It’d come to her when she set the phone down on the table after talking to Jack. When she did, she bumped that rat bite on her hand—the worst one, where it bit all the way through and hung there while she was tryin’ to shake it off. The pain had set her to rememberin’ that night, them rats all over her, how rats was about the awfullest thing a body could possibly imagine.
The thought dropped into her mind, then. Plop. If she’d a’heard a ding, she’d a’thought it was an email.
Anybody’d run from rats.
And there it was. Could they come up with a way to use them rats to freak out them people at the ball so bad they’d get up and run out of the room? And right on the heels of that question come the answer!
“That newspaper story said the staff of the Rivergate would be all dressed up in costumes like the guests. We ain’t got no tickets for that ball, but we can get ourselves in as servers. All’s we need is Halloween costumes.”
“So we get into the ball…then what? Start throwing frozen rats at people?”
“They’ll be thawed out by then, sugar.”
“Okay, throw thawed-out rats at people?”
“Didn’t you say them cleaning men hosed the rats down, got ’em presentable?”
“Presentable?”
“Not all bloody like they just did get hit by a truck. They’ll just be dead.”
“They weren’t in real good shape when they died, you know.”
“Oh, that part don’t matter. Folks ain’t gone get a very good look at ’em anyway. Long’s they look like they could be alive, we’re good.”
“So how are we going to get six dozen thawed-out dead rats into that ballroom and what are we going to do with them once we get them there?”
“We ain’t gone take them into the ballroom.” She stopped. “You ain’t ’fraid of heights, are you?”
Becca barked a mirthless laugh. “Theresa, I’m afraid of everything!”
“That newspaper story said they was gone be a balloon drop at the ball tonight.”
“And somehow we’re going to put the rats in with the balloons?”
Theresa nodded. Then she waved off the questions she could see Becca forming.
“The answer is I don’t know,” she said.
She patted Becca’s arm. “I once heard a preacher compare God to them motion-activated lights folks use to line they sidewalks. They only come on when you’re close enough that you need ’em and they only light up what you got to see right in front of you. I got some of this figured out and I’m trustin’ I’ll figure out the rest of it when the time comes.”
She started toward the garage door.
“Grab another garbage bag, sugar. Soon’s them rats thaw out enough we can separate ’em, we gone need to divide ’em up.” She shuddered at the thought of touching the rats. But they was dead. She comforted herself with that thought.
They was dead, right?
Becca took the garbage bag full of rats out of the freezer in the garage and set it with a clunk into the trunk of the car. Theresa wondered how long it would be before them rats was…usable. She didn’t have no experience with how long it took a dead rat to thaw out.
She and Becca swung by Hedringer’s Novelties and Party Supplies and done the best they could to outfit themselves. It being Halloween, them costumes was mighty picked over, and she and Becca wasn’t ’xactly average size eights. They was only two costumes in the whole store big enough to fit Theresa. One was an outfit with alternating rows of red, green, gold, purple and orange fringe sewn around and around it.
“If I go dressed as a piñata, I’m gone spend the whole night dodging people trying to whack me with a stick,” she said.
Resigned, she picked up the other costume and made a humph sound in her throat. “Fat as I am, the Big Bad Wolf’s gonna have to take home a doggie bag.”
Theresa’s face was completely hidden when she put the hood of the red cape up over her head. Wasn’t nothing showing from behind Becca’s mask but her chin. Theresa stopped before they checked out and selected a pair of fancy white gloves with lace around the top for herself—fit snug over the rat-bite bandage on her right hand—and red gloves for Becca.
“I don’t know if what we’s plannin’ is technically illegal, but I ’spect there’s a little bitty law or two we’s gone break along the way. Might be a plan not to leave no fingerprints behind.”
The ball didn’t start until six o’clock, but they had to get there soon’s they could so they’d have time to figure out a way to pull this off. Theresa figured she’d ought to make sure the both of them was singin’ from the same sheet of music.
