12 Drummers Drumming

by Diana Deverell

  The plastic slipped again, the strip now grazing his fingertips.

  I lunged forward. Jammed my hand into the opening. The bag was an inch from the floor when I felt the full weight on my palm. I exhaled. Tightened my fingers into a fist, the strips of white plastic locked inside my grip. The bag swayed gently against my thigh. I extended my arm, held it carefully away from my body. Breathed again.

  My father rocked back on his heels so that he could see my face without having to tip his head back. “Said you weren’t coming,” he said, slurring the initial S so that the word sounded more like “Shaid.”

  “He lied.” I put my left hand on his arm. “Come with me.” I wanted to run with him to Erika, waiting outside in the Jetta. But the arm I gripped felt withered, as though the muscles had atrophied. Sweat shone on my father’s forehead as he strained to put one foot in front of the other. We inched forward.

  I looked back. The security guard knelt beside Bert. The two thugs huddled to one side, kept from bolting by an equally stocky airport policeman, tapping a nightstick against his palm. He was listening to van Hoof, whose mouth was moving fast. Then van Hoof turned toward Port-Wine as though he’d been interrupted. I saw van Hoof’s arm move. He slapped Port-Wine in the face. Nightstick shoved between them and jerked Port-Wine’s hand up the center of his back.

  My father and I were now fewer than fifty feet from the exit doors. Airport noises swirled up under the high ceilings, bounced off the expanses of glass and combined the way that colors do, so that the spectrum disappears into a single new color. I felt as though we were crossing an immense Arctic plain, buffeted by roaring whiteness.

  “Can’t breathe,” my father wheezed. “Got to rest.” His skin was ashy beneath the film of sweat.

  The heavy bag dragged my arm down. My shoulder ached with the effort to hold the package steady. Other travelers surged around us. An information kiosk was centered in the area off to my right. A navy-suited man leaned across the counter. He waved and mouthed something at me, as though trying to get my attention. Maybe he wanted to offer the kindhearted airport maintenance worker the use of a wheelchair for the elderly tourist. Maybe he wanted to get a better view of my face, see if I matched the Wanted poster under the counter.

  I nudged my father. Beyond the glass entry doors I saw the Jetta idling in the passenger-discharge lane, its exhaust like a white plume. I put more pressure on my father’s arm. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

  He gasped. I thought I’d hurt him. Then I saw her. Short and compact, with straggly hair tinted the henna shade favored by women who learned their beauty secrets in the former East Bloc. In an instant she was beside me, the muzzle of her pistol a hard circle pressed into my back. She said something in German, a command that had to mean “Come with me.”

  I dropped my father’s arm and half turned toward her. The circle became a sharp line running along my kidneys. I hugged the bag with both arms against my stomach. “You won’t shoot me,” I said. “I’ve got enough Semtex to take us all to kingdom come.”

  She hesitated. Then the pressure on my back eased. As the muzzle moved toward my father, I chopped down on her wrist with my left hand. A twenty-five-caliber Glock hit the floor, the clatter of plastic against concrete lost in the white noise. My face was separated from hers by fewer than six inches.

  Her eyes shifted toward the floor, searching for the gun. But before she could go for it, my ball peen hammer caught her on the bridge of her nose, perfectly centered between those eyes. She dropped to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The Glock was under her sprawling body. Nearby, a woman squealed. The clerk in the information booth shouted, but I couldn’t understand the words. I shoved the hammer back into my belt. Someone screamed as if terrified.

  Time to run. But running was impossible. My father stood there as though he were the one who’d been coldcocked. I gently bumped him forward. “Come on, Dad. My car’s outside.” He seemed to register the Jetta then. Slid one foot in that direction. Then the other. Step by slow step, we made it through the door, over to the curb.

  I yanked open the door and helped my father lower himself into the rear of Erika’s car. I slammed the door. Ran behind the car, jumped in the other side. The Jetta slid smoothly away from the curb.

  I balanced the bag firmly on my lap as I unbuckled the electrician’s belt. I couldn’t get enough air. “I’ve got a bomb,” I said to Erika.

