Collision Course Read online

  "What do you want to know?" she asked.

  She had no way of knowing who these men really were or who they thought she was. They wore uniforms but that meant nothing. She was in a suite at a resort hotel crawling with foreign intelligence operators. Their behavior and manner had been thuggish rather than coolly professional.

  The backhand blow struck her across the cheek and snapped her head to the side. For the second time she tasted her own blood.

  "I'll ask the questions," the man snarled.

  He pulled a stainless-steel lighter from a pocket and began to absently play with it as he regarded her. His lips were full, almost feminine but with a quality that made Benson think of slugs.

  He snapped the lighter open. Sparked a flame. Snapped the lighter closed. His eyes, the color of mud, watched her with predatory interest as he repeated the sequence. Behind him his men stood in a loose, silent phalanx. Guns were visible now. One man, the tallest of them, leered at her.

  The main interrogator said something over his shoulder in a machine-gun dialect, sharp and dissonant to her ears. The others in the room chuckled in response. It was not a pleasant sound.

  "Well, since you refuse to cooperate I'm afraid we'll have to take things up a notch." The man's voice was laconic. He snapped the lighter again.

  "What!" Benson nearly screamed. "You haven't asked me anything yet!" Despite herself she was nearly frantic as she began to consider the implications of that flickering lighter flame.

  "Oh?" The man feigned surprise. "You want to answer questions?"

  "Sure." She nodded. Just killing time. Give him time, she told herself.

  "How many men have you slept with?"

  "What?" Her voice was a squawk even to her own ears.

  "How many? In what ways? Were they big men, did you love it?"

  "What!"

  The interrogator was on her in a flash. He straddled her legs and pushed his weight down onto her lap, pinning her to the seat. He snatched her face up by the chin and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into her temple.

  "I don't care what you know, whore, and I don't need you to tell me things."

  He leaned in very close, his lips bare centimeters from Benson's own bruised and swollen mouth. His breath was hot against her skin, and she could feel his excitement against her stomach. She wanted to throw up.

  "No," he continued. "I don't need you to learn things from. I need you to send a message."

  His tongue flickered out and he licked a trail of blood from the corner of her mouth.

  "To get my message across," he whispered, his eyes now bright, "I'm going to do things to you. My men are going to do things to you. Then we'll dump you and when they find you they'll know never..."

  There was an angry shout in the hall then an unmistakable thud of something heavy falling against the door. The man was rising off her lap, twisting with the pistol when Benson lunged.

  Her mouth found the side of his head and her teeth found the lobe of his ear. Her jaw snapped shut like a trap. The interrogator screamed in surprise even as his men were turning toward the door.

  Bullets burned through the door, shattering the lock mechanism. A moment later the door snapped open, splintering along its length in the process with a sound like a gunshot. A sentry in plainclothes standing next to the door swiveled and swept a lethal-looking submachine gun out from under his suit jacket.

  A dark and mangled shape came hurtling into the room. Gunfire erupted. She had a brief image of Cooper charging forward, a dead man in his arms as a shield like a tackling dummy. The corpse's head looked odd, like a deflated balloon. She could see the blue-gray scrambled-egg pieces of the dead man's brain sticking to his hair.

  Benson jerked her head hard to the side and ripped the man's ear off. He screamed out loud and threw himself backward. Blood splashed her face as his weight lifted off her.

  He rose and punched the bound woman hard in the face, knocking her over backward in the chair. She bounced off the hotel bed behind her and fell to the floor. She grunted with the impact and twisted to look up.

  The interrogator loomed above her, blood soaking the side of his face and uniform. The pistol was in his hands. He lifted it and sighted down the barrel at her. His fat lips were pulled back over his teeth, and his muddy eyes were wild.

  The shot sounded loud from so close, but it also merged with the fierce gunfire echoing in the room. There was a muzzle-flash half a second after the man jerked to the side.

