The Program tr-2 Read online

  "They made me surrender my phone like last time," Tim said. "We didn't get her. She wasn't there."

  "I know. I got an e-mail from her. She's in trouble."

  As Dray pulled out, TD emerged from the fire exit, shirt untucked. His perfect posture had eroded; he stood stooped, shoulders wilted.

  Reggie rolled down the window as they passed and extended his middle finger.

  "Marco's en route," Will said. "Get here as fast as you can."

  TD's eyes found Tim in the passenger seat. The Blazer veered around a celebratory huddle of liberated Pros. TD smoothed his shirt-tails back into his pants, his shoulders pulling square, and watched with a cool, dead stare until they turned the corner.

  Chapter fifty

  The Blazer pulled through the Hidden Hills gate right behind Tannino's Bronco, the two vehicles caravanning to the house. High noon blazed off the hood of the Blazer, the temperature climbing toward ninety. L.A. summers came on fast and hard, sometimes overnight.

  Tannino shook his head as Tim and Dray approached him on the walk – he didn't know anything yet. He looked past them at Bederman and Reggie and said, "Wait out here, please, until we know what's going on."

  Rooch opened the door before they could knock and led them in. A cast encasing his arm to the biceps, Doug offered Tim a peacemaking head flick of a greeting. From deep in the house, the muffled sound of Emma's crying overlapped with the baby's screams.

  Will sat cocked back in his mesh chair, working his cheek with the cap of a pen. His eyes stayed on the computer monitor as they entered.

  They circled behind him. His e-mail account was up on the screen, three messages from customercare@getwiththeprogram. com occupying the in-box. They'd each come with an attachment, judging from the already-downloaded icons on the desktop – two jpeg photos and an mpeg video clip.

  Tim's head buzzed, an ache cramping the temples. Judging from the look on Will's face, he did not want to know what the e-mails held.

  Will double-clicked on the first jpeg. A photo appeared, resolving slowly in several waves. The potbellied stove in Randall and Skate's shed, the loading door open to reveal burned fragments of mail amid mounds of ash. Fluorescent yellow scraps from Tannino's mailing stood out against the soot. Tannino tapped the screen eagerly, indicating them. "This establishes time frame."

  The second jpeg showed the shed from outside, TD's cottage in the backdrop.

  Tim's hands were shaking with excitement.

  Tannino flipped open his phone.

  "Wait." Will still did not look up at them.

  He clicked the mpeg. The little clock icon seemed to blink interminably as the segment loaded. The image popped up, Leah hunched in front of the computer in the mod, staring into the QuickCam mounted atop the monitor. The glow from the screen lit the room a pale blue. One of the file drawers to her right sat open. Over her shoulder the ceiling was barely visible and the dark, offset pane of the skylight.

  The time stamp on the e-mail said 4:41 A.M.

  Just before the colloquium had begun, when TD and the other Pros were heading down to the Radisson. Tim wondered how in hell she'd managed to get her hands on a telephone cord to send out the e-mails.

  She spoke with hushed urgency. "I couldn't get enough time alone to get done what I needed to, so I screwed up the Web site launch to make TD ground me from the colloquium. I'm sorry I couldn't get word to you, but I figured it was worth the risk to get more time up here with most everyone gone. Will, you should have downloaded two digital photos by now." She glanced nervously behind her, though the mod was empty. "And show Tim this, too." She held up a piece of paper.

  Tannino said, "Pause that."

  Will froze and enlarged the image. TD's letterheaded memo became clear.

  1. 1. Mail is to be picked up at the P.O. box every two days.

  2. 2. Mail should be delivered to the Teacher's cottage and set inside the front door to the right.

  3. 3. When the Teacher is done sorting through it, he will place it to the left of the door.

  4. 4. Mail is to be picked up and disposed of in the stove in the shed.

  5. 5. Mail should never be opened by anyone other than the Teacher.

  The list continued, thirteen points in all, punctuated by TD's flowery signature.

  "Holy Mary." Tannino flipped open his phone and started punching numbers. "There's our hook. They'll be renting his ass in Men's Central by the end of the week."

  Dray kept her eyes on Will. "What's the problem?"

