by Abbott, Jeff
‘He’s one of the guys behind your kidnapping,’ Eric said. ‘I grabbed him, he’s your ransom. So don’t feel bad for him, babe.’
The woman - Aubrey - stared hard at Luke and Luke shook his head. He grabbed at her smooth wrists. ‘He’s lying. I’m not a bad guy. Please.’
‘Let her go!’ Eric roared. He fired a bullet past Luke’s head, into the wall.
Luke and Aubrey froze, doubled over in surprise. She trembled at the gunshot and Luke released her. She raised the cuffs to his wrists and clicked the shackles on him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’
Aubrey glanced at Eric. Then she attached the chains to his ankles.
‘He’s lying to you, I’m innocent …’ Luke said.
‘All I did,’ Eric said, ‘was deliver a ransom.’
Aubrey stepped back, shaking, and the man embraced her again. ‘Go outside, wait for me. We’re going home.’
Aubrey stumbled out of the cabin.
Eric unfolded the phone. He pulled a small metal device from his pocket - Luke guessed it was a modulator, designed to mask his voice - and snapped it over the phone, and he punched in a number. He raised his finger to his lips in a hushing motion.
The phone was on speaker and Luke heard Henry say, ‘Hello?’
‘Henry Shawcross. I have bad news. Your stepson, Luke Dantry, has been kidnapped.’
‘What? Who the hell is this?’
‘Let’s just say I’m passing the baton to you,’ Eric said. ‘Listen carefully. To get your stepson back, you must wire fifty million dollars to a series of offshore accounts.’
‘Henry doesn’t have fifty million dollars. Are you insane?’ Luke said softly. The idea was ridiculous. ‘You’ve made a serious mistake.’
A long, agonizing beat of silence. ‘I wish to speak to Luke,’ Henry said.
‘Tell him you’re alive and well. Nothing else.’ Eric unhooked the device from the phone and put it close to Luke’s face.
Luke said, ‘Henry?’
‘Luke.’ Henry sounded stunned. ‘Is this a joke?’
‘No. He grabbed me at the airport. He had a gun. He—’
Eric stood and replaced the modulator onto the phone. ‘He’s alive and unhurt. Do what you’re told or your stepson is dead.’
Another long stretch of silence; Luke could hear the rasp of Henry’s breathing. ‘I’m sorry. I will not pay.’
Luke froze. He thought he had misheard. He said will not. Instead of cannot. ‘What?’
Henry’s voice sounded thin, tinny, a ghost of his usual confident baritone. ‘I don’t know what money you’re talking about. Please don’t hurt Luke. But I don’t have this money you want.’
Eric said, ‘Don’t lie. You know you have the fifty million, you bastard.’
‘I do not.’
‘For God’s sakes, give him what he wants!’ Luke yelled. He was thinking: if you don’t have the money, just tell them that you do. Stall them; make them think the money is coming, get the FBI on the job. ‘Please, Henry. Tell him you’ll cooperate.’ Maybe Henry was too stunned by the ransom demand to know what to say.
‘Luke, I cannot. I cannot.’
His stepfather - smart, determined, more than capable of thinking on his feet - was not willing to bluff. He was not willing to lie, to promise complete cooperation, and get off the phone and call the police. He was leaving Luke to the murderous mercies of a kidnapper. The realization hit him like a stone hammering into his chest.
Why wouldn’t he lie, say anything to save Luke?
‘You don’t understand, you don’t cooperate, he will die,’ Eric said.
‘I can’t help you.’ Henry, unyielding.
‘He’s already killed one guy. He knows about the Night Road!’ Luke yelled. ‘Give him what he wants!’
Silence, like a thread pulled to a breaking point. ‘I suspect this is a sort of very bad joke. Luke, why are you doing this?’
Eric retreated across from the room, holding the phone still, a look of disbelief on his face.
What does a kidnapper do when the family tells him to screw himself? Luke thought. ‘Henry! It’s not a joke!’
‘I am going to hang up now,’ Henry said.
The line went dead.
Eric and Luke stared at each other in the dim light of the cabin. After their yelling the room seemed to echo with the silence.