  A 9 mm round burned into the bed next to Benson's head, tossing tick stuffing into the air. The interrogator spun and dropped forward, his gun falling from his slack hands. An exit wound had blown out his left eye and temple, turning it into a saucer-sized cavity.

  The man's weight tumbled forward and flopped across the redheaded agent, crushing her bound hands cruelly against the thin carpet of the floor. The chair she had been secured to snapped under the pressure along its back and legs.

  Benson grunted as the wind was driven from her under the impact. She struggled to rise. The bed blocked her view. Her own ragged breathing confused the sounds. She heard sharp curses and anguished cries and live bodies striking inanimate objects. From all around her the sharp, pungent scent of cordite sliced into her nose, burning it.

  She struggled to lift the body off her by pushing up, but with her hands still bound behind her back it was nearly impossible. She scissor-kicked her legs and fought to rise. More of the man's blood spilled across her.

  She got her head up and saw an Asian in plainclothes stumble backward, arms flung out wide, red geysers blossoming in his white dress shirt. She fought to rise, pulling her legs underneath her and shoving at the body. Her head cleared the edge of the bed and she saw bodies splayed across the room like abandoned toys. The walls were splashed with blood. The television screen had been shattered. A picture on the wall held the evidence of dual bullet impacts. A corpse, glassy-eyed and gory, lay sprawled belly down on the bed.

  She twisted her head and saw Cooper locked in a deadly dance with the final survivor of the room's squad. She recognized the tallest man from the elevator. His uniform had been ripped open. He fought with Cooper over possession of the big American's pistol. She didn't quite comprehend what she was seeing, but suddenly Cooper bent at the waist, dropping his center of gravity, then rose again while twisting at the hips. He held the other man hard by the wrists and when he uncoiled his body the man tumbled over his own arms and was planted headfirst into the carpet.

  Still holding on to the man's captured wrists, Cooper pointed the barrel of his weapon down and it fired three times in rapid succession. Benson could hear the wet, flat impacts of the rounds as they burrowed into flesh from brutally close range.

  Cooper lifted his head and met hers eyes as she rose.

  The moment ended in a heartbeat, and Cooper crossed the room and quickly worked to unlock her cuffs with the key he took from the dead interrogator's pocket.

  "Thank you..." Benson began.

  She wasn't gushing, just grateful and controlled though her heart was beating in her chest. She could still remember the feel of the men's hands on her body, insulting her sense of self, her dignity.

  Cooper cut her off. "We've got to get moving. The plan is now maxed out. This changes everything. Here's one of the key-card controls Mitchell forged to operate the elevators."

  Benson threw the cuffs down and quickly buttoned her shirt as she listened to Cooper's instructions. As he talked she reached down and took a pistol from a still warm corpse, jacked the slide and slid the weapon home behind her back.

  "Go to the far end of the hall where the laundry service elevators are. Use that. Get to the ground and get the car 'cause Mitchell is going to be right behind you. I'm going directly for Lerekhov now, screw the hit team. I'll take it as it comes."

  "What about your distractions? The professor and the Red Sox fan?"

  "They've been mobilized. I don't know if they're fluid enough to get rolling in time, but the pro
test marches should provide enough cover for you two to get to the river should you end up on foot. Jack should be rolling and ready for extraction."

  "I'm ready," Benson said, her voice firm.

  Cooper smiled, half to himself, at her courage. She was a lioness.

  "Good," he said.

  He turned to go and Benson followed close behind him. He crossed the room, stepping around spreading pools of red. The enclosed space still reeked of cordite but a sweeter, more biological smell had already started to creep in. A fan turned overhead. Benson heard the hum of the air conditioner.

  Cooper reached the door, his hands gripping his pistol. He quickly looked around the corner then ducked his head back. He stuck his head out again and took a fuller look. He turned toward the redhead.

  "It's clear. You get to the service elevators. If there's a problem, shoot anyone armed. You've got to get out. I'm going to the stairs."

