The Seventh Floor, page 25
Sam knew that Procter knew this; in fact, he suspected that she’d had the point nailed before coming to Vegas. But her deflated countenance now suggested that she had gathered here the exact opposite of what she wanted: she had confirmation. “I’m going to piece it through for a spot,” she said. “I’m gonna meditate, then scrub the grime of this godforsaken city off my skin so the smell doesn’t get me tossed off the plane. You be good and break it off with Natalie. But let her down gently, for god’s sake, like you’re terminating a swell agent who’s been damn good to us. You know the script, plus she deserves better than you. It’s a no-brainer. Now get the hell out, I’ll be in touch.”
34
DALLAS / FORT WORTH / EL PASO / THE BIG BEND COUNTRY
History teaches us, Irene explained, that soldiers of Russia must often fight without rations, weapons, or training. We are fortunate to have money, she said, and what of our good food and comfortable shelter? Impossible luxuries to the Russian soldier. And the Venables’ inexperience? It would be overcome. Assassination was a trade; they would become master craftsmen. “And we are lucky, Peter, that our fight will not occur in the dead of winter,” Irene said, crouching to pull the margarita mixer from a kitchen cabinet.
Around the end of their second round of drinks they settled on a bomb: the preferred weapon of the revolutionary, an act of theater, and a practical means to create distance from the act, so, as Irene put it, “We might live to fight on.” Peter had found the tipsy chatter about a bomb thrilling, but the notion of an endless fight overpowered the nervous excitement gifted by the tequila, leaving him merely nervous.
It was slow going at first. The decision to use a bomb was not without complications, but, as Irene had become fond of saying, they had been chosen for this work because they could solve problems, navigate obstacles. “They trust us because we will, like, figure it out, babe.” They downloaded a manual drafted by Al Qai’da’s branch in Yemen (already translated into English) and perused dark web vendors hawking classified PDF scans of U.S. military bomb tech “lessons learned” from Iraq and Afghanistan. Together they watched dozens of hours of YouTube videos on electrical circuits. They endlessly debated the parameters: delivery device, explosive type, detonators, circuitry.
At work Peter massaged PowerPoint presentations and tweaked Excel models and suffered through hours of pointless meetings. He was bored. But this project had quickly ballooned to devilish complexity, and, much to Peter’s surprise, he found it exhilarating, challenging. Because what was this, other than the greatest challenge of their lives?
In Texas, the only resource more plentiful than land is weapons.
Peter left his cubicle at the airline on a Friday afternoon and by dinnertime he and Irene were strolling among the Fort Worth Gun Show’s twelve hundred vendors inside the Will Rogers Center. At the A-Jack Knives table they purchased two Amtac Northman blades. At the Texas Shoots table: two SIG Sauer P320 pistols, a .30-06 Springfield rifle, and several boxes of ammunition. They paid in cash, flashing their driver’s licenses for proof of Texas residency, but, because many of the vendors were selling—legally—as unlicensed hobbyists, the Venable name and address would not be connected to the weapons inside any official database. Peter also bought a box of fifty empty .30-06 casings and three pounds of black powder. Because sometimes, he told the vendor, in a speech he had practiced with Irene, he just preferred packing his own ammunition. Big smiles all around. They loaded everything, all purchased legally, into a U-Haul trailer attached to their mud-spattered Mercedes SUV and spent the night at the Fort Worth Sheraton, toasting the day’s shopping spree with a nightcap at the Reata bar.
Next morning, a shopping run around Fort Worth. REI. Home Depot. Multiple mom-and-pop hardware stores. AutoZone. Two drugstores. Target, where a generous under-the-table tip to the assistant store manager secured a mannequin wearing mom jeans and a graphic T-shirt decorated with flowers and a message that read: DREAM YOUR LIFE. At every stop they paid cash, wore bulky N95 masks and ball caps, and used hand sanitizer, liberally and theatrically, to complete the picture. At some Peter went inside, at others Irene. Their license plate, as with most of the vehicle, had been caked in mud.
