Heartbreaker (39 page)

“He came to our cabin when they … attacked. He was there.”

“You saw him?” Jess stared at her.

Theresa shook her head. “I never saw him. I hid in the root cellar with Elijah when they came. But I heard his voice.” She shivered. “I would know his voice anywhere. After we left the congregation we all—us kids—started calling him Death instead of the Lamb. You know, from the Bible: Death is his name, and Hell follows with him. Because our lives became like hell to us because of him, because we had to do without so much and be afraid all the time and hide.”

“Are you
sure
it was Robert Talmadge’s voice you heard?”

Theresa nodded.

Jess pursed his lips thoughtfully and glanced around. “Louis?”

His voice sharpened. “Where’s Louis?”

Louis was gone.

After a quick but thorough search of the bank, Jess ran outside, down the steps, and into the street. The helicopter waited, blades idle now. Its pilot watched incuriously from behind the controls. Patrol cars still blocked either end of the street. More patrol cars waited in the bank’s parking lot.

Louis was nowhere to be seen.

A trooper got out of one of the cars in the parking lot and headed toward them. Watching him come, Jess motioned to him to hurry. The man picked up his pace.

“Did you see a man come out of the bank? A black-haired man in a green hospital gown and black pants?”

“Sure did. He walked down to the end of the street and hopped a cab.” The cop frowned as he looked at Jess. “We didn’t have any instructions about keeping people from leaving. Should we have stopped him?”

“Too late now,” Jess said grimly. “Not your fault, anyway. See if you can find out where that cab went, would you, please? And fast.”

The trooper ran back to his car. Jess looked at Lynn.

“I have a feeling Reverend Bob’s been under our nose the whole time. I think I’ve started to get a feel for Michael Stewart, and I don’t think he chose Utah to hide out in at random. He wanted to be close to something, and my bet is that something is the place where Talmadge planned to go to detonate the bombs. Stewart’s been keeping an eye on things all along, staying out of sight until it was time to use the stop code he secretly programmed into the system. Only somehow Talmadge found out about the code and came after Stewart. Now that Stewart’s gone, Talmadge thinks he’s home free.” Jess smiled grimly at Lynn. “But he’s wrong.”

The trooper came running back, clutching a piece of paper, which Jess took. “The cab went to 22079 Orkdale Road. It’s a farm out toward Springville,” the trooper said.

“Okay, get together all the backup you can and meet me there. Tell everybody, no sirens. I’m going to take the helicopter.” That grim smile flickered again, and his gaze slid to Lynn. “I might even beat Louis.”

The trooper ran for his car, while Lynn darted after Jess as he headed toward the helicopter. The pilot, seeing something was afoot, already had the rotors in motion.

Jess glanced back, saw Lynn, and stopped just as he was getting ready to duck beneath the blades.

He turned and caught her arm. “You stay here,” he yelled over the sound of the rotors.

“I’m coming!” Lynn screamed back.

“Oh, no, you’re not! You’re a civilian, and a woman, and this is the big leagues!”

“Listen, you male chauvinist pig—” Lynn began furiously, only to find herself shoved back out of the way as Jess sprinted toward the open doorway and leaped aboard. Before she could recover, the chopper lifted off.

Jess waved jauntily at her from the passenger seat as the chopper banked sharply left and headed aloft.

The state boys burned rubber getting out of the parking lot. Lynn had to jump out of the middle of the street.

One car stopped as it passed, brakes squealing. The trooper who had spoken to Jess leaned out the passenger window.

“By the way, you had a message: You’re to call this number,” the cop yelled, waving a piece of paper. Lynn barely had her hand on it before the car shot off again.

She glanced down, read the message, and ran back inside the bank past Theresa, Marty, and Mr. Thompkins, who had come out onto the steps when the commotion outside penetrated the euphoria within.

Snatching up the phone, she dialed.

“Lenny, I’m in Provo, at the Second National Bank on State Street,” she said before the man who answered had even finished saying hello. “Where are you?”

“Knockin’ at your back door, baby,” he answered. “When I showed up at the hospital as requested, a nurse tipped me off to where you’d gone. What’s up, girl?”

