The Loch Ness Legacy (5 page)

When the wind blew in their direction, the stench was overpowering. Tyler made sure to close the Suburban’s exterior vents as they approached Coalinga on Interstate-5. Located halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the section of freeway was well-known to travelers as the site of Harris Ranch, the largest cattle processing facility on the west coast. Tyler was amused to see that despite the aroma, the ranch had its own inn and restaurant in addition to a small runway. He wondered how well the building’s air conditioning filtered out the smell from a hundred thousand cattle. Tyler imagined that Brielle wouldn’t appreciate the ranch’s nickname. It was dubbed “Cowschwitz” by animal rights activists because of the two hundred million pounds of beef processed in its slaughterhouse every year.

The central valley of California is among the most productive agricultural regions on Earth, and Tyler had seen nothing but fields and orchards on the three-hour drive from the Bay Area. Special Agent Melanie Harris had filled the time with the region’s history as she drove. She joked that the owners of the ranch were no relation, but that she wouldn’t mind being adopted.

It would be just the two of them visiting Victor Zim. Zim hadn’t provided any hint of what he would reveal, but Harris thought he might be willing to make a deal to shorten his sentence. Tyler wasn’t as hopeful. Zim was serving twenty-five to life for premeditated murder, having rejected an offer to plea down before he was convicted. He could have had a change of heart about bargaining now that his brother was dead, but Tyler thought that the word of a man who’d killed six innocent people was worthless.

They turned off the highway at Jayne Road just beyond Harris Ranch and drove past stands of almond and orange groves toward the ironically named Pleasant Valley State Prison. Tyler would bet not a single person at the penitentiary—neither inmate nor guard—would describe the twenty-year-old prison as pleasant.

A mile from I-5, groves gave way to fallow fields, and the sprawling prison came into view. Adjacent to the prison was a mental hospital. The combined units housed more than five thousand inmates, including Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin.

Harris drove past the entrance of the hospital and turned left at the next road to take them into the vast prison parking lot. After they passed through the security gate and parked, Tyler opened the door to heat that he rarely experienced in his home town of Seattle, particularly in mid June. The sun blazed through a cloudless sky, baking the asphalt. Thermal waves billowed so thickly that it caused mini-mirages.

A thin but fit blonde, Harris put on her jacket despite the heat. It was her effort to project the FBI’s sense of professionalism, a trait Tyler admired. He had specifically requested that she be assigned to this interrogation because he’d saved her life on a Miami cruise ship a few years back, and they’d kept in touch ever since.

“You ready for this?” she asked as they walked toward the visitor’s building.

“Sure,” Tyler said with a shrug to give the impression that he wasn’t as stressed as he really was. “Why not?”

“Well, you did send the guy to prison and kill his brother. Any new ideas about why Carl was up on the Eiffel Tower in the first place?”

Tyler had thought about it for the last week and couldn’t come up with any valid reason. The bomb he’d planted was too small to do any significant structural damage.

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “Gordian’s French unit is analyzing the pieces of wreckage to see if they can find anything revealing. I understand the French authorities will release Carl’s autopsy results soon, but I can’t see how that will help. What I’d like to know is how Victor Zim found out I was the one who killed his brother. That has to be the reason he would meet with the FBI only if I agreed to come. How did word get to him all the way out here?”

Harris shook her head. “We’re checking into that. Probably through some French journalist. Carl must have a few men still scattered out there to feed info to Victor.”

“Like the one who was controlling the quadcopter bombs from somewhere off the tower? If he had a telescope, he could have seen me fighting with Carl.”

“We’ll get him soon. Once we track down André Laroche and bring him into custody, we’ll have no trouble finding the rest of Carl’s gang.”

Laroche was a Jewish immigrant from France now living in the Seattle area. The shell corporation that funded the Eiffel Tower display above the gift shop was traced back to him, so he was now the prime suspect for funding the attack. The fact that Laroche had gone missing just a few days after the assault enhanced the suspicion.

