About a dozen-the least sociopathic-looked hesitant, but no one raised a hand.
"Good," Bowie said. "Then get your cash and your knapsack. Find your place on the map. Make sure your weapon's ready. Get plenty to eat and a good night's sleep. I'll talk to you tomorrow morning."
As Carl stepped from the podium, the men formed a line in front of Raoul, who distributed the money.
"Mr. Culloden," Carl said to one of the men, "when you first came to us, you looked soft and pale from solitary confinement. You were puffy from lack of exercise and the starchy crap the prison called food. Now you're solid. You've got a healthy glow. You ought to be paying me for treating you to a spa."
Culloden chuckled. "Right, Mr. Bowie, but if it's all the same to you, I'll keep the cash."
Carl continued his banter, making the men grin and feel part of a cherished team. Sometimes he shook hands or gave a man a good-natured slap on the back. But as he scanned the line, concealing his calculated assessment, he noticed that a half-dozen men hung back.
They waited while the majority pocketed their money and drifted back to cleaning guns, playing video games, watching action movies, and eating the best buffet in New Orleans.
"Mr. Bowie," one of them said.
Knowing where this was headed, Carl replied, "Yes?"
"We, uh… We've been wondering…"
Another man said, "Did you mean it that, if we didn't think we were up to this, we didn't have to do it?"
"This isn't a dictatorship, Mr. Todd. I believe that the best team is one that's totally voluntary."
"Then…," another man said.
"Yes, Mr. Weaver?"
"I think I've got myself in enough trouble for one lifetime. I don't need any more."
"It's not as if you're going to kill anybody," Carl said. "All you need to do is activate the smoke canister and shoot into the air."
"I guess I was more comfortable holding up gas stations, but I don't even want to do that now."
"Totally voluntary," Carl said. "I won't pretend I'm not disappointed. A lot of effort went into training you. But if you can't commit to the mission, you're doing everybody a favor by admitting it. You're sure you won't change your mind?"
They didn't respond.
"Okay then." Carl sighed. "Naturally, you won't get next month's wages. And naturally, you can't stay with the team any longer. But I can't let you stay in New Orleans, either. If you get drunk, you might stagger into some bar in the French Quarter and say more than you should."
"We wouldn't do that, Mr. Bowie. You know you can count on us."
"All the same, Mr. Weaver, you have an alcohol problem that made you do things that put you in prison. You also, Mr. Todd. I'll arrange for the six of you to stay in a motel for a couple of days. Outside town. Stock it with booze. Get take-in food. I don't want you out in public."
"No, sir."
"Two days from now, you can leave the motel, and it won't matter what you tell anybody after that."
Todd looked relieved. "Thanks, Mr. Bowie."
Bowie told Raoul, "Bring the van."
Ten minutes later, Raoul was driving them through dense traffic west on Interstate 10. The setting sun hurt his eyes. As they left the city, he said, "Mr. Bowie says the motel can't be fancy. Nothing where you need to show a credit card and leave a trail. You've got plenty of cash you haven't been able to spend. Use it. That place'll do." He pointed toward something called the Escort Inn.
"As long as it's near a liquor store," Todd said. "I haven't had a drink since an hour after I got out of prison. Then Bowie convinced me to go to his damned camp, and that was the end of that."
"Hey," Weaver said. "There's a liquor store across the street."
They stocked up with beer, bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin, soft drinks, potato chips, onion dip, beef jerky, and a deck of cards, then drove to a parking lot at the side of the motel.
"I'll wait here while you register," Raoul said. "In case the mission turns to merde, you don't want to be seen with me."
"Right. Good idea. We don't want to be linked to what goes on in town."
"Ask for rooms in back. Less chance of anybody noticing me park back there while you unload this stuff."
"Yeah, we'll tell the clerk we want to be away from the noise of traffic."
Five minutes later, the six men returned from the motel's lobby. Raoul drove them to their rooms in back.
"Ground floor," Todd said proudly. "We won't be seen carrying all this stuff up the stairs."
Raoul watched them take the booze and food into one of the rooms. "Everybody set?" he asked from the doorway. "Need anything more?"
"A couple of hookers," Todd said, smirking.
"Mr. Bowie doesn't want you talking to anybody," Raoul warned.
"Yeah, okay, don't get bent out of shape. I was just making a joke."
One of the men twisted the cap off a Jim Beam bottle. Another popped the tab on a Budweiser can while a third turned on the television.
"See if they get the History Channel," Weaver said. "Maybe they'll have a program about machine guns or something else that's neat."
"Gotta use the bathroom," Raoul said.
He went in, closed the door, urinated, and flushed the toilet. He pulled two Beretta fifteen-round handguns from under his baggy shirt. He attached sound suppressors that he took from pouches on his belt. When he opened the door, he heard a TV announcer describing the invention of the AK-47 assault rifle. Stepping from the bathroom, he emptied both pistols into the six men. The suppressors made sounds as if a pillow fight were taking place. The nine-millimeter ammunition had fragmentation tips that disintegrated in their targets instead of passing through and piercing walls, alerting someone outside or in a neighboring room.
Raoul searched for and picked up every expelled cartridge, a few of them taking longer to find than he intended. Even if somehow he didn't locate every one, it wouldn't have been calamitous-he'd worn gloves when he loaded the weapons, taking care that he didn't leave fingerprints on the shells. But without empty cartridges, the investigators wouldn't have firing-pin marks and extraction scratches that could provide ballistics evidence linking Raoul's pistols to the crime scene. For certain, the bullets were so mangled and fragmented that they wouldn't provide ballistics evidence. In addition, Raoul planned to wipe his fingerprints from the pistols and abandon the weapons the moment it was safe to do so. As Mr. Bowie had taught him, survival depended on details.
He removed cash from the bodies. Then he cleaned his prints off the toilet lever and the few other things he'd touched. Leaving the unit, about to lock the door behind him, he heard the History Channel announcer explain that the Communist-era inventor of the AK-47 never received royalties from it.
4
Hearing a barge chug past on the Mississippi, Carl pressed buttons on his cell phone and yet again got a recording that told him to leave a message. He pressed a different set of buttons and got a similar message. He interrupted the transmission and brooded. It had been twenty-four hours since he and Brockman had been in touch. Brockman was supposed to have flown to New Orleans the previous evening. This morning, he was supposed to have reported to the Global Protective Services base here and evaluated the security preparations for the World Trade Organization conference. He would then have spoken with his counterparts in the various government protective services. When he knew the schedules and the routes that various agents would use to escort their clients to the convention center, he was under orders to get in touch with Carl and inform him of the details.