“If you have a story to tell,” an FBI man said, “now’s the time to tell it.”
“Wait,” Tabari said, moving toward the door. “I wish this to be recorded.”
“We both do,” the FBI man told him.
While Tabari opened the door and spoke briefly to somebody outside, the FBI man took a mini-cassette recorder from his pocket and placed it on the desk, saying, “Why don’t you sit there?”
“Behind the desk?”
“Yes.”
So I sat down, and he adjusted the recorder so its built-in mike faced me, a tiny round black ear eager to know all. A somewhat larger recorder had been handed to Tabari, who put it on the desk next to the first one and started it recording. One of the FBI men, clearly for the benefit of the record, said, “You’re telling us your story of your own free will, Mr. Holt?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.” Then my audience of three stepped back, arms folded, to watch and listen.
I looked at the tapes turning in the machines. “Well,” I said. A strange place, this, for an actor to have stage fright. “All right,” I said. “The beginning of this story is last winter, in New York, when an old friend of mine named Ross Ferguson phoned...”
50
“The first thing,” Deputy Ken said, looking very earnestly into my eyes, “it didn’t blow by accident.”
“Meaning they did it on purpose?”
“Meaning it wasn’t your fault,” he said, and showed a trace of grin. “I had the feeling you were worried about that.”
“Okay. I was.”
“Also, yes,” he went on, and nodded. “They did it on purpose.”
“How can you be sure?”
Chuck said, “The technical people can be sure. From the way it blew, and where we found the bodies.”
I looked out across my pool. It was a sunny warming day in early March, two weeks since Barq Cyrenica had blown itself apart in its tunnel under Al-Gazel. Bly paddled around in the clear water, decorative in her peach bikini, giving me privacy for my talk with the deputies, who’d arrived unannounced, so that I sat with them in my pale blue terry-cloth robe. We three were around the table near the pool, Sugar Ray watchfully asleep beneath and Max patrolling the far side, on the alert for enemies and disturbances.
But the enemies and disturbances were all gone, most of them dead on that night, the rest captured when the police finally swarmed onto Ross’s property after the explosion. Bly and Robinson, after Ross’s phoned message from me, had called Deputy Ken and managed to interest the police enough so that they were watching Ross’s house by that time, but they’d been maintaining a low profile — to protect me! — waiting for something to come out of there, and if they’d stuck to their original script, they wouldn’t have intervened until it was too late. The explosion, of course, had made them rewrite.
The explosion. Only about half the dynamite had been moved into the tunnel when I’d come along to interrupt the process, and not all of that had been shifted into final position. The tunnel, nearly a quarter-mile long, was less than four feet tall and three feet wide, shored up where necessary with boards and sheets of thin paneling, illuminated by flashlights, and running very gradually uphill to a widened-out room just beneath the mosque. Perhaps a third of the full store of dynamite was in position there, and fourteen men in the tunnel, when it blew, killing them all.
That explosion had been echoing in my mind for two weeks, and no point denying it. I brooded about it by day, and dreamed about it at night, when I was usually one of the men inside, struggling along in the grave-smelling semi-dark, dragging the heavy cartons, sweating but chilled, bent almost double under the low earth roof. In my dream I was following some antlike compulsion to do this work, without understanding why. I would do it, and then I would see the red ball flashing toward me down the tube, I would feel its heat, and I’d wake up sweating, panting for air.
Had it been my fault? In crushing the entrance, packing the van down into it, had I created the circumstances that made the dynamite down there blow fifteen minutes later? I didn’t see how it could be a direct result of what I’d done — if it were, wouldn’t it have gone off right away? — but I couldn’t be sure, and the uncertainty had left an opening for nightmare.
Until now. If Ken was right, if indeed the “technical people” did know what they were talking about... I said, “I have trouble believing it, that they did it to themselves.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, the political suicide, with people like that,” he said. “You’d trapped them down in there. Sooner or later the law would come along and dig them out.”
“Humiliation,” suggested Chuck. He was mostly watching Bly swim.
“That’s right,” Ken said. “Public shame. Failure. And maybe even exposure of whoever finances them.”
“And the point from the beginning,” Chuck added, “was to blow up the mosque.”
I said, “Which they didn’t even manage to do.”
“Well, they hurt it,” Ken said, giving them their due. “There was some structural damage.”
“But you’re right,” Chuck told me. “They didn’t bring it down.”
“But they tried, right?” I wanted to hear that again, to be certain about it. Looking at them both, I said, “That’s what they were doing? Turned it into a suicide mission, on purpose.”
Ken nodded. “Said their prayers, burned their incriminating documents, gave each other the secret handshake, put their detonators in place—”
“That’s one way we know it wasn’t an accident,” Chuck said.
“Right,” Ken agreed, and finished his sentence. “Put their detonators in place and went to talk it over with Allah.”
I sighed and smiled. The day was getting warmer and brighter. “Then it’s done,” I said.
Done. Finished. Nothing left over. I had, of course, backed up Doreen’s self-defense story about killing Ross, and her doctor father had provided heavyweight legal help before taking her back to Santa Barbara, so she was out of it. Besides, nobody much cared how Ross had died. His file on Fire Over Beverly Hills was enough to make him a co-conspirator in official eyes whether he’d been coerced into it in the first place or not.
Given the various newsworthy elements in the story — a twenty-seven-million-dollar mosque, an underground mass suicide, a tunnel full of dynamite, a shootout in a Beverly Hills mansion, the presence of a former TV star — the Al-Gazel people and the authorities between them had done an amazing job of smothering the flames of publicity. There had been newspaper stories and television reports about the explosion immediately after it happened, and the phone here had rung off the hook for a couple of days (everybody being referred to my PR outfit for a handout full of vagueness and generalities), but the follow-up was astonishingly meager. The mosque wanted it kept quiet, their enemies had no reason to trumpet this failure, the city always tries to downplay the growing Arab presence here, and the federal authorities feel understandably nervous about public reaction whenever foreign disputes get fought out on our turf, which does sometimes happen, so the story merely faded and died.
Ken made as though to get to his feet. “We just thought you’d like to know,” he said.
I said, “Duty calls?”
He grinned. “We’re late for our break, actually.”
“Then take it here. Dive in the pool.”
Ken laughed as though I were kidding, and Chuck said, “Not in uniform.”
“I keep spare suits in the poolhouse there,” I told them. “Top drawer on the left.”
“Thanks for the offer, Sam,” Ken said, rising, “but we’ve really got to get—”
“Why? I’m serious. It’s a warm day, you’ve just brought me peace of mind, I think you ought to have a nice swim.”