by Thomas Perry
Stahl hung up and sat in the car watching the house from a distance. The night seemed to have reached its darkest hour already, but that meant he was running out of time. He would have to accomplish some things before daylight changed everything.
He had to know what was waiting in that house for Almanzo and the local police. He needed to know if a dozen men with automatic weapons and unlimited ammunition were waiting to ambush them, or if they were rushing to change cars and leave for an airport. He couldn’t let them do either. Stahl wished there were some way to find out other than walking up and looking. There wasn’t.
Stahl looked at the brush and the ground beside the highway. It was dark enough to risk leaving the car and walking. There were yucca plants and tumbleweed, lots of thick, dry spiky plants high enough to disguise the shape of a car, at least until dawn. He released the brake on Diane’s car, shifted it into neutral, and let it coast into the brush.
Motion was what the eyes noticed most easily. He walked directly toward the house instead of along the road, and tried to stay among the Joshua trees, which looked a bit like human shapes. He tried to make the best use of the landscape and the darkness.
Soon he was at the edge of the open land around the house. The grounds had been cleared of random desert weeds and brush, so the land looked like white sand under the night sky. Someone had planted dark-colored drought-resistant shrubs in tight rows that circled the house. This was an arrangement that Stahl had never seen anywhere. From the air, the house must look like a huge target. Was that a psychopath’s private joke? No, he thought. This man’s jokes were cruel.
He couldn’t move his attention past the arrangement of shrubs. The rows were about ten yards apart, going from almost the edge of the highway all the way to a spot about fifteen yards from the house.
Stahl walked close to the outer row and knelt just outside the giant circle. He began to brush away the coarse sand from between two shrubs to see anything hidden there. The sun had been down for at least eight hours, but the sand was still warm to his touch. He dug a little bit deeper, where the sand felt cooler and less dusty. He felt a length of insulated wire. He kept digging, unearthing more and more of the wire.
The wire was thick, about a quarter inch, jacketed with a rubbery plastic like coaxial cable. The wire ran along the same course as the shrubs, but just outside them. After a few feet he found a pair of thinner insulated wires that had been spliced to the cable.
He followed them a couple of feet, where they entered a plastic box. He dug around the box with great care, because even working by feel, he thought he knew what must be inside. The boxes were there to keep the rainwater, the burrowing animals, the shifting sand away from the electrical wiring and the explosives. He was kneeling at the edge of a minefield.
He kept digging until he could lift the plastic box out of its hole, set it down on the warm surface sand, and open it by stripping away a layer of duct tape that ran along the side seam. He disconnected the thick wire that carried the electrical power that probably fed off the house’s 110-volt circuit, and then explored with his fingers what was left in the box. It was a blasting cap stuck into a few pounds of Semtex with one of its two wires connected to the power wire and the other back out. The way the charge was wired, a switch in the house could set off a mine, or maybe blow a whole row at one time.
He dug at the next place where he found thin wires spliced to the main cable, which was about ten feet away, then disconnected them and unearthed another box. He took up a third, and realized it was not going to be possible to disconnect them all before dawn. Out of caution he examined the next row of shrubs, and realized this row had very thin wire strung about two inches above the ground between very small eye screws in the trunk of each shrub, so a man walking through would trip the wire and be blown up.
If he hadn’t been here looking for booby traps, he probably wouldn’t have suspected that the wires were a trigger. They looked like the sort of guide a gardener might string to show him where to plant his shrubs.
He studied the second row. There would be a number of buried bombs here. He guessed there would be bounding mines, like the ones that had been used to kill Ed Carmody. A whole assault squad of cops could be killed that way without an explosion big enough to do much harm to the house. Stahl decided that if he lived, he would blow them up in place.
The lights in the house were on, but the shades and curtains were drawn. He was positive now that this was the place he guessed months ago must exist somewhere. He had favored the theory that the bomber was a loner rather than a terrorist, someone acting out of personal malevolence. The men Stahl had followed here had proved the loner theory wrong.
He stacked the three boxes of explosives, picked them up, and carried them along the trail of footprints he had made coming from Diane’s car. When he got there he set them down carefully, opened the hood of the car, and began to work. He was pleased to see that the tape the bomber had used to seal the plastic boxes was still very sticky and functional. He also noted that this bomber always used more tape and wire than he needed, possibly to avoid the chance of having a circuit’s wires get jostled taut and disconnect. It wasn’t just the device’s high explosive and blasting caps that could be reused.
48
The bomb maker was lying on the garage floor, his wrists and ankles bound with heavy-gauge wire and duct tape from his own workshop.
The terrorists had completed their inventory of his munitions, his supplies, and his devices. They were carrying the devices, one by one, from the garage into the three black vehicles and his van and his sedan.
As they worked, he tried to talk to them. “You don’t have to do this. There’s no reason to panic and think we have to launch the attack right away. If they had found you or traced you here, they would never have let you get this far. What you’re trying to do is very dangerous for you. I can do it safely.”
