Hosts

by F. Paul Wilson

  Joe was on his way. "What're you gonna do?" he said over his shoulder.

  "Follow her inside. See where she lives."

  "Excellent!"

  Sure enough, the couple disengaged and their guy started walking away. Stan got moving, quick-walking along the street side of the parked cars as the woman turned toward the front door of the apartment building. She keyed the lock, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. Stan dodged to the sidewalk and dashed for the door, catching its edge with barely an inch to spare.

  As he stepped into the vestibule he spotted the elevator standing open at the far end, but it was empty. Where the hell…?

  Directly to his right he saw a door marked STAIRWAY swinging closed, and heard footfalls echoing. Keeping at least a flight between them, Stan followed her up to the third floor. As he stepped out into the hallway he spotted her to his left, moving. Stan turned right and ambled down the hall in the opposite direction. He fished in his pocket for his keys and dropped them on the carpet. While stooping to pick them up he watched her out of the corner of his eye, saw her disappear into a doorway.

  When her door had closed, he reversed and hurried toward it.

  Pleased, Stan headed back to the stairway.

  Now we know where she lives, he thought. Let's hope that's where he lives too.

  13

  That feeling again.

  Jack did a slow turn, giving the small, crowded platform of the Twenty-eighth Street subway station a full inspection.

  Somebody watching him. Could feel it. Trouble was, the Friday afternoon rush hour was just getting started and he was surrounded by a horde of possible suspects.

  The question was who? Probably some member of Holdstock's cult. Jeanette and Holdstock he'd recognize immediately, and maybe a couple of others, but not all. One of them could be standing beside him right now… or behind him…

  That possibility pushed Jack back from the edge of the platform.

  Why follow me?

  To keep tabs? Or find out where he lived?

  The notion jolted him. That was where he was headed now: a stop home to run a few errands, then return to Kate's later with the car, in case they needed to take another trip to the Bronx.

  The uptown 9 rattled into the station then, and the crowd pressed forward. Jack held his spot, watching for the slightest hint of undue interest in the commuters eddying around him.

  Nothing.

  But the watched feeling persisted.

  Keeping to the rear of the press, Jack shuffled with the rest toward the nearest open door. He squeezed aboard backward, the tips of his shoes barely inside the door line, and waited. As soon as the doors began to move he stepped back onto the platform. He turned and scanned the length of the train as all the doors slid shut, watching for someone else making a last-second exit. But everyone stayed put as the doors closed, sealing all the passengers within.

  The train began to roll, rumbling out of the station. Jack watched the windows, searching the visible faces for signs of surprise or anger. He saw only boredom and fatigue.

  Had he let the train go by for nothing? Maybe. He knew he had paranoid tendencies—with good reason, he always insisted—and this wouldn't be the first time he'd expended extra time and effort because of a vague suspicion. He considered it time and effort well spent. Never be too busy to walk that extra mile… just in case.

  And he was going to do a little extra walking right now—over to Eighth Avenue to catch a train there.

  Started to move, then stopped, noticing something.

  The feeling of being watched… gone.

  14

  Stan had found a spot on Seventh Avenue to wait for Joe. He'd just settled himself onto a shady bench near the Fashion Institute when his cell phone rang.

  "Lost the fucker," said Joe's voice.

  Even through the tiny speaker Stan could feel the heat of his brother's barely suppressed rage.

  "He spot you?"

  "Couldn't have. I kept my distance and he never even looked at me. Fucker must have a sixth sense or something. You pin down his apartment?"

  "Sure did. Three-C. Checked the mailbox downstairs. Says the place belongs to 'J. Vega.'"

  "J. Vega, eh? 'J' as in 'Jack'? I like it. You keep an eye on the door so we know when he comes back. I'm goin' home to put a few things together."

  "What few things?"

  "I'll show you when I get back. See you soon."