“Have you thought ’bout what’s gone happen—to us—if this don’t work?” she asked.
“We’ll be in the room when the bomb goes off,” Becca said. Then she turned to Theresa and her eyes looked haunted. “I’d rather be in a room with a bomb than in a room with…where Jack and Andi and Crock are going.”
Sebastian Nemo left his hotel room fifteen minutes before checkout time on Monday morning. Sometimes hotel maids remembered people who made them wait to clean the room. He stopped at a fast-food restaurant for lunch and drove to a crowded Walmart parking lot, where he sat in his van until mid-afternoon. Then he set out for the half-hour drive northeast along the Ohio River upstream from Cincinnati. Five miles below the speed limit even though it was a rural two-lane road. It wouldn’t do to get pulled over packing a Javelin missile in the back of the van.
He’d selected the spot along the riverbank carefully. As he approached it, he slowed to allow the pickup truck behind him to pass. He pulled to the side of the road and waited until the truck vanished over the next hill and no other vehicles were in sight in either direction. Then he drove the van off the road through the undergrowth and around trees to the bank of a small inlet a quarter mile away. He parked among a stand of bushes and hurried back to the road to remove the tire tracks he’d left behind.
When he returned to the van, he checked his perimeter. The area was so densely overgrown with brush that the inlet was invisible from the road and from the riverbank both upstream and downstream. He parked the van longways, facing downriver, to block the view from passing boats and barges, then pulled the inflatable dinghy out of the back of the van and went to work.
Inside an hour, he was set. The black dinghy with its twenty-horse-power outboard motor was ready to shove into the water in the inlet. The missile lay on the floor of the dinghy. A Javelin had two components—the reusable command launch unit and the missile, which was sealed in a disposable launch tube. Fully assembled—locked and loaded—it was less than five feet long and weighed less than fifty pounds.
As he donned his black jumpsuit, pulled the black cap low on his head and applied eyeblack to his face and hands, he went over the plan again. It was simple. All good plans were.
No plan ever survived the first contact with the enemy, a former Navy SEAL instructor had told him years ago, so reducing the number of moving parts that could…would…go wrong minimized the damage control you had to do when things inevitably began to unravel.
The Javelin was the perfect weapon for the job at the Rivergate Hotel because you could fire it two ways. You could fire it directly at the target. Or you could set it to come down on top of the target, in this case right through the hotel’s rolled-back roof to detonate in the Balloon Ballroom on the top floor. Like shooting ducks in a washtub—sight in on the gigantic neon-flashing balloons on the four corners of the hotel roof and fire.
For all its accuracy and ease of use, however, the Javelin had a drawback that had presented a significant challenge. Mortars used coordinates to hurl incendiary devices off into the blue. With a Javelin, the man firing it had to be able to see the target.
That was the manufacturer’s slogan: “If you can see it, you can destroy it.”
That proved problematic in the case of this mission. Though the missile’s range was more than a mile and a half, there was no land-side approach to the Rivergate Hotel that offered a sightline view of it. The hotel was part of a four-building riverfront complex called The Cedars, and the Stabler Building sat directly behind it. The Bank of Ohio Building sat beside the Rivergate on the east and the Regency Plaza was snuggled up beside it on the west. All three buildings surrounding it were two to four stories taller than the hotel. The only open approach was on the river side—but not from the opposite shore. On the Kentucky side of the Ohio River across from the Rivergate was a collection of buildings that held the government offices of Boone County as well as the Northern Kentucky State Police post!
There was only one option left—he would have to hit the building from a position on the river itself, and because the Rivergate was set back from the water farther than the buildings on either side of it, even the river approach had limitations.
When he’d first set up the hit on the Balloon Ballroom, there’d been talk that the First Lady might attend the Better Day Society Ball—which would have meant security out the wazoo. Most people didn’t know that after 9/11, the US Coast Guard stopped routinely policing inland waterways. Their resources instead were trained on security for locks, dams and bridges. But with the First Lady nearby, you’d probably be able to walk across the river on Coast Guard vessels. They’d be all over every pleasure craft on the water, every yacht, pontoon boat, speedboat, raft and kayak—if they didn’t just ban pleasure boat traffic on the river altogether until she left.
