The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER One





Tuesday



Helena, Western Montana

The small black alarm clock beside the bed emitted a series of faint ticking sounds, then four loud and penetrating beeps. The fifth was cut short as Steven Hunter’s hand slapped down on the protruding button, and the room fell silent again. After a few seconds, Hunter squinted his eyes to focus on the digital read-out, groaned softly and switched on the bedside light, then closed his eyes again. Three minutes later, he threw back the covers and climbed out of bed.

Hunter padded silently across the room to the windows, hauled back the drapes and peered out, blinking in the early morning sunlight. The TV forecaster the previous evening had got it right, as usual. It was going to be another hot day in another hot month.

He walked into the bathroom, pulled the cord to switch on the fluorescent overhead light, used the toilet and then turned on the shower. He glanced round the room and shook his head. He’d been in America for nearly eighteen months, and he had still to discover why a room that contained a shower stall, sink, toilet and even a bidet – everything, in short, except a bath – was called a bathroom.

A little under an hour later, having dressed and breakfasted on two cups of instant coffee and three McVitie’s Digestive biscuits – an English habit he stubbornly refused to break – Hunter pulled shut the apartment door and headed for the elevator. The Glock 17 in its belt holster now felt familiar and comfortable, which it certainly hadn’t done the first few times he’d worn it, but he had quickly got used to it.

He was also, Hunter realized, as he pulled the dark grey Ford out into the light early morning traffic in Helena, getting used to American driving. For some reason, that thought depressed him, and reminded him that he wasn’t particularly enjoying life.

It wasn’t the actual work, he thought, though he was getting somewhat bored with the minor narcotics cases that were all that Michaelson, the Helena Senior Resident Agent, seemed to push in his direction. It wasn’t even the mountain of paperwork that the Federal Bureau of Investigation required from him virtually every time he took a crap. It probably wasn’t even the fast food – fast it certainly was, but it wasn’t food in Hunter’s opinion – that he ended up consuming almost every day. And it certainly wasn’t Christy-Lee. She was about the only thing that kept him going.

It was probably, he thought, just being in America. Hunter had decided he didn’t like America, and was actually looking forward to getting back to Britain and Lincolnshire. Now that, he thought, was certainly some kind of a first – he’d never heard of anybody getting homesick for Lincolnshire.

Hunter pulled out and eased the Ford around a taxi that had suddenly stopped, double-parking without warning. The driver of a Chevrolet coming towards him hooted angrily. Hunter grinned and waved. Take it easy, he told himself, only another three or four months to go. He’d said the same thing the previous week. And the week before that, in fact.

In short, whatever sort of time Steven Hunter was having in America, the one word that really couldn’t be applied to it was ‘good’.



Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Andy Dermott glanced left and right as he eased the big John Deere tractor through the narrow gateway which led into the top field. The right hand wheel only just cleared the fence post, and Dermott again reminded himself that he would have to get the entrance opened up before the crops ripened if they were going to get the new harvester through.

Dermott had worked the land for nearly thirty years, and had inherited the farm on the death of his father nine years previously. He was proud of his small property, eleven hundred acres of good, productive, arable land that curved protectively around the southeast end of the forest on the western outskirts of Beaver Creek. The town was small, lying not quite midway between Helena and Great Falls, just west of the Missouri river and at the southern end of the Lewis Range, at the very foot of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Once through the gateway, Dermott looked ahead again, and what he saw made him bring the tractor to a sudden, shuddering halt. At first he couldn’t make out what the black, heaving mass was, then he realized it was birds – crows, in fact – scrambling on and over something lying on the ground.

He pressed the horn button three times, and was rewarded by half a dozen or so of the black birds hopping away and then flapping awkwardly into the air. He climbed down from the cab and walked over to the shape on the ground, clapping his hands to disperse the remaining crows.

Dermott knew something of the law and crime scene investigation, and had served as a temporary deputy to Sheriff Dick Reilly some five years earlier, so he stopped about six feet away and looked down at the figure on the ground.

