by Thomas Perry
“Are you in a safe place right now?”
“Safe enough. I’m inside the condominium.”
“Then stay where you are until the officers get there.”
“I don’t plan to go anywhere.” She was sitting in the corner of the kitchen using the house phone. Dick was using her cell phone to track his phone, so there had been no better way to call the police to reach Almanzo.
Diane wasn’t sure why the police weren’t here already. She’d assumed the guards had called 911 right away, but now she thought probably they hadn’t. There must not have been time before they were killed. She had called during the thirty seconds or so while she waited in her car for Dick, but nobody seemed to know that either. Had her first call broken up because she was underground in the garage?
Using the house phone was the best way. The computer program that ran the emergency communication system had a reverse phone book, so it identified where a call had originated. The cops would be here soon.
She waited, holding the phone and listening to dead air. Now and then the emergency operator said, “Are you still there, Sergeant?”
She would answer, “Still here.”
The operator would say, “Keep standing by. I’ll be here with you.”
“I’m here,” Diane said. “If I have to hang up I’ll warn you.”
She switched the phone to speaker and set it on the kitchen table where she could hear it without pressing it to her ear. She wanted to keep both ears uncovered so if anything happened in the condominium building she would hear. She kept the M4 she had used to shoot the terrorist on the table with her hand near the trigger guard.
When had she decided to call him a terrorist? she wondered. She deduced that it was when she’d identified the AK-47.
The time seemed too long. She said, “Did I neglect to tell you that this is a life-and-death emergency? Where are they?”
“I’m showing them as all around you, pretty much,” the operator said. “They’re closing in.”
“Tell them I’m coming out.” She hung up.
She removed the magazines from the rifle and her Glock, left the guns and ammunition on the table, stood, and walked to the front door. She switched on the porch light over the front steps and opened the door wide without standing in it. She waited until a number of bright spotlights from the cars and police officers all converged on the spot, and then she stepped out with her hands high in the air.
When she got a few steps from the door and onto the lawn she knelt there to wait, her hands still high. She judged it was safe to look around, so she tried, but the bright lights made it impossible. She knew there was a SWAT team out there in the dark behind the lights.
Seconds later she heard the sound of men running in combat boots. The first shout was: “Lie down where you are with your arms spread.”
She eased herself forward onto her stomach and let the first SWAT team members approach.
As they dragged her to her feet, she said in a loud, clear voice, “I’m Sergeant Diane Hines, LAPD Bomb Squad, and I need to talk to Captain Almanzo, Homicide Special. It’s a Code Three.”
They ushered her toward the row of police vehicles that clogged the street. She knew she had to think of a way to force things to start happening. “Get him on the phone now!”
45
The bomb maker had been sleeping soundly for several hours. He had worked longer and harder than he considered wise. For several weeks he’d been stockpiling all the Semtex he could make. Since the night the terrorists said they were ready, he had been building explosive devices.
He had not wanted to deal with these men any longer than he had to. He was sure the terrorists were getting more volatile and dangerous each day. They’d been waiting for a year, and now that they had the guns and ammunition and had practiced in the desert, they were terribly impatient. They could hardly wait to kill someone.
He would once have said they could hardly wait to die but was no longer sure they were a suicide squad. During the last visit the bald man had told him they’d assembled things intended for survival—cars and food. Dead men didn’t need food. They seemed to have some notion that they could attack Los Angeles and live. It wasn’t a likely outcome, since the city was protected by about ten kinds of local, state, and federal cops, and the terrorists’ ignorance about that seemed to be causing cognitive dissonance among them. It seemed to him the reason they were so eager to launch their attack must be that the longer they waited the more likely they would be to lose their nerve.
For the past few days he had been working to shape and wire the immense new batch of Semtex into the right containers. He wanted the smaller ones to look like harmless objects, so they would be easy to leave in the open. Waste containers could go almost anywhere. Luggage could be left in and around airports, train stations, parking lots, bus depots. Potted plants could be placed near houses or in public buildings. Cardboard boxes inside shopping bags with the names of stores printed on them could be left in or around malls, stores, or restaurants. He had been collecting containers ever since he’d begun leaving bombs for the police. He had a good supply of yard ornaments, birdbaths, plaster trolls and statues, electrical fixtures and appliances. He had toys and games, basketballs and hollow aluminum bats. He had a few dozen orange traffic cones that could be filled and armed. He had bought two fire hydrants from a scrap yard and left their faded paint jobs intact so they wouldn’t be noticed. All of these devices required extra work, and all required that he see the object as part of a scene and an action, almost like a small play, ending in the triggering of the initiator.
Some of the larger devices had taken the most effort for him. They needed to contain very large quantities of Semtex—tens of pounds and up. They had to be delivered to sites, but some were too heavy to carry. He had loaded one charge into a portable electric cement mixer that had a tow hitch and wheels. He put one batch into a generator made for construction projects. Another he built into the van he used, all set into the bay and then covered with a false floor. There were seven blockbusters in all, each containing five hundred to a thousand pounds of high explosives. He was ready to blow up bridges and buildings, not just a few curious civilians.
