24 Declassified 11 - Death Angel by David Jacobs

Author:David Jacobs [Jacobs, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

12

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 P.M. AND 11 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

10:11 P.M. MDT

97 Meadow Lane, Shady Grove,

Los Alamos County

“Interference—that’s what triggered this bloodbath,” Jack Bauer said.

He’d skimmed the notebook and the documents in the folder. The information they contained allowed him to piece together the backstory. He now ran it down to Hickman and Ross. Not all of it, but as much as they needed to know. He needed their help and goodwill. Hickman was Sabito’s savviest operative in Jack’s estimation, and Ross was Sabito’s key contact in the County Sheriff’s Department.

Jack went on. “It started with interference, electrical interference, the kind that screws up the picture on your TV. More specifically, Gene Parkhurst’s TV. That’s what brought him to Ironwood’s OCI. He came in about a month ago. As far as OCI was concerned, he dropped in out of the blue. McCoy’s people had never heard of him, had no professional interest in him. He was a walk-in.

“Walk-ins are the wild cards of the intelligence game. A citizen comes into the shop unsolicited. He might be there to pass along a hot tip, make a complaint, or make a deal. You don’t know his motivation. Maybe he’s what he seems, acting in good faith.

“Maybe he’s got a hidden agenda. Maybe he’s a crank, a nutcase. There’s no way of telling until you hear out what he’s got to say and evaluate it.”

“It’s pretty much the same in my business,” Ross said.

“Of course an ordinary civilian can’t just walk into OCI. Parkhurst phoned first, saying he wanted to report something suspicious. He wouldn’t say what it was over the phone except that it was confidential. Maybe he had something worth telling; it wouldn’t do any harm to hear him out. He was given an appointment to come in on a weekday morning. Kling drew the assignment to interview him. He pulled a lot of those kinds of chores. Routine security and background checks, mostly. Stuff that nobody else wanted to handle fell to the low man on the totem pole, and the lowest man on the OCI totem pole was Harvey Kling.

“Kling did a routine background check on Gene Parkhurst prior to the interview. Parkhurst was a retired master machinist who’d spent most of his professional life working in various capacities for LANL at South Mesa. He came up clean: a respected career professional in his line, solid security rating, ditto on the credit rating, no black marks on his record, good marriage. No suspicious contacts or associates, no substance abuse problems, no involvement with the law beyond a few parking tickets. He seemed like a normal, competent, levelheaded guy.

“But Parkhurst had a complaint: interference. For the last six weeks or so, he’d noticed a peculiar pattern of interference on his TV. Every now and then, for no particular rhyme or reason, the sound and picture on his set would get knocked out of whack and become a jumble of chaos and static. The disruptions lasted from one to two minutes, tops.

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