“It’ll do.”
Belsky shifted his seat on the hard chair. “About personnel—we don’t have enough trained people to handle all the message traffic that will come through; after all we’re throwing a red alert at them and they’ll be firing back requests for clarification and verification. Unfortunately there’s no way we can simulate incoming rockets on their radar screens and they’ll want to know why they don’t see anything on radar if there’s an attack under way. We’ve got to convince the launch personnel that NORAD and the Pentagon and a few other sites are under attack by Chinese missiles. That will explain to them why they’re being ordered to fire on China, and they’ll attribute any foul-ups in communications to the confusion of the attack.”
Ludlum said, “The easy way’s to act as if the Chinese are dumping enough megatonnage on NORAD to dig Cheyenne Mountain right out of the ground. Then all orders will appear to come from Looking Glass—the airborne headquarters—and if a lot of it gets garbled by static the launch people won’t get suspicious.”
Nick Conrad stood up, looking at his watch and shooting his cuff. “Listen, I’d better get going—we’ve got to set up the codes and start printing.”
Nicole said, “Yes, let’s not keep the Kremlin waiting.”
Belsky had left his rented Ford in a pay-parking lot and torn up the ticket; he was driving a dark Dodge hardtop that belonged to one of Hathaway’s men. The car smelled of tobacco and there were big fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. He drove up the Sabino Canyon road and made a left turn into a vague dirt track that ran back into the hills. On the tall weeds between the road’s ruts the headlights picked up fresh dark grease that had rubbed off the bottom of a recent vehicle.
The place had been a farm. It had been abandoned for several years; the windows were smashed, the shingles cracked, the barnyard overgrown.
When Belsky stopped the car he blinked his headlights on and off twice before he got out. Culver appeared in the barn door and waved. “Hi there, Mr. Beldon. Right on time.”
“Everything all right, Culver?” Belsky carried the transceiver in his left hand.
“Got everything you ordered. Come see for yourself.” Tim Culver had the quick restless eyes and the mouth-corner speech of an ex-convict. He backed up to make room in the doorway and when Belsky came inside Culver slid the big door shut and switched on a big multicell flashlight. The beam played over the ton-and-a-half truck. It had U.S. Air Force blue paint and a variety of stenciled white identification markings. The barn smelled of old hay and fresh paint, and the glass and chrome of the truck were stripped with masking tape; the truck was still aglitter with wetness. Near the back of the steel-enclosed bed there was a patch of Army olive-drab paint that hadn’t been covered yet.
“I just got a little left to spray,” Culver said. “I took care of the stencils up front first because that white stuff’s tricky; you got to dry it just right or it runs.”
“Looks good, Culver.”
Culver went back and got the spray canister and resumed work on the back of the truck. Its loading doors stood open; Belsky looked inside. The small steel tanks had been fitted carefully into soft-lined wooden frames to prevent their being jarred. Belsky made a quick count—twenty-four pressure tanks, each with valve and hose. They were smaller than aqualung tanks and looked vaguely like fire extinguishers.
Culver said, “I already took the plates off. You bring those Air Force plates?”
“In the trunk of my car.”
“Okay. I’ll put them on soon as I finish up here.”
“Take your time,” Belsky said. He looked at his watch in the reflected glow of Culver’s big flashlight.
Squares of brown corrugated cardboard had been taped over the insides of the rear-door windows to make it appear from outside as if the truck were loaded with cartons.
Belsky said, “Did you have any trouble?”
“Naw. I waited down at Sierra Vista and when the truck came out the Fort Huachuca gate I tailed it out toward the highway and went by it on that narrow stretch above Tombstone—dumped out the spikes, and when it blew a tire I handled them easy with that rifle of yours. That’s a sweet silencer.”
“What did you do with the bodies?”
“Buried them out back of the barn here.” Culver lowered the sprayer and stood back to shine the torch along the truck and study his handiwork. “Let that dry overnight it ought to look fine. I’ll get those plates now.”
Belsky waited while Culver screwed the Air Force plates onto the truck’s license-plate brackets. Afterward Culver straightened up and said, “That first ten thousand was real sweet, Mr. Beldon. I hope you got the other ten thou with you.”
“Right here, Tim. You’ve done a fine job.” Belsky took an envelope from his pocket and when Culver came to take it from him, Belsky’s single blow to the throat crushed Culver’s windpipe.
He carried the body to the car and got the pint of whiskey from the dashboard glovebox. He poured the whiskey over the corpse, draped a canvas tarp over the passenger seat of the car, and then lifted Culver into the seat. He drove out to the canyon highway, turned left toward the mountains, accelerated the car to high speed and on a leftward curve threw Culver’s body out. It was no easy maneuver but it was not the first time Belsky had performed it. The body bounced off the road and crashed into scrub brush. Leaning far over in the seat, Belsky pulled the passenger door shut and slowed before he reached the canyon park gate; he made a sedate U-turn and went back the way he had come. He noticed when he went by that the body was not visible from the road. That was all right. He returned to the farm, opened the barn door, drove the truck out and put the car inside the barn. He took the transceiver over to the truck and placed it on the seat, closed the loading doors and started the engine. He drove very slowly until he reached the paved highway because he didn’t want to kick up dust that would adhere to the wet paint. Going into Tucson he bounced along high up in the cab, maneuvering the truck with professional ease.
He had obtained Culver’s name from the Los Angeles rezidentsia—the name of a habitual criminal willing to do anything for pay. But he couldn’t have let Culver run around loose afterward with the knowledge of what had happened to the truckload of GB3X nerve gas he had hijacked from the Army Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca.
The gas was colorless, odorless, designed to kill within seconds.
Belsky drove through Tucson on Wilmot Road and Fifth Street and Alvernon Way—main arteries—because he would attract less attention than by driving through back streets. When he reached Twenty-second Street he turned right and made all the green lights in the two-mile stretch to the railroad overpass. He turned right into the warehouse district that lined the Southern Pacific yards and drove the truck easily through the narrow clearance of the open doors of the corrugated-metal storage building Hathaway had rented two days before in the name of the Tanner-Kavanagh Packing Company.
He switched off the headlights and closed the building’s overhead door before he climbed into the back of the truck with the flashlight and the can of aluminum spray paint and carefully obliterated the warnings and descriptive stencils on each of the twenty-four canisters. He was nearing the last of them when the blinker on the transceiver began to flash.
The apparatus was programmed to tape-record the incoming message automatically and so he took the time to finish spraying paint on the canisters before he opened the transceiver case and rewound the tape to play it back and write out the message. It took two or three minutes to decode and when he was done he had filled a notebook page in his crabbed hand.
PRIORITY UTMOST
DANGERFIELD TUC 6 APR
VIA NUCSUB 4
KGB 1
CIPHER 1548 SG
SENT 0527 GMT D ACKNOWLEDGMENT UNNECESSARY MESSAGE BEGINS X PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS CONFIRMED X EXECUTE PLAN B3 1830 7 APR CONFIRMED X HENCEFORTH BE ALERT FOR COUNTERFEIT INSTRUCTIONS THIS FREQUENCY X EXAMINE CIPHER REFERENCES WITH UTMOST CAUTION X HENCEFORTH ALL LEGITIMATE INSTRUCTIONS FROM VR WILL CONTAIN PHRASE FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS X REPEAT X FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS X RELY ON YOU X VR X MESSAGE ENDS 17661 42 6474