Even though, to Sebastian’s vast relief, the First Lady’s plans changed, he wasn’t sure what kind of security—if any—there might be for the four main contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination. So he’d decided to stick with the original First-Lady-in-Attendance plan. It was simple and safe—though its small window of opportunity made it a little more challenging than other alternatives. But Nemo enjoyed the adrenaline rush of danger every now and then. He usually let the hired help take all the risks. Not tonight. He would be the man firing the Javelin…from a position on a coal barge chugging down the Ohio River.
A standard barge was thirty-five feet wide and one hundred ninety-five feet long, twelve feet deep and sank nine feet below the surface of the water when it was loaded. A standard tow for one tugboat had fifteen such barges—three wide and five long—winched together with cables. That amounted to roughly a thousand feet of surface area piled high with thirty thousand tons of coal—a floating island. It would take an army to find one man dressed in black in the dark, carrying a pipe a little bigger than a fence post in an area the size of four football fields placed end to end.
A barge’s only drawback was the fact that it was moving. Slowly, though, less than six miles per hour—not a whole lot faster than a brisk walk. Still, Sebastian would have a limited window of opportunity to fire, from the time the Rivergate came into view from behind the Bank of Ohio Building upstream until it was blocked from view by the Regency Plaza Building downstream. By Nemo’s calculations, that would be somewhere between nine and fifteen minutes—plenty of time for the Boss, who apparently intended to be on the site of the explosion, to get clear.
Nemo hadn’t intended to launch the dinghy out into the river until it was full dark, and sundown would be at 6:29 p.m. But shortly after five o’clock, it began to get foggy. It was a strange fog that had appeared out of nowhere, not settling first in low-lying areas and around streams. It was suddenly there, all around, reducing visibility to fifteen or twenty feet.
Well, no plan ever survived the first contact…
The presence of fog would require adjustments, but it did mean the launch would not be visible from the Kentucky State Police Post on the Kentucky side of the river—if anybody chanced to be looking in his direction when he fired. And it also closed the loophole of his only vulnerability. It would be possible to spot him from the air with a helicopter and searchlight. Fog this thick would ground all choppers, and it would hide the small tail of fire and smoke produced when the round fired. The fog would cause no sighting problem for Sebastian, though. The neon balloons on the four corners of the Rivergate’s roof were brightly lit spheres three times the size of Volkswagens.
He’d thought long and hard about it, figuring out how he was gonna get them boys out of the boxcar and all the way to that cavern to kill them the way Chapman Whitworth had told him he had to kill them. And how he was gonna carry all the stuff he had to take with him to do it like Chapman Whitworth said he had to. Finally, he decided he’d use Daniel and Kendrick as pack mules.
It took a couple of trips back and forth to the house to get the supplies to the boxcar. Until he was ready to go in and retrieve his captives, he left the things sitting in the open area in the front of the cave next to the shelves where he kept his own supplies. He had containers of water, a few tools and a great big stack of extra car batteries—and he had to have spares. Couldn’t be down here with no ’lectricity. In the dark.
They’d been in there stewing a long time, staring death in the face. That was why he’d left the light off. It was a lot scarier to think about dying when it was dark.
He stepped into the boxcar, flipped on the light and watched the two of them squint.
“It’s showtime,” he announced cheerily. He walked to where they lay. “Let me tell you how this is gonna go down. We’re gonna go out into this here cave and down it to the spot where I’m going to send you fellas on to meet your maker. I figure you’ve spent a good bit of the time you been in here coming up with all kinda plans on how you’re gonna escape. You need to know what’s gonna happen if you decide to try one of them plans.”
He pulled a Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol from a holster on his belt.