  Stan hit the OFF button. If Joe wouldn't discuss the few things on the phone, that meant they weren't legal. But Stan had a pretty good idea of what Joe was going to put together. Something that went boom.

  15

  Kate approached the door cautiously. Who could be knocking? No one had buzzed from the vestibule. She peeked through the keyhole, half-expecting to see Jack. Instead she found a heavyset man in coveralls.

  "Yes?"

  The voice filtered through the closed door. "Bell Atlantic, ma'am. We got reports of line trouble all through the building. Any problems?"

  "No. I don't think so."

  "It's with incoming calls."

  She wished he'd speak louder. Did he say incoming calls? How would she know if an incoming call hadn't got through? What if Jeanette or Jack—or, dear lord, one of the kids—were trying to get through to her.

  Kate reached for the knob, then hesitated. She'd heard horror stories about situations like this—rapists posing as servicemen. She slipped on the chain latch and opened the door a few inches.

  He looked convincing with his gray coveralls and toolbox.

  "Can I see some ID?"

  "Sure."

  He unclipped the badge that hung on an elastic tether from his pocket and handed it through. It certainly seemed authentic, and identified the man as Harold Moses, Bell Atlantic employee. But the photo…

  Kate looked up again, comparing the picture to the real thing.

  "I know, I know," he said with a sheepish grin. "I quit smoking and I'm the size of a house."

  The smile did it for Kate—the same as in the photo.

  "Is there any way you can come back later? It's not my place and—"

  "Well, it's late and if I don't do it today it could be another week. We've got trunk line problems all over the city."

  No incoming calls for a week? Kate unlatched the door and handed back the badge.

  "Okay. I guess you'd better check it out."

  "Only take a couple of minutes," he said, stepping past her and looking around the front area.

  Immediately Kate wished she hadn't let him in. She hadn't sensed it when he was in the hall, but now, enclosed in the same room with him, she found him frightening. He seemed so tense and he radiated… something. She couldn't put her finger on what it was but it seemed malevolent, as if his overstuffed coveralls were bursting with rage instead of flesh. And those narrow eyes, darting everywhere, as if searching…

  But when he spoke he was all business. "How many phones you got, ma'am?"

  "Three," she told him. She wanted to run out into the hall but kept her cool. "One in the kitchen and two more in the bedrooms."

  He placed his toolbox on the kitchen counter and she noticed for the first time that he wore an oversized work glove on his left hand—only his left.

  "Okay. I'll work through this one; but I'll need you on one of the others."

  "Any particular one?"

  He shrugged. "Your choice."

  He barely looked her way, didn't seem at all interested in her. Kate began to relax. This strange business with Jeanette seemed to have shifted her imagination into high gear.

  After an instant's hesitation she started for the bedroom. "Okay. What do I do?"

  "Just pick it up and keep talking. Don't dial—just talk. Count from one to a hundred if you want. Anything."

  He waved his left hand as he spoke and Kate saw that some of the fingers of the glove looked empty and others looked stretched to the limit.

  Wondering if his deformity was congenital or accide
ntal, Kate entered the bedroom; she picked up the receiver and started counting.

  She heard the kitchen phone come off the hook. "That's good," the serviceman told her. "Keep it up. Don't stop."

  Through her receiver she listened to him whistling softly as he rummaged through his toolbox. She heard tape rip and wondered what he was doing, but the phone cord didn't stretch far enough to reach the door. She looked around for her pocketbook and saw it on the dresser. At least she knew he wasn't pilfering her wallet.

  After three minutes or so she heard a series of beeps through the receiver, then the man's voice.

  "Okay, ma'am. All set."

  Kate hung up and returned to the front room to find the man snapping the clasps on his toolbox.

  "That's it?"

  He nodded. "Yours was okay. Have a nice day."

  "You too. Thanks."

  As she closed the door behind him she wondered at her earlier apprehensions. Just now he'd seemed a different man, calm and serene, as if he'd been relieved of a great burden. Almost… happy.

