wife, too, but she wouldn’t be coming out to see their visitor, and Parker wouldn’t be going inside the house. He and Briggs sat on a patio in front of one corner of the low, broad house, facing the lake glittering like a diamond pin out there, where motorboats snarled and white sailboats slid silently among them at a slant.
Watching the movement on the lake, Parker said, “You like things calm. No commotion.”
“We get commotion sometimes,” Briggs said. He’d put on a few pounds but was still basically a thin unathletic man who looked as though he belonged behind a desk. Nodding at the lake, he said, “A few years ago, a tornado came across from the Gulf, bounced down onto the lake, looked as though it was coming straight here, lifted up just before it hit the shore, we watched the tail twist as it went right over the house, watched it out that picture window there. That was enough commotion for a while.”
Parker said, “You watched it out a picture window?”
Briggs either shrugged or shivered; it was hard to tell which. “Afterwards, we said to each other, that was really stupid.”
“So you want to stay retired,” Parker said.
“The last time we met,” Briggs said, “we were crawling through a tunnel with alarms going off. Michaelson got shot. I don’t want any more of that.”
“Let me tell you what I’ve got,” Parker said. “I don’t need you there, when it goes down. I need materiel.”
Briggs looked doubtful. “You want me to sell stuff to you?”
“I want you to provide it,” Parker told him, “for a piece of the pie. Come along and show how it works, but then be somewhere else when it’s going down.”
“What materiel do you need?”
“I need to stop three armored cars, and open one more.”
“That’s a lot of armored cars.”
Parker told him the setup, and Briggs said, “Using them as roadblocks, that’s nice.”
“You’re the one knows what would work.”
“Well, a lot of things would work,” Briggs said. “I’ll tell you something I can get my hands on. You know the Carl-Gustaf?”
“Sounds like a king.”
“It’s an antitank gun, made by the Swedes, ever since the Second World War. It’s heavy, but you won’t be carrying it except in cars.”
“How heavy?”
“Thirty-six pounds, a little over four feet long. It’s eighty-four millimeter, shoots different kinds of rounds, including antitank. The antitank shell is almost six pounds all by itself.”
“It sounds old,” Parker said.
“But it’s still in use,” Briggs assured him. “The NATO countries used it a lot. Singapore’s got two hundred of them right now, Uganda uses them. There’s a place in India makes the ammunition.”
Parker said, “And you can get hold of some of these Carl-Gustafs.”
Grinning, Briggs said, “I’m retired, but not that much. The difficult part, these days, you start dealing in arms, the feds figure you’re probably hooked up with terrorists. Makes it hard for a private guy to get along. But the good thing is, I know people who have materiel they’re afraid to move, because anybody they talk to could turn out to be undercover. And one of these people I know has Carl-Gustafs.”
“Could you get them to New England by October fourth?”
Briggs considered. “Five days from now? I’ll drive them up in my van.”
“Good. One of the people with us manages a motel, we can put you there without paper, so you never left home.”
Briggs nodded, smiling at his lake. “That’s the goal, all right,” he said. “Never leave home. What else do you need?”
“To get into the last armored car without setting fire to anything.”
“They’ll have a radio in there,” Briggs pointed out. “And a global positioning device.”
“I know that,” Parker said. “So it all has to be fast.”
“You’ll want an Uzi or a Valmet or something like that, to shoot out the tires and the door locks. Do you worry about the guards?”
“If they’re sensible,” Parker said, “it’s better to leave them alive. Doesn’t get the law as agitated.”
“I agree. So the three Carl-Gustafs and two assault rifles. Do you want tear gas?”
“Then we’d need masks,” Parker said, “so we could go into the car to get the goods, and everything slows down. No, it’s up to the guards. They get out of the way or they don’t.”
“I suppose so.” Briggs frowned out at the lake. The noise of the motorboats, an irritation at first, after a while seemed to become a part of the day, like the droning of insects. Briggs said, “In my years on the heist, I never liked it when somebody died. I still think about Michaelson from time to time.”
“That wasn’t us,” Parker said. “He was shot by a guard.”
“He was dead.”
Parker said, “I don’t want these armored car people dead, but I’m not going to have a lot of time to spend on
