****
Marionwoke at first light. He changed into the linen he had laid out the night before, and then made his breakfast. Bacon, two fried eggs, fried "toast," coffee, and a small can of tomato juice. After he ate he washed the dishes and pots and pans, and added the refuse to the garbage from supper.
He then began to lay out on the table everything he would need to make the devices. There were two large rolls of duct tape, approximately thirty feet of one-inch link chain, the shortwave receivers from Radio Shack, and an assortment of tools, including a large bolt cutter. Then he went out to the car and brought in the Composition C-4.
The basic device would be two quarter-pound blocks of Composition C-4, which looked not unlike sticks of butter, except of course they were gray in color, and had a hole to accommodate the detonator. He didn't have as many detonators as he would have liked to have had, so for the testing, he would use one detonator per device. The devices he would install in the lockers in 30^th Street Station would have two detonators per device. Redundancy was the term. The chances of two detonators failing to function were infinitesimal.
First he taped a dozen blocks of Composition C-4 together, two blocks to a unit. Then he wound chain around one of the double blocks, as tightly as he could, twisting the links so that they sort of doubled up on each other. Then, holding the last link carefully in his hand, he unwound the chain. He took the bolt cutter and cut the link he had held in his hand.
Then he measured off five more lengths of chain, using the first length as a template. He then wound the chain around the six double blocks of Composition C-4, and then wound that with the duct tape.
That was all that he felt he should do, in the interests of safety, in the house. The rest he would do on site.
He put the partially constructed devices into a canvas satchel, and carried that outside to where the Fordson sat under its tarpaulin. He removed the tarpaulin, and checked to see that there was sufficient fuel in the tank. Then from a small, two-wheel trailer attached to the rear of the tractor, he took a set of jumper cables.
He then started the rental car, drove it to the tractor, opened the hood, and connected the jumper cables. The tractor started almost immediately, which Marion interpreted as a good omen. He set the throttle at fast idle.
He then put the satchel with the partially constructed devices in the utility trailer, and then, in four trips into the house, took the garbage, the shortwave equipment from Radio Shack, and most of the tools from the table and loaded it into the trailer. Finally he went into the bedroom and took the detonators from the dresser. He wrapped each very carefully in two socks, one outside the other, and then put the padded detonators in a tin Saltines box.
He took two pillows from the bed, and carried them and the Saltines tin box with the detonators to the trailer, where he carefully laid the Saltines box on one pillow, covered it with the second pillow, and then put the bricks on the upper pillow to keep it in place.
Then he disconnected the jumper cables from the tractor, got on it, and drove off between the stunted pines. He drove very carefully, so there would be no great risk of somehow, despite all his precautions, setting off one of the detonators.
When he reached the garbage dump, he decided that the first order of business was making sure the shortwave transmitter and the receivers worked. He had tested them in Philadelphia, but electronic equipment didn't like to be bounced around and it was better to be sure.
He dug out the Saltines box from between the pillows, and carried it carefully two hundred yards into the pines as a safety precaution. Then he returned to the garbage dump and carefully rigged the test setup.
When he pressed the key on the transmitter, the capacitors that he had installed in the receiver where the speaker had been began to accumulate electrical energy and then discharged. The 15-watt 110-volt refrigerator bulb Marion had installed where the detonator would ultimately be glowed brightly for a moment. There would be more than enough juice to fire the detonator.
He disconnected everything, in the interest of safety, walked back into the pines, and took one detonator from the Saltine box. He went back to the garbage dump and carefully slipped the detonator into one of the double blocks of Composition C-4. He taped this, except for the leads, into place with duct tape.
Then he carried this down into the garbage dump, to one of the lockers, and propped the door open with his shoulder as he inserted the device, then hooked the receiver up to the exposed leads.
He then closed the locker door, put a quarter in the slot, removed the key, and climbed up out of the garbage dump. He got back on the tractor and drove what he estimated to be two hundred yards away, and then stopped. Carrying the transmitter with him, he walked fifty feet from the tractor and then turned on the Radio Shack transmitter.
He depressed the key. Nothing happened.
Kaboom!
Marion smiled.
TEN
Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, wearing a faded green polo shirt and somewhat frayed khaki trousers, both liberally stained with oil spots and various colors of paint was in the process of filling a stainlesssteel thermos bottle with coffee when his door buzzer went off.
He went quickly to it and pulled it open. A slight, olive-skinned twenty-four-year-old was standing there, dressed in a somewhat flashy suit and obviously fresh from the barber.
"Hello, Hay-zus," Wohl said. "Come on in."
"Good morning, sir," Martinez said.
"You pulled your car in the garage?"
"Yes, sir."
"I just made coffee. Will you have some?"
"Thank you, please."
Wohl gestured for Martinez to have a seat on the couch under the oil painting of the naked Rubenesque lady, took two mugs from a kitchen cabinet, carried them to the coffee table, fetched the thermos, and sat down beside Martinez on the couch.
"So how are things at the airport?" Wohl asked with a smile.