  How silly she'd been.

  16

  Joe opened the rear door of the car, dumped his toolbox on the floor, then dropped into the front passenger seat.

  "Done!"

  Stan looked at him. "Fine. And now that it's done, you mind telling me just what it is that's done?"

  Half an hour ago Joe had arrived in this stolen Taurus and parked it downstream from the apartment building. He'd looked like a new man—showered, shaved, and dressed like a serviceman. He'd been coy, refusing to say what he was up to until he'd done it.

  "Left a little gift for our guy. I was afraid I wasn't going to get in, what with that obsolete Bell Atlantic ID from the old days, but she bought it."

  "Lucky. How big a gift?"

  Joe grinned. "A brick."

  "A whole brick?"

  "Damn right."

  Stan closed his eyes. Before the Feds had closed in they'd managed to salvage part of their stash of army-issue C-4—foot-long bricks, two inches wide and an inch thick, neatly wrapped in olive-drab cellophane. Lovely stuff. Stable enough to play catch with, still soft and moldable at minus-seventy degrees, no extrudation even at one-hundred-seventy.

  In Nam he'd come up with other uses for it beyond explosions. Starting fires, for instance. Cut an inch-thick slice off a block, put a match to it, and instant fire. Stank but it burned hot enough to ignite wet wood. One thing you had to remember, though, was if you wanted to put out burning C-4, you drowned it. You did not—repeat, not—stomp on it. He once saw a guy lose the front end of his foot trying that. Stan even learned the meaning of detonation velocity, and that C-4's was a devastating 8,100 meters per second.

  And Joe had set a whole brick of it in that apartment. Shit.

  He pressed the buttons that raised the windows and swiveled toward his brother.

  "Joe… an old building like that… you just might bring the whole thing down."

  A beautiful building… a shame to mess it up.

  "Yeah, maybe. But probably not."

  "At the very least it'll take out most of the third floor and both apartments above and below his, and blow off the whole front of the building."

  Joe stared at him. "And your point is…?"

  "He hasn't come back yet. He might not come back before it blows. It might not even be his place."

  "Oh, it's his all right. His girlfriend told me it wasn't her place, so that means it's his."

  "All right, let's say it is his place. What if he's out all night? If the place blows without him there, then we've tipped our hand. He'll know—"

  "He'll know that his girlfriend is dead and that he's next." Joe's voice dipped to a cold rumble. "Let him stew awhile, let him suffer a little, let him be scared, wonderin' when the next shoe's gonna drop. I almost hope he doesn't come home in time. I want to be in the crowd and see his face when he finds what's left of his building."

  "It's not our style, Joe. We always placed just the right amount in just the right place to get the job done with a minimum of collateral damage. We were surgeons, Joe."

  "Yeah, well, this is a special case. This will send a message that if you mess with the Kozlowskis you die. And not only do you die, but your family and friends and neighbors die. You mess with the K brothers you invite a whole shitload of death and destruction. So think twice. Think three times. Better yet, don't think about it at all."

  Stan sighed. No talking to Joe on this.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror where he had the apartment house entrance framed. The car seemed far enough away to be safe from the bigger chunks of debris. And it would be downstream from the explosion, which meant they'd be able to cruise away immediately after the blast.

  He watched a black Crown Victoria pull into a space directly in front of the doorway. He had to smile. Here was a guy probably thanking his lucky stars for finding such a primo parking spot. He wouldn't be thanking anyone if his car was still there when Joe's bomb blew.

  "Joe!" Stan whispered when the driver stepped out of the car. "Take a look!"

  Joe did a casual one-eighty in his seat, then jerked up straight when he recognized the man on the sidewalk.

  "Yes!" He started punching Stan on the shoulder. "Yes-yes-yes-yes!"

  "When does this go down?"

  "Soon," Joe said softly. "But not soon enough."

  17

  "You let him in?" Jack said, not quite believing this.

