Pyramid Lake (36 page)

Fuck them and fuck their “civilized.”

Slamming the laptop shut, I jumped up and stalked off to the kitchen. I grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge, twisted the top off, and gulped half the contents. I hadn’t eaten for thirty hours, and I was starting to feel lightheaded, so I threw some spinach, egg whites, and fruit into the Vitamix and blended it into a smoothie.

Somewhat calmer now, I took my smoothie and water bottle to the counter. I grabbed the laptop off the couch and slid onto a barstool, searching McNulty’s hard drive for “human resources” as I drained the glass.

The first document I opened was a draft termination letter that McNulty had prepared. My own name jumped out at me from the text. I smiled humorlessly, noting the planned termination date: last Friday.

I was already living on borrowed time, then.

Uncertain whether it had been Cassie’s threat or McNulty’s death that had temporarily saved my job, I scanned the letter for the reason McNulty planned to give for firing me.

“Early termination of DARPA sub-lease.” What the fuck?

The implications stopped me cold. Then I went back to the search results, already knowing what I would find. I brought up the next item in the list and stared at it: a document identical to the one I had been reading, except for one small difference.

This one was a termination letter for Kate.

The one after that was for Roger.

The next was for Blake.

The last was Cassie’s.

• • •

McNulty had planned to fire us all. I needed to think this through.

Lowering myself to the hardwood floor, I hooked my toes beneath the couch frame, placed my fingertips behind my ears, and started knocking out rapid sit-ups. Things were starting to make sense now. Because the Pyramid Lake Navy base had a sensitive new mission, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security.

Pyramid Lake was the United States’ new, ultrasecret rendition and detainment camp, and it was now ramping up to an operational phase. It was time to streamline other base operations to protect the secrecy and security of the mission. That meant getting rid of unrelated activities like the DARPA projects that Kate, Roger, and Blake ran.

Frankenstein, however, was already a key component of the rendition camp—an infallible interrogator to extract every secret the detainees might try to hide. I grunted and increased the pace of my sit-ups, incensed again at the smug arrogance of their plan. McNulty, Bennett, Linebaugh, and the base commander—they had taken it on themselves to decide the fate of
my
project, without my approval—without even
consulting
me. I was barely an afterthought to them—Bennett hadn’t even known who I was.

What they had done to Cassie was even worse.

Linebaugh had used an inoffensive-sounding DARPA research project to lure her back to Pyramid Lake and promised her contingent funding for her school. But he had known all along that her new role would be terminated a week later. He had lied to Cassie, counting on her unwillingness to abandon her dream of a computer-literacy program to help her people. He knew she would have no choice but to accept the alternative role that Homeland Security would offer her: managing technical interrogations at the Pyramid Lake detainment camp.

Her own natural face-reading talent would make her ruthlessly effective in the prosecution of that role, even as it destroyed her soul.

Well, Frankenstein and I would save her from that heartbreak. But helping Cassie was actually the easy part. First we had to find a way to save my daughter from her own sort of rendition and lifelong detainment—an undeserved living nightmare that would make whatever happened to terror suspects inside the little building-within-a-warehouse here at Pyramid Lake look gentle and kind by comparison.

I thought back on that two-story structure and how I had dragged my fingers against the windowless concrete walls as I circumnavigated it. At roughly fifty feet square, it was too small for a prison camp… unless there was more to it than met the eye.

I shot to my feet. Returning to my laptop, I searched the files I had copied for the words “floor plan,” “blueprint,” and “map.” Two documents popped up—one from Blake’s directory and one from McNulty’s.

The one from Blake’s was a bathymetric survey of Pyramid Lake, with notes annotating subsurface features of interest:
“ballast
,” “
target barge,” “torpedo,” “steel barrels,” “PT boat hull,” “small aircraft.”
It was the copy he had gotten of the Navy’s ten-year-old survey, from the abandoned cleanup of the Pyramid Lake bombing range.

