesitation. “Yes. We understand. Let me speak to my principals.

How do you want the payment?”

“In cash.”

“That’s available. But you might want to think about other forms of value. That amount in cash is a lot of paper. Don’t mistake me—we can and will do that. But there are other possible modalities.”

“Such as?”

“Such as diamonds. Purchased by us from a jeweler of your choice. He authenticates their value for you and holds them as trusted agent. We get the item; it’s what you say it is, you go get the diamonds. Just as good as cash, if not better. And much easier to conceal. We’re talking twenty top-quality stones.”

Carson knew absolutely nothing about diamonds. “Let me think about that,” he said. “I’m … I’m nervous about all this. This is a lot of money.”

“I understand.”

“I mean, everything up to now has been some cash hi an envelope. Money by mail. But this—”

“I .understand. For a million, you’re afraid we might stiff you. But consider this: We stiff you, you can always go public. Yes, .you’d be in trouble, but if it got out that there was a cylinder of this stuff loose in the arms market, we’d be unable to sell it. It would become a useless, dangerous liability. Surely you understand that we’re going to make more than we’re paying you for this thing. I’ll be honest with you: What you’re getting is the ultimate client’s deposit money, okay? But it’s not our money, so we have no motive to mess around with this deal.

More importantly, the whole thing has to remain secret. Optimally, the Army won’t even know it’s missing, and no one else can know it’s moving through clandestine commercial channels.

That’s also your protection.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Carson said, not wanting even to mention the obvious: They could take the cylinder and kill him, and maintain their precious secrecy. Tangent seemed to read his thoughts.

“And you could always preposition something that could be released to the public in the event something happened to you. We’re assuming you will have done that. Look, Carson, we’ve been doing business for a long time. Good business. Smart business. Low-level, intermittent, nothing to attract auditors. Yes, this is a lot of money. But it’s potentially a hell of score for us, too. And we know this is a onetime deal. Hell, we could both retire, you know? So we have no motivation to screw around here. You know you can’t move it by yourself. You can’t even destroy it.

Where would you dispose of something like that?”

“That’s true.” Actually, that isn’t true, he thought. There’s always the Monster. The real question is, Why would I ever want to destroy it?

“So think about those payment terms, and get back to me in, say, twenty-four hours. We’ll evaluate the DRMO as the place to do the deed.

Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, second item—Stafford. Our sources tell us he is who he says he is, but the real reason he’s down there has very little to do with any auction scams or even with DRMOs.”

“That sounds like good news.”

“It is. He’s been shit-canned. Thrown out of Washington. He’s a damned whistle-blower. Got some Senior Executive Service guy in the DCIS up on charges, and then got a senior FBI guy in the shit, too. Now he’s a pariah in the DCIS. He may make it sound like he’s on some big deal case, but he isn’t. We’ll need to be circumspect, of course, but our information is that he’s not a player.”

“That is good news.”

“Yes, we think so. This is a guy whose world is imploding. His wife left him when all the shit started over the whistle-blowing. Divorced his sorry ass and ran off with some Air Force colonel. And in the middle of that, he was getting gas one night in some minimart. Unbeknownst to him, two of Washington’s upstanding citizens were doing a smash-and-grab. He took a stray round in the arm.”

“Yeah, that’s him; he’s basically one-armed. Keeps his right hand in his suit pocket all the time.”

“Right, that’s the guy, then. He supposedly started drinking big-time, but our source wasn’t sure if he was still on the sauce. Hell, after all that, I’d be drinking like a fish. Anyway, be polite, bury him in cooperation and bureaucratic bullshit, but let’s proceed. I’ve gotta go.

Let’s talk same time tomorrow, okay? Think about how we’re going to do this thing.” “Okay,” Carson said, feeling much better already.

“Here’s the new eight hundred number,” Tangent said.

