This gave Henry some pause. “Two blocks?”
“You have the televisions rigged?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I’m going to guess that you’ve rigged a heating line to them. Would that be accurate?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Pump a little heat into each television and the xenon, neon and helium in the plasma cells will act like hundreds of tiny bombs. How hot does it need to be? Three hundred degrees for, what, ten seconds? That sound about right?” I stood back and examined his bookshelves again for a moment until I found the right book: Your House Is Your Kingdom: How to Stop Radical Islam and Communism at Your Door, Literally. I pulled it off the shelf and handed it to him. “You find that recipe in here?”
“It’s in a couple books,” he said. “All from very reputable sources in the counterterrorism community.”
“See, the problem is, Henry, you can’t just turn off three hundred degrees of heat. You didn’t figure in cool-down time, did you? And that ignition, where’d you get that? A fireworks store? You’re more likely to explode yourself than the televisions, but say you’re lucky. Say everything works perfectly. Odds are still fair that you broil alive and so do a bunch of innocent people you don’t owe money to.”
“Who are you with?”
“I’m with your son,” I said. “You’ve left him in a very tight spot, Henry.”
“I mean, who are you with? What agency?”
“I’m not with any agency,” I said.
“You haven’t been watching me?”
“No,” I said.
“Because many people are watching me,” he said.
At that moment, I realized how very lucky we were that Brent was gone. Because his father had gone mad. Plain and simple. My second-worst fear had been realized, at least as it related to Henry.
“My name is Michael Westen,” I said. “And he is Sam Axe. Your son, Brent, has been staying with me since you disappeared. He sent us to help you. Do you want help?”
“Can I Google you?”
“You can,” I said. “If you hand me that ignition switch I’ll let you do whatever you want to do.”
When you’re negotiating with a crazy person, the best thing to do is let them feel like they are in charge of the situation, while still maintaining the position of mental and physical power. In a hostage negotiation, this is usually done by accepting whatever condition the hostage taker wants.
They want a plane that will fly them to Beirut? Roll a private jet onto the street in front of them.
They want eighty million dollars? Make an electronic deposit in their foreign bank account.
They want to talk to their dead mother? Find a Ouija board.
None of it matters in the long run because what you have that the hostage taker doesn’t is, invariably, overwhelming firepower and operational intelligence. They know this, too, but usually are under the impression that the human life that waits in the balance is too much to risk.
“How do I know I can trust you? That you’re not with… them?” Henry asked.
“For one,” Sam said, “we don’t have any black helicopters.”
Henry nodded. “What about the fluoride? Are you doing anything with the fluoride in the water?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “Not us. We’re promoting tooth decay and other freedoms.”
Henry looked at me and I could tell he was waging a war of many voices in his head. Sam’s probably wasn’t helping.
“You’ll just have to take my word for it, Henry,” I said.
I decided I’d wait five more seconds and if Henry didn’t hand me the ignition, I’d punch him in the face and take it. It wasn’t personal. I just didn’t want to die.
Apparently, Sam felt the same way, since I only made it to three in my head before Sam punched Henry flush on the chin, knocking him out cold. I reached down and picked up the ignition.
“Sorry, Mikey,” Sam said. “He was sweating an awful lot and I didn’t want him to short out the system and cook us.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I was about to do it, too.”
Henry opened his eyes, but they clearly weren’t focusing yet. “Mom?” he said.
“Oh, Mikey,” Sam said, “this isn’t good.”
9
Weapons of mass destruction aren’t all that difficult to build. If you really want to kill hundreds of people at a time, all you need to do is go to the grocery store and purchase a few different cleaning agents, a box of nails, an artificial fire log, a few pressure cookers and, if you really want to cause problems, put all of those items into a car loaded with containers of hydrochloric acid. And then if you really want to make an impression, park the car next to a convention center hosting a gun and ammo show, and when it blows up, well, you’ll also have people against the Second Amendment up in arms, too, since in this case unchambered ammo would kill an awful lot of innocent bystanders.
To cause a horrible, tragic and ultimately doomed catastrophe, follow the steps found in most “how-to” books produced by those concerned citizens who think every helicopter is black and every government worker is secretly a member of the Trilateral Commission. Getting advice on how to kill from the paranoid and delusional is never a wise decision, a point I didn’t try to elucidate to Henry after we’d convinced him we were the good guys, since I wasn’t sure just yet where he fell along the continuum between paranoid and delusional. It was hard enough to convince him that no one was going to touch his dolls-which he preferred to call his “men.”
I carefully explained to Henry that the setup he’d rigged with his plasma televisions hooked to the house’s gas line was likely to trigger an underground explosion that would crater around his home. He seemed oddly elated, which I found disturbing.
I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the level of his loss of sanity-at some points he seemed fine, and at others he seemed… lost. It was evident that he’d had some kind of break from reality. Nevertheless, I wanted him to know that he could have taken out a lot of innocent people.
“Really?” he said. “That big?”
“That’s why I had to hit you,” Sam said.
“I’m a pacifist,” Henry said, just like his son.
“Do you hate your neighbors, Henry?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no, they’re all very nice.”
“Then why would you want them dead?”
“Oh, oh, I wouldn’t,” he said, serious now. “I just think it’s very interesting how these sorts of chain reactions occur. One person with a desire to keep his house protected could, with a push of a button, take out a city block. It’s chaotic, isn’t it?”
Henry and Sam and I were sitting in his bedroom, the only room in the house that didn’t have a window easily accessible to the outside world, as it looked out to the side yard, and even then the window was largely blocked by an armoire that Henry had moved almost directly in front of it. Not exactly design 101. But then Henry was probably more concerned about the black helicopters than the editorial staff of Architectural Design.
“No,” I said, “it’s not chaotic, actually. It’s dangerous, Henry. Can you appreciate that?”
“You can’t appreciate the synchronicity?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a theoretical synchronicity that I find fascinating,” he said. “Now, where’s my son? Have you told me where my son is? You did, didn’t you? You said he’s working for a Russian syndicate?”
I had, in brushstrokes, explained the situation to Henry, but this time I went into a bit more detail, including that Brent had tried to pay off Henry’s debts, that he’d duped Yuri Drubich and that Henry’s notary office had been destroyed. The problem was that everything I said essentially fed directly into Henry’s current delusions. I needed to see how he handled the information in order to gauge a bit more accurately where he fell on the scale of things.
“You see,” Henry said, “this is the upside of everything that has happened with my son. Look at how industrious he’s become in my absence. I couldn’t be more proud of him. He could very well have fallen into the clutches of the fluoride people, but he didn’t. Did you know that we’ve all been poisoned for almost fifty years? It’s true. It’s a systematic poisoning of the American people so that we are dulled to our wit’s end when the New World Order takes over.”