By late afternoon they were heading west. The sun flared blood-red and collapsed into the flattening horizon. Neither had ever been to the Texas west of the Brazos River.
Peter’s spirit rose as they crossed into the rolling prairie, the sky opened, and the land began stretching away in every direction. Windmills and cattle dotted the grassy brown pastures, the trees thinned with each passing mile, and the barrenness, the desolate grandeur, overtook him. The motherland made him feel like this, Peter thought, remembering a summer drive east from Nizhny with his uncle. The land was wild and open. They’d driven for hours and all around them was Russia. It had folded him inside of her, cradled him in her womb.
The El Paso gun show is a two-day affair celebrating guns, ammunition, and explosives in the El Maida Shriners complex.
The Venables had come for Tannerite, which Peter had spent dozens of hours researching online. It is a binary explosive: fueled by aluminum powder and titanium; oxidized by ammonium nitrate and perchlorate; popular in target practice. Peter now knew almost everything about it, from chemistry on up to practical application. After mixing the fuel powder with ammonium pellets, and when struck by a high-velocity round, it will explode, producing a bang and a puff of smoke. Peter, adopting the persona of an avid sport-shooter, had called a dozen participating vendors to confirm Tannerite would be for sale on-site.
As Peter and Irene wandered among the stalls—N95 masks and face shields eliciting a mix of irritation, derision, and amusement from the crowd—they came upon a vendor selling explosives: grenades, black powder, and, yes, he said, Tannerite out of the back of one of his box trucks behind the stall. “I’d like to load up,” Peter said. “I’ve got about twenty guys coming to the ranch to shoot here in a few weeks. What’s the limit?”
“No limit,” the man said, giving Peter an unfriendly stare. “But why are you wearing that face shield, anyway?”
“Wife’s going through chemo. Doctor’s orders. I know we look like freaks.”
The vendor’s face sank. “Oh jeez, I’m sorry, man.” There were no more questions after that.
That night, in an El Paso Super 8 near the airport, Irene fell asleep in minutes, but Peter churned the sheets, fretting about the gear in the trailer. Next morning, after two large cups of lousy coffee apiece, they began driving south, toward a ranch property they had rented in the Big Bend country.
The main house was two stories, a white-painted adobe with a red roof nestled into a grove of pinyon pine and juniper in the northern reaches of the Big Bend. The view from the wraparound porch carried across lowland pasture until it met a rocky ridgeline across the valley. Peter and Irene drank coffee and watched the sunrise. They’d work from the back; there was a large concrete surface for cleaning game, nestled into the trees and boasting a high pavilioned roof. The nearest property was miles away, but the privacy afforded by the foliage was nonetheless comforting. He pulled the car onto the concrete block, opened the trunk, and set up the folding table that would function as his workbench.
Irene gave him a kiss and trekked out to scout the property for test sites. Peter decided to start with the initiator. With frequent references to the classified manuals and YouTube videos, he drilled two small holes in the bottom of an empty .30-06 casing. He checked to ensure the casing was clean and bone-dry. He packed in black powder, crimped the opening, and sealed it with epoxy. He placed it in the sunshine to set.
For a moment he thought about how his Southwest colleagues were spending their weekends: kid’s sports, brunches in Uptown and on Lower Greenville, the Financial Planning and Analysis weekly pickup volleyball game, every Sunday at noon, on-site at headquarters in the shade of planes taking off and landing. He looked at the carload of supplies and the initiator and laughed. They were all dumb sheep. Selecting a rock playlist, he cranked up the volume on his phone.
He assembled one of the large cardboard boxes and evaluated the dimensions.
Next, the circuitry. From the bag purchased at a Fort Worth hardware store he removed Gorilla glue, a clock, a two-inch knife pin, a metal hacksaw, and a file. He cut and filed down the knife pin. When the clock struck twelve, the minute hand would kiss the metal of the pin. He glued it to the clock.