What he saw sent him running back to the John Deere and the cell phone clipped to the dashboard. But before he made the call to the sheriff’s office, he locked the cab door and looked all around, and made sure that the twelve-gauge in the rack behind him was loaded.

Dermott stayed in the tractor’s cab for nearly fifty minutes, until he saw Reilly’s white Cherokee Jeep bouncing towards him over the adjacent field. Then he got out, clutching the shotgun, and walked across to meet the sheriff. He didn’t say anything, just nodded in recognition and gestured to his right. The two men walked together across the field towards the body.

They stopped a few feet away, and just looked.

‘Holy shit,’ Reilly muttered. ‘You haven’t touched him?’

‘Nope,’ Dermott replied. ‘I haven’t gotten any closer than we are now.’

‘Those marks on the ground?’

‘Crows,’ Dermott said, economically. He was tall and seemed almost too thin for his height, slow and measured in his speech, but Reilly knew he was by no means slow-witted. ‘Chewed him up pretty good, I guess.’

Reilly nodded.

‘See the bone?’ Dermott asked, pointing.

Reilly nodded again. ‘Difficult to miss.’

‘See the footprints?’

‘I see his prints,’ Reilly replied, looking carefully at the ground around the body. ‘I don’t see no others.’

Dermott nodded. ‘Me neither. That’s the point.’

‘OK,’ Reilly said. ‘Try and keep the birds off of him. I’ll get the wheels turning.’



Helena, Western Montana

The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains fifty-six Field Offices scattered across America. These Offices are effectively the Bureau’s regional capitals; unusually, Montana’s Field Office is out of state, at the Towers Building in Salt Lake City in Utah.

In all states, authority for local investigations is deputed to smaller subsidiary offices known as Resident Agencies, each responsible for a specific geographical area, generally comprising two or more counties. Montana is usually, from a criminal activity point of view, quiet, the number of Resident Agencies small, and their areas of responsibility correspondingly large. Beaver Creek is in Lewis and Clark County, and the Resident Agency responsible for that county, as well as Beaverhead, Broadwater, Gallatin, Jefferson, Madison, Meagher, Powell and Silver Bow, is at Helena, the state capital.

The call from Sheriff Reilly was received just as Special Agent Kaufmann was closing up for lunch. Some people would have ignored it, but Kaufmann had never been able to walk past a ringing telephone, so she unlocked the door and picked up the receiver before the answering machine could cut in.

Twenty minutes later she strode briskly across the street and into a fast-food restaurant. She walked straight to a secluded booth at the back, stopped, and looked down at a tall fair-haired man in his early forties, who was studying a menu with a marked lack of enthusiasm. After a moment, the man looked up and stared levelly back at her.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Lunch is postponed, Hunter,’ she said.

‘That’s the first good news I’ve heard all week. I still can’t believe you eat this stuff from choice,’ Hunter said, pointing at the menu.

Christy-Lee Kaufmann grinned down at him. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘That,’ Hunter replied, as he stood up and reached for his coat, ‘is what really worries me. OK, what’s up?’

‘I’ll tell you in the car,’ Kaufmann said. ‘And it’s not all good news – we’ve still got to eat.’

On the way out of the restaurant she picked up a couple of burgers each, to go, and four cans of soda. Ten minutes later the two of them were in the Bureau Ford heading north out of Helena for US91 and Beaver Creek.



Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Dick Reilly was short and stocky, broad across the shoulders and, increasingly in recent years, broad in all directions around the waist, a legacy of his too-regular coffee and donut stops at the Main Street Diner. His hair was greying and getting somewhat sparse, and his face was ruddy from exposure to the sun and wind. He had been sheriff of Beaver Creek for almost nine years, and in various types of law enforcement for twenty-three years before that, but the body in the field was a first for him.

