On Monday morning—yesterday—the truck had emerged from Clyde’s gate with a reconditioned shipping container on its back and made the short trip down to the barge terminal, where the container had been loaded on a barge bound for New Orleans, which departed immediately. Clyde drove down the river a few miles, hiked out onto a sandbar he knew, and checked it out as it went by, using a big pair of binoculars he’d borrowed from Ebenezer; “Aqaba,” its port of destination, had been freshly stenciled onto it. Clyde had called Hennessey, who had called some of his friends in the brown-water division of the Coast Guard, who had done an investigation of the container at Lock and Dam Number Thirty-one, where the Iowa River joined the Mississippi. The container was found to be full of corn oil, and nothing else.
Almost immediately after dropping off the container at the barge terminal, the Ryder semi had returned to the Matheson Works, followed closely by Knightly, vanished through the now-familiar gate, and emerged an hour later with a new container loaded on its back. Al-Turki proceeded to head east on U.S. 30. Fazoul chased him, just to make sure he didn’t double back, and Clyde, when he returned from his excursion to the sandbar, called Hennessey again. Hennessey pulled some strings at the Illinois Highway Patrol. They pulled the truck over on the pretext of searching for drugs. Once again, nothing but corn oil.
Then, late in the afternoon yesterday, a freight train had pulled out of the Denver-Platte-Des Moines yards adjacent to the Matheson Works, headed west, carrying several hundred shipping containers, several hoboes, and—by the time it had cleared the metropolitan area—three Ph.D. candidates belonging to the Vakhan Turk ethnic group, all dressed in the same gear they would have used for riding ponies over Central Asian mountain passes in the dead of winter. As the big freight had lumbered across the state of Iowa, these three had crawled up and down its length, one car at a time, checking the serial numbers and destinations of the shipping containers, and relaying them via citizens-band radio to none other than Ken and Sonia Knightly, who were shadowing the train in the four-wheel-drive Suburban. Ken did the driving, and Sonia wrote down the numbers and the destinations. Ken pulled in at every pay phone he saw so that Sonia could relay the information back to Fazoul, who typed it into his laptop, encrypted the data, and E-mailed it God knows where to be checked over by whatever intelligence apparatus Fazoul’s people were running.
By the time Clyde had got back from the Christmas Eve Mass late last night, they had identified one suspicious container, leased by a Jordanian company that was thought to be a front organization for Iraqi interests, and bound for Aqaba by way of Tacoma—an odd bit of routing that was suspicious in and of itself. While the Vakhans on the train could not get the container open to inspect its contents (and dared not, lest they spill botulin toxin along hundreds of miles of track), they did notice some suspicious welds and fittings along the bottom, which looked as if they might have been added recently. Perhaps it was a tank within a tank, the outer one containing corn oil to deceive any customs inspectors, the inner one full of toxin.
“Third time’s a charm,” Hennessey had said, and had proceeded to ruin the holidays of many FBI agents by mobilizing a C-130 and vectoring it westward. Notwithstanding his pessimistic statements in the Happy Chef, he seemed, within the last day or two, to have suddenly amassed tremendous power and resources.
As Clyde entered Metzger’s diner, Hennessey was probably passing overhead, making ready to intercept the train in a little crossroads town in western Nebraska where not too many people would be killed if it turned out to be booby-trapped. The rendezvous was going to happen in about four hours. Until then Clyde had nothing to do but be nervous, and to try to keep himself from foolishly hoping for too much. He had just talked to Ken and Sonia Knightly, who had encountered heavy snow on their way back across the state and had checked into a Best Western on the northern outskirts of Des Moines to wait the storm out.
“Morning, Clyde. Merry Christmas,” said a man’s voice, a polished and fine voice. Clyde looked to the end of the smorgasbord and saw Arnie Schneider sitting there before a bloody mastodon roast, gripping a giant two-pronged fork and a knife or short sword, using them to tap out a metallic rhythm on the edge of the butcher block. He was listening to a Walkman, probably to drown out the sound of the Christmas-music tape on the overhead speakers. He was eerily lit from below by the red glow of a powerful battery of heat lamps, and his bifocals, flecked with tiny droplets of juice and blood, reflected the meat table, upside down and miniaturized, a carnal microcosm. Clyde nodded at the mighty roast, eschewing the almost equally stupendous turkey. Arnie slid his weapon through the meat, cutting off an inch-thick slab, and the newly exposed face sighed out a glittering sheer waterfall of juices.