Tyler had never met the man and was only familiar with the name because his sister, Alexa, had been working for him on an unrelated project. Tyler didn’t like the coincidence, but he couldn’t fathom a reason why the attack on the Eiffel Tower and Alexa working for Laroche would be related. He was still trying to figure out how to break the news to Alexa that her patron was the mastermind behind the attack.

“It’s hard to believe he’s involved. You still haven’t found him?”

“We have agents searching his house in Seattle right now. We’ll find him.”

“He has a lot of money,” Tyler said. “It could be a long time before you hunt him down.”

Harris’s tight lips told him that she wasn’t as confident as she sounded. She stopped and glanced at the prison entrance. “You clear on how this is going to go?”

Tyler nodded. “I just sit there and respond only if you tell me to.” He didn’t have to say that it would be uncomfortable staring into the face of the criminal he’d testified against, who also happened to be the brother of the man he’d killed.

“Good,” Harris said. “Interrogations can be tricky, so let me steer the direction of the conversation.”

They passed through more security inside, and Harris handed over her weapon. They were escorted to a private interrogation cell and took their seats to wait for Victor Zim. The room met Tyler’s expectations. Gray bars supplementing the cinder-block walls, a metal table topped with a welded steel loop and bolted to the concrete floor, and three aluminum chairs were the extent of the spartan furnishings.

The squeal of unoiled hinges heralded the approach of Zim. Tyler recalled the trial that brought Victor here.

Victor was a gifted chemical engineer working at a plastics plant in Oakland, and Carl was a construction foreman at a different firm. Their baby brother, David, died in the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11. That day he had been waiting tables at the Windows on the World restaurant to put himself through college at NYU. The two surviving brothers tried to join the army in the aftermath but were turned away because both failed psychological exams in which they displayed tendencies toward extremist behavior. The two of them became heavily involved in militia activities on weekends, traveling to private compounds in the forests of the Sierra Nevada where they received training in weapons and tactical situations. Their constant paramilitary drills for a hypothetical Muslim terrorist attack drove them into the embrace of white supremacist groups.

Victor’s pent-up rage and need for revenge reached a peak when he assaulted a Pakistani executive one day at the plant and was summarily fired.

Three months later Victor sneaked back into the plant to sabotage the facility, using his extensive expertise and knowledge of its layout to overheat one of the processing tanks. Six people, including the Pakistani executive, were killed in the subsequent blast. Initially, the police thought it was an industrial accident, and had it not been for Tyler’s investigation, it would have been a perfect crime.

Gordian Engineering was one of the foremost forensic engineering and analysis firms in the world. As the former captain of an Army combat engineering company, Tyler had gained extensive experience with explosives. Although he had founded Gordian, Tyler left the day-to-day operations to his former professor, Miles Benson, who became CEO.

Tyler’s role was to take the lead in high-profile and unusual jobs as Gordian’s chief of special operations, and the chemical plant explosion had been his investigation. During the analysis of the destruction, Tyler determined that the supposedly malfunctioning temperature regulator was an almost exact duplicate that had been installed in place of the original. He was the only one who had noticed that it was the next year’s model, different from the previous year’s model only in the updated font of the brand’s logo.

When they tracked the purchase of the regulator to Victor Zim, Tyler’s testimony had been enough to get him convicted. They also suspected that Carl was an accomplice, but there wasn’t enough evidence to bring him to trial, and Victor wouldn’t testify against Carl to reduce his sentence.

Tyler recognized Victor’s combination of methodical planning and desire for violence in Carl’s attack. The brothers had the same qualities. The only difference was that Victor Zim didn’t look the part. Tyler remembered Victor at the defendant’s table as a pudgy man with receding hair, someone who ate a lot of donuts at his desk and spent his exercise time at the militia encampments by lying on his considerable stomach to fire guns.

The prison bars slammed shut and two hulking guards accompanied an even larger man between them. This was not the Victor Zim from the trial.

The face was a few years older and the pudginess was gone, replaced by angular creases that would be at home on a marble statue. Every trace of flab had been transformed into coils of ropey muscle that made his prison uniform ridiculously tight across the shoulders. This was a man who spent every minute in the yard at the weight sets, possibly as a way to defend himself from marauding gangs. Someone would have to be extremely confident in his fighting ability to take Zim on.

