Dark Zone

36

Karr scanned the ruins of the chemist’s house with the night-vision binoculars, a commercial pair that used light amplification technology rather than infrared rays to see. The police had left for the night, roping the area off with crime scene tape but otherwise trusting that it would not be disturbed before they returned in the morning.

“Ready?” Karr asked LaFoote.

“You’re sure we’ll know if the police are coming?”

“Oh yeah. A little birdie’ll tell me. Come on.”

Karr wasn’t lying, exactly. Fifteen minutes before, just after the last policeman had gone home for the night, Karr had walked to a point on the other side of the hill, obscured from LaFoote as well as the nearby farmhouses. There he had taken a small black robot aircraft from his pack. Called a Crow, it had been designed to look like a bird from a distance. The aircraft, which could be controlled by Karr or the Art Room, provided real-time video of the area. Under other circumstances, Karr would have tapped into the video feed himself via his PDA. But he didn’t want to share any more of his bag of tricks with LaFoote than absolutely necessary.

“Nothing coming for miles,” said Rockman in his ear.

“Let’s move out,” Karr told LaFoote — and the Art Room.

The explosions and the fire that followed had destroyed the roof and gutted much of the interior of the house, but a good portion of the brick walls remained upright. The police theory — shared with Karr via a small boom mike — was that a leaking gas pipe in the kitchen had exploded because of some random spark.

The theory made some sense, but it failed to explain the extraordinary damage near what had been the refrigerator — clearly where the bomb had been set. That explosion might have damaged the gas line running beneath the kitchen in a crawl space, causing it to explode a few seconds later. Or perhaps there had been another bomb set on a delayed fuse.

Whatever the exact sequence of events, the bomb had blown through the floor and the crawl space, disturbing dirt that hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. Karr’s chemical analyzer picked up some traces of complex compounds used in explosives, but not as much as he expected; he had to slide the probe around in the dirt before he got strong readings. These were consistent with Semtex.

“Truck coming,” warned Rockman.

Karr got up and found LaFoote, who was looking through what had been his friend’s office. The office’s walls had been battered; one had crumbled entirely and the other leaned toward the front of the house at a thirty-degree angle.

“Truck coming,” Karr told LaFoote. “Turn off your flashlight.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you. Birds talk to me,” Karr said.

The pair squatted down behind a metal desk, watching as the headlights swept briefly across the front corner of the building and then back onto the road.

“Clear,” Rockman told Karr.

“OK. What are we looking for?” Karr asked the Frenchman. “Papers?”

“Non,” said LaFoote, opening the bottom drawer of the desk. He glanced in for a moment, then started to close it. Karr stopped him.

“What’s all this?”

“Old soccer clippings,” said LaFoote. “He was a fan.”

Karr riffled through the yellowed papers. That’s what they were.

“How about bank statements? Where’d he keep them?”

LaFoote shook his head — a little too quickly, Karr thought.

“You wouldn’t happen to know his account numbers, would you?” asked Karr.

“Of course not,” said LaFoote.

“We’ve got that already,” said Rockman.

“You know where he banked?”

“There is only one bank in town,” said the Frenchman. “You think you can trace payments?”

“Possibly I could get someone to trace his accounts,” said Karr. “So what, the bank in town?”

“There’s nothing there,” said Rockman.

“He had another account,” said LaFoote.

“Where?”

“I don’t know the name.”

“France?”

LaFoote kept his lips pressed together.

“Ah, come on. You can tell me. We’re partners, right?”

“Austria.”

“Austria’s tough,” said Rockman. “We’re going to need account numbers.”

“So what was the bank?” asked Karr.

“I can’t remember the name. But I have a copy of a statement.”

“Where? Here?”

“Non.”

“Austria, OK, Vefoures took two train trips there four and five months back. Used his credit card,” said Rockman. “Good going, Tommy.”

“Yeah, but you know, I really need to know the name of the bank,” said Karr, talking to LaFoote. “And an account number. I mean, if we’re going to work together, we have to be kind of up-front with each other. You know?”

LaFoote nodded. “I’ll get it for you. It’s not here.”

He opened another drawer of the desk and pulled out a small but solid-looking crowbar. Tommy looked through the drawers himself — there were no financial papers that he could see — then went to find LaFoote. The Frenchman had walked to the room at the front of the house and begun using the crowbar as a pick against the front wall near the corner. As in the other room, the two outside walls were intact, the interior ones badly battered. The wall that separated this room from the front hallway was about two-thirds gone.

Karr laughed as the Frenchman hacked at the wall. “Mad?” he asked.

“Non.” LaFoote took a mighty chop at the wall, the edge of the crowbar chipping off a piece of plaster.

“If you hit it too hard it’ll fall on us,” Karr warned.

“The brick is far from the wall,” said LaFoote, swinging again. “It won’t fall.”

“Car — two cars,” said Rockman.

“Hold on, partner, hold on,” said Karr, dousing his flashlight.

LaFoote took another swipe at the wall, breaking through part of the plaster, then ducked down just as the car lights appeared. The cars passed by quickly; the Frenchman started to rise.

“No, no, hold on,” Karr told him. “Wait. Give them time to go where they’re going.”

“They’re stopping, Tommy,” said Rockman. “I think you’d better get out. Coming back,” he added. “Go on. Get out of there.”

“No time,” said Karr. He pulled out his pistol and glanced at LaFoote, who had taken out his own weapon — an old revolver.

“We don’t fire unless we absolutely have to,” Karr told him. “And if we do, I want you to go through that window and run like hell,” Karr added.

“I’m not running away.”

“It’s all right. I’ll be right behind you.”