Carol tried not to smile. Hal took everything he did quite seriously and was a far better i-dotter than she. “Asymmetrical” would be a sin, possibly mortal.
She walked up to the two motel employees who were organizing the room for the Christmas party, which would last from three to five today, and asked that they move several of the round ten-tops to cover the bald spot in the banquet-room floor. The men hefted the tables and rearranged them.
Hal nodded.
Carol said, “De-asymmetricalized.”
Her vice president laughed. Taking his tasks seriously didn’t mean he was missing a sense of humor.
Hal took the room in. “Looks good to me. Double check the sound system. Then we’ll get the decorations up.”
“The PA?” she asked. “I tried it yesterday. It was fine.” But being the i-dotting banker that she was, Carol walked to the stage and flicked on the PA system.
Nothing.
A few more flicks of the off-on toggle.
As if that would do any good.
“This could be a problem.”
Carol followed the cord but it disappeared below the stage.
“Maybe those workers,” Hal said, peering at the microphones.
“Who?”
“Those two guys who were here a half hour ago. Maybe before you got here?”
“No, I didn’t see anybody. Jose and Miguel?” she asked, nodding at the men on the motel staff, now setting up chairs.
“No, other ones. They asked if this is where the banking meeting was going to be. I told them yes and they said they had to make some repairs under the stage. They were under there for a few minutes, then they left.”
She asked the two motel workers in the corner, “Did you hear that there was a problem with the sound system?”
“No, ma’am. Maria, Guest Services, she handle everything with the microphones and all that. She said it was fine this morning. But she off now.”
“Where are those other workers?” Carol asked. After receiving blank stares, she explained what Hal had told her.
“I don’t know who they’d be, ma’am. We’re the ones, Jose and me, who set up the rooms.”
Walking toward the access door to the stage, Hal said, “I’ll take a look.”
“You know electronics?” she asked.
“Are you kidding? I set up my grandson’s Kinect with his X-Box. All by my little ole lonesome.”
Carol had no idea what he was talking about but he said it with such pride she had to smile. She held open the access door as he descended beneath the stage. “Good luck.”
Three minutes later the PA system came on with a resonant click through the speakers.
Carol applauded.
Hal appeared and dusted off his hands. “Those guys earlier, they knocked the cord loose when they were under there. We’ll have to keep an eye out, they don’t do it again. I think they’ll be back.”
“Really?”
“Maybe. They left a tool box and some big bottles down there. Cleaner, I guess.”
“Okay. We’ll keep an eye out.” But the workmen were gone from Carol’s mind. Decorations had to be set up, food had to be arranged. She wanted the room to be as nice as possible for the two hundred CCCBA members who’d been looking forward to the party for months.
# # #
A stroke of luck… and good policing.
The CHP had collared the Brothers of Liberty perps.
Kathryn Dance, who’d dropped the disgruntled children off with her parents in Carmel, was standing in the weedy parking lot of an outlet mall only six miles from the California Bureau of Investigation’s Monterey Office, where she worked. Michael O’Neil now approached. He looked like a character from a John Steinbeck novel, maybe Doc in Cannery Row. Although the uniform of the MCSO was typical county sheriff’s khaki, Chief Detective O’Neil usually dressed soft—today in sport coat and tan slacks and blue dress shirt, no tie. His hair was salt-and-pepper and his brown eyes, beneath lids that dipped low, moved slowly as he explained the pursuit and collar. His physique was solid and his arms very strong—though not from working out in a gym (that was amusing to him) but from muscling salmon and other delicacies into his boat in Monterey Bay every chance he got.
O’Neil was taciturn by design and his face registered little emotion, but with Dance he could usually be counted on to crack a wry joke or banter.
Not now. He was all business.
A fellow CBI agent, massive shaved-headed Albert Stemple stalked up and O’Neil explained to him and Dance how the perps had been caught.
The fastest way out of the area was on busy Highway 1 north, to 156, then to 101, which would take the suspected terrorists directly back to their nest in Oakland. That route was where the bulk of the searchers had been concentrating—without any success.
But an inventive young Highway Patrol officer had asked himself how would he leave the area, if he knew his mission was compromised. He decided the smartest approach would be to take neighborhood and single-lane roads all the way to Highway 5, several hours away. And so he concentrated on small avenues like Jacks and Oil Well and—this was the luck part—he spotted the perps near this strip mall, which was close to Highway 68, the Monterey-Salinas Highway.
The trooper had called in backup then lit ‘em up.
After a twenty-minute high-speed pursuit, the perps skidded into the mall, sped around back and vanished, but the trooper decided they were trying a feint. He didn’t head in the same direction they were; instead, he squealed to a stop and waited beside a Tires Plus operation.
After five excessively tense minutes, the Brothers of Liberty had apparently decided they’d misled the pursuit and sped out the way they’d come in, only to find the trooper had anticipated them. He floored the cruiser, equipped with ram bars, and totaled the Taurus. The perps bailed.
The trooper tackled and hogtied one. The other galloped toward a warehouse area three or four hundred yards away, just as backup arrived. There was a brief exchange of gunfire and the second perp, wounded, was collared, too. Several CHP officers and a colleague of Dance’s at the CBI, TJ Scanlon, were at that scene.
Now, at the outlet mall, the perp who’d been tackled, one Wayne Keplar, regarded Dance, Stemple and O’Neil and the growing entourage of law enforcers.
“Nice day for an event,” Keplar said. He was a lean man, skinny, you could say. Parentheses of creases surrounded his mouth and his dark, narrow-set eyes hid beneath a severely straight fringe of black hair. A hook nose. Long arms, big hands, but he didn’t appear particularly strong.
Albert Stemple, whose every muscle seemed to be massive, stood nearby and eyed the perp carefully, ready to step on the bug if need be. O’Neil took a radio call. He stepped away.
Keplar repeated, “Event. Event… Could describe a game, you know.” He spoke in an oddly high voice, which Dance found irritating. Probably not the tone, more the smirk with which the words were delivered. “Or could be a tragedy. Like they’d call an earthquake or a nuclear meltdown an ‘event.’ The press, I mean. They love words like that.”
O’Neil motioned Dance aside. “That was Oakland PD. The CI’s reporting that Keplar’s pretty senior in the Brothers of Liberty. The other guy—the wounded one…” He nodded toward the warehouses. “Gabe Paulson, he’s technical. At least has some schooling in engineering. If it’s a bomb, he’s probably the one set it up.”
“They think that’s what it is?”
“No intelligence about the means,” O’Neil explained. “On their website they’ve talked about doing anything and everything to make their point. Bio, chemical, snipers, even hooking up with some Islamic extremist group and doing a quote ‘joint venture.’ ”