Payback

13

In his last lifetime, Stephan Babin had consummated many of his deals in a Moscow after-hours club, an establishment he partly owned. He liked to fantasize about the place now, picturing the flushed faces and bursting bosoms, the red lips of Lida the hostess, and the purple jowls of Boyce, his German partner. Babin imagined he could smell the sweat and perfume, the overbearing breath of the drunks, and the vague metallic scent that clung to the bodyguards. He pictured it all in his mind, heard the sounds again. He saw himself at his table, watching the others with his quiet smile. He saw himself taking the bottle of champagne — he had sealed his deals with champagne, a trademark-and carelessly filling his glass to the brim. He would raise it slowly to his lips, pause to toast the room, then sip-a tiny, infinitesimal sip, all he would have.

Then he saw himself standing and waving his hands. The room exploded in a fireball. He heard a delicious shriek, a shout of recognition as well as fear and pain: an acknowledgment that Stephan Babin held the power of life and death in his hands and had chosen death.

The dream faded as Babin poked the smoldering rubbish pile in front of him. Encouraged, the fire leapt upward, its red tongue leering at the dark shadow of the nearby hills, as if to frighten the ghosts from the Inca ruins that lay there. The old stones were not quite visible from here-the Indians had oriented them to catch the sun at its zenith-but they loomed in Babin’s imagination, charred and broken, their destruction a foreshadowing or the retribution he planned.

He heard a truck approaching.

Babin leaned his weight on his right crutch and reached into the back of his belt for the Walther pistol hidden there. There were no random visitors up the nearby road. It connected the old Spanish house and its accompanying barn to the nearby highway, where traffic was strictly controlled because of the military installation to the north. The vehicle would belong to either General Túcume or an American spy coming to finish the job they had botched three years before.

Babin listened carefully, trying to decide from the sound which it was. He couldn’t tell. The general used a variety of vehicles, and the Americans — who knew what they would steal?

As the vehicle rounded the sharp switchback and drove onto the small terrace before the old Spanish building and its accompanying bam, Babin’s pulse quickened. It was a small Toyota pickup. He held the pistol to his side, shifting his weight slightly so he would be as stable as possible when he fired. Despite his profession as an arms dealer, he had never been a very good shot. The gun in his hand did not have much of a kick for a pistol, but his crutches would add to the uncertainty. He would have to wait until whoever was in the truck came very close to be sure of killing him.

How ironic, Babin thought, to be discovered so close to his chance for revenge.

The truck stopped thirty feet from him. Belatedly, Babin realized that the fire silhouetted him in the darkness. It was too late to move.

“Excuse me,” called the driver, rolling down the window of the truck. “Could you direct me to Señor Babin?”

“Why?” said Babin. He held the pistol at his hip, not quite concealed but not obvious, either.

“A package from Kleis.”

Babin raised his arm, making the gun obvious. “Leave it.”

“I was told to—”

“Leave it. Put it out of your truck—carefully.”

The driver ducked down in his cab. Kleis had supplied the parts for the general’s dummy warhead — and a few parts Babin needed for himself.

Kleis was a scoundrel of the worst sort. He could easily have sold him out.

As the driver opened the door, Babin steadied his arm to shoot. From this distance in the dim light, the shot would not necessarily be an easy one for an untrained man, even if he had full use of his body. The bullet would have to strike the target in the head — surely anyone who came gunning for Babin would wear a vest.

And it would have to be on the first shot fired.

The driver sat back upright in the cab and opened the door. A box clattered to the ground.

Babin kept his finger against the trigger but did not squeeze. The truck backed down ten yards, twenty, then turned and hurried away.

Slowly, Babin began crutching toward the package. His left leg had enough sensation and strength to act as a sturdy pivot even on his worst days. Today was one of the better ones, with his right aching but able to bear more than its usual portion of weight.

He stood over the box for at least a minute. Then he turned it over with his crutch.

It could be a bomb. But anyone who wanted to kill him would have taken the much surer route of hiring an assassin to kill him in person, wouldn’t he? Especially if he knew they had failed once before.

Getting to the ground was not difficult — Babin simply pitched himself forward and rolled onto his shoulder. He crawled to the package, then pushed his legs around and under him so that he could sit. He turned the package over, then took his pocketknife out and scored a small cutout in the side. He worked slowly, stripping off layers of the cardboard a few at a time until only a thin piece remained. He made a light perforation, then poked into the box.

Shredded newspapers filled the interior. By now it was so dark out that he had to crawl back to the fire to see into the box.

But the fire was smoldering, much of its fuel gone. Patiently, Babin pulled himself up by leaning on the rake, then grabbed the can of kerosene. Babin made sure the rake was steady-the last thing he wanted to do was pitch forward into the names — then sprinkled the contents on the embers. Nothing happened for a moment or two, but then some spark caught and the liquid flared so high he dropped the can. It bounced in the dirt in front of his right leg. Instinct took over, and he swooped forward to try to grab the container before it caught fire. But he didn’t have nearly enough control of his body to do that, and he landed on the ground in a pool of the dribbling kerosene.

