“Why do you think that?” asked Decker.
“Your cardinal rule: There are no coincidences.”
“Well, for every rule there is an exception. In fact, I think he did learn about it from Brad Daniels.”
“Based on what?” she asked.
Decker pulled out Daniels’s hat and pointed to another pin on there.
Jamison examined it. “An anniversary event the Air Force held?”
“Two years ago, at Minot Air Force Base, right here in North Dakota.”
“But how can we know they both attended, even with that pin on his hat?”
“I know they did, because it was noted in Purdy’s service record that he attended that very same event.”
“But we still can’t be sure that they met there.”
“Which is why I’m going to call the nursing home in Williston and have it out with Brad Daniels once and for all.”
“Go easy on him, Decker. He’s an old man.”
“That ‘old man’ is tougher than just about any son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” Decker groused.
“But he wouldn’t tell us anything before. Why would he now?”
He held up the hat and smiled. “Because now I’ve got a bargaining chip.”
“MR. DANIELS, IT’S AMOS DECKER with the FBI.”
Decker held the phone away from his ear as the old man started screaming at him.
“You son of a bitch. You give me back my hat. You’re a thief!”
“So you noticed it was gone? I take it your eyesight is better than you let on.”
“If I were forty years younger, I’d kick your ass.”
“But you’re not, so let’s make a deal, Mr. Daniels. You answer my questions and I guarantee that you’ll get your hat back intact.”
“What questions?” Daniels barked. “I told you I can’t answer nothing. It’s classified. Do you know what ‘classified’ means, moron?”
“What I’m going to ask you has nothing to do with classified information. I just want to ask if you met someone at the anniversary event you attended at Minot Air Force Base.”
“How the hell did you know about that?” Daniels barked.
“You have a pin about it on your hat.”
“A hat you stole. That’s a felony.”
“At most it’s a misdemeanor. And like I said, you’ll get your hat back. I promise.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“Because, like you, I took an oath to serve this country. And that oath means a lot to me, like it did to you.”
“Go on,” said a suddenly calmer Daniels.
“Was there someone there you met named Ben Purdy, he was a sergeant with the Air Force?”
Daniels didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “Is he dead, too?”
“No, but he is missing. So you did meet up with him?”
“What the hell is going on up there?”
“I’m trying to find that out. Did you mention to Purdy that the London facility was used to work on biological and chemical weapons?”
“That’s classified, dammit. You said nothing you asked me would make me reveal classified information. You’re a big, fat liar, you are.”
“I know all about the program that went on up here and at other facilities around the country. Pine Bluff, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Fort Detrick.”
“Camp Detrick, least it was back then.” He fell silent. “So, you been read in, I see.”
“I have been. I have top secret security clearances.”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“I’m not sure. But it seems that a lot of people are interested in it enough to kill other people. So it wasn’t a radar facility back then?”
“Not exactly.”
“But you worked with radar and such. Why would they send you there if it involved working on chemical weapons? You had no expertise in that.”
Decker heard a long sigh, and then Daniels said, “It was supposed to be a radar facility, so they had to have radar people stationed there. Otherwise, it would look funny. So I was one of those guys. You know, keeping up pretenses.”
“Did you know that going in?”
“I didn’t know anything. I went where I was told.”
“Did you have anything to do with the work there?”
“Not really. Us radar guys learned pretty quick that something was up. I mean we weren’t running a radar facility, for starters, and we had been sworn to secrecy, even beyond what you normally are. We had to sign papers and stuff. Now, we knew the commies were in a nuke race with us. But we also knew the Germans had been making chemical weapons during the Big One and we had to play catch-up. That wasn’t a huge secret. So when we started seeing some of the stuff being brought into London? Well, I saw enough boxes marked with skulls and crossbones to know what was going on. And then they recruited us to do some stuff with what they were doing. I don’t mean making the shit. But I’d seen some of the labs they had down there.”
“You mean in the lower level of the pyramid building?” Decker asked.
“Yeah. They usually didn’t want us down there. We mainly worked on security and keeping up the facility, stuff like that. But occasionally, as time went on, we were sent down there to do some tasks. And we had to put on masks and special suits and crap like that.”
“Did you see any of the stuff that came out of there?”
“Yeah, we helped put it in these special storage rooms in these bombproof containers. Scared the crap out of me, I can tell you. They had warning signs all over the place: ‘Highly toxic,’ ‘Do not touch,’ ‘Never take your masks and goggles off,’ stuff like that. Even with that some of the guys got sick. I mean inadvertently. They never tested stuff on anybody, nothing like that. This is the good, old U.S. of A. We don’t do that shit.”
“Anything else?”
Daniels didn’t answer.
“Mr. Daniels, anything else? It’s important.”
Daniels didn’t respond and Decker decided to just let the silence linger. He wanted Daniels to feel the moment, to let him understand that something momentous was happening and he could be an integral part of it. If he would just open up.
Daniels said, “Then, sometime in the late sixties, it all went away. They closed up shop and then we started using the facility as a radar station. I got to do what I was trained to do. It was really exciting stuff. We were protecting our country from the commies.”
“So they took all the ‘stuff’ away?”
“That’s right.”
“Now, can you tell me about your talk with Purdy, the young man you met at the event?”
“He was a nice young guy. Stationed where I had been. He had proper security clearances. We had a lot in common. We hit it off. We had a couple drinks even. Made me feel young again.”
“And then what?”
“And then, well, I told him about some of the stuff that we had done up there.”
“And he was interested?”
“Yeah, asked a million questions. I answered what I could.”
“Did you ever tell him about Mary Rice?”