Now it all seemed a horrible mockery. They’d never been in control at all. Whoever had put all of this together had built an airtight box around them, ruined them. Killed his son. Now there was only emptiness. Now there was only guilt.
And no one else seemed to see the helplessness of it all. Nick kept asking him what they were going to do next, treating him like he was still the leader of this operation. Didn’t he understand that without Carolyn and Travis behind him, leadership meant nothing? Nick couldn’t seem to grasp the obvious fact that there was no next. This had been it, all along. This was as far as the plan was ever designed to take them. He realized now just how ridiculous the gamble had been. He’d bet everything- everything- on a single roll of the dice, and he’d lost.
He felt the panic building again within his gut, but this time he didn’t think he’d be able to stop it.
“Jake, snap out of it!” Nick yelled. His frustration raised his voice an octave. “You’ve got your whole lifetime to feel sorry for yourself. Right now we’ve got some planning to do!”
“He’s useless,” Thorne said from his perch in the doorway. “He can’t handle all this.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick growled. “Well, he’d better handle it.” He put his hand on the top of Jake’s head and rotated his face up high enough to make eye contact. “You’re pissing me off, Jake! No one disputes that you’ve had a horrible goddamn day, but you’re not the only one waist-deep in a shit bog here. We got caught, pal. All of us. There were witnesses. I might have gotten into this for different reasons than you, but-”
Jake twitched suddenly, as if something had startled him, and his eyes cleared. He clutched Nick’s hand.
“What is it?” Nick asked, pulling away a little.
Jake was still struggling to connect the dots. “You’re right,” he said haltingly. “We… we got caught. How did we get caught?”
Nick scowled and cocked his head. “ How? The cops found us. I guess when we snipped the fence, we made a bell ring somewhere.”
Jake waved him off. “No,” he said. That explanation wouldn’t work. “You said that the response would come from a rent-a-cop. But this was a real cop.”
“It’s not like you haven’t been in the news, ace,” Thorne scoffed. “So they increased their security. They were probably expecting you.”
They didn’t see it yet. “Exactly, Thorne. They were expecting us. But why? Why on God’s green earth would they ever expect us to go back there? If they really think that we blew the place up back in ’83, that’d be the last place they’d expect us to go. I mean, what would be our rationale? Christ, if I had a brain in my head, I’d be in Arizona by now!”
“I’m not getting your point,” Nick said. His expression, however, showed curiosity.
“Somebody was expecting us to go back there,” Jake repeated, frustrated by his inability to make them understand. “They were waiting for us to go back. Something we’d never do if we were guilty.”
Nick frowned. “But even if someone knew you were innocent, why would they assume your play would be to go back there-especially after all this time? Remember, the hide-a-corpse theory was all in our minds.”
“Maybe they didn’t see the Newark move at first,” Thorne said, thinking. “But if there was a trip wire-I mean, if they were concerned you might go back, maybe they took precautions.”
Jake wrestled with the trip-wire idea. “You think maybe the guy who framed us is someone local? Someone who has plenty of eyes and ears around Newark and got wind of our entering town?”
Thorne was indignant. “No way. It was a clean insertion.”
Nick was lost in thought. A trip wire has to be tripped. Was there something there? “Maybe,” he said at last, “we left an electronic trail of some sort.”
Jake considered it for a moment, then dismissed it. “How, though? It’s not like we bought plane tickets to get here or used a credit card for lunch.”
Nick played a word association game in his head, trying to connect “electronic” with the events of the past two days. Just recently, he’d had to search his memory for a password… Now, what was that for?
He remembered. “Oh, shit! The computer file!” Nick smacked his forehead with his palm. “I had to log on to the computer back in Washington to get the records on the Newark site. When I accessed it, I rang a bell. Someone heard it. Given the timing of it all, they must have figured we were coming back. Dammit!” He stomped the floor.
“That’s it,” Jake said.
Nick hung his head low and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, God, Jake, I’m sorry. I should have-”
Jake waved the apology off as ridiculous. “How could you have known? Who would ever suspect…” He stopped in midthought. His eyes grew wide as an even larger idea formed. Is it even possible? “Holy shit, that’s it!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Nick and Thorne said the word together.
Jake thought his heart was going to explode, and he held his hands out in front, palms forward, to calm himself down. Completely gone was the self-pity of minutes before. In its place, rising excitement. “Okay,” he said, setting himself to begin. He might as well have said, On your mark…
“Let’s go back to the basic premise. Whether they were watching the roads, or they were watching a computer file, the key here is that they were watching, right? I mean they had to guard against the possibility, however remote, that we might go back to Newark-to do something that would never make a bit of sense unless we were innocent and they were trying to hide something, right?”
“Who’s the guilty ‘they’?” Thorne interrupted.
Jake shook him off. “I’m getting to that. So, whoever this person is, they have the power to tap into the EPA computer files, right? They knew that if anyone ever wanted to reenter the magazine, they’d have to tap into the file first.”
Nick shrugged, growing weary of the explanation and wanting to turn right to the end. “Right. Okay. So you’re saying it’s EPA? Somebody in my agency wants to keep you away from Newark? What the hell for?”
Jake shook him off, too. “No, you’ve got to think back further than that. When did the EPA get involved in the Newark site? Nineteen eighty-three maybe? Eighty-two at the earliest?”
Nick bobbed his head. “Okay, somewhere in there. What’s your point?”
“From that point on, B-2740 was locked up tight as a drum, right? Sure it was. I was there when we took the lock off a year later. No one could get in.”
“I think that’s right,” Nick agreed. It was tough to be definitive after so many years.
Jake paused while he mentally took the next step. “So the bad guys must have gotten caught with their pants down when the EPA threw a lock on the place. Whatever they needed to hide was locked inside the magazine. They had to sit on their thumbs for two years while everything was debated and paid for. First chance they got to go inside was when we opened the door for them.”
Nods all around. The logic made sense.
“So EPA is out.”
“Okay, hotshot,” Thorne prodded, his patience gone. “Then tell us who.”
Jake looked at Nick like he should already have made the connection. “Who can put a trigger on another agency’s computer files, Nick?”
“The FBI,” Nick joked, but when Jake didn’t laugh, Nick’s smile went away. “Come on, Jake, the FBI? You’re crazy!”
“Think about it,” Jake insisted. “It could probably be any federal agency-CIA, Secret Service, even IRS-but who has consummate ability to perpetrate a frame like this? Who can make a person look as guilty as they want to make them look? I mean, Jesus Christ, Nick, a note at the murder scene? Who the hell would leave a note? And who has the authority to decide that such a preposterous thing isn’t preposterous at all?”
Nick found himself nodding absently, beginning to buy into the concept. “And who was pushing for us to shut the scene down so early?”
Jake sighed as all the pieces began to fit into place.
Nick sat down heavily. “Oh, shit, this is huge. We’re screwed.”
The words made Jake recoil. “How are we screwed? We just figured it out!”
“You haven’t figured shit,” Thorne scoffed. “You can imagine any theory you want. Hell, aliens did it! Until you can figure out why-and prove it-Nick’s right. You’re screwed.”
“It’s the FBI,” Jake insisted again. “More specifically, it’s Peter Frankel.”
Jake’s conclusion, materializing out of nowhere, seemed to suck all the sound out of the room. Then,
