Extreme Prey: A Novel Part 4

He smiled to himself: she had no idea what he had.

He still had his friends.

FOUR.

At one o'clock in the morning, with broken clouds hanging low in the sky, the scent of rain in the air: a blacktopped highway a half-mile out of Westile, home of the National Guard's D Company, 34th Engineers. The white pickup's lights were the only ones to be seen, other than a distant yard light or two.

"This is it," Marlys Purdy said over her shoulder, through the window to the pickup's truck bed. Cole was in the back, lying flat on a plastic air mattress, a pack between his feet. "Wait 'til I've stopped rolling."

Marlys didn't want to touch the brakes, because she didn't want the brake lights flas.h.i.+ng in the dark. The pickup rolled to a halt and she said, "Go now," and Cole bailed out the back, pulled on the pack, and humped down into the roadside ditch. At the bottom, he sank knee-deep in muck and, cursing, plowed through to the other side, the foul-smelling water soaking through his boots and into his socks.

Cole was wearing bow-hunter's camo, with the matching camo backpack, and carrying a StrongArm cutter. Out of the swampy water, he climbed the far side of the ditch and rolled across the fence and into the cornfield beyond, where he instantly became invisible.

With the truck gone, he for the first time realized exactly how dark it was. He could not see his own hands.

Marlys moved on to the next stop sign, looked both ways down a gravel road, and continued through town, out to Interstate 80 and a cl.u.s.ter of cheap motels and two gas stations. She didn't want anyone to see her face, so she parked at an empty motel s.p.a.ce and slid down in the driver's seat.

Nothing for her to do but wait.

- COLE MOVED a few rows back into the cornfield and pulled up his face mask, not so much for concealment-not yet-as to keep the corn leaves from cutting his face as he walked through them. He tried to be as quiet as he could be, but he was not quiet, to his own ears, as the saw-edged corn leaves dragged across the camo jacket and pants. The corn rows ran parallel to the road, and acted as guides: he followed two rows straight north, emerging at the gravel road that Marlys had crossed.

He waited inside the screen of corn, listening for motors, watching for lights, then climbed the fence and plodded through the ditch, feeling his way-this one was dry at the bottom-and across the road. He had to grope for the next fence, found it, dropped into another cornfield. That field ran right up to the edge of town and to the edge of the blacktop pad around the National Guard building.

When he got to the pad, he sat again, and listened for a while. He could hear some sound from the sleeping town, but not much-the hiss of a car going by on the main road, some sort of motor noise from far away, maybe at the grain elevator, and the muted rumble of traffic on the distant interstate highway. He could also see a little better in the thin reflected light from the other side of the Guard building.

Cole was apprehensive: not frightened, but tense. A lot could go wrong here: the story of his life.

- IN TROUBLE THROUGH most of his school years, he'd been sitting in an a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al's office, in seventh grade, and he heard the guy say to a secretary, "Him again. Something seriously wrong with that boy. He's had more fights than Muhammad Ali."

The secretary had said, "Shhh . . . he's right outside."

Cole pretended he hadn't heard, to everyone's relief; but he had heard. And he'd heard that stuff all the time, from the minute he walked into kindergarten and another kid asked, "What you lookin' at?" and Cole punched him in the face.

The only place he'd felt at all at home, besides when he was at home, had been in the Army. Army rules had been stupid, but simple, and following them hadn't been a problem. He was athletic enough that basic training had been a snap, and he'd driven a truck for years before the Army sent him to truck driving school.

Iraq had been different. After growing up in the fertile fields of Iowa, he'd looked down at the deserts surrounding Baghdad, and only one word came to mind: "s.h.i.+thole."

Iraq was a s.h.i.+thole, and in his whole time there, he'd seen nothing to change his opinion. Well, one thing, maybe. He'd come and gone through Kuwait, and if anything, Kuwait was even more of a s.h.i.+thole than Iraq. Was it possible to have a s.h.i.+thole lite? If so, then maybe that's what Iraq was.

Though Iraq had left him injured, there was one aspect about the place that fascinated him. The snipers. There'd been four of them at the FOB where he'd spent most of his time, and it wasn't so much the non-standard guns that had fascinated him, but the att.i.tude.

Whatever else you might say about them, the snipers were stone killers.

Told to kill, they would do it. They were cool: just do it.

He admired that. Liked it.

- COLE PUSHED THE SPEED DIAL b.u.t.ton on the cell phone, said, "Going in."

Marlys came back: "Don't get hurt."

Cole picked up the Hurst StrongArm cutter he'd surrept.i.tiously borrowed from the volunteer fire department. He was a volunteer, had a key to the building, and would have the cutter back before dawn.

He pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and sat for a few more seconds, letting the electricity flow through him. He was out there, he was operating, fighting the good fight. He'd driven tankers full of high-test gas through towns controlled by Al Qaeda fighters, and here he was again.

Well: more or less. Anyway, the action seemed to quell the headaches, clear the cobwebs from his brain, bring the world into focus. More than the VA had ever done for him.

- THE NATIONAL GUARD PARKING LOT was illuminated by two pole lights, both on the other side of the building, near the parking lot entrance. He crossed the fence, not to the National Guard building itself, but to a steel shed at the edge of the parking lot. He was somewhat concealed by parked Humvees, but not entirely. If anyone were to unexpectedly drive past, he might be seen, even with the camo.

The shed was locked with a fat-shanked padlock. Cole turned on the StrongArm and cut through the shank. He pulled the door open and stepped inside, where there was barely enough room to stand, pulled the door shut again, and turned on his flashlight. Now he was invisible again, from the outside. If somebody had seen him going in . . . nothing to do about that.

"You're sweating like a dog," Cole muttered to himself. "You stink."

His boots were even worse, reeking of the muck from the roadside marsh.

- THE SHED WAS EMPTY, but on the floor, set in a foot-high circle of concrete designed to keep water out, was a steel manhole cover, with another fat padlock on it. The StrongArm cut that one, too, but it took a minute, and a few tries. When it was done, with a loud clunk, Cole froze, and listened. Heard nothing-and realized that while the clunk was loud in his ears, it probably wouldn't have been heard ten feet away.

"Move," he whispered.

The manhole cover had two steel loop handles, and he lifted it out of the circle of concrete. Beneath it was an eight-foot-deep hole, with poured concrete walls and a concrete floor, and a ladder going down.

Cole went down.

- MARLYS'S CELL PHONE RANG. Jesse. She answered, "Yeah? Jesse?"

"Where are you guys?"

"Went out to the all-night Walmart, thought we'd stop and get a bite. We're off I-80."

"Well, I'm home. See you when you get here."

"Don't wait up," Marlys said. She hurriedly clicked off: couldn't have the phone tied up, if Cole called.

- COLE SHONE THE FLASHLIGHT around the underground concrete box. The box was lined with wooden shelves, on which he found two wooden boxes of plastic explosive and smaller boxes of blasting caps. Candy store!

If it all went off at once, he thought, it might blow the manhole cover to the moon, but that deep in the ground, with bunker-weight concrete all around, probably wouldn't hurt much else. Except him, if he were still there. The cops might not even find the raspberry-jelly stains he'd leave behind . . .

- COLE CARRIED a whole box of explosive up the ladder, left the box on the ground-level floor, went back down for a box of blasting caps and four electronic detonators. Back up the ladder, he stuffed the blasting caps and detonators in his backpack, picked up the StrongArm. He listened for a minute, in the steel shed, then turned the flashlight off, put it in his jacket pocket, and picked up the box of explosive, which probably weighed twenty pounds.

As he did that, he saw lights swing across the hairline crack where the door wasn't quite closed tight: his heart jumped and he touched the holster at his hip. Then the lights dimmed and he heard a car accelerating away. Somebody had used the parking lot to turn around.

He hoped.

He waited another minute, then another. He reached toward the door to ease it open . . .

Scotch tape! He'd almost forgotten. He got a roll of it out of the side pocket of his camo cargo pants, put it in his mouth, picked up the box of explosive again, and pushed the shed door open.

Outside, in the dark again, Cole lingered just a minute, fitting the broken padlock back on the shed's door latch, fastening the broken ends with a strip of Magic Mending tape. He and Marlys thought it unlikely that the engineers would go into the explosives dump with any regularity. If you could see the padlock hanging there, in place . . . it could be days or even weeks before anybody discovered that the C4 was gone.

With the padlock in place, Cole picked up the box of explosive and the StrongArm, humped them into the cornfield, back the way he'd come in. He crossed the gravel road and then, instead of going back into the second field, he jogged down the road to the corner, where he sank behind a clump of weeds. No point walking through that swamp again.

- A MILE AWAY, Marlys was getting nervous: then the cell phone lit up, and the call came in.

"I'm out. We're good. Pick me up at that corner."

"Coming," she said. No identifiers.

As Marlys started the truck, she felt as though somebody had stuck an icicle in her heart.

Until this moment, they'd done nothing illegal. With all the reconnaissance they'd done, with all the research, they'd really had no way to get at Bowden-nothing that wasn't purely suicidal. She wasn't suicidal.