But he was still not finished, not ready. He had at least two more weeks of very hard work ahead, and when he dozed off in his chair last evening after watching the news on television, he had forced himself to wake up only long enough to go straight to bed.
Stahl followed the red dot on the phone’s GPS map onto the 134 Freeway toward Glendale and Pasadena. He could see from the map that at least the black SUV carrying the corpse was staying on the freeway. As soon as it passed the junction with the Golden State Freeway he was sure it was still heading east. The Golden State could have taken them north toward Oregon or south toward Mexico.
Stahl kept driving, going faster now. He didn’t want to gain on them enough to be visible, but he also didn’t want to allow them too much distance. At some point they could simply stop, abandon those three vehicles, and take others. If they left the body inside one, he would have no way to find them again. Or they might just stop and dump the body somewhere. He had to be able to catch up with them in a minute or two. He and Diane had been lucky so far—lived through the attack and placed a phone among the assassins—but luck was never limitless.
He needed to be alert, be aware of their speed, and watch carefully for stops. They were on a freeway before 4:00 a.m., and they were in sparse traffic. There should be no need for stops unless something new was happening.
Diane’s phone rang. He didn’t want to do anything to interrupt the tracking of the corpse, but he knew he had to answer.
“Hello?”
“Dick? It’s Bart Almanzo.”
“Hi. I’m using the tracking program that’s installed in Diane’s phone to track the GPS on mine. We’re on the 210 Freeway heading east. I just passed Indian Hill Boulevard near Claremont.”
“I know. She installed the same program on m
y phone, so we’re tracking you and the body.”
“Good. If you call ahead, make sure the cops ahead of us don’t block them off. We’ve got to see where they’re going.”
“I know,” said Almanzo.
“How far behind me are you?”
“About forty-five minutes, maybe more.”
“I’ll let you know when I get where we’re going.”
“Do that,” said Almanzo.
Stahl ended the call and put the phone back on its stand. Then there it was, the red dot with the circle around it, still moving along Interstate 210.
They passed Victorville, then got off the interstate and moved onto Route 18. They moved along the road at almost freeway speed through Lucerne Valley and then turned north onto a nameless road.
Stahl could tell the road must be good because it was straight and their speed didn’t change. Out here that probably meant it was smooth and level. A road curved only if it had obstacles to get around or if it was on a steep hill.
Ten minutes later, the dot on the map stopped.
46
The bomb maker woke to the sound of wheels rolling up the gravel driveway. The SUV engines almost idled as they slowly approached the house.
He stood up immediately, put on his pants, and pulled the shirt he’d left on the chair on over his head. The nearest window was high, placed where the outer wall met the ceiling of his bedroom. He pushed his chair against the wall and stood on it to look.
It wasn’t the police or the FBI. It was only the three black SUVs. He swore to himself as he walked to the closet beside the entrance to his house. He turned off the firing circuits and made sure the door was closed so they wouldn’t get curious, and then opened the front door.
Tonight he wasn’t feeling just the usual irritation at their presumptuous, unwelcome visit in the middle of the night. He supposed that if they had to come, the middle of the night was the best time. But these visits were costing him. He felt the anger as a pressure this time, like someone squeezing his chest and making it hard for him to breathe.
He’d made an agreement with them, and he had been living up to his side. He was doing impossible things, many of them repeatedly, just to speed things up and meet their ridiculous schedule. In return, they were supposed to go away and leave him alone to accomplish his work.
As he stood there he had a fantasy in which he would throw open the closet, hit the switches to arm the circuits for the mines outside, and then begin closing the switches that would set off the ones beside the driveway where they would have to step when they got out of their cars.
To calm his rage, he reminded himself of the money he had almost finished earning. Usually that worked to distract him from annoyances. But he was so sick of these men that even the huge payment he’d demanded did not seem like enough compensation. They were swaggering and arrogant and brutish. Their bald-headed leader was irritating.
He began to open the front door, but it swung inward into his shoulder and side, knocking him backward onto the floor. Two men carrying a third who seemed limp and injured staggered toward him. He crawled to the side out of their path, and was immediately stumbled over and kicked by the gang of men coming in after them who didn’t see him lying there. He was hurt, and the pain frightened him. One of the men turned on the light, and the glare seared his eyes.
His right shoulder was injured. How was he going to be able to do the rest of his work? If he couldn’t use his arm properly he could blow himself up. And if he said he couldn’t do his work, what would these men do?
Making and planting explosives could be very delicate work, and if something went wrong right now, it wouldn’t be some minor problem. The whole house and workshop were filled with wrapped bricks and tubs of high explosives. He looked at the other man on the floor with him.