Then, cursing himself, he realized he should have tested the initiator without the powder. He drilled two holes in the bottom of another .30-06 casing, then ran two leads through the holes so they jutted into the brass like tines on a fork. He ran those leads to the battery. There was a small, glinting spark inside the casing. Yes, hell, yes.
“Going well?” Irene smiled as she walked up.
“We have a spark,” he said, looking up from the table.
She clapped and gave him a kiss. “What can I do?” she said. He pointed to a pile of boxes. Irene began unpacking the magnesium bars from the firestarter kits, the steel balls, and the shanks of nails. The magnesium was pyrophoric. Inside the blast radius, anything flammable would be set alight. An insurance policy, they had decided, to increase the odds of success.
While Irene arranged the magnesium and shrapnel in the box, careful to leave room at center for the bucket of Tannerite, Peter labored over the trembler device. The clock would count down ten, maybe twenty minutes—enough time to clear out—and the minute hand would hit the knife pin, completing the first circuit. When the target moved the box, the trembler device would complete the second circuit. Then the box goes boom.
From a drugstore bag he collected a syringe and cut off the needle, so all that remained was a plastic tube. As he had with the casing, he carefully drilled two small holes in the top, pulled two leads through, then glued them in place. He slipped a steel ball inside the syringe and cut a small wedge of plastic to fill the open end. Then he took two thin strips of wood and glued those to the syringe so it would sit level, like a ship in a bottle. He set up one of the smaller cardboard boxes and taped the syringe to the bottom. He practiced: picking up the box, sliding, dropping. The bearing rolled nicely. He taped it inside the bottom of the larger box.
Now the circuitry. He again watched one of the more helpful YouTube videos and Irene read aloud from a classified manual on the iPad as he worked, laying it out on the concrete like a spaghetti diagram.
When he felt confident in the wiring, he said, “We can do the last bit at the site.”
Packing the bomb materials, a hundred-foot length of rope, and the mannequin into the car, they set off for the test site Irene had selected. To his consternation it was flanked by a screen of trees. “Irene, we might start a forest fire,” he murmured. “The magnesium.”
Irene slipped off her sunglasses and looked around. She bit her lip. “Shit,” she said.
They trundled around the property for another hour searching for a suitable spot, finally settling on a patch of treeless valley floor nestled into a rocky crumble at the base of a ridge. Peter filled the bucket with fifty pounds of the Tannerite. He closed the lid and slipped the powder-filled casing inside, through a hole he had drilled, checking to be certain it was snuggled into the explosive and that there was sufficient wire peeking out the back end to close the circuit. The battery went into the box alongside the bucket of Tannerite. Peter wound the rope around the cardboard, securing it with several hastily tied knots. Irene stood the mannequin next to the box.
His hands were shaking while he completed the wiring. Irene’s face was rosy when he first looked up at her. Next time he met her gaze her cheeks were flushed, and by the time he was finishing they almost looked bruised. “Focus, baby,” she whispered. “Almost there. You are crushing it.”
When he was done, he turned the clock hands with his fingers to give them twenty minutes. He slid the clock into the box and for a breathless second took in the stillness, the caw of a distant crow, the rustle of long grass flattening in the wind. Irene set a timer on her phone, and they gathered the rope and hiked up a low rise until they ran out of length and it pulled taut.
They were seventy, eighty feet from the bomb. Was it far enough? Why, he kicked himself, why had he not bought more rope?
Ten minutes left.
Though it was early November, the weather was fair, the sun was high and bright, anxiety was turning them inside out, and they were both soaked in sweat. His phone lit up—he’d not had cell service for most of the morning, but now, on this rise, he did. He mindlessly scrolled through work emails. His boss wanted him to double-check the math on a financial model he’d built. He grimaced, looked to Irene, sweat staining her shirt. “Something wrong, babe?” she asked.
“No.” He saw he’d neglected to turn on his out-of-office message. The phone slid into his pocket.
Two minutes. He felt they were maybe too close. Should he say something? One look at Irene and he knew a stony, resolved silence was the answer. None of this is illegal, he reassured himself. You’re out here having some fun with your wife.