Luke was afraid to speak, instinct told him to be silent, that Eric was on the brink of either killing him or calling Henry back or calling back Jane, the British woman - the master pulling the strings - to report Henry’s refusal.
Eric stared at him. Raised the gun.
Luke stared back in his eyes. It was his only defense. Eric had shot the homeless man in the back; he hadn’t had to watch his victim face death.
‘She’ll hear,’ Luke said. ‘She’ll hear and she’ll know what you did. Know what you are.’
The gun wavered.
‘You can’t talk about this,’ he said. ‘Your stepfather’s in deep. That’s all I can say. You’re in deep as well.’
‘Deep in what?’
‘The woman who took Aubrey, Jane, she’ll call Henry again. I’m sure they’ll work out an exchange for you.’ Eric’s voice broke.
‘I just want to go home. Please.’ Luke rattled the chains.
‘I’ll give you a bit of advice if you get free or Henry pays up. Find a place to hide if you can. Trust no one. That’s your life now.’
‘You know Henry. You know about the Night Road. How?’
Eric leaned against the wall, as though the weariness of the past day had drained him of bone and blood.
‘What the hell is my stepfather involved with? Why would he have fifty million dollars? Tell me.’
Now Eric looked at him again. ‘I can’t afford to feel sorry for you. Goodbye.’ He walked toward the door.
‘Don’t do this. Don’t leave me here.’ Luke struggled against the chains. ‘For God’s sakes, no one knows I’m here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘You’re right. And that ignorance buys me time.’ Eric turned and he left, slamming the door behind him.
A few minutes later Luke heard a car - his car - start, in the far distance, past the grove, past the gate. The BMW’s engine gave what sounded like a joyful revving. Of course. Eric and Aubrey’s ordeal was over.
His sure as hell wasn’t. He was alone, chained to a bed. In the middle of nowhere. With no way out. And no one to help him.
7
The bombs required a high level of trust. It started with several hundred pounds of high-grade Semtex explosive smuggled out of the Czech Republic and then sold to an operative in the FARC terrorist group in Colombia.
The explosives were then bartered for detailed intelligence on a new surge of anti-narcotic operations supported in Colombia by the American government. This trade resulted in the eventual torture and murder of four undercover agents.
The Semtex was muled into America by the most trusted couriers of a Mexican drug lord in exchange for the name of a key government informant inside his own ring. The informant was tortured for three days. Her body, with her throat slit, was left on her mother’s doorstep in a quiet Mexico City neighborhood.
Once the explosives were in the United States, the construction of the bomb was completed in a suburban garage outside of Houston, Texas, by an American woman who felt a deep and abiding hate for the government. Her nickname was Snow. It did not matter who was in power; Snow loathed all authority figures within the government with a fevered intensity. Snow had learned how to make Semtex-based bombs when she was a youngster, from her father, before he died. She refreshed her knowledge by perusing instructions found on the internet and studying worn, tea-stained manuals left over from the Irish Republican Army’s campaign in the 1980s that she had acquired on an online auction site.
Snow made many of them, in careful and rote fashion, one after another, for weeks, working in the quiet of her aunt’s house. Her aunt had died a ye
ar before and Snow’d kept the house as a workshop. Her boyfriend grew tired of her long absence; they fought on the second day, when she came home exhausted, her fingernails nicked from cutting wires, her nerves raw, and he left for his mother’s house. She was glad he was gone, he wasn’t committed to the cause, he was a pain in the ass. Fortunately he didn’t know about the bombs. She went and bought her own supplies: cell phones, wire, blasting caps.
Then she made one special bomb, shaping the plastic to detonate in a certain way, with a calculated force to produce an exact result. Snow was so proud of it; she called this bomb Baby. She was drinking coffee, waiting at her house for the man to pick Baby up, hoping that her boyfriend wouldn’t show up, wanting her back. She was done with the boyfriend.
‘It’s lighter than I thought it would be,’ Mouser said when he picked up the bomb. He stood in Snow’s suburban kitchen; she had, as ordered, placed the bomb inside a reinforced canvas carryall. He picked up the duffel bag, measured the weight. Heavy but manageable.
