by L. J. Martin
“So long,” he laughs, “as you get the job done. So, you want to suit up and head out to the Purple Parrot?”
Shaking my head, I back away from that suggestion. “I can't brawl with a half dozen bikers with a full gut, and I know you'd be no help. Although, maybe you'd get a fat lip, or worse, a broken leg, and couldn't go to the big function with Cindy baby and I'd have to take over.”
“Fuck the Purple Parrot,” Pax says, with a guffaw.
“Then let’s hit the hay and get a good night's sleep.”
“10-4.”
I glance at my phone on the way out and note it's nearly eleven, so am a little surprised when it buzzes with an unknown caller.
“Reardon,” I answer.
“Nice picture,” the voice, I recognize as Merrick says.
“What picture is that, agent?”
“You and Zebrowski, yuking it up at the bar. Can you explain that?”
“Just having a friendly drink and he climbs up next to me.”
“There's a term involving the defecation of a male bovine—”
“Bullshit,” I say.
“That's the one. I guess you need to take another few hours in our interview room.”
“Your young wounded agent can verify what I say. You remember him, the one whose young ass I saved.”
“Accidentally, I'm sure,” he says.
“A rose is a rose by any other name. I've had a few drinks there before, Paula, the barmaid will vouch for that. Pure coincidence, Agent Merrick.”
“That's your story and you’re stickin' to it,” he says, and if I'm not mistaken there's a little humor in his voice.
“Pure as the driven snow,” I say.
“We should have your Glock processed by tomorrow. You might want to drop by and pick it up.”
“Processed for DNA, which I'm sure you'll find is a match to other DNA you have on file.”
“If so, don't plan the rest of your day…or maybe week…or maybe several years.”
“Why the commination, agent?”
“Communation?”
“Nope, commination, the act of promising vengeance.”
“I've read your sheet, Reardon, and you didn't attend Harvard.”
“No, I didn't. However, white-collar prison, please. I don't play well with gangs.”
“No promises. You dropping by to pick up your firearm?”
“See you soon.”
I hit end call.
“He's working late,” Pax says, as we climb into his jeep.
“I don't think the guy sleeps. Maybe he's a vampire? However, I sense he's got a good sense of humor, for a fed.”
“The long arm of the law,” Pax laughs. “Glad it's your DNA he's after. I'll bake you a cake with a hacksaw blade deeply embedded.”
“I'm beginning to feel the noose tighten around my neck. You sure you don't want to be kind and let me do the Cindy gig? Might be my last for a while.”
“You're a good buddy, Reardon, but nowhere near that good.”
27
To my great surprise, Pax has a pot of coffee and breakfast breakfast burrito put together when I roll out of the shower. He seldom beats me up as I sleep about five hours a night on the average. Sometimes it’s bad dreams of Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes I see the faces of guys I've had to put down, sometimes I see the faces of people I've avenged who are normally smiling, which offsets the rest of it…but they still wake me in the night. Occasionally it's the sight of my old man beating up my mother when I was way too young to help her.
He was a miner, a logger, a truck driver, occasionally a cowhand, and always a drunk. She passed from cancer when I was thirteen and he passed out of my life when I was seventeen. Just gone. God only knows where. But I was a big kid at seventeen, already over six feet and two hundred pounds, and made my own way taking all kinds of jobs around Sheridan, Wyoming. Following in his footsteps, except for the booze. I only have one real regret, and that's that I might have had a future in football. I wrestled in high school and made all-state, and was a fair outside linebacker.
Even working, I was able to make it to the third year of college, then a little trouble in a fight in a bar I shouldn't have been in, and a Justice of the Peace who suggested I join the Marine Corps and would not prosecute me if I did…and if he prosecuted me I'd never be able to join the armed forces. So, better the Marines than the gray bar hotel.
