Fourth Day (25 page)

Later, in my room, I was twenty pages into
The Catcher in the Rye
when there was a tentative knock at my door. I was finding it hard to concentrate on the printed page and was glad of the excuse to put it down without feeling like a literary peasant.

‘It’s not locked,’ I said, which, for once, was the case.

I’d been hoping for Maria – although not as much as I’d been hoping for Bane – so Dexter’s lanky presence came as a surprise. He’d changed his clothes and his fair hair was damp from a shower. I swung my feet down off the bed and put the book aside, careful not to spill the key I was still using as a bookmark. He took his time about speaking.

Eventually, with a sliver of defiance, he said, ‘I’m told I oughta thank you.’

Double-edged, but not outright hostile.

I shrugged. ‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On why Maria was targeted in the first place.’

Dexter moved across to the window, leant on the wall
nearest and stared out through the glass. ‘How do you know Nu wasn’t after you and Maria got in the way?’

I shook my head. ‘He had plenty of other opportunities, but I think he wanted to get us both together. Any ideas why?’

It was Dexter’s turn to shrug. ‘You tell me. Things were fine here until you came.’ He tore his eyes away from the view of the compound outside. ‘Until you took Thomas away to his death.’

‘From what I’ve been told, it looks like Nu may have had a hand in that one, too. This thing is centred here,’ I said mildly. I paused, thinking of the circled newspaper story about the oil refinery visit.
Right up Debacle’s street
. Fishing, I added, ‘What I don’t know…is why now? We were tasked to extract Witney, and it had to be done quickly, but he’d been here five years. What’s kicked all this off now?’

Dexter ignored that. He twitched restlessly away from the wall, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched, then said abruptly, ‘Thomas had been helping us – Debacle, I mean.’

‘His son died for your cause,’ I said. ‘Why would Thomas help you?’

‘Because he came to believe in Randall.’

‘Helping you with what?’

‘Whatever we needed. Research, mainly, but if things got tight, he organised an escape route across the border to Mexico. Maria’s extended family would give us shelter when we needed it.’ The affection in his voice told me he’d needed it more than once.

‘So, it was all bullshit, that stuff you fed me back in Scotland – about the reasons Thomas Witney stayed in Fourth Day.’

Dexter smiled thinly. ‘We wanted to throw you off track. I remembered the name Parker Armstrong soon as you said it. He was the guy they hired to grab Liam when he first came here.’ A flash of contempt lit his eyes. ‘He missed.’

Understanding made me ignore the jibe. ‘Ah, so when I started asking questions about Billy…’

He nodded, sober. ‘Randall thinks I’m a fool to have come back here, but I couldn’t come before, when Maria needed me, so…’

No, you were already in custody in another state
, I thought, but noted the ‘back’ and said carefully, ‘You were all here – you and Maria and Liam – before you went off to join Debacle.’ I made it a neutral statement of fact, then asked, ‘Whose idea was that?’

‘It was kind of a joint decision,’ Dexter said, a little defensive even so. ‘Randall encourages everyone who comes here to find what’s important to them. For us, it was the environment. I mean, what’s more important than the planet we all live on, right?’

‘Right,’ I echoed. ‘And for Liam, of course, protesting against oil exploration had the additional appeal of sticking it to his parents. Or, more particularly, his mother.’

Dexter shrugged again. ‘Liam was into Debacle, right from the start. But when Randall held out, that really did it for him.’

‘Held out?’

‘Against temptation,’ Dexter said. He shook his head, wonder in his voice. ‘You gotta be real firm in your beliefs, to turn your back on all that dough.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘But I guess it kinda helps if you don’t need the money.’

Something prickled at the base of my neck, the back of my skull.

‘Held out against what temptation?’ I repeated and something in my voice brought him up short.

‘You mean nobody’s told you about the oil?’ he said, looking confused. ‘Jesus, I assumed that was the whole reason you people were here.’ He lifted his hands in exasperation, let them drop again, bitterness twisting his mouth. ‘That’s what it’s always about, isn’t it? You think this great country of ours would ever have gone in to “rescue” Kuwait if they hadn’t had a shitload of oil under their sand?’

‘Nothing to do with Kuwait being invaded by a hostile nation, then?’ I asked mildly.

‘If you believe that, kiddo, you’re living in a dreamworld.’

I paused, then pointed out, ‘I seem to recall we went to war over the Falklands.’

‘Yeah, and you notice
we
didn’t help you guys out on that one, even though it was practically in our own backyard.’

‘So, you’re trying to tell me that there’s enough oil under Fourth Day’s little patch of land to be worth murdering for?’ I asked, not bothering to hide the cynical note.

He snorted. ‘Some neighbourhoods in LA, they’ll cut your throat for your sneakers. And there’s enough oil under parts of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado to last into the next millennium.’ His face grew serious. ‘You telling me
that’s
not worth killing for?’

‘OK, let’s say you’re right,’ I agreed. ‘Why is it only just coming to light now? Why has the US allowed the Middle East to hold it to ransom for decades? However difficult the oil is to get at, surely it’s cheaper than going to war in the
Gulf – twice? So, why aren’t there oil drilling platforms all over the Midwest and tanker ships lining up halfway along the Pacific coast?’

That provoked a full-fledged laugh. ‘Because it’s not that simple, kiddo. This is oil
shale
.’

I frowned. ‘What’s the difference?’

He sighed, as if talking to someone woefully ignorant. ‘They’ve known about oil shale for nearly one hundred fifty years,’ he said. ‘The problem is extracting it. They used to use a process called “retorting”. What happens is—’

‘I’m not an engineering student, so spare me the gory details,’ I interrupted. ‘Just cut to the chase. What’s the big problem?’

‘Using the retorting method – environmental catastrophe is what,’ Dexter said flatly. ‘Once the shale is mined, they have to crush and heat it to extract kerogen, which can then be distilled into oil and gas. But this produces huge amounts of waste, and I mean
huge
– like, the heat desiccates the rock and expands it, so by the time you’re done, there’s too much of it even to shove back into the hole it came out of.’ He raked his hands through his hair in frustration. ‘Not that you’d want to put it back, of course, because it’s now contaminated with heavy metals and a load of other highly toxic crap, just waiting to poison the nearest groundwater.’ He gave a caustic smile. ‘And there wouldn’t be much groundwater left, ’cause the refining process uses so much it sucks the area dry.’

‘So, what’s changed?’ I asked carefully. He stopped, pulled his focus back onto me. His breathing was elevated, I noted, cheeks flushed. ‘Has the price of oil finally risen to the point where the benefits now outweigh the concerns?’

‘The oil companies claim they’ve been working on an
in situ
conversion process, which means you don’t have to mine the shale at all. Instead, they drill down and insert heating elements into the rock, then heat the whole of the subsurface up to like seven hundred degrees, for several
years
.’

This was clearly supposed to provoke some kind of a reaction, but I just blinked. ‘What does that do? Boil it off?’

‘No, it speeds up the natural development of the oil and gas by
millions
of years. But, of course, nobody knows about the long-term consequences,’ he added glumly, ‘and I doubt they care.’

I asked, ‘Surely it can’t be cost-effective to heat up something to that temperature, for so long?’

‘Compared to conventional oilfields, you’d be amazed,’ Dexter said. ‘They’re still developing the process, but the word is, they’ve got it just about cracked. Soon as they do, any pockets of oil shale the government doesn’t own already are going to suddenly become prime real estate. We’re talking a million barrels an acre.’

OK,
now
it was something worth killing over. ‘And there’s oil shale under Fourth Day’s land?’

‘Yeah. Liam discovered it, not long after we came here, but Randall, of course, wasn’t interested in exploiting it.’ He gave a smile that was a mixture of pride and sadness. ‘Which is why they’re trying to get rid of him.’

‘Who is?’ I said. ‘Nu?’

Another derisive snort. ‘John Nu doesn’t have the
cojones
for something like that – not on his own,’ Dexter muttered, ‘but I know who has.’

‘Epps.’ The name came to my lips almost unbidden.

His head jerked. ‘Whoa – that bastard’s involved, is he?’

‘You know him?’

‘Our paths have crossed, let me put it that way,’ Dexter said, lips twisting. ‘He tried to get me to rat out Debacle after the Feds grabbed me in Texas a few years ago.’

‘Which is where you were when Liam was killed in Alaska.’

He paused a moment. ‘Sharp, aren’t you?’

‘It has been said,’ I returned dryly. ‘I know Maria was there and saw what happened.’ When he raised an eyebrow at that, I added, ‘Things she said, after Nu took a potshot at her. She had kind of a flashback.’

‘Shit, poor kid.’ He looked away, swallowed. ‘It destroyed her. She only joined Debacle to be close to Liam. He was like the big brother she never had.’

‘You knew, last time we met, that I believed Billy might be Liam’s kid,’ I said. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that if you’d told me the truth – that he was yours – I would never have come here? You could have saved yourself a lot of bother.’

His mouth twisted. ‘Yeah, and painted a damn great target on the kid’s back while I was at it. You’ve met Epps. You think he’d hesitate to use Billy to get to us?’ His eyes looked through me, then he said, ‘I would have married her – I
wanted
to marry her, but she said no. That made me angry for a while, but I guess it runs in the family, what with her mom and all.’

‘What happened to Maria’s mother?’

‘She and Bane had a thing going, then she went home to Mexico, joined some bunch of fanatics down there. Never
told Randall she’d gotten pregnant,’ Dexter said. ‘Maria only found out about him after her mom died while we were at college. She tracked Randall down, wanted to meet him.’ He shrugged. ‘Liked what she found.’

I let my breath out slowly. Well,
that
explained a lot. For a moment, I wondered if Bane had allowed his personal feelings to colour his advice, and telling Sean of my own pregnancy might well turn out to be the worst thing I could possibly have done.

He had to know some time
.

I pushed the thought aside. ‘You said you didn’t think Nu was the brains of the operation, so who was?’

‘The only person I can think of is the one who was trying hardest to persuade Randall to go ahead with the exploration project,’ Dexter said. ‘That little bastard, Sagar.’

‘Chris Sagar?’ I demanded faintly, mouth dry, skin shimmying in reaction. ‘But wasn’t he Bane’s second in command?’

Dexter laughed again, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. ‘Second in command? What is this now, the military? He wasn’t good enough to scrape the shit from Randall’s shoes.’

‘So, who is he?’

‘He was part of the old Fourth Day, before Randall bought them out. Sagar stayed on, but Randall cleaned out all the rot and Chris Sagar was rotten, believe me, all the way through. He’s the one who campaigned hardest to develop the oil shale. He hounded Liam for figures on how much could be made out of it. Eventually, Randall threw Sagar out.’

I jerked to my feet. ‘We’ve got to talk to Bane,’ I said,
agitated. ‘Epps is using Sagar as his Fourth Day advisor. Either he had no idea Sagar’s got some kind of personal vendetta going, or he doesn’t care.’

‘It’s a little late to consider that, I’m afraid,’ said a deep voice from the doorway. We both turned, to find Bane himself standing in the opening, regarding the pair of us gravely. I wondered how long he’d been there. Dexter flushed.

I said quickly, ‘What’s happened?’

‘Tyrone has reported some disturbing activity around our boundaries,’ Bane said, eyeing the way Dexter’s face had turned corpse white beneath his tan. ‘It would seem there is a significant SWAT presence surrounding us.’

‘They’ve come for me,’ Dexter whispered, sinking onto the edge of the bed. ‘You were right, Randall. I shoulda never come back. I’ve put you all at risk.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you’re the one to blame,’ Bane said, looking straight at me as he spoke.

That hurt more than I expected, a physical pain in my chest. ‘Bane, listen—’

He held up a hand. ‘I’ve heard all I need to. If Chris has been feeding those people with enough lies to have brought them this far, the time for talking is over.’

I felt the blood drop from my face. ‘You can’t make a stand,’ I said, thinking suddenly of those twenty little faces who’d turned towards me in the classroom. ‘It will be another Ruby Ridge. Another Waco. You’ll be slaughtered.’

‘You speak as if we’re a cult,’ he said, nothing more than moderate distaste in his voice. ‘How long do you have to be among us before you realise that’s not the case?’

‘I know you’re not,’ I said.
Now
. ‘But what
I
believe is immaterial. You should be worrying about the guys out
there. The ones dressed in black with the armoured Humvees and the fifty-cal machine guns because, right now, what
they
think is pretty bloody vital to your survival.’

Bane didn’t respond, just switched his gaze to Dexter. ‘If you’re done here,’ he said to him, ‘we have arrangements to make.’

‘Of course,’ Dexter muttered, getting to his feet.

‘What can I do?’ I demanded. ‘If you need help with defensive—’

Again, Bane held up that silencing hand, cutting me dead. ‘You’ve done enough,’ he said, face grave. ‘I trust you won’t take it as a personal insult if I insist that you remain here?’ And he held out his hand. For an absurd moment I thought he wanted to shake on it, then I realised he wanted the Salinger, and the key it contained.