‘I do good work,’ Snow said. Mouser thought the nickname fit her; her hair was dyed a stark white, cut short. Her gray eyes were like flecks of ice. Her body was muscled, not afraid of hard work. There was a thin crinkle of scar on her jaw and her neck; she’d been burned once. Maybe one of the bombs had backfired on her. She watched him with crossed arms. ‘Assuming your people provided the correct specifications.’
‘They did.’
Snow raised an eyebrow. ‘If you’re wrong about the tank thickness, we’ll have a problem. Or rather, you will.’
‘It’s been double-checked. Three-fourths of an inch thick, non-normalized steel. More brittle. The cars are old.’ Mouser didn’t much like his facts being called in question. ‘You put in too much explosive, we’ll have more burn than drift.’
‘I guarantee my work.’ Snow sipped orange juice. ‘You don’t look like how I pictured you.’
She was not at all what Mouser expected in a bomb maker. He knew a few and they were foreigners, often older guys (he suspected incompetent bomb makers died early), and frequently missing fingers. But she was supposed to be one of the best.
‘How did you picture me?’
‘Arab.’
Mouser cracked a grin with no humor in it. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘I’m not disappointed,’ Snow said. ‘If you were an Arab I wouldn’t have let you have the bomb. I don’t much like Arabs. They’re worse than the government.’
Mouser said, ‘Nothing’s worse than the Beast.’
‘The what?’ A light hit her eyes; she tilted her head to look at him.
‘The Beast - that’s what I call the government. I’m curious as to how you could have gotten the bomb away from me if you didn’t like the look of me.’
‘Oh, I would have just detonated it once you were about three miles away,’ she said lightly.
‘Ah.’ Mouser raised an eyebrow.
‘Joking,’ she said.
Mouser was careful to keep his neutral expression on his face. ‘I’m not much for jokes.’
‘No. You shouldn’t be. This is important work. Take good care of my baby’ - she put a proprietary hand on the duffel bag - ‘and she’ll take good care of you.’
It creeped him out a bit to hear her call a bomb a baby. ‘And the rest?’
‘Ready when you are.’ She watched him with a bright interest. Maybe making bombs, living on the constant edge of disaster, made her eager for physical sensations, for release. He had no interest in complicating his life with a woman. He had the mission he had appointed himself in life; to him, the mission was everything. The government had to be shown for the Beast incarnate that it was, the ravager of liberty, the ruination of hope, the devil that destroyed what made America great. That was all that mattered.
‘I’ll call you when it’s done,’ he said.
‘I’ll watch it on the news.’
‘And then the next stage.’
She nodded, but she didn’t seem to care so much about the money. She watched him with an intensity that made his stomach twist. Strange woman, he thought, but useful.
He got into his car and drove through the quiet streets. Spring break was this week. Freed from the mind-numbing indoctrination of government schools, lots of kids played on the lawns, riding bikes with those dorky helmets that the Beast insisted they wear for their protection, another emblem of its constant meddling. One girl waved at him and he raised his hand in a brief wave.
Honey, I’m going to set you free, he thought. Bring you a different world where the Beast has broken legs and dulled claws.
Mouser drove through Houston, the bomb sitting on the passenger seat, the duffel bag wrapped in a cloth cover. He listened to speeches he had written for himself on his cassette player and thought he needed to polish his metaphors a bit; he spoke too much of purpose, not enough of war. He was firing the first, carefully considered shot in a long war and the realization thrilled him to the bone. More shots would come in the next couple of days.
The resting place for Snow’s baby had been selected with great care: a quiet bend close to the rail switch station in Ripley, Texas, forty miles northeast of Houston. Ripley was a small town of two thousand people, a few farmers and ranchers, mostly blue-collar workers employed by the oil refineries and related service industries. Mouser had no specific quarrel with the people of Ripley; but he had no regard for them either. They’d chosen to live in a dangerous place. Ripley lay in a small depression along the railway, with a heavy growth of trees ringing the entire town. The people of Ripley could suffer the consequences of their poor planning, he thought. It had taken him weeks to find and select the right spot.