He looked carefully around the crime scene once again, as he had done at least six times since he had arrived there, cataloguing and searching.

About two hundred yards to the west lay the edge of the woods which formed a transition between Dermott’s farmland and the Helena National Forest. The open field in which Reilly was standing extended roughly four hundred yards to the north, fifty yards to the south and about fifty to the east. The gate was in the north-east corner, and beside it stood Dermott’s John Deere tractor and Reilly’s Cherokee Jeep.

As Reilly looked towards the gate, a patrol car lurched into view, tires scrabbling for grip on the earth, roof lights flashing. The County Medical Examiner and the police photographer had arrived almost simultaneously at Dermott’s farm, and Reilly had sent the police cruiser to ferry them out to the field.

‘Good afternoon, Dick,’ Roy Walters called out cheerfully as he walked towards the sheriff. ‘What’ve we got here?’

Reilly nodded, and held out his hand. ‘Afternoon, doc. A corpse, and I only need you to confirm that officially, but I don’t want you anywhere near it yet. First we need pictures.’

He gestured towards the photographer. Joe Nyman was a police cameraman by inclination. He owned the oldest camera shop and picture studio in Beaver Creek, and had worked with the local police department for nearly twenty years. Thirty minutes earlier he had been telephoned by one of Reilly’s deputies. He had grabbed his camera box and closed the store immediately, glad of the break in his routine.

Nyman walked over to the sheriff and gazed with frank curiosity at the supine figure, now protected by half a dozen wooden stakes driven into the ground in a rough circle about fifteen feet in diameter around the body, and with yellow ‘Crime Scene – Do Not Cross’ tape wound around them. He put his camera box on the ground, opened it up and pulled out a Nikon.

‘Ready when you are, Dick.’

Reilly took Nyman by the arm and pointed towards the body.

‘No closer than the ring of stakes, Joe. I want general views of the whole field, then middle-distance pictures of the body from all sides. Take at least two rolls, duplicating each picture. When you’re done with that, I want a bunch of close-up shots of the body, from every side, including the bone.’

Nyman nodded and peered more closely. ‘Is that bone what I think it is?’

‘We don’t know for sure yet, but Roy will be able to tell us.’

‘So this might be two murders, not one?’

Reilly smiled for the first time since he had climbed out of his Cherokee. ‘I guess that’s one way of puttin’ it,’ he said.

Fifteen minutes later Nyman stepped back from the body and replaced the lens cap on his Nikon. ‘That’s it, Dick. I’ll develop the films as soon as I get back to the shop, and I’ll get the prints to your office no later than –’ he glanced at his watch ‘– oh, say, about three thirty.’

‘Thanks,’ Reilly nodded and waved farewell as Nyman walked off towards the cruiser. Then he turned to Roy Walters. ‘OK, doc, do your stuff. Walk over to him, confirm he’s dead, and then walk back. Nothin’ else, and try not to leave any unnecessary prints on the ground.’

Walters looked slightly surprised. ‘What about the cause and approximate time of death?’ he asked.

Reilly smiled bleakly and pointed at the body. ‘You and I already know the cause, Roy, and he’s been dead at least a day. Crows won’t touch a body ’till it’s good and cold, and this guy’s got no face left. That means he’s been dead awhile.’

Walters nodded, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and a surgical mask, and walked across to the crime scene. He ducked under the tape and walked the last few feet with exaggerated care. Then he knelt beside the corpse and, out of habit not expectation, briefly felt the side of the neck. There was no pulse, and the flesh was cold but not hard.

‘Rigor mortis has faded, Dick,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘so you’re right – he’s been dead well over twenty-four hours.’

Before he straightened up, Walters looked carefully at the skull. Like Reilly, he had seen a lot of dead bodies in his career, but never before had he seen anyone killed quite like this.