  “Hans is skillful with explosives,” she said, carefully steering us toward the street. “He’ll disarm it.”

  “Sure,” I said. If he catches up with us before it explodes.

  22

  I reached over and fastened the seat belt across my father’s lap. He sat as if in a stupor, his chin forward on his chest, his eyes closed. His breathing was labored and the air whistling out smelled of acetone, like the breath of a feverish child.

  Erika was watching us in the mirror. “Is he okay?” she asked.

  “No.” My fingers touched the back of his hand. “Dad?”

  He didn’t react. Maybe he was hurting from all the sudden movements, but that didn’t explain why he seemed so out of touch. I had to get help for him.

  But first we had to deal with his carry-on luggage. The plastic bag was slick beneath my fingers, the weight ominously heavy on my lap. I yearned to pull up beside the next Dumpster and heave it away. But that would endanger anyone nearby when it exploded. We had to dispose of this present ourselves.

  Unless it disposed of us first. “Want to guess when this will go off?” I asked Erika.

  Her eyes met mine in the edge of the mirror. “Most likely Krüger set the timer to explode over the Atlantic.”

  “On the Global flight from Frankfurt.”

  “What?”

  I held up the ticket I’d been studying. “My father was using his return ticket. The one he bought on December thirtieth. He was trying to catch the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. He’d have taken Global from there to Kennedy.”

  My face was warm, my whole body overheated by dread. Sweat soaked my T-shirt under both arms, dampened my bra between my breasts, made a wet circle on my back. I smelled the rancid odor of my fear.

  Above us the sky was cloudless, a piercing blue that intensified the winter sunshine, the harsh beams bouncing off the concrete and assaulting my eyes. My father and I sat like two hunchbacks, he bent by his pain, me unthinkingly curved around my parcel as though I could contain it. I repeated Erika’s calming words. The bomb was probably set to explode four to five hours from now, when my father would’ve been over the Atlantic. But maybe Krüger thought it would be more fun to have it explode on the ground. Tracking my father to the airport had been too easy. Was I now sitting at ground zero, right where Krüger wanted me?

  My heartbeats magnified. They exploded inside my head, the giant ticks of a clock counting down to our doom. I heard them, each and every one, at least a thousand total in the ten additional minutes it took for Erika to get us back to the industrial park.

  We left my father’s package in the car while Erika and I brought him indoors. Then she went back outside and moved the Jetta to the far side of the lot, beyond the rows of concrete block. I heard every rumble of the engine, every grating of rubber against gravel. My wet T-shirt turned icy against my skin and my sour scent filled my nostrils.

  I tried to get my father to talk with me, tell me where he’d gone and what he’d done for the past few days. He was as cranky as a child, cheated of his sleep. Kept insisting it was time for “a little lie-down.” I helped him into the cubicle where I’d rested the night before. He curled up on the cot at once, pulling the bedroll up to his chin and squeezing his eyes shut as though that would make me leave him alone.

  I’d never heard of a drug that worked like this one, but his strange behavior had to be chemically induced. I reached out to touch my father’s shoulder, then drew back my hand. Let him rest. Let it wear off, whatever it was.

  Erika was still outside. My mov
ements were jerky with tension. I went back into the main room and forced myself to do something, anything, besides listen for the sound of Erika being blown to bits. I ran rusty water from the spigot until it turned clear, the thin stream tinny against the steel-bottomed sink. I filled a teakettle and set it on the hot plate. As the coils reddened, the spatters burned off, filling the room with the scent of scorched fat. On the shelf above the hot plate I found a jar of instant coffee and a battered container of Earl Grey. I set both on the table, along with mugs and spoons.

  The kettle shrieked. Erika came inside. My shoulders dropped. She was okay. She made a phone call, then said, “A doctor will come to check your father.”

  Outside, gravel again scattered beneath a set of tires. Erika hurried to the door and opened it. “Hans,” she said over her shoulder to me. She spoke to him, then came back in. “Bert may have some broken bones. The police took him away for X rays.”

