Hidden Charges Read online

  Hidden Charges

  Ridley Pearson

  Copyright

  Hidden Charges

  Copyright © 1987, 2014 by Ridley Pearson

  Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover jacket design by David Ter-Avanesyan/Ter33Design

  ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795340123

  CONTENTS

  Tuesday August 18

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Wednesday August 19

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Thursday August 20

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Friday August 21

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Saturday August 22

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue Two Weeks Later

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Tuesday

  August 18

  1

  The construction crews began work at seven-thirty, an hour before the doors to the other pavilions opened, two hours before the stores opened. This was possible in part because not a single worker on the project was union. The union had been broken in the early days of the new pavilion’s construction, following a walkout protesting fifty-hour work weeks with no overtime pay.

  Jim McClatchy climbed the stepladder. One of the ceiling fixtures was not working; he’d been told to fix it. The row of lockers to his left provided temporary storage for the workers. This small concrete room would be a utility area once the construction boys had left, and if everything went according to schedule, that meant Saturday—the day of the new wing’s grand opening.

  Having already thrown the circuit breaker in the panel room, McClatchy moved an acoustic ceiling tile out of the way and aimed his flashlight at the overhead J-box. There was one good reason the fixture didn’t work: It wasn’t hooked up.

  McClatchy went about his work with annoyance written on his thirty-five-year-old face. It was not the first foul-up he’d seen on this job. The trouble with hiring nonunion labor was that you often got nonunion quality. He knocked the punch hole out of the junction box and attached a piece of flex with a locknut, running the fixture’s two wires to the box. Three half-inch conduit pipes entered the J-box, each with one black and one white wire pulled through. The light fixtures were connected in series. The presence of an extra set of wires made him realize that something else, somewhere else, wasn’t working either.

  Making a mental note to check the plans later, McClatchy cleaned the ends of all the wires, twisted the blacks together and then the whites, and covered them with wire nuts. He worked the stubborn wires inside the J-box, finally capping it with a blank plate.

  He replaced the acoustic tile and descended the stepladder.

  Down the hall he entered the panel room and threw the appropriate breaker. All in a day’s work. McClatchy’s wife was studying in Hartford for her teaching certificate. As a result, he saw her only on weekends. For the past few months, life without her had become a little too routine, too boring. That woman meant more to him than anyone would ever know.

  He ambled back down the long, drab utility hallway and checked his watch. He’d been on the job a total of one hour and ten minutes and was already bored.

  He pushed open the door and casually threw the light switch, his eyes on the overhead fixture he had just connected.

  A tongue of orange flame uncurled toward him, pinning him helplessly against the doorjamb. The intense pressure of the explosion whipped the steel-edged door on its hinges, cleaving his head open, killing him instantly.

  Amid a swirling cloud of charcoal smoke, debris from the lockers settled onto the floor like feathers from a pillow fight. The fire alarm cried out, strangely mechanical and inhuman.

  Jim McClatchy’s wedding ring rolled twenty feet down the long hallway before tilting to one side and falling over. The ring danced on the smooth concrete surface, a tiny bell chiming, and finally came to a stop only inches from a small drain.

  2

  As the rumble of the explosion rolled through the building, the short stocky man looked up from his work. He eased his finger off the trigger of the star-bit drill and listened to the eerie pulse of the fire alarm, its sound dulled by his earplugs and the wall of cement between this area and the utility room. The explosion had happened nearby. He spent a moment debating what to do. How could he stop now? He made a hasty decision and leaned his weight against the butt of the heavy drill, simultaneously pulling the trigger. The drill screamed into action, its special bit chewing through the hardened cement.

  The man wore unusually thick eyeglasses which distorted his eyes and the sides of his face, giving his head an ungainly figure-eight shape. Thin gold-colored wire rims hooked around his oafish ears, holding the heavy glass onto his face. He had a narrow chin with a day’s stubble on it. An oddly shaped scar, barely visible, ran from the edge of his left eye into the coarse brown curly hair at his temple. Still drilling, he crooked his neck to mop his brow on his shoulder, the sweat staining his faded cotton shirt like the stroke of a careless paintbrush.

&nbs
p; He heard the bit strike the electrical conduit that ran up the center of this column. He withdrew the bit and, with the aid of a small penlight, peered inside the long cylindrical tube he had drilled. It took two more gentle efforts with the drill to shred the conduit without damaging the wires held within.