His hair was shorn to a buzz cut. Black tattoos of skulls and flame-girdled dragons snaked down his arms. Knowing he was going to be in prison for the rest of his life, Zim must have adapted quickly to a regimen that would keep him alive.

Zim strolled in as though he were the one in charge. He stared at Tyler, who returned the gaze with equal force. While Zim had a bemused grin on his face, Tyler kept a stony expression.

The guards shackled him to the table, and Tyler didn’t mind the safety precaution. Desperate men with nothing to lose were the most dangerous type. Though Tyler was a combat veteran and able to handle himself in a fight, his current condition meant he wasn’t at a hundred percent. No sense in taking chances with this man.

As he’d been instructed, Tyler let Harris do the talking.

“My name is Special Agent Melanie Harris from the FBI, and you know Tyler Locke.”

Zim glanced at Harris and then back at Tyler. “I didn’t know if you’d actually show.”

“We’re here because you said you have information pertaining to the Eiffel Tower attack,” Harris said. “We’re in a hurry, so get on with it.”

“No, you’re not. If this isn’t the most important thing you’re doing today, I’d be surprised.”

Tyler didn’t look at Harris, but he could feel the annoyance radiating from her. “Your brother, Carl, was killed seven days ago trying to attack a summit in Paris. Did you know anything about his plan?”

“I know that this guy here was the one who pushed him off the Eiffel Tower.”

“How do you know that?”

Zim shrugged. “Word gets around.”

“Why are we here, Mr. Zim?”

“I’ll only talk to Locke.”

Harris shook her head. “You’re talking to
me
.”

“Yeah, and that’s over with now. If you don’t like it, get the hell out of here. Or is he deaf and dumb now? Should I write it down for him?”

Harris paused, then turned to Tyler and nodded at him.

Zim laughed. “You need her permission to speak? What, is she your lawyer, too?”

Tyler leaned forward with an unflinching stare. “What do you want to tell me, Zim?”

“So you haven’t gone mute.”

“No, but looking at you makes me wish I’d gone blind.”

Zim laughed again, this time a full guffaw. “Wow. You weren’t this funny in court.”

“Why was your brother on the tower last week? We figured out his plan before he even got there. That’s why it didn’t succeed.”

Zim sat back in his chair with a self-satisfied smirk. “Huh. It didn’t? You sure about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just think you know what this is all about. And here I was under the impression you were a smart guy. MIT grad. Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford. Served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Started your own company when you were thirty. Those are some pretty impressive credentials. And yet, you don’t know squat.”

“Why don’t you enlighten us, Zim? Carl’s dead. No reason to hide it any more. Maybe Special Agent Harris here will even put in a good word for you. You could get out of here in twenty-three years instead of twenty-five.”

“I don’t want anything from her.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to see the look on your face when I tell you that I’m going to return the favor.”

“What favor?”

“You took my brother from me, and I’m going to do the same for you. It’s Alexa, right?”

Tyler jumped up from his seat so quickly that his chair crashed into the bars behind him. He would have launched himself at Zim if Harris hadn’t grabbed his arm. Tyler winced as she dug her fingers into his healing wound, which only made him angrier.

Zim noticed the grimace. “Did Carl hurt you? Looks like he went down with a fight.”

“He went down screaming like a girl,” Tyler growled. “And I swear, if you have your friends do anything to my sister—”

“You’ll what? Send me to prison? Your threats sound a lot stupider than mine. Besides, I don’t need friends to kill her. I’ll make sure it happens personally.”

It was Tyler’s turn to laugh. He shook off Harris and straightened up. “Well, that actually makes me feel better. If you ever get out of here, which I seriously doubt, you’ll have to be released to a nursing home. Why don’t you think about that while you stare at the walls of your spacious eight-by-eight cell?”

“Boy, you really got me there, Locke,” Zim said with a smile. “Believe me, now that you’ve taken my second brother from me, there’s nothing you can do to scare me.”