Chapter 40
The air was cold and smelled of mold. He was in a storage room.
Empty shelves lined the walls. The concrete floor had a broad, shallow puddle in the center.
He looked up and was rewarded with a drip of water in his eye.
The roof was leaking, the ceiling stained black with mold.
The noise of a passing diesel locomotive drowned out all sound.
The light from the open loading dock door was dim and watery.
With vacant commercial buildings, the owner would usually pay for light and heat until the space was rented again, although this place felt like it had been vacant for years.
He glanced around for a switch, found one on the far wall and flipped it.
Nothing. He looked up and saw that the fluorescent overheads had no bulbs.
A tiled utility room in the corner stood open.
Along with the furnace and water heater, it had a toilet, a stained slop sink with a cheap saucepan in the bottom, a handheld shower fixture attached to the sink spout, and a floor drain.
Above the sink was a shelf of ancient cleaning supplies and a shriveled bar of soap.
He figured it was a former showroom of some kind.
All the fixtures had been stripped, leaving holes in the walls and gaps in the floor tile where some kind of counter had once been.
There was nothing to identify the business that had been here.
Here, too, the floor was puddled with moisture and the ceiling discolored from another leak.
Tucking the .357 into his waistband, he walked to the front wall to scoop up the pile of mail from the floor below the delivery slot.
By the light of his phone, he flipped through the envelopes, circulars, and catalogs.
Office supplies, janitorial services, warehouse equipment, generic stuff.
He was hoping for something that might provide a clue to Circuit Rider’s identity, but it was all addressed to “Office Manager,” “Owner,” or “Occupant.”
So much for the mail. At least he’d figured out how Circuit Rider could pick up his vehicle tabs. Maybe he was a former tenant who’d kept his keys? It would be a reasonably safe mail drop. From the condition of the place, Peter figured the owner hadn’t set foot in this property in years.
He left the mail in a pile and headed for the back room.
In the hallway, he passed the closed door and tried the knob.
It was locked. On closer inspection, both knob and door were newer, and of decent quality.
There was even a deadbolt. Peter didn’t get it.
What was the point of replacing this knob and locking this door when the place was boarded up and the roof was leaking in two places?
Only one way to find out. Peter walked through the storage room, hopped off the loading dock, and scanned around for something heavy. He saw a large chunk of broken concrete lying in the weeds at the base of the fence to the railyard.
He needed two hands to pick it up. It weighed about as much as a sack of Quikrete.
Peter had carried hundreds of those sacks in his life, and would no doubt carry many more.
He hoisted the chunk onto the loading dock floor, climbed inside, picked it up again, then returned to the locked door.
Mindful of the location of his toes, he swung the massive chunk directly at the deadbolt.
The door popped open on a dark room. He dropped the concrete chunk on the tile floor, then reached through the jamb and felt around for a light switch. Expecting nothing, he flipped it on and was surprised when a bank of fluorescent overheads lit up, nice and bright.
He’d thought it might be an office, filled with some remaining inventory or supplies worth protecting.
Instead he saw a pair of metal bunkbeds with thin mattresses, an electric space heater, a mini-fridge with an ancient hot plate on top, and what he assumed was the door to the back room set over sawhorses and used as a worktable.
On the wall over the table, attached with a thumbtack, was the same glossy brochure for Resilient Systems that he’d seen in Reed’s apartment, folded in the same way.
The same face stared out from the glossy paper with those same penetrating eyes that somehow seemed to look right inside you.
Peter looked down at the contents of the worktable.
Scattered snippets of wire with insulation in a half dozen colors, the remains of several rolls of tin solder, spent tubes of epoxy, and a paper plate holding a random assortment of machine screws.
Someone had been repairing something. Or building something.
The paper plate sat on a book. He moved the plate. The book was a cheap printing of the Unabomber Manifesto, well-thumbed with underlined passages on every page.
The Unabomber was a former mathematics professor turned Montana hermit who had railed against the industrialization of America.
His bombing campaign had lasted from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring twenty-three more.
He was finally caught when The New York Times published his so-called manifesto and his brother recognized the writing style.
The Unabomber Manifesto had since been republished many times.
It was a touchstone for many disaffected oddballs and school shooters.
Aw, hell, Peter thought. This just gets better and better.
He looked up at the brochure again. Despite the slightly bulging eyes, there was something about that face, something warm and compassionate. Garrison Bevel, Founder of Resilient Systems.
He reached across the desk and pulled the glossy paper free from the thumbtack.
It was a single legal-size page, folded in half and printed on both sides to make a simple four-page booklet.
Bevel’s photo was on the second-to-last page.
The paper had softened and the gloss had dulled at the edges, as if it had been taken down and handled frequently.
Folding the booklet back to its intended form, he flipped through from the beginning. He saw stock images of downed utility lines, smiling customers, and rooftops covered with rectangular black panels. Solar power with battery backup. Live in comfort through even the longest power outage.
The back page touted Bevel’s engineering degrees and his career with Pacific Gas and Electric, along with a graphic suggesting that your solar investment would pay for itself in just a few years, which seemed a little optimistic in the rainy Pacific Northwest. At the very bottom was the company contact information. Email, phone, and physical address.
507 Puyallup Avenue, Tacoma, WA.
The storefront he was standing in right now.
Holy shit. He turned back to the photo of the founder. He looked again at those eyes, that face. He felt something click.
He couldn’t prove it, but he felt pretty damn sure that Garrison Bevel was the voice on the cassette tapes. Garrison Bevel was the Messenger.