  This was the third of three such drill holes in this column, each uniformly distanced from the other, likes spokes of a wheel. Using a special hook he had fashioned from a garden tool, he had snaked his No. 12 THHN wire from the conduit into the first hole he had drilled. Two spliced wires made connections to the other drilled holes possible. He placed the dynamite inside the drilled tubes, connecting the wires from the blasting caps to the No. 12 THHN with wire nuts. When each of the three sticks was in place, he opened his small Tupperware container filled with wet cement and plugged the drilled holes. In a few short hours the cement seal would cure. By the next day at this same time, after a little work with sandpaper, it would be damn near impossible to spot the plugs.

  He had the disconcerting habit of breathing from an open mouth, brought on by two deviated septums, the result of the same accident that had scarred his face. He snorted as he hurried to collect his tools and organize himself.

  The fire alarm continued to cry on the other side of the wall. This area was a dead space in the architecture accessed from a crawl space below the utility room. All the pavilions were riddled with such crawl spaces, known to the maintenance crew as utility tunnels and shafts.

  The man with the thick glasses slipped through the open space, over a low cement wall and found himself crouching in a dim utility tunnel. Bare bulbs hung at intervals of twenty feet, as far as the eye could see. He pulled his tools over the wall, and then moved slowly in the same low crouch, avoiding banging his head on the overhead pipes. The slightest bump to his head caused him excruciating pain because most of the top of his head was platinum. He’d sometimes laugh to himself about how rich he’d be if he could only melt his own head down.

  He didn’t much care for darkness. It brought upon him a sensation of choking. Drowning. He was never without his penlight.

  He was quite accustomed to traveling around these tunnels. This column was the sixth. Five to go. Four wall charges after that and she was all set. Ready to go. He would have the columns finished by late this afternoon.

  What really worried him now was that explosion. He knew without investigating what had happened; if there was one thing this man knew it was the sound of an explosion. He convinced himself it was no big deal. He couldn’t let himself worry about it; he couldn’t stop now. One charge by itself would do little structural damage. It was the combination that would have the desired effect.

  Any explosion would certainly bring the cops, however—and Toby Jacobs; he worried about the Director of Security, a man he had never met and hoped never to meet. Jacobs seemed to have the ability to be in several places at once. It was unnerving.

  It wouldn’t be long now, he reminded himself. It was almost time.

  He reached a door, turned the knob, and pushed it open, quickly shoving his tools into the drab hallway.

  He would avoid the site of the explosion at all costs. But he had to appear curious. He left his tools and hurried over to a group of painters. Painters always struck him as a bit short on brains—too long in the fumes.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he asked as the alarm stopped.

  The thinnest of the three replied, “Explosion in the locker room. Maybe gas or something.”

  “Terrorists,” said the one with the potbelly, looking frightened.

  The man with the glasses shook his head in disgust. “Terrorists? Here?” He turned and hurried back to his tools, appearing appropriately anxious.

  There was much work to do.

  3

  Toby Jacobs paused on Level 3, Pavilion C, Administration Concourse South, overlooking the Atrium, where a group of nearly forty senior citizens walked briskly in unison, headed toward Pavilion B. Ten of them wore the color-coordinated T-shirts of their walking club, the Greyhounds.

  It was something of a sociological phenomenon, this walking craze. Seven months earlier, in this hour before the shops opened, the concourses would have been nearly empty. Recently however the “pre-open” hour had swelled in attendance to several hundred. Nearly all were over sixty; all walked energetically for forty minutes to an hour, taking advantage of the empty, environment-controlled space.

  Waves of blue hair moved below him. Rotund individuals, alongside bodies deserving the Greyhound logo, pushed themselves to an enviable pace, driving their hearts and lungs.

  These elderly walkers gave him a daily sense of purpose: it was like having several hundred grandparents to look after. He had never met his own grandparents, though he’d heard plenty of stories. He appreciated the bright eyes, the pumping arms, the hungry slap of rubber on the polished stone floors. The blue-hairs were a wonderful addition to the mall.

  He reached up to massage the base of his neck. He yawned. He’d been up half the night working on the spars and rigging to the Angel, a ship-in-a-bottle project that had consumed his evenings for the past several weeks. He longed for two weeks on the Cape, with the lazy slap of surf and a cooler at his side. No chance of that. No time for it. There never seemed to be time for it.