The phone timer went off. Irene’s jaw set, and she twisted her frantic eyes toward the rope, sitting in the dirt.
“Let’s do it together,” she said.
They knotted their hands together, entwined fingers hovering over the cord. He pulled her in for a kiss. I love you, he mouthed to her. I love you, too, she said. Then he slid their coupled hands around the rope. They braced themselves like this was tug-of-war. Yanked as one.
The overpressure filled his ears. He ducked, then fell, hearing only a tinny ring. Debris plinked across his back. He looked up.
A fountain of dust had shot into the air above the test site, masking the ridge. Irene’s hand covered her mouth. A trace of blood ran from her nostril.
But he could see that she was smiling.
Thirty minutes later, walking through a patch of long grass for a tour of the damage, celebratory bottle of tequila in hand, Peter stopped for a pull and peered down at the sound of a crunch. He’d stepped on a charred plastic ball. He bent down for a look. It was the top half of the mannequin’s head.
35
KISSIMMEE
In the dim light of the trailer, boggy air rushing across the swamp and through windows opened to free the smoke, Artemis Procter sat at her banquette, facing a pile of yellow legal pads and an overworked brass ashtray fashioned into the shape of a gator’s snout. An old shoebox sat on the counter above the dishwasher. A haphazard stack of faded photos lay curled beside it. She’d only needed one, from that fateful day in Afghanistan, a shot of them all standing in front of a Hesco barrier at the Base. It was, she believed, the last surviving picture of all five of them. And her scissors were swishing through it.
She’d wanted the pictures because she had to look at their faces for this part, to make it real. A skyline of newly acquired liquor bottles dotted the sill under the bead curtain. Procter had vague memories of chess pieces being used to mount the pictures in the old spy stories, but alcohol was more in line with her present mood. Plus, she could drink the booze, and she fucking hated chess. The occasional whump and flitter of wings floated by the opened window. Procter was so consumed in her work that she did not hear the bump of a fruit bat into the trailer’s metal skin, nor the shrieky meows of a pair of coital cats.
Inside the black beating heart of any double-cross operation is an essential and blinding lie, forcing you to reckon with its version of the truth, foisting a set of facts on you that suit perfectly innocent theories, turning you inside out. Tangles within tangles. That afternoon, alone with her thoughts, she’d at last put structure to the dark reality bearing down on her.
All of them had been on the flight from Vienna, when CIA had brought Sam home. Following spy swap tradition, each of her friends had brought something to drink, for the toasts. Jaggers had supplied the details during the all-night debrief when he had first appeared on her doorstep in Florida.
Mac had carried a bottle of Blue Label for the flight from Vienna, Sam had said. But her reptile fund was dwindling so she’d bought Black Label and spruced it up with a blue Sharpie. She taped the cutout picture of his head to the neck of the bottle. Next, Gus. Teetotaling Gus sipped sparkling water on the return—Perrier. Gus’s picture was affixed to the bottle. Then Theo, a man whose alcoholism was nothing if not functional, financially reasonable, even. I don’t like to break the bank with my bad habits, Artemis, he’d told her once, and she’d held her tongue about the quality of the women he bought. Theo had trucked along a handle of Canadian Club. Onto the bottle squatting on the sill went his picture; she cut out his entire body because in the photo he’d been giving the middle finger salute. Finally, Debs, the brat, brought vodka. What kind of sociopath, Mac had said, brings a bottle of Russian vodka to offer a guy who just got sprung from a Russian prison? She could have been sensible, brought Grey Goose. Debs had carried along a nice bottle, started with a K, Procter recalled, but she hadn’t been able to track it down in Kissimmee and so settled for Stoli. Debs’s mug was taped to the neck. Procter looked across their faces, and for the first time forced herself to say it aloud, to speak it into being.
Procter put a finger to Mac’s photograph, snug on the Blue-Sharpied bottle of Black Label. Whispered, Rich Man.