“You’re on cellular, aren’t you? Then I’ll wait and fill you in when you get here. Hurry, Lenny! This is the big one!”

“Hurryin’, baby,” Lenny promised, and rang off.

J
ESS WENT IN ALONE
because he was afraid of what could happen if he didn’t. The memory of the botched raid at Waco was too fresh in his mind. And this time his backups were not federal agents, but a bunch of state troopers he didn’t know. In Jess’s mind that made for a pack of wild cards in a game nobody could afford for him to lose.

At his direction the chopper and the squad of cop cars converged just out of sight of the farmhouse, using as cover a fence, a herd of cows, and a thick copse of trees.

There was no way of knowing if the stop code had worked until after nine
A.M.
to be absolutely one hundred percent safe, he had to stop Talmadge from trying to detonate the bombs at all.

Just another day in the life of a federal agent. Jess was reminded all over again of why he had quit the Bureau. Laying his life on the line made him nervous.

So here he was already, doing it again. Only this time without health benefits or a pension plan.

Jess waited as long as he dared to see if Ben and his crew might make it in time, but they didn’t. By 8:51 he would have welcomed even the ATF’s archrivals, the FBI. Advised of Jess’s destination en route, those guys were on their way.

On their way did Jess no good at all. At 8:52 he could wait no longer. As he ran across the long field that separated the farm where Talmadge was possibly holed up from its neighbor, Jess tried to think of a plausible reason to come knocking on the door. After all, his suspicion was still unverified; Louis could have been paying a visit to a maiden aunt.

Subtlety wasn’t going to work, Jess realized. Even if he could convince everybody else that he was Goldilocks, Louis would recognize him at once.

Having already hit upon the brilliant notion of having the farmhouse’s electricity shut off—no electricity, no accessing the Internet—Jess had learned that the place had its own generator.

His mission, and he’d had no choice but to accept it, was to knock out that generator.

How hard could that be?

Courtesy of the state boys he was armed with a pistol, a two-way radio, a pair of insulated gloves, and an industrial-strength wire cutter.

All he had to do was find the generator, cut the wire running from it to the house, and summon his posse to mop up.

Easy.

The generator was simple to locate. He heard it chugging away before he saw it. Rounding a corner of the house—a two-story white clapboard with a picturesque front porch—he spotted his target instantly. It was out in the open, its unadorned metal casing gleaming in the morning sunshine.

Nobody was around. Taking a deep breath, Jess pulled the gloves on, grabbed hold of the wire cutters, and went for it.

A glance at Louis’s watch told him that it was 8:57
A.M
.

Seconds later something slammed with blinding force into the back of his head.

W
HEN JESS OPENED HIS EYES
he was watching CNN. This was so surreal that for a moment he blinked at the TV screen as if blinking would make it disappear.

He was, he discovered when he tried to move, tied to a ladder-back kitchen chair. His hands were bound behind it, and loops of rope wrapped tightly around his waist secured him to it. A strip of cloth was wound around his lower face, gagging him.

His mission had obviously not been a success. Maybe he should have tried playing Goldilocks after all.

Jess glanced around. From all appearances he was in a bedroom of the farmhouse. A nearby window was curtained, but the filmy panels didn’t quite meet in the middle. From the glimpse he got outside he could tell he was on the second floor. The walls were white, the floor covered with a mauve area rug, and there were no furnishings as such. Except for the TV and his kitchen chair, which he was willing to bet was an extremely recent addition to the decor.

And a long, utilitarian, conference-style table.

A glowing computer served as the table’s centerpiece.

As he spotted it Jess thought, uh-oh.

A group of men in flowing white robes entered the room. The man in the lead was fifty-two, six foot four, 220 pounds, with regular features and a leonine head of silver hair.

Robert Talmadge. Though he had seen only a picture to go with the statistics he had researched in connection with Waco, Jess would have recognized him anywhere.

Without sparing so much as a glance for Jess, Talmadge moved to stand in front of the computer.

