He drove more cautiously than usual, acknowledging this to be possibly the most dangerous part of what he intended to do; he was driving a doubtfully roadworthy rented car containing Czechoslovakian-made explosives and Soviet detonators. And other materials that could, without too great a stretch of a policeman’s imagination, be described as housebreaking equipment.
O’Farrell drove bv the house on Christchurch Hill the BMW was there—but didn’t slow. He continued on to a turn, turning again and then again, completing the square, parking farther away than he had before. He wanted the concealing protection of the other cars that lined the road there, where his vehicle would be one of many, not isolated for a registration check by a cautious policeman. The lights extinguished. O’Farrell remained behind the wheel, checking the time against the unseen but scheduled passing of the police patrol. At the precise moment he knew they would be going by Rivera’s home, he left the car, a smooth, quick movement. Whatever he carried in this area at this time of night would have aroused curiosity, but O’Farreii thought the briefcase was the most acceptable. It bulged heavily, but so did a lot of briefcases; he wished he had been able to age it more successfully. He was glad of the darkness.
O’Farrell walked alert to everything around him, not consciously using the shadows—which in itself would be suspicious—but ready to withdraw into them if necessary. He did, after about fifty yards, when outside lights abruptly blazed ahead of him and there was a noisy, shouted parting between guests and hosts. But when a car suddenly came around the comer, filling the road with its headlights, he did not withdraw. He realized he would have already been seen and that to do so would clearly be suspicious. The vehicle was unmarked and there was no obvious interest from anyone inside. He pulled into the cover of an overhanging tree after it had passed, to watch for the glare of suddenly applied brake lights, but none came. At the comer of the road upon which Rivera’s house was built, O’Farrell paused, checking the police progress. Twenty-five minutes before their next patrol, allowing five minutes for any unforeseen change in their pattern. And he had about one hundred yards and a gate to negotiate. Time to spare, he calculated, walking on. O’Farrell saw car lights far ahead. He would easily have been able to dodge, but trees did not overhang in such profusion as before and there was less shadow. He decided it was better to walk on, as if he had every right to be where he was. There seemed to be a perceptible slowing but the car didn’t stop; he didn’t immediately look back, as he’d done before, worried of their watching him in their rearview mirror. He waited until he was two houses from Rivera’s official residence. There was no sign of any vehicle. People either. Ahead, the road was deserted. He checked the time again. Still ten minutes.
He consciously slowed when he reached the edge of Rivera’s property, ears strained for any movement or sound—guards, dogs, whatever he had missed in his surveillance. There was a dog barking but it was far away; nearer, and louder, water was running. A fountain, O’Farrell guessed; it might have been in Rivera’s garden but could have been in that of a neighbor. He stopped just short of the gate so as not to be silhouetted by it, but able to reach out to test if it were locked after all. As he did so, far up the road, he saw the black, moving outlines of two pedestrians—it had to be the returning policemen. He did not hurry. As close to the wall as he was, he would merge completely with it. The latch lifted with barely an audible click and there was no sound at all as the gate gave inward, on oiled hinges. O’Farrell opened it only enough to ease through, closing it just as soundlessly before moving sideways to the protection of the shrubbery, and off the crunching gravel. He dropped, perfectly comfortable, into a squatting crouch, waiting for the police to pass, ears again tensed to hear a voice or a footstep. Unaccountably he was swept by a feeling of deja vu and searched for the memory. It came very quickly. How he’d learned to crouch, for hours if necessary, and how he’d listened on deep reconnaissance missions behind the lines in Vietnam, he recalled: in Vietnam, where for the first time he—O’Farrell closed his mind to the recollection.
The sound came indistinctly at first, meaning the officers were a long way off, and O’Farrell was pleased; if he’d been unaware of their approach, the warning would have been more than early enough to evade or avoid. Overhead an airliner growled toward London airport and O’Farrell was able to see the triangle of its landing lights. Less than twenty-four hours, he thought, this time tomorrow, in fact, he would be home in Alexandria, with the newly preserved archive to go back to and the cars to clean on Saturdays and only die problems—the seemingly easier, ordinary problems—of Jill and Ellen and John to worry about. Normality, blessed normality.
“… know she’s screwing around,” came a voice, at last.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve got nothing to confront her with,” came a policeman’s reply.
“So you’re going to wait until she gets pregnant or catches the clap?”
“‘Course not,” said the voice, fading.
“What then?”
The reply was too indistinct to hear. Forty-five minutes, O’Farrell calculated. The BMW was not directly in front of the house, as it usually was, but to the side near the garage. It was a doubtful advantage. The vehicle was out of the direct line from the road, making it easier to work on undetected either from the house or by any passerby, but increasing the distance, he had to move across the noisy gravel. O’Farrell used the grassed garden border until there was no more and hesitated with each seemingly echoed step toward the car. Around him everything slumbered, undisturbed.
O’Farrell squatted again, this time with his back against the vehicle’s fender, to prepare the charges. Before separating the plastic into three, he put on the rubber gloves,-flexing his fingers against their thickness, wishing he had the thinner surgical type. He didn’t attempt to get into the car to reach the electrical system from the front; it would have brought the light on and meant lifting the hood, both impossible. O’Farrell waited until he was beneath the vehicle before turning on his flashlight. The gas pump was clearly visible, about eighteen inches from the fuel tank. O’Farrell taped the charge into the space between the two, and then, with the penknife, stripped the gas- pump lead back to its wires; the positive was the nearest to him. He scraped away the blue covering, attached the contact from the detonator to the bare wire, and sealed the join with adhesive tape. From this detonator he trailed a lead tightly along and beneath the car to a point directly under the driver’s seat, where he attached against the chassis his second charge. From it O’Farrell brought his continuous lead up through the engine housing to meet with the explosives he had already introduced through a bigger access and strapped in front of where the driver sat. A perfectionist, O’Farrell checked the placing and the connections from the rear to the front. The ignition activated the gas pump and the gas pump activated the detonator-placed charges. The entire vehicle was one huge bomb.
O’Farrell, finally satisfied, came crabwise from beneath the car. He was not hurrying, knowing he had to wait another passing of the police before he could leave. This was the first time, he reflected idly, that he had used his knowledge of cars and engines professionally, and wondered why; what he’d fixed up tonight was infallible. But this was no place for idle reflection. O’Farrell gathered everything back into the briefcase, propping it against his legs. There was absolutely no question of his being allowed to pass any police with it in his hand, he decided; it might be sufficient to cause an insomniac resident to raise an alarm, too. O’Farrell carefully cleaned the handle, trie only part he had touched with his bare hands, and went beneath the car again, strapping it tightly to the fuel tank in die recess available around the exhaust-pipe arch.
He settled down on his haunches in the shrubbery, where he had before, for the police return, unable to see but using the time to brush off the grit and dirt that stuck to him from being beneath the car. The cleanup wouldn’t. he knew, withstand any close scrutiny, but he didn’t expect there to be any.
The police pacing approached, as monotonously repetitious as their conversation.
“… why not ask the wife to have a word with her?”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“So you’re mistaken.”
“Not something I like talking about to the wife.”
“Don’t talk about sex to your wife!”
“Rarely a subject that comes up between us, as a matter on fact.”
O’Farrell was against the gate as the sound faded, edging into die road as soon as he felt it safe to do so; they were a blurred, moving blackness, as mey had been when he first saw them. O’Farrell went in the opposite direction, walking just short of the pace diat would have attracted attention, eager for the first corner. He slowed slightly when he rounded that and relaxed further when he turned into the road where the rental car was parked. For several moments, when he got inside, he sat without firing the ignition, letting the tension seep away.
