Astride a Pink Horse (35 page)

Everything was in place—secured, jelled, glued, and ready. Rikia Takata’s protective radiation gear sat on the front seat of the Volkswagen along with Silas Breen’s .32 and the all-important cell-phone bomb trigger. As a final precaution, he’d let the air out of the tires of the U-Haul to make certain that if things got dicey, the truck bomb casing, as it were, couldn’t easily be moved.

With his hands wet with perspiration, he recalled something a high school Latin teacher had once crammed into his head:
Thrice is better than twice
. Heeding that teacher’s singsong advice, he decided to check the leads to the cobalt-60 capsules a final time.

The twenty lead-encased capsules didn’t look very ominous. In fact, lined up as they were, ten each on the top of a couple of pickup-bed toolboxes in the U-Haul’s cargo bay, they reminded him of spice-rack bottles. Remnants of the gel that would become the current that would trigger his nuclear blast clung to his fingers. Tacky and slightly rubbery, the gel had a cleansing, post-thunderstorm, fractured-ozone smell. A smell that was overwhelmed by the putrid smell of Silas Breen’s already decaying body.

As he surveyed the cargo bay and its contents one last time, he thought briefly about Hiroshima, his photographer grandfather,
and the incinerated man on a pink horse. “Done,” he whispered as if speaking to someone. Glancing over his shoulder at the capsules for a final time, he stepped down from the cargo bay onto the truck’s bumper and jumped to the ground.

Bernadette spotted the turnoff to the forest service road seconds before Cozy. “That’s it just ahead,” she yelled above the rumble of the motorcycle. “Twelfth road from the airport’s southern boundary fence.”

“See it.” Cozy slowed down and turned onto a narrow, badly rutted dirt road. “It sure looked smoother from the air,” he said as the motorcycle bumped through ruts, and over tree stumps and rocks.

“Everything does.”

“Think he’s still here?”

“Yep.”

Cozy eased the motorcycle to a stop, slipped the shotgun, a lightweight pistol-grip double-barrel that Freddy had purchased in Colombia after once nearly being kidnapped there, out of its case, rotated the case aside, and handed the gun to Bernadette. “Think you can handle it?”

“I’ve handled heavier.”

“What about pulling the trigger if it comes to that?” Cozy asked, nosing the bike farther into the forest.

“I’m a fighter pilot, Cozy. They train us to kill,” Bernadette said, tightening her now one-handed grip around Cozy’s waist.

They’d bumped another quarter of a mile down the kidney-jarring road when Cozy saw a flash of something that looked silver
or gray moving in the trees. It took him a second or two to realize that whatever it was was moving fast and headed their way.

By the time Bernadette shouted, “Something’s headed for us!” Rikia Takata, tightly gripping the steering wheel of the Volkswagen he was driving with both hands as he sped away from the U-Haul truck, spotted them. Recognizing Bernadette, he muttered, “Shit,” and floored the accelerator.

As car and motorcycle closed the gap between them in some bizarre, deep-pine-forest game of chicken, Cozy saw only fog. “Cozy!” Bernadette screamed as Cozy continued to accelerate. They were within sixty feet of each other when Cozy yelled, “Shoot, Bernadette! Shoot!”

Taking aim at the VW’s windshield, Bernadette squeezed the shotgun’s trigger once. Seconds before the motorcycle’s front tire hit a rock, the bike fishtailed out of control and left the trail. The VW’s windshield shattered, and the bike danced along a line of boulders lining the muddy floor of a bar ditch. They were twenty yards past the Volkswagen before Cozy could get the bike back under control and stopped. Gunning the engine, he jumped the bike out of the ditch, spun it around in a glade of ferns, and with a blown shock and bent front tire rim headed back for the Volkswagen, which had broadsided the trunk of a fifty-foot-tall lodgepole pine.