She had worked out an idea of how they might kill Bowden and get away with it, but she didn't have what she needed to do that: now they did.

Marlys was a fatalist: if she had a perfect plan, but if something were to stop her from doing that, by denying her the materials . . . well, then, Fate had spoken, hadn't it?

Bowden would walk away from Iowa, get elected, and the whole ugly system would grind on.

But so far, Fate was telling her that she was right on course.

FIVE.

At eight in the morning, Lucas called Bell Wood, a friend who headed the major crimes section of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. Wood said, "I was talking to that f.u.c.kin' Flowers a few days ago and he said you're being a hangdog about it all and you still don't have a job."

"Yup."

"What are you doing? You gotta work, man."

"Well, I'm putting an addition on my cabin up in Wisconsin. I've been doing that all summer," Lucas said. "Right at this very moment, I'm making an inquiry . . . for Governor Henderson. I'm down here in Iowa, in Ames."

"Uh-oh. What's going on?" Wood asked.

Lucas explained about the e-mails and the woman and the man who'd spoken directly to Henderson, and the problem with getting someone to take the threat seriously.

"We've got a security team dealing with the campaigns. Send me the e-mails, and everything else you've got, and I'll run it past the team," Wood said. "Will you keep looking at it?"

"Yeah, unless somebody tells me different," Lucas said.

"I say keep going. You got a gun with you?" Wood asked.

"In the car, I'm not carrying," Lucas said.

"Listen, down here we've got a professional weapons permit deal that would allow you to carry," Wood said. "I'll talk to my guy at Weapons Permits and I'll get you one."

"That'd be nice. I don't think I'll need it, but . . . I'll take it," Lucas said. "And I'll s.h.i.+p you those e-mails in one minute. I've already done some checking around, and I'd like to see if you could get me phone numbers and addresses for three different people. None of them are suspects, but they run political groups that might give me a lead on this woman and the other guy."

"Send them," Wood said. "I'll get back to you as quick as I can, with the information and the permit."

- LUCAS SENT THE E-MAILS to Wood, then called Mitford, the governor's weasel. "When are you leaving?"

"Fifteen minutes. Well, that's when we're scheduled to leave. Probably be more like half an hour."

"I'd like to stop by and talk to the governor for a minute," Lucas said.

"Better hurry," Mitford said.

- THE GOVERNOR'S CAMPAIGN PARTY was in another interstate motel, less than a block away. The campaign bus was idling in the parking lot, belching out diesel exhaust, and a group of underlings was loading luggage and office equipment onto it. Lucas found Alice Green getting a cup of coffee in the front lobby.

"Got breakfast in the campaign suite, if you want a bagel and cream cheese," she said. "Coffee and c.o.kes and Pepsi for caffeine freaks."

Together they walked back to the campaign suite, and Lucas said, "It occurs to me that once I start digging around, somebody could get p.i.s.sed off at Henderson . . ."

"Thought of that. The governor knows what these people look like and we've got a safe word. Rumpelstiltskin. He says that, we close around him."

"Best you can do, I guess," Lucas said. "Anybody talk to the Gardner campaign?"

"I don't think he's important enough to shoot, but yeah, I talked to his head security guy and sent him the photo and Elmer's descriptions."

At the campaign suite, Lucas got a toasted bagel with jam and a Diet c.o.ke, and followed Green to Henderson's suite, where Mitford and Henderson were on hardwired phones, dealing with political business back in Minnesota.

As Lucas waited, his phone rang: Bell Wood.

"That was easy," Wood said. "All three of those guys are in our database, they've all been involved in various marches and sit-ins, they've all gone to jail at one time or another. Two of them are nonviolent, more or less, but the other one has a problem. I'm dropping it all to your e-mail right . . . now."

"How big is the guy's problem?" Lucas asked.

"He's getting a little old for it now, but he liked to beat people up, back in the day," Wood said. "Details in the e-mail."

"Thanks. I'll keep you up to date," Lucas said.

- MITFORD AND HENDERSON were still yammering away on the phones, so Lucas called up the e-mail on his phone, then called up Google Maps. There were three names, with three addresses and phone numbers. Switching between the map and the addresses, he located a David Leonard in Atlantic, Iowa, a small town south of I-80 between Des Moines and Omaha; a Joseph Likely, from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in the southeastern part of the state; and a Clark Alfred from Mason City, off I-35, near the Iowa-Minnesota border.

Checking the map a final time, he found that Mount Pleasant wasn't too far from Ottumwa, one of the towns from which the suspicious e-mails had been sent, and the drive between the two towns was fast and straightforward, on U.S. Highway 34.