simple enough one: quit now or get the hell on with it. He chose to follow his heart and get on with it but felt suddenly and uncharacteristically nervous. His stomach began to churn. It was strange but he reckoned he knew why. Working against an enemy of his country was, after all, his job and the support he had from his government under such circumstances gave him the confidence he needed. But on this mission he was truly on his own – especially if he was caught.
Then Stratton looked at the man who had slaughtered Sally. He remembered her voice on the phone followed by her screams and then the sound of Josh crying. He touched the match’s flame to the bottom of the length of black string, which immediately ignited. He extinguished the match, picked the file off the floor and hurried back to the seating area.
The explosion was surprisingly loud for such a small piece of plastic, accentuated by the flat surfaces and confined space. Seconds later an alarm bell sounded as smoke began to drift along the corridor.
Stratton dropped to the floor as the sound of buzzers joined the alarm bell. The lawyers and defendants in the cubicles wanted out. The door beside Stratton opened and an officer stepped in, holding his gun.
‘What the fuck,’ he exclaimed as he looked around.
Stratton sat up, feigning shock and fear as another officer ran up to him.
‘What happened, Joe?’ one of the lawyers shouted above the noise of the alarms.
‘Don’t know,’ came the reply.
‘I heard a gun,’ Stratton called out. ‘In one of the cubicles.’
‘You hurt?’ the first officer asked him.
‘No.’
The buzzers continued to sound and were joined by the noise of banging on the cubicle doors, adding to the confusion.
‘Stay there. Don’t move,’ one of the officers said to Stratton as they made their way along the corridor and into the smoke.
Stratton didn’t waste a second. He got to his feet and slipped through the door, closing it behind him. The guard’s key was still in the lock so he turned it and left it in place. One of the officers saw the door close and called out as he hurried to it, yanking hard on the doorknob as he looked through the small window in time to see Stratton race up the stairs. He grabbed his radio.
Stratton made it to the top of the stairs at full speed. As he reached the door he slowed down and pushed calmly through it.
Most of the people in the crowded hall were listening to the alarm bells and asking those close by what was going on. The entire courthouse appeared to have come to a standstill after the explosion except for those officers who were running about listening to radios and trying to ascertain what was happening.
Stratton pushed through the crowd towards the front door where he saw several officers gathering. He paused to consider an alternative escape plan but could not think of one other than the obvious. ‘Fire!’ he called out. ‘There’s a fire below!’
It had the immediate desired effect. The crowd made a general move that soon became a panicky surge towards the entrance. Officers, as confused as everyone else, were pushed aside by those wanting to flee until one of them picked up a radio message. He called for his partners to close the doors and not let anyone out.
The officers’ concerted effort to push the large double doors shut only served to fuel the panic among those trying to get out. They shoved against the officers even harder.
Stratton got to the doors and added his weight to the would-be escapers. Along with a handful of others, he managed to squeeze outside just before the officers succeeded in closing the doors. He kept on going and crossed the parking lot briskly while removing his false moustache and glasses. A moment later he was heading down the street towards a large mall two blocks from the beach between the courthouse and his apartment building, leaving the pandemonium behind him.
Inside the mall entrance all was calm with no one remotely aware of what had happened a block away. Stratton dumped the removable parts of his disguise in a trash bin before casually making his way to another entrance and across the street to his apartment building.
It was a bright sunny day and Stratton’s heart rate was almost back to normal by the time he rounded the corner onto Santa Monica Boulevard where the blue-grey sea glistened beyond the palm trees that ran along the top of the cliff. He was confident that he had made a clean escape. Next would come the wait to determine the success or otherwise of his mission. With a regular mission it was not unusual to have to wait hours and sometimes days to learn the outcome of an attack: quite often it required satellite surveillance or other forms of high-tech intelligence to ascertain damage. In this case Stratton would use the best intelligence source of any criminal or terrorist organisation and that was the media. In his experience the media was generally a very poor source of accurate information since they were more concerned with drama. But in this case he felt that he could rely on them.
All in all, Stratton felt good about the little operation and could not help thinking now about finishing the job and going after Ardian. It seemed that now he had started he should finish. The internal voices of caution returned but he was tiring of them. They were right, of course, but so were the others. Besides, what was particularly sweet about killing Ardian was that he was the brother of the prick who had tried to kill Stratton in the limousine.
It was well worth carrying out a feasibility study, Stratton reckoned. If it looked good, there’d be another test run.
15
Hobart arrived at the main entrance of the Santa Monica District courthouse as the sun was setting behind him. He walked towards the door at the far end of the courtroom lobby where a couple of police officers stood guard. He knew his way around, having made several recent visits to the building. As he approached the door he flipped open his FBI badge and clipped it to the breast pocket of his jacket. The officers were already inspecting the badge as he walked towards them and stood aside to let him through.
He walked down the steps and paused in the doorway of the interview room to observe the activity. A camera flashed inside a cubicle somewhere towards the end while several officers in plain clothes were inspecting the area and taking samples.
‘Is it okay to walk through here yet?’ Hobart asked no one in particular.
One of the officers looked up, saw the badge, and waved him in. ‘Walk down the centre and keep clear of that area,’ the man said, indicating the seating alcove.
Hobart obeyed the instructions and stopped outside a cubicle inside which were two more officers. One was examining the far wall, which was spattered with dark bloodstains, while the other stood still, looking at the floor while holding his chin and apparently contemplating something. Hobart had been an FBI agent for nearly twenty years and had long since learned that time spent patiently studying people and crime scenes before talking to anyone or touching anything was often productive.
Hobart’s early working years had primarily been devoted to the eastern seaboard of the USA, mostly New York and Washington DC, followed by nine years in Eastern Europe, specifically the Balkans. He’d spent the last eighteen months in Los Angeles, the FBI’s single most heavily populated territory. He had worked so long for the massive bureaucratic machine that his youthful eagerness, zeal and keen response to the dramatic had become dulled. He had hoped, too, by this stage in his career to be further up the promotional ladder. Too many disappointments, more than anything else with the organisation’s unhealthy indulgence in politics, had dampened much of the fervour which had originally inspired him in his chosen vocation. But he was not a burn-out and had lost none of his enthusiasm for the purity of the job. A fire of some kind still smouldered somewhere deep inside him, fuelled by hostility towards the enemies of his country. He often suspected that much of what he had left was a kind of patriotic mania or anger. Not the best reason to get up each morning and go to work.
Hobart was something of a dormant volcano and it was that aspect of his character that made him memorable to others, the impression he gave that he was about to erupt at any moment. What kept him on an even keel was the belief against all the odds that there was someone somewhere on top of this wasteful, misguided heap of bureaucracy who actually knew what they were doing and had a plan for a saner and more logical solution to the madness of the world.
