Nightzone (12 page)

“The more the better as far as they're concerned.” He held up two fingers. “Number one, more publicity means more access to grants and funding. They need every buck they can scrounge. And two, the more publicity, the less of this conspiracy shit there is to muddy the water. And that won't go away unless the whole thing is public—wide open. Tours for them are essential. The public just doesn't get to
use
their monster, is all. You'd have to be a trained astrophysicist to understand what the computers are listening to, anyway.”

“That's a tough nut,” I said. “People who believe stupid things are the last to admit that they might be wrong.”

Waddell nodded. “I'd be an idiot not to think I've got a whole sea of hurdles to face,” he said. “Maybe I'm smart enough, maybe I'm not.” He pointed to the west, where a tiny tan SUV had crested the access road and rolled quietly toward us, a plume of rich red dust rising behind as it turned off the macadam.

“What was I saying about a lock on the gate not being enough?” I said. “How did they get through the gate? You locked it behind us.”

“Yet another glitch to fix. Closed, but not locked. All you have to do is push. You know these folks?”

I squinted as the vehicle drew closer. “That's Neil Costace driving. You've met him, I think.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation? You're kidding.”

“Decision time, Miles.”

“Decision?”

“Now you need to decide how much you want to tell the feds.” I shook my head slowly. “It starts early and never stops. You want me gone so you can have some privacy?”

He regarded the approaching SUV. The driver and passenger appeared to be in animated conversation.

“Do you think I'm nuts?” The rancher asked quietly, ignoring my question. I looked at him quizzically. “I mean this whole project. Spending the money like this.”

I reached out a hand and clamped his shoulder. “Stop it. You're stepping in the most common trap there is. If you spend your money the way
other
folks think you should, you're courting misery, Miles. I'll give you all the help I can, short of being on the payroll.”

He smiled. “Let's not be courting misery, then.”

Chapter Thirteen

Just as the district attorney had been comfortable to let the state investigator do most of the grilling during my earlier interrogation, Neil Costace had brought along his own hired gun. Costace had never impressed me as being a stereotypical Hollywood-style G-man. No dark suit, no beady eyes, no arrogance. He no doubt had access to the stereotypical black Suburban, but even that had been upstaged this time by a little tan Jeep Patriot sporting a New Mexico plate. He stepped out wearing worn jeans, salmon-colored golf shirt, and a quilted vest. He ruined his cover with the black ball cap with three-inch gold letters that announced “FBI”, the kind that wannabes like to adopt.

The young man with Costace climbed out of the SUV carefully, watching where he put his feet. In New Mexico, that's not a bad idea. So skinny that I could see joints poking at his jacket, he sported chinos, blue polo shirt, and a New Mexico State University ball cap. With his New Balance trainers, he might have been a graduate student in astronomy, even though graduate students generally didn't carry guns. This kid's howitzer was a concealment challenge.

“You turn up in the damnedest places.” Costace gave me a two-handed shake, and I appreciated that he stopped just short of crushing my joints into little arthritic granules. His amber-flecked green eyes—very un-FBIish—scrutinized me. I'd known the agent for fifteen years, and I'm not sure what new detail of my physiognomy fascinated him this time. There was even a hint of sympathy in his tone.

“This is Richard Hotchkiss.” Costace held a hand toward his partner.

“Rick, this be the legendary Bill Gastner, guardian of the purple sage, recently retired New Mexico livestock inspector, former Sheriff of Posadas County, and the man who knows more about this country than all the rest of us put together.” He drew himself up and shook his head. “Bill, you've had a hell of a time these past forty-eight hours.”

“It's been interesting.” Since he'd brought it up, I assumed he knew the details. He would already have talked with the sheriff and undersheriff, perhaps even Schroeder, the district attorney.

Costace regarded me with a wry smile. “Takes guts to draw against a man with a shotgun.”

“He had already fired the damn thing once, Neil. I didn't have much choice. I didn't want him to shoot again.”

“I suppose not.” As if he'd noticed my companion for the first time, he thrust out his hand to the rancher. “Miles, how are you?”

That Neil Costace knew Miles Waddell didn't surprise me. It was a tiny county, without many clumps of sage, purple or otherwise, behind which to hide. But I filed the interesting association away for future reference.

“You want to watch your step, hanging out with this guy,” Costace added. “Agent Hotchkiss here is with Homeland Security,” he continued without giving Waddell time to respond. Posadas County included a number of residents who would hear that and react as if Costace had said, “Agent Hotchkiss carries smallpox.” I sympathized a little bit. When a sheriff introduced himself, you knew that he had a neat little book of county statutes that he was enforcing. The State Police or the Department of Game and Fish had well-established guidelines. But I always had the feeling that the folks at Homeland Security were making it all up as they went along, with no clearly apparent limit to their authority. And when the agent in question was a kid without the wisdom of the ages, that made me very nervous indeed.