Pax and I met in Desert Storm, where he dragged me out of a haji street after a close shot from an RPG rang my bell and I was wandering punch drunk in the middle of a dirt road with lead flying all around. But he paid with a shot thru his left femur and now has that leg an inch or so shorter than the right. So I owe him big time, and no matter the patter and BS we give each other, we've got each other's back.
He's laughing and shaking his head when he drops my burrito down in front of me. “You know a costume shop?” he asks.
“Why, you thinking of telling Cindy you're someone else…Clark Gable, maybe?”
“Sol didn't mention this function tonight is a costume ball. You can't get in the door without a costume.”
That makes me chuckle, and with a mouth full of burrito, I suggest, “You can wear my Ghillie suit and with that ugly puss of yours they'll think you're a gorilla.”
“Very funny, fuck nuts. The Ghillie suit represents grass, not fur, so that won't work…particularly since I look more like Gable than King Kong.”
“Yeah, I know of one. Next to Party City is Costume City, owned by the same lady. Let's head there after breakfast and fit you out in something sexy…Porky Pig, maybe.”
“Ha!, Batman or Spider Man maybe.”
“Half the guys there will be Batman…come to think of it how are you going to recognize Cindy in a costume.”
“Sol texted me. She's going as Wonder Woman with a full mask to cover the black eye.”
“Then I suggest Spider Man.”
“And while we're there, we can get you fitted in a George Burns’ outfit, so your lady, Trixi, will be attracted to someone her age.”
“Let me eat this burrito in peace, please.”
“You bet, George.”
As it happened I was right about both Batman and Spider Man; they’d sold out in the last two days. But he looks great in Captain America, and Wonder Woman and he will make a great couple, should Pax be able to get next to her…and if anyone can, my gimpy bud is the one. I never saw anyone better in a bar…and hopefully in a costume party.
As we're walking out of the shop, Pax's phone plays a bar of heavy metal, Sol's favorite music.
“Soul man,” Pax answers.
There's a moment and then he looks as if he's not surprised, and says, “No shit. And how'd Mr. Fin do?”
Another moment and, “Cool. Stay invisible.”
He hits end-call and climbs behind the wheel in the jeep.
“So?”
“So, he's got Roth's phone bugged and is on his way to Pointer's place to see if he's making any calls this morning.”
You've got to be close enough to the phone you want to hack to be able to intercept an outgoing call. The Finfisher mimics a cell tower, picking up the call, relaying it, but at the same time downloading FinSpy. Sol will have to do the same thing for each of the phones we want to bug, placing a different cell number or email address into each, one of five hundred or more belonging to Taj in Malta, who'll forward the information back to us. That way the only exposure Sol will have to being busted is while he's actually in the process of hacking each individual phone.
“Anything on Trixi?” I ask.
“Not yet. He's had his hands full.”
“Let's see if we can buy Lieutenant Bollinger a cup of coffee, and pick his brain.”
“Regarding?” Pax asks.
“Regarding how the investigation is going. We don't have any trading material yet, but Bollinger knows I'm good for my word.”
“Give him a call and let's meet up. You're buying; I bought breakfast.”
> “Okay, Captain America, I'll buy. That was a great burrito, you're my honorary Mexican amigo.”
“Si, senor.”
Across town, in a dank garage of a musty three-bedroom, one-bath tract house across the fence from and backing up to Gragson Elementary School, on Hudson Bay Avenue, four young Middle Eastern men are gathered in the single car garage. The garage has been converted from a car port, illegally, but not much attention is paid to this particular mixed neighborhood.
Amar Jamil Mehrzad is the oldest of the group at twenty-nine, and the only one to have been to Yemen, the country of his father and mother's birth, to Pakistan, and to Syria. His three younger neophytes, who listen enrapt as he lectures and quotes from the Koran, include his twenty-two-year-old brother, Hisram; a Turkish youth, Baris Abdulkadir; and a Syrian who's recently arrived from Paris, Mohammad Al-Hafiz. All of them proudly think of themselves as freedom fighters and have named themselves the DSA, an acronym for Destroy Satan America.
