The Templar Conspiracy (20 page)

33

Malcolm Teeter, who liked his friends to call him Stryker, his favorite character from the video game
Mortal Kombat
, sat alone at the wheel of the Sunoco oil tanker parked behind the Winter Falls Shopping Center on Crooked Pond Road. The detonator for the nine-thousand-gallon, twenty-eight-ton ANFO bomb that filled the red, white and blue tank was on the dashboard in front of him. Made up of a radio-controlled servo from a toy motorboat purchased at a RadioShack in Portland, the detonator was connected to four six-volt batteries and a PerkinElmer slapper blasting cap like the kind used in antitank rockets.

The new dude had showed them how to order things like that online. He’d even managed to get them all what appeared to be perfect replicas of New Hampshire National Guard uniforms so they’d fit in during the Winter Falls operation.

He called himself Barfield, and he was nice enough but he was too quiet. And, anyway, Malcolm wasn’t stupid, was he? In no more than a week, even though nobody said anything, you could tell who was boss now and it sure as hell wasn’t Wilmot
goddamn
DeJean anymore. He had the rank, sure, and walked around the compound with that “I am the principal of this school” look on his face, but it was Barfield who showed them all the new tricks—like getting rid of all that hot-dog stuff, about shooting pistols on the side, like how to mix in and not give people clues like showing your tats or wearing shit-kicker boots, like the difference about looking and actually seeing, and most of all about patience.

Malcolm didn’t like driving in the smallest load, but just like this Barfield guy said, it was the most important because it was the first. It would draw away the heat from the real ground zero—the school—and bring it up here, to the north of the town. According to Barfield, there was going to be a lot of heat in town, and driving down Main Street you could almost feel it.

Going by the park in front of the cop shop and fire hall, you could pick them off everywhere. Like, what kind of idiot wears a topcoat and carries an attaché case and just stands on the corner in the middle of a snowstorm? Secret Service or a Fed, that’s who. Nobody noticed Malcolm, of course, which was the whole point. Sunoco was just about the biggest heating oil distributor in the state and there were Sunoco stations all over the place. Who saw a fuel truck in the middle of winter? They were
supposed
to be driving around at all hours of the day and night.

But still, he didn’t like the waiting around. Of the six trucks his was the only one that wasn’t going to be close to the rink. It was fine that he was key man or whatever Barfield called him, but it didn’t do much for his—what was it?—his self-esteem. He felt a bit like the odd man out.

Teeter looked out the half-frosted windshield. The parking lot in front of the big P&C supermarket. Almost closing time. Teeter picked up the simple little radio control that would detonate the bomb parked next to the side wall of the shopping center. He might be the odd man out, but he knew the stats.

He grinned. He could see the estimates and the comparisons in the newspapers. The Oklahoma City bomb had been three thousand pounds; this one was fifty thousand pounds. The Oklahoma City bombing created a thirty-foot-deep crater and took out half an office building, causing damage for blocks around. This one would vaporize the entire supermarket and half a dozen other stores in the shopping center.

He would get a cell phone call from Barfield. That was the signal to climb out of the truck with the detonator, press the switch and then run like hell. He’d have five minutes to get himself out of range and to the rendezvous on Pine Street. He checked his watch again. Twenty minutes. He turned up the Tina Turner cut on his iPod. Now
there
was an old bitch who could sing.

General Angus Scott Matoon sat in his E Ring office in the Pentagon and fretted. It was eight o’clock in the evening and so far there was no news from Winter Falls. That could mean nothing or anything, but if Crusader was to succeed he needed to take the men of Prairie operational, and soon. He had enough men in place to take over the small but vital command-and-control units of the nation’s telecommunications satellites, but to gather the reins of that power into a single fist would take time. Crusader was a tightrope; America had to be briefly thrown into chaos before Vice President Sinclair came to the rescue. As well as being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Chief of Staff of the Army, Matoon also had personal command of the little-known and even less-documented USNORTHCOM, the United States North American Command—a million-member strong homeland defense force controlling the land, sea and air in and around the continental United States, Canada and Mexico, and essentially occupying both the United States and those two sovereign nations under an iron-fisted martial law that came from the Oval Office and the commander in chief. It had been quietly established just after 9/11 and further augmented during the economic crises of 2008 to 2010, with the fear of a banking collapse and the threat of a new civil war.

