37
It had been dark for hours, and the neighborhood was quiet. Natadze’s stomach churned and sent bile into his throat as he approached what was left of his house, slipping from shadow to shadow in the night, moving with great caution.
He had driven past once earlier in the rental car, and what he had seen had twisted his bowels and thrust a shard of icy fear into his soul. His house was gone.
He had one hope. The safe.
The gun safe — a Liberty Presidential model with Quad-fire protection — had been in the basement. If it had just been a fire, he wouldn’t have worried as much. The salesman had shown him pictures of a safe like his that had been in a building that burned to the ground, and the contents, which included valuable documents, had not even been singed.
He’d had to hire a crew to take out part of the house’s wall in order to install the safe, a massive, hollowed- out chunk of insulated steel that weighed fifteen hundred pounds. Natadze had the interior of the box redesigned so that he could squeeze five standard-size guitars into it, with room left over for his Korth revolvers. He always kept the Friedrich locked away when he was gone, as well as his Hauser; others, he rotated in and out. Currently, there was an Oribe, a Ruck, and a Byers in it. Less than a third of his collection.
The room in the basement in which the safe had stood was insulated and humidity controlled, with an automatic fire-retardant system that used carbon dioxide. The other guitars had been in their cases in that locked room, and, under normal circumstances, relatively protected. But when he finally arrived, having walked there from three streets over where he had parked his car, he knew there was no hope for anything outside the safe. The entire house was gone, save for part of the chimney, and the basement was hollowed-out and black. Even in the dark, he could see that.
Most of his collection of fine instruments — among them, an Elliott, a White, a Schramm, a Spross, and the new Bogdanovich, were
It was like a hammer blow to his heart.
It was not the money. He could buy new ones, maybe even better than the ones he’d had, but there would never be others exactly like them. Those instruments had been unique, each with its own special voice, and those voices were now stilled forever. Murdered — because it had not been an accident. Somebody had blown up his house and the precious instruments in it. Somebody. And who knew it was his house? Who stood to profit if he were to be killed in an explosion?
This was not how the authorities did things in the United States. They would confiscate the house and what was in it, sell it all, make a profit. Not blow it up.
It made him want to cry.
Natadze stood in the shadows for half an hour, watching. It was late, there was yellow police tape strung, but no sign that anybody was there waiting for him. What would be the point in watching a burned-out house?
After he was sure he was alone, he moved stealthily, and climbed down into the rubble that had been his home.
The natural gas main had been in the basement. The force of the initial explosion had knocked the safe onto its side, hinge down. The paint had been burned off, but there was enough left of the steel dial to work. He used his tiny flashlight to look at the numbers as he input them.
The safe was designed to protect the contents against temperatures over fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, according to the tests he had been shown, keeping the condition inside well below the flash point of paper for more than half an hour at extreme external temperatures. A normal house fire would never reach that. While it might get hot enough inside to damage the finishes, which was bad, there were partitions between each instrument so that falling over shouldn’t bang them together. Only the Byers, which was up top and angled, was likely to move about much.
But — how much concussive force might have been transmitted into the safe? An explosion powerful enough to blow away most of a house and to knock a fifteen-hundred-pound safe onto its side was not a small matter.
His mouth dry with fear, he finished the combination and retracted the bolts. He nearly wrenched his shoulder lowering the door to the floor. He found he was holding his breath as he shined the light into the box…
The Friedrich was in the middle, next to the Hauser. He took the Friedrich out first, and a great sense of relief washed over him. It was okay! The finish was smooth, unblemished. He carefully replaced it, removed the Hauser, and it, too, was undamaged!
The Ruck was whole! The Torres!
The Byers, topmost, had some damage. The side of the guitar nearest the safe’s wall had been partially cooked. The finish had bubbled up, and there were small cracks in it. They didn’t seem to go into the wood of the bout itself, which meant that it could be repaired.
He put the Byers back into the safe, shut the door with some effort, and spun the dial. He would go and get his car, return, and collect his precious instruments. His condo in New York did not have a sufficient floor-strength rating to install a safe this large, but there were places where he could store the guitars until he could find a new house that could. A fireproof vault in a high-class storage company that specialized in rare valuables, antiques, furs, like that, would serve.
As he hurried to collect his automobile and return, the sense of fear and worry he’d had was replaced by one of rage.
Why had he done it? What had been the point? He would have known Natadze wasn’t there. Why destroy the house?
And the only thing that came to mind was something Cox had said after his meeting with the head of Net Force at that party:
38
Cox, on his stair-stepper, with a few minutes left to go on the timer, smiled at the memory of the phone call he’d gotten an hour earlier.
He hadn’t laughed when his lawyers told him about the government’s tentative and careful approach, though he had felt like laughing. The government wanted to make him an offer, to spare the country the trauma of a trial…
Cox had played high-stakes poker with some of the best. It had taken him all of two seconds to realize that they didn’t have squat and were trying to bluff him. He hadn’t thought they’d try this, frankly, and it was maybe not so surprising — if you couldn’t get the whole loaf, or even half of it, you might settle for a few crumbs.
Not that he was going to give them even that much.
He had already put his spin docs into play, to scotch the rumors that would certainly show their faces eventually. The war on terrorism wasn’t going as well as it should, the Middle East was still an unhealed wound, the country was on the edge of a recession, and in its desperation, the current administration was looking for high- profile targets it could attack. They needed a victory, anything they could flack into looking impressive, and the little people did love to see a rich and powerful man brought low. The spin docs would lay this out, and it would be the government who came off looking bad — not a man who had just given ten million dollars to various charities, and who employed so many people in so many good jobs.
The fed didn’t have the weight, and Samuel Walker Cox was not a man to flinch if somebody yelled
