The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER Two





Tuesday



Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Christy-Lee Kaufmann put her hands behind her back and surveyed the crime scene, much as Sheriff Reilly had done earlier that day, and came to pretty much the same conclusions.

Kaufmann had joined the Bureau straight from college, and although she’d only worked in Montana, she’d been assigned to investigate over twenty murder cases already. Some had been unusual for one reason or another; a handful had been frankly bizarre, but most of them had just been boring and predictable – at least for the investigators. They had had a somewhat different effect upon the victims’ families, not least because in the vast majority of cases another family member had been the perpetrator.

But this case was a first for her, and she was entirely in agreement with Sheriff Reilly.

‘What we have here, Special Agents Hunter and Kaufmann – I get that right, miss? – is a murder that couldn’t have happened.’

Reilly had taken them to the edge of the ring of stakes, and all three of them were standing and looking down at the body.

‘Do you know the victim?’

Hunter spoke for the first time, and Reilly looked up sharply.

‘You’re British,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘What’s a goddamn limey doin’ in the Bureau?’

Hunter just looked at him, and it was Kaufmann who replied.

‘A good question, sheriff. Mr. Hunter is British, but I didn’t actually say he was in the Bureau. He’s a policeman who’s been seconded to the FBI for a couple of years.’

‘What kind of a policeman?’

‘Does it matter?’ Hunter asked, deflecting the question and looking straight at Reilly.

The sheriff stared back at him for a few seconds, then dropped his eyes. ‘No, I guess not,’ he said, and after a moment turned back to look again at the body. ‘OK, we do know the deceased. Name was Billy Dole. Lived on the northern edge of town. He worked in the prison service in Texas and retired out here two or three years ago. Never married, and he kept himself pretty much to himself. Told me he’d spent almost his whole life cooped up behind concrete walls just like a convict, and aimed to enjoy his retirement in the open air – huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’.’

He looked down at the husk of the man. A 30.30 rifle with a telescopic sight lay beside the body, and he had a heavy-calibre pistol and a hunting knife on his belt.

‘Up here after deer, I guess.’

‘You ever go hunting together?’ Hunter asked, looking at the rifle with professional interest.

‘Yeah, coupla times. Why?’

Hunter ignored the question. ‘Was he a good hunter? You know, aware of what game was around, a good shot, that sort of thing?’

Reilly paused for a moment, then nodded. ‘Yeah, I see where you’re goin’ with that,’ he said. ‘He was good enough, I guess, so nobody could sneak up on him and punch his lights out with a goddamn human leg bone.

‘And,’ Reilly continued, ‘the doc thinks the attack was from the front, ’cause he’s lyin’ on his back, and there’s no sign of the body bein’ turned over. As far as we can see, Billy Dole died right where he fell.’

Hunter and Kaufmann looked at each other, but neither spoke.

‘There’s the height problem, too.’

‘Height problem? What height problem?’ Kaufmann asked.

‘Billy Dole here was a big guy – around six two, six three,’ Reilly said. ‘Whoever smashed that bone into his head drove it straight down through the top of the skull. He used it like a dagger, not a club. That means, according to the doc, that the attacker had to be at least two feet taller than the victim. Unless o’ course Billy Dole bent over to let him do it, and I can’t think of no good reason why a man carryin’ a rifle and pistol would let that happen to him.’

Reilly grinned, but there was no humour in his face. ‘The doc’s mutterin’ about Bigfoot and all sorts. He reckons the force needed to drive that bone six inches into the skull ain’t somethin’ any human could do, not even a guy nine feet tall and built like Arnie. And,’ he added, grinning again, ‘we don’t get too many of them around here.’

‘Arnie?’ Hunter asked.

Reilly glanced at Kaufmann and smiled before replying. ‘Big Arnie – Arnold Schwarzenegger. I guess you don’t get out to the movies much, Mr. Hunter.’

‘Apparently not,’ Hunter muttered.

‘There’s also,’ Reilly went on, looking back at the body, ‘the footprints.’

Hunter nodded. ‘We see Dole’s prints clearly enough. The soil was obviously soft when he walked up here, what, two days ago?’

‘The doc reckons he’s been dead thirty hours minimum, fifty hours maximum. He can’t be more accurate without an autopsy.’

Hunter pointed towards the body. ‘And that single line of footprints was made by the doctor, right?’