The force of the impact had snapped Rikia’s left ankle and slammed his head into the dashboard. Bleeding from his nose, he was slumped over the steering wheel. Dazed and with blood curling around one corner of his mouth, he raised his head and swiped at the blood with his right hand. He tried to concentrate, tried his best to refocus on his mission, but his mind was too cloudy, too inexplicably
foggy. He tried to force the VW’s door open, but the frame was bent, and the door barely budged. Patting the car seat for his cell phone and then his shirt pocket for his cyanide capsules, he grabbed the phone and Silas Breen’s .32 in one hand. Powered by a rush of adrenaline, he shouldered the car door open, jumped out, and, with his broken ankle throbbing, hobbled toward a clump of piñons.

Grimacing in pain, he aimed the .32 at two undulating, ghostly human shapes that were crouched low to the ground and seemed to be moving toward him. He squeezed off a right-handed shot, then used his left hand to punch in the first of six cell-phone numbers that would trigger his bomb. He’d punched in the second, third, and fourth numbers and, with a bloody index finger, was prepared to punch in a fifth when a shotgun blast slammed into his neck.

Screaming, he dropped the cell phone and clutched his neck with both hands. Suddenly the front of his shirt was covered in blood, and he felt as if he were falling. As he struggled to breathe, he could hear the crunch of footfalls on the pine-needle-covered forest floor. The crunching sound moved closer and got louder until he passed out.

Bernadette kicked the .32 out of Rikia’s hand to send it skittering across a bed of pine needles and soft dirt before kneeling over him to check for a carotid pulse. Looking up at Cozy, she said, “He’s alive. Better call 911.”

Cozy slipped his cell phone out of his pocket, punched in 911, and in response to the operator’s robust “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” said, “We’ve got a badly injured man and a possible nuclear device on a forest service road just outside Los Alamos. Better send someone who can handle the situation.”

“Can you give me any more information and a better location, sir?” the operator asked, her voice barely rising.

“No, I can’t!” Cozy yelled over a surge of static.

“Are you still there, sir?”

Sensing Cozy’s frustration, Bernadette snatched the cell phone out of Cozy’s hand and yelled into it: “This is Major Bernadette Cameron, United States Air Force. We’re one right turn off New Mexico State Road 502 and exactly twelve forest access roads from the southern boundary fence of the Los Alamos Airport. Get someone the hell out here on the double, damn it!” She snapped the cell phone closed and checked to see if Rikia was still breathing.

“Is he still alive?” Cozy asked.

“Looks like it.”

Cozy walked over to Rikia’s cell phone and turned it off. “Wonder who he was trying to call when you popped him?”

“No way of telling now,” said Bernadette. “Let’s leave that problem to the folks who show up.”

“Fine by me,” Cozy said as the faint wail of sirens erupted in the distance.

“Freddy’s not going to be happy about his toy,” Bernadette said, sounding apologetic as she stared at the damaged motorcycle.

“Better than if we’d crashed
Sugar
.”

Surprised at how intently Cozy was also suddenly staring at the motorcycle, Bernadette asked, “What’s got you so mesmerized?”

“I don’t know, really,” Cozy said as an odd, enlightened look slowly spread across his face. The look seemed to announce as it broadened into a smile that a long-lingering fog had finally lifted.

The oak-paneled room in the Bradbury Science Museum, where Cozy and Bernadette had been sitting for almost three hours, was a small room smelling of floor wax inside a government facility that had been constructed in 1963. Designed to highlight Los Alamos National Laboratory’s role in technology and science, including the Manhattan Project, the building, normally open to the public, had four hours earlier become off-limits to anyone without the highest government security clearance. A half-dozen Styrofoam cups containing remnants of stale coffee sat on the large, oval boardroom table that Cozy and Bernadette shared with FBI Agent Thaddeus Richter and a red-haired, beady-eyed man with a buzz cut and closely cropped, military-regulation-length sideburns.

The red-haired man, who’d introduced himself as Melvin Stoops, had remained in the room with Agent Richter after nearly a dozen people from the FBI, homeland security, and the New Mexico State Police had taken turns interviewing Bernadette and Cozy. Everyone had been silent for over a minute when Bernadette, who’d been thinking about Rikia Takata’s cell phone, asked Stoops, “Is Takata still alive, and do you know if his cell phone was the bomb trigger?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss those issues, Major,” Stoops said dismissively. “Now, how about we get back to your and
Mr. Coseia’s roles in the current matter? My job is to determine whether, in association with Mr. Coseia, your actions represent a court-martialable offense, Major Cameron.”