The question had been intended to put Martinez at ease. It had, Wohl saw, almost the opposite reaction. Martinez was almost visibly uncomfortable.
"I'm not pushing you, Hay-zus," Wohl said. "You've only been out there a couple of weeks. I don't think anybody expected you to learn very much in that short a time."
"Yes, sir," Jesus said, then blurted: "I think I figured out how I would get drugs, or for that matter anything else, out of there."
"How?"
"For little packages, anyway. Coke. Heroin. Are they still trying to smuggle diamonds, jewels, into this country?"
I really don't know, Wohl thought. That's the first time jewelry has come up.
"All the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs mentioned was drugs," Wohl said. "You think someone is smuggling diamonds, gemstones, through the airport?"
"The way it works, on international flights, is that the plane lands and comes up to the terminal. The baggage handlers come out, they open doors in the bottom of the airplane. On the big airplanes, one guy, maybe two guys, actually get in the baggage compartment. Nobody can see them from the ground. If they knew which suitcase had the stuff, they could open it, take out a small package, packages, conceal it on their person, and then send the luggage onto the conveyor belt over to the customs area."
"Hay-zus," Wohl said. "I want to show you something."
He got up and walked to his desk, unlocked a drawer and took out a vinyl-covered loose-leaf notebook. On it was stamped:
BUREAU OF NARCOTICS AND DANGEROUS DRUGS
Investigator's Manual
FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY
Martinez looked at the cover, then opened the manual and flipped through it, and then looked at Wohl for an explanation.
"They sent that over, they thought it would be helpful."
Martinez nodded.
"I took a look at it," Wohl said. "They refer to what you just described as a common means of smuggling."
"I guess it is," Martinez said. "I didn't exactly feel like Sherlock Holmes."
"Maybe not
Sherlock Holmes," Wohl said. "But maybe Dick Tracy. It didn't take you long to figure that out."
That was intended, too, to put Martinez at ease. This time, Wohl saw in Martinez's face, it worked.
"When you leave, take this with you. I don't think I have to tell you not to let anybody see it."
"Yeah," Martinez said. "Thank you."
"Okay. So tell me what you've figured out about how someone, a baggage handler, or anyone else, would get a small package out of the airport."
"Well, there's all sorts of people keeping an eye on the baggage handlers. The airline has their security people. Customs is there, and the drug guys, and, of course, our guys. When the baggage handlers come to work, they change into uniforms, coveralls, or whatever, in their locker room. They change back into their regular clothes when they leave work. They have spot checks, they actually search them. What they're looking for is stuff they might have stolen, tools, stuff like that, but if the airlines security people should find a small package, they would damned sure know what it was."
"Unless they were part of the system," Wohl said thoughtfully.
"Yeah, but they're subject to the same sort of spot checks whenthey leave, and also, I think, when they're working. I thought about that. What theycould do, once one of the baggage handlers had this stuff, is take it from them, and then move into the terminal and pass it to somebody, a passenger, for example. Once they got it into the terminal, that wouldn't be hard."
"You think that's the way it's being done?"
Martinez did not reply directly.
"Another way it could be done, which would not involve the airlines security people, I mean, them being in on it, would be to put the package in another piece of luggage, one being either unloaded off, or being put on, a domestic flight. They don't search domestic luggage."
"But they do have drug-sniffing dogs working domestic luggage."
"Not every place," Martinez argued. "Like for example, AllentownBethlehem-Easton. Or Harrisburg."
"Yeah," Wohl agreed.
"The risk the baggage handlers would run would be getting caught with this stuff before they could get rid of it. Which means they would have to know when the plane with the drugs was arriving, and when the plane for, say, Allentown was leaving. And then they would have to arrange it so they worked that plane too."
"How do you think it's being done? Or do you think it's being done?"
"It's being done, all right," Martinez said. "And I think we have a dirty cop involved in it."
"How?" Wohl asked.
"Nobody searches the cops. And nobody, except maybe the sergeant, or one of the lieutenants, asks a cop what he's doing. He's got keys to get onto the ramp, and keys to open the doors leading off the ramp onto the conveyors and into the terminal. I went onto the ramp and watched them unload arriving international airplanes, and nobody said beans to me. I could have been handed, say, three, four, even five kilo bags of coke or heroin, and just walked away with it."
"Five kilos is ten, eleven pounds," Wohl said thoughtfully.
"Worth twenty, twenty-five thousand a K," Martinez said.
"How would you have gotten it out of the airport?"
"Passed it to somebody in the terminal. Put it in a locker, and passed the key to somebody. Or just put it in my car."
"Let me throw this at you," Wohl said. "Add this to the equation. I had a long talk with a BNDD agent. I got him to tell me something his boss didn't happen to mention. There have been two incidents of unclaimed luggage. Both about five weeks ago. Each piece had four Ks of heroin. That's why they're so sure it's coming into Philadelphia."
"The luggage is marked in some way, a name tag, probably with a phony name. If the baggage handler gets to take the stuff out of the bag, he also removes the tag. When the mule gets to the carousel, and sees his baggage, and the tag is still on it, he just doesn't pick it up."