One of the men, who was with some trepidation carrying a device that weighed about eighty pounds, said, “Shut up.”
The bald man came out of the kitchen eating a sandwich he had made from food in the bomb maker’s refrigerator.
The bomb maker felt a hot wave of irritation wash over him, but reminded himself he didn’t need any of that food. He had always planned to get out of Southern California the minute the first charges began to explode all over the city.
The bald man stared at him, chewing thoughtfully.
The bomb maker knew he had to be strong and prove he was still valuable, not a sad, craven victim, if he wanted to live through this. He said, “I’ve forgiven you for losing control of your emotions before. That was understandable. If you’ll give me the money I was promised, I’ll still set all the big devices and place them. They’ll be set at the most strategic spots and they’ll demolish their targets. They’ll be incredible. I guarantee a thousand or more dead.”
“Forget the money,” the bald man said. “Do you see ten million dollars on me? It’s not here, and I have no way to get it. The money is over. Everything goes today.”
“You won’t be able to do it.”
The bald man smiled. “Why do you think we would hire you to kill off the Bomb Squad and not, say, the SWAT team, or the chief, or something? We’re all trained in demolition. We can set a bomb ourselves.”
“That’s even better. Pay me whatever you can, and let me go, and I’ll tell you how each device works.”
“I’ll take the chance of setting the big charges off by putting little ones beside them. That’s simple enough even for men who aren’t geniuses like you.”
“But you don’t have to do this yourself. I’ll do it better because I’ve spent years studying it, and I designed all of them,” said the bomb maker. “Every one of them is designed to fool the Bomb Squad. You could have men killed with our own devices.”
The bald man finished his last bite of sandwich, chewed it, and swallowed. “I once saw a man kill a dog in a desert. He didn’t need to shoot it or poison it. He t
ook duct tape just like the kind wrapped around your arms. Then he taped the dog’s mouth shut so he couldn’t cool his body temperature. It’s hot outside here too.”
The bomb maker fell silent.
Stahl had finished his work, and now he returned to watching the house from a distance. There was something different going on. Two more vehicles that had been parked somewhere in the dark area far behind the house had been moved up, and now there were men walking out a back door carrying things to the five vehicles, loading them into the cargo spaces, and then going back inside for more. He moved around to the far side of Diane’s car, sat down, and called Bart Almanzo.
“Captain Almanzo’s line.” It was Diane’s voice.
Stahl stiffened. “Hey! What are you doing on this phone?”
“The captain’s busy driving and my hands are free. Didn’t you know I was in the car with him? I was the one who installed the program on his phone so we could follow you. Are you still okay?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was better when I thought you were home surrounded by cops. Where are you?”
“We’re just about to Victorville. We’ve got the local police briefed for this, but it’s taking them time to call in their SWAT teams and get everybody moving. The teams are a way behind us.”
Stahl blew out his breath without forming words.
“What’s wrong?”
“The men I followed seem to be moving stuff into their vehicles. There are five now, including a van and a four-door car.”
Diane said, “We’ll get to you pretty soon. No more than twenty minutes.”
“Not soon enough,” Stahl said. “These men are all up, all heavily armed, and by now they’re rested, fed, and ready. If the police show up now, it’s not going to be a raid. It’ll be a battle. And this guy has the land around his house mined. Judging from the wiring, I think he can set at least some of the mines off with switches in the house. Others are booby-trapped.”
“Oh, great,” said Diane. “You were digging up mines in the dark? Just sit tight, and we’ll be there.”
“Don’t come roaring in here. As soon as you see the lights in the distance, turn yours off and pull over. Call the locals to let them know what’s waiting for them.”
He hung up. The stream of men going back and forth between the house and the vehicles had dwindled. Now there seemed to be a couple of men standing by the open doors of the vehicles, talking and fiddling with their equipment. He saw one man insert a fresh magazine into a rifle. He had to act before they left.
He checked under the hood of Diane’s car. He had about thirty pounds of Semtex in a bundle attached to the wall of the car’s engine compartment. He had inserted the three blasting caps in the Semtex, and then attached one lead wire of each blasting cap to a circular saw blade he’d found in Diane’s toolbox and taped to the inner side of the grille and the other to a second circular saw blade he’d taped on the front of the radiator. He’d insulated the blades from the metal car parts with more duct tape, and connected the wires to the car’s battery. If the front end of Diane’s car accordioned to take the force of a collision, the two bare metal surfaces would clap together to complete the circuit.
Stahl judged that the men in the house had reached the stage when they were ready, but were looking around the inside of the house to be sure they’d done everything to prepare and left nothing behind. The men beside the cars had begun to pace or walk back to the house to check on their comrades’ progress. The approach of daylight must be bothering them as much as it did Stahl.
For the first time in his life, Stahl hoped the police would be late. When the cops came east up the highway, now they would be blinded by the sun and completely visible to the men at the house. The SWAT team would be here, but not ready to do what SWAT teams were supposed to do—apply military-level force to a civilian-level threat. They would be crowded into trucks, too late to be shielded by darkness, and too early to let the terrorists depart without a fight, but not prepared to win it. Many would die in the first minutes. And somewhere among the vehicles would be an unmarked police car carrying Captain Bart Almanzo and Sergeant Diane Hines.