“Either one of you so much as sneezes or looks at me funny and I’m gonna shoot you. I ain’t gonna kill you—that’d spoil all the fun, but I am gonna shoot you. I’ll take out your kneecaps, point-blank range. You can still kneel to get executed with busted kneecaps.”
Kendrick and Daniel just looked at him and said nothing.
“That’s for the first offense even if you didn’t mean nothin’ by it, so you better be real careful. But if you pull something where I know you really are coming after me…” He pulled a small but vicious-looking knife from a scabbard on the other side of his belt and turned it so it flashed silver in the overhead light. “I’ll take out your knees and then I’m gonna use this on you, fix it so you won’t want to escape anymore because ain’t no point in living after I castrate you.”
He liked it that they both flinched visibly. He’d got their attention alright.
“Anybody unsure of what’s at stake if you screw up?”
They didn’t respond.
“I said are we clear on this?”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Kendrick said. He was probably smirking, but you couldn’t really tell with his face all messed up like it was.
“I heard you,” Daniel said.
“Since I ain’t plannin’ on carryin’ you, you’re gonna have to walk, so I’m gonna cut your feet lose.” He sniffed. “Don’t think that gives you no advantage. You’re gonna be blindfolded. Good luck trying to run away when you can’t see! And good luck getting out of this cave with the gate padlocked and I got the only key.” He held a key ring with a lone key up for them to see, then stuffed it down in his pants pocket.
He used the knife to cut the tape binding Kendrick’s ankles together, then tied a piece of the rope around both ankles, leaving about three feet in between.
“A hobbled horse don’t do no kicking.”
After he’d freed Daniel’s ankles, he took hold of his upper arm and lifted him to his feet. He swayed, almost fell, so Billy Ray kept hold of his arm until he was steady, then did the same with Kendrick and shoved both of them out the door of the boxcar into the cave.
He picked up the roll of duct tape and went to Daniel first. Using his teeth to rip off a piece of tape about two feet long, Billy Ray wrapped the tape around Daniel’s head and over his eyes, then tore off several more pieces and covered his face with them so wasn’t no way he could even see light.
He turned to Kendrick and noticed how he was looking around, taking everything in.
“I done a good job on this place,” he said. “Course, ain’t nobody ever gonna know that since everybody who sees it ends up dead.”
He ripped off a piece of tape and began to wrap Kendrick’s head, making a special effort to poke his swollen, broken nose, and enjoyed hearing him moan in pain.
“Broke nose hurts, don’t it,” he said. “You broke mine when you kicked me in the face and I ain’t forgot it! Time for payback!” He made a fist and slammed it like a hammer into the tape covering Kendrick’s face. The man screamed, staggered backwards and fell to the cave floor.
As Kendrick lay moaning on the floor, Billy Ray studied the both of them. Puzzled on it hard as he could, but he couldn’t figure a way two blind men with their hands taped together and their arms taped to their bodies could put up any kind of fight. Still, he’d be ready if they tried anything.
He reached down and picked up a long length of the rope he’d bought special at that fancy hunting/fishing/hiking store that’d opened up in town after he was sent off. It was rock climbing rope—light and strong and easy to work with. He tied a slipknot in both ends, placed one end around Kendrick’s neck—blood was seeping out the edges of the tape covering his face—and the other around Daniel’s. The slightest pull from one of them would yank the rope tight around both their necks.
He had tied the handles of two halogen lanterns together and he draped the lanterns around Daniel’s neck like a scarf hanging down on his chest. He did the same thing with another set of lanterns. Then he took two additional lanterns he’d tied together and draped them around Daniel’s neck to hang down in back. Six lanterns in all. The weight of them combined with the choke rope made it hard for Daniel to breathe—and that was a good thing.
He dragged Kendrick to his feet and draped him with lanterns, too—made it a dozen lanterns in all—then slid a second slipknot-tied rope around Daniel’s neck as a lead rope. It was a long piece so he’d be way out in front. He gathered up a duffle bag with the rest of what he needed in one hand and a lantern in the other, stepped out in front of Daniel and gave the rope a tug.