Reilly nodded. ‘Yeah. I had to get him up here just to confirm death – it’s the law,’ he added, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘But before I let the doc go to him I had everythin’ photographed, so’s we got a permanent record of what the crime scene looked like ’fore folks started tramplin’ the place up.’

Christy-Lee smiled at him. ‘That was good thinking, sheriff.’ She pointed at the ground around the dead man. In a rough circle that more or less followed the outline of the body, the grass had been almost flattened, and the three-toed prints of the crows were clearly visible where the mud showed through. Around the corpse’s head, the ground was soaked with blood, and small scraps of flesh and blood were scattered about – the remains of the crows’ last, unfinished, meal. ‘No sign there of any prints except those made by the deceased, I suppose?’

Reilly shook his head decisively. ‘Nope. I cast around the whole area when I first got here. The only prints I could find were made by Billy himself and Andy Dermott – he’s the farmer who owns this land – when he found the body this mornin’.’

Hunter turned away from the corpse and looked steadily at Reilly. ‘You do realize what you’re saying, sheriff?’ he asked.

Reilly smiled again. ‘Sure I do. This man’s been killed by a guy nine feet tall and as strong as a gorilla, who did the job with another guy’s leg bone, and who didn’t leave no footprints anywhere near the corpse. We are talking seriously weird here, and I’m real glad we got an FBI, ’cause I sure as hell don’t have any idea where to start.’

Reilly hitched up his trousers and tightened the belt a notch. ‘I know a lot of law enforcement officers bitch about it when the Bureau gets involved in local crime,’ he added, ‘and I’ve got a bit uppity about it myself a coupla times. But now, it’s different. Anything you want, all you gotta do is ask. I’m real happy to be able to just walk away from this and leave it to the professionals.’

‘Thanks a lot, sheriff,’ Hunter said, sarcasm dripping from his voice, and turned back to look again at what was left of Billy Dole.



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

President Charles Gainey looked steadily across the gold-embossed green leather top of his desk at the Secretary of Defense.

After a few moments James Dickson closed the CIA report with a snap and replaced it on the desk in front of the President. ‘It may be nothing,’ he said, ‘or perhaps just a coincidence. The CIA’s witnesses are hardly the most reliable of people.’

‘Agreed,’ Gainey said, ‘but we do know they’re not deluded. What they’re reporting is, at least in some cases, actually happening to them, despite the lack of any credible supporting evidence.’

‘I know,’ Dickson replied. ‘But it could still be just a statistical anomaly,’ he repeated.

Gainey shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. The CIA could well make a horse’s ass of the figures, but I doubt that the AMA would. And before you go any further down that road, I know that the AMA report deals in national and international trends, while the CIA’s contribution is specific, but the trend is certainly there. Small it may be at the moment, but the consequences could be serious.’

Dickson sat in silence for a few moments. ‘Have you discussed this with any of your scientific advisors, Mr. President?’

‘No, not yet. For obvious reasons – Roland Oliver’s security classification for one thing – I want to keep this tight and in-house for the moment.’

‘So what do you intend to do, Mr. President?’

‘For the moment, nothing, but if further evidence emerges that Roland Oliver is tampering with the gene pool of the American people for its own purposes, we will have to take steps. What steps, exactly, I don’t know, but I’d like you to give it some thought and come up with appropriate recommendations.’

‘They do have the technology, I suppose?’ Dickson asked, somewhat doubtfully.

Gainey actually laughed. ‘Of course they have. We could almost do it ourselves, so there’s no doubt Roland Oliver can.’



Reno, Nevada

The two-storey office building sat among a dozen others just like it on the northern edge of Reno. Between the building and the road was a small parking lot which could house a dozen or so vehicles. The exterior of the building was rough brownstone under a tiled roof, with rows of small square windows marking the level of each of the two floors. The main entrance was a double door, but the left-hand side was kept permanently bolted, and the right-hand door was always locked. Beside the door was a faded plaque which announced, to anyone who could decipher the wording, that the building was the Nevada office of the North American Professional and Allied Trades Health Insurance Company Inc.

Next to the plaque was a doorbell, but there were almost never any visitors, because the company did all its business by mail. The mailman visited every day, and other tradesmen when they were summoned, but they never got beyond the ground floor and basement utility rooms. Those few people who ever ventured into the building were met in a drab and poorly-lit reception area, and were escorted wherever they went. If they thought about it at all, they assumed that the upper floor housed offices full of clerks working on files and letters.

