Big Trouble Part 21

They were now heading northbound in the southbound lanes of Le Jeune. This was not unheard of in Miami, but it was irregular, and the southbound motorists were not happy about it. Monica, her face rigid with concentration, was yanking the wheel left and right to avoid the oncoming, horn-blaring cars. Just past the crumpled corpses of the pickup truck and the taxi, where the two drivers were screaming curses at each other in two different languages, Monica spun the wheel hard right, jouncing the Kia over a low median barrier and screeching across three lanes of traffic into the airport entrance road.

"Don't ever tell anybody I did that," said Monica.

"I didn't see a thing," said Matt, truthfully.

"I don't believe this," said Henry, slapping the steering wheel. Ahead of the car, and now behind it, traffic on Le Jeune had congealed into a nonmoving ma.s.s.

"You see what the problem is?" asked Leonard, peering ahead through the winds.h.i.+eld.

"Looks like it's jammed up way past those lights," said Henry. "Some kinda commotion up there. Maybe they got something about it on the radio." He punched the power k.n.o.b.

... not hearing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, when they lose-not now, tonight, but when they play a game and LOSE-then I don't hear a peep from Gator fans.

Well, you 're not hearing what I'M saying. I'm saying that I'M a Gator fan, and I'm calling you now, OK? I'm talking on the phone right ...

Sighing, Henry punched the power k.n.o.b again.

Behind them, horns were honking. Ahead, they heard shouting. Suddenly, a low, dark shape scooted past their car.

"Please tell me I did not see that," said Leonard. "Please tell me that I did not just see a f.u.c.king goat."

"OK, Mr. Herk," said Walter. "We gotta work together here. We're gonna carry this thing around the house to the street, OK? So we can get some help. OK? Mr. Herk?"

Arthur slowly turned his gaze from Roger to Walter. Arthur's eyes were black voids; his chin was covered with foam.

'Tell her to leave me alone," he said.

"Listen to me," said Walter. "You have to listen to me. That's a dog, OK? A dog. And we're gonna be here all night if you don't ... "

"Make her leave me alone," said Arthur.

"Look," said Walter, "we need to ... "

'TELL HER TO LEAVE ME ALONE!" screamed Arthur.

Walter began to realize that his only hope of getting Arthur's cooperation was to play along. He sighed, then shook a finger at Roger and said, "Leave him alone."

Roger perked up, in case Walter was talking about food.

"You have to call her by her name," said Arthur.

"Jesus," said Walter.

"BY HER NAME!" said Arthur.

Walter sighed again, then said to Roger, "Leave him alone, Mