“Maybe,” said Sutton. “I guess time will tell. I like your other idea, though. Maybe we can make a deal tonight and be ahead of the game. What do you want to offer for the ten rifles?”
The bomb maker thought about his problem—finding AK-47s with no histories and getting them to his house without having his name on any government list. These, if the story Sutton told his friends was true, were probably brand-new, and he was far ahead of the schedule he had devised. “I’ll give you the going rate in cash tonight. No haggling. What everybody seems to ask is a thousand a rifle. I’ll give you a thousand a rifle. Ten thousand cash for the lot of them.”
Sutton looked at him for a moment, and whatever doubts he had seemed to fade and disappear. “All right.”
“Where are the guns?”
“In my room at the hotel across the way. You staying there?”
“Yes,” said the bomb maker.
“You bring the money and we can load the guns into your vehicle right away. You got a truck?”
“A van.”
“That’ll do it,” said Sutton.
They shook hands and walked out of the bar. When they reached the street they looked up and down and saw that there were long breaks in the traffic. At the right moment they stepped into the wake of a semi and strolled across to the hotel parking lot.
Sutton said, “Bring your van over here to the nearest spot to this door, and I’ll start bringing the guns down.”
The bomb maker trotted to his van as soon as Sutton went inside. When the bomb maker got into the van he removed one of the rifles he’d already bought, inserted a loaded magazine into it, and set it down across the passenger seat. Then he sat still for a moment. He scanned all the windows and balconies, then the dark spots around the hotel. He saw a room on the fourth floor where two men stood on the balcony looking down on the lot. They were the same two who had been in the bar with Sutton. He watched for a few seconds, then pulled his van into a space near the door to Sutton’s corridor. He went into his suitcase and found a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills that had the numerals “10,000” and stuck it in his jacket pocket.
In a moment Sutton came out with a two-wheel dolly that held a box. When he moved up behind the bomb maker’s van, they lifted it off the dolly into the van. The bomb maker looked into one end of the box and saw five muzzles and into the other end and saw five rifle butts. He pulled one out at random and examined it, then said, “Looks good. Want to get the others?”
Sutton said, “What’s to stop you from taking off with those five while I’m up there?”
“Okay, let’s go together.” He locked his van.
They walked into the building with the dolly, took the elevator, and walked to a room on the fourth floor. Sutton opened the door and loaded the second box on the dolly.
The bomb maker examined the other five rifles and said, “Here’s your money.” He handed Sutton the banded stack and then stepped back to look out the window so he could see his van. “Feel free to count it.”
Sutton leafed quickly through the stack. “They’re all hundreds. That’s good enough for me.” He put the money in his coat pocket and started to wheel the guns out.
The bomb maker said, “I’d be careful from here on. People in the hotel will have seen us hauling these guns out. They’ll know you must have gotten a lot of money for them.”
“Don’t worry. They’re the only guns I’m selling, not the only guns I have.”
They took the rifles down and loaded them in the bomb maker’s van. They shook hands, and the bomb maker drove off. He turned into the parking lot of a diner far down the street just before the city road met the highway, and pulled in between two big semi trucks.
While he waited he loaded a second thirty-round magazine for the AK-47 he’d already taken out and set on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he saw Sutton, the man who had sold him the weapons. Sutton drove past the lot, but didn’t see the bomb maker’s van. He was busy looking in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. Then he swung up the westbound entrance to the interstate. After about two minutes another truck pulled up the ramp after him. The driver was one of the men who had been in the bar with him hours ago.
The bomb maker shrugged. He had warned Sutton. Looking for a buyer for ten military rifles was a dangerous task, but obviously it wasn’t as dangerous as the time after the sale was made and everybody knew you must have the cash on you.
For the first couple of hours he wondered if Sutton was going to make it home, but after that he forgot because he didn’t care. He had nineteen rifles, four more than he needed to keep his employers satisfied, and nobody knew his name.
When he stopped for a snack and a cup of coffee outside Salt Lake City, he went to the case where he’d been storing the .45 pistols he had bought. He hadn’t been paying much attention to them along the way, just buying a good one whenever there was one in the inventories of the private sellers. When he counted, he came up with only thirteen, so he headed southeast and bought his last two at the Houston show. Once he had all of the AK-47s and the .45 ACP pistols, he knew how many extra magazines and boxes of ammunition he could pay for in cash, so he bought them from a wholesaler at the show. He drove homeward in a leisurely manner, not taking any chances of being stopped by police.
30
The bomb maker drove his van into his garage and closed the door with the remote control. He cleared his AK-47 rifles to be sure there were no forgotten rounds in any of the chambers, and then he examined them closely and carefully. They had all been cleaned and covered with a thin protective layer of gun oil, and at least ten of the nineteen had never even been fired. He locked them up, then carried his suitcase into the house.
He went to sleep and got up early the next day to begin work on the next stage. His clients had never said anything about the serial numbers of the weapons. Why would they care? They seemed to be terrorists, and if their guns were ever in the hands of the authorities, they would already be dead. Tracing the weapons could not harm them. But tracing any of the guns to a previous owner might lead to a description of the bomb maker, and maybe a surveillance shot of him, or even his van.
The next stage of the bomb maker’s work was purely for his own protection. An AK-47’s serial number was stamped on the lower receiver. He put on latex gloves, took the first AK-47 apart, clamped the lower receiver on his new drill press, aimed the bit at the right spot, and turned on the power.
Removing a serial number was difficult, because the process of stamping the number into the steel made microscopic changes deep in the metal. After filing or buffing it was still possible to bring back the number. The only way that really worked was to set a drill on the surface and drill all the way through. There had to be nothing left to read.
When he finished the first rifle, he put it in a fresh, clean metal box and began to work on the next one. Removing the numbers took two days. In the end he had fifteen AK-47 rifles with no serial numbers.
He cleaned another steel storage box and went to work on the .45 ACP pistols. The Beretta numbers were on the left side of the receiver. The Springfield, Smith and Wesson, and Sig Sauer pistols had a variety of locations—either side of the receivers or on the underside. He went about the work patiently and drilled all of them off.
At the gun show in Houston he had bought a fully functional replica of the original trigger and sear mechanism for the AK-47. Now he went to work duplicating enough of these parts for all nineteen rifles.