Soliano was nodding. “And then what?”
“Then the twerp takes the dummy cask with the shipment to the dump, and the knothead takes the resin cask wherever he friggin takes it.”
“The depot, we will call it. Where would you site the depot?”
“With that rig,” Ballinger indicated the offroader-trailer, “I’d be going somewhere off in the wild.”
“What would you do when you got there?”
“Unload the friggin cask. With a telly. Remember, knothead stole two of my telehandlers.”
Soliano kept nodding. “And then?”
“Come back here.”
“Ah yes. Ready for the second swap, when the time comes. Last night. Which, to your dismay, went wrong.”
Ballinger snorted. “Maybe I’m not such a hotshot.”
“More than a mistake, I think. You, or your partner, shot out the tires. To stop the procedings, yes?”
“Why I’d do that?”
“Cold feet? Change of plans?” Soliano flipped a hand. “In any case, there follows the chase — Mr. Beltzman in his truck, Mr. Jardine in his pickup.”
Soliano, I noticed, had just switched to calling the perp Jardine, instead of putting Ballinger in that role. Ballinger seemed to notice too.
“And then,” Soliano said coolly, “we come to the end of the scenario. The crash, the shooting.”
“Almost,” Ballinger said, easy now. “Then Roy comes into work this morning. That’s just nutso.”
Maybe, I thought. But Jardine had learned something at work, hadn’t he? He learned he was leaving tracks. In talc. I’d made that plain enough, letting him know who was the geologist and who wasn’t.
“If this scenario is correct,” Walter said, “where is the resin cask now?”
We looked, as one, at the telehandler with its open arms empty. We’d seen the talc cask at the crash site. More than seen. So that meant the resin cask was here, last night, snuggled in the telly’s arms like a toxic baby. So at some point Jardine came back to retrieve it? I figured I knew when: while we were shopping and eating and going about our business in Beatty. I said, chilled, “Jardine got the jump on us.”
Hap whistled again. “Boy’s got cojones.”
“That he has.” Soliano regarded Hap. “And what does a boy with cojones do with this cask?”
“My turn to be Roy?” Hap shuddered. “Depends on his motive. Who knows? That boy’s brainpan is beyond my ken.”
I said, “What about the drawing on the radwaste truck?”
“You asking,” Hap said, “what if the boy unleashes the beads?”
I nodded.
Hap ducked.
We had no idea where Jardine had gone from here. We had no soils from his blue Ford pickup to trace. So Walter and I went to the offroader rig: here was something we might be able to follow. Find the depot where he stored his toxic babies.
Walter opened the field kit.
Soliano herded the others out, promising to return with his trace analysis techs. I doubted they’d have much more luck here than they’d had at the crash site. Jardine was surely equally fastidious in here. Protocol, certainly, to wear protective clothing when you’re playing swap with radioactive waste. And even when you panic. I could see Jardine — couple hours ago? Spooked, rushing, but protocol says you suit up first. I hoped, fervently, that he’d worked up a nasty sweat. I no longer pitied him, with his sad face. I wanted to put him away, down deep somewhere where the sun don’t shine. I wanted to find his toxic cargo and see it buried where it belonged and it damn well didn’t belong running around on little cat feet out in the environment.
I yanked open my field kit and spilled half the contents.
Walter looked. “Focus, dear.”
I inhaled, exhaled. That Zen thing.
We set to work. Walter began with the trailer and I took the offroader.
The treads of all the tires were ripe with dried mud but that didn’t set my heart racing. Oh, we’d likely be able to ID it but there’d be no way to tell in what order the mineral components had been acquired. With every rotation of the wheels, the tires would have mashed the stuff, mixing the new with the old.
I decided to start on the fenders, where there should be something worth having. Tires mash soil but they also kick up glop onto the underside of fenders, which preserve and protect, one layer after another. I squatted at the right rear fender and shined my flashlight deep underneath. It was lovely. I made three cuts then slid my scalpel down to the metal and pried out a fine wedge of soil. I placed it gently in the specimen dish so as not to spoil the sequence of deposition.
The trailer, unfortunately, had no fenders. Walter made do with the tires.
We came out of the tunnel with our little ice chest packed with samples and told Soliano we’d need a few hours in our makeshift lab to build a soil map.
Hap was stretched out in the shade. “Map?” He lifted his sombrero. “Where y’all going?”
“To hell.” Chickie spat. She sat on the tailings heap. She’d claimed to have no knowledge of what was stored in her unused tunnel, and there was no evidence linking her to Jardine. No probable cause for Soliano to detain her. Still, she remained, keeping watch on her mine.
Walter said, mild, “Hell is not on the itinerary.”
I presumed not.
“Jardine left a trail,” Walter said. “We’ll be following it.”
Soliano looked at his watch. “Good. Alert me before you leave. My agents and Mr. Hemmings’ team will be expanding the search around here. We must select a place to rendezvous, at the end of the day.” He thought. “We will establish headquarters at park headquarters — Furnace Creek. Check in at the ranger station.”
We were huddling like high-school freshmen to exchange cell phone numbers when I reminded myself to ask Scotty if he could spare a couple gallons of Wal-Mart water for our field trip.
13
Roy Jardine had a problem.
There was hot cargo in the bed of his pickup, and his pickup was registered in his name, and that was not being incognito.
Last night, sitting at home in his Lazy-boy, he had wrestled with the problem of the resin cask. After the showdown with Beltzman, after things went critical, he had decided the safe thing was to leave the cask where it was, in the talc mine. Then this morning, Jardine had gone undercover at the dump to do recon — and that turned out to be a real smart decision. He’d learned what the enemies were up to. He’d had a bad moment when Mister FBI questioned him, but he’d played that real cool. The real danger was the geologists with their talc-sniffing noses.
That changed everything. He’d barely had time to get to the mine and recover the cask.
But he’d aced it.
And then he had to decide what to do with it.
He couldn’t deliver it for use in the grand mission because he needed the trailer rig, and that loser Beltzman had crippled it.
This cask was an orphan now.
Orphaned cask. New enemies. The math was clear. The only thing that wasn’t clear was how and when he would use it against them. Until that became clear, he needed to store it.
So here he was traveling this two-lane road with a hot cargo, checking the rearview mirror so often his neck hurt. Nobody on this road but jackrabbits. And him. He checked the rearview. The cask rode low because he had loaded it on its side so it would look incognito under the tarp. He was proud how he’d improvised. He’d used a lead curtain from the supply box — and the curtain had grommets! And he had bungee cords in his toolbox! And voila, as snooty people say. And the tarp did more than just shield the cask. He’d filled the pickup bed with talc, for more shielding, and the tarp kept the talc from flying away. Tarp and talc, two layers of shielding. In job eighteen redundancy was a lifesaver that he’d taken to heart. He would have liked to stay dressed out — triple redundancy — but that wouldn’t be incognito.