We reached the toe of the fan, and highway 190.
We’d traveled 190 yesterday, to Twenty-Mule-Team canyon. Turn left onto the highway right now and we’re almost there. Real convenient, I thought, for Brother Roy to transport a cask from Point D to the borax mine.
I turned the Cherokee right, heading for the Inn. Back to the barn.
We passed the crumbly white travertine I’d noticed yesterday, bearding the Funerals fan.
“Look Pria,” Walter said, pointing out his window, “where it’s white.”
I knew it. He couldn’t resist.
“Those deposits,” he said, “are from old dry springs.”
“Aliens used to camp there, Grandfather. There was water then.”
I just had to join in. “Look further, Pria — at all that mesquite. There’s water here now.”
“Well yeah. Like, bighorns drink there?”
Well duh, like this is only the second time I’ve been on this road and I didn’t see any bighorns yesterday. All I saw now was a covered flume paralleling the highway. Aliens built that, I thought. Aliens to the desert.
“Mr. Miller,” Pria said, “it’s not nice to keep texting when people are talking.”
The car went thick with silence and then Hap gave a rough laugh. “You’re right. Can’t come up with a good reply anyway.”
I heard the snap of his phone shutting.
I pulled off the highway and shut down the engine and kinked in my seat to look Hap in the eye. “What the hell is going on?”
He met my gaze. Second time today. He opened his phone and thumbed the keypad and passed it to me. “Message came just after we left the Inn.”
I read the text, at first not getting it, then I passed Hap’s phone to Walter. He read, and after a long hesitation, he passed it on to Pria. Because it’s sure not nice to exclude her.
She read, scowling. “Is this from the bad guy?”
Who else? I thought. Still, we’d be wanting Soliano to trace the message — to the resender in Bulgaria or maybe, this time, directly to Roy Jardine’s phone. I wondered how Jardine had gotten Hap’s number. From the dump directory? Or the online white pages, easy enough. Or maybe he had Hap’s number on speed dial.
Hap might not be Jardine’s homie but it looked like Hap had, somehow, come to Jardine’s malignant attention. He’d texted: You’re on my list now, Doc Death.
30
What Roy Jardine admired about C4 plastique was its risk-to-bang ratio. No risk, big bang. Dudes can handle it. Dudes can roll it into a ball and hit it with a bat. He’d heard somebody tried that once. It made a lousy baseball.
Add a blasting cap and it made an explosive.
He’d learned to use it in crap job number nine, road demolition. The plastique was ace but the work was hot and dirty. At least he hadn’t had to work dressed out.
He was in full hazmat now.
He opened his pack and took out the stubby sausage. It was wrapped in cling wrap, like cheese. Cheese — he must be hungry. He was so sick of freeze-dried. When this was all over he was going to find himself a trucker’s diner and order sausage and eggs with cheese melted on top. His stomach roared.
He looked around, in case his gut sounds made him miss the sounds of somebody approaching. That was not obsessive. That was careful. It was two-thirty a.m. Friday but he would not count on the dark or the night. He would keep his eyes and his ears wide open. The new audacious Roy Jardine was audacious in vision but he was not a fool.
He was at a stage where the risks were coming at him fast.
Yesterday afternoon, the risks came way too close. He’d been up on the ridge above the canyon, as usual, keeping watch. He’d hoped the geologists wouldn’t recover enough to do their job. But they did. And they came with a whole party. Miller the cad. Some girl — who was she? And two FBI men — what else could they be? — with FBI submachine guns. If Jardine had had one of those weapons he could have opened fire right then and there.
He had his Buck knife and his pistol. Not a fair fight.
Watching, he’d gotten distracted again with the female. Look how she paid attention to her details! Even though she was tracking him, he had to admire her. In fact, he’d wanted to have her. He could admit that. He wanted her to admire him but even if she didn’t he still wanted to have her. He’d even have her right down there in the dirt. By the time the enemy left the canyon he was all tangled up. Worried about being tracked, retreating like a dog to his hideout, thinking about the female so much that he got way ahead of himself. In the privacy underground he’d had to abuse himself to get her out of his head and that was humiliating.
But it worked.
He’d cleared his mind and considered his situation. He’d lost his breathing room but he couldn’t hurry things up. The trigger event had not yet come and he could not launch Stage Two of the mission without it. What he needed now, he saw, was to throw something big at the enemy. And he had that something big waiting in storage at Vegas. He got to work. He’d sat at his makeshift desk with his notepad and pencil for hours and when he got up he had a detailed plan. It was — no reason to be modest — brilliant.
It was also risky.
First had been the risk of hiking down to the Ranch and getting into his rental car. It was almost midnight Thursday by then and the only people around was a couple arguing about if they should complain about the torn screen door in their room, and they hadn’t cared about him. The next risk came in driving to Vegas. That went good too. The next risk, parking at the self-storage and driving away in the pickup, had given him a headache. All that adrenaline. But it went good. Driving back with his cargo had been both scary and exciting. Every time he’d seen headlights — five times — he’d nearly died. Every time the headlights disappeared, he’d howled.
When he’d turned onto the service road behind the Inn, he’d actually prayed.
When he’d backed his pickup right up to the target, he’d gone calm. That was a surprise. Here was the biggest risk of all. Him out here in his suit. No way did he look like a post. And when he’d unhooked the lead-curtain tarp in the bed of his pickup, the cask stood out like it wanted to be seen. It was mostly buried in talc but even some tourist who didn’t know a cask from his ass would look at that and say what the hell? Jardine remained thoughtful. Anybody came along now, he’d have to use the knife. He’d already used it to cut through the polyvinyl of the target and it lay blade-open on top of his pack.
He returned his attention to the plastique. He unwrapped it. He moved to the bed of the pickup. His next moves had to be fast, to keep his exposure down.
That’s the way he’d done it back in the borax mine — attaching plastique to the cask in that dark cramped tunnel. Fast fast fast.
That’s the way he moved now. First he attached the plastique to the cask and then he stuck the blasting cap into the plastique. Fast fast fast. Next he ran the wires to the detonator. Then he got in the cab and turned on the engine, cringing at the noise. He pushed the lift button. He got out to watch the pickup bed rise — he wouldn’t miss this sight for a million bucks — well yes he would but nobody was offering. He watched the talc spill out. He watched the cask tumble out and hit the target. He moved to the detonator and pushed the button. There was a muffled sound, far quieter than the engine noise.
The great thing about the target was that the noise of the explosion was muffled and the concussive effect was increased.
He wished the female could be here to watch with him. He wasn’t ashamed to think about her now. She would see his handiwork and even though she was working with the enemy she would be impressed, and that was enough for him.