The top of the skull had clearly been shattered, and the weapon that had done the damage was unmistakably a human thigh-bone, driven vertically downwards, and still protruding like a bizarre and obscene head-dress from the dead man’s greying hair. From the amount outside the body, Walters estimated that about six to eight inches of the bone had penetrated and was still lodged inside the skull.

Death had obviously been instantaneous, but Walters couldn’t imagine how any assailant could have done it. The dead man was heavily-built and well over six feet tall – Walters estimated six feet three or thereabouts – and was lying on his back. That suggested that the blow had been struck from the front and downwards, and to deliver a killing blow with such a weapon an attacker would need to be both immensely strong and very tall. Real tall, Walters thought, like eight to nine feet.

He shivered suddenly and looked around nervously. Reilly and Dermott were behind him, and Dermott, the doctor noticed, was still carrying his shotgun. Walters bent again to the corpse and looked closely at what was left of the man’s face.

‘Hey,’ he called out, ‘I think I know this guy.’

‘Bingo, doc,’ Reilly said. ‘We all know him. Now, don’t touch anythin’ else. Just get the hell away from him.’

Walters stood up and walked backwards, retracing his steps as accurately as he could until he was standing outside the ring of stakes. ‘Damnedest thing I ever saw,’ he commented briefly, pulling off his mask and gloves. ‘When are you moving the body – when can I do the post?’

‘I ain’t movin’ the body,’ Reilly said, ‘and probably you won’t get to do an autopsy. I’m not gonna to mess around with somethin’ as weird as this. I’ve already called the FBI, and as soon as they get here I’m leavin’ it to them.’



Oval Office, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

Presidential Aide Mark Rogerson paused outside the partially-opened door of the Oval Office, looked up at the green light glowing above the doorway, and leant forward, listening intently. Standing instructions forbade him to enter the room if the President was on the telephone or in conference. The green light meant that he was able to enter, but a couple of times the President had forgotten to press the switch, hence Rogerson’s cautious double-check.

Satisfied, he straightened up, gave a brisk rap on the door with his knuckle, waited a moment for the call to enter, then pushed it open and walked inside.

The forty-seventh President of the United States of America was sitting at his desk, a thick report open in front of him. A short, grey-haired man whose ready smile had been rather less evident – at least in private – since he had taken office, Charles Gainey was, unlike many of his predecessors, both a consummate politician and an intellectual. He had a firm grasp of the realities of politics that had led him to the White House but, perhaps more importantly, he could talk mathematics, economics and finance with anyone. He read everything that crossed his desk, and seemed able to remember most of it. Rogerson found him quite unnerving, an almost frighteningly competent man.

‘James Dickson is here, Mr. President.’

Charles Gainey nodded. ‘Good. Send him in, please.’

The Secretary of Defense, who had followed Rogerson down the corridor, nodded and walked past him into the room. The aide pulled the door closed and retreated to his own office.

‘Good afternoon, James,’ the President said. ‘Please take a seat,’ he added, gesturing towards the three leather armchairs in front of his desk. He picked up the report he’d been studying and held it up so that Dickson could read the title.

‘This report,’ Gainey began. ‘I presume you’ve read it?’

Dickson squirmed slightly. There was no right answer to that question. He’d not actually read the report, just the three page summary at the end, but he had signed off on the distribution list. Whatever he said, he guessed he was going to be in trouble.

‘Well?’

‘Yes, Mr. President, I’ve read it,’ Dickson replied, mentally crossing his fingers and hoping for the best.

‘And your conclusions were what?’

‘It’s a complex matter. What particular aspect is concerning you?’

Charles Gainey shook his head. ‘It’s not that complex. The CIA, in my experience, isn’t capable of producing anything very complicated – at least, not in writing. The aspect concerning me, as you put it, is the analysis of birth figures in Appendix Six.’

Dickson was already lost. ‘Birth figures?’

