“Sure, I’ll be glad to see him.” Ham got them both a beer from the fridge. “You know, I haven’t spent this much time alone for a long, long time—maybe never—and I’m really enjoying it. All I’ve done is read and watch sports on the satellite.”
“That’s all you ever did anyway, isn’t it?”
“Well, I worked, didn’t I? You forget I was in the army?”
“Why haven’t you played golf?”
“I haven’t had anybody to play with. You and Jackson have been so busy.”
“I’ll play with you this weekend, then.”
They sat down and watched Tiger Woods sink a forty-foot putt on TV.
“Holy shit,” Ham said.
Jackson arrived at half past six, loaded with groceries and a cardboard tube. “I’m starving,” he said. “Can we eat before we do anything else?”
Ham warmed up the grill and put on the steaks Jackson had brought.
“Oh, Ham,” Jackson said, “I’ve got something for you.” He handed Ham a sheet of paper. “It’s your application for the Dunes Country Club. The committee meets later this week, so fill it out and I’ll get it over there tomorrow.”
“That’s fast work,” Ham said, finding a pen and going to work on the form.
“Glad to do it.”
They finished dinner and cleared the table, then Jackson opened the cardboard tube he had brought. “Get me some transparent tape and some thumbtacks,” he said. He pinned rolls of photographic paper to the dining table and taped the seams. “Okay,” he said, “there you have it: Palmetto Gardens.”
Holly pointed to where Jungle Trail met the fence. “I was here this afternoon,” she said. “There’s a double fence here with a plowed strip in between and signs about high voltage.” She pointed elsewhere on the photographs. “Look, it goes all the way around. In front, the wire is obscured by the high hedges.”
“Here’s the building with all the antennas,” Jackson said, pointing.
“What are these buildings here?” Holly asked, pointing to a series of parallel structures.
“Looks like housing of some sort—for staff, maybe.”
“You think all the employees live on the place?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve never met anybody who worked there, so maybe.”
“What do you suppose they do for R and R?” Ham asked.
“They’ve got an airfield. Maybe they fly them to Disney World or something,” Jackson offered.
“Hey, look at this,” Ham said, pointing.
“Looks like vegetation,” Holly said.
“That’s not vegetation, it’s camouflage netting.”
“Are you sure?” Holly asked, peering at it.
“You think I’ve never seen that stuff? I lived under it for two years, in ’Nam. I’ve seen a lot of it in photographs, too. Look, here’s another patch, and another.” There were half a dozen patches, scattered over the area, and two more near the airfield.
“What would they be covering up with camouflage netting?” Holly asked.
“Antiaircraft-gun emplacements?” Ham offered. “Ground-to-air missiles?”
“Come on, Ham, we’re not in Vietnam. It must be something else.”
“What else would you need to hide from overflights?” Ham asked. “That netting doesn’t work if you’re on the ground, you know.”
Jackson spoke up. “Does it strike anybody that this place looks more like a military installation than anything else?”
“Yeah,” Ham said. “I mean, there’s lots of big houses and the golf courses, but if you don’t count those, it looks military to me.”
“Look,” Jackson said, pointing. “Radar at the airfield. Orchid Beach Airport doesn’t have radar.”
“Ham,” Holly said, “if you had to take Palmetto Gardens, how would you do it?”
Ham looked at the photographs again for a moment. “I’d chopper in a regiment of airborne, take the airfield and overwhelm the rest of the place in a hurry.”
“How would you do it if you were the cops, instead of the military?”
Ham shook his head. “I wouldn’t,” he said.
CHAPTER
A couple of hours later, Jane came into her office. “Not one of them had anything on his record more serious than a juvenile offense or a speeding ticket,” she said.
To Holly, that meant one of two things: either they had screened every applicant for a record and discarded those who had one, or they had cleaned up the records of some of their employees. There was no way to judge, from the state’s records, which was the case. And, if they had done some record scrubbing, there was no way to determine for which employees, except the five that Jackson knew about. There was another way, though.
“I’ve got a lot on my plate today, Holly. Is there anything else you need?”
“No, Jane, and thanks. You get back to work.”
Holly turned to her computer and logged on to the national crime computer, in Washington. One by one, she entered the names from the list she had run through the state computer, printing out individual files. It took her a couple of hours, but when she was done, she was astonished at the results.
Holly picked up her private line and called Jackson. “Can we meet at Ham’s?” she asked.
“What’s up? Why don’t we go to my house?”
“Just meet me there as soon as you can.”
“I’ll see you around six.”
She called Ham and told him they were coming.
“You young people sure like it here,” Ham said, as Jackson arrived. “Holly’s already here.”
“What’s going on?” Jackson asked her.
“I didn’t want to meet at your place or mine, because I thought there was an outside chance that one or both of them had been bugged.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling paranoid.”
“Tell me about it.”
Holly took the stack of criminal records from her briefcase and laid them on the dining table. “This morning I ran all the gun-toting employees of Palmetto Gardens through the state crime computer. They were all clean. This afternoon I ran them through the national crime computer. Of a hundred and two, seventy-one had criminal records, lots of them for serious crimes.”
“That many?” Jackson said, sitting down.
“That many.”
“And all of them clean with the state?”
“All of them.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I guess they couldn’t fix the FBI records.”