Hotchkiss shook hands without a word, his grip gentle and polite. He let a pleasant nod suffice.

“So…” Costace began, and then stopped, gazing off to the north, hands on his hips. He squinted into the distance, and I knew he was examining the dark outline of Cat Mesa north of Posadas, twenty plus miles as the raven flew. “The sheriff tells me that you were sitting on top of the Cat. And when things fell apart down here, you saw the action.”

“That's a little over-dramatic,” I said. “I saw two flashes of light, Neil. That's all, at first. I assume now that what I saw was the transformer shorting out when the poles went down. I could see another pinprick of light that I think was the grass fire started by the short. And a few minutes later, I saw headlights northbound on fourteen. I called the S.O. at that point. He—or she—drove north to the state road and turned toward town.”

“Two little blips of light.”

“That's it.”

“What was your first thought about what was going on?”

“Most likely? Just some unsubstantiated, wild guesses. None of them turned out to be true.”

He continued scanning the mesa-top. “So we're not actually looking at a direct connection between that speeding vehicle that you saw and the pickup truck that Officer Kenderman reported stopping. It's an assumption that they're one and the same.”

“That's correct. A strong assumption.”

Costace turned and regarded Miles Waddell. “And you?”

Waddell raised an eyebrow, but didn't respond.

“You were out and around during all of this? The sheriff said you might have heard something. The saw, maybe.”

“I was in my camper,” the rancher said. “Parked way over there, near the south rim.” Costace shielded his eyes, squinting into the distance. The travel trailer was a dot near the mesa rim, a modest little domicile for a billionaire. Waddell's home, a sprawling ranch house twenty miles north of Lordsburg, saw its owner rarely.

“And first?” Costace waited patiently, content to draw Waddell's answers out one at a time.

“I heard a chain saw. But it was off in the distance, and I didn't bother to investigate until I heard the ruckus. Maybe it was the power lines crashing down. I went to investigate, and sure enough. I drove down, got close enough to see the damage, and thought I saw a body. So I called the S.O.” He held up both hands. “That's it. In a few minutes, the emergency vehicles started arriving. The distance plays tricks. I couldn't tell for sure at first where the noise of the saw was coming from.”

“That's odd, though,” Costace said. “At that hour.”

“Yeah, it's odd,” Waddell laughed. “One o'clock in the morning? Not to mention one little point—there are no trees worth firewood down there. We don't get many firewood cutters in these parts.”

“But you didn't get up to investigate right away?”

“Well, sort of. I could hear the saw, so I went outside to listen. That's when I could tell they were off to the north, not too far away. Then I heard the crash…more like a
whump.
I drove over to the rim to look, and I could see the fire. It was just a little scatter of flames at that point.”

“I was surprised to hear it was Curt Boyd,” Costace said. The agent had had a run-in or two stemming from the family's interest in military weaponry. Every one of their fully automatic weapons—even a rare Lewis once mounted on a World War I biplane—was fully documented and taxed. I had tried my hand with the big .50 Browning during one memorable July Fourth shindig at the ranch, and did myself proud, reducing a '62 Chevy to scrap metal at 500 yards. Then there came a time when another rancher had taken a wild shot at a low-flying airplane and in a one-in-a-million fluke had actually struck the pilot. For a while during the investigation that followed, it might have seemed natural to suspect the Boyds.

But machine guns are like a mesa-top observatory in at least one way. No one believes that you own all those automatic weapons without some hidden agenda, and rumors fly.

“I've known Boyd since he was a kid,” I said.

“Sure,” Waddell added. “In fact I saw him a couple of weeks ago, and we chatted for a bit. He was hunting prairie dogs north of here.” Waddell turned to me in question. His memory was accurate. I'd been hiking the Bennett Trail and seen first the young man with the Mauser 98 World War II sniper's rifle, and then, a few minutes later, Miles Waddell himself, repairing a short section of barbed wire fencing.

“You mean he wasn't using a Thompson on the dogs?” Costace laughed.

“Ah, no,” Waddell said. “What the hell was it? I'm not much of a gunny.”

“A German sniper's rifle,” I supplied. “Not antique, but historical. A little overkill for prairie dogs, but effective. He was hiking by himself, and wasn't anywhere near the power lines.”

“So,” Costace mused. “You went to have a look-see. You saw the truck leaving the scene?”