  The two Americans stepped out into the hallway. Benson saw the crumpled heaps of the sentries she had seen on her way into the hotel room. Both men lay like discarded dolls with slack mouths and glassy eyes. Their spilling blood was very bright against the subdued hues of the hall carpet.

  Benson reached out and grabbed his arm as he shrugged himself free of the knapsack. "Cooper, thank you. You take care of yourself."

  "I will. You'll be fine—you have what it takes."

  Then they ran.

  19

  Once Caine had the money the rest was mundane. There was nothing exotic about his purchases, and that, of course, was the beauty of it all. He didn't need covert connections or extralegal networks once he had the operating capital.

  He went to the lawn-and-garden department of a home-improvement store, where he bought the fertilizer with the ammonium nitrate in an amount he thought wouldn't raise suspicion. He was putting in new lawn, a full acre of Kentucky Blue Grass. Then he drove across town and bought some more. Then he drove across town again and bought some more. Then he waited for the shift to change and he did it all again.

  While he was at the store he wandered through the home-improvement aisles and picked up the washers, faucets screens, loose nuts and screws, the blowtorch, the power tools. It was all right there. He went to a toy store for the chemistry set. He bought two "because my nephews are almost the same age and I don't want them to fight."

  At the hobby store he purchased the model rocket fuel. He purchased KNO3 from the pharmacy next door where the print on the bottles instructed him to use one-quarter teaspoon dissolved in water to promote diuretic action. To ensure he had enough of the potassium nitrate he bought several tubes of toothpaste, as well.

  For powdered aluminum Caine simply hit the Internet. He found a multitude of sites willing to ship. He purchased the quantities he needed in discreet amounts from more than twenty sites, expedited shipping each time. For his primary source of hydrazine he repeated the dispersed-ordering process, this time buying industrial dyes.

  The bombs were simple, so simple the risk of destroying himself was considerable but that came down to fear, and overcoming fear came down to wanting it bad enough. He stacked sealable plastic bins with fertilizer for the ammonium nitrate. Over the dry, loose bulk he added hydrazine at a ratio of two to one. The refining process from the dye to remove the hydrazine was not even necessary.

  Using a pocket calculator he factored the amount of hydrazine in the dye per measured volume with the amount of ammonium nitrate per volume of fertilizer. All the numerical components for the problem were spelled right out on the package as per federal regulations. Despite the need for numerical calculations, he did not fall into the trap of digit summoning.

  He now had a homebrew of the commercial substance Astrolite G. It was a compound slightly more powerful than the commercially manufactured TNT, offering him an impressive detonation velocity. Over this Caine mixed in the powdered aluminum and once it set, much like a birthday cake, he had made Astrolite A, a stable explosive causing a marked increase in density and brisance.

  Shifting through foreign media reports, he was able to determine the amount in kilograms used by Iraqi terrorists to destroy the twenty-six-ton Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. He put that much in the sedan. He doubled the amount he put in the tour van.

  Now he needed to create triggers. Again it was laughably simply.

  He purchased four prepaid cell phones. He knew he was leaving a record, a paper trail. There were simple steps he could have taken to obscure the trail, but it was always wise to give the devil his due.

  There existed no single entity on the planet more capable of deciphering a paper trail than the U.S. Government. Maybe the French, but they had invented the word bureaucracy and it didn't really matter; once he acted the Feds would find his trail. He would most likely be dead, but it wasn't as if it was speed that would save him and nothing else.

  In this case the trigger was simply a smaller detonation used to incite a larger explosion. For ease he went with picric acid, using a process taught by the CIA for their improvised-explosives course. It produced an explosive from aspirin.

  Caine crushed a handful of aspirin tablets and then added water to make a chalky paste. He stirred ethyl alcohol into the aspirin paste and then filtered the solution to remove solid particles.

  He painted the inside of the metal tube he would use as a container with epoxy while he waited for the ethyl alcohol in the aspirin to evaporate. Once that was done Caine recovered the remaining crystals.

