Tsar

by Ted Bell

  Come to Papa, boys.

  41

  He watched the cops exit the cruiser in his rearview. They got out with their guns drawn, approaching him from the rear on either side of the truck. When the guy on his side was abreast of the driver’s window, he rolled it down, gave the young cop a big smile, and said, “Was I going too fast?”

  “Sir, I’d like your driver’s license and registration, please.”

  “Absolutely, officer,” Paddy said, handing him the fake license and registration papers.

  “Your real name is Happy? That right?”

  “Yessir. Named after my old man. He was Happy, too.”

  “Sir,” the cop said, looking from his license photo to him and back again, “are you aware that this town is under an evacuation order?”

  “I was wondering where the hell everyone went. Evacuation, huh? What’s going on?”

  “How did you get this vehicle past the police barricades, sir?”

  “Weren’t any barricades up when I arrived.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Few days ago.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “You mean since I arrived?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’ve been asleep.”

  “You’ve been asleep for three days?”

  “Correct.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Motel 6. Real nice place.”

  “Sir, no one sleeps for three whole days.”

  “I do. I get these dang migraines. Once I get ’em, I just pop a bunch of Dalmane pills and nod on out. If I wake up, I take another handful. Wham, I’m out like a light. Hell, I just woke up a few hours ago.”

  “And what exactly are you doing?”

  “Delivering doughnuts.”

  “To an empty town?”

  “Well, see, here’s my thinking on that. Are you familiar with the franchise system?”

  “Franchise system.”

  “Yeah. My thought is this. I’m a baker. I bake the best damn doughnuts west of the Mississippi. And my business plan is to take my product direct to the consumer. I’ve delivered product in Junction City, Wichita, hell, all the way to Topeka. Don’t charge a nickel. I just deliver the boxes and let folks discover them for themselves. Now, I’ve got my Web-site address right on top of every box. People eat them, like them, and want more. That’s my strategy. Right now, I’m a one-man distribution system. But pretty soon, hell, folks are going to be knocking my door down. I’m going to open up a string of Happy Baker Doughnut Shoppes from here to Canada.”

  “They do smell pretty darn good back there.”

  “You see? That’s just what I’m saying! And you know what? They taste better than they smell. I’ve got some fresh glazed back there, you and your partner want to try a couple.”

  “Hey, Gene, you want a warm doughnut?” the young cop said to his older, and much fatter, partner.

  “Damn right I do, Andy,” Gene said. “You can smell them things a mile away.”

  “There you go,” Paddy said with a smile. “Let me go around and open up the truck. We’ll have us a nice hot breakfast up here on the hill. I got a thermos of steaming black New Orleans French Quarter coffee back there, too.”

  “Well, I guess we can do that. Not much else we can do. Andy, go back and get on the radio, will you? Tell them we’ve got a gentleman up here needs assistance, and we’ll be standing by in case, you know, anything happens.”

  Happy climbed out and opened up the back. He slid the loading platform out and opened up a box of glazed, a box of cream-filled, and a box of jelly.

  The two cops dug in, and while they did, he poured all three of them steaming cups of black coffee.

  “Dang!” Andy said, polishing off a glazed in two bites. “That is one hell of a doughnut.”

  “You feel happy, Andy?”

  “I sure do.”

  “Good. ’Cause that’s my new advertising slogan. ‘Eat Happy.’ You like it?”

  “Love it. Can I have another one of the cream-filled?”

  Ten minutes later, they were all sitting on the platform, talking football, whether or not the Chiefs would make the playoffs, and, of course, the war on terror. Andy said he thought the whole evacuation thing was a crock. Something dreamed up to scare ordinary Americans and make a laughingstock out of a whole town. That was the town consensus, he said.

  “Yeah?” Paddy said. “Well, maybe you’re right. Will you excuse me a sec? I got to get my smokes. Call me crazy. I can’t drink my morning coffee without my smokes.”