Carson wrote it down, hung up, and walked back to his car. Everything Tangent had said made sense, and it confirmed his own judgment about Stafford. He could forget Investigator Stafford. Truth was, it wasn’t Stafford he was worried about; it was Tangent and that royal “we” he used all the time. He realized now that he knew absolutely nothing about Tangent other than a constantly changing 800 number and his voice. And several years of reliable cash, he reminded himself.

But this deal was for a million dollars, which upped the stakes considerably. So now he had to think in detail about how tp do it. As he left the pay phone, he felt a return of that fluttery feeling, a sense that what he was up to was perhaps getting away from him. By the time he got back to his office, his secretary had returned from lunch. He asked her where Mr. Stafford was. She said he had left a message that he would be out for the day. Back tomorrow afternoon. He thought about that. Now what was that guy up to? On the other hand, he thought, why should I give a shit?

THURSDAY, THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D. C., 12:10P. M. General Waddell shut the door behind them as he escorted Colonel Fuller into his private office. They had just come from the first meeting of the newly formed Security Working Group. Carrothers had come up with the name, saying they needed something that would point directly away from the real focus of the task force. Colonel Fuller, an old friend of General Waddell, had been appointed chairman of the task force.

“Well, Myer,” Fuller said. “This is a real mess.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Ambrose.” Fuller eyed the general for a moment. “Okay, I will,” he said. “Being probably the only ex-biological weaponeer still on active duty, I’ll tell y$u something no one else knows. Not those smart young officers out there, nor anyone at Fort Dietrick, either.”

Waddell just stared at him. The reports in from Tooele and Anniston were pointing more and more toward the distinct probability that a cylinder of Wet Eye was missing. None of the bright young men at the meeting had had the first idea of what to do next, including his deputy.

“Wet Eye is not entirely a chemical weapon,” Fuller said. “To be succinct, it’s a hybrid.”

Waddell leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk and resting his head in his hands. He peered over the tips of his fingers at Fuller. “I don’t think I want to hear this, Ambrose.” . “Somebody has to hear it, Myer. Might as well be you, seeing as you’re the proud owner of this developing shit cyclone.”

“Okay, lay it on me.”

“Wet Eye is a hybrid weapon. The only one developed under this great nation’s biological, not chemical, weapons program, before Tricky Dicky shut the BW program down back in 1968. It is a chemical weapon, but it has a biological constituent, a very special pathogen that prospers in a toxic chemical soup. It’s a one-two punch: The chemical constituent disables the victim; the pathogen then does some serious physiological damage.”

“Specifically?”

“It eats the eye. It literally propagates a bacterial chain reaction that consumes the human eyeball. The chemical creates the disabling pathology that gives this stuff its name, a wet-looking, bleary, teary, swollen eyeball that can no longer focus—hence, Wet Eye. The pathogen then consumes the eyeball tissue all the way back to the optic nerve root.”

“Great Christ,” Waddell muttered.

“Yes. Strategically, it was a hell of a weapon—instead of killing, it blinds. The enemy is presented not with corpses, which they can ignore in the heat of battle, but with mega casualties that overwhelm their medical facilities, not to mention gutting their capacity to fight.” “Great Christ,” Waddell said again.

“Indeed. But there’s more. I went back into the BW archives to see when this stuff was developed and tested. Found out something interesting. We didn’t develop this stuff. The Russians did.”

“Somehow that makes me feel better,” Waddell said. “Hold that thought, General,” Fuller replied with an ironic smile. “Apparently the CIA acquired this substance when a defector came over from the other side.

He brought with him a film clip. I’ve had it copied into video format I have to warn you—this is pretty gory stuff. The Russians used humans for the test.”

“Humans?”

Fuller nodded. “Probably residents of the Gulag. This film goes back to the late fifties. But I wasn’t sure this should be seen by those men out there in the working group.”

“Okay, Ambrose,” Waddell said with a grimace. “Roll that pogue.”

