Keep it simple. Keep it symbolic.
And most importantly, keep herself as far from the fray as possible.
Nobody outside of ISOC would know of her involvement. She would refuse to speak to the press out of respect for the family and their tragedy. Reporters would snap blurry photos of her shuttling the Senator (if she survived) into and out of SUVs, along with the Secret Service detail that would glue themselves to her. During the investigation she would share what she knew about Sinclair’s state of mind, his troubled friendship with Danielle Britton, who will have been eliminated by Tom Booker who would eventually meet his demise in a hail of gunfire.
It would be widely understood as a security shit-show. The security forces taking the blame would argue the unprecedented nature of the attack. They would argue for the necessity of better screening techniques and technology.
Checks would be written. Large checks.
Probably even larger than the check that had already been written for her. Many, many millions of dollars tax-free and safely ensconced in a numbered account in Zurich. The pressure of the investigation will be too much for her to bear. Cara will make a show of how responsible she feels for not detecting the impossible-to-detect device until, overcome and exhausted, Cara will quietly announce her retirement and move to a small cabin in Upstate New York.
And pack her bags for Bali. Or Fiji. Or Hong Kong. Or wherever the hell she felt like moving after all of this nonsense was behind her. She sure wasn’t staying in the United States, though. Not knowing the sensibilities of the men and women grabbing unprecedented power.
She wasn’t crazy.
And the plan wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of moving pieces peripheral to the main event. She had to remain flexible in the event something went sideways.
Most importantly, she had to ensure the main event came off as planned.
The truth was that the technology for surgically implanted explosives was underdeveloped. There hadn’t been a great deal of time to test the device and limitations had to be accepted. It wasn’t like they would get a second chance to lay open the chest of a scion of the Charbaneauxs. Precautions restricted latitude in the possibilities.
They couldn’t risk the kid blowing sky high after an overly vigorous sexual encounter. They couldn’t take the chance of a misdialed cell phone activating the trigger. The specially engineered plastique ribs had to be physiologically stable enough to not sicken the boy before he had served his purpose.
Cara was willing to work with what they gave her. She understood the parameters of the device and was prepared to do whatever was necessary to activate the trigger according to the timeline. She had also calculated how far away she needed to be to be completely outside of the blast range and ensuing shrapnel.
It went without saying that if Cara would not eat meat on the bone, she certainly did not want to wear it.
Cara chuckled to herself as she strolled through the polite chaos of the grand sitting room where well-bred adults and children obeyed stressed and underpaid assistants who ordered them around. Light screens rose and fell. Bolts of fabric were draped and pulled and draped again, making the already beautifully appointed house obscenely opulent. Dozens of poinsettias were sacrificed in the name of holiday color.
Cara stepped out of the way of two women carrying armloads of fresh cut pine boughs. Nonze sighed and cursed, smoking cigarette after cigarette while complaining about the smoke from the fireplace. Her every suggestion was met with quick obedience. Her every scowl evoked sweat from her assistants.
Cara could only imagine how much more unbearable the woman would become after snapping the soon-to-be famous family portrait.
Maybe they would all get lucky and Nonze would be taken out by a piece of bone shrapnel. One could only hope.
A full bar had been set up to the left of where the family would be seated. There was no bartender, Jack insisting, at Nonze’s suggestion, that no staff be on hand for the photograph. The artist complained that “uniforms smutted family soul energy.” What the hell did that even mean? It didn’t matter. Cara could certainly make her own cocktail. Vodka and cranberry in a cut crystal glass.
As she plucked the ice from the ice bucket, Cara searched for the perfect hiding spot. The bar wouldn’t do. The way this family drank, there was no guarantee of keeping the trigger in place. Cara pulled the small device in its red pebbled leather case from her purse. It looked like a small phone charger, about the size of a mascara package. The small size made it easy for Cara to keep with her at all times since leaving the Dunbarton facility where the explosive had been implanted. She would never have risked letting it leave her possession.
But its size worked as a disadvantage in its placement. It had to be set carefully. One of the limitations they had come across in designing the device was ensuring control of its activation. After much arguing, it had been decided that there would be a secondary trigger, rather than having the explosives activated by cell phone alone. This eliminated the possibility of a misdial or interference. The small triggering device was kept charged and inactive, blocked from sending or receiving any information until Cara turned it on, as she had this morning. She had tested it according to the engineers’ instructions. Appropriate data had been downloaded onto the small memory; data that would paint a horrible picture of the life Sinclair Charbaneaux had chosen to live after leaving his family for Florida.
It would paint the picture of a troubled young man willing to die for chaos.
The problem was she couldn’t risk giving him the device to hold. How would she explain it? And the explosion might damage the data she needed shared with the investigators. There was no way in hell she was going to hold the device herself. Once she wiped her fingerprints off the red pebbled leather, Cara would never be linked with it.