  Will's hand slid over and clicked the mouse again, unfreezing the mpeg.

  Leah hopped up and returned the memo to its place, sliding the file drawer quietly closed. She came back over and leaned in front of the QuickCam. "I found" – she swallowed hard – "I found a letter you wrote me, Will, scanned into the computer." Her eyes moistened. "I wanted you to know I read it. TD stole it just to pervert the personal parts, use them against me." Her tone hardened. "I have more information for Tim, but nothing I could send out fast, so I figured I'd get you what was concrete and fill you in on the rest when you get here. Now, don't worry. I erased the digital photos and the e-mails I sent. I even programmed this one to delete as soon as it's sent."

  Dray gasped, which she rarely did. Tim turned to her in surprise, but she pointed at the screen.

  In the background the faint reflected light on the doorknob behind Leah began to shift. The door eased open, and a dark, bulky figure slid into the room. Leah remained leaning forward, oblivious.

  The shadow inched toward her, a fall of light unmasking an edge of Skate's leering face. He took another silent step forward as Leah smiled into the mini camera.

  "I'm perfectly safe."

  She reached for where the mouse would be, and the video went to black.

  Chapter fifty-one

  While Tim went out of his mind with impatience, Winston reviewed and reworded the affidavits that Tim had drafted while bouncing in the passenger seat of Tannino's Bronco on the way over. They caught the magistrate judge, a white-haired fixture of the court named Judith Seitel, on the bench; she considered Tannino's mad gesticulations in the back of the gallery with mild amusement before signaling them to wait for her outside chambers until she could break away.

  Tim, Dray, Tannino, and Winston Smith sat like schoolchildren, lined on a wooden bench in the courthouse corridor. Their cell phones chirped every few seconds like angry insects. To ensure that the operation would be locked and loaded by the time they arrived at the pre-step-off point with search and arrest warrants in hand, Tannino alternated calls between Miller, who'd activated the ART squad, and the station captain at La Crescenta, whose sheriff's deputies serviced Sylmar.

  It was already after three o'clock – every minute passed with kidney-stone agony. Tim tried to keep his mind off what was being done to Leah right now as they waited in the air-conditioned hallway. If she was still alive.

  Winston flipped through the search-warrant affidavit, reviewing it a final time. "You'll only be authorized to search the shed, Betters's cottage, and the modular office where the memo was stored and the mail scanned – the areas relevant to mail destruction and theft."

  "We've got to be able to look for Leah, too," Tim said.

  Winston nodded sagely. "Given this is an armed camp, known members of which we've already charged with kidnapping a federal officer, you can take extra precautions to assure your safety. It might be prudent and reasonable to move cottage to cottage to neutralize potential threats."

  "Can we seize the computer in the mod?"

  "We have to find something incriminating on it first. The warrant should clear you to click around, look for mail-related evidence, like the scanned stolen letter Leah mentioned. Get in, get something concrete, then you can take it into evidence and spend more time with it in the lab." He winked. "Then we can get into the Dead Link files we don't yet know are stored on the hard drive. Let's hope they put out for us."

  Tannino nodded at Tim. "We'll bring Frisk
from ESU in case he has to do some hacking."

  Tim checked his watch again.

  "I hate to be the one to say it," Dray said, "but what if she's already dead? I mean, Betters wasn't coming back to the ranch in the best mood after we clusterfucked his colloquium. She might be six feet under in the woods."

  Tannino paused from his call, tucking the receiver to his neck. "We need cadaver dogs."

  "You can't bring cadaver dogs to investigate destruction of the mails," Winston said. "It doesn't fall under the warrant's scope."

  "The mail charges buy us dick at sentencing. I want a body."

  "Then you'd better hope you trip over one."

  Tim tilted his face into his spread hands, working the angles like a Chinese puzzle box. He pictured Skate and Randall marching Nancy into the woods, her pale hand clutching the shovel that was to bury her corpse. His head snapped up. "We're short a dog."

  Tannino said, "Hold on," into the phone and shot Tim an inquisitive stare.

  "Precious is injured," Tim continued. "We're short a dog. We ask the sheriff's department to supply one of their own since they're backing us up on the entry."