  “Go ahead. We’ll hold down the fort back here. See if the town blows up,” the young cop, Andy, said.

  “Yeah,” Gene said. “I can hardly wait. What a damn deal we got here. If she blows, we’re screwed. If she doesn’t, we’re a national joke.”

  It was five-fifty-five A.M. when Paddy unlocked the glove compartment and took out the rectangular black plastic box that had been sent from Moscow, through Iran, and delivered to him by courier in Miami a week ago today. It represented the very latest in remote-detonation technology. Every Zeta machine built had a GPS broadcast device built in, as well as the eight ounces of puttylike explosive called Hexagon. The machines also broadcast an ID number, much like the squawk system used by aircraft. So you always knew which machines were where before you decided to arm them or detonate them.

  The box Paddy held in his hand contained dual microprocessors in addition to the radio-signal command that would cause the Zetas to explode. The system was currently preprogrammed to detonate only those devices now inside the city limits of Salina, Kansas.

  “Hey, Happy,” Andy called, “c’mon back. You’re going to miss her if she goes.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gene said, laughing, “Miss the whole shebang. The whole damn shooting match.”

  It was five-fifty-nine A.M., coming up on six A.M.

  “I won’t miss it, Andy. I can’t find my damn smokes, that’s all. You got any?”

  “Hell, no. Cops can’t smoke for insurance reasons. Besides, my wife’d up and kill me she thought I was puffing on them cancer sticks. Why, she’d-”

  Paddy was walking back toward the rear of the truck with his finger on the button, eyes glued to the red digital display that was spinning down to zero.

  Now.

  You could feel the ground shaking, even up here on Hickory Hill. The three men stood and stared down in wonder at the little town as it exploded. It was like watching a movie of a building coming down, only it was all of the buildings, all of the neighborhoods, and they were all coming down at once, sending a huge cloud of smoke rolling skyward as the noise and sheer force of the blast came rolling up the hill and rocked the truck, spilling the coffee from all three cups and sending the doughnut boxes flying off the back of the truck.

  “Holy shit!” Andy screamed, walking out to the edge of the overlook. “They freakin’ did it! The goddamn A-rabs blew up our whole goddamn town!”

  Fires broke out everywhere. Power lines sparked, ignited, and came down, writhing like angry snakes in the streets. Underground gas lines exploded up through asphalt intersections, the power station was sparking into yet another inferno, and every last filling station in town had turned into a brilliant fireball that climbed into the dawn sky and lit up what used to be Salina like the Fourth of July fireworks every summer up at Hickory Hill.

  Paddy had his snubbie out, was looking down the barrel at the backs of the two Kansas policemen. He could easily put a bullet in each of them, shots to the back of the head, walk away. He raised the pistol, put a pound of pressure on the trigger…and then changed his mind.

  Having admired his work from afar, Paddy climbed up into his truck and stuck the key into the ignition. He had a long way to go and a short time to get there. He was catching the next thing smoking out of Topeka to Miami. There was a lot to be done before Pushkin lifted off in a matter of hours.

  He left Officers Andy and Gene standing there at the edge of the bluff, lo
oking down at what was left of the town they’d both grown up in, tears already drying on their cheeks.

  Happy had mixed emotions about sparing the lives of Officers Andy and Gene of Salina PD. But, but, but. He was a professional. He didn’t kill people for fun. Only for money. Or for a good reason. And he could see no good reason to off these two guys. If the two cops identified a crazy baker delivering doughnuts to a deserted town, so what? He’d be long gone before anyone could tie him to the multiple explosions that had flattened the place. And he seriously doubted anybody ever would.

  Anyway, by the time anybody had a clue what had blown Salina to smithereens, the world would be an entirely different place. A lot of America might look like the blackened ruins smoldering at the bottom of the hill. And Happy? Hell, he’d be sailing the skies above the blue Atlantic, enjoying the many pleasures of the floating pussy palace on what promised to be a very interesting voyage to Stockholm.