He wore a carefully chosen costume: jeans, a shirt with the logo of a railway freight line. No jacket because he wanted the railway’s logo visible. He walked along the railroad with a cell phone in his hand, pressed to his ear, laughing as though someone on the other end had told a joke. The duffel bag was fashioned from camouflaged fabric, painted to match the gray puzzle of stones along the rails. He set the bag down close to the rail as he walked, in view of the train station, but no one saw him. He put a foot on the rail and waited until he felt the barest vibration of the approaching train. He walked across the grassy slide down to the road where his car was parked, closing the phone that he wasn’t looking at, and glancing at his watch. Three minutes, he guessed.
Mouser got in the car. No one had seen him, no one had noticed him. A pickup truck drove past him, loud country music spilling from the windows. Two young men, laughing, on their way to an evening shift at the railway. Mouser liked the song they were playing; he started to hum it under his breath. He used to sing, back in church when he was a kid, and he had a fine tenor.
He drove away from Ripley, the farm-to-market road that led back to the highway. The pavement threaded alongside the rail track. A pickup truck, with a bunch of young Mexican workers in the bed, shot past him. Then another car, a minivan, a harried mother at the wheel. He could see she was yelling at the kids bouncing in the back.
You should take the time to tell them you love ‘em, lady, Mouser thought, instead of yelling at them.
He heard the approaching train before he saw it; a long low whistle of approach. Ripley was a scheduled stop - a water treatment plant was nearby that served much of the northern stretches of suburban Houston.
He pulled his cell phone back out, dialed a number, poised his finger over the button. Snow had given him a choice on the bomb: timer or detonation through calling the phone. He’d picked calling.
The train wasn’t impressively long, just a stretch of old, weathered rail cars, each carrying 90,000 tons of chlorine gas.
He pushed the car up to a hundred miles an hour, counted down another minute, and pressed SEND.
Ashley Barton drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The kids were wearing on her last nerve but the morning was nearly done. Thank God. She’d had her two boys and her sister’s girl and they’d zoomed like little
rockets. She was exhausted. As it was she would get home from the shopping trip to Houston just in time to get a lunch of hot dogs and carrot sticks and an ice-cream sandwich in each kid. Park them in front of Cartoon Network while she could catch up on laundry and have a glass of iced tea and a moment’s delicious peace and quiet.
She aimed the air conditioning vent toward her face; the day had grown warm and she felt sticky. She’d taken the kids to one of the big Houston malls to get clothes, where the kids begged her to buy toys for them. She knew she was an easy mark. She’d let them pick out a toy each, nothing too expensive, though. They were still paying for Christmas.
‘Give it back!’ Her seven-year-old, Kevin, yelled behind her, and she heard the familiar sound of a boy-fist hitting a boy-shoulder.
‘Kevin’s hitting Brandon,’ her niece Megan announced in a tired voice. ‘Over those stupid trading cards.’ Megan’s tone made it clear what she thought of trading cards.
‘Kevin,’ she said, glancing back at him. ‘We don’t hit.’
‘You don’t but I do,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s gonna tear my card, Mom!’
‘Brandon, give him his card back. Kevin, do not hit your brother. If I have to get on y’all again, no dessert.’ She drove past the Ripley rail yard; her own house was only two minutes away.
In the rearview mirror she saw Kevin had his face pressed to the window glass, watching the long freight train lumber into Ripley. Kevin and trains. He’d been fascinated with them from when he was a toddler. God, that was only a few years ago. They were getting so big so fast.
Suddenly a roar pounded her ears, the minivan bucked on the road, and at first Ashley thought she’d blown a tire. The sound of the derailment was deafening, steel hammering onto steel, metal tearing in a horrific screech she felt in her bones.
‘Jesus!’ she screamed. Then Kevin was hollering and she braked to see that the windows were broken, one of the back ones blown in, glass dusting the kids. The noise had been so loud she hadn’t heard the shattering. All three of the children screamed. She stood on the brakes, wrenched around in the seat.