Gainey nodded patiently. ‘These conversations would take a lot less time if you just admitted you didn’t know what the hell I was talking about right from the start. This report,’ Gainey continued, tapping the dark blue cover in front of him, ‘is the CIA’s annual analysis of –’

‘I do know what the report is, Mr. President,’ Dickson interrupted. ‘What I still don’t know is what aspect of it is bothering you.’

‘What bothers me, James, is the fact that the annual statistics for births in America are showing a small but measurable anomaly.’

Dickson looked blank. ‘Birth statistics? I’m sorry, I don’t –’

‘It’s not in the summary, James, which is no doubt why you missed it,’ Gainey said, revealing his knowledge of Dickson’s professional routine with uncomfortable accuracy. ‘In fact, it’s not actually mentioned specifically in the CIA report at all. It was detailed in the AMA Annual Medical Statistics report, which I note you’ve also signed as having read.’

‘I have to read a lot of reports, Mr. President,’ Dickson said, somewhat irritably, ‘and I still don’t see what you’re driving at.’

‘What I’m driving at is that these two separate reports both refer to birth statistics, but with obviously different emphasis. The American Medical Association just gives the numbers with some simple mathematical analyses. The CIA report doesn’t cover total figures, but does contain one very interesting – or disturbing – fact. What concerns me is the conclusion you can draw if you correlate the two reports.’

Dickson had endured similar conversations with Charles Gainey over the two years he had been in office. Usually the easiest and fastest response was to play dumb and let the President work his way through the arguments and make whatever point he had in mind.

‘And what conclusion is that?’ he asked.

‘According to the AMA’s figures – and they should be right – the number of female babies born is increasing every year, with a corresponding decrease in new-born male children.’

Dickson shrugged and relaxed, though he still couldn’t see where Gainey was going.

‘I’m sure that’s just a minor statistical anomaly, Mr. President. No doubt if you looked back at the analyses from previous years you’d see similar fluctuations.’

‘I agree, James. Taken by itself, it’s totally insignificant, although the same kind of bias has been evident since about nineteen-ninety. What worries me is the other factor mentioned in the classified footnote to Appendix Six of the report from Langley.’

The President paused, looking at Dickson in silent appraisal. The Secretary of Defense shook his head.

‘I don’t think –’ Dickson stopped, comprehension suddenly dawning. ‘This hasn’t got anything to do with Roland Oliver, has it?’ he asked.

Charles Gainey nodded. ‘Yes, it has. According to the CIA report, every woman who claimed to have had any close contact with Roland Oliver has subsequently only produced female offspring.’



Beaver Creek, Western Montana

The FBI arrived in force, if two people in one car could be described as ‘force,’ some two hours later. Dermott and Reilly were sitting in the front seats of the sheriff’s Cherokee, drinking beer and eating the sandwiches that one of the deputies had brought out to them, when the grey Ford compact nosed into the field, preceded by one of the Beaver Creek police cruisers. Reilly got out of the Jeep and walked towards the car.

The Ford stopped, and a tall, well-built man in his early forties climbed out of the driver’s seat. He had short-cropped fair hair and a craggy face that stopped just this side of being handsome. Reilly was used to sizing up people at a glance, and could tell by the way the man moved that he was very fit.

Reilly looked at him for a few moments, then switched his attention to the blonde woman who was just emerging from the other side of the car. She was twenty-eight – no older – and had the kind of face and figure that could stop traffic, just as she had stopped Reilly.

Steven Hunter grinned. He was starting to get used to the effect Christy-Lee Kaufmann had on middle-aged men.

‘I was kinda expectin’ Mulder and Scully,’ Reilly said, extending a large and horny hand.

‘They don’t work for us any more, sheriff,’ Christy-Lee Kaufmann replied politely, and walked over to Reilly. The hugely popular ‘X-Files’ television series seemed to entitle all US citizens to make smart remarks about the Bureau these days, but she smiled anyway. She pulled out her identification and showed it to the sheriff.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. I’m Special Agent Kaufmann of the FBI and this is Steven Hunter. What’ve you got for us?’