“Well, you made damn sure that he couldn’t live with that, either.”
“Where are the others?” said Robie. “Walton and the others?”
“They’re here,” said Patti. “They’re waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For you, of course.”
With that she turned and walked back into the tunnel.
Fitzsimmons stirred and said, “Well, now you know. You will meet up with your friend, Mr. Walton.”
“He’s Patti’s father, did you know that?” said Reel.
“Perhaps I did and perhaps I didn’t.”
“Is that what this is all about?” said Robie. “She has daddy issues?”
“I’m a chemist, not a psychologist. And I don’t really care.” He shook his head and grimaced. “To think that all of this started because that idiot Lamarre saw something in the back of a van that he shouldn’t have seen and then started blabbing. Every day it seemed like we had one more person we had to silence. It was like a virus mutating.”
“Well, sometimes the virus wins,” said Reel.
“And sometimes it doesn’t,” replied Fitzsimmons. “The key is quarantine. And then finding a way to kill the contagion.”
Fitzsimmons motioned to two of the guards, who came forward and lifted up one end of the seesaw. Now Robie and Reel could see that it was actually being used as a slide.
Bender’s body zipped right down the board and then off it.
They watched it fall over two hundred feet, where it hit the mucky water and then slipped under the surface.
Fitzsimmons explained, “We always slit the lungs so they won’t inflate when the gas builds up as a result of decomposition. And of course the weights and chains serve to keep the body at the bottom. It’s quite deep down there. And impossible to see anything in the depths.”
“Why do I think that’s not the first time you’ve done that?” said Reel. It was clear from the revulsion on her features that if she could have gotten to Fitzsimmons, he would be a dead man.
“Well, it’s not.”
“And I guess that’s where we’ll be ending up,” said Robie.
“I normally leave that up to Patti. But be warned, though I can kill in cold blood, I’m actually simply a humble chemist and genuinely a nice person. She’s far more dangerous than she appears.”
“So are we,” Reel muttered under her breath. “So are we.”
CHAPTER
67
“Do you think Blue Man is dead?”
Robie didn’t answer Reel’s query right away.
They were back in the same cell.
“I don’t think so. Patti said they were waiting for us. Not that I have any reason to believe her.”
“So she figured we’d end up here as prisoners, too?”
“She seems to be a long-range planner,” replied Robie.
“Where do you think those prisoners are coming in from?”
“From the little I could see behind the blue scrubs, they looked to be young and mostly Hispanic.”
“Are they snatching them from their hometowns?”
“Maybe they’re runaways or they came into the country illegally. That might make more sense. You start snatching kids from homes, there’re going to be a lot of questions and people looking for them.”
“You’re probably right.”
“They might have sold them a story of good-paying jobs and a new life before putting bags over their heads.”
“Some life.”
Robie leaned back against the cinderblock wall. “I’m not sure how good our lives are looking right now.”
“Well, I don’t see too many options.”
He said, “We have to wait. And adapt.”
“Story of our lives. What’s Patti’s motivation, do you think? It’s not like she’s living this rich lifestyle. She’s still here in her dirty jeans and boots.”
Robie shrugged. “I mentioned she might have daddy issues. Maybe that’s it.”
“Blue Man didn’t even know he had a daughter.”
“That’s what Claire told us. Maybe she told Patti something else. Or she might have discovered it on her own.”
“But that couldn’t be why she went into a business like this,” pointed out Reel.
“Like Dolph — or Fitzsimmons — said, I’m not a shrink. I don’t know. All I do know is that we’re in a tight spot with very few options.”
“They’re not going to let us sit here long. We’ll be reported as missing at some point.”
Robie said sharply, “By who? Both of the cops in this jurisdiction are out of commission.”
“The Agency. When we don’t get back to them.”
“We can’t count on that saving our lives.”
“I’ve never counted on anyone else saving my life,” retorted Reel.
Footsteps along the corridor alerted them that someone was coming. They both sat up straighter and stared expectantly at the barred cell door.
Patti Bender appeared there. They both noted that her fingers were tapping the butt of her holstered Glock. Then she reached her hand out of sight and jerked on something.
A moment later Blue Man was standing in front of them.
His clothes were dirty, his hair unkempt, and his face unshaven. Yet his eyes were clear and alert and his manner calm and unflustered. Like them, he was shackled.
Both Robie and Reel stood.
Blue Man said, “It’s good to see you’re both still alive.”
“I was about to say the same to you,” said Reel.
“Stop talking, please,” Patti said quietly.
Blue Man glanced at her, and Robie noted something in his eyes that he never thought he would see in his superior.
Fear.
Patti nodded at something out of their line of sight, and a guard appeared. He unlocked the door and Patti pushed Blue Man forward, causing him to stumble as he crossed the threshold. The door was locked after him.
“It won’t be long now,” Patti said ominously. Then she disappeared.
Blue Man wearily sat on the cot against the wall while Robie and Reel hovered in front of him.
He looked up at them. “I trust London and Iraq went according to plan?”
“Not precisely according to plan, at least for me,” said Reel. “But the mission was accomplished.”
“We found your drawing in the gun muzzle,” said Robie. “Atlas. We were just a little slow on getting to your actual meaning.”
Blue Man nodded. “I knew that was a long shot, but I didn’t have much time to consider alternatives.”
“How did you figure out what was going on?”
“I didn’t figure it all out — only enough pieces, I guess, to make people nervous.”
“We know you spoke with JC Parry and Holly Malloy.”
“JC is a good man, who knows a bit of my history. He came to me with this most incredible story of prisoners in hoods. That’s what started all of this.”
“How did you get onto the silo?” asked Reel. “I mean this one, the second silo?”
“I knew about the Atlas missile sites from growing up here. I knew there were two in the vicinity. By coming back here over the years, I knew that Roark Lambert had turned one into a doomsday safe haven for the affluent. But the other one had lain fallow all this time. But when Holly told me what Lamarre had told her, I started doing some digging. Where could you hide prisoners here? I knew of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the area. I knew of the Apostles, although they struck me as being rather innocuous.”
Reel looked at Robie but neither of them spoke about King’s actually being an FBI undercover agent. They didn’t know if the cell they were in was being bugged or not.
Blue Man continued, “But I couldn’t think of a reason why any of them would be bringing in prisoners. And they really didn’t have the facilities to discreetly keep a group of people against their will. Word would have eventually gotten out.” He paused. “But I had something else working to my advantage that perhaps others here didn’t. I knew from reports that had crossed my desk that somewhere in this general vicinity it was suspected that there was a large-scale illicit drug-manufacturing center. Both DEA and ICE had internally reported on it to us. Though we can’t operate domestically, the Agency still conducts joint task forces with our sister agencies. And there seemed to be an international element to this operation, which did bring it within our purview. But no one had been able to pinpoint the location in this country besides believing it was in a general six-state quadrant. That was far too large an area to do any type of concentrated search or investigation.”