  The Happy Baker, his mission accomplished, silently rolled away, gone in a flash.

  Taking care of business, baby.

  TCB.

  42

  MIAMI

  It was gone.

  The whole damn town, just flat gone.

  Standing beneath one of the giant monitors mounted on a granite lobby wall, Stokely and Fancha, along with everybody else, were watching CNN images of a small Kansas town that no longer existed. Rumors were flying.

  The buzz inside the teeming Miami Herald lobby was this, it was that; it was al-Qaeda, it was Hezbollah, no, it was the Iranians, some kind of small nuke, a dirty bomb, hell, no, it was simply a main gas line under the town that had blown, a fertilizer factory, some even theorized a fertilizer bomb, set off by some home-grown disciples of Timothy McVeigh, antigovernment militia still simmering over Waco and Ruby Ridge.

  The real truth was, nobody knew what the hell had happened to Salina, Kansas. Especially not the talking heads on CNN, in Stoke’s opinion, anyway. Anybody who did know, wasn’t talking to the media.

  On the oversized monitors throughout the lobby, the all-too-familiar banner “Breaking News” was running beneath devastating live pictures of what used to be the little town of Salina, Kansas, population 42,000. Salina was now a charred, smoking ruin, with nothing standing but a few brick chimneys and a blackened water tower.

  “What’s this all about, Stokely?” Fancha asked, a worried frown on her face. “Terrorists?”

  “I don’t know, baby. Could be terrorists. Maybe just a chemical plant or an underground natural-gas main. Could be anything. But we’ve got to be getting aboard, anyway. We’ll get more scoop soon as we’re settled in our stateroom.”

  “A whole town? Just gone?” she said, staring at the monitor. “Unbelievable.”

  “Yeah, but the town was completely evacuated before, right? So somebody knows something, and whatever it is, they ain’t saying yet.”

  One thing Stokely Jones did know for sure: this might turn out to be very, very bad news. For America. For the whole damn world. Say it wasn’t a simple accident, gas main or whatever. Some terror group takes out an entire American town? That’s a message, no matter who sent it. But he’d cleared this trip with Brock, check out Tsar and besides, he’d promised Fancha he’d accompany her, and a promise was a promise.

  He gave her waist a squeeze.

  “Let’s go, baby, this is going to be fun.”

  She was nervous as a cat about this trip, and she was counting on him, big time. Hell, he’d been smiling since the second he woke up that morning, making breakfast, making bad jokes, trying hard all day to keep things upbeat. He took her elbow and steered her toward the short lines waiting at the elevators to the rooftop. They were a little late, and most of the passengers were already onboard.

  “You believe all the famous faces we’re rubbing elbows with?” he said.

  “You don’t rub elbows with faces, Stokely.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Faces don’t have elbows. People have elbows.”

  “True enough.”

  Still, the lobby was celebrity-packed, filled to overflowing with the rich and famous and their entourages, all of the remaining people who would shortly be boarding the giant airship Pushkin for her maiden voyage to Stockholm and the Nobel awards ceremony four days from now.

  “You excited, sugar?” he asked her, leaning down to whisper in her ear.

  “Now that you’re coming, I am. I only feel safe when you’re next to me, Stoke. I need you by my side. That’s the Lord’s truth.”

  “I’m there for you, baby, you know that.”

  “What about you, Stoke? Aren’t you even a little excited?”

  “Honey, you know me. I only got two emotions. Hungry and horny. You see me without an erection, quick, make me a sandwich. Hey, look. You see who I see coming through the door? The Marlboro Man himself.”

  The vice president of the United States, a tall, rugged-looking rancher who hailed from the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, was entering the lobby. Tom McCloskey had come to see his wife, Bonnie, off. The veep was originally supposed to go on the voyage himself, but something had come up at the last minute. Stoke had been shaving early that morning when he’d heard on the radio that the vice president’s wife would now be traveling alone.