  "Cover your ears, Win," Tannino said.

  The AUSA shook his head and trekked down the hall. Tannino nodded for Tim to continue.

  "We make sure they supply a patrol dog that's also a cadaver dog. Then we make sure it does its scent work in the process of securing the camp."

  "Are there double-duty dogs?" Tannino asked. "And handlers who are deputies?"

  Dray was already dialing. "They're mostly weekend warriors, but Mac's got a deputy buddy over at Walnut who works Canine, too."

  "It's an armed camp," Tannino said. "We had to sweep the woods with dogs for our own safety, Your Honor. One of them just happened upon the dead body."

  Tim said, "Precisely."

  "I always said you should've been a lawyer, Rackley."

  "Looks like I'll have plenty of time for a career change."

  "This thing goes smooth, you might not have to worry about a career change." Tannino met Tim's puzzled gaze. "We pop Betters, there's gonna be a lot of tail wagging up the chain. Maybe I get my way."

  "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's just get Leah."

  Trailing her black robes, Judge Seitel turned the corner. She raised a wary eyebrow at Winston as he scrambled to present her the affidavits.

  "Let's hope you brought me something I can put my name on this time around, gentlemen. Even an old girl wants to say yes now and again."

  Chapter fifty-two

  The marshal screeched over on the side of Little Tujunga near the dirt road that twisted up the hills to the ranch. Tim leapt out before the Bronco stopped. Two Expeditions, a rusty Pathfinder, Freed's Porsche, Bear's Ram, and six black-and-whites from the La Crescenta Sheriff's Station crammed the dirt turnoff. More vehicles stretched up the roadside, including the Service's armored personnel carrier, a military peace-keeper they'd dubbed the Pacemaker for all its hours in the shop. Painted black right down to the bulletproof turret, the APC looked like a Humvee on steroids. Tim had requested it over the Beast in case the flooded creek a mile up the road still proved treacherous.

  Miller stood with one foot on the running board of the APC, the deputies and geared-up ART members circled around him. Chomper poked at Bear with his snout until he lowered a hand to scratch behind his ears.

  Denley was emerging from his wife's teal Saturn and taking a good ribbing for it.

  Tim ran over, warrants triumphantly raised over his head, flapping in the wind. Miller snatched them from his hand, squinting to read them in the dusk.

  The station captain, a box-headed ex-Marine who went by Duke, glanced over Miller's shoulder. "What's the fire? We could've served these tomorrow."

  "Leah Henning moled out the evidence for the warrants." Tim held up Leah's graduation photo, the one from Will's wallet, and the men handed it around the circle. "She got caught."

  Duke took note of his expression, snapped his chin down in a nod. "Right."

  "You see this girl, you bring her to me. Got it?"

  Bear tossed Tim a vest, and he zipped it over his T-shirt as he introduced himself to the sheriff's deputies. Owen B. Rutherford nodded at him severely from the back. Though Tim had alerted him largely as a courtesy and he'd have to wait back at the staging point with Dray and Tannino, Rutherford was fully decked out – raid jacket, shotgun, shoulder-slung MP5, Beretta, gold-and-blue postal inspector badge dangling from a chain around his neck. Mail defilers beware.

  Tannino jogged over, Dray at his heels, then assessed the crew.

  Miller glanced at his watch. "Thomas is en route."

  Duke said, "The secondary is up, but we can't get airtight around the rear boundary given the terrain. We'd like to get a few more units positioned -"

  "We don't have time," Tim said.

  Duke looked at Miller, and Miller shrugged.

  The Lincoln Navigator skidded up, and Will, Rooch, and Doug hopped out. Tannino snapped his fingers for them to stay put away from the briefing area.

  Miller jerked his head at the Navigator. "Who bought the senator's boyfriend front-row tickets?"

  "He did," Tannino said. "Don't worry – I'll babysit him at the staging point."

  Tim's lip tingled along the scar, an itch too deep to scratch. "Where's the dog?"

  A soft-voiced deputy with a droopy mustache pointed to a leonine German shepherd gazing forlornly from the passenger window of a Volvo. "That there's Cosmo. She's L.A. Sheriff's and OES cadaver-certified."

