“No, I’m afraid not—not according to my suspect.”
“But he must have known about it, right?”
“Maybe, but apparently he wasn’t openly complicit. My suspect says Render wasn’t prepared to go as far as Gant, and Gant took it further than he would have approved.”
“Do you believe this?”
“Yes,” Jon said, looking down at Shinsky. “I’d have to say I do. A lot of the facts in the case are swirling in my head right now, so I need to think it all through. But initially this does seem to fit what I’ve seen. We’ve been assuming that if GS people are involved, Render would have to be behind it…. But I think this all actually could have been done without his knowledge.”
“Well, I’m not inclined to believe it,” Rielle King said. “But it’s enough for me to work with. Just the scandal of the payoffs alone will disqualify that asshole, not to mention the cloud of all the murders by people from his company….”
She thought for a few moments, and then started thinking out loud again.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “this evidence isn’t as incriminating as what I’d hoped for. I can definitely use it as a threat to make him give up on the referendum, and probably leave the city. But if he got ahold of the testimony you have, he might be able to pin it all on Gant and keep fighting….
“Send me the video right now,” she concluded after another few moments of silent thought. Jon did, and when she got it, she added, “Now erase the video. I don’t want it getting around and somehow making Render look better than I want him to look.”
“It’s erased,” Jon said, after fiddling with his phone for a moment.
“Is the suspect who gave the testimony in police custody?”
“No, he’s here with me.”
“Good. Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Could you eliminate him and make it look clean?” she asked.
Jon looked down at Shinsky again.
“Yes,” Jon said. “In fact, that’s what he wants me to do, believe it or not.”
“Good. Then do it.”
Jon pulled out the gun he had put away after he secured Shinsky, and pointed it at the big man’s head. He pulled the trigger twice, and the pounding sound of the shots reverberated through the air from floor to high ceiling of the old church building.
“It’s done,” Jon said.
“Good boy,” Mayor King said on the other end of the line. “Keep playing your cards right and you’ll be a very rich man.”
“Thank you, Ma’am,” Jon said.
“Just clean up that mess.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jon said, and hung up the phone.
He stood still for a few moments, then he looked at the video of Shinsky’s testimony, which was still on his phone, and sent it to another cell phone he had before Mayor King had given him this one. Then he looked at Shinsky himself, who was alive and well on the floor, because Jon had fired just above his shoulder.
“You promised,” said the big man, clearly disappointed that he wasn’t dead.
“I did,” Jon said, “but you know what they say about promises.”
Looking around and noticing that no law enforcement or GS agents had arrived yet, Jon called Halladay to find out what had happened with their pursuit of Sturm.
“We lost him,” Halladay said. “Now we just got back to the Below, and are checking it out.”
“What’s in there?” Jon asked.
“A lot of explosives,” Halladay answered, but he must have had his phone on speaker, because Jon then heard Amira say, “But there’s even more missing.”
“You think Williams took them somewhere?” Jon said, remembering Sturm’s comment about the bomber “partying” in another part of the city.
“Are you talking about the stuff in that room?” Shinsky spoke up from the floor, and Jon just looked at him without answering. “I know where he’s taking it.” Jon looked at him some more. “He’s gonna put it below the Flatiron Building—the plan was to kill a few birds with one stone when the sun comes out. It’ll cause more panic than ever when police headquarters goes up, and it’ll thin out the force so that GS will have to secure the city. It might even get rid of the Mayor herself, if she’s there at the time.”
“Did you hear that?” Jon said into the phone.
“Yeah,” said Halladay, then Amira chimed in again. “There are some underground maps here with some markings that support what he’s saying.”
“Are they in that room now?” Shinsky asked.
“Yeah, why?” Jon responded.
“They need to get out right now. Williams and Sturm rigged it to blow at Dayfall, and Sturm set the timer while I was in there. The sick bastard wanted me to sit there for a while knowing I was gonna buy it, and the blast would be the first chaos crime of the day, killing a bunch of people in the subway and the streets above.”
“Halladay, Amira,” Jon said. “You need to get out…. Shinsky says it’s rigged to blow, on a timer.”
“I found it.” Jon heard Amira’s voice in the background on Halladay’s phone, and he could almost feel the pall that fell on both his partners.
“The count is down to a few minutes,” Amira said. “The good news is I know how to diffuse the detonators; the bad news is I doubt we can get all of them in time. And it only takes one of them to set all this off—that’s why they use so many.”
“Stop talking and get out of there, for God’s sake!” Jon said, but he didn’t sense that either of them was moving.
“The thing is,” Amira said, “there’s a lot of people above us who will probably be killed or wounded if we don’t stop this. And it would take both of us to even have a chance to do it in time.”
Now Jon’s two partners had to make a life-or-death decision. He could almost see them looking at each other. He thought of telling them to leave again, that they could still get far enough away, but then he held his tongue.
“How do we do it?” Halladay asked Amira.
“Just take the two green wires out of the back of each of the detonators,” she said. “But they have to be unscrewed—that’s what takes a while.”
Jon listened to them moving around in the room, visualizing their panicked fingers trying to turn thin casings as fast as they could in the cramped little space, and feeling a sense of utterly helpless dread.
“Takes a while, for sure,” Halladay grunted as he continued the frantic work. “You’re not kidding….”
“What’s the timer say?” Jon finally blurted out, unable to hold it in anymore.
“Don’t wanna take the time to look at it,” Amira responded through heavy breathing. “I did the ones close to it first, and moved away. I’ll check if I can.”
Moments that seemed like minutes passed, until Amira finally spoke again.
“It’s at thirty-nine seconds,” she said.
“Can you get all of them in time?” Jon asked, and then pictured them looking around in desperation.
“Not even close,” Halladay said.
“Get the hell out of there!” Jon screamed.
It sounded to Jon like they’d started running—he couldn’t tell for sure—but right after that it sounded like a geyser had sprung up from hell itself, and the line went dead.
Even though the restaurant was far away from the blast, the walls and floor were jarred violently enough to throw glasses and dishes off some of the tables.
Jon covered himself briefly, afraid the roof might fall in. When it didn’t, he let loose with a string of profanities and looked up again at the stained-glass ceiling, this time with anger. He vowed to put that God back on the shelf, or better yet, cast him into a pit.
27
Jon’s vengeful thoughts soon transitioned from a God he had never seen to the real live people who were behind the various crimes he had now uncovered. Politics didn’t concern him enough to be confused or distracted by their motives, but he did care about justice, and he knew that it was due for Gant and the two remaining mercenaries. He also knew that Render and Mayor King should face the consequences of their actions. And he was worried about what Williams was apparently doing under the Flatiron Building, mostly because of the innocent people in that area, and the fact that Mallory was one of them.