But she needed the trigger to have a clear shot to the boy and to be within cell range of her phone. She would set the device somewhere unobtrusive once the family was situated, somewhere out of sight but in no way blocked by wires or anything metal. Then she would slip from the room, seemingly driven out by the insane photographer and her minions. Once the photography session was underway and the room was quiet, Cara would pull out an unused burner phone with a preprogrammed code. Hit send to activate the timer and wait for the chaos.
She had not been able to preset the device, not with all the fussing and foolishness in setting up the photo session. She had to wait until every last pine bough was set, every last light screen pulled and pushed and repositioned, until every last Charbaneaux had been settled and arranged for maximum family unity and cheer.
Cara caught the amused eye roll Senator Meeks threw her way amid all the activity. Cara laughed and gave a thumbs up. It looked like the senator had gotten her wish. She was standing with her arm around her beloved little brother Sinclair. It was a Christmas miracle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
8:34 a.m. – 26 minutes to trigger
“I need to know how to keep that bomb from going off!” Dani shouted.
“First of all, keep your voice down.” Kaneisha sounded tired and tense. “I don’t get paid enough to take shit from you. I don’t know why I even agreed to go this far with you. Tom, I gave you an earbud for a reason.”
“Dani needs to hear what you have to say.”
“What I have to say is you are out of your mind to go into that house or anywhere near that boy with that thing in his chest.”
Dani gripped the seatbelt across her chest tightly enough to make her knuckles ache. Booker was driving. He had the Charbaneaux address in the GPS. He had security clearance to get past the gate. He also had far less to panic about than Dani in that moment.
She breathed out loudly, trying to settle the clanging alarms going off in her head. “We are going in, Kaneisha. I am not leaving Choo-Choo to die. So, either you help us or—”
“Or what? You think I give a shit what happens to you or that society boy?”
“Kaneisha,” he said, his voice calm and even. “We need your help. Anything you can tell us about this device, we need to hear it. Just tell us what you can. We need any advantage we can get. What do you know about it?”
The girl sighed and when she spoke, she sounded resolved to their stupidity. “You say this was put in a year ago, right? That means it’s got to be pretty stable. That boy hasn’t spent the year wrapped up in gossamer and he’s still in one piece so that’s the closest you’re going to get to good news from me.”
“We’ll take it,” Booker said, nodding at Dani. His hand warmed her shoulder.
They heard Kaneisha typing. “From what I can see from the scan, which is far from conclusive you should know, it has a receiver. That means something is going to trigger it. That’s also not the worst-case scenario because if there’s a trigger, there has to be someone to pull it. Not literally, of course. My guess is it’s a dial-in trigger.”
“Cara,” Dani said, her mouth dry. “Cara is going to call a number and set it off.”
“That would be my guess,” Kaneisha said.
Booker nodded. “So, we kill Cara and keep her from calling.”
“That’s sounds good.”
“Not so fast.” Her voice dropped as if she had turned away from the phone. “If I were going to do this…”
Dani leaned forward, staring at the phone as the words trailed off.
“What?” She finally screamed. “What would you do?”
This time Kaneisha didn’t seem to notice her anger. “I would have a relay. Having put the device in place over a year ago changes the dynamics of the performance. There are just too many things that could go wrong with a set-up like that. You wouldn’t just program that number into a cell phone. It wouldn’t just be a ten-digit phone number. What if you butt-dialed it? What if someone dialed the wrong number? No, if I had built this, I would have a relay trigger.”
“What does that mean?” Dani asked. “Is that good?”
“It’s not great but it’s not the worst thing.”
Booker’s hand tightened on her shoulder as she tensed. He was right, she knew. Losing her temper at Kaneisha would not do them or Choo-Choo any good. But the Paper Sister was making this sound like a thought exercise or an experiment, not a life-or-death situation.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kaneisha sounded as if she had come to some conclusion. “That’s what I would do. Unlike you two idiots, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that boy’s chest. Granted, the explosion won’t be massive. We’re not talking about pounds and pounds of C4 wrapped in a jar full of nails. His body is going to absorb a great deal of the explosion.”
Dani’s stomach flipped so hard she thought she would vomit.
Booker stroked her arm with his thumb.
“My guess is that this device is more about spiritual damage than physical.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means this is a psy-op design. It’s designed to create horror, mental scars, to send a message with maximum gore but minimal actual damage. They’re trying to send a clear message to the family. That is one hell of a Christmas card.”
Booker cut Dani off before she could scream again. “What can we do? What would you do if you were going into this?”
Kaneisha hummed. “Well, there is no way I would ever be going into this but if I had to, first I’d find that bitch running the show. You could always try telling security that the boy is wired to blow and that their boss is the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. But none of us are stupid and we know how that would turn out. You’d be shot and arrested, and he’d still blow. You’ve got to find her yourself. My money says she’s not going to be close by unless she’s a real freak and wants to take a literal blood bath.” Dani pressed her fists into the pain in her stomach.
“Then I’d look for a trigger relay device. Probably something small. Could be disguised as anything really but I’d bet it’s something small enough to fit into a purse or briefcase. Something that wouldn’t seem weird to carry around because if I were going to try to activate a device like this, I would make damned sure I controlled all the devices that played a part in it.”
