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 my 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.”