“One guy is doing all this?” Arturo snorted. “C’mon.”
“You don’t believe me?” I said. “Then what about the Unabomber?”
“Who?”
“Ted Kaczynski. For twenty years, this guy went on a nationwide bombing campaign from a cabin in Montana that didn’t have electricity or running water. What he had instead was an extremely keen intelligence that he used to make incredibly intricate letter bombs. And that was in the seventies and eighties. Imagine what he could do today if he was free.
“What I think we have here is a Kaczynski-level intelligence running amok.”
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Emily said, suddenly frantically thumbing her phone.
“What?” I said.
“Ted Kaczynski. Two days ago, I got an e-mail from the Washington office,” she said, tapping her cell screen. “Here it is. The Bureau of Prisons sent a request from Kaczynski to the FBI. He said he saw the news of the bombing and put in a request through his lawyer to help us.
“Which I and everybody at the Bureau dismissed as crazy. Until now. I think you’re right, Mike. About the intelligence involved here. It’s very similar to Kaczynski’s. Maybe we should interview him.”
“Interview the Unabomber?”
“Yes,” Emily said. “Why not? He’s completely brilliant and crazy. Just like the person we’re trying to catch. Maybe he can give us some insight.”
“How is the Unabomber still alive?” said Brooklyn. “Didn’t the feds execute him?”
“You’re thinking of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber,” said Doyle.
“Doyle’s right. Kaczynski is alive,” Emily said. “He’s in his seventies now and housed at the fed supermax in Florence, Colorado. So what do you say, Mike? My bosses couldn’t be more ready to do something. This is the worst loss of life in the Bureau’s history. Let’s go talk to him.”
“When?” I said.
“Ain’t no time like the present,” she said. “There’s a Bureau plane at Teterboro that flew in the director for all the funerals. I’ll get us on it. What do you say?”
I rolled the strangely heavy little bot across the blotter of my cluttered desk and peered at it.
“I say let’s go to Colorado.”
Chapter 65
It was evening when the FBI Gulfstream V bounced down hard onto the tarmac of the Fremont County Airport in Colorado.
Two young male agents were standing beside a black Ford Explorer outside the aircraft’s dropped door. They speedily helped move us and our files and bags into the backseat before spinning the roof lights as they floored it out of the rural airport and onto the service road.
As we got onto a highway, outside my window in the distance, I could see the blood-orange glow of the sun that must have just settled behind the dark, serrated peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
“Well, what do you know?” I said to Emily through a yawn as we looked over the piles of Unabomber case files. “Those mountains actually do look like the ones on the beer cans, huh? Speaking of which, where is the Coors brewery? Close by? Do they give tours? With tastings?”
“Unfortunately, that’ll have to be the next trip, Mike. The warden is waiting on us,” Emily said as she opened a laptop. “But believe me, when this is over, the first six-pack of Silver Bullets will be on me.”
Known sometimes as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, ADX Florence is a 490-bed concrete-and-steel hotel that the feds reserve for its system’s most notorious and most extremely violent prisoners. In addition to Kaczynski, it houses convicted foreign and domestic terrorists, spies like the ex–FBI agent scum Robert Hanssen, and leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Gangster Disciples.
“So, Mike, what do you think? You’ve read the files. You ready to talk to Ted?” said Emily as our SUV went up the long driveway and was buzzed in at the gate, flanked by towers manned with armed guards.
“I don’t know,” I said as we rolled in past the twelve-foot-high fencing, topped with razor wire. “The guy isn’t your regular perp, is he? I never interviewed a killer who went to Harvard at sixteen or was a Berkeley math professor at twenty-five. Why do you think he wants to talk to us now? He’s never offered his help before.”
Emily shrugged.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
The assistant warden was a tough, matronly Native American woman named Marjorie Greene. She met us at the administration building’s sally port and helped us get through processing, where we handed over our service weapons.