Stahl climbed into Diane’s car and practiced what he would have to do when the time came—tightening the knot in the cable that would keep the steering wheel immobile, and then jamming the jack and tire iron between the gas pedal and the front seat. He took a few breaths. He had to do this now, before it was too late.
He started the engine. He drove the car up onto the highway with the headlights still off and the engine running low to keep the noise down, and turned toward the house. He was aware of the moment when the men at the back of the house detected the approach of Diane’s car. He saw one of them reach into the back of an SUV and bring out a rifle. The man opened his mouth to yell, but his voice was inaudible from this distance.
A second man put his hand on the man’s arm and said something to the others. Stahl knew he must be saying, “It’s only one car. It can’t be the police.”
As Stahl turned into the driveway and put the car in neutral, he got the impression that men were running toward the front of the house to stop him. He aimed the wheels of the car up the center of the driveway toward the garage, held it on course with one hand, and cinched the cable tight with the other. He used his right foot to jam the jack against the gas pedal and the other end against his seat, and step out. The last things he did were to pull the shifter to Drive, lock and slam the door as the car moved ahead, and then go low behind it to dash toward the dark desert where he’d come from.
He reached the brush at the right side of the property and kept running hard, staying where the bushes and plants screened him from the house. He sprinted as fast as he could to put some distance between him and the house. He heard rifles firing, as though bullets could stop the accelerating vehicle. When he reached a bowl-shaped depression in the land, he dived to the ground on his belly and clapped his hands over his ears.
Diane’s car was moving fast when it reached the garage door. It hit the sectioned aluminum door, and the two metal objects seemed to merge. The car’s front end crumpled as it bent the door backward, tore it out of the track, and pushed halfway into the bay as the two saw blades in the engine compartment clapped together like cymbals. The circuit was complete.
What happened next was too fast to be anything but a single event. There was simply an instant when the garage, the house it was attached to, and the cars behind it became motion. There was a bursting, expanding black wall of smoke with a fiery release of chemical power at its core. From the first instant there were boards, shingles, irregular pieces of wood and brick and concrete and glass that flew out in every direction at ballistic speed.
The blast was so powerful and hard that the ground kicked up against Stahl’s chest, arms, legs, and face. Dust and dirt were hurled hundreds of feet into the air and held there.
He kept his face down with his hands covering his head, hearing large objects fall to the ground all around him for at least ten seconds. When they landed on the pavement of the highway they made hard, ringing noises. The ones that came down near Stahl thudded and dug into the dirt.
During these seconds, a few large objects came down in the minefield around the house and set off secondary explosions that set off other mines in chain reactions.
When the mines had exploded there came a moment when the sounds all stopped. Stahl sat up and looked around him for a few breaths. The house was gone. The road was covered with things that didn’t belong. There was a heater/air-conditioner, a complex steel object like a drill press, a water heater, all charred and smoking. But most objects were only parts of things that had once been in or near the buildings. The remains of cars were barely recognizable dozens of yards away, just assemblies that were charred, bent, and torn apart by the explosives that had been loaded into them.
Stahl stood and began to walk. He saw nothing that looked to him like part of a human body. Either the body parts had been thrown too far, o
r the force and temperature at the center of the explosion had cremated the men and scattered their ashes.
He realized that dawn had begun as he surveyed the leveled spot where the house once stood. He could see shapes, but no color yet. He supposed this spot wouldn’t have had much color even when the sun was high. Nothing was living within a broad circle around him. It would be gray dust and ash until the wind blew it all off the surfaces that remained. The bushes and desert trees and brush were scorched and wrenched out and blown outward. Eventually a person driving by would probably guess something had been here only from the long, straight driveway that led a few hundred feet from the highway and stopped. And even now it would be clean. High explosives had a sterilizing effect.
49
Tucson, Arizona
January
Ace Feiker got out of his car a distance from the back wall of the property, and that put him half a city block from the house. It was just an estimate, because up here on the hills above Tucson there were no blocks. He walked along the empty road. The soundless steps of his black sneakers were long and fast because of the mood he was in. He felt like an ace. His mother had named him Asa, a name from the Bible, but it got shortened along the way, and Ace suited him better anyway.
The nights of killings always made him feel especially energetic. There was a feeling at the start like stage fright, with his heart beating and his lungs craving more air. But then, when the job began, he felt smart and slick and on his way to another win.
He had to be conscious of the passage of time. This was the rich part of Tucson, in the hills north of the city, not far from the big hotels with three golf courses and seven swimming pools, and parking a normal little car—not even new—on the road at night might make someone curious. The servants at big houses and the hotel workers usually parked somewhere on the property.
Ace reached the back wall of the yard, hoisted himself up to the top of the stucco wall, and rolled over it into the hedge, which took his weight like the arms of a mother and bent to release him gently onto the lawn.