'One of your sacred ones once said: 'Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.' '
'What's that mean?'
'It means you will be rewarded for your diligent efforts. But there is a condition.'
'What is that?'
'You must come alone without your police. There will be no meeting if you bring them-you will not get your answers. There will be time enough for the police.' Then the man bowed. 'If you will excuse me.'
She noticed that the door onto the patio was slightly ajar. How had he done that? Quickly he stepped out into the night and was gone. He could have killed her easily.
She looked at her watch. It was 9:20 p.m., and Dan was attending an office function with out-of-town clients. He had promised to leave early, and she expected him at any time. At 9:33 she heard the family-room door open. Forcing herself to wait, she counted to ten to ensure that Nate could get there first. Nervous with anticipation, she wondered how long these newlywed-type feelings would last. Then she walked faster than she intended into the family room to find him hugging Nate. Instantly Dan's eyes went to hers.
'Hey, Dad, we caught five fish this morning,' Nate said.
'That's great,' Dan said.
She put her hand on Nate's back and the other behind Dan's neck, kissing him firmly on the lips.
'Did you catch them in the same place?'
'Yeah. By the water tower. Hey, can I go over to Tim's and spend the night tomorrow?'
Dan tilted his head at Maria. She appreciated the consultation and nodded.
'Well, Maria and I are going to discuss it a little later, but I think it's gonna be fine.'
'What's to discuss?'
'It's the principle of the thing, son. You know what that is?'
Nate smiled up at Maria. 'She'd never say no if you said yes.'
'I won't always be a pushover, buddy boy,' she said, running her fingers through Nate's hair.
'I'm gonna go watch The Simpsons on video,' Nate said.
'I had a really unusual visitor,' Maria said when Nate had disappeared.
'What do you mean?'
She told him the story.
'Those cops outside are incompetent,' he said. 'I'm gonna go give them a ration-''
'No,' she said, hugging him around the waist. 'I think there's another set of players here and they mean us no harm. In fact, I think one of them stopped the shooter from killing you and me both. Maybe even this guy.'
'We'll see. The police think the head of security over at Amada is implicated in all this. They have physical evidence at the barn that he was present. Amada's masters are Japanese. Nobody knows much about Kenji Yamada. And now you're telling me some Asian guy breaks into our house.'
'There wasn't much breaking. He means us no harm. Trust me.'
Corey's scheme worried her only because it was so ambitious and elaborate. It was all but impossible, which is what made it so delicious. She would show them all, especially the little Japanese bastard. Carefully she had studied the Hutchin Office Building, found old plans in the public library from the days when it was Mr. Carson's bank, and even crawled underneath it.
She had four bombs that she intended to plant in the crawl space directly under Dan Young's chair. Dialing a cell phone and then punching in a code that would normally activate a voice-mail playback system would leave a lethal message. She had stolen the technology from an engineering contractor who blasted roads through mountain rock. The rest she had adapted from an electronically minded prankster.
Activation could occur from anyplace there was a digital-cell-phone signal by simply dialing the detonator and punching in a code. Specifically, it would work from the little knoll where she intended to terminate Maria Fischer by firing a single shot through a window. Convinced that the bombing and shooting could be combined, she intended to send them on their way together. Dan Young's house had constant police surveillance, but they didn't check beyond a hundred yards. Her shooting spot was 150 yards distant.
Tonight she would take care of Groiter and Kenji. A few minutes earlier, she and Janet had deposited them both chained in the bilge of a small fishing trawler. She didn't kill them first because she needed them to walk under the cloak of darkness. Once on the boat she hadn't killed them because she wanted to watch them contemplate their own deaths. For the time being, she had sedated them beyond such contemplation, worried that chains and gags might not be good enough. Last she had seen, they looked nearly dead.
Now parked in the van with yet another set of stolen plates, she waited for 11:00 p.m. before she and Janet began hauling the bombs and placing them under the building. All in all, including the setup of the detonator, she expected to spend about one hour at this location. She didn't want to stay much after midnight because the janitorial service arrived around 1:00 a.m. Working earlier increased the risk that some night-owl attorney might stop by the office.
After the bombs were set, she would go to the boat and Janet would take the Chevy home. Deathly seasick on anything but a lake, Janet wasn't into watching Groiter and Yamada slide screaming into the sea.
The street was quiet, streetlights glowed in the night fog, and she hadn't seen a car for minutes. A stone's throw from the waterfront, she could hear the quiet chug of a diesel-some bone-weary captain and his even more exhausted crew were docking the boat. In the distance the whistler buoy and the gong buoys made a ghost party in the mist. Much louder, the foghorn bellowed its melancholy at the jetties.
Wearing all-black clothing, she slipped from the van with a nervous shiver and nodded at Janet, who was parked in the Chevrolet behind her. Quickly Corey opened the van's rear door.
She and Janet would each carry one bomb at a time. She pulled out a pair of heavy-duty Atlantis travel cases on wheels, flipped open the tops, and signaled Janet to help with the placement of the first heavy round pipe, weighing in at eighty pounds. It was crammed with TNT, nails, and a twelve-ounce detonator.
Zipping up the first suitcase, they immediately repeated the process with the second and then hurried across the road. Once they reached the edge of the sidewalk, they grabbed the handle on the travel case and carried it over the decorative bark, setting it down in front of a hinged door. Two days earlier she and Janet had cut the lock with heavy bolt cutters. It had not been replaced. She zipped open the case and winced at the sound. In the utter silence it unnerved her. She looked around, saw no one, told herself to relax, and with Janet's help removed the pipe.
Janet held the door while Corey slid the pipe under the building. When they had repeated the process three more times, it was 11:15 p.m.
Once under the building with all four of her creations, she and Janet had to wrestle them to the intended location.
With a maximum of three feet under the building and in some areas only two, they had to struggle to get to the spot she had previously marked. Although the building was old, it had obviously been replumbed in recent times. The pipes were shiny copper and covered with modern insulating material. Little pieces of string affixed to these pipes led her to the chosen spot. At 11:30, after returning to the trapdoor for the third bomb, Corey decided to take a quick peek outside. Quietly she opened the door. And froze.
Two men stood on the sidewalk. She tried to hear, but they spoke in low tones. She made herself go to work anyway.
Returning to the bombs, she and Janet placed them in a perfect square about six feet apart. Although she might not have them located directly under Dan's chair, she was pretty certain she was under his office. Using copious amounts of duct tape, they managed to fasten the pipes in place. From each pipe a telephone cable protruded. Each cable was quickly plugged into a cable connector, then the cables fed into a central terminal that sat on the ground. Satisfied with her work, Corey activated the computer in the junction box and they each headed for the trapdoor with a travel case.
Gradually Corey opened the door. Five feet in front of them, a man watched the street. Something was wrong. The building was being watched. Probably a meeting with important people. And in the middle of the night. While she was pondering these things, she saw a car drive up. Instantly she recognized Dan Young's truck. Out stepped Maria Fischer and Dan Young.
'I'll be damned,'' she whispered to Janet. Maybe it would be easier than she thought to kill them both at once.
