Rules of Vengeance

11

The components sat on the floor of the garage, stacked neatly against the rear wall.

Twenty sticks of plastic explosive, bundled into packets of four, each packet weighing five kilos and thermowrapped in orange plasticene.

Two 15-kilo bags of four-inch carpenter’s nails.

Two 10-kilo bags of three-inch steel bolts.

Five 5-kilo bags of 00 buckshot.

Four 25-kilo sacks of Portland cement.

One reel of copper electrical wire.

One length of det cord manufactured by Bofors of Sweden measuring one meter.

One box of blasting caps. Ten count.

A can of stalignite gel, better known as napalm.

One cell phone (still in its factory packaging) and a SIM card carrying a stored value of twenty pounds.

Last but not least, the delivery device, recently detailed and sparkling beneath a raft of fluorescent lights, occupied the center of the garage.

A BMW had been chosen for the job. Expensive automobiles attracted less attention than cheap ones, and this one carried a sticker price of one hundred twenty thousand pounds, nearly two hundred thousand U.S. dollars when you included VAT. It was a brand-new 7-series, stratus gray with black leather interior, an elongated wheelbase, and conservative nineteen-inch rims. It was a car a diplomat might drive. A car that would look very much at home parked on the streets of Whitehall, the London district that was the site of many government offices.

One man stood in the garage, studying the automobile. He was wan and thin, dressed in a blue coverall. Except for his hands, he was unremarkable in every way. The left hand had only three fingers, the pinkie and ring finger lost to a faulty detonator. The right hand, though intact, was webbed with scar tissue and grotesque. When ignited, white phosphorus fuses with human flesh and cannot be extinguished with water. They were a bombmaker’s hands.

He, too, had been smuggled into the country, though the route was less circuitous than that of the stolen BMW. He had come from Calais, France, spirited across the English Channel in a high-speed Cigarette motorboat and landed on a beach in Dover twenty-four hours earlier. After constructing the bomb, he would return to the same beach for the outward leg of his journey, but whether he would go back to Calais or elsewhere was unknown. Men like him did not publish their itineraries.

He had no name. He was known simply by his trade. The Mechanic.

The Mechanic circled the car, running a hand over the hood, the roof, and the trunk. Every explosive device was different and had to be constructed according to its specific purpose. To bring down a building required five hundred kilos or more of high explosives and the ability to gain close proximity to the target. For that, a truck or van was best, as was the willingness to sacrifice one’s life. To maximize human casualties, fewer explosives were required, but more materiel, or shrapnel. Proximity was essential. Military-issue plastic explosives detonated at the rate of 8000 meters per second. The blast wave alone was capable of crushing a nearby automobile. At that velocity, a carpenter’s nail would travel a long and deadly distance.

The job he was entrusted with this evening fell somewhere between the two. It took him six hours to complete.

When he was finished, he surveyed the BMW with a former policeman’s eye. The vehicle appeared no different from before, which meant it neither listed to one side nor drooped on its suspension. The explosives were evenly distributed throughout the left-hand, or passenger, side of the automobile and concealed in the trunk, the rocker panels, the roof, and the engine.

The Mechanic designed his charges according to a three-tiered model. First he coated the chassis with napalm gel. Next he layered in the materiel (nails, bolts, buckshot). And last he shaped and affixed the plastic explosives.

The cement was used as a tamping agent. He placed one bag of cement on the right-hand side of the trunk. The other bag he divided into smaller packages and spread throughout the engine cavity. The cement would thus deflect the force of the blast in the desired direction.

A standard cell phone attached to a blasting cap served to detonate the device. When the cell phone received a call, it passed along an electrical charge that ignited the blasting cap. The cap in turn ignited the det cord, instantaneously setting off the plastic explosives. The entire detonation sequence would last one one-hundredth of a second.

There was one last thing he needed to do. Crawling beneath the steering wheel, he installed an antijamming device. Targets had grown as sophisticated in protecting themselves as the assailants who wanted to kill them. It was not uncommon for vehicles to carry a wireless jamming device that blocked out all incoming phone signals as a defense against roadside bombs. The black box he wired to the car’s internal battery would jam the jammer. It was a question of who was one step ahead of the other.

Finished, he hauled himself from beneath the automobile and stood up.

It was then that he saw her standing by the door. “Is it ready?” she asked.

The Mechanic wiped his hands with a chamois cloth. The woman had bottle-green eyes and wavy auburn hair. Her beauty was as unexpected as her stealth. He knew better than to ask her name.

“Don’t turn on the cell phone until you park it. They have scanners these days.”

“What’s its number?”

As he read it off, the woman programmed it into her own phone.

“Why the nails and bolts?” she asked.

The Mechanic darted a glance to a corner of the garage, but he did not answer.

“Why the nails?” she repeated. She had spent a week gathering the necessary materials, and the last-minute addition of nails, buckshot, and bolts bothered her. “The blast will be more than enough to do the job.”

“To make sure the job is completed to my satisfaction,” answered a gravelly baritone. A short, stocky man rose from the recesses of the garage and walked toward the car. A filterless cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. As always, he was dressed in a gray pinstripe suit of questionable quality. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a shaped charge. The blast will be confined to the target. Any collateral damage will be minimal.”

“Hello, Papi,” said the woman.

“Hello, child.”

“Why are you here?”

“I came to wish you luck.”

“Two thousand kilometers for a pat on the back? How nice of you.”

“I thought my presence would impress upon you our commitment to the mission.”

“I’m impressed.”

Papi tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it under his heel. “Nails, eh? They bother you? It doesn’t surprise me. You always were more sensitive than you liked to admit.”

“Cautious. There’s a difference.”

Papi frowned. He did not agree. “I took a risk in bringing you back.”

“It was you who let me go.”

“It was not a matter of choice. I could no longer pay you. The system was broken. It was a financial necessity.”

“But we were family. Remind me, was I your daughter or something else?”

Papi raised a hand to her face and brushed his rough fingers over her lips. “I see your husband never taught you to shut your mouth. Americans. So weak.”

The woman turned away brusquely.

“Many people are relying on you,” Papi went on, fishing in his jacket for another cigarette.

“Especially you.”

“Especially me. I admit it. I wanted to make sure you didn’t have any last-minute misgivings.”

“Why should I?”

Papi picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. “You tell me,” he said offhandedly firing his lighter, a dented Zippo that he had owned as long as she’d known him.

“Are you forgetting Rome?” Emma Ransom untucked her T-shirt and showed off her scar. “Going back isn’t an option.”

“Just so we both know that.” The stocky man kissed Emma on both cheeks, then pressed the car keys into her hand. “Good hunting.”