He checked under the hood of Diane’s car. He had about thirty pounds of Semtex in a bundle attached to the wall of the car’s engine compartment. He had inserted the three blasting caps in the Semtex, and then attached one lead wire of each blasting cap to a circular saw blade he’d found in Diane’s toolbox and taped to the inner side of the grille and the other to a second circular saw blade he’d taped on the front of the radiator. He’d insulated the blades from the metal car parts with more duct tape, and connected the wires to the car’s battery. If the front end of Diane’s car accordioned to take the force of a collision, the two bare metal surfaces would clap together to complete the circuit.
Stahl judged that the men in the house had reached the stage when they were ready, but were looking around the inside of the house to be sure they’d done everything to prepare and left nothing behind. The men beside the cars had begun to pace or walk back to the house to check on their comrades’ progress. The approach of daylight must be bothering them as much as it did Stahl.
For the first time in his life, Stahl hoped the police would be late. When the cops came east up the highway, now they would be blinded by the sun and completely visible to the men at the house. The SWAT team would be here, but not ready to do what SWAT teams were supposed to do—apply military-level force to a civilian-level threat. They would be crowded into trucks, too late to be shielded by darkness, and too early to let the terrorists depart without a fight, but not prepared to win it. Many would die in the first minutes. And somewhere among the vehicles would be an unmarked police car carrying Captain Bart Almanzo and Sergeant Diane Hines.
Stahl climbed into Diane’s car and practiced what he would have to do when the time came—tightening the knot in the cable that would keep the steering wheel immobile, and then jamming the jack and tire iron between the gas pedal and the front seat. He took a few breaths. He had to do this now, before it was too late.
He started the engine. He drove the car up onto the highway with the headlights still off and the engine running low to keep the noise down, and turned toward the house. He was aware of the moment when the men at the back of the house detected the approach of Diane’s car. He saw one of them reach into the back of an SUV and bring out a rifle. The man opened his mouth to yell, but his voice was inaudible from this distance.
A second man put his hand on the man’s arm and said something to the others. Stahl knew he must be saying, “It’s only one car. It can’t be the police.”
As Stahl turned into the driveway and put the car in neutral, he got the impression that men were running toward the front of the house to stop him. He aimed the wheels of the car up the center of the driveway toward the garage, held it on course with one hand, and cinched the cable tight with the other. He used his right foot to jam the jack against the gas pedal and the other end against his seat, and step out. The last things he did were to pull the shifter to Drive, lock and slam the door as the car moved ahead, and then go low behind it to dash toward the dark desert where he’d come from.
He reached the brush at the right side of the property and kept running hard, staying where the bushes and plants screened him from the house. He sprinted as fast as he could to put some distance between him and the house. He heard rifles firing, as though bullets could stop the accelerating vehicle. When he reached a bowl-shaped depression in the land, he dived to the ground on his belly and clapped his hands over his ears.
Diane’s car was moving fast when it reached the garage door. It hit the sectioned aluminum door, and the two metal objects seemed to merge. The car’s front end crumpled as it bent the door backward, tore it out of the track, and pushed halfway into the bay as the two saw blades in the engine compartment clapped together like cymbals. The circuit was complete.
What happened next was too fast to be anything but a single event. There was simply an instant when the garage, the house it was attached to, and the cars behind it became motion. There was a bursting, expanding black wall of smoke with a fiery release of chemical power at its core. From the first instant there were boards, shingles, irregular pieces of wood and brick and concrete and glass that flew out in every direction at ballistic speed.
The blast was so powerful and hard that the ground kicked up against Stahl’s chest, arms, legs, and face. Dust and dirt were hurled hundreds of feet into the air and held there.
He kept his face down with his hands covering his head, hearing large objects fall to the ground all around him for at least ten seconds. When they landed on the pavement of the highway they made hard, ringing noises. The ones that came down near Stahl thudded and dug into the dirt.
During these seconds, a few large objects came down in the minefield around the house and set off secondary explosions that set off other mines in chain reactions.
When the mines had exploded there came a moment when the sounds all stopped. Stahl sat up and looked around him for a few breaths. The house was gone. The road was covered with things that didn’t belong. There was a heater/air-conditioner, a complex steel object like a drill press, a water heater, all charred and smoking. But most objects were only parts of things that had once been in or near the buildings. The remains of cars were barely recognizable dozens of yards away, just assemblies that were charred, bent, and torn apart by the explosives that had been loaded into them.
Stahl stood and began to walk. He saw nothing that looked to him like part of a human body. Either the body parts had been thrown too far, or the force and temperature at the center of the explosion had cremated the men and scattered their ashes.
He realized that dawn had begun as he surveyed the leveled spot where the house once stood. He could see shapes, but no color yet. He supposed this spot wouldn’t have had much color even when the sun was high. Nothing was living within a broad circle around him. It would be gray dust and ash until the wind blew it all off the surfaces that remained. The bushes and desert trees and brush were scorched and wrenched out and blown outward. Eventually a person driving by would probably guess something had been here only from the long, straight driveway that led a few hundred feet from the highway and stopped. And even now it would be clean. High explosives had a sterilizing effect.
49
Tucson, Arizona
January
Ace Feiker got out of his car a distance from the back wall of the property, and that put him half a city block from the house. It was just an estimate, because up here on the hills above Tucson there were no blocks. He walked along the empty road. The soundless steps of his black sneakers were long and fast because of the mood he was in. He felt like an ace. His mother had named him Asa, a name from the Bible, but it got shortened along the way, and Ace suited him better anyway.
The nights of killings always made him feel especially energetic. There was a feeling at the start like stage fright, with his heart beating and his lungs craving more air. But then, when the job began, he felt smart and slick and on his way to another win.
He had to be conscious of the passage of time. This was the rich part of Tucson, in the hills north of the city, not far from the big hotels with three golf courses and seven swimming pools, and parking a normal little car—not even new—on the road at night might make someone curious. The servants at big houses and the hotel workers usually parked somewhere on the property.
Ace reached the back wall of the yard, hoisted himself up to the top of the stucco wall, and rolled over it into the hedge, which took his weight like the arms of a mother and bent to release him gently onto the lawn.