Bykov went back into the dining room and gestured for Zimin to break off and join him at the front door. The bomb expert folded his hand and came over.
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re driving across the river first thing in the morning, and I want to make one last check of the van,” Bykov said.
“As you wish.”
The two of them took the elevator straight down to the underground parking garage, turned left, and walked down the ramp past a dozen cars, finally coming to the plain white Mercedes transit van they’d rented from an agency on the Upper East Side two days ago.
Zimin would be doing his business in back once they arrived at the travel agency in the morning, while Kolchin would be behind the wheel waiting until the detonator circuit for the explosives was set and the two of them could get out and walk one block around the corner.
Alexei Mazayev, driving the backup Mercedes C300, Bykov riding shotgun, would be waiting for them to show up, and from there drive directly out to JFK for their flight home.
The final payment would not be deposited to their offshore account unless the bomb actually went off and destroyed the entire building, so Bykov wanted to make sure that everything was as it should be.
He unlocked the doors, and they got in. Zimin went into the back first while Bykov locked the doors and then joined him.
The cargo space was crammed floor to ceiling, left to right—with only a narrow crawl space in the middle—with fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer stacked on top of long narrow cylinders of nitromethane gas and several tubes of Tovex, which was like dynamite.
The gas, which was normally used to power racing motorcycles, had been bought from a supply company in Queens, the fertilizer from a farm supply in a small town twenty miles from West Point, and the Tovex they stole from a construction company’s warehouse up in Danbury.
When the detonator circuit was activated, an electric signal would be generated that would ignite the Tovex, creating a massive explosion of the fertilizer and Tovex. It was the same combination that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had used in ’95 for their attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed or seriously wounded nearly nine hundred people.
This time the casualty list would be much smaller, but the NYSE’s backup computer would be completely obliterated.
“Once the countdown clock is set, we’ll have five minutes to get out of the blast zone,” Zimin explained.
“Tell me again why we just don’t use a cell phone signal to set the thing off.”
“Be our luck that someone makes a wrong-number call while we were close. This way is better.”
“What if we’re delayed?” Bykov asked. He had been around high explosives all of his career, long enough to respect their power and yet not be frightened if the proper procedures were followed. Yet he’d also had experiences—all of them had—with shit happening by dumb luck.
“We shoot our way clear, unless we want to become martyrs.”
At this moment the timer was set to zero, and the positive lead on the battery was disconnected.
“Don’t make a mistake in the morning, Arkadi,” Bykov said.
“Be there when we come around the corner,” Zimin countered.