In fact, upstairs, it was all rather different.

First, there were only nine people on staff, because almost all the operations conducted there were effectively run by the computer system. The five technical-specialist employees worked shifts which meant that one of them was always on the premises, and they were simply there to minister to the computers and solve any hardware or software problems as soon as they arose.

The other four staff did what the computers told them, which generally involved mailing letters to hospitals, clinics, doctors, and potential clients of the company, and handling the incoming mail. The computers selected the people to whom client letters were sent, based upon strict demographic criteria and other factors, and then printed the letters and envelopes.

The envelopes were plain and unadorned, anonymous in every way, but the paper that ran through the printers was very special. The surface layer contained a combination of specially-modified silver salts, which made the paper highly light-sensitive. The printers were normal commercial lasers, and when the paper went through them, the text of the letters was printed in the usual way.

What was unusual was that the printing process, which exposed the paper to extreme heat when the laser toner was fused to its surface, also activated the silver salts. From the moment the paper emerged from the printer, it had a life of about one month – the actual time varied with its subsequent exposure to light. At the end of that period, the paper would have turned completely and impenetrably black, making the text totally illegible. It had been calculated that it would take at least one month from the date of mailing before any sort of investigation would be likely to begin.

The other benefit, from the point of view of the Reno program, was that any attempt to photocopy, scan or photograph the letters using a flash camera would result in the immediate blackening of the paper. That, as far as anything could be considered a guarantee for such a sensitive operation, was one of the safeguards of the program.

The problem with all computers is that the data you get out is only as good as the data you put in. The data used in Reno was derived from a number of different sources, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Census Bureau, and most of it was accurate.

But in one case and in one important respect, the data was flawed. PC (Potential Client) 73418 was not quite without family. Her parents were dead, and so was her husband, but she had decided to keep her married name, and for some reason that had thrown the system. If she had reverted to her maiden name, the fact that she had a sister would have red-flagged her. As it was, the letter had been sent out to the address in Utah, and that was a mistake.



Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Ninety minutes later the top field was almost empty. The body of Billy Dole was starting to chill in the hospital mortuary, laid out on a dissecting table and covered with a rubber sheet held down with ice-packs, because the protruding thigh-bone made the corpse too long to fit inside the refrigerator. The FBI-retained specialist pathologist had been summoned from Helena. Reilly was starting on his second donut of the afternoon at the Diner. Dermott had given up the idea of plowing the top field, for a while anyway, and was checking all the ground floor doors and windows at his farm house, just in case.

Three of Reilly’s deputies were taking plaster casts of Dole’s last half dozen footprints, visible now that the body had been removed. In fact, one deputy was pouring the plaster and lifting the casts when they’d hardened, while the other two stood on either side of him holding pump-action twelve gauge shotguns loaded with rifled slugs. They didn’t know who or what they were watching out for, but they were watching out anyway. They were actually looking in the wrong direction, but that didn’t matter, because Billy Dole’s killers were long gone.

Hunter and Kaufmann had carried their overnight bags, which they always kept in the Bureau Ford, into their adjoining single rooms at the Rest-A-While Motel just outside Beaver Creek, and were wondering what the hell to do next.

‘We’ll have to wait for the results of the autopsy, obviously,’ Hunter said, sitting down on the edge of Kaufmann’s bed.

Christy-Lee nodded agreement. ‘When in doubt, stick to standard procedure,’ she said, and picked up a small tape recorder. ‘We’d better make notes as we go along, just in case either of us has a brainstorm.’

‘Right,’ Hunter said. He lay back on the pillows and stared at the ceiling for a couple of minutes. Then he sat up again and began ticking off points on his fingers.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘We need the pathologist to confirm the cause of death, and also to estimate the force needed to drive that bone into Dole’s skull. It’s probably a waste of time, but I want him to check that Dole hadn’t got an unusually weak skull or anything like that, and that the bone is what we think it is – a femur, a human thigh-bone.

‘We’ll ask the sheriff to start the usual next-of-kin tracing, and to find out who last saw Dole alive. Then we need to talk to his friends, if he had any here, and find out if he had any enemies, owed any money to people he shouldn’t, that kind of thing.’

