Triple Threat

They asked if this is where the banking meeting was going to be. I told them yes and they said they had to make some repairs under the stage. They were under there for a few minutes, then they left.”
    She asked the two motel workers in the corner, “Did you hear that there was a problem with the sound system?”
    “No, ma’am. Maria, Guest Services, she handle everything with the microphones and all that. She said it was fine this morning. But she off now.”
    “Where are those other workers?” Carol asked. After receiving blank stares, she explained what Hal had told her.
    “I don’t know who they’d be, ma’am. We’re the ones, Jose and me, who set up the rooms.”
    Walking toward the access door to the stage, Hal said, “I’ll take a look.”
    “You know electronics?” she asked.
    “Are you kidding? I set up my grandson’s Kinect with his X-Box. All by my little ole lonesome.”
    Carol had no idea what he was talking about but he said it with such pride she had to smile. She held open the access door as he descended beneath the stage. “Good luck.”
    Three minutes later the PA system came on with a resonant click through the speakers.
    Carol applauded.
    Hal appeared and dusted off his hands. “Those guys earlier, they knocked the cord loose when they were under there. We’ll have to keep an eye out, they don’t do it again. I think they’ll be back.”
    “Really?”
    “Maybe. They left a tool box and some big bottles down there. Cleaner, I guess.”
    “Okay. We’ll keep an eye out.” But the workmen were gone from Carol’s mind. Decorations had to be set up, food had to be arranged. She wanted the room to be as nice as possible for the two hundred CCCBA members who’d been looking forward to the party for months.
    # # #
    A stroke of luck… and good policing.
    The CHP had collared the Brothers of Liberty perps.
    Kathryn Dance, who’d dropped the disgruntled children off with her parents in Carmel, was standing in the weedy parking lot of an outlet mall only six miles from the California Bureau of Investigation’s Monterey Office, where she worked. Michael O’Neil now approached. He looked like a character from a John Steinbeck novel, maybe Doc in
Cannery Row.
Although the uniform of the MCSO was typical county sheriff’s khaki, Chief Detective O’Neil usually dressed soft—today in sport coat and tan slacks and blue dress shirt, no tie. His hair was salt-and-pepper and his brown eyes, beneath lids that dipped low, moved slowly as he explained the pursuit and collar. His physique was solid and his arms very strong—though not from working out in a gym (that was amusing to him) but from muscling salmon and other delicacies into his boat in Monterey Bay every chance he got.
    O’Neil was taciturn by design and his face registered little emotion, but with Dance he could usually be counted on to crack a wry joke or banter.
    Not now. He was all business.
    A fellow CBI agent, massive shaved-headed Albert Stemple stalked up and O’Neil explained to him and Dance how the perps had been caught.
    The fastest way out of the area was on busy Highway 1 north, to 156, then to 101, which would take the suspected terrorists directly back to their nest in Oakland. That route was where the bulk of the searchers had been concentrating—without any success.
    But an inventive young Highway Patrol officer had asked himself how would
he
leave the area, if he knew his mission was compromised. He decided the smartest approach would be to take neighborhood and single-lane roads all the way to Highway 5, several hours away. And so he concentrated on small avenues like Jacks and Oil Well and—this was the luck part—he spotted the perps near this strip mall, which was close to Highway 68, the Monterey-Salinas Highway.
    The trooper had called in backup then lit ‘em up.
    After a twenty-minute high-speed pursuit, the perps skidded into the mall, sped around back and vanished, but the trooper decided they were trying a feint. He didn’t head in the same direction they were; instead, he squealed to a stop and waited beside a Tires Plus operation.
    After five excessively tense minutes, the Brothers of Liberty had apparently decided they’d misled the pursuit and sped out the way they’d come in, only to find the trooper had anticipated them. He floored the cruiser, equipped with ram bars, and totaled the Taurus. The perps bailed.
    The trooper tackled and hogtied one. The other galloped toward a