“Sorry,” Jay said.
“Qui’yah!”
For just a second, Jay considered manifesting a blaster and turning this clown into a pile of smoking ash. He didn’t recognize the words in what he assumed was Klingon, but he knew an insult when he heard it.
Then again, why bother? Everybody had to be somewhere, and if it made this guy, who was probably a file clerk or an accountant, feel better to spend a couple hours getting into costume as a Star Trek alien to wander around a media convention spouting a made-up language, so what? It was a harmless fantasy, and better than a lot of ways he could be getting into trouble. At least he wasn’t out on the street mugging old ladies or selling crack.
Jay was all for whatever floated your boat, as long as you didn’t hurt anybody when you did it.
Jay raised his right hand and split his fingers into the Vulcan V-sign that Spock used to do on the Trek television show. “Live long and prosper, Warrior.”
The ersatz Klingon sneered, but moved off.
Cowboy, cowboy, where was the space cowboy?
Jay wound his way past a display of toy rockets and space ships, then a table stacked with lurid magazines featuring busty women in what looked like brass bikinis, being menaced by tentacled monsters. A television monitor flickered with an old black-and-white serial showing Flash Gordon in front of the Emperor Ming. The music sounded familiar. Was that Liszt’s Prelude?
He glanced up from the TV and caught a glimpse of a white hat ahead. Definitely a Stetson-style cowboy hat.
He smiled as he recalled the Stagolee scenario. All about the hat . . .
Jay tried to worm his way closer, but the crowd was thick here. He stepped on an alien’s foot, and was rewarded with a curse that was very much human. He brushed past a guy with a head shaved bald, save for a topknot, with green makeup on his face and hands, and long fingernails. He was holding hands with a drop-dead-gorgeous blond woman in purple spandex and leather boots, with a blaster on a hip belt.
Jay nearly stepped on somebody down on all fours, dressed up like some kind of four-legged alien critter and following the happy couple. The creature snarked at him, halfway between a bark and a moan.
Lord.
He looked up, but he’d lost sight of the hat.
Damn!
A very tall man dressed as an Amazon woman, complete with a wig, a spear, and what looked like a fiberglass copy of a bronze breastplate over huge fake hooters, stood in front of a table stacked with tapes from 1950s Saturday morning television shows, like Howdy Doody. The Amazon was six-four, if he was an inch. Somebody that tall would have a good view. “Excuse me, I’m looking for a cowboy,” Jay said.
“Honey, aren’t we all?” the faux-Amazon said. “Her” voice was as dark brown as L-O-L-A Lola’s, and closer to Darth Vader’s than any woman Jay had ever heard. She could sing the bass parts in opera, easy.
After a fruitless fifteen minutes of searching, which included at one point hopping up on a bare table to see better, Jay gave up, at least for now. The cowboy with his six-gun was here at the convention somewhere, but he seemed to have left the room.
Maybe he had gone across the street? There were all kinds of programs scheduled at the hotel.
Jay headed for the door. As he worked his way through the stream of humanity, real and fake, he thought it was kinda fun, actually, though he wondered what a straight person who happened into this scene would think upon seeing people dressed up in such outlandish costumes.
Probably think they were all nutty as fruitcakes.
Oh, well. Reality was almost always stranger than fiction.
Jay headed out into the hot afternoon. Jeez, it was like an oven! Like being hit in the face with a board. Dry heat or not, when you went from seventy and AC to maybe a hundred and ten, that was hot. A wonder people weren’t passing out in the street.
The hotel was just across the street. Jay started walking.
Was that somebody wearing a cowboy hat, just heading into the building?
Heedless of the heat, Jay ran.
24
Townenda Hollow
Virginia
Carruth picked a place he’d been to back when he’d been in the Navy. He and a bunch of buddies had gone camping, hiking into the woods in Virginia, and they’d passed this old falling-down barn way the hell out and gone in the country, down a gravel road. The farmhouse that had been there was gone, burned down, except for a chimney mostly covered with kudzu.
There were other farms around, but nobody within a mile or two of the old place.
He took Dexter, Hill, and Russell. They spent a couple hours checking things out—nobody had been down the gravel road as far as the barn lately; there might have been some hunters or cold-weather campers using the road, but no fresh tracks.
One they had the lay of the land, they turned to tactics. A couple shaped-charge shot-canisters were set up next to the road in trees, devices that could be triggered by a remote, right at eye level for a guy driving a car or van. Those would serve as backup. Nasty little things, they were essentially explosives packed heavy inside a fan-shaped tube that was welded shut on one end. The explosives were laced with little steel ball bearings. When the thing went blam! anything in front of the blunderbuss-bell would get blasted hard. It would turn the driver of a car within ten meters into bloody hash, window down or up, and with a pair of them, one on both sides of the narrow road, any passengers would be likewise chewed to ratburger PDQ.
Other than that, they didn’t need anything fancy. They had the ground. Carruth knew that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid was the best way. It might not always work every time, but KISS kept you from screwing up more often than not.
There were plenty of trees and scrub brush around the barn. Nobody would be inside the place—the wood was so rotten it might collapse from a big sneeze. They’d come in two cars—one would be the decoy, set up where it was easy to see, the other well hidden. They’d wear gillie-suits, and when the bad guys showed up, they’d do it by the numbers. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am . . .
He opened his cell phone. NO SIGNAL, it said. Good.
“Okay, boys, rendezvous at my place tomorrow morning, 0600. I’ll bring the hardware. Get some sleep, I want fresh eyes and trigger fingers, come the dawn.”
The other three nodded.
They had the decoy car set up—one that Hill swiped and switched plates on—and they were well hidden in the woods. Hill and Russell had overlapping fields of fire, using M-16s, though if it went the way they figured, they would only need those for mop-up.
They were in place and ready an hour before Lewis made the call to Al-Thani. The meeting was set for four hours after that, but it would only take maybe half that long for Al-Thani to drive there, assuming he was in or around the District, and if Carruth had been him, he would have pushed that to make it even sooner. But ninety minutes was way more time than they needed, since they were ready to rock now. . . .
Carruth had the Dragon, and the plan was simple. As soon as Al-Thani and his troops arrived, he would put a rocket through the windshield of whatever vehicle they were in and cook ’em. Bye-bye, boys.
If anybody survived that and managed to get out of the car alive, Hill and Russell would chop them down with automatic-weapons fire, and the dance would be over.
It would be a bit noisy, but by the time anybody got curious and came to see what all the thunder had been about, Carruth and his troops would be long gone.