“Well, Vic, let’s just get it all out then,” he said. He looked at Graver. “I guess this is a surprise,” he said, tilting his head at Last.
“Yes, this is a surprise.” Graver turned to Last “How long have you been working for him, Victor? From the beginning?”
Last didn’t know exactly how to behave, at least he had enough scruples remaining in his soul to be ashamed. He mumbled something lame about it being “just business.”
“We wouldn’t have known where you were tonight if it hadn’t been for Vic,” Strasser explained. “He’s been carrying a couple of special frequency beepers. He kept one turned on all the time so we knew where you were. Then, when he was sure where the money was going to be, he turned on the second one. We just homed in.”
Strasser then turned and waved at the plane again and another man jumped out Strasser turned back to Last “Where’s the other plane?”
“Around behind the hangar. They pushed it around there.” Last was ingratiatingly eager to help. He didn’t look at Graver again. Like a lamprey, he was firmly attached to Strasser’s soft, hosting underbelly. Last was going to make enough from his usefulness in this affair to pull off his own bourgeois retirement.
“Take these guys around there,” Strasser said to Last, as the second man jogged up to join the man with the radio.
Graver turned and waved for Remberto and Murray to come over to him. He looked at Strasser.
“I’ve got to tell them what’s happening here.”
Strasser nodded, understanding.
When Remberto and Murray approached it was clear they recognized “Geis” too.
“This is Brod Strasser,” Graver said. Remberto and Murray shifted their eyes from Graver to Strasser who just stood there with his hands in his pockets as though he was waiting for an elevator to arrive. “Kalatis was ‘stealing’ this money from him. He’s apparently already squirreled away over one hundred million. There’s forty million over there,” he said, nodding his head toward the hangar. “Strasser’s people have Neuman, Ledet, my assistant from my office, and Ginette Burtell. He wants the money.”
“Ho-ly shit,” Murray swore.
Remberto looked at Strasser as if he had seen it all before. This was the drug business.
“Mr. Strasser,” one of Last’s helpers yelled, “it’s going to be easier to push the plane over there. It’s a small Mooney. We could use the spot from the chopper.”
Strasser turned and walked back to the helicopter and told the pilot to turn on the spotlight.
“Did you talk to Neuman?” Remberto asked quickly as Strasser stepped away.
“Yeah, I did. And to my assistant She was keeping Ginette Burtell at my house.”
“Then Strasser’s people are actually holding them?” Murray said.
Graver nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
As Strasser started back toward them they all turned and looked at the path of the spotlight shooting down between the two hangars and saw the three men turn the Mooney and then begin pushing it toward them between the two buildings.
“I see some bodies over there,” Strasser observed incidentally. “The guards?”
“Yeah,” Graver said. “One of them killed-”
The explosion was a double impact: the bomb and then the Mooney’s fuel tank, both combining into a mini-mushroom that lifted up between the two hangars, incinerating the plane, Strasser’s two men, and Last in a fluorescing orange flash. The blast also blew the thirteen million dollars high into the night sky so that when the mushroom burned itself out in midair in a matter of one or two seconds, the only fire in the sky was another cloud, a floating, drifting, fluttering cloud of burning money, individual bills flittering crookedly like falling leaves, leaves afire, an autumn of burning millions.
Everyone gaped in stupefaction at the incinerating fortune that hung in a slow descent like a star-burst of fireworks.
And then Strasser screamed:
“God Almighty! God damn his soul to bloody hell! The son of a bitch…”
Everyone had the same thought at the same instant: Kalatis’s guards had probably left bombs on all the planes. All of the pilots had been doomed the moment they unloaded their planes and flew away. Kalatis had come close to making a clean sweep.
“The Pilatus,” Strasser croaked. When the Pilatus blew, it would take the van with it Forty million up in flames.
Remberto and Murray and Graver ran for Redden’s plane, lifting its tail and dragging it away from the door of the hangar. Since Last and Strasser’s men had just begun to push the Mooney it was still near the rear of the hangar when it blew and the fiery concussion blasted the rear wall of the hangar all the way into the office. Redden, Landrone, Landrone’s copilot, and the two clients could not have survived the blast.
Remberto was scrambling inside the van before anyone else could get to it. Throwing it into reverse, he roared out of the hangar and kept going all the way out to the helicopter which was already starting its rotors again. As Murray and Graver were running away from the Pilatus two more men bailed out of Strasser’s helicopter and started running toward the Pilatus while Strasser shouted instructions to them. They ran past Graver and Murray who spun around in disbelief and watched in horror as the two men climbed into the still-open cockpit as Strasser had ordered them to do. Strasser himself watched without any visible emotion as the two men confronted almost certain death on his behalf. He might have been standing at a gaming table where life and death played no part in the wager. But he wasn’t. And it did.
The prop on the Pilatus kicked on and almost simultaneously one of the men clambered out of the cockpit door with a briefcase with which he disappeared into the dark as the Pilatus revved and pulled away from the burning hangar, taxiing out onto the tarmac near the helicopter and the van.
In a moment the man came running out of the dark without the briefcase, running as hard as he could, and was well onto the tarmac when the bomb went off. Another red mushroom lighted the airstrip, and though they could feel the heat from its explosion, it was well away from the hangars and did no damage, the fireball dissipating quickly as the darkness rushed back into the space from which it had been driven.
It was only at that moment that Graver realized that both hangars had been on fire since the initial explosion, and their cars were burning inside the second one.
Chapter 81
Graver and Remberto and Murray stood on the tarmac and watched Strasser’s men unload the Pilatus and the van and stack the boxes of cash into the sleek body of the Bell 206L. Strasser walked over to Graver when it was all done.
“That’s twenty-two million,” Strasser said. “You know how much went up? Eighteen million. The biggest load was in the smallest plane.” He snorted. “I don’t know how Panos figured that.”
“How do I know my people are all right?” Graver asked.
“They’re all right,” Strasser said. He lifted the telephone he was carrying and punched a button again. He listened a moment. “It’s me. Give me fifteen minutes and then walk away from them. When you leave, tell them to call this number.”
He punched a couple of numbers on the handset, tried to dial out, listened, punched another button and handed the telephone to Graver.
“Here,” he said. “Your people will call you in fifteen minutes. But you can’t call out on that now. I just turned it into a receiver.” He looked at the still-burning hangar. “I imagine somebody’s on the way out here now anyway,” he said. He studied Graver. “This has been a hell of a deal for you, huh?”
“Yeah,” Graver said.
“What did you do, go around the bureaucracy?”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole thing started for you five days ago when Arthur Tisler turned up dead. Now you’re standing here talking to me. To tell you the truth, this surprises me very much. I’m not a pretentious man, Graver. I don’t see much use in crowing about anything, but I do know how I run things. I do know I’m good at what I do. Under normal circumstances you couldn’t have gotten this close to me in five years, let alone five days.”