"Shut up and bend down," said Holliday, crouching lower. "The bad guys will be here any second."
There was nothing but the faint clicking sound of the magnetic lock popping to announce their arrival and then a dull rattling sound like fifty ball bearings in a washing machine. Holes appeared in the bathroom door, the medicine chest mirror exploded and then there was silence.
"Do prdele!" said an angry voice.
"Do pic?e!" said another voice.
There was a brief silence and then the sound of Pesek's voice. "Dobry den, Zdvor?ili panove," said the assassin politely. There was a startled exclamation and then three clicks, like someone slowly winding an old-fashioned alarm clock, followed by three more.
"What the hell was that?" Peggy whispered, crouched down like a frog in the tub.
Holliday stood up. He could have been melodramatic and told her it was the sound of death, but he stayed silent.
"It's safe," said Pesek. "You can come out now, Colonel Holliday."
Holliday stepped out of the tub and opened the bathroom door. Peggy followed him.
"Holy crap!" Peggy said.
There were bleeding bodies all over the floor.
Pesek stood in the short hallway leading to the front door, unscrewing the suppressor from his weapon.
"Don't touch anything," he said. "And come with me quickly. There are probably more where these came from." He nodded at the corpses bleeding into the worn carpeting. "If not more of them, the police will arrive eventually. We must get you on your way."
"Where are we going?" Holliday asked. "We have no papers, no passports-nothing."
"Aix-les-Bains," said Philpot, stepping into the room and surveying the damage. "I have a friend there."
28
Billy Tritt and a boy named Stephen Barnes, one of the more technically minded of the skinhead, psychopathic members of Maine's Right Arm, stopped the stolen AT amp;T Southwest van beside the big junction box on Highway 18, a mile from the Tom's Hill plant of the King Fertilizer Corporation. Tritt switched off the engine and turned to the young man beside him. Both Tritt and Barnes were wearing official AT amp;T uniforms and hard hats taken from the bodies of the former occupants of the van.
"You know what to do, soldier?" Tritt asked firmly.
"Yessir." Barnes nodded. "Open the junction box and look for a yellow T1 line cable. Where the yellow cable joins the main bundle I insert a three-way and run a secondary line back to you in the van."
"Good," said Tritt. "Got your tools?"
"Yessir." Barnes patted the weighty belt around his waist.
"The three-way?"
Barnes nodded and dug into the upper pocket of his slightly bloodstained uniform pocket and found the large, chrome connector piece. He held it up. "Right here, sir," the young man answered proudly. He hadn't graduated from Lincoln Technical Institute because of money and some drug problems, but he knew what he was doing. If he'd graduated he could have worked for any cable TV company in the state, although the two years at Wynd-ham Correctional really screwed him when it came to getting jobs.
"Good. Off you go, then, soldier."
Barnes, eager as a 260-pound, muscle-bound puppy, clambered out of the van and set up the traffic cones just like he'd been told, even though there wasn't a car for miles. The scenery was bleak-endless stretches of wind-swept, dirty snow over stubbled cornfields that went on forever.
The junction box was a big green thing just off the shoulder. Barnes took a short crowbar out of his tool belt, snapped the lock and got down to work, looking for the T1 line that fed the fertilizer plant's routing information to the servers at the API Logistics center in Wichita. API was the dedicated contract carrier that shipped King Fertilizer's product to its various locations.
It took Barnes fifteen minutes to find the T1 line and another ten to feed a line from the box to the little porthole in the side of the van. Tritt took the cable, crimped on a connector and fit the line onto his Hewlett-Packard laptop. Within a minute or so he'd made his way onto the server at King Fertilizer and had diverted four container loads of ammonium nitrate prills to the dedicated King Fertilizer International docks in Baltimore.
A few more keystrokes and he set the proper authorization codes for the drivers he would send for the shipment, routing the fertilizer from Baltimore to Maine via Triskip Carriers, a container barging service that served multiple shippers carrying mixed cargo from Baltimore to New Jersey, New York, Boston and Portland, then connecting onward to Halifax and Montreal.
With those few actions in the middle of the frozen Kansas hinterland, Tritt had put 270,000 pounds of the primary explosive element for the biggest truck bomb ever made into the system. Within the next seven days it would arrive in Portland. During those seven days the other members of Maine's Right Arm would collect the 2,700 gallons of diesel fuel necessary to add to the explosive-grade prills in the containers. The resulting explosion, effectively ignited, would be roughly one thousand times greater than the Oklahoma City bombing.
When Tritt was done, he disconnected the computer and rapped on the side of the truck. The cable snaked out through the little porthole and disappeared. Tritt opened the driver's-side door of the truck and stepped out into the cold, his breath hanging like fog in the still air. He watched as young Barnes gathered up the extra cable, then closed the door of the junction box. He replaced the combination lock he'd snapped off with the crowbar with an identical one from his jacket pocket.
"All done," Barnes said, grinning at Tritt. The assassin looked up at the dull gray sky. It was beginning to snow. Big, wet flakes. Perfect.
"Good job. Now drop the extra cable onto the ground."
"Beg pardon?" Barnes said.
"Drop it, soldier."
"Sure, sir," the young man said, frowning and obviously confused. He did as he was told, however, dropping the extension cable onto the snowy ground. Tritt unzipped his jacket, took the Mossberg Bullpup shotgun out of its sling and shot Barnes in the head. From the neck up Stephen Barnes vanished, pieces of flesh, brains and skull as small as shining pennies went rising into the air like a cloud of spray, settling invisibly on the snow behind and beyond the rest of the young man's body.
The corpse crumpled like a Kleenex. Tritt replaced the shotgun in its sling under his arm and went to the corpse. He took a pair of large biohazard bags out of his pocket and the small hatchet off the dead boy's tool belt. He neatly hacked off the boy's hands, putting one into each biohazard bag.
He sealed the bags, put one in each pocket of his down jacket and then picked up the wound-up length of cable. He used his toe to nudge the corpse into the ditch by the side of the road. Eventually, after a few more nudges, the boy's body toppled over into the ditch.
Tritt kicked snow into the ditch until the headless, handless body was roughly covered. With luck the boy's decomposed and leathery remains wouldn't be discovered until spring planting time. It would probably be longer than that before the corpse was identified, if ever.
He gathered up the cones, got back into the truck, switched on the engine and the heater, then tossed the coil of cable and the traffic cones into the back of the vehicle. He headed east, toward Wichita Airport. He'd park the truck in the long-term lot, wipe it down and that would be that.
His basic kit was in an overnight bag in a locker there. He'd rent something from one of the big agencies, drive a couple of states over and buy a food processor in some anonymous Wal-Mart. He'd grind up poor Steve's hands and flush the pureed remains down the toilet in an equally anonymous motel at least one state over from where he'd shopped at the Wal-Mart.
He'd rinse the food processor in a bath of Clorox in a motel one state farther on, and finally he'd donate the food processor to a Goodwill in some big city he was passing through. It was overdoing it, Tritt knew, but better too much than too little, as his old grandma used to say, whether it was for making pies or anything else in life.