Fuller put the videocassette into the VCR and adjusted the controls. A grainy black-and-white film without sound came on the screen. The scene showed what looked like a dirt prison yard, complete with guard towers and high barbed-wire fences, the bottom half of which were clearly studded with electrical insulators made of black glass. Beyond the prison yard, there was only a dense, dark forest. The film had obviously been shot from one of the guard towers, and the barrel of a machine gun protruded into the frame, somewhat out of focus. In the center of the yard, thirty disheveled prisoners sat on the ground with their hands in their laps. Most were staring down at the ground, with only a few looking up at the camera. They were dressed in ragged shirts and pants, and their heads were shaved clean. They were not quite close enough for their expressions to be visible.

At first, nothing happened. Then there was movement on the other guard towers, and the guards could be seen stepping back inside the huts and closing their doors. The machine-gun barrel moved a couple of times, pointing down into the compound. There was an awkward jump cut to a close-up. Suddenly, the prisoners began grabbing at their faces. Some rolled down onto the ground, others got up, and still others began writhing in place. All of them were grabbing at their faces, and then at their eyes. The shot jumped again, showing individual faces; the prisoners were screaming soundlessly and rolling around in the dirt, some holding then-eyes, others clawing at theirs. The scene finally focused on one man who had stood up, backing blindly toward the fence.

He kept clasping his hands to his face and then bringing them forward, as if to see what was on them. Watching a close-up of the man’s face, Waddell gasped. The man’s eyes were gone. In their place were two empty sockets, blood streaming down the man’s face even as he smeared it all over himself while attempting to feel his eyes. He kept backing up until he hit the wires, which blasted him back out into the yard with an arc and a puff of white smoke. He fell headlong to the ground and did not move, a pool of fluids spreading out around his face in the mud.

The victims were usually moving too much for individual faces to be discernible. When certain faces did come into focus, they were all the same, however. There were two gaping black holes where their eyes had been, from which blood and fluids covered their faces like some deadly aboriginal war paint. Fuller shut off the video.

“There’s more,” he said. “But you get the picture, I think.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” Waddell said. “Reagan was right. The Russians were the evil empire.” “Were?” Fuller said. “What makes you think they’ve gotten rid of this stuff?” Waddell sighed and rubbed his eyes, men realized what he was doing and got up and walked over to the window.

“Put what we’ve just seen in technical context, Ambrose. How dangerous is a single cylinder of Wet Eye?”

Fuller dropped the VCR remote onto the table. “The truthful answer is that I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s not a particularly stable brew.

It’s temperature-sensitive. It has to be stored in special environmental containers. There are indications—not proof, mind you, but indications—that the pathogen is capable of mutating if not maintained under those specified conditions. Now unfortunately, these were statistical projections, as opposed to facts based on lab evidence.”

“We didn’t test it?”

“We never tested it. Not after seeing that film. In fact, a few years after we synthesized it, the program was terminated, because we could never be sure of what might going on in the cylinders. That’s one of the reasons the

BW division didn’t make much of this stuff.”

“One of the reasons?”

“The other reason, of course, was that it wasn’t binary safe.”

“Ah, right. So it was undiluted demon spawn right there in the can. But I thought we destroyed all that biologic shit when the program folded.”

“I love the way the Chemical Corps denigrates biological weapons,” Fuller said with a wary smile. “As if chemical weapons were somehow a more wholesome proposition.”

“Cut the shit, Ambrose. We’re hi trouble here.” Wad dell’s tone was more that of a major general than friend.

“Yes, sir, we are. Sorry, I guess I’ve been in this business too damn long. To answer your question, yes, almost all of the biologies were destroyed. But the biological weapons destruction facility was originally at Pine Bluff, in Arkansas. Wet Eye was stored at Anniston, Alabama. Nothing happened for a few years, but then when the Army got around to the Wet Eye arsenal, it had to get permission to move it. You know, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Transportation, like that.

