I took my foot off the accelerator, and the Chrysler immediately slowed. Max put her front paws on the dashboard, the better to lean forward and look at this interesting thing, while Sugar Ray climbed over from the storage area to the backseat and stared forward, with the alert expression that means he’s thinking of barking.
“Cool it, fellas,” I said, and moved my foot toward the brake. There was something just too tense about those guys. I don’t ever want to put any officials into the position of having to apologize to my next of kin, so I was prepared right then to stop, shift into reverse, and go back where I came from.
Except that just as I was tapping the brake, one of the uniformed men made a down-patting motion, obviously telling me to stop right there, to go neither forward nor back. So I complied, and even shifted into park. The dogs watched, tensing up a bit themselves, sensing the atmosphere, Max with her nose actually touching the windshield, Sugar Ray edgily moving back and forth on the rear seat, trying to get a better view.
One of the men stayed where he was, well back, in front of the car and a bit to the right. The other one moved off to my left and then came forward. They both kept their hands on their guns.
I pushed the button and my window lowered all the way. Sugar Ray immediately stuck his head into the space, close enough to my left ear to hear him snuffle. “Sugar Ray!” I said sharply. “Sit down!”
They both sat on their haunches, reared up on their stick-straight forelegs, watching with utter intensity.
It was a police uniform this one wore, dark blue, with silver badge. His belt was loaded down with all the gear of a cop; in addition to the gun, there was a walkie-talkie, a large notebook, a pair of handcuffs, and several small black leather pouches. As he approached I said, “Yes, officer?”
“May I help you, sir?”
Never has that question been asked with less good will. The only time I could remember myself ever being that tense on duty was once back in Mineola when a guy had gone berserk and murdered the three people in his immediate family plus two neighbors before barricading himself into his house. My partner Doug Walford and I were the first to respond to the squeal, and when we got out of the patrol car in front of that ordinary suburban house on a hot humid summer day, with a middle-aged woman in a sundress lying facedown dead on the lawn, I felt just about the way this cop here looked.
I’m an actor? Never have I tried so hard to act innocent. “Just taking the dogs for a drive, officer,” I said. “I saw that dome up there, wondered what it was.”
“Private road from here on, sir,” he said. He had made sure to glance at the floor in back, ignoring Sugar Ray.
“There’s no sign down at the corner.”
“No, sir, there isn’t. Just a dead end sign.”
“I suppose that keeps most traffic away,” I agreed. “Except rubberneckers like me.” I stuck my head partway out the window, wondering if I could see the dome from here. “Mind telling me what that is up there?”
“You could make a K-turn right here, sir,” he said. “Just back around, and you can continue on your way.” For an Easterner like me, L.A. cops do seem to overdramatize a lot, but that’s their style and they didn’t ask me for a review. “Okay,” I said, smiled at him as falsely as he’d been calling me “sir,” and prepared to back up.
“Wait a second,” he said.
Now what? I looked back at him, and he was frowning at me. “Aren’t you—?”
Good; the salvation once again of having a known face. Taking off my sunglasses so he’d be sure he was right, I said, “Sam Holt. I used to play Jack Packard on television.”
“I thought I recognized you.” It was astonishing how thoroughly he’d thawed, all at once. He even cracked a small smile before turning to his partner and calling, “It’s okay.” The partner nodded, but didn’t move, and his hand stayed on his gun.
“Sorry to make trouble,” I said, put my sunglasses back on, and shifted into reverse.
“That’s okay, Mr. Holt. And listen—”
I shifted into park, and listened.
“We’re keeping it quiet,” he said, “to keep the civilians out.”
“Uh-huh.”
He leaned down, putting both hands on the windowsill. “It’s that Arab church,” he told me confidentially. “The mosque they just built.”
I remembered my lawyer Oscar Cooperman saying something about a new mosque, and he representing a supplier for it. I said, “Why such total security for a church?”
“They’ve had some threats, I guess,” he said. “About a month ago, when they were still building it, some guys tried to get in with a truck supposed to be filled full of Sheetrock; it was full of dynamite instead. Suicide mission, gonna blow up everybody and themselves along with it.”
“Good God. Who were they?”
“I dunno. Some other Arabs. They get tough when they’re mad at each other.” He grinned a bit crookedly. “When we see a car we don’t know,” he said, “we get a little antsy.”
“I guess so. Sorry to shake you up,” I said. “I’ll take the dogs for a run somewhere else.”
“Good idea,” he agreed, and with that lack of irony that I’ll never entirely get used to in California, “Have a nice day,” he said.
36
Well, now I knew where the lightning was supposed to strike.
Ross Ferguson’s property was on the east side of his street. Up at the next intersection to the north I’d turned right, eastward, into that dead-end road, with the golden dome at the far end of it. Somewhere back up in those scrub woods on the hills there would be an invisible line separating Ross’s property from the land belonging to the mosque.
Barq Pool Service; lightning in Arabic. And an effort had been made a month ago to destroy that mosque with a suicidal truck bomb. Oscar Cooperman had told me how tight the security had been during the mosque’s construction.
This was what Hassan Tabari had been referring to on the plane, the incredible polarization between the fundamentalists and the modernists in the Arab world, with the terrorists and the fanatics here and there in control, with oil money to pay for their adventures.
Oil money to pay for setting Ross Ferguson up. Delia West thrown away as casually as any of the innocent bystanders they’d taken with them over the years. Official or semi-official support and expertise from fundamentalist governments, using spies and secret police well-trained by either the United States or Russia. All the time in the world to make their preparations, money no object and humanity nonexistent.
Who was coming to the opening day ceremonies that the lightning people planned to kidnap? A religious figure? A political figure? There was oil money on both sides of the Islamic religious war, and that was undoubtedly oil money being spent up there on that mosque, so would their target be some billionaire sheikh, to be held for ransom to finance more terrorist acts?
On the drive home Max and Sugar Ray soon settled down into their usual traveling mode of eager expectancy. I talked to them, my voice soothing, but what I told them was what I thought Ross had gotten himself — and Doreen, and to some extent me — tied up with. Religious maniacs. Armed professional terrorists. A religious war with roots on the other side of the world. People whose language and ambitions and desires and fears and code of ethics Ross Ferguson couldn’t begin to understand. The lion tamer.