  Now Stoke figured it was maybe this disaster in Kansas that was keeping McCloskey close to home. Washington probably knew more than they were saying? Security was tight, crew-cut guys talking into their sleeves everywhere. Hell, Stoke had never seen so many Secret Service personnel in one room in his life. “M &M is in the lobby, moving to the elevator bank,” he heard an agent say. M &M, Stoke knew, was the Secret Service call sign for McCloskey. It was based on a moniker the agents had given McCloskey when he first arrived at the White House, Marlboro Man.

  Of course, any number of Washington types, senators and their wives, were on the trip. Congressmen, God knows who all, but players, mostly. He saw the governator of California and his pretty Kennedy wife, big-time business magnates like Michael Eisner and that Apple guy, Steve Jobs, people like that. And there were Hollywood people, of course, big-time producers and a few movie stars, a few he even recognized.

  Plus, you had all the geeks and brainiacs. The Nobel Prize winners and nominees from around the world and their families. A lot of former Nobel laureates had been invited, too, according to the fancy formal invitation Fancha had received at her home on Low Key. Stoke had actually read it. This trip would be the biggest congregation of Nobel laureates ever assembled.

  You could understand the excited buzz in the air. Hell, you had media everywhere, celebs mixing it up with geniuses, people thinking and acting as if they were part of history. And they were. The first ocean crossing of the world’s biggest airship, the largest vessel to ever cross the Atlantic. Kinda like the maiden voyage of the Titanic, back in the day, Stoke was thinking, but he quickly shoved that bad thought aside.

  They’d finally made it to the front of the line, next ones to board the elevator. There were monitors on the walls here, too, some kind of a press conference going on. Stoke ignored the hubbub and listened carefully, but there still didn’t seem to be much new information.

  Clearly, nobody, including the state trooper captain in Kansas, had a clue yet to what had happened. He was now holding forth at a podium on a hill overlooking the town.

  “Stoke, did you remember to pack your-”

  “Hush a second, baby, I want to hear this.”

  “Sir, first question,” a young female reporter said. “How’s the mayor doing? We hear she’s suddenly gone into seclusion.”

  “That’s correct. Mayor Bailey was taken violently ill sometime during the night. She’s at an undisclosed location with her family now, and they have asked that the media please respect their privacy.”

  “Where are they, sir?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “No truth to the rumor that there was foul play involved? That her disappearance is
somehow tied to all this?”

  “None at all.”

  “Sir, moving on from the mayor, how long ago did you get the order to evacuate?” an NBC talking head asked.

  “The first call came in at four o’clock this morning, Central time.”

  “Who made that call, sir?” another reporter asked.

  “That would be the governor. The second call came direct from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.”

  “And what did the FBI tell you?”

  “To evacuate the town immediately.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a threat.”

  “From whom?”

  “Didn’t say. Unspecified. But credible, that’s what they said. Credible.”

  “Al-Qaeda?”

  “Like I say, unspecified.”

  “And you were able to evacuate everyone in time?”

  “Yessir, we were. Salina PD, working with my folks, did an outstanding job. I’ve got the Salina police chief arriving here in about twenty minutes, and a couple of his officers. They were the last ones patrolling inside the town before she blew. They’d be happy to answer-”

  The elevator doors slid open, and Stoke and Fancha moved quickly to the rear. Stoke remembered that it opened at the back when it reached the roof. When it did, he and Fancha stepped out into the brilliant Miami sunshine and looked up at the moored airship, her gleaming hull strung with red, white, and blue bunting. Stoke didn’t say anything, but he thought the stars and stripes sort of clashed with the big red Russian stars painted on the ship’s tail sections.

  There were velvet ropes on either side of the red carpet leading to the moving stairs at the stern of the ship, lots of cameras pointing and clicking as he and Fancha walked by. Not clicking at him, at Fancha.