When they got a look at what it was, they all said no, naturally. Since the Army couldn’t get permission to move it, one thousand cylinders of Wet Eye just sat there in the tombs at Anniston until this year, when this country finally ratified the Chemical Weapons Treaty.”

“I don’t remember going after permission to move this stuff,” Waddell said.

“I asked the Army international-law types about that. It seems your JCS reps to the CW Convention put language in about five years ago, stating that unannounced movement of chemical munitions for the purposes of destruction was authorized. Since that language is now in a treaty, and since treaties supersede national laws, your people did not have to ask permission. They just shipped it.”

“Wow. And when we finally shipped them, we lost one.”

“So it would appear. But I guess my point is that we have even more reason to find it quickly, because if it isn’t in its coffin, it might be changing into something a lot worse than Wet Eye.”

“Is that possible? Jesus. This is awful.”

“Well, I’m going to have the group do some discreet checking. The cylinders purportedly were taken out of their coffins and put into tombs awaiting’ destruction at the contained furnace facility at Tooele. If it had been my call, the cylinders would never have been separated from their coffins.”

“Why in hell were they?”

“You’re going to love it. Federal regulations, this time covering surplus, reusable Defense Department material. Remember all that “Fleecing of America’ TV coverage last year on the Defense Logistics Agency’s huge spare-parts inventory? Well, now the Defense Department is required by Congress to offer any reusable thing it declares surplus to the DRMO system. The rules go so far as to state that any nontoxic or nonhazardous material associated even with the chemical weapons program has to be destroyed in the DRMO demil process.”

“That’s crazy. The coffins could have been destroyed right there at Tooele!”

“Left hand, regulate the right hand. Yes, sir, they certainly could have. I suspect this rule probably had more to do with sustaining work for the DRMOs than with the CW program. Anyway, the empty coffins were then all shipped from Tooele back to Anniston, which, in turn, consigned them to the nearest DRMO, which is in Georgia, we think. Being CW-related material, they would have been earmarked to go directly to demil, of course. I’m not sure how the demil process works, but if you approve, the Security Working Group is going to trace them.”

“If I approve?”

“As soon as Headquarters U.S. Army starts asking questions about a shipment of CW containers, wouldn’t you expect a buzz?

I didn’t want to do anything until we’ve thought through the risk of public disclosure. Was I right?”

Waddell nibbed his face with his hands and nodded. “Yes, of course you were. Especially considering this business about the biological component.” Waddell returned to his desk before continuing. “This aspect, I think, we should keep to ourselves for the time being.”

“Really, General?”

“Yes. The group doesn’t need to know about the biologic angle in order to find it.”

“And General Carrothers?”

“Same argument. This is a need-to-know issue right now.”

Fuller just looked at him for a moment, but Waddell wouldn’t look at him. Then Fuller had an idea. “I think I need to turn some of my people on to a simulation drill,” he said. “See if we can determine or predict what might be happening in a cylinder of Wet Eye living outside of its coffin.”

“Okay,” Waddell replied distractedly. “But surely if someone at a DRMO found something in a CW container, wouldn’t we have been notified?”

“You’re assuming that anyone at a DRMO would open a CW environmental container. I know I wouldn’t. Look, if we’re real, real lucky, Myer, and the demil process is a totally contained process, we can maybe make the case here that the cylinder must have been destroyed. If it was lost, it was in one of those coffins. All the coffins have probably been destroyed by now. Shit on us for letting one get loose, but everyone can relax now, because it most likely went through a contained demil process.”

Waddell sat back in his chair. This was the first ray of hope he had seen since this crisis had begun. It would depend on the DRMO, of course, but Fuller was right: If they could certify that a batch of containers had been shipped from Utah, the same number as had been shipped originally from Anniston, and assuming that no one at the DRMO had opened them, just sent them directly to a closed destruction process, then the logical assumption was that anything in the containers would also have been destroyed, assuming it was a contained process, as Fuller had pointed out. Lots of assumptions there, he thought. He blotted out a quick vision of a dozen civilian workers streaming out of a building somewhere with bleeding sockets where their eyes had been. He looked over at Fuller, who was watching him work it out. —F; “Which DRMO in Georgia, exactly?” Waddell asked.