Looking at the prominent feature marked
“torpedo
,” I had to smirk. Blake had been serious about going scuba diving for naval artifacts. That wasn’t a real bright idea: the lake-bottom ordnance was sixty years old, but it might still hold a nasty surprise.

The document from McNulty’s directory was more interesting. It was a 3-D rendering of what looked like five stacked circuit boards, separated by a spiraling interlink: smaller CPU and GPU boards on top, two larger memory boards on the bottom. It looked like a computer architecture diagram. But it had nothing to do with computers at all.

It was a three-dimensional cutaway view of the little building Cassie and I had found in the warehouse, and it confirmed exactly what I had suspected: the bulk of the hidden construction was underground. The building we had seen was merely the entrance to a long series of ramping tunnels that spiraled downward at a gentle slope, making ninety-degree turns every few hundred feet.

Every four turns, a network of other tunnels radiated out to form a sizable underground level. The three upper levels were divided into a network of rectangular chambers of different sizes. The bottom two levels were larger than the others. Each was a grid of parallel tunnels, flanked on each side by uniform rows of square chambers—no doubt prison cells.

Two doors in tandem—almost certainly air locks—separated each level from the access ramps access ramps leading back up to the surface and down to the level below. Each air lock was a large chamber flanked by other rooms: high-tech security checkpoints, barracks, and guard posts.

Looking at the scale on the blueprint, I was surprised to see that the bottom levels were more than a thousand feet below the ground’s surface.

Homeland Security had dug its hidden prison deep into the solid rock.

I remembered the massive tarp-draped tunnel-boring machine originally used to dig the geothermal plant’s injection and extraction wells.

The rock-chewing borer had been re-activated sometime in the past four years, it seemed. Before the midnight trains started delivering their sensitive cargo, they had no doubt been used to carry away many thousands of tons of excavated rock.

But why imprison suspected terrorists so deep underground? To hide the camp from satellite or aerial surveillance, a few feet of dirt would work just as well. Even ground-penetrating radar couldn’t see through more than a few dozen meters of rock.

Frowning, I read the designations that marked each level on the map:

L1 - INTAKE PROCESSING

L2 - SHORT-TERM HOLDING

L3 - EXTRACTION

L4 - LONG-TERM INTERNMENT

L5 - FINAL INTERMENT

Extraction
. What a mealy-mouthed bureaucratic euphemism for forcible interrogation by a machine that could read lies and hidden information off a detainee’s face. I snorted in disgust.

But it was the designations for the bottom two levels that I found most troubling:
“Long-Term Internment”
and
“Final Interment.”

The difference in spelling wasn’t a typo. With the second ‘n,’
internment
meant confinement for preventative or political reasons. But
interment
—without the second ‘n’—meant something else altogether.

It was another word for burial.

Staring at the diagram now, I felt a chill run down my back. Checking in to Homeland Security’s underground resort at Pyramid Lake, it seemed, was a one-way trip: a Roach Motel for terror suspects.

Digging it so deep made sense now.

Because political climates shifted. What passed for borderline legal under one administration could land a politician in front of a Senate Investigative Committee after the next election. Linebaugh had learned his lesson after Iraq, while answering awkward questions about a missing eighteen billion dollars. He wasn’t planning to make the same mistake here.

And so, one fine day, the order would be given to fill in the tunnels. No news-media photographs of razor wire and claustrophobic cells would come back to haunt Linebaugh and his DHS buddies. The camp and its detainees would simply never have existed.

A sick feeling spread from the pit of my stomach. And today I had taunted Garmin, daring him to send me down there?

I dropped to the floor to do some pushups, thinking furiously.

I didn’t much care what we did to terrorists. Anyone who posed a danger to innocent women and children like my family deserved whatever they got. But I didn’t like this sneaky, dishonest way of dealing with the problem. Dragging people away in the middle of the night—including Americans who were only
suspected
of terrorism—wasn’t right. Making them disappear wasn’t right.