  “The cops didn’t figure out Bert’s connection to van Hoof?”

  “No,” she said. “And they won’t learn anything from Bert.”

  A car door slammed.

  I started.

  “Calm down,” Erika said. “He’s good at this.”

  I spooned instant coffee into a cup, poured hot water over it. The crystals foamed up. I didn’t want coffee, but I had to do something. Had to stop listening for explosions. Had to stop thinking about my father. Had to concentrate on Krüger. He’d abandoned his plan to come to the States with me. I wondered why. But the more critical question was, what would he do instead?

  Erika sat down and clinked a spoon against the edge of her cup. I poured more hot water in. She kept stirring with the spoon, swirling whitish scum in circles.

  I sat down. “At least we can defuse this one.”

  Her eyes were on my face. “You think there is another? That your father’s flight was not the one Krüger’s been planning to blow up all along?”

  I shook my head. “Giving that bomb to my father was not part of Krüger’s original plan. No, Krüger’s been working up to a major incident since long before I became involved.” I ran my gaze around the room, automatically searching for a calendar. I didn’t need to check. “Wednesday. Everything he said points to Wednesday as the day. A farewell blast timed to occur after he leaves Germany for a safe haven.”

  “He must have picked Global 500 as his initial target before he decided to seek safety in the U.S.,” Erika said. “It defies common sense, killing so many Americans, then going straight to their homeland.”

  I picked up my coffee cup, then set it back down. I’d given this point a lot of thought, puzzling out why Krüger had seemed so arrogantly confident that he’d retain his power over me when we reached the U.S. I said, “Remember, he’s using Lockerbie as a model. He concealed his role in that one. He’ll do it again. Both the Global 500 bombing and the next one will be clearly identified as the work of terrorist groups.”

  “But how could he be sure no one would discover he was the one who planned the bombings?”

  “He’d definitely have covered his tracks well. And, given the valuable information he was bringing with him, nobody in the U.S. would have looked hard for a link either. Just like Harry—they’d have wanted to go on believing he was clean enough to do business with. All the people involved with him would have had a strong interest in not connecting him to international terrorism.”

  Erika frowned. “What you’re saying is reasonable, but I think he started this with a different safe haven in mind.”

  “Of course he did. Libya is the obvious choice. But there are hazards in being the guest of Qadhafi. When I came on the scene, he saw a way to arrange a more attractive future in the States.”

  Erika clicked her teeth together, her forehead still creased. “Going to America was an inviting option. But after he met you, he realized that plan contained too many variables beyond his control.”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t think Krüger had gotten cold feet. I’d detected no doubt in his cavalier assumption that I’d do as he wished. And so long as he held my father hostage, he was right. “He wanted me to know he was going to blow up another plane.”

  “To guess what he planned, but to tell no one.”

  “And to save my father, I had to share his guilt.” I remembered Krüger’s cool assertion that without his help I’d have no way to solve my problems. “He was letting me know that he could make my situation worse whenever he chose.”

  “Perhaps not going to America achieves that in some way I can’t yet see,” Erika said slowly.

  I couldn’t see it either. “We need to figure out what he’ll do next.”

  “He can’t remain in Europe,” said Erika. “I’m certain the Israelis intend to kill him.”

  “He’ll go to Libya,” I predicted.

  “Qadhafi will know that he orchestrated the next terrorist action. Krüger will be a hero in Tripoli.”

  “He wants his arrival there to coincide with whatever he’s planned for Wednesday.” I saw the problem clearly now. To stop the next bombing, we had to catch up with Krüger before he reached safety in Libya. We had to extract all the details of his plan from him. If the Mossad killed Krüger before we got that information, our only hope of preventing the incident would die with him.

  The door flew open. In van Hoof’s hands were the two halves of a boom-box case. He slammed the door shut and then crossed the room to drop the plastic on the table between us. Toshiba.

  “They’d have stopped your father as soon as he put this on the security belt,” van Hoof told me. “It was a setup.” He slapped a piece of gift-wrap on the table. “Krüger wanted him caught with this.”