  He finished by pouring concentrated sulfuric acid from the children's chemistry sets into a large jar and added the crystals from the alcohol-aspirin solution. Feeling like a witch out of Macbeth, he heated the acid in simmering hot water bath for just over fifteen minutes. The acid turned a reddish color and he knew it had worked.

  Next he added leftover potassium nitrate to the crystallized acid while stirring slowly. He let the acid cool to room temperature, then poured the amalgamation slowly into some water and let it cool down again. He filtered off the particles of picric acid and washed them with a cup of ice water.

  He dried the crystals before packing them carefully into the epoxy-lined tube. He placed the tube onto a piece of wax paper before folding a length of wire into a hairpin loop and securing the loop in the tube, up against the wax paper. He added a few drops of epoxy in the tube and let it harden.

  He cracked another beer and slowly chewed a Ritalin tablet while he waited for the epoxy to finish drying. He clicked his MP3 player up to his digital copy of AC/DC's "Back in Black" and let it play. The warning chimes and building riff of "Hell's Bells" filled his ears and he felt like the song was just his, for him, about him. The lyrics made promises he intended to fulfill. The bitter salt taste of the Ritalin was astringent in his mouth as he absorbed the drug through his inner cheek like a pinch of chewing tobacco.

  Once the initial epoxy had set, Caine filled the rest of the tube with the picric acid. He carefully peeled the wax paper away from the tube and pushed the epoxy plug out of the tube. Taking a file Caine shaved the end of the plug, reducing the wire diameter at the loop.

  Feeling like a medieval alchemist, Caine ground up a small amount of black powder from the caps designed for children's cap pistols with dextrin and water to make a paste that he coated along the wire loop. With sufficient voltage connected to the wire leads, the black powder would flash.

  He then used a jeweler's screwdriver from an eyeglass-repair kit to open one of the prepaid cell phones. He attached the ringer activation wire directly to the wire loop. When he dialed the right number he would have his voltage. When he had his voltage he would have his flash. With the flash would come the trigger detonation. Following the initial detonation would be an explosion just like the one that had rocked Oklahoma City.

  It was, literally, that easy.

  20

  Bolan moved down the hall at a brisk walk, his knapsack hanging casually off one shoulder. He looked hurried but not frantic; he didn't run. His weapon remained dow
n and hidden. He wasn't in the business of killing security guards and local police. If he could avoid conflict, he would continue to do so.

  But if actual players got in his way, whether military or foreign intelligence, he intended to go down fighting. He had committed himself, made a promise to the President that he would succeed and he was a man of his word.

  He left the hall and hit the stairs, leaving Jill Benson behind him at the door to the service elevators after checking to make sure the area was empty. Once he hit the stairs he began to run up.

  Lerekhovs delegation had clout commensurate with Vietnam's status at the conference and the code breaker had been given a deluxe suite some eight stories up from the room where the unknown players had taken Benson for "questioning."

  The situation involving the dead body and the actors involved was already proving too murky for easy categorization, and Bolan realized he wouldn't have the time to arrive at satisfactory answers before events overtook him.

  Whoever those players acted for, whatever their plans, Bolan had his own and he was hell-bent on sticking to them. He ran the stairs two at a time, his head up, eyes tracking for targets and suspicious movements. Like a grunt humping a heavy rucksack through the bush Bolan gutted it out.

  Bolan's earpiece came to life and Sparks's voice broke through to give him an update.

  "I have confirmation from Professor. His machine is running smoothly, and he had numbers in place already. Red Sox fan is loading his troops into position. We're cutting this so last minute I have doubts about him. I have just attempted landline contact with the room you're headed to now. Negative contact. Negative contact."

  "Understood. Get what you can, scramble, meet our friend and scoot," Bolan replied.

  "Understood." Sparks paused. "Good luck."

  "Out."

  Bolan jogged up the last flight of stairs and yanked open the fire door to the floor that Sparks's intelligence had identified being LerekhoVs. He stepped out of the heat of the stairwell and into the cool expanse of the hallway.