I had promised Linebaugh I would step in for Cassie, but I now realized I could never go along with this. What about when we screwed up and grabbed the wrong folks? Our mistakes would get buried a quarter mile below our feet. No one would be accountable.

The serendipity of Frankenstein’s awakening wouldn’t save just Cassie. It would save me, too. But in the meantime, to make it all work out, I had to stay free. And given what a bungling, incompetent clusterfuck the investigation had become, that meant it was now up to Cassie and me to figure out who killed Bennett and McNulty.

Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight…
The pushups helped clear my head. Hammering up and down, I thought about what McNulty’s termination letters meant for the other DARPA leads. Roger would probably be fine—in addition to his DARPA work, he had other Navy projects cooking, like the Ducrete cylinders he used as targets for his destructive testing. The loss of a DARPA contract wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience for him. Besides, despite the annoying revelation that Roger hated me, Frankenstein had cleared him of the murders. That left Kate and Blake. Both of their projects were scheduled for termination, and they would be out of their jobs with nothing but a three-month severance package. Neither of them would take that news well.

Seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two…
My arms were starting to burn with lactic buildup, trembling with the effort of the pushups, as I tried to come up with a working hypothesis.

Regardless of what Cassie thought, Frankenstein had been uncertain about Kate’s innocence. Her bipolar instability did make her a wild-card possibility. Still, to me, Blake looked like the best candidate for both murders.

Despite his age, Blake was a big strong guy. He had considered McNulty a friend, so he might well see his surprise termination as an unforgivable betrayal. Could he have faked his upset reaction to McNulty’s death?

After seeing the trap Blake had set for me, I now knew that there was another side to him. When pushed, he was capable of surprising vindictiveness.

Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred.
Springing to my feet, I shook out my arms and grabbed the phone. Blake didn’t answer at his home number, and I didn’t have his mobile number. Sliding onto the barstool again, I drained my water bottle as I dug through his e-mail, checking bill receipts. Blake’s online payments were for work-related hardware and electronics, mostly. Other than that, he had no interesting expenses except for monthly payments to a storage facility outside Reno, and an occasional piece of scuba gear.

Blake’s house was in Flanigan, a few blocks from mine. I had been there once, for an awkward barbecue with Roger, Kate, and a handful of other staff. Closing Blake’s e-mail now, I brought up Google Earth and navigated the onscreen globe, zooming in on our neighborhood and bringing up satellite imagery of the surrounding backyards and fences. Panning a half mile west, I focused on Flanigan’s only 7-Eleven, along with the surrounding streets and houses. Memorizing. Then I closed the laptop.

Time to go get some exercise.

A couple of minutes later, I was on the porch in shorts and a hoodie, earbuds in. When I waved at Zajicek and Peterson they sat upright and started their car. A couple of quick stretches, and I took off running down the sidewalk. The Sheriff’s Department squad car pulled away from the curb and followed, staying half a block behind me.

Breathing slowly and evenly, I jogged along the sidewalk, setting a moderate pace as I covered the distance between my place and Blake’s. I kept a lot in reserve.

I would need it shortly.

B
lake’s car wasn’t in his driveway. And I knew it wasn’t in his garage, either, because his garage had been stuffed wall-to-wall with machine-shop equipment, leaving no room for a car.

From the sidewalk, the house looked empty as I jogged past. A second Sheriff’s Department car sat parked at the curb fifty feet away. Its nose was aimed at Blake’s front door. I didn’t acknowledge the two officers inside, but I recognized them: the other pair who had been shooting the breeze with Peterson and Zajicek at the range.

Stopping to retie my shoe, I glanced over my shoulder in time to see the driver punch in a number and raise a cell phone to his ear—they had recognized me, too. But he lowered it once Peterson’s squad car followed me around the corner.

I chuckled. They weren’t using their radios; this was still unofficial.

Keeping the same moderate pace, I looped through the nearly identical craftsman-style houses of my neighborhood, heading toward the 7-Eleven now. Without turning my head, I noted the heights of the fences and hedges as I ran by. That had been hard to determine from Google’s aerial images.