They have claimed the bombing of the Las Vegas City Bus as their own, although they had nothing to do with it.
They are, however, planning to redeem themselves with a bombing that will eclipse that feeble attempt at the destruction of Satan America with a blast which will be heard, or at least reported, the world over.
The house belongs to Amar's mother, widowed from his father who passed just last year. His father immigrated from Yemen over thirty years ago and became a construction worker at the beginning of the Vegas boom. He was an insulator, and became an expert at wrapping steam pipes—a skill that killed him from asbestos poisoning, mesothelioma, a hard death as one's lungs slowly shut down. It was one of the many reasons Amar hates America, capitalists, and Christians like the company his father had worked so hard for, for so many years.
Now he will obtain his revenge by destroying the last club his father worked on, or something equally significant, and taking at least a thousand infidels with him.
Allahu Akbar.
28
DSA is nearly ready.
Five hundred grams of PETN, Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, an odorless white crystalline solid, with a confined detonation velocity of over twenty-five thousand feet per second, rests in a corner. PETN is an explosive chemical that is currently used as the primary ingredient in detonating fuses and as a component in “plastic” explosives such as Semtex.
PETN is also a component of the plastic explosive, Semtex-H, used to destroy the commercial jet, Pan Am Flight 103, near Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. PETN explosive was used by the so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight between Paris, France, and Miami, Florida, in December 2001. A would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia's Prince Mohammed bin Nayef hid his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body. Several news reports said the assailant hid the bomb inside his rectum, but the Saudi government discounted those reports. The prince was slightly injured when the bomb exploded in the August 2009 attack. The Saudis said they think the bomb weighed one hundred grams.
PETN is one of few explosives which can be detonated with a gunshot.
But five hundred grams, a little over one point one pounds, although very powerful, is not enough to effect the kind of destruction Amar and his friends want.
Then again, they wouldn't have to hide the explosive in their underwear or their rectums. In fact, they plan to live to enjoy the sight of one of Satan's houses, a large casino—or any more opportune target—collapsing on top of thousands of infidels, or destroying even a few very influential or particularly evil infidels.
In order to accomplish their aims, they are formulating another several pounds of explosives and will merely use the PETN as the agent to ignite their current project. It has taken Amar's connections with ISIS to obtain the PETN, but this they can formulate on their own.
Baris, as a chemistry student at UNLV, had some expertise, and has prided himself in formulating smaller batches of explosive, which the youths have set off in the desert, far from the prying eyes and ears of infidels.
Now, on the folding picnic table in the middle of the little garage space rests four hot plates, four five-quart enameled steel pots, and a hydrometer. Across the room, in a corner opposite the PETN, rests two fifty-gallon drums of bleach, five gallons of gasoline, twenty-five pounds of candle wax, five gallons of distilled water, and ten pounds of potassium chloride—merely a salt substitute.
The bleach has come from a Los Angeles chemical supply firm, ordered by a laundry in Fresno and picked up by the boys as they said their family wanted to avoid the cost of freight, and they were in the area visiting Disneyland. The potassium chloride was gathered from a number of health food stores. The gasoline and other substances easily bought without question.
These were being carefully combined to become two hundred pounds of potassium chlorate, a highly explosive substance formerly used in hand grenades and land mines, and formulated as a malleable plastic substance. Normally blasting caps would be used to detonate the resultant plastic explosive, however the PETN, and a well-placed .308 round would serve that purpose.
An alarm goes off, an old wind-up clock that had belonged to Amar's father, signifying it is noon. Amar rises from boiling down bleach and punches a button on a boom-box on the floor beneath a wall outlet, and the Muslim call to prayer rings out over the garage. It is time for Dhuhr, the noon prayer. After the day's work has begun, one breaks shortly after noon to again remember Allah, the second time in that day, and seek His guidance. Now, as the boys roll out their prayer rugs and face Mecca, Amar hopes His guidance will be for the destruction of at least a thousand infidels, if not more.