  I drew the wrinkled paper toward me. The tag was glued to the silver gift-wrap. It read, “To Dad from Casey with love.”

  “And inside the player?” Erika asked.

  “Semtex all over the printed circuit board.” Van Hoof tapped the casing. “Identical to the one used to blow up Pan Am 103. Everyone knows this piece of equipment.”

  “But my father would’ve told them . . .” I let my voice trail off. I couldn’t guess what my father truly believed about my involvement with Krüger. I said, “That’s why Krüger let my father travel to the airport so openly. It didn’t matter how I reacted.”

  Van Hoof said, “Given the tight time frame, odds were you’d botch any attempted interception. Be caught by airport security with the bomb.”

  Erika said, “And if they stopped only your father—”

  “They’d have tied the bomb directly back to you,” van Hoof finished.

  Erika’s eyes seemed to turn a darker blue. “That’s why Krüger made your father use the same ticket,” she said.

  “He was making his return trip precisely two weeks after the Global 500 bombing,” I said slowly.

  “The investigators would conclude that you had been involved in the preparations for both disasters,” van Hoof added.

  “Causing me trouble won’t count for much in Tripoli.” I frowned, trying to make sense of it. “Why is Krüger wasting his time?”

  “Stefan loves you.” Erika’s fingers were cool on the back of my hand. “And Reinhardt Krüger hates his brother. He knows that harming you will harm Stefan.”

  Stefan. I felt a sudden surge of panic. “Where is Stefan?”

  “We have a bungalow in Limburg, in eastern Belgium, situated on a ridge above the Maas valley,” Erika replied, her voice soothing. “A safe location. Danièle and Hilly-Anne took him there.”

  Stefan hiding out from his brother. Unless I could defeat Krüger, I’d have to do the same.

  My stomach clenched, a gut-twisting bitterness unrelated to all my motives for capturing Krüger alive. He’d tried to kill two people I loved. Savaged my career. Wrecked my life.

  I wanted him to suffer. Suffer hideously. Then die a horrible death. Van Hoof’s eyes were on me, and suddenly I knew—I knew—what drove him.

  That desire for vengeance blazed up. Just as quickly, dre
ad snuffed it out. Bloodlust left an aftertaste like ashes in my mouth. And fear knotted my stomach. “I think we need to take a hard look at what Krüger’s after—” I began.

  Erika held up a hand, her head tilted toward the door.

  I heard something disturb the gravel outside. Van Hoof moved to the right of the entry. He hand-cocked his Browning with a sharp click. I was on my feet, too. I moved into position on the left of the door, behind Erika. I felt the handle of the hammer in my fist. I didn’t remember grabbing it from the counter.

  23

  Erika said, “Danièle and Hilly-Anne are here.”

  Van Hoof said, “If you’re going to run this place like a convention center, I better set up a guard post.”

  “My friends will make excellent sentries,” she said, opening the door.

  The Vespa idled ten feet from the entry. The two women were both in motorcycle leathers now, their heads and most of their faces covered by glistening blue-black helmets with smoky plastic shades over the eyes. But their mouths were visible, their teeth gleaming. Erika stepped outside to talk to them.

  I shut the door and dropped the hammer back on the counter. I pointed at van Hoof’s weapon. “Got one of those for me?”

  “Certainly,” he said, moving to a padlocked storage locker. When he opened it, I smelled gun oil. Inside were at least a dozen Browning pistols and four times that many boxes of nine-millimeter parabellum cartridges.

  How many Browning weapons had I seen in the past week? “Is this the only gun available around here?” I asked van Hoof.

  “The finest firearm in the world,” he said.

  I hefted one in my hand. “Designed by a Mormon from Utah.”

  “And crafted by artists in Belgium.” He handed me a box of cartridges.

  I fed the bullets into the magazine. The gun was manufactured by the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre of Liège, a town whose armorers had been supplying weapons to all sides since the Middle Ages. A Modèle 1900 had been used to kill Archduke Ferdinand during his Sarajevo visit. FN’s guns had gotten even more accurate in the eighty-odd years since then.