“No kidding? So do I. Maybe we can have some tomorrow night. How about it, Callie?”
His wife was standing by the little desk that served as a paper catchall. looking once again at the diet book. She turned to Jake and nodded. She had tears in her eyes. He winked at her.
“Amy, better get your school books. And, Callie, don’t we have some sugarless dessert around here for little girls who eat their dinner?”
17
A woman from the garage called at 10 A.M. and said his car was ready: $119.26. Camacho told her he would stop by after work. She hung up before he could even ask what the problem had been.
Dreyfus gave him a ride and dropped him in front of the show- room.
The new cars gleamed shamelessly and flashed their chrome with wanton abandon as he walked by. Light, easy-listening music sounded everywhere. Two salesmen asked if he needed help.
He paid for the repairs at a window where a harried young woman juggled two phones as she pounded numbers into a com- puter. He surrendered his driver’s license for her scrutiny before she asked. Without even glancing to see if his puss matched the photo, she copied the number onto the check and slid it back at him.
His six-year-old car sat amid twenty or so others of its vintage on a gravel lot out back. Dingy and coated with road grime, it hadn’t seen wax since… not since he gave his son twenty dol- lars that Saturday two years ago and the kid let the wax dry like paint all over the car before he tried to wipe it off.
Camacho unlocked the door, rolled down the windows and tossed the yellow card dangling from the rearview-mirror bracket onto the floor. The car started readily enough and ran sweetly. He examined the invoice. Diagnostic test. Defective spark plug. Defec- tive lead cable? Ouch — they got him there! Labor. How is it a garage can charge $55 per hour for a mechanic’s time?
About two miles from the garage was a shopping center with a large parking lot, most of which was empty except for light poles and a couple of cars that looked as if they had sat in those spots all winter. One even had two flat tires.
He parked near it and got his jack from the trunk. The rear end went up first. He had an old army blanket in the trunk and spread it under the car so he wouldn’t get too filthy.
With coat and tie on the back seat, flashlight in hand, Luis Camacho slid gingerly under the car. He knew exactly what he was looking for, but it might be hard to spot.
Five minutes later he stood beside the car and scratched his head. If Albright had put a bomb in this thing, where was it?
After a thorough scrutiny of the engine compartment and the trunk cavity, he attacked the door panels and rockers with a Phil- lips-head screwdriver. How many possible places were there? The backseats? Could he get them loose and look under them? The odds of a bomb being there were small, of course, but there was a chance. Just how big a chance, Camacho didn’t know. Peter Alek- sandrovich Chistyakov was not a man to take unnecessary risks. That double-agent discussion yesterday had frightened Camacho, coming as it did from a man who owned an assassin’s pistol and had enough gadgets in his attic to blow up half the cops in Wash- ington.
To assess just how likely it was that good ol’ Harlan Albright had decided to eliminate a possible threat, one would need to know just what it was that was being threatened. How many other agents was he running? What kind of information were they getting?
Of course, Albright could slip a bomb under the car any night while Camacho snored in his own bed. Risky, but feasible. But perhaps he had planted a bomb with a radio-actuated device as insurance, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it, but with it already in place should the need arise. A careful man might do something like that, right?
Apparently Albright was a careful man. The bomb was in the driver’s door, behind the panel, below the window glass when it was rolled completely down. It had been carefully taped in place so it wouldn’t rattle.
At a glance it appeared to contain a couple pounds of plastique. One fuse stuck out of the oblong mass. A wire ran from the fuse to a servo and from the servo to a six-volt battery. A little receiver was wired to the servo and four AA batteries were hooked up to power it. A tiny wire attached to the receiver was routed all along the inside of the door. It was a simple, radio-actuated bomb. Sim- ple and effective,
Luis Camacho pulled the fuse from the bomb and used a pen- knife to cut the wire. The plastique and the rest of it he left in place.
Sweating in spite of the fifty-five-degree weather and fifteen-mile- per-hour wind, he replaced the jack in the trunk. The door panel he put in the backseat
Had he figured it right? Was this merely insurance? Or bad Al- bright-Chistyakov already decided to push the button?
Standing there beside the car, he looked around slowly, check- ing. A lot of good that will do you, Luis. Cursing under his breath, be got behind the wheel and started the car.
There was a little hardware store in the shopping center, right between a gourmet food store and a factory fabric outlet. Inside Camacho bought a small flashlight, a coil of insulated wire, and some black electrician’s tape.
Out in the parking lot he used the knife and screwdriver to disassemble the flashlight. The bulb he mounted with tape on a bole he carved in the door panel. Fifteen minutes later he had the last screw back in place and the crank for the window reinstalled.
Therel Now if Albright pushes the button, instead of a big bang, this flashlight bulb will illuminate and burn continuously until that six-volt ni-cad battery in the door is completely discharged. As- suming be sees the illuminated bulb — and the unsoldered wire con- nections don’t vibrate loose — our saintly hero Luis Camacho, FBI ace spy catcher, will then have time to bend over and kiss his ass goodbye before the bullets from the silenced Ruger.22 send him to a kinder, more gentle world.
What more could any man ask?
He sat behind the wheel staring at the storefronts. After a mo- ment he got out of the car and walked back across the parking lot to the gourmet store, the Bon Vivant The place smelled of herb and flower leaf sachets. The clerk, a woman in her forties with ironed hair, was too engrossed in a book to even nod at him. He wandered through the aisles, looking at cans and jars of stuff imported from all over the world. Nothing from Iowa here. If it’s green or purple and packed in a jar from Europe or the Orient, with an outrageous price, you know it’s got to be good.
He selected a jar of blue French jam, “Bilberry” the label said, paid $4.32 plus tax to the refugee from Berkeley, and walked back across the empty, gray parking lot to his car.
The flight surgeon at the China Lake dispensary pronounced Rita fit to fly on Friday afternoon. Jake Grafton spent Saturday in the hangar with Samuel Dodgers and Helmut Fritsche going over the computer program and modifications to Athena that were needed.
As he worked Jake became even more impressed with Dodgers’ technological achievement and even more disenchanted with Dodgers the human being. Like every fanatic, Dodgers thought in absolutes which left no room for tolerance or dissent. On technical matters his mind was open, inquiring, incisive, leaping to new in- sights regardless of where the leap took him or the hoary prece- dents shattered by the jump. On everything else, however, every aspect of the human condition, Dodgers was bigoted, voluble, and usually wrong. It was as if his maker had increased his scientific talents at the expense of all the others, thus creating a mean little genius who viewed the world as a collection of wicked conspiracies hatched by evil, godless agents of the devil. His opinion of most of his less gifted fellow men was equally bleak. And he did believe in the devil. He waxed long and loud on Satan and his works when- ever he had a half minute that was not devoted to the task at hand- How Fritsche tolerated these diatribes Jake couldn’t fathom. He found himself increasingly irritated, and retreated to the head or the outside of the building when he had had all he could stomach.
“How can you listen to that asshole without choking him?” Jake asked during a brief interlude when nature called Dodgers to the head.
“Whatszat?” Fritsche asked, raising his eyebrows curiously. “These endless scatterbrained rantings,” Jake explained pa- tiently. “In the last hour he’s slandered every racial and ethnic group on the planet and denounced