As soon as word came down that Crusader was in motion, Matoon’s main job was to take over the euphemistically named Consequence Management Response Force, a massive, military-manned national police force from USNORTHCOM’s headquarters at Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. None of this could be accomplished until he had control of the satellite systems and Rex Deus became the de facto leadership of the nation. He looked at his watch. He couldn’t wait any longer. He picked up the red telephone in front of him on the big oak desk that had once belonged to General Robert E. Lee and punched in a number.

“We have a prairie fire.”

Everything went off like clockwork. The chopper landed square in the center of the big canvas target that had been pegged out on the snow-covered grass of the little park in front of the Municipal Building on Croppley Street. The smiling president, bounding down the short steps, shook hands with Mayor Dotty Blanchette, and together, before they froze to death, they got into the middle Escalade in the nine-car procession and headed for the Abbey School.

The Abbey School rink, named for the president’s late father, was located on the foundations of what had once been the main animal pen for the Abbey’s cheese-producing sheep and that had later been converted into what had been pretentiously referred to as the Big End— the main cricket field for the school. Cricket had gone over like a lead balloon and the large area to the east of the main school building had been converted into a baseball diamond. With New Hampshire regularly having as much as five months of winter, hosing down the baseball field in late October or early November and turning it into a skating rink seemed like a natural thing to do, and with the prez’s prowess at hammering his opponents blindsided into the boards and making power plays, covering the rink and putting in seating followed equally naturally.

Previously the classic game between Winter Falls High and the Abbey School had taken place on the schoolyard rink at the latter, but that meant the game had to be played in daylight and attendance was usually pretty low. With the covered rink at the Abbey the game changed dramatically; there were cheerleading squads for both schools—all-male for the Abbey, all-female for Winter Falls—and with seating for 2,500 you could get half the population of the town and the faculties and student bodies from both schools into the building.

Marching bands played, programs and hot dogs were sold to raise money for the two schools’ favorite charities—in the case of the Abbey School this meant sending twenty dollars a month to a child of indeterminate sex named Sui Sang in Hong Kong, and in the case of Winter Falls High it was twenty dollars a month to the Salvation Army.

The whole thing had the nice, American ring of sportsmanship and charity about it, and in its own way the dropping of the puck ceremony developed its own cachet, like being made a Hasty Pudding Man or Woman of the Year at Harvard University. Celebrities of both real and dubious distinction had been given the invitation, from Dick Cheney and Wayne Gretsky to Pee-wee Herman and Howie Mandel. To drop the puck at the Abbey-Winter Falls game was a hot photo op, especially when the
New York Times
was doing a magazine cover story on you timed to coincide with the announcement of your political autobiography,
Promises, Promises
, which the prez knew he was going to have to write sooner or later.

The ride to the old gray wall surrounding the Abbey School took less than ten minutes, even at motorcade speed—more than enough time for Morrie to inquire about the whereabouts of the luscious Shannon O’Doyle, who, Dotty was sad to inform him, had died of breast cancer almost ten years gone by.

They drove through the main gates, manned by two patrol cars with their flashers going just to show people how serious they were, then drove around the long, curving driveway past the main building and the old cloisters to the rink, a glass-and-steel flying wedge that had nothing to do with the nineteenth-century, gothic pile of the dark, gloomy school.

Another three minutes and Dotty, Morrie and the president were being escorted to their center-ice seats by two Eagle Scouts, one from the Abbey and one from the high school. Flashes flashed, the PA system boomed and the two teams were introduced and lined up on the ice to shake hands with the man who held the throttle of the world. At seven fifteen the festivities began. Forty-five minutes of high school bands and stupid speeches and the puck would drop.

