That was the only one of the recent deaths to occur before the bus crash, but it could only have been a few days before. It was astonishing that Redford could have made the link so quickly, because Dan guessed the only reason he would have been interested in Mike Naismith’s death was if he’d believed there was a connection with Bill Brabham.
Was someone tipping him off? That was one possibility, that he’d still had contacts, still had a steady drip-feed of information from his former life. Dan doubted it though, doubted that someone so determined to disappear would have left a thread running through the maze. More plausible somehow, was the prospect that Redford had simply been good at this, the top of his game, master of all this information.
Inger came back out of the door, making for the other that faced it, but said, “Kitchen, bathroom, two small rooms with bunks, but the bedrooms are unused. This place is pretty big.” She opened the other door and stepped inside, and Dan heard her say, “Wow.”
He pushed away from the desk, realizing as he did that Redford hadn’t quite been the master of all this information, in that he clearly hadn’t yet found the thing he’d needed to bring Brabham down. That was key, because there was a good chance it was the same thing Dan needed to safeguard his own future.
When he stepped into the room, Inger was still standing motionless, just looking out at the stacks of shelves. It was bigger than the main room, “the office” as Dan already thought of it, and had probably been designed as the storage room for the people hiding out down here.
Redford had also used it as a storage room, but for someone looking at starting Armageddon rather than surviving it. There was a lot of weaponry in there, of almost every conceivable type, including some heavy-duty explosives. But there was also an incredible amount of electronic equipment, from small components right up to pieces of machinery that Dan couldn’t even begin to identify.
Dan said, “I don’t know what he was planning, but it would have been something to behold.”
Inger still hadn’t moved, but said now, “How did he get hold of all this stuff without anyone noticing? How did he get it here?”
The logistics of it weren’t so hard to imagine. It was an enormous amount of kit, but he could have easily brought it in little by little over a couple of months and no one would have thought anything of it, even if there’d been anyone to see him unloading his SUV.
More interesting was what the sophistication of both the weaponry and the electronics said about Redford. They’d suspected it already, of course, not least because of the interest shown by Brabham’s people, but this was certainly a more definitive declaration of that truth.
“He was one of us,” said Dan. “This guy was clearly one hell of a specialist. He knew how to get hold of stuff, knew what he needed, was able to do it all without ever once appearing on the radar.”
The day before, Dan had imagined this guy leading his half-life up here, traveling by bus and tinkering with his old motorbike, and he’d felt a mixture of fear and contempt at the thought of such an existence. Now, without knowing much more about him, he couldn’t help but admire him and wish he’d had the chance to meet him.
Again, he thought about what might have happened had the man who wasn’t Jacques Fillon not died on that bus. What endgame had he been working towards, how much of the equipment in front of them was part of it?
And at another level, thinking of the picture of Bill Brabham pinned to that board out there, Dan wondered how much of Redford’s plan he could resurrect himself, and what his chances might be of seeing it through. Dan and Jack Redford had never known each other, but fate had put them on converging paths and, even without knowing the history of it, Dan knew that he had no choice but to make this his investigation now.
Chapter Fifteen
They spent the rest of the morning down in the shelter. Dan went through Redford’s recent Internet history in more detail and searched the computer for other files that might have been hidden away on it—though Redford seemed to have been quite old school in that respect, and had apparently printed most of the stuff that had interested him.
That accounted for the filing cabinets. Inger started on them, working methodically through the drawers, and then Dan joined in too, though in truth, neither of them were entirely sure what they were looking for. Perhaps, if they were lucky, they would find something that at least pointed to the keystone, to the thing that lay at the center of all this endeavor.
They walked back to the cabin for lunch, and as they sat eating, Inger said, “How long will you stay?”
It was a complex question. As she’d already pointed out, there was too much material for them to go through in its entirety—Dan simply didn’t have that much time. But he had to go through enough of it to provide him with a next step. And he didn’t want to walk away from Redford’s archive and then find it out of reach.