THURSDAY, WILLOW GROVE HOME, GRAN1TEVILLE, GEORGIA, 1:15 P.M. J Gwinette Warren led Stafford across the large screened porch and through a formal entryway. The ceilings inside were at least fourteen feet high, and the interior was cool, somewhat dark, and smelled of crayons. The front doorway opened into a main hallway, with a large airy parlor room on the left that had been converted into a classroom for small children.

The double doors to what should have been its twin on the right were closed. A staircase rose up the left side of the fiall to the second floor. Stafford wondered where the children were, but Mrs. Warren walked straight back into an expansive well-lighted kitchen area, and then she turned right into an office, where she invited Stafford to sit down.

The office was long and somewhat narrow, reflecting its antecedent as the kitchen pantry. There was a desk near the single window and high bookshelves down one of the long sides. The opposite wall had several framed academic certificates, as well as what looked like a collection of family pictures. A large white PC sat to one ,side of the desk, and behind and to the left of the desk, there was an alcove crowded with other office equipment. In front of the desk were two upholstered chairs, and behind them a small conference table. She sat across from him in one of the upholstered chairs and crossed her slim legs.

Stafford found himself distracted by this woman. He secretly wanted another moment to examine her face, but he forced himself to get back to business. “Well, Mrs. Warren, I believe you called me.” “Yes, I did,” she said. Her voice was husky, as he had noticed before, and her diction was unusually precise, with only the barest trace of a Georgia accent.

“Before we begin, I’d appreciate it if you would explain what you are, Mr. Stafford. I’m not familiar with your organization.”

Her gaze was direct, but if she was aware of his interest in her as a woman, she gave no sign of it.

Stafford proffered his credentials, which she dutifully examined. He briefly explained the mission of the DCIS, and why he was in Atlanta.

“I’m assuming your call has something to do with what happened in the airport that day?”

She gave him a long, level look before replying. In the subdued lighting of her office, her enormous green eyes were the color of jade.

“Yes, Mr. Stafford, it does,” she said. “I’m not sure where to begin with this. Perhaps I ought to tell you about Willow Grove School first.”

“This is a school? I thought the sheriff said it was a home.”

“It’s both, but he’s right. It’s first and foremost a group home, what used to be called an ‘orphanage.’ This house has been in my father’s family for a longtime. My father was a doctor, and my mother was a schoolteacher here in Graniteville. This place was called Willow Grove Farm back when I was born here. I came back to it permanently almost ten years ago, when I was divorced. It was my father’s idea, originally, to start an orphanage.”

“How many kids do you have here, Mrs. Warren?”

“Now only six. We’re licensed for eight. That’s fairly typical of group homes in Georgia. Few of them are very large,-. We have five youngsters and Jessamine, who is a teenager.”

“That’s a most unusual name, Mrs. Warren,” Stafford said. “The sheriff seemed to know her.” ; ‘

“We call her Jess.”

“And Warren? That’s also the sheriff’s name.”

“Yes, Mr. Stafford.” She was giving him that faintly challenging look again. “John Lee and I were married, after I came back to Graniteville from the university. We’re divorced now, but it’s—what’s the word?

Amicable? It’s difficult to be anything else in a town and county as small as this.”

“Especially if he’s the sheriff,” Stafford said, trying to lighten it up a little.

She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, as if still trying to decide whether or not to trust him with something. He heard noises from upstairs.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s true.” “And where do these kids come from?” he asked.

“The north Georgia mountains, primarily. The process begins when the state takes custody. These are basically normal kids who’ve been abused or neglected or even abandoned by their parents. The situations are usually bad enough that they’re never going back home.”

“So you don’t work with autistics, or things like that?”