It had stopped when he'd thrown the door open.
Three times the phenomenon had repeated itself. Koldstad figured there was some mechanism involved. Close the door, the drumming starts. Open it, it stops. He had gone over every inch of the door and its jamb and found nothing even after he'd removed the door from its hinges. There had been no sign of wiring or strange devices. Not even a microchip. He knew you could buy greeting cards that played little musical notes when you opened the cards, activating a pressure-sensitive microchip.
But there was no microchip to be found, and the sound was too loud for a tiny chip or even a big chip.
Then there were the damn vultures that kept circling Folcroft.
They had been doing that since Koldstad first rolled through the Folcroft gates at dawn. It was approaching dusk now, and they were still at it. No one could explain what they were or how they came to be there.
They never broke off for food or rest or even to take a dump. It was infuriating. It defied all logic, all rules.
Jack Koldstad was a stickler for rules. So he had one of his men fetch up a scope-mounted Ruger rifle and personally went out on the grass to bring those damn birds down.
He went through an even dozen clips. Sure, he missed a time or three. But they were flying lazy circles. Impossible to miss time after time. Yet not a pinfeather came fluttering to earth.
Most unnerving was the fact that they looked exactly the same through the scope as they did to the naked eye. Dark. Indistinct. Unidentifiable.
Koldstad jerked out the twelfth and last clip from the rifle and threw it away in disgust.
"You!"
A G-12 flinched under the lash of his call. "Sir?"
"You have bird duty."
"Sir?"
"Watch those birds. They have to tire sometime. When they do, follow them. Follow them and kill them if you can."
"But why?"
"Those damn birds are flouting the authority of the almighty Internal Revenue Service. That's why!"
"Yes, sir."
Koldstad stormed into Folcroft. This was ridiculous. They'd been on-site for most of the day already and they hadn't completed the search yet. It was all the fault of the damn DEA. They were fighting the IRS every step of the way. The unshaven bastards. Where did they get off trying to usurp IRS authority?
He took the elevator to the second-floor office that bore the legend Dr. Harold W. Smith, Director on the door. When he opened the door, a blast of chilly mid-September air struck him. Hunching his shoulders, Koldstad went in and took the cracked leather executive's chair behind the desk, whose top was a slab of tempered black tinted glass.
The cold air coming through the break in the picture window made the close-shaven skin on the back of his neck creep and bunch, but Jack Koldstad ignored it.
It was time to report in to the local office, and Jack Koldstad wasn't looking forward to it. Still, he dialed the number without hesitation, even if his dialing finger did quiver a little.
"Mr. Brull's office," a clipped female voice announced.
Koldstad cleared his throat. "Jack Koldstad calling for Mr. Brull. "
"One moment."
The voice that came on the line a moment later sounded like two stones grinding together.
"What's your report, Koldstad?"
"We're still in the inventory stage," Koldstad said.
"What the hell?"
"This is a big place, sir. And with the DEA to contend with-"
"Who's the DEA honcho on the ground there?"
"Tardo. First name Wayne. Middle initial P. "
"Social Security number?"
"I haven't developed that information yet, sir."
"Doesn't matter. How many Wayne P. Tardo's can be working out of the New York DEA? Did you ask him the question?"
"I did."
"His reply?"
"He informed me that no, he had never been called in for a tax audit, Mr. Brull."
"The bastard sweat when he answered you?"
"No. But his upper lip twitched noticeably, and since then he's been on the quiet side."
"Then you have no excuses. Get Folcroft buttoned up and locked down. I want answers. What has been going on down there, how long has it been going on, and how much money is the service owed?"
"Understood, Mr. Brull. What about the DEA?"
"Those bastards would seize a rendering plant if they knew it would come up for a government auction three months later. They're seizure happy, and that makes their people all ripe for a field audit. You won't be bothered by the DEA once I make some calls."
"Very good, Mr. Brull."
"And your estimates had better be damn high or I'll bust you down to extractor by the end of this fiscal quarter. Between that dead G-12 trainee and the wounded, this operation is going to send the service's risk insurance premiums into orbit. Make damn certain that Folcroft revenue more than covers the losses. Revenue neutral won't cut it."
"Guaranteed, Mr. Brull. "
The line went dead. Jack Koldstad replaced the receiver with sweaty palms. There was only one man on earth who could set his pores leaking, and that was Dick Brull. God help Jack Koldstad if he didn't squeeze every drop of money out of Folcroft Sanitarium. And God help anyone who got in his way of fulfilling his quota on this one.
The trouble was, so far Folcroft showed no signs of illegal activity outside of that twelve-million-dollar bombshell in the bank account.
As he got up to set the downsizing of Folcroft Sanitarium in motion, his heel struck a piece of the broken picture window lying on the floor. The shard cracked underfoot.