She had spent most of that day watching him work and serving as another set of hands for him, always following his calm, clear instructions. She had become intrigued by him. At the end of the day, she had seen him take the last and worst and deadliest part of the device into his arms and carry it all alone. Her emotions—fear, admiration, gratitude—overwhelmed everything else.
And then she had openly, unabashedly thrown herself at him that same night. She had some trouble remembering what had happened before she met him. She had no problem remembering everything that happened that first day. Usually if she’d been drinking, details would be a little hazy the next day. But that night, after she’d had two powerful glasses of single malt Scotch, the inebriation sharpened her impressions and sensations rather than dulling them. The liquor had removed the surrounding distractions. The night had occurred in a mental tunnel. Her eyes had seen only him, and her ears had heard only his voice and hers.
Lately she had been going over the six days after that in her memory. It felt as though she were holding a piece of fabric in her hands and moving it slowly, inch by inch, examining it so closely that she was able to follow each horizontal thread as it went over the first vertical thread and under the next all the way from one seam to the other.
The part that remained remarkable to her was that on the first night they had both known they were very likely to die in days or weeks, and they had each accepted the other as the ideal person with whom to share those days and nights. Her impulsive attraction to the nearest wise and brave man had turned into something huge and real.
When she got blown up in her apartment, she had been more than injured. The doctors had switched her brain off artificially, and her consciousness ceased to exist for all that time. Dick had lived those forty-two days, but she had not. The doctors saved her by giving her a taste of death.
What now? She had been trying to ask that question since she was allowed to come back. Since she was revived. That was just the right term. She had been allowed to live again. What was supposed to happen next? What did she want to happen?
She thought back to the day when she opened her apartment door intending to face the dull necessity of doing her laundry and paying her bills. What had she been thinking just before thinking was cut short? She had not been making any decisions about the future. She had been intending to move a few more outfits to Dick’s place on that trip. That was it. She had not seen the need to make bigger decisions. She had known only that her shift for the day was over and she was planning to spend the night with Dick. Everything in her mind was about the next few hours.
She had made a choice. She’d thought, “Don’t think about the man who may kill you. He’s been there all along, and he’ll always be there. Think about paying your bills and getting clean clothes, and dinner tonight, and Dick. Be alive now.” And then she’d actually thought, almost making a joke on herself, “Boom.”
27
The bomb maker saw the cars coming a long way off. The road was flat and broad and straight, a model highway. But a strong east wind had been blowing for a couple of days, and now the wind had stopped, leaving sand and dust across much of the black asphalt and on the shoulders, so all he saw at first was two tan clouds like long tails. His mind had to supply the vehicles ahead of them like the heads of comets, but then he could see them, two black cars moving fast.
He stared at them, trying to make out any features he could. They could be the FBI or the ATF or some other agency. This was certainly the way they would come, fast and obvious as they traveled up the road from Los Angeles. Probably there would be other vehicles from the opposite direction, and then off-road vehicles crawling over the hills from behind his land on the old mine roads. When they converged to surround him, they would probably bring in a helicopter so he would know there was no way to be unseen, and no way to outrun them.
He went to the control box he had mounted on the wall of the coat closet near the front door, looked out the peephole toward the road, and waited. On three walls of the closet he had put steel plates from the floor to the six-foot level. The inner side of the closet door had a steel plate on it too, so they couldn’t just fire at the house with high-penetration rounds and hit him through the walls. The peephole was hidden behind the upper part of the black metal mailbox he had mounted on the porch wall outside, so he could look without anyone seeing the lens.
He opened the control box, where he had installed a board of toggle switches that activated the firing circuits of mines he’d planted in various places. One set was where the driveway met the highway, and there were others in rings around the house at a hundred yards, seventy-five, fifty, and twenty-five. He had mines down the center of the driveway every ten feet. He could activate any of the mines individually, or sweep down a whole row of toggle switches with the side of his hand.
He believed in explosives. They were reliable and instantaneous and merciless. He didn’t have to aim them; he just had to look out and watch to see when an attacker reached the particular rows of shrubs he had planted at various distances from the house. He had planted the rows of shrubs in front of his mines so attackers would choose them as places to take cover.
The bomb maker had also prepared in other ways for an attack. He had a pair of H&K MP5 rifles that he modified to restore them to fully automatic fire, and several thirty-round magazines for each. He had only one pistol in the closet, a Sig Sauer .45 with two magazines.
He didn’t imagine that if this turned out to be a visit from federal agents he would escape. He wouldn’t, but getting him would cost them a great deal. The number of corpses he made would be an expression of his value.
The two black cars slowed and stopped at the end of his driveway. Then they stayed there while the clouds of dust and sand slowly drifted away. Even at this distance he knew that the engines were still running because none of the windows rolled down. The Mojave Desert in August was a very hot place to sit in a closed car without air-conditioning. He remained motionless, watching them not move and thinking that the last hour of his life had begun.
He heard a phone ringing. He felt for his cell phone in his pocket and looked at it, but the screen was black. Had it been the house phone? He opened the closet door cautiously, because he knew that calling him would be a great way to lure him out of a hiding place. He ducked low and hurried to the phone on the other side of the living room. He heard the ring again, but it was not this phone.
What was the matter with him? The men in Niagara Falls, Canada, had given him a cell phone. The ones in the car must be those men. He ran. He had hidden the phone in his kitchen inside a cupboard and run the charging wire down through the cupboard to the outlet under the sink to keep the battery charging. As he picked up the phone the ringing stopped. He was sweating, the kind of sweat that felt as though it had been squeezed out of him. He stared at the telephone, trying to remember the number they had given him to call. He pressed the button to get the opening screen. The phone had been programmed with that number. Just as he raised his other hand to touch the screen the phone rang again. He swept his finger across the screen. “Hello?”
“We’re at the end of your driveway and we want to talk to you. Come out to us. Don’t bring anything with you.”
The bomb maker took everything out of his pockets and put it on the kitchen island. He set the phone down with his wallet and keys and walked to his front door so he would be visible when he stepped outside.
He opened the door, used the button on the doorknob to make it lock automatically, and closed the door. He had a key hidden under a pot among some potted succulents near the closest ring of land mines, so he knew he wouldn’t have to break in later.