“Run!”
We spun and bolted toward the open door. I was behind Mahoney and one step onto the balcony when the phone in my hand began to ring with a different ringtone.
I threw myself completely out of the room a split second before the bomb went off behind us, blowing out the windows and blasting the metal door off its hinges.
Chapter 40
Two hours later, the blast was still ringing in my ears as I looked down on the carnival that had descended on the Happy Pines Motel. Two fire trucks. Five police cruisers. Four vans bearing a small army of crime scene techs and special agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Mahoney was standing next to me, elbows on the balcony railing, still shocked by how close we’d come to death.
“Wish I’d never quit smoking,” he said, and I heard a quiver in his voice.
“Close,” I said, equally shaken. “That’s the closest I’ve ever come.”
I’d called Bree to let her know what had happened, and Mahoney and I had already spoken about Varjan with a parade of agents assigned to the case. Our theory was that she suspected she’d been spotted after arriving at Dulles and had tested that suspicion by renting the motel room under the name Martina Rodoni.
“She sat on us, waiting,” I said. “For two days.”
“She’s disciplined, I give you that,” Mahoney said.
“Is she? Why try to kill us? It only increases the heat on her.”
“I’ll set aside the why for now. She did it is all I need to know. We have to get her face everywhere. She’s got other business planned.”
“I agree. Enhance and enlarge the security photo of her. She’ll be recognized.”
He nodded and took out his cell phone.
Almost directly below us in the parking lot, Rani Yasant was yelling at her husband, who was looking up at the smoldering hole that had once been room 15.
“You see?” Mrs. Yasant cried, hands on her belly. “If you had been brave and gone up there, you would have died, Vash, and then where would I be? Answer me that, where would I be?”
Yasant put both hands to his head as if squeezing it in a vise. “Why do you always think this way, Rani? I did not go up there. I am alive. And you wish me to be a coward in every aspect of my life!”
He shouted this last bit, and it caused his wife to step back and start crying.
“What are we going to do?” she said, sobbing. “I told you not to buy that extra fire insurance. I said it was too expensive!”
Her husband softened and walked over to her. He put his arms around her.
“It’s okay, Rani. I did not listen to you.”
His wife looked up at him through tears. “Is that true?”
“We’re covered,” he said, and he kissed her forehead.
“Agent Mahoney?”
Mahoney and I turned to find Tim Schmidt, the supervising special agent with BATF, coming toward us. Mahoney finished his call and hung up.
Schmidt said, “Preliminary results say you had plastic explosives in that bag with a frequency trigger set to trip at the phone’s ringtone. Where is the phone, by the way? We’d like to take it if possible.”
Mahoney said, “It’s already on its way to Quantico, but we will share everything with BATF as soon as we have it.”
Schmidt puffed up his cheeks and blew out his mouth. “Fair enough. It’s cooled down enough in there to look around if you want.”
We walked back to room 15. The walls were scorched and blackened. So was the ceiling. There was an inch of dark water on the floor.
The near twin bed had been thrown over. The mattress lay in the slurry, coated in soot. The mattress of the far bed, the one where the bag and phone had been, now had a gaping charred hole in it almost the entire width and three-quarters of the length.
I stared at the blast hole. So did Ned, who said, “Darn happy to be here, Alex.”
I nodded, still stunned and thanking my guardian angel for helping me put the phone, the bag, and Varjan’s words together fast enough to clear the room and survive. I felt humbled and then desperate to go home and be with my family.
But I overrode that desire with the need to do my job. I turned from the mattress and looked at a table lamp, bent and twisted on the floor, and then at the night table flipped over on its left flank. The right side was caved in and scorched. The drawer was closed.
Beside the table on the floor was an open and partially burned Gideon Bible.
I looked at the closed drawer. I supposed it was possible the blast had driven the open drawer shut. Or that Gideon Bible had been out before the blast. Had I seen it?
I didn’t remember. If it was out, why? Would a professional assassin like Varjan seek spiritual solace in a motel Bible?
After putting on gloves, I picked the Bible up. A charred chunk of pages fell out from the back. I flipped through the Bible but found nothing tucked in it.
I was about to set it aside when I noticed that soot from the burned pages had streaked and smudged across the mostly white inside of the Bible’s back cover. Then I noticed that the soot had raised the impression of letters there. An e and an r.
Someone had obviously scribbled on the front of the back page, and the pressure had gone through to the cover. I was about to set it aside to be bagged again, but then I thought, What if Varjan scribbled there?
What were the odds of that? Hundreds of people must have used the room in the past twelve months, let alone years.
Still, I did not want to leave any stone unturned. I broke off the charred edges of the pages that had fallen on the floor, crumbled the charring into dust, and spilled it around the two visible letters and across the page.
Words appeared, a stack of them:
Celes Chere
Prelim 2 sharp
Marstons, same
Gabriel, same
Conker 3
Conker? Below that, there were other letters but they were indistinct. A b and an i or a t and then a c. Or an o?
I had no idea when the words were written or what significance they held. I took a picture of the list with my phone and left the Bible for the criminalists to bag and analyze further.
“Not much here that wasn’t here before she planted the bomb,” said Schmidt, the ATF agent.
“This was a kill zone for her, nothing more,” Mahoney said. “But we’ve got her phone, and we’ll be inside it in hours.”
“Why the hell is she here?” Schmidt said. “Who the hell is she trying to kill?”
“Besides us?” I said. “No clue. But when we find her, I sure plan to ask.”
Chapter 41
Kristina Varjan drove a beater Dodge sedan she’d bought off a lot in College Park. It had a shimmy in the front end and almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, so she kept on at one mile under the speed limit, heading up I-95 toward Atlantic City, New Jersey, and an Airbnb apartment she’d rented online.
Varjan had cut her hair shorter, spiked it, and bleached the tips blond. She’d changed into skinny jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket, and a long-sleeved Sex Pistols T-shirt. Her makeup was heavy on the mascara. She’d pierced her own nose the night before, and her upper right lip and tongue too.
When she glanced at herself in the rearview, she looked nothing like Martina Rodoni, the fashionable European in for a week of sightseeing. Now she was Elena Wolfe, rebellious nonconformist over from Great Britain to play a few games.
Varjan shifted. She was sick of sitting, especially in this seat. She’d sat in it for almost two days, watching the Happy Pines Motel from well down the street.