No one noticed the big Sunoco heating oil truck parked beside the main building, a man in a Sunoco uniform with a nozzled hose in his hand in front of an ordinary-looking standpipe. No one, it seemed, realized that if any truck should be parked beside the school that night it should have been a big green Hess Natural Gas truck, not a big, yellow Sunoco fuel oil tanker.

Kate Sinclair’s Gulfstream landed at Manassas Regional Airport and taxied toward the cluster of 1930s-style buildings that marked the terminal area. Just as the pilot cut the engines to a dull throb, Mike Harris’s satellite phone pinged again. He took the call, a slow grin wreathing his features.

“What?” Sinclair asked, irritation in her voice; she hated when other people knew things she didn’t.

“According to the GPS, they’re in Winter Falls.”

“Put out an APB or whatever it’s called. Have them picked up,” said Sinclair. Her smoky breath rattled in her throat and she felt her heart swell with expectation.

She smiled her own private smile. It couldn’t have worked better if she’d planned it. With Matoon’s people in charge and habeas corpus suspended in the face of martial law, getting the whereabouts of Holliday’s invaluable notebook could be done legally and on American soil. With that notebook and the enormous wealth it represented, the Rex Deus line would rule in the Western world for a thousand years. “Have them held in custody until I figure out exactly what to do with them.”

34

William Tritt had dispatched small units of Maine’s Right Arm in their National Guard uniforms to the homes of all off-duty members of the Winter Falls Police force, all members of the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department who lived within a twenty-mile radius of the town and the homes of all off-duty firemen in the area. By now those potential threats would either be bound and gagged or dead if they gave any resistance.

The remainder of his small force was dispatched to the woods surrounding the Abbey School. It was virtually a suicide mission, of course, but he’d spun enough tales of the population rising up in sympathy that the men of Maine’s Right Arm were positive of their success.

Tritt, of course, didn’t give a damn; he was doing a job that he was getting paid for. What happened after the job was done was none of his affair, nor did he want it to be. Until the detonation occurred there, they were to keep anyone and everyone from exiting the rink. For his own part, Tritt was in his room at a local bed-and-breakfast on South Main Street, his laptop open on the bed, waiting for the confirmation that the last payment had been deposited into his Swiss account. He had no intention of being near any of the fireworks when they went off. In fact, he intended to be some miles away.

Dean Crawford piloted his cruiser through the falling snow, doing his regular run up North Main along the lake up to Goose Corner, then back again, winding up at the shopping center where he’d Code Seven for a meal at Denny’s and then do it all over again until the end of his shift.

Tonight everyone was getting hot and bothered by all the security around the president’s visit, but Crawford had been a cop for far too long and in far too many places to care. Red Balls were something to be avoided no matter what form they took. A tour to Iraq during the Gulf War plus a decade on the Miami-Dade force, then the Baltimore force, had taught him that. Even marriage was a Red Ball, as he knew only to well after three wives had left him. Not that he wasn’t a good cop. He was; he prided himself on it, in fact, but you had to slow down eventually.

No, for now at least he was perfectly happy just to do his regular shift up to the sewage plant and around again, keeping his eyes out for the bad guys that never showed up at this time of year. For the most part crime was seasonal in Winter Falls, just like it was most other places. Crooks don’t like the cold any more than they like it too hot. On a night like tonight the worst he was going to get was a stalled-out car in a snowbank or a DUI, and that was just fine with him. He’d book out at the end of his four-to-midnight, go back to his little bungalow on the pond and catch a little late-night TV with a beer or maybe two. Alone. Quiet. Peaceful.

Crawford turned the cruiser off Willow onto Crooked Pond Road then turned into the shopping center parking lot. Just about everything was closed except the P&C and Denny’s. Everything else was dark. The snow was coming down heavily now, the wind off the lake sending it into whirls and eddies that caught in the yellow vapor lamps like bizarre, miniature tornadoes. A big Sunoco tanker was servicing the P&C, and Crawford found himself wondering if the drivers of those hulking things got extra bucks for night work or for driving through blizzards. Probably, the lucky bastards. The way the chief made it sound you were supposed to take the occasional midnight-to-eight shot if you were unmarried and you were supposed to do it without overtime.

