Better off Dead

Chapter 43

I felt Fenton’s body relax and her breathing grow slower and deeper. But when I tried to follow her off to sleep I had no luck. Not right away. My head was too full of questions. And doubts. About Dendoncker. About the whole charade we were playing out. I’d almost caused him to get kidnapped. And I had killed a bunch of his guys. Burned down his business. Broken into his hidden HQ. He should have been angry. Resentful. Outraged. But instead he’d laid out his proposal like he was interviewing me for a job in a candy store. I was missing part of the picture. There was no other explanation. I just didn’t know how big a part.

Dendoncker could have had someone from his regular smuggling crew deliver the bomb. The long-standing team Fenton had been allocated to backfill when she infiltrated his organization. That would have been the easy thing to do. The straightforward thing. But he hadn’t gone down that path. He’d gone out of his way to avoid it. Twice. First when he tapped Michael to transport the bomb, even though that wasn’t his specialty. And now with me. He was determined to compartmentalize. To insulate the rest of his operation from this one job. And he was desperate to see it through to completion. Both those things were clear. But neither was consistent with helping Michael make an innocent protest.

My guess was that there was an additional layer to the scheme. That someone else had approached Dendoncker. Someone with an agenda that involved wreaking havoc on Veterans Day. And with deep enough pockets to convince Dendoncker to play ball. Or with a big enough stick to force him to. Dendoncker already had Michael on board. Fenton’s contact said Dendoncker hired Michael to help with the land mines he was selling. Michael was on shaky ground, psychologically, at that time. I doubt it would have been too hard for Dendoncker to finesse him into believing the protest was his own idea. So Michael designed the devices. Built them. Tested them. Then something happened. He got cold feet. And sent an SOS to his sister.

I didn’t know Michael. I’d never met him. But I couldn’t imagine anyone in his position wanting to pull the plug on an operation he’d worked so hard to create. Not unless something about it had fundamentally changed. Or had been fundamentally misunderstood from the outset. Like the ingredients of the smoke. Maybe Dendoncker was planning to add something to the final mix. Or maybe his paymaster was. Dendoncker had a bunch of artillery shells crammed into the shed beyond the school building. Three hundred of them. At least. Some of them could contain chemicals. All of them could. Mustard gas. Sarin. All kinds of nasty things. That could be what Michael had discovered. What brought him to his senses. What ultimately got him killed.

If I was right, Dendoncker and his guys were in for a busy night. The device wouldn’t just need to be moved through the tunnel and carried up to ground level. It would need to be doctored. Filled with poison or loaded with extra explosives or made lethal in some other way. All without their resident bomb maker’s help. But whatever Dendoncker had in mind it wouldn’t make any difference. Not anymore. Not combined with the demonstration. Because he hadn’t just agreed to prepare another bomb for transport. He’d also promised me the keys to its truck. That meant two-thirds of his immediate arsenal would soon be neutralized. Which left only one device to deal with. And it would be. Just as soon as Fenton was out of harm’s way.

I slept for five hours, in the end. My eyes opened again at seven. Half an hour later I heard the key turn in the lock. The door was thrown open. Fenton woke with a start. She rolled back onto her own mattress. The lights flickered into life. And the guy in the pale suit stepped into the room. He covered us with his Uzi. The guy in the dark suit moved in behind him. He was carrying a tray in each hand. He set them down on the floor between the bathroom doors. Each had a plate covered with some kind of orange mush, and a cup of coffee.

“Thirty minutes,” the guy in the pale suit said. His words were slurred. I guess his jaw still wasn’t working quite right. “Be ready. Don’t keep us waiting.”

The two guys backed out into the corridor and locked the door. I collected the trays while Fenton hauled her mattress up onto the bed frame and then we sat together and drank our coffee. It was weak and lukewarm, and someone had put milk in both cups. Not a promising start. And things got worse with the food. The stuff on the plates turned out to be baked beans. They must have been microwaved to death, but now they were cold. They had started to congeal. Fenton balked at hers so I ate both platefuls. It was the golden rule. Eat when you can.

The guys came back after twenty-eight minutes. I was lying on my mattress, pretending to doze. Fenton was in the bathroom.

“On your feet.” The guy in the pale suit held the door open. “Let’s go.”

I stretched and yawned and stood up and ambled toward him. “See you in three days,” I called as I passed the bathrooms. Then I left the room. The guy in the dark suit led the way. I was the meat in the sandwich, with the other guy following with his Uzi. We went through the double doors. Along the glass corridor. Diagonally across the dining hall. And into the kitchen.

The guy pointed to the door in the far corner. “You know the way.”

Mansour was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t say anything. Just set off into the tunnel and beckoned for me to follow.

We walked in silence, side by side, breathing the stale air. We followed the rails, in and out of the pools of yellow light, until we reached the hole in the wall that led into the house. Mansour went through first. It was darker in the little anteroom. The motorized door was closed. There was a button on its frame. A small thing, like a bell push. Mansour pressed it. A motor rumbled and the door started to move. It cranked its way through ninety degrees. We went through into the cellar. Mansour waved his keys near a spot on the rough wooden wall and the door started to close again. Then he nodded toward the ladder. I climbed up first. He followed, pushed past me, and led the way through the door to the side of the kitchen.

A U-Haul truck was sitting out on the street. It had been left in the spot Sonia had parked in the day before. It was a regular size. Not shiny. Not filthy. It had pictures of national park scenes on both sides. It was a good choice of vehicle. It was so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible. The guy walked over to it then reached into his pocket and pulled out Sonia’s phone.

“Here.” He handed it to me. “There’s a number in the memory. Call it, and you can talk to the woman. Nothing will happen to her. Nothing bad. Not as long as you follow your instructions.”