Cozy leaned forward in his chair, dropped his elbows down hard on the table, and stared angrily at Stoops. “Are you going to court-martial me, too, jackass?”

“Cozy, please,” Bernadette said, grabbing Cozy’s arm.

“Please, my ass, Bernadette. You just stopped some wacko from setting off a nuclear weapon, and you’ve got this nitwit talking about court-martialing you. Can’t you do something about this, Richter?”

Richter shrugged. “No.”

“I can have you removed from the room,” Stoops said calmly to Cozy.

The look Bernadette flashed Cozy, a look that said,
Please shut up
, served to calm him down, at least momentarily.

Looking slightly less sure of himself, Stoops asked, “Why is it that you decided to strike out on your own with the Tango-11 investigation, Major? And why didn’t you inform your superiors of your actions? Especially Colonel DeWitt.”

“There wasn’t time,” Bernadette said, suspecting that Stoops was more than likely an air force OSI internal affairs colonel who had been hurriedly sent to Los Alamos with orders to quickly put a damper on anything that had the potential to embarrass the air force. “Besides, I’d already informed the FBI.”

Stoops looked at Richter for confirmation.

“We’d talked,” said Richter.

Staring down at the top page of his more than four pages of
notes, Stoops said, “We’re almost done for the night, Major. Here’s my last question. Why did you stray so far from your original assignment, which was simply to investigate the security breach at Tango-11?”

“I was just hoping to help solve a murder, I guess.”

“But you’re not a police officer or a sheriff or anyone with such authority, Major.”

Unable to bite his tongue any longer, Cozy said, “And the air force says she’s not a pilot anymore, either. But in light of the day’s events, I beg to differ.”

Stoops eyed Cozy impassively and began collecting his papers. “I’ll be talking with you tomorrow, Major—in the absence of Mr. Coseia or Agent Richter, you might like to know.”

“Fine,” said Bernadette, watching Richter, who looked even less pleased than she was by Stoops’s announcement, rise and head toward the door.

“You and Mr. Coseia are staying here in Los Alamos, of course,” Stoops said, getting up out of his chair.

“Yes,” Bernadette said, feeling as if she were somehow a criminal suspect.

“Of course you are.” Stoops smiled and headed for the door.

As the door closed behind Richter and then Stoops, Cozy asked, “How the heck did that apple-polishing idiot get from wherever he was to Los Alamos so fast?”

Smiling and tweaking Cozy’s cheek, Bernadette said, “He’s probably out of Travis Air Force Base in California, and that’s not so far when the company you work for has a nice little stash of supersonic jets.”

An hour and a half later Cozy sat on the edge of the sagging king-sized bed in his room, banging out a story on his laptop. Freddy Dames had called him a half-dozen times about the story, and finally, at twelve thirty in the morning, bone-weary both mentally and physically, Cozy was close to having it done. He and Bernadette had settled into adjoining rooms in a two-story limestone building that they’d been escorted to by an FBI agent. Not at all surprised that their rooms were adjoining, Bernadette stood in the doorway that connected them and watched Cozy type.

She wasn’t certain whether the FBI agent who’d walked them to their rooms was still outside in the hall. She hadn’t looked. But she was positive that someone from some faceless government agency was stationed there. Especially since, after being released by Stoops, they’d had a ten-minute hallway interview with an official from the Office of National Intelligence, followed by a twenty-minute hallway talk with a droopy-eyed man from homeland security and finally a fifteen-minute eyeball-to-eyeball chat with the government’s regional weapons of mass destruction coordinator, a perky-looking woman named Loretta Vines who’d flown in from Denver. And as they’d headed through the darkened building toward their rooms with their FBI escort at their side, a man from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Emergency Operations had swooped down on them and flashed his credentials at the FBI agent. But the agent, frustrated after forty-five minutes of interruption, had said to the man, “You can talk to them tomorrow.”