  He studied the Atrium’s central chandelier, twenty feet across at its widest spot, boasting some two thousand individual pieces of cut glass. It hung above the computer-controlled fountain that displayed fifty-five separate streams of water in varying heights and combinations, creating a reported 440,000 possible different patterns—a promotional claim Jacobs found difficult to believe. Placed around the fountain were six maturing elms and ten whitebark birch. Below, and in the shade of these trees, several dozen varieties of annuals encircled a small rose garden and were flanked on four sides by hanging baskets of flowering begonias. The combined colors and smells were intoxicating. All of Yankee Green was intoxicating.

  Suddenly, the building rocked beneath his feet.

  He reached for the small radio handset he kept clipped to the inside of his suit coat. Its two-foot coiled cord ran to the lightweight walkie-talkie hooked to his belt. From the walkie-talkie another tiny wire led up between his jacket and shirt and out between the collars, attached to a clear plastic invisible earpiece. All his guards carried similar equipment.

  “Dicky, what was that?” Jacobs spoke in a pleasant tenor. A tall lean man, he wore a light suit. A brimmed hat, like something worn by Elliot Ness, sat cocked at a gentle angle over bushy black brows. The hat provided two functions: it gave him the appearance of a visitor to the shopping center, a customer perhaps, and at the same time made him immediately identifiable to his security staff—easily spotted in a crowd, even at a good distance.

  He looked up through the immense overhead skylight and spotted yet another set of steel-wool clouds blowing down from Boston, toward Providence, trapping the city of Hillsdale and the Yankee Green beneath an August umbrella of heat and humidity.

  Still looking up, he noticed the small antenna protruding from the wall. Because of interference caused by the tremendous amount of steel in the huge complex, Security’s radio signals were bounced to these nearby relay stations. From the relay stations the signals were transmitted by coaxial cable to the roof and then radioed across the street to another set of relays, which deflected them back across the street to the far end of the mall, where again they ran via coaxial cable to the Security Dispatch Control Center—all this accomplished in less than a thousandth of a second.

  Considering where Jacobs stood, there was a certain irony in the complexity of this technological feat: the Dispatch Control Center was just across the way, on the other side of Pavilion C’s third level.

  Installation of the sophisticated radio relay system had been one of his first recommendations. The old system, riddled with dead spots, had been too inefficient and prone to failure. The new system had cost over twenty thousand dollars. One of th
e early joys of his job had been spending someone else’s money.

  He pushed up the sleeves on his poplin suit and tugged at the cuffs of his shirt. He jerked his tie. It felt like someone had tied him up. The jacket was often kept hooked over the back of the chair in the office marked DIRECTOR OF SECURITY AND SAFETY, but not during summer, when air conditioning kept the Green’s seven pavilions as cool as meat lockers. Out of habit, he dragged his shoes across the backs of his pant legs. His efforts failed to restore the shoes’ original luster.

  In the instant of time it took to release the call button, he studied the lush, attractive setting below. The Green’s architects had specifically designed the complex to direct customers’ attention to the inside, to move the foot traffic deeper and deeper into the heart of the multi-pavilioned maze, and to mesmerize shoppers with exotic sensory experiences, diverting them from the problems of everyday life. It was, in essence, a giant trap: inviting, alluring, seductive. For patrons, an hour passed in a matter of minutes, an entire day in what seemed more like an hour. For employees, this same distractive atmosphere, this purposely controlled confusion, the perpetual temptation for the mind to wander, proved to be a miserable environment to work in.

  At 3.5 million square feet, Yankee Green was the second largest enclosed shopping complex in the United States, the third largest indoor amusement park in the world. In New England it was already the stuff of legends.

  The voice of the dispatcher, Dicky Brock, came through his ear piece. “Fire alarms are activated in the new wing. It felt like an explosion.”

  “Agreed. Get DeAngelo on the horn and find out what’s up. I’m headed over there. Keep me informed.” Jacobs was moving toward the escalators as he spoke. This central pavilion, Pavilion C, was immediately adjacent to the newest wing.

  At the bottom of the escalator, Jacobs turned right. As he dodged his way through a cluster of Greyhounds, several of the seniors said good morning to him. He waved, his concentration on his earpiece.

  A huge banner, blocking the eight doors to the new wing, read: GRAND OPENING—FUNWORLD—AUGUST 23RD. PUBLIC INVITED. Below in slightly smaller letters it continued, DON’T MISS YANKEE GREEN’S FIRST LOTTERY DRAWING—$200,000 C*A*S*H—2 P.M. Jacobs ducked around the banner and pushed through one of the fireproof glass doors. When locked magnetically, these doors could sustain an impact of 6,000 pounds of force—another of his security modifications. All doors were now equipped with similar mag locks, under the control of Dispatch’s central computer.