“We’re starting out now, boys. One of you falls, gonna choke the other. If I figure you didn’t fall on purpose, I’ll only take out one kneecap, and then the other one’s gonna have to drag you. Make it easy on yourselves, walk careful and don’t try nothing. We’ll take it slow.”
And so they started. It was hard for the men to keep their footing with their hands tied, trying to stay balanced with the weight of the lanterns and the ropes. He’d planned it that way. They had to concentrate just to stay upright, so their minds were occupied, no time to stew about what was about to happen and start to panic.
The two of them finally got a rhythm going, timed and measured their steps so it wasn’t so herky-jerky on the ropes around their necks. He walked backwards for probably a hundred yards of slow going, keepin’ his eyes on ’em, but finally relaxed. There was no way for them to try anything.
Eventually, they made the final turn in the tunnel before the cavern—if Billy Ray was remembering it right, and he’d only been here the one time right after he buried the boxcar.
When the cavern opened up in front of him, Billy Ray was as awed by it as he’d been that first time. He’d never been in any place as strange, as otherworldly as this. He led the men through the forest of stalag-things out into the middle of the almost-marble floor and then stood very still, looking around. He set down the duffle bag and his lantern, took one set of lanterns from around Kendrick’s neck, untied them and flipped the switches.
The light revealed two things that hadn’t been here the only other time he’d been here. One was a table-like thing in the center of the cavern. It was made from rocks and broken pieces of stalag-things, piled up about four feet high with a huge flat rock four feet by six feet lying across the top. Billy Ray’d bet ten strong men wouldn’t have been able to lift that thing into place…but ten strong men hadn’t been who put it there.
The second thing that was different was the drawings. Something had been drawn with black chalk on the floor that’d looked like frozen water before.
This must be what Whitworth had meant when he said things was all ready—had been waiting for today for more than twenty years.
Images suddenly splashed on the walls of his memory and he shook his head to get rid of them. That nightmare, dream, whatever it was—there’d been something drawn on the floor that time, too. He’d seen the lines when he fell. And there’d been a table—he remembered now, a table, and he’d looked up past it—
He clamped back down on the images, shoving them out of his mind with a great force of will. But they were right behind the door and he couldn’t keep the door locked anymore. He couldn’t even keep it closed all the way anymore and they were right there, ready to come rushing in all the time.
He went to Daniel and lifted off the lanterns. He had a raw rope burn on the front of his neck.
Billy Ray giggled, reached out and touched the mark.
“You’re making this easy. All I gotta do is cut on the dotted line.” He roared at his own joke, his ragged, damaged voice bouncing around the walls of the huge cavern, echoing in such an eerie fashion that the humor drained out of him at the sound. The place was creepy in a way he didn’t remember from before. He had to hurry up and do this, get it over with so he could get out of here.
He worked as quickly as he could then. He turned on the other of the set of lanterns he’d taken from Kendrick and set it on the edge of the fissure in the floor—wanted to light that up real well. Wouldn’t want to accidentally step off into it. If he did, he’d still be falling by the middle of next week.
He took all the lanterns Kendrick and Daniel had hauled from the boxcar and left the two men standing where they were with the rope around their necks still tethering them to each other.
“Case you were considerin’ running off blind, you need to know there’s a crevice in the floor in this cavern—probably thirty feet wide and so deep you can’t see the bottom. You best stand real still right where you are.”
He set the lanterns in a circle around the edges of the cavern, trying to light it as evenly and effectively as he could. He’d use that table thing to set the video camera on so it’d catch every detail. He’d saved two lanterns to set right up next to them two men when he was ready to do the deed so’s their faces would be lit up and recognizable. Wouldn’t do no good to video him whacking off their heads if it was too dark to see who they were. Chapman Whitworth had been very specific about that—make sure we see their faces!
Billy Ray remembered his voice and shivered. He’d been specific about everything—not only the light. So much crazy stuff to do…