We pay a call on the young wounded FBI agent. Alan Richardson, and to my surprise find him guarded by a uniformed LVPD officer, who stops us in the hall a dozen steps from Richardson's door.
“No visitors,” he snaps, with a hand in my chest.
“Not even old friends from the scene of the crime?” I ask, with a smile.
He looks questioning, then asks, “Your names?”
We give them up and he instructs, “Stay here,” and he walks to the door and speaks to whoever is inside, then nods and waves us forward.
I'm pleased to see my new favorite FBI agent seated at his bedside. Marla Maeberry, still blond with dark brown eyes the size of a whitetail doe back in Wyoming, flashes a smile to melt a heart. And it must come from the heart as I'm sure they don't teach that at Quantico.
“Agent Maeberry, this is my good buddy Paxton Weatherwax, and I'll caution you right off, don't believe a word he says.” Then as Pax is enjoying the sight of the striking blond, I take two steps and extend a hand to Agent Richardson. “Howdy, I'm Mike Reardon.”
He shakes, albeit a little weakly, but gives me a decent smile.
“Alan, but I guess you knew that and I guess I owe you a thanks.”
“Not really, I let your boss believe it but the fact is I stumbled out and was lucky I didn't get ventilated.”
He laughs. “Whatever…the fact is I'm still here after I did get ventilated and it sounds like it might have been a lot worse had you not shoved open that door…and had the nads to stick your nose in.”
“Old Marine superstition, you don't want to get shot in the back. Looks bad to the brass who give out the medals. I was coming your way down the hall, so there was nothing to do but come to the party.”
Again, he gives me a smile. “Nonetheless, I'll buy you a beer if I ever get out of here.”
“Okay, you're on. We'll let you rest. Just wanted to say howdy—”
“I've got to go too,” Marla says, and stands. “Anything I can bring you, Alan. Magazines, newspapers?”
“A medium rare filet, if you can get it past the nurses.”
She laughs, and turns to me. “I'll walk y'all out.”
“Our pleasure,” Pax says, before I can reply, but as we go down the hallway I beat him to the punch.
�
�Agent, we're off to lunch and would love to have you join us,” I ask, hopefully.
She smiles, but disappoints. “As much as I'd like to…let's wait until this investigation is over so I don't lose brownie points with Merrick.”
“I'm holding you to that,” I say, and wink at her. She laughs and exits the elevator on the ground floor and we're in the basement parking garage.
“Nice,” Pax says.
“Yeah, except she's armed and I bet a dead shot.”
“I ain't scared,” he says.
“Sure, Captain America, you’re not scared of anything.”
“Now where?” he asks.
“We haven't talked with the dead girl’s boyfriend…his name’s in my phone notes…or to Paula, the bartender from Sandy’s. I still think she might have something interesting to say. But I'm most interested in Roth. We should be getting feedback from Taj in Malta as Roth's had all morning to jabber on his phone. Besides, they've got a good buffet and it's lunch time.”
“If he's habitual, he's at work. Usually hits there at eleven on a weekend. Let's see if we can get next to the old boy.”
“Okay, but I've got to be back at the condo by four, to get ready for my date.” He laughs, the prick.
I'll see if I can pick a fight with Roth's bodyguards and maybe get Pax's lip busted. That would serve him right.
29
We screwed around at my mini-storage for an hour, reloading the van and its secret compartments with the tools of our trade, then get a call and an email with the printed texts of several of Roth's calls.
None of them, I'm sorry to say, are from Pointer and his crew…or Roth's crew who obviously also work for Pointer…or anyone who'll do us much good.
Still, maybe it's a good idea to roust Roth and make him wonder what we're up to…if he doesn't already know. We don't expect trouble, so we take the jeep.
Maxmillian's is not a large club as Vegas goes, a six-story hotel with a couple of hundred rooms and a ten-thousand-square-foot gaming floor, which caters mostly to locals. Maybe half the size of The Majestic.