  Miller tossed the deputy a Racal portable. "Channel forty-eight. Make sure you don't break in if she alerts over a dead squirrel."

  The deputy bobbed his head. His name tag announced him as Danner. "Don't you worry 'bout no dead squirrels. Cosmo's like that squinty little bastard from The Sixth Sense. She howls, there's a corpse talkin' to her."

  A few of the deputies chuckled.

  "How many people are up there?" Denley asked.

  "Could be seventy, probably less," Tim said. "We busted up their last meeting, so I hope we knocked loose the fence-sitters."

  "So what's left are hard-line zealots eager to die for Allah."

  "Remember, we're just serving a warrant here. It's our job to make sure this doesn't spin up."

  "Tell that to the David Koresh motherfucker," one of the deputies said.

  Tannino stuck his head into the circle. "This thing goes Ruby Ridge, I will personally chew off your ass."

  The deputy's grin faded.

  Miller had ordered some of the deputies to carry less-lethal. Bear handed around the Remington 870s, the clear rounds showing off the stuffed beanbags inside. Maybeck shouldered the big-bore launcher and dug in the APC for pepper-spray canisters.

  A county fire ambulance pulled up, red light strobing through the darkening air. Miller gestured at them, and the driver nodded, cutting the lights and idling at the curb. Law-enforcement and emergency-response vehicles crowded Little Tujunga. Drivers were starting to rubberneck.

  Duke and his deputies peeled out to shore up the secondary perimeter, leaving behind four units to join the caravan of vehicles to the front gate.

  Thomas jogged up the road, ballistic helmet under one arm, waving what looked like a rolled blueprint. "Sorry. I stopped off at the barn to grab the topograph for the ranch."

  Miller stretched out the blueprint and squatted over it.

  The ART members were heating up, checking shotgun slides, testing the portables, changing out flashlight batteries.

  For a moment Tim took it all in – the vehicles jammed along the road, Denley snugging his goggles into place, the grind of steel-plated boots into dirt, the smell of gun oil, the big-barreled shotgun breach-broken over Maybeck's arm, Guerrera tugging on thin black gloves, the splotches of dried sweat staining the tactical vests, Bear thumbing round after round into his magazine.

  Tim came out of his reverie, and everyone was staring at him, stacked back three deep, curve
d in a fat arc around the front of the

  APC.

  He realized that the circle had re-formed around him, that he was standing in the center.

  Miller nodded at the unfurled topograph. "Your show, Rack."

  Maybeck firmed two tempered steel hooks around the bars of the gate, and the APC lurched back. The cable groaned, and then the gate popped free, skidding in the mud. The abandoned guard station seemed a pretty good indication that The Program's ranks had been thinned by the unsuccessful colloquium, but Tim wasn't going to count on it.

  The sheriff's deputies lined out across the gap, guarding the staging point, Dray and Tannino holding back with them. Bearing his various weapons like a downsized Rambo, Rutherford paced ravenously, pausing to flash the ART squad a flight-deck officer's thumbs-up. Waiting between Rooch and Doug far from the deputies' vanguard, Will caught Tim's eye and gave him a serious nod.

  Tim and Bear were the first over the fallen gate, the others drawn behind them, stacked in two-man cells with their shoulder weapons low-ready, sweeping up the hill like a force of nature. Tim's badge bounced on his belt. His head buzzed with adrenaline. The five thrusts of cypress, the jagged ice plant like shag carpeting along the drive, the sharp tree-bark taste of the breeze – it was all disorienting yet familiar, a place he'd visited in the hazy grasp of a dream. They pierced Cottage Circle, the full authority of the federal government blazing its way through forbidden land. The Pros on the circular lawn gaped at the rapid approach. Tim noted bodies in the windows – he'd guessed right, catching them in their cottages before the nighttime Orae.

  "U.S. Marshals, we're here to serve a search warrant," Tim shouted.

  Miller forged forward, Chomper straining on his lead. Denley and Palton peeled off to run a recon loop around the treatment wing and Growth Hall. The others began knocking and moving through the buildings, two cells per cottage. The first rule of any operation -clear and contain before progressing.