He could see the man was dead. There was a hole in the side of his temple. Nobody was trying to help him or stop the blood that collected under his matted hair. The bomb maker crawled closer, drawn mostly by curiosity, and saw that the other side of the man’s head was much worse. That was the place where the bullet had passed out of the skull—the exit wound. Blood and tissue and bone had been blown out.
“What happened?” he said.
He pushed himself off the floor with his uninjured arm and lurched to his feet with a clumsy stagger. He went into the kitchen and grabbed a roll of paper towels, and then returned to the living room. He knelt beside the corpse and began to wipe the thickening blood off his floor, making a pile of crumpled towels beside the man’s head.
He collected most of them and wrapped them in a length of towel to carry them out to the kitchen trash, but stopped and dropped them by the body when he saw the bald man come in the door with two other men in a muttered conversation. The bomb maker heard, “We’ll just have to do things more quickly, and fight that much harder. The important thing is to move right away, before they realize the meaning of what happened. We can’t give them time to bring in all their men and send for more.”
The bald man noticed the bomb maker standing there over the body, holding his right arm. “What’s the matter with you?”
“The door hit me and I fell. What happened?”
“That building was like a military bunker. We lost a man trying to get to Stahl.”
“Why?”
“Somebody shot him.”
“No, why get to Stahl?”
“Because we wanted to be sure the whole plan wouldn’t be ruined. Once bridges and buildings began to blow up, they would have brought Stahl back. He was the one who was always able to make your bombs harmless. We didn’t want to let that happen again. Not now.”
“Did you get him?”
“Probably not.”
“Probably not?” said the bomb maker. “What the fuck are you saying?”
In less than a second the bomb maker realized he had not been seeing the situation clearly. The bald man had already been chagrined, and while he had been standing there looking calm, his rage had been growing. His left hand shot outward and clamped shut on the bomb maker’s shirt, then held him there to punch him in the face with his right fist. He hit him six times in rapid succession, holding him immobile. When the bomb maker’s knees would no longer support him, the bald man let go of the shirt and gave a tremendous push that sent him into the nearest wall, where his muscles lost their strength and his body slumped to the floor. He was astounded. His life had not offered any opportunities to fight that he couldn’t escape. He felt shock and pain that he had never experienced before.
The men all seemed to go into motion to fill the sudden silence. One stepped into the bomb maker’s bedroom and came back with sheets and blanket stripped from the bed. He and two others began to wrap the dead man in them. Other men turned and went outside.
The bomb maker heard the engines starting, and then the sound moved around the side of his house as the cars were parked out of sight behind the buildings. He hoped none of them swung too wide and went over a mine, but he didn’t feel up to getting to his feet, running out there, and shouting warnings.
He felt profoundly harmed. He looked down, saw his own blood drenching his shirt, and knew his nose was broken. Other things inside his face were damaged too, as though maybe a cheekbone had been fractured. He had never imagined what this felt like. He was filled with anger and hatred.
47
Dick Stahl drove up the road slowly, alerted by the GPS that he must be very close to the place where the three black vehicles had stopped. As soon as he saw the house at the end of a long driveway that led far back from the road, he switched off his headlights and pulled off the pavement. He took Diane’s phone from its stand, and called Bart Almanzo.
“Almanzo.”
“Hi, Bart. It’s me. They’ve stopped. Do you have my location?”
“Yes. We’ve been tracking your phone. You’re on a road that heads north from Route 18, right?”
“Right. This seems to be where they were headed. We passed a
thousand places where they could have stopped if they just wanted to lose a tail or dump the body.”
“Can you describe the place?”
“The house is ranch style, one story, not big. There are lights on inside. It’s maybe two thousand square feet, but it has an attached garage that’s about a thousand square feet. It’s got space for at least four cars, and a few extra feet besides. I can’t really tell the color in the light from inside, but it’s white or pale yellow. The three black SUVs are parked behind the garage right now. In front of the house is a long gravel driveway—maybe two hundred feet, and there’s a lot of land in the back. It could be a hundred acres, most of it desert brush. I can’t tell what’s behind that, but along the horizon I see a line like mountains.”
“All right. We’re still maybe forty minutes behind you,” said Almanzo. “The best thing to do is back up and put a few miles between you and that house. We’ll be there.”
“I’m pretty sure this is the place we’ve been hoping to find all this time. It’s the perfect place to make bombs. There are no neighbors for a mile or two, no sign that people go by here much. It’s dark as the basement of hell, with no electric lights to be seen in any direction except the ones in that house.”
“Just wait. I’ll call the county sheriff’s office and some of the local police. We’ll cut off the road from both ends and move in.”
“We’ll lose these guys, and we’ll lose him.”
“Do you still think it’s one bomber?”
“It’s always one bomber. Somebody designs the devices, and he’s usually the only one who puts his hands on them until they’re assembled and ready. I’m really surprised he’s got all these men with him, but this is where they came. I’ll talk to you soon.”