“So, something Cara carries with her?” Booker asked.
“That would be my guess. If you can find it, you have to isolate it. You need a Faraday cage which won’t be easy to find. Do you know what a Faraday cage is?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Dani said, unable to keep her mouth shut. “We talked about this. I know, not a refrigerator. I don’t have any tacos on me!”
“Okay,” Kaneisha said. “That was weird but okay. I’m not going to go into that with you because that’s probably not going to work anyway. Depending on the size of the device, it’s not likely you’ll find a shit ton of aluminum foil laying around.”
Dani couldn’t hold back the tears. “Then what do we do?”
It took a moment for Kaneisha to answer. “If you can’t stop Cara and you can’t find the trigger, the only thing you can do is put that boy somewhere he can’t hurt anyone.”
They cleared the security gate as Kaneisha disconnected the call. Dani’s mouth tasted like blood and she couldn’t swallow past the iron knot in her throat. Booker clipped his badge to his shirt pocket and pulled up to the front door of the house. Before Dani could leap from the car, he grabbed her arm again.
“Dani, are you sure you want to do this? This is not a smart plan.”
“I know.” She did know. She knew that the smart play was to leave with Booker because that was the insane world she had somehow wound up in. She should leave with him, take a new identity, put all of this behind her and get away. It was her only real chance.
But that meant living without Choo-Choo. And living with the fact that she had let him die. She knew he was in danger and, if she left him to die with no chance, she was no different than the twisted fucks who were ruining her life.
“I’m going to get Choo-Choo out of there. How long until the countdown ends?”
“It’s set to hit zero at nine a.m. sharp.”
Dani thought of that deafening old grandfather clock in the great hall of the house. Choo-Choo loved that clock. Would that be the last sound he ever heard?
“You don’t have to go in if you don’t want, Tom. You don’t have to risk it.” Strange but she meant that, and the words tinged her fear with sadness. Nobody should have to risk this. Of all the horrible things that had happened in her life, this was worse than she could ever have feared. She didn’t wish this on anyone.
Anyone except Cara Hedrick.
“You need me,” Booker said. “I’ll go find Cara. You go find your friend. See if you can find the relay trigger. Something you might have seen Cara carrying. She’s a control freak, tidy to a fault. My guess is that it’s something she’s had in her purse for a while. Remember to look for something with a clear line of sight to your friend.”
A clear line of sight to her friend. This couldn’t be happening. Dani felt that too familiar fog of shock settling over her as she climbed out of the car. The large clock in the foyer read eight minutes to nine. Eight minutes to pull off the impossible. Eight minutes left in her friend’s life. Why couldn’t she go faster?
They followed the noise of people through the great hall toward the back of the enormous house. Booker had the presence of mind to ask a maid where the picture was being taken and she pointed with a terrified expression.
“You don’t want to go back there,” she warned in a whisper. “Trust me.”
“You have no idea,” Dani said. When she began to run, it was like something from a nightmare. Her legs wouldn’t move quickly enough, the hallway lengthened the farther she got. She would never make it to the sitting room. She wouldn’t be on time.
Booker saw a flash of Cara’s face disappearing into a narrow room off the sitting room. Dani ignored his whispered ‘Good luck’ as he peeled off to the left. He knew she didn’t hear him. He saw it in her eyes. She was going into a different headspace. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was rage. Maybe it would give her the physical and psychological edge to do what she needed to do. Maybe it would make her useless.
There was nothing he could do about that now.
He had no intention of going into the room with the bomb. Booker had plans that hinged upon him being alive and intact. He wanted Dani Britton to be a part of them but that was up to her. That was a decision she had to make on her own.
A small part of him hoped she would realize the futility of this plan. That she would stop at the doorway, realizing she was walking into danger and decide to cut her losses. It’s what he would do, wasn’t it?
Was it?
Then why was he here?
There was no point in dwelling on that question. What happened to the kid in the sitting room didn’t matter to him in any material way. He was here to kill Cara Hedrick. Even if she hadn’t put Dani’s friend in danger, she needed to die.
It had been a long time since Booker had killed for himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
8:52 a.m. – 8 minutes to trigger
What was an appropriate snack to enjoy while bringing your life’s work to fruition?
Cara hummed to herself as she skimmed over the beautifully arranged buffet. Nonze the nutcase had sent extensive demands for post-photograph dining. The Charbaneauxs had outdone themselves but nothing really struck Cara’s fancy. Her stomach twitched with hunger and excitement but so much of the food revolted her.
Strawberries with the little caps still on. No.
Shrimp with tails attached. Come on.
And the worst – lamb chops. Lamb chops were bad enough on their own - so much bone for so little meat – but these had been artfully arranged to prioritize the presence of the bone. The ends had been sharpened so that they could pierce an enormous roasted squash, creating a grisly meat fan in the middle of the table.
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