‘What the hell is my stepfather involved with? Why would he have fifty million dollars? Tell me.’
Now Eric looked at him again. ‘I can’t afford to feel sorry for you. Goodbye.’ He walked toward the door.
‘Don’t do this. Don’t leave me here.’ Luke struggled against the chains. ‘For God’s sakes, no one knows I’m here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘You’re right. And that ignorance buys me time.’ Eric turned and he left, slamming the door behind him.
A few minutes later Luke heard a car – his car – start, in the far distance, past the grove, past the gate. The BMW’s engine gave what sounded like a joyful revving. Of course. Eric and Aubrey’s ordeal was over.
His sure as hell wasn’t. He was alone, chained to a bed. In the middle of nowhere. With no way out. And no one to help him.
7
The bombs required a high level of trust. It started with several hundred pounds of high-grade Semtex explosive smuggled out of the Czech Republic and then sold to an operative in the FARC terrorist group in Colombia.
The explosives were then bartered for detailed intelligence on a new surge of anti-narcotic operations supported in Colombia by the American government. This trade resulted in the eventual torture and murder of four undercover agents.
The Semtex was muled into America by the most trusted couriers of a Mexican drug lord in exchange for the name of a key government informant inside his own ring. The informant was tortured for three days. Her body, with her throat slit, was left on her mother’s doorstep in a quiet Mexico City neighborhood.
Once the explosives were in the United States, the construction of the bomb was completed in a suburban garage outside of Houston, Texas, by an American woman who felt a deep and abiding hate for the government. Her nickname was Snow. It did not matter who was in power; Snow loathed all authority figures within the government with a fevered intensity. Snow had learned how to make Semtex-based bombs when she was a youngster, from her father, before he died. She refreshed her knowledge by perusing instructions found on the internet and studying worn, tea-stained manuals left over from the Irish Republican Army’s campaign in the 1980s that she had acquired on an online auction site.
Snow made many of them, in careful and rote fashion, one after another, for weeks, working in the quiet of her aunt’s house. Her aunt had died a year before and Snow’d kept the house as a workshop. Her boyfriend grew tired of her long absence; they fought on the second day, when she came home exhausted, her fingernails nicked from cutting wires, her nerves raw, and he left for his mother’s house. She was glad he was gone, he wasn’t committed to the cause, he was a pain in the ass. Fortunately he didn’t know about the bombs. She went and bought her own supplies: cell phones, wire, blasting caps.
Then she made one special bomb, shaping the plastic to detonate in a certain way, with a calculated force to produce an exact result. Snow was so proud of it; she called this bomb Baby. She was drinking coffee, waiting at her house for the man to pick Baby up, hoping that her boyfriend wouldn’t show up, wanting her back. She was done with the boyfriend.
‘It’s lighter than I thought it would be,’ Mouser said when he picked up the bomb. He stood in Snow’s suburban kitchen; she had, as ordered, placed the bomb inside a reinforced canvas carryall. He picked up the duffel bag, measured the weight. Heavy but manageable.
‘I do good work,’ Snow said. Mouser thought the nickname fit her; her hair was dyed a stark white, cut short. Her gray eyes were like flecks of ice. Her body was muscled, not afraid of hard work. There was a thin crinkle of scar on her jaw and her neck; she’d been burned once. Maybe one of the bombs had backfired on her. She watched him with crossed arms. ‘Assuming your people provided the correct specifications.’
‘They did.’
Snow raised an eyebrow. ‘If you’re wrong about the tank thickness, we’ll have a problem. Or rather, you will.’
‘It’s been double-checked. Three-fourths of an inch thick, non-normalized steel. More brittle. The cars are old.’ Mouser didn’t much like his facts being called in question. ‘You put in too much explosive, we’ll have more burn than drift.’
‘I guarantee my work.’ Snow sipped orange juice. ‘You don’t look like how I pictured you.’
She was not at all what Mouser expected in a bomb maker. He knew a few and they were foreigners, often older guys (he suspected incompetent bomb makers died early), and frequently missing fingers. But she was supposed to be one of the best.
‘How did you picture me?’
‘Arab.’
Mouser cracked a grin with no humor in it. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘I’m not disappointed,’ Snow said. ‘If you were an Arab I wouldn’t have let you have the bomb. I don’t much like Arabs. They’re worse than the government.’
Mouser said, ‘Nothing’s worse than the Beast.’
‘The what?’ A light hit her eyes; she tilted her head to look at him.
‘The Beast – that’s what I call the government. I’m curious as to how you could have gotten the bomb away from me if you didn’t like the look of me.’
‘Oh, I would have just detonated it once you were about three miles away,’ she said lightly.
‘Ah.’ Mouser raised an eyebrow.
‘Joking,’ she said.
Mouser was careful to keep his neutral expression on his face. ‘I’m not much for jokes.’
‘No. You shouldn’t be. This is important work. Take good care of my baby’ – she put a proprietary hand on the duffel bag – ‘and she’ll take good care of you.’
It creeped him out a bit to hear her call a bomb a baby. ‘And the rest?’
‘Ready when you are.’ She watched him with a bright interest. Maybe making bombs, living on the constant edge of disaster, made her eager for physical sensations, for release. He had no interest in complicating his life with a woman. He had the mission he had appointed himself in life; to him, the mission was everything. The government had to be shown for the Beast incarnate that it was, the ravager of liberty, the ruination of hope, the devil that destroyed what made America great. That was all that mattered.
‘I’ll call you when it’s done,’ he said.
‘I’ll watch it on the news.’
‘And then the next stage.’
She nodded, but she didn’t seem to care so much about the money. She watched him with an intensity that made his stomach twist. Strange woman, he thought, but useful.
He got into his car and drove through the quiet streets. Spring break was this week. Freed from the mind-numbing indoctrination of government schools, lots of kids played on the lawns, riding bikes with those dorky helmets that the Beast insisted they wear for their protection, another emblem of its constant meddling. One girl waved at him and he raised his hand in a brief wave.
Honey, I’m going to set you free, he thought. Bring you a different world where the Beast has broken legs and dulled claws.
Mouser drove through Houston, the bomb sitting on the passenger seat, the duffel bag wrapped in a cloth cover. He listened to speeches he had written for himself on his cassette player and thought he needed to polish his metaphors a bit; he spoke too much of purpose, not enough of war. He was firing the first, carefully considered shot in a long war and the realization thrilled him to the bone. More shots would come in the next couple of days.
The resting place for Snow’s baby had been selected with great care: a quiet bend close to the rail switch station in Ripley, Texas, forty miles north-east of Houston. Ripley was a small town of two thousand people, a few farmers and ranchers, mostly blue-collar workers employed by the oil refineries and related service industries. Mouser had no specific quarrel with the people of Ripley; but he had no regard for them either. They’d chosen to live in a dangerous place. Ripley lay in a small depression along the railway, with a heavy growth of trees ringing the entire town. The people of Ripley could suffer the consequences of their poor planning, he thought. It had taken him weeks to find and select the right spot.