"And struggle to fuel and steer and park it? How I loathe the American product," said `Trnka,' frowning, pleased to wedge more misdirection in as he climbed into the Toyota.
Ian McEvoy trudged back to his Seabee, pleased with an honest negotiation, cudgeling his memory to recall where he had seen Trnka before. Movies? He had heard that voice somewhere, for sure. Maybe on the TV ...
The telltales in the apartment were undisturbed, the weather report optimistic. He left the clothes on their hangers but applied more cement to his fingertips, scrubbing glassware and fingers meticulously as he had the Toyota's interior. Then he turned his attention to the telephones. First there was the microprocessor, which passed an on-the-spot function check before he installed it on a circuit board and patched the tiny rig into the automatic answering device. He disconnected the smoke alarm in his kitchen, then placed the answering device, connected to both telephones, in the sink. He dumped his small potted plant on the floor, cleared the hole in the pot's bottom only to cover the hole with tape, and twisted coat hangers into a sling that suspended the empty clay pot over the circuit board.
Next he mixed a cupful of magnetite and aluminum powder, pouring the potent stuff into the clay pot. He used squibs and an igniter common to model rocketry though he always, always employed them in threes, wired in parallel for reliability. Finally, though its crudeness irritated him, he deployed the twenty-meter extension cord and connected its bared wires directly to the squib circuit. He knotted the free end of the extension cord around a chair leg near a wall socket and spent several minutes taping the mousetrap firmly to the chair. Adhesive tape was so damnably adhesive it could take a faint impression of a fingerprint even through the protective cement. He had plenty of time, and he knew how to use it.
After he wired one leg of the extension cord to the trap, arranging it to complete the circuit when triggered, he deformed another coat hanger and taped it, centered vertically, to the inside door knob. He measured a length of cord with great care, tying a loop in its exact center and securing the loop over the mousetrap's trigger. Each end of the cord was then loop-knotted to an extremity of the coat hanger. The cord was very slightly slack. He turned the door knob several times. Either way the knob turned, the lengthened arm of the coat hanger would assure triggering, completed circuit, squib ignition—and a few more gray hairs for the apartment manager.
At last he was ready, going through his preparations again, checking every connection. It was rush hour by now on a Friday afternoon, and he would be all the more anonymous. He took up the attaché case, studied the entry rig again, and then plugged the extension cord into the wall. That moment always set him on edge: you never knew.
Then he slid one loop knot loose and opened the door, peering casually into the empty hall before he swiftly secured the loop again and tightened it. He set the lock on the inside, picked up the attaché case, and stepped into the hall, pulling the door closed. He did not test the knob. If the lock was faulty the knob would turn, and if the knob turned much he would get the gray hairs. He strode from the building and down the street to another parking complex where an attendant brought all six meters of his dun-brown Pontiac Parisienne, the Canadian version of a Catalina. Moments later he turned north on Route Eleven toward Lake Simcoe, chafing at the need to drive around Lake Huron en route to Winnipeg. But, "To regain the initiative we must ignore the main body of the enemy and concentrate far off," he quoted silently. El Aurans had known.
He held the big Pontiac at the legal maximum, unmoved by the occasional view of sunset over inlets from Georgian Bay. At Parry Sound he fed seventeen imperial gallons to his brute, nagged himself into checking the equipment in its trunk, and made a toll call to one of his two Toronto numbers. His own voice said, "Mr. Trnka regrets that he is unable to take your call at the moment. At the tone, please leave your name and number." The response tape was blank. More important, his communication center was still functioning, which meant that no one had traced him to the apartment. Yet.
He drove nearly to Marathon before he entered a rest stop, evacuated himself, and fluffed out the slender goosedown mummy bag. It was not optimal, but neither was confrontation in a motel by some red-suited lackey of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He slept.
On Saturday he passed Winnipeg ahead of schedule, crossed Manitoba, stopped well into
Saskatchewan. Hunger, as he knew, kept a healthy animal poised for the hunt—whichever end of the hunt it was on. He nibbled at fruit, then, in the mornings and feasted at the end of each day's travel.
Sunday he was immersed in listening to a mysterious noise in the Parisienne's luxurious vee-eight and nearly failed to hear a news item on the radio. Government sources had disarmed two charges of high explosive hidden in the structure of the Cap Rouge Bridge north of Quebec City. The massive charges would have rendered the bridge useless for weeks. On undisclosed evidence, both metropolitan police and the RCMP sought one Jean Bonin, known as a violent Quebecois separatist.
He snorted to himself, certain that the evidence was as simple as fingerprint impressions in the plastique. Bonin was an excellent provider, but an idiot with explosives. He would wind up in Archambault Penitentiary yet. The Cap Rouge fiasco, at least, explained why Bonin had refused him even a kilo of plastique. And now it belonged to the government! C'est la guerre; another toll call assured him that in Toronto, Mr. Trnka still regretted .. .
The terrain was a distinct drawback as the Parisienne labored into the Canadian Rockies, its malaise now more pronounced. He skirted Banff, stopped near Lake Louise, and nestled into the mummy bag at midnight. The cold was one thing he had never mastered, and anger at this failure in himself kept him awake too long.
Monday he flogged the car through Kamloops and past Ashcroft, unwilling to admit that the
Parisienne was no vehicle for mountain driving. He found a turnoff with a downhill slope leading to the highway, nearly backing the big machine over a precipice. He was grimy, he was hungry, he was in no mood to appreciate the cataclysmic rush of the Thompson River that boiled southward below him in the moonlight.
He was in the same mood at dawn on Tuesday and feared for long minutes that, even after gliding down onto the highway and building up to cruising speed, the Parisienne might not start. It guzzled fuel at an infuriating rate but, once past Chilliwack, he knew he would make it to the ferry south of Vancouver.
Thirty-three hundred kilometers to the east in the offices of Salon du Nord, Pelletier gnawed a cuticle and waited for a call which, he was increasingly sure, would not come. If Trnka was buying the remaining microprocessors, he was infernally slow about it. If Trnka was buying time, Pelletier himself was dilatory. He thought about the anonymous cash again. He would wait one more day.
TUESDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER, 1980:
During the long ferry ride across the Strait of Georgia to Sidney on Vancouver Island, the little man poked at the vast pig-iron innards of the Parisienne as long as light permitted. Unknowingly he moved two frayed plug leads apart and, at Sidney, was intensely relieved to hear the engine splutter to something like a willingness to move the two thousand-kilo machine. He drove to Victoria, found the upper harbor, and left the car near the small boat flotilla off Wharf Street. It might never start again, but this possibility did not disturb him.