“Morning,” they replied.
“Short trip, here we go.”
The pilot smiled at the two men, gave them a thumbs-up, and increased the collective pitch. The little bird lifted off the tarmac, climbed quickly, and took a northerly course, fast and low, skimming over a group of hangars and climbing rapidly en route to Salina.
Stoke turned in his seat and smiled at the FBI kid.
“You go by John or John Henry?” he said into his mike.
“My mother named me John Henry, sir.”
“No need to ‘sir’ me, John Henry. Call me Stoke.”
“Deal. Glad to have you aboard here. You’re Langley, right, you’re CIA?”
“Nope. I got a small private security operation in Miami called Tactics International. Work with the Agency, Pentagon, on special assignments. Mostly for a guy named Harry Brock. Heard of him?”
“Oh, yeah, we’ve heard of him, all right. Kinda legendary. He’s the one asked the Bureau to bring you in.”
“What have we got up there, John Henry? How do you see this thing?”
“A mess, sir. A quadruple homicide, the town mayor and her family murdered in bed, and a town wiped off the map.”
“Any leads?”
“A cell phone left on one of the victims. Had a message in Arabic to vacate the town by six A.M. yesterday. We traced the call to a cell tower in Tehran. Group called Arm of God claiming responsibility.”
“Verified?”
“No, sir.”
“Any idea why the Iranians would want to provoke us? I mean, they’re already walking a fine line, building nukes and threatening Israel with extinction. The ayatollahs giving us a perfect excuse to take them out doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right now.”
“No, sir, it does not. We’re hoping you can shed some light on this. Harry Brock told my boss you might have a whole different angle on this Salina situation.”
Stoke nodded but didn’t reply. He wanted to see and hear what the FBI knew before he told them about the baker. He was thinking about the last time he’d seen Happy, when he was delivering his surprise birthday cake. The explosion had been huge. And Harry Brock had said the baker was a Russian-American assassin. Maybe KGB. What the hell was the KGB up to in Salina, Kansas?
SALINA AND HIROSHIMA had a lot in common. Stoke and Agent Flood drove silently through streets full of downed and blackened trees, block after block of houses and buildings burned to the foundations, piles of burned debris that filled entire intersections. The smell was unbelievable. A raw, choking cloud of smoke and rot hanging over everything. He saw charred corpses of dogs and other animals that had been left behind, now stacked in piles on what used to be street corners. A storm had moved through the night before, and the streets had a patina of grey mud and matted black dirt.
The day was cold and bright. When the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, there was an odd glittery quality to the surfaces of the black and desolate acres, as if it had rained glass an hour ago, or some giant had flung great handfuls of tiny silver coins over the town after it had been destroyed.
John Henry’s face was somber, and the conversation was minimal. He was staring straight ahead; he’d obviously seen enough of this wasted town to last a lifetime. Flocks of birds circled overhead, and it occurred to Stoke that they simply had no place to land.
“Where’s the first stop?” he finally asked John Henry.
“We’ve got a temporary HQ set up. A trailer up top of that hill over there. A state park called Hickory Hill. It’s a heavily wooded area, but it escaped the fire because of its height above the town. Also the Motel 6 where I’ve booked you a room. Not great, but it’s the only thing still standing.”
Stoke was gazing out his window, having a hard time dealing with such complete destruction. A fine old American town, with a lot of history he didn’t know and now never would. Gone.
“You know this is the heart of America, John Henry?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this town is, was, exactly halfway between the East Coast and the West Coast. And halfway between the northern and southern borders. Smack dab in the middle of the country when you open up a map. Right in the crease.”
“You think that’s intentional?”
“Yeah, I do. They wanted this to hurt.”
“Well, they sure as hell succeeded.”
“You had kin here?”
“I grew up in a big yellow house with green shutters, used to stand right on that corner.”
“I’m sorry.”
They drove up a narrow winding road that led to the hilltop overlooking the town. Near the edge of the cliff was the big silver Winnebago doubling as FBI headquarters. Stoke grabbed his door handle and smiled at Agent Flood.
“John Henry, I want you to cheer up,” Stoke said. “We’re going to catch this slimeball and nail his balls to the wall, okay? Don’t you worry about it.”
“How are we going to do that, sir?”
“Well, for starters, I know exactly who he is.”
“That’ll help,” John Henry said, smiling for the first time since they’d landed at Salina.
47
“Mr. Jones, welcome, I’m Agent in Charge Hilary Spurling,” the attractive blonde FBI lady said as Stoke and John Henry entered the trailer. It was cold as hell outside, and it felt nice and warm inside. Spurling was in her thirties, all business, but still a babe. She introduced him to the rest of the group. It included Bruce Barnett, the Salina PD’s medical examiner, a guy from the FBI’s Explosive Unit Bomb Data Center in Washington named Peter Robb, and the two uniformed officers Stoke had seen on CNN.
“How’s everybody doing?” Stoke said with a smile. “This the team?”
“This is the team,” the ME said.
Spurling said, “Mr. Jones, let’s cut right to the chase. I understand from my director, Mike Reiter, and our colleagues at both Langley and Homeland, that you and Agent Brock may have some information that would help us in this investigation. Is that correct?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is. But if you don’t mind, before I share that information, it would be helpful to hear what you’ve got so far. Is that all right with you?”
“Certainly. Won’t take long, because we haven’t got much. Why don’t we start with you, Bruce? Dr. Barnett here is the state ME assigned to the multiple homicide by Salina PD.”
The medical examiner pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Yes, well, there were no casualties from the explosion, as you know, Mr. Jones. So, I’ve spent the last twelve hours with the four murder victims at 1223 Roswell Road. The home of Mayor Bailey and her family.”
“Who found the bodies?” Stoke asked.
“The housekeeper when she arrived at work that morning,” Bruce Barnett said.
“Is she available? I might want to talk to her.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the crime scene.”
“No forced entry. The killer was freely admitted into the home. So, he was known to the deceased or used some ruse to gain entry. Two of the victims, children, female, ages four and nine, were found in their beds. The husband died of a gunshot wound to the head. Mayor Bailey died the same way her children did. Poison gas.”
“Jesus,” Stoke said. “He gassed them?”
