Now Nancy parked the car, grabbed her flashlight, and climbed out, leaving the headlights on. Even with the mittens, the hat, and the coat she had borrowed, the air was bitterly cold. Behind the first building she found the bulldozer, the apron of broken earth spread out before it. She tromped through the snow that covered the rubble of frozen earth until her flashlight landed on a small lump about a foot high, toward the edge of the scar in the ground. She walked toward it, dusted off the snow with her mitten, and gasped—her sharp exhalation marked by a puff of condensation.
She was looking at a delicate hand reaching up through the frozen ground.
Unable to excavate with any efficiency, she pulled off her mittens to use her bare hands. Eventually, she uncovered the entire arm and the shallow form of a woman’s chest.
Nancy pulled out the burner phone she had bought at the airport in Las Vegas and quickly discovered that there was no cellular signal. Then she put the phone away. Even if she were able to reach Gideon, what could she say except that someone—and maybe several people—had been killed here. But it still gave her nothing to take to Dahlgren. Dead people recovered from a pile of dirt was a state crime, something to alert the sheriff about. But theheiiiiiii D‡re was no hard evidence of a plot against the government of the United States.
She got up and walked around to the first building. The door was locked, so she walked to the second building. Inside she found a tangle of complex stainless steel piping attached to various sizes of vats and pressure vessels. It looked similar to the larger pharmaceutical labs Nancy had raided during a joint task force she had served on with the DEA. But these vessels were far larger. And most importantly, it didn’t smell like a meth lab. Small-scale meth labs could often be smelled by neighbors a mile away. But here the smell wasn’t bad. Only a faint, bitter odor that reminded her of almonds.
She walked slowly around the deserted building, probing with her flashlight. On the far end of the room she found a pile of what appeared to be a root vegetable she didn’t recognize, although it was similar to potatoes or yams.
She examined one, which was frozen to a rocklike consistency. She tossed it back in the pile and continued surveying the room.
It was clear as she followed the pipes that the roots were being ground up, the liquid residue piped into a large vat. That vat led to a series of increasingly small steel vessels. Something was being distilled from the roots, and perhaps chemically altered. She reviewed the various naturally derived drugs she was aware of: cocaine, heroin, khat, THC, psilocybin. None of them came from root vegetables.
At the far end of the room was the smallest of the vessels. It appeared to be refrigerated—though that seemed a little unnecessary today. At the bottom of the vessel was a small petcock. She turned the petcock. A single drop of a thin clear liquid ran from the petcock and fell to the concrete floor where it rapidly froze. She considered touching it, but then decided that might not be wise.
Was it possible, she wondered, to synthesize some kind of explosive compound, like nitroglycerin, from a vegetable? If so, she would be wise not to mess with it. She walked out of the shed and around to the other building. The door was reinforced with heavy steel. She drew her Glock and fired point-blank into the door bolt. Dahlgren had forced her to give up her service weapon, so this was a spare she kept on hand. It took half a magazine to finally blow a hole in the door so she could get in.
The room inside was spacious and appeared to be some sort of dormitory. Along one wall stood a row of bunk beds with personal items lying here and there—photographs, a Bible, several dog-eared magazines written in French, with pictures of people Nancy took to be Africans. It was clear that nobody was living here now. The room was nearly as cold as the ten-degree weather outside. On the far side of the wall was a small kitchen. She walked over and found several pots and pans on the stove, one of them full of scorched food. It was as if everyone had left the place in a hurry, before they could even remove their food off the stove.
Whoever had lived here was now probably buried beneath the snow.
Oddly, the rest of the room was empty. It seemed like an awful lot of space for the use it had been put to. Looking around some more, she noticed a foot-long smear of blood on the polished concrete floor. And now, having keyed in on this first blood, she noticed other jagged streaks of dried blood—like the brushwork of a desperate painter. Crusted in one of these was a clot of hair. Then, she felt her eyes begin to sting.
She became aware of the smell of almonone Q of almonds, and within a minute, Nancy’s throat tickled uncomfortably, her nose burned, and she began to feel nauseated. She walked outside and took several deep breaths. The fresh, frigid air burned her nasal passages, even as it relieved the tickling sensation.
A survey of the perimeter revealed a huge air-conditioning unit that looked more suited to a far larger building. Still feeling woozy, she went and sat back down in the Jeep. She had left the vehicle running and was comfortable inside.
She considered heading back to the Wilmot house but decided to take one last circuit of the dormitory building. The wind was bitter cold, and although she understood that she had no choice, she was immediately sorry she hadn’t stayed in the Jeep. Back inside the big room filled with beds, the almond smell seemed even more noxious—as if she were more sensitive to it now than she had been earlier. Suddenly her stomach cramped up. She ran outside and threw up in the snow.
And then, suddenly, she understood. It was like watching the fractured pieces of a puzzle knit themselves together into a unified picture.
Cyanide. Wilmot and Collier were manufacturing cyanide gas.
She ran to the Jeep, climbed in, and began driving quickly up the road. Get to a phone.
The Jeep bumped and slammed as she forced the aging four-wheel-drive vehicle down the slippery rutted road. She could see the house in front of her when she remembered Evan’s wheelchair lying across the logging trail. Driving down here, she had steered carefully around the abandoned wheelchair. But her racing mind had forgotten that, and now the big lump in the snow rose up suddenly before her. She yanked the wheel to the right.
The Jeep pitched up onto its left wheels, hanging there for what seemed an interminable moment, before rolling over.
Once, twice, then a third time.
Nancy hadn’t worn her seat belt. She felt herself slamming hard against the floor—or what seemed like the floor until she realized it was actually the roof.
The Jeep lay quietly, the noise of its impact muffled by the snow. From her inverted position Nancy could see the big house only a few hundred yards away, its windows lit up bright yellow against the whiteness of the snow.
She crawled out of the Jeep and felt something very wrong with her left leg. The pain was acute. Although she could barely put any weight on her leg, she began hobbling toward the house, which suddenly seemed very far away.
33
WASHINGTON, DC
Dale Wilmot and John Collier landed at Reagan National Airport, where they rented a gray Buick Enclave—an SUV guaranteed to attract no attention. They drove back to the hangar, loaded their luggage into the vehicle, then proceeded to downtown Washington, DC, where they checked into a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel. The two men declined the assistance of a bellman and unloaded the vehicle themselves. Collier had managed to pack their equipment into several suitcases that fit neatly on the steel luggage cart.
Once they were in their suite, Collier turned on his laptop and beganInsssssss T‡ to review his notes on an encrypted file. But Wilmot found himself unable to concentrate and walked out onto the balcony overlooking the mall. Night had fallen, but the Washington Monument and the Capitol were brightly lit.