  Kate shrugged. "He had a Bell Atlantic ID, with his picture and everything. What was I supposed to do?"

  Jack didn't want to go into how easy it was to fabricate photo ID. Someday he'd show Kate his extensive personal collection. But maybe it was all right. Maybe the guy had really been from the phone company and Jack was making more out of this than he should. But the fact remained that Terrence Holdstock seemed to know too much about what went on in this apartment. Maybe one of the bugs had gone bad and he'd sent someone to replace it.

  "All right, what did he do while you were here? Tell me exactly."

  "I… I don't know exactly. You see, he needed someone talking on one of the extensions while he…" She flushed as her voice trailed off. "Boy, that really sounds dumb, doesn't it."

  Jack wanted to shout Yes! But this was Kate, so kept his voice level.

  "It's okay. You simply don't have a fine-tuned sense of paranoia."

  "Like you."

  "Like me. How long was he alone in here?"

  "Five minutes tops."

  Jack looked around the front room. This wasn't good. The guy could have hidden any number of bugs in a zillion places, or—

  Wait. Kate had said the guy carried a Bell Atlantic ID. Bell Atlantic didn't exist anymore.

  He motioned Kate closer and cupped his hands around her right ear.

  "Ignore anything I say out loud from now on," he whispered. "Got it?"

  She gave him a puzzled look but nodded.

  "Only five minutes?" he said aloud. "I guess he couldn't have stolen anything significant in that time. Nothing missing, right?"

  He motioned for Kate to chime in.

  "Missing? No. Everything's here."

  The best thing would be to go home and retrieve his bug detector for a 5-to-1,000 MHz sweep of the room. And he might yet have to do that. But for now a simple visual check would have to suffice. All he needed to vindicate his paranoia was to find a single bug. After that it was like being a little pregnant—didn't matter how many more there were, he'd know they were under surveillance.

  Which could work to his advantage by allowing him to spread some customized disinformation to the listeners.

  He turned on the radio—loud—and started with the kitchen wall-phone. A seemingly obvious place, but only to someone looking for a bug. He disassembled it but found nothing. A search of all the lighting fixtures and the undersides of the counters and cabinets yielded nothing either.

  Time for another perspective: he lay on the floor and slithered around like a snake,
looking for anything that didn't belong. His joints felt a little stiff, his muscles sore. He wondered why. Hadn't done anything strenuous lately. And it felt kind of good to lie down. If he had a choice between a nap and hunting for bugs right now, he knew which one he'd take. But he had to keep looking.

  He glanced at Kate who was staring at him as if he were crazy as he wriggled out of the kitchen into the dining area, checking out the underside of the chairs, the table—

  "Holy shit!"

  Jack's saliva drained away as he stared at the bomb duct-taped to the underside of the table. And no question it was a bomb—fine wires running from a tiny travel alarm clock to the ends of a block of either Semtex or C-4.

  "What is it, Jack?" Kate said.

  Looked for the readout on the alarm clock but it was dark. Had the battery died? Couldn't risk it. Might already be too late. Had to get Kate out of here as fast as—

  Wait. Nothing sophisticated here. In fact a pretty basic piece of work. Could see the ends of the blasting caps jutting from the plastique. All he had to do…

  "Jack, what did you find?"

  Jack dried his hands on his pants and reached up to the bomb. His fingers trembled as he gently tugged the caps from the plastique—the one in the left end came loose first, then the right. As they fell free, dangling from the clock, Jack ripped the plastique from the underside of the table and rolled away.

  Panting, sweating, he lay on his back with closed eyes, pulling himself together.

  "What is that?" Kate said.

  Jack sat up and looked at the block. As soon as he saw the olive drab wrapper he knew it was C-4.

  "Enough plastique explosive to make a real mess of this building."

  One of Kate's hands flew to her mouth while the other fluttered behind her, searching for a chair. It found one and she dropped into it.