“No. Sure didn't.”

“Any ideas who Boyd's associates might have been for this deal?”

“That's the question, isn't it?” I said. “When the sheriff has time to deal with the Las Cruces end of things, maybe we'll find out. Curt had been teaching and coaching down there, so that's a place to start.”

“We've been there, and will be again.” Costace apparently was unconcerned that he was blabbing his intentions in the presence of a couple of civilians. “It makes sense to me that if Boyd was tied in to the school's schedule down in Cruces, his associates might be in Cruces as well.” He studied the ground at his feet. “It's a crap shoot, though.”

“His associate could have been living in Calcutta,” I remarked. “With the Internet, or e-mail, you can command-center from anywhere in the world. They could have planned to rendezvous here for this little gig.”

“If Boyd's vehicle shows up in Posadas, I might buy that,” Costace said. “Otherwise, it makes sense that they drove up here together.”

“So what's your interest in this?” I asked Hotchkiss. I knew exactly what his interest was—sabotaging interstate power lines, maybe any kind of power lines, was a federal matter, and would spike all kinds of interest. But the young man had kept his own counsel so far, and I admired the zipped lip.

“An attack on interstate power lines is a serious matter,” the young agent replied as if he'd heard my prompt. That was an entirely adequate explanation, and he didn't embellish it.

“Somebody's dumb prank,” I said, and didn't believe it.

“Were that the case, they'd have taken out something closer to town, where more people would actually see their handiwork.” Costace looked hard at Waddell. “Pretty close to you.”

“And they wouldn't kill a cop if it was just a prank,” Hotchkiss added, the first time he'd offered an independent thought. I didn't agree with him, since many a prank had turned needlessly tragic.

The wind was picking up a chill, and Costace zipped up his vest. “It bothers me that someone is out to disrupt your power up here,” he said. “If that's what this is. Could be just coincidence, but who the hell believes in those? They picked a spot where they could work
without
drawing attention. It almost worked, if you'd been sleeping a little harder.” He smiled at Waddell. “There's not much up here yet, but it sends an interesting message, don't you think?”

I wondered what the official FBI thinking was about Waddell's undertaking—of course, they would know something, even if it was wrong. They had access, if they so wished, to all the permits that Waddell had filed. They would know about the California outfit and the huge radio telescope.

“There are all kinds of rumors,” Waddell said carefully.

Hotchkiss prompted, “For instance?” His voice was reedy, reminding me of a bassoon playing in its tenor register.

Waddell turned guarded. “Just all kinds of things.”

“A United Nations listening post up here, maybe?” Hotchkiss managed to say that with a straight face.

“You've heard that one, too,” Miles said.

That didn't appear to surprise either agent. “And are you?” Hotchkiss asked.

“There might be some good rent to be had for that.”

Hotchkiss didn't look amused. “What
are
you going to do for power up here? One little transformer stepped off that line down there doesn't seem adequate for what you have planned.”

Waddell pulled out the little tin and took his time loading his cheek with another neat pinch. “And just what
do
I have planned, Agent Hotchkiss?”

“Just in a manner of speaking,” the young man said, with no hint of apology, “what you do is your business within the parameters of law, but the road up here bespeaks
something,
it seems to me. This isn't just pasture.”

For a moment, Waddell fell silent, and then sighed as he reached a decision. “Let's make this easy, gentlemen.” He uncorked the tube once more. “Maybe knowing what's going on will help find these jerks.” In a moment the two feds were examining the plans and the architectural rendering of the completed site.

Costace whistled in amazement, and the rancher let them look without comment, until the FBI agent straightened up. “I have a nephew who would give his left nut to work in a place like this.”

“Tell him to watch my website for progress reports.” He extended business cards to both agents. “The application process will be posted.”
How odd,
I thought,
to hear this rancher talk in terms of “posting” and “websites,” a rancher whom I'd known by way of cattle counts, freeze-snapped fences, or vanishing groundwater.

Hotchkiss was glued to the rendering, eyebrows furrowed together, head shaking slowly from side to side. “Who's funding all this…I mean, we're talking millions and millions.”

“I'm funding it,” Waddell said easily. “I'm sure your agency has tendrils into the IRS vaults. Go there, and you won't have to take my word for anything.” They didn't protest, even weakly.

After another moment scrutinizing the plans, Hotchkiss nodded. “You're going to be a target, sir.” He looked satisfied to be able to say that. Maybe it was a form of job security for him.

“Tell me why?”

Hotchkiss hesitated, and Costace didn't come to his rescue. “Well, for one thing, it's the money. You can't dump this kind of money around without attracting the kind of attention you don't want.”