Dropped it and left it and now a mob of big sturdy black ants swarmed on it.
He wondered how long that doughnut had been out there. Probably only an hour or so, it didn’t look that old. Self-consciously, he looked around. The urge started in his eyes and descended into his mouth, and he felt the saliva start at the back of his tongue.
He licked his lips and stared at the pastry.
The insect activity seemed to burst from a bulge of jelly on the side of the pastry. He squinted. The way the thin light hit the jelly made it look almost voluptuous, like a naughty fat lady’s red titty nipple.
He pulled his eyes away. He had to control himself. Like the Mole said. Concentrate on the Big Picture. Charon grinned, remembering an old line from that TV show, where David Carradine played Kane, the kung fu pilgrim. The greatest compliment a student can pay his teacher is to surpass him. The man he called the Mole had admitted that Charon had surpassed all his expectations.
The phone rang, right on time. The Mole was punctual, as usual. Charon got out of the car, carefully stepped over the jelly doughnut, entered the booth, and picked up the receiver.
“This is Charon,” he said.
“Listen, we have a problem,” the Mole said.
“You mean the rain; I know. We got it to the site. But we’ll have to wait for the rain to stop to get it in position.”
“I mean in addition to the rain.”
“Okay, what kind of problem?” Charon asked.
“Remember Rashid? You met him in Winnipeg for the demonstration.”
“Sure. Rashid.” The Saudi prick. “He didn’t particularly like me, but he liked what I had to sell.”
“Listen. He was taken in Detroit…”
“Taken?”
“Captured, arrested. He knows a lot.”
“He doesn’t know where. And he doesn’t know when.”
“But he knows about the weapon and the kind of target. He met us. He gave us an advance. He was trained in the camps, he should be tough. But it’s been my experience they start to go soft once they get over here.”
“Unlike you,” Charon said.
“That’s right. I’m a student of history, not the Koran. History tells me that one out of three talk during interrogation. And remember, we’re not among the faithful, we’re just the hired help. He may give them something; a place, a name, to protect his other operations.”
“If he talks, how much time have we got?” Charon asked.
“No telling.”
Charon’s breath came more rapidly. The idea of the government sending agents after him increased his heartbeat. Looking down, he saw that the black ants had started climbing over his boots. Methodically, he stomped on them. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Then he said, “Are you getting scared?”
“This isn’t funny. You should leave now, get in position near the target. Just meet me on the road,” the Mole said.
“Okay, okay. But I get to do another one. That was the deal.”
“That was the deal,” the Mole said with an audible sigh.
“You don’t sound real sincere. I can still pull the plug on all this. One phone call and it’s all over,” Charon said.
“A deal’s a deal,” the Mole said more firmly.
“Okay. So when we go do it, I want to take another one along.” Charon’s voice sped up. “To celebrate.”
On the other end of the phone connection, the Mole marveled at the total imbalance, the complete lack of proportion. Giving credit to a Jew had never been his style, but Hannah Arendt certainly summed it up when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” In his youth, he had killed out of political conviction. But now his former Marxism and Arab nationalism were seen as just another infidel pose. Jihad was the new battle cry back in the region of his birth. He had become a contract man. In the eyes of the jihadists he was a contemptible, but useful, smuggler of Western poisons: drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.
In turn, he held the jihadists in contempt: primitive fools, like the cleric in Egypt who urged his followers to go out and tear down the pyramids. But beneath the guise of his U.S. citizenship, he was still an Arab radical and was not opposed to killing Americans for money.
A lot of money.
But not for pleasure. He’d thought he’d seen it all. But he’d never believed in monsters, until now. And he had basically created this one.
“Well…” Charon demanded.
“Take your pick.” He could not quite disguise the disgust in his voice.
“Good. Okay. So that’s it,” Charon said.
“Unless the FBI comes knocking on our doors, it all depends on the weather…”
“I’ll keep an eye out, okay? And some of it depends on the weather. Most of it depends on me,” Charon chided him.
“Yes,” the Mole said carefully. Dealing with Charon was like walking on eggshells. Or live grenades. “Most of it depends on you. We need two days for the ground to firm up once the rain stops.”
“That’d be my estimate. It’s starting to clear to the west,” Charon said.
“That’s what I figure. But you should get moving. Your security’s on the way.”
“Oh, I see. You want to keep an eye on me? Whatsa matter, you don’t trust me on my own?” Charon’s voice cracked into a laugh. It was their personal joke. But the serious fact was, the operation was put together in such a way that only Charon could pull the trigger. The Mole wanted to make sure that nothing interfered with the rendezvous of Charon’s finger and that trigger.
“Just as long as you keep your impulses under control,” the Mole said, trying for humor.
“No problem there. See ya.” Charon hung up the phone, exited the booth, and, without missing a step, leaned down and snatched up the debris of the jelly doughnut. He wiped the smear of mud away and most of the ants and took a bite. The jelly squirted out and he had to lick the sticky goo from his fingers.
Definitely a sugar rush!
On the Minnesota-North Dakota border, the man Charon referred to as the Mole walked away from his remote phone booth of choice. He got back in his vehicle and headed north along rainswept Interstate 29. He hoped Charon was right, that this was the last of the front moving through.
But every time he saw a shudder of lightning on the horizon he flinched.
Not good.
It was still raining back where the weapon had been delivered. He imagined the tendrils of lightning sending out impulses that tickled the circuits in the power source attached to the blasting caps they’d set so lovingly in all that Semtex.
A ton of it.
Semtex, the Cadillac of explosives. A push to get the ball rolling.
Far to the east the sky flickered, and he braced behind the steering wheel as he counted the seconds until he heard a low rumble. He didn’t think that an electrical storm could prematurely power the detonators. But the technology was new to him; the combination of frequency and carrier-coded signal…
So he wasn’t 100 percent sure.
Damn.
The weapon sat in the rain, mired in the mud.
Simplicity itself. It hid in plain sight. Poised. Washed clean. A gleaming tribute to Al Qaeda’s brilliant high-concept, low-tech philosophy.
The things the Americans see every day will be the tools we use to kill them.
In very large numbers.
But the religious fanatics lacked the Mole’s cold vision. They thought it was a great victory to knock down a few buildings, to wipe out a few thousand city dwellers.
He had enhanced Charon’s original concept into something as grim as the plagues in the Bible. And, best of all, the whole world would get to watch it unfold live, in full color, on television. Unfold over days, weeks, and months.