On the other hand, he’d had worse bosses than Lockwood. If nothing else the old graybeard knew what combat was like, which was a plus. Coming back from any war wasn’t easy. It did things to you and did them to you young, things most people who hadn’t done it couldn’t understand. Lockwood did, so the occasional temper flare or sour mood was taken with more than a grain of salt. He also understood that sometimes a man had to put himself to sleep with something stronger than a beer or two to keep away the dreams and that was a bonus, too.

Crawford parked the cruiser in front of Denny’s, then coded himself out with dispatch. He made sure the bulky Motorola portable PDA was tucked into its little holster on his belt, then climbed out of the car. He took a few seconds to stretch, then trudged through the soft, deepening snow and stepped inside the restaurant. The place was almost empty except for a couple way in the back and two or three more customers hunched at the counter like regulars at a neighborhood bar. Workers coming off shift; maybe the driver of the Sunoco truck. Who knew? Most of the locals were at the hockey game—a game he could take or leave.

A bored-looking waitress came around with a menu, but he ordered from memory what he had every night on this shift: country-fried steak and eggs with hash browns and coffee. There was a copy of the
New Hampshire Gazette
on the bench seat of the booth he was in and he browsed through it until the big plate with his dinner came.

The waitress put it down in front of him, and for a while he read while he ate. Halfway through an editorial on setting a Robin Hood tax on the banks he stopped eating and put his fork down. Coming down Crooked Pond he’d seen a car with rental plates and a JFK Hertz license holder going in the opposite direction. He even remembered the number: ABC 2345, like a kid had chosen it. Why would somebody renting a car at JFK come to northern New Hampshire on a day like this? There were a hundred legitimate reasons, of course, but his cop sense was twitching and his appetite was gone. He took out his PDA, typed in a Code Five wants-and-warrants request and got an answer back almost instantly.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered.

“Pardon?”

Crawford looked up. The waitress was standing there with a pot of coffee in her hand. He dropped ten bucks on the table. He looked at the PDA screen, took a deep breath and switched the machine off. “I gotta run,” he said.
Who’da thought, a goddamned Red Ball in Winter Falls, New Hampshire
. He put the PDA back into its little holster and stood, his meal forgotten. He headed out of the almost-empty restaurant at a run.

They drove down Sugar Hill Road on the outskirts of Winter Falls with Holliday behind the wheel. They’d spent most of the day searching for some evidence of Tritt, but had come up empty. What they had seen was a town crammed with Secret Service. Holliday had even seen what appeared to be National Guardsmen here and there, which he thought might be a little extreme. He headed the rental car toward South Main Street and the highway out of town. Kessler had been wrong; there was no threat here.

“I can’t believe the press swallowed that whole Jihad al-Salibiyya thing. Don’t they have investigative reporters anymore?” he mumbled in frustration.

“It’s all blogs and opinion these days.” Peggy shrugged, shivering in the seat beside him. The car’s heater had died long ago. “The Internet bled newspapers dry and real journalism dried up with it. The news cycle is all about razzmatazz, not story. An autistic kid getting found in a swamp or a guy hiding under the pulpit of his church, surviving a hurricane, outrates the outbreak of a foreign war or a disaster somewhere else killing tens of thousands. Live outside the United States like I have and you start to realize what a bunch of navel-gazers we are.” Beside Peggy, Holliday suddenly tensed. “What’s the matter?”

“I think that’s a cop car behind us.”

“Maybe it’s nothing. There are cops everywhere in this town tonight.” Suddenly the cop car’s flasher came on and his siren whooped once.

“He wants us to stop.”

“Can we outrun him?”

“In a Ford Escort?”

“We’ve got ID.”

“Let’s hope Pyx did his job right,” said Holliday. He pulled over and stopped. Behind him the police car did the same. Nothing moved; no cop climbed out of the cruiser.

“What’s he doing?” Peggy asked.

“Something’s wrong.”

“FREEZE!” said a bullhorn voice out of the snow-white darkness.

And then all the lights in the world came on.