Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(28)
“Long as the drone’s high enough,” the agent said. “We’re just having us a look-see.”
He gave the remote an order. The little helicopter blades started spinning, and soon the drone lifted off.
I said, “If Dwight Rivers sees it, he’ll probably get his shotgun and blow it out of the sky.”
“I hope he does,” Mahoney said. “Then we’d have probable cause to enter.”
“A person can’t just shoot a gizmo that’s spying on him?” Sampson said.
“Not if it’s high enough,” Mahoney said.
“Which means you wouldn’t want to take it to court,” I said.
“No comment,” Mahoney said, watching the drone soar over the treetops, heading southwest.
My cell phone buzzed with a Wickr text from Ali. I read it in a glance.
Going riding with Captain W and the Wild Wheels!
I grinned and texted back, Have fun! Text me when you’re home!
A thumbs-up emoji appeared and vanished. I put my phone back in my pocket. We crowded around Ned’s laptop on the hood and saw what the drone was seeing: the woods, several logging roads, then a fast-running creek and a meadow with at least fifty big solar panels in it.
Mahoney had the drone climb to four hundred feet as it flew over the solar array and then over a lone pine tree in the meadow that looked scorched; maybe it had been hit by lightning, because its crown was gone. A nest big enough for an eagle had been built in the remaining branches at the top, but it looked abandoned.
Then Ned altered the camera angle, and we saw what looked for all the world like a giant, squat anthill rising out of the meadow several hundred feet beyond that pine.
Nearly sixty feet tall and covered in green vegetation, the anthill had to have been two hundred feet wide. At the top, it was less than fifty feet across and it had waist-high defensive walls around the perimeter and concertina wire above.
“Heck of a high ground,” I said.
“Rivers evidently planned it that way,” Mahoney said as the drone took us high above the anthill.
We could see over the defensive walls now. Three satellite dishes were bolted to the roof of a tan and green railroad container car that jutted out of the top of the anthill, like a ready-made bunker atop a bunker.
“How many containers inside the hill and belowground?” Sampson asked.
“Our sources say at least thirty more, all connected and laid out according to some plan only Rivers seems to grasp,” Mahoney said. The drone moved past the anthill and various pieces of heavy excavation machinery sitting idle by a serpentine dirt road and continued on to a beautiful house on a knoll above a pond.
The home was all stonework, wood beams, and glass; it had a broad flagstone terrace and a carriage house with a three-car garage. It was the kind of trophy property that might grace the cover of a pricey real estate brochure.
“This guy Rivers is smart, huh?” Sampson said.
“Wharton MBA,” Mahoney said. “Self-made man. Mucho dinero.”
“Right, so then what is it? I mean, what makes a guy like that, a guy who has it made, all of a sudden crack and go full-on survivalist?”
“They call themselves preppers, John,” I said. “Doomsday preppers.”
CHAPTER 35
I’D HEARD OF DOOMSDAY PREPPERS going to extremes so they’d be ready to meet the coming apocalypse. People spent minor fortunes on food, fuel, and crop seeds to be used to eke out a life after Communists or zombies or whatever future plague they expected had laid waste to society.
But according to the dossier Mahoney had shared with us, few of them had spent as much on their preparations as Dwight Rivers had. He’d apparently made big money in the sale of TRUAX, a global security firm that had been founded by a group of seasoned ex-military men and women. He’d been the company’s business brain.
Based on FBI interviews with local machine operators and builders, on UPS and FedEx delivery records, and on multiple eyewitness accounts, Rivers had gone on a mind-boggling spending spree from the moment he bought the estate. During the first two years, he’d overseen the excavation and placement of the subterranean container cars and the construction of the upper anthill. The third year, a steady parade of contractors, electricians, and plumbers had finished the interior.
That’s when the supplies started rolling in, enough for Rivers and a small army to survive for a long time after the apocalypse. He had three thousand-gallon gasoline tanks buried in the field near the anthill, and the solar panels fed big battery banks somewhere inside it.
All of this had gone on below the FBI’s radar initially. Then Rivers began buying assault rifles, scores of them. He filled an underground armory with the weapons and enough ammunition to defend himself for a long, long time. But even that did not catch the federal government’s attention.
That happened when Rivers’s name came up in the course of a joint FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms investigation into a ring of former soldiers and mercenaries selling contraband weapons, including grenades, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, and claymore mines.
When BATF and FBI agents interviewed Rivers, he denied knowing anything about those kinds of weapons. When they’d asked to inspect the anthill, however, he’d refused, citing his constitutional rights.
Without cause, the Feds could do nothing but wait for Rivers to make a mistake. And Sampson, Mahoney, and I couldn’t do much but survey the area with a drone.