He didn't think about that before replying, Wohl thought. He'd already figured that out as a possibility. He's as smart as a whip.
"That means giving up four Ks, a hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs."
"The cost of doing business," Martinez replied.
"I don't suppose you have any idea which cop is dirty?" Wohl asked.
"No," Martinez said.
That was too quick, Wohl thought.
"I'm not asking for an accusation," Wohl said. "Just a suspicion, a gut feeling. And nothing leaves this room."
"Nothing yet," Martinez said.
That was not the truth. The moment Jesus Martinez had laid eyes on Corporal Vito Lanza, he had had the feeling that something was not right about him. But you don't accuse a brother officer, or even admit you have suspicions about him, unless you have more to go on than the fact that he gambles big money in Las Vegas, and dresses and behaves like a Guinea gangster.
Wohl suspected that Martinez was concealing something from him, but realized he could not press him any more than he had.
One of the telephones in his bedroom rang. Wohl could tell by the sound of the ring that it was his personal, rather than his official, telephone.
That makes it fairly certain, he thought as he turned toward the bedroom, that I am not to be informed that one of my stalwart Highway Patrolmen has just run though a red light into a station wagon full of nuns.
He had used that for instance as the criteria for telephoning him at his home on weekends. Any catastrophe of less monumental proportions, he had ordered, should be referred to either Captain Michael Sabara, his deputy, or to Captain David Pekach, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, for appropriate action.
"Excuse me," Wohl said, and went into his bedroom.
The fact that this is on my personal line, he thought as he sat down on his bed and reached for the telephone, does not mean that I am not about to hear something I do not wish to hear, such as Mother reminding me that I have not been to Sunday dinner in a month, so how about tomorrow?
"Hello?"
"From that tone of voice," his caller said, "what I think I should do is just hang up, but I hate it when people do that to me."
"Hello, Matt," Wohl said, smiling. "What's up?"
"I was wondering how welcome I would be if I drove over there."
Not at all welcome, with Martinez here. And from the tone of your voice, Detective Payne, I think the smartest thing I could do is tell you, "Sorry, I was just walking out the door. "
"You would be very welcome. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of calling you. I am about to polish the Jaguar and I hate to do that alone. A weak mind and a strong back is just what I need."
"I'll be there in half an hour. Thank you," Detective Payne said, and hung up.
It is possible, Wohl thought, that Matt is coming over here simply as a friend. The reason he sounds so insecure is that he's not sure of the tribal rites. Can a lowly detective and an exalted staff inspector be friends? The answer is sure, but he doesn't know that. And the truth of the matter is, I was glad to hear his voice and I miss him around the office.
But clever detective that I am, I don't think that a social visit is all he has in mind. His tone of voice and the "thank you" is not consistent with that.
Is he in trouble? Nothing serious, or I would have heard about it. And if he was in a jam, wouldn't he go first to Denny Coughlin?
There is a distinct possibility, now that I think about it, that Detective Payne has, now that he's been leading the exciting, romantic life of a real-life detective in the famous East Detective Division for two months, decided that law enforcement is not how he really wants to spend the rest of his life. Unless things have changed a hell of a lot, he has spent his time on recovered stolen vehicles, with maybe a few good burglary of autos thrown in for good measure.
If he did decide to quit, he would feel some sort of an obligation to tell me. That would be consistent with his polite asking if he could come over, and then saying "thank you."
So what will I do? Tell him to hang in there, things will get better? Or
jump on the wise elders bandwagon with his father and Denny Coughlin, and tell him to go to law school?
The telephone rang again.
"A Highway car ran the light at Broad and Olney, broadsided a station wagon full of nuns, and knocked it into a bus carrying the Philadelphia Rabbinical Council," his caller announced without any opening salutation.
Wohl chuckled. "Good morning, Captain Pekach," he said. "You better be kidding."
"Am I interrupting anything, boss?"
"No. What's up, Dave?"
"It's a beautiful day. Martha's got some shrimp and steaks and we' re going to barbecue lunch. Mike and his wife are coming, and I thought maybe you'd be free?"
Is he inviting me because he likes me, or because I am the boss? Why the hell are you so cynical? Dave is a good guy, and you like Martha. And they are friends. He is not sucking up to the boss.
Your cynicism just might have something to do with last night. When are you going to learn, Peter Wohl, that blond hair and splendid boobs do not a nice lady make?
"I've got somebody coming over, Dave."
"Bring her, the more the merrier."
"It's a him. Specifically, Matt Payne."
"I thought maybe he'd be in touch…"
What the hell does that mean?
"…so bring him too. Martha likes him, and we've got plenty."
"I don't know what his plans are, but I'll be there. Thank you, Dave. When?"
"Noon. Anytime around there."
"Can I bring anything?"
"Nothing but an appetite."
Wohl walked back to his living room, where Martinez was reading the BNDD Investigator's Manual.
"That was Matt Payne," Wohl said. "The first call."
"How's he doing?"
"I understand he's become the East Detectives' specialist on recovered stolen cars," Wohl said, and then added: "He's coming over here."
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