‘He was a prison guard,’ Christy-Lee pointed out. ‘He wouldn’t have made many friends in the pen, but it’s real easy to make bad enemies. We should find out which prisons he worked at and check all recent releases. Maybe somebody big and nasty got out and came looking for him.’

‘If Reilly and the doctor are right,’ Hunter interrupted, ‘they’d have to be really big and really nasty and really light on their feet.’

‘Yeah,’ Kaufmann agreed, ‘and none of these standard procedures are going to achieve anything until we can work out the answer to just one simple question – how the hell did Billy Dole get himself killed?’

She stopped and looked inquiringly at Hunter. He looked back at her and shook his head.

‘Right now,’ he replied, ‘I haven’t any idea.’



Helena, Western Montana

The Helena FBI Resident Agency office possessed five computers linked in a Local Area Network, an email computer attached to the LAN but with client-only access and a firewall for security reasons, three printers, and a part-time secretary, Gloria Gray, who worked from two to five in the afternoon, Monday to Friday. Kaufmann could type, but not well, and much preferred to scribble notes which Miss Gray, an elderly and somewhat irascible spinster, then attempted to read and type into her computer. This operation was made easier if Kaufmann was in the office, because she could usually read most of what she had written.

Gloria Gray got to Kaufmann’s scribbled notes of the call from Sheriff Reilly at about four thirty that afternoon. In accordance with standard procedure, she took a new file cover, allocated a file name that was an amalgam of the date and reported location of the incident, and inserted Kaufmann’s hand-written notes. Then she created a new file on the computer and transcribed the notes into that. She printed a copy of the finished text and inserted that in the file as well, so that Kaufmann could check it for errors when she was next in the office.

When the FBI had been run as Herbert Hoover’s private kingdom, the Bureau had nearly submerged in the sea of paper that he had insisted upon. Every action, every day, by every agent in the Bureau, had to be reported and passed up the chain of command.

With the departure of Hoover, the requirements had lessened, but the Resident Agencies still reported to the Field Offices, and the Field Offices to Headquarters in Washington D.C. That was why almost the last thing Gloria Gray did before she left the office that evening was to email encrypted copies of all the notes and reports she had typed that day to the Salt Lake City Field Office.

She should really have waited until Kaufmann had seen her transcription of the Beaver Creek incident and approved it but, she reasoned, if there were any errors in it she could always send a revised copy the next day.



FBI Headquarters, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

The email report from the Helena Resident Agency was downloaded onto the Salt Lake City Field Office email computer at five fifty that evening and automatically decrypted. The Duty Special Agent read it, noted its points of interest, and included it in the Field Office bulk email to the Hoover Building that evening, where it arrived at eight ten.

All email messages received at FBI Headquarters are automatically scanned by a program designed to search for keywords in the text, and to flag all messages which contain such words. Two of the words contained in the text from Helena matched those in the program’s look-up table, and by nine the message had been printed as hard copy and automatically allocated a Top Secret classification. By eleven fifteen the Helena email message had been inserted in a red folder and was in the hands of the Director of the Criminal Investigative Division, who had been called-in by the duty staff.

At eleven forty-five, having checked the original message text and noted the instructions contained in a file he hadn’t seen before, but which bore a classification of Top Secret/Omega, he reached for the telephone.

When he received the call, the Director of the FBI was in bed, and with his wife, which would have surprised some people who knew him well.

‘Donahue,’ he said.

‘Please go secure, sir.’

The Director grunted with annoyance but pressed the button on his bedside telephone base unit.

‘What is it?’

‘William McGrath, sir. Sorry to call you so late, but we have a possible Omega Incident.’

‘Oh, shit.’

George Donahue had only headed the Bureau for a matter of months, and few people, even McGrath who worked with him on a daily basis, knew him well. But he usually displayed mild manners and even temperament, and his expletive surprised McGrath.

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘Never mind.’

Donahue glanced at his bedside clock. ‘Do nothing about it until I get to the Bureau,’ he said. ‘Send a car for me immediately. I’ll see you in my office in about half an hour. Get me the original text of whatever message or messages you’ve received, plus whatever data you’ve got on any personnel involved in the incident – that’s Bureau, law enforcement and civilian.

‘Lastly, get a file called Omega Procedures from the Central Registry, on my authority, but don’t, under any circumstances, unseal that file.’