Babin rolled to his stomach and dragged himself back to the box, pushing it with his face.

So close, he thought to himself. I was so close to my goal.

He heard a loud whoosh behind him and felt the warmth as the fire roared with its new fuel.

Not yet, he thought to himself. Not yet. Not yet.

Babin hunkered down in the dirt and pushed forward, continuing until he no longer felt the flames scorching his side. He twisted around, half-expecting to see his legs on fire, but they weren’t. Provoked by the kerosene, the flames climbed ten or twelve feet high, consuming the last pieces of wood and rubbish in the pile.

He sat up, then pulled the package to his lap. Caution on the one hand, foolhardiness on the other — that had been the story of his life. It was a character flaw that had cost him his legs.

Babin tore open the package quickly. Wrapped at the center of the newspaper and a wedge of bubble wrap was a small timing circuit that could be used to trigger a bomb.

He had asked Kleis for it with the other items months ago. It had never been delivered, though he had to pay in advance. He assumed that the dealer had simply forgotten or perhaps kept the money as an extra payment. Now it seemed that he had had trouble obtaining it.

Babin’s warhead had come from an antiaircraft missile modified for use against ballistic missiles. It was relatively small; it weighed just over two hundred kilos and fitted in a crate about the size of a small bathtub or office desk without the legs. The main trigger was essentially a proximity fuse wired with an altimeter circuit. “Proximity” was relative-the bomb was designed to explode above thirty-five thousand feet when a fast-moving object was within a half mile. The altimeter circuitry also acted as a fail-safe detonator, triggering the bomb if the primary fuse failed.

Babin had modified the fusing circuitry so that he could “trick” the fuse into exploding when triggered by an elementary detonator: a cell phone circuit, an astoundingly easy and versatile trigger he had first seen used by Chechnyans on roadside bombs more than a decade before. He’d wanted the timer as a backup but had resigned himself to doing without one.

He clutched the circuit board tightly in his hand as he crawled over to his crutches. As he rose, the fumes in the kerosene can ignited. It exploded with a low boom, the flames flowering like a red-yellow lily. But Babin no longer paid attention. He crutched quickly to the barn, opened the door with the key he kept around his neck, and went to work.

Unlike the nano-switches that actually did the work, the circuitry that Babin had modified to set them off was not particularly complicated; even if he had not been an engineer by training, Babin would have known how to wire the timer in simply by virtue of having built train layouts when he was a child. Still, there was a certain delicacy involved, not least of all because the weapon was packed in a large, shielded crate and maneuvering the sheathing was not easy. It took several hours, and by the time Babin was done, he was physically drained. He made his way out of the barn and slowly to the main house; he was so tired that he crawled up the steps rather than pulling himself on the banister.

He’d just closed the door when he heard the housekeeper’s voice from the rear of the house.

“Senor Stephan, are you OK?”

Rosalina hurried to the foyer, a worried look on her face.

“I’m quite all right,” he told her.

“I saw the fire,” she said.

“I was in the barn.”

“I thought, yes, but then when you did not come… In a little while, I would have gone over.”

“I’m OK. Just checking on things,” he told her.

The barn was not off-limits to her; not only did the general trust her completely, but Rosalina would not comprehend what was in there anyway. Still, she seemed to fear the building, and her weekly forays were quick visits to empty the trash can in the workshop. Maybe the spirits she sometimes talked to=like many Yahua Indians, Rosalina thought she could talk to the dead-had warned her away.

“Señor Stephan? For breakfast?”

:An egg would be fine.”

She bowed her head but did not leave.

“Was there something else?”

“I was going to ask for tomorrow afternoon and the next day off. My daughter’s son is to make Holy Confirmation. I can get a ride with a truck if I wait at the edge of the road.”

“You must have the day off,” he told her. The timing was perfect, though of course he didn’t tell her this. “Both. This is the daughter who lives near the city?”

Rosalina nodded. The daughter’s husband was a mestizo — a mixed-breed who worked at a small farm.

“The general—”

“Don’t worry about the general,” Babin told her. “He will never know. But if he were to find out, I would say I gave you the day off for your hard work. You deserve it. It’s too little time. A week-you should have a week.”

“You are very kind, Senor Stephan. Thank you. I will be here Friday.”

“Take Friday, Saturday, Sunday, too-make a vacation of it.”

“I could not do that. The cleaning would not be done.”

“I don’t think there is a house in Peru as clean as this one,” he told her. She smiled, but Babin knew she would report to work Friday, bright and early.

By then he would be gone, as would the warheads, both the general’s and his.

“Good night, Senor Stephan. Stay warm.”

“Oh, I’m very warm, Rosalina. Very, very warm.”

You wouldn’t believe the inferno that bums inside me, he thought, making his way to his room.