Somewhere in the house a clock began to chime the hour. Jess mentally counted along: six, seven, eight,
nine
.

“It’s time, my children,” Talmadge said.

“But Yahweh said—” An unhappy voice protested, and Jess recognized Louis under one of those white robes. Talmadge silenced him with a stern look and an upraised hand.

“It’s time,” he said again and began to type.

Though Jess knew it was ridiculous—either the country was going to blow up or the stop code had worked and it wasn’t—he braced himself.

“Love heals,” the group chanted. On the screen Jess caught just a glimpse of e-mail postcards, one after the other, winging away into the infinite universe of the Internet.

“Yahweh’s name we praise,” Robert Talmadge said. The group echoed him, then turned as one to stare at CNN.

They wanted to watch, Jess realized. They wanted to watch the effects of their handiwork. Here in Utah they would probably survive the nuclear blasts and perish later by poison gas or chemicals or pestilence or whatever was released in the second wave.

Jess wouldn’t have chosen that fate for himself. Being decimated instantly by a cataclysmic explosion seemed kind in comparison.

On CNN an unidentified reporter was standing in front of the Washington Monument babbling about Whitewater.

And the Washington Monument was still standing.

Jess felt a wave of relief so intense his muscles sagged. The
stop
code had worked!

The realization that something had gone wrong appeared to occur to Talmadge at about that time.

He turned to stare at Jess. The group turned too. Even Louis, Jess discovered, could look positively diabolical in a white robe with religion in his eye.

“I hope you’ve been a good boy, Mr. Feldman,” Talmadge said quite gently and turned back to the computer. The others turned with him. The tension in the way they stood gave Jess an inkling of what was afoot.

Talmadge began to type.

Jess’s adrenaline kicked in. He got his feet beneath him, stood up, took a running leap, and threw himself out the second-floor window, chair and all, just as the farmhouse blew up.

He hit the ground hard and blacked out.

When he came to, lying on his side, still tied to the chair, fire trucks and police cars surrounded the house, sirens wailing. Firemen wielded a gigantic hose off to his left. Policemen ran around yelling into walkie-talkies. An ambulance jolted into the yard. Smoke and the acrid odor of something burning made his eyes water.

Lynn stood over him, a microphone in her hand, talking into a camera as a man focused it on her. She gestured first at Jess as the paramedics bent over him, then at the burning house behind him.

Only when the camera was shut off did she crouch down beside him. He was just being loaded onto a stretcher.

“Well, hi there, hero,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“What the hell are you
doing
?”

“Reporting,” she said. “It’s what I do. And, believe me, the end of the world makes a heck of a story.”

L
ATER THAT DAY
in the hospital in Salt Lake City, Theresa was rocking Elijah, who sat in her lap. His IV had been removed only an hour before. Except for a bad case of diaper rash, which was healing, Elijah had been pronounced well on the road to recovery.

The doctor said he could go home the next day.

The thought made Theresa’s lower lip quiver. They had no home to go to.

A family of nine had been reduced to two: herself and Elijah.

She knew she would never let him go. But she didn’t know how she was going to take care of him.

Babies needed things. Like food. And shelter. And diapers.

Things she could not provide. All she had to give him was love.

She was scared, so scared.

Elijah let out a piercing baby squeal and wrapped a hand in her hair. Theresa smiled down at him even as tears welled in her eyes.

“Theresa Stewart?” A uniformed policeman stood in the doorway looking at her.

Theresa nodded warily, her hold on Elijah tightening. A terrible fear crystallized into words in her mind: Had they come to take Elijah away?

If she could not provide for him, would they give him to someone who could?

“Could you come with me, please?”

She had been raised all her life to obey authority; she didn’t want to now. But the way the policeman looked at her seemed to give her little choice. She stood up, clutching Elijah to her breast, and followed the policeman down the hall.

The nurses at the nursing station, who had been so kind to her, looked at her strangely as she passed them.

Her throat tightened, and she held Elijah closer still. The baby kicked and bobbed his head against her neck.

At the elevators she almost balked.

“Where are you taking us?” she asked the cop before she would get in.