mushroom that lifted up between the two hangars, incinerating the plane, Strasser’s two men, and Last in a fluorescing orange flash. The blast also blew the thirteen million dollars high into the night sky so that when the mushroom burned itself out in midair in a matter of one or two seconds, the only fire in the sky was another cloud, a floating, drifting, fluttering cloud of burning money, individual bills flittering crookedly like falling leaves, leaves afire, an autumn of burning millions.
Everyone gaped in stupefaction at the incinerating fortune that hung in a slow descent like a star-burst of fireworks.
And then Strasser screamed:
“God Almighty! God damn his soul to bloody hell! The son of a bitch…”
Everyone had the same thought at the same instant: Kalatis’s guards had probably left bombs on all the planes. All of the pilots had been doomed the moment they unloaded their planes and flew away. Kalatis had come close to making a clean sweep.
“The Pilatus,” Strasser croaked. When the Pilatus blew, it would take the van with it Forty million up in flames.
Remberto and Murray and Graver ran for Redden’s plane, lifting its tail and dragging it away from the door of the hangar. Since Last and Strasser’s men had just begun to push the Mooney it was still near the rear of the hangar when it blew and the fiery concussion blasted the rear wall of the hangar all the way into the office. Redden, Landrone, Landrone’s copilot, and the two clients could not have survived the blast.
Remberto was scrambling inside the van before anyone else could get to it. Throwing it into reverse, he roared out of the hangar and kept going all the way out to the helicopter which was already starting its rotors again. As Murray and Graver were running away from the Pilatus two more men bailed out of Strasser’s helicopter and started running toward the Pilatus while Strasser shouted instructions to them. They ran past Graver and Murray who spun around in disbelief and watched in horror as the two men climbed into the still-open cockpit as Strasser had ordered them to do. Strasser himself watched without any visible emotion as the two men confronted almost certain death on his behalf. He might have been standing at a gaming table where life and death played no part in the wager. But he wasn’t. And it did.
The prop on the Pilatus kicked on and almost simultaneously one of the men clambered out of the cockpit door with a briefcase with which he disappeared into the dark as the Pilatus revved and pulled away from the burning hangar, taxiing out onto the tarmac near the helicopter and the van.
In a moment the man came running out of the dark without the briefcase, running as hard as he could, and was well onto the tarmac when the bomb went off. Another red mushroom lighted the airstrip, and though they could feel the heat from its explosion, it was well away from the hangars and did no damage, the fireball dissipating quickly as the darkness rushed back into the space from which it had been driven.
It was only at that moment that Graver realized that both hangars had been on fire since the initial explosion, and their cars were burning inside the second one.
Chapter 81
Graver and Remberto and Murray stood on the tarmac and watched Strasser’s men unload the Pilatus and the van and stack the boxes of cash into the sleek body of the Bell 206L. Strasser walked over to Graver when it was all done.
“That’s twenty-two million,” Strasser said. “You know how much went up? Eighteen million. The biggest load was in the smallest plane.” He snorted. “I don’t know how Panos figured that.”
“How do I know my people are all right?” Graver asked.
“They’re all right,” Strasser said. He lifted the telephone he was carrying and punched a button again. He listened a moment. “It’s me. Give me fifteen minutes and then walk away from them. When you leave, tell them to call this number.”
He punched a couple of numbers on the handset, tried to dial out, listened, punched another button and handed the telephone to Graver.
“Here,” he said. “Your people will call you in fifteen minutes. But you can’t call out on that now. I just turned it into a receiver.” He looked at the still-burning hangar. “I imagine somebody’s on the way out here now anyway,” he said. He studied Graver. “This has been a hell of a deal for you, huh?”
“Yeah,” Graver said.
“What did you do, go around the bureaucracy?”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole thing started for you five days ago when Arthur Tisler turned up dead. Now you’re standing here talking to me. To tell you the truth, this surprises me very much. I’m not a pretentious man, Graver. I don’t see much use in crowing about anything, but I do know how I run things. I do know I’m good at what I do. Under normal circumstances you couldn’t have gotten this close to me in five years, let alone five days.”
“Well,” Graver said, wiping his forehead on the arm of his shirt which was now gritty with soot and dirt and sweat, “these haven’t been normal circumstances.”
“No, that’s true,” Strasser conceded, “that’s true. But still, bureaucracies don’t move as fast as you’ve moved these last five days.” He looked at Remberto and Murray. “And I don’t think these two guys are cops.”
“Tell me something,” Graver said, “have I still got somebody dirty in the police department?”
“Hell, you know, I don’t even know.” Strasser shrugged casually. “All that was Panos’s business. I never had anything to do with any of this except for buying out Faeber and Hormann through front companies. My people arranged that. I basically backed Kalatis’s ventures. All the details were his. I’m just here because, you know, when you’ve got people like Panos for business partners, you’ve got to have somebody watching them all the time. Some of my people inside his works, people he didn’t know were my people, told me they thought he was working on some kind of rip-off. Panos is about as good as they get. You know anything about him?”
“Yeah, I know he’s Yosef Raviv. I know his background with the Mossad, all that.”
“The hell you say.” Strasser nodded, looking at Graver with admiration. “Well, okay, then you know how good he is. Compartmentalized everything. So this ‘rip-off’-nobody knew much about it because he didn’t tell anybody about it. That’s why I moved on Burtell. He was already suspecting Tisler and Besom so I just gave him everything, told him I was CIA-which kept him from bringing you into it, you know, a higher calling-and he almost got to the core of it too. But he was too damn smart for his own good. He figured me out about the same time he figured out what Kalatis was doing.
“Anyway, Panos was my biggest success and my worst mistake all rolled into one. Like all high-yield propositions, he was also high-risk.”
“Then he’s disappeared… along with one hundred million.”
Strasser crossed his stubby arms and looked around at the helicopter. The pilot had kicked on the turbos and the rotors were beginning to whine.
“Well, recovering the money’s a moot point,” he said. “I’ll see if I can’t recover that. That’s a maybe.” He turned and brought his eyes back to Graver. “But Panos… Panos is not a maybe. Panos is a sure thing.”
The rotors on the Bell picked up speed surprisingly quickly and were hammering the night air.
“Sir,” a man shouted above the swelling whine of the jet rotors, “we’re going to have to go.”
Strasser waved a stubby arm without looking around.
“How many people burned up in there?” he asked.
“Two pilots, one copilot, and two businessmen who accompanied their money for the delivery. I don’t even know who they were.”
Strasser nodded, looking at the two burning hangars.
“Could’ve been worse,” he said, and turned and walked away toward the helicopter, the rotors of which were whipping the air now, working up to the familiar whumpwhumpwhump sound before it lifted off.
Strasser climbed into the helicopter and the door closed. He sat with his back to the cockpit, and Graver could see him buckling his seat belt, and then he could see Strasser’s face looking out the window at them as they stood on the tarmac. Then the big Bell’s rotors revved up to a fierce speed, and the craft grew light on its skids and lifted up into the darkness. Graver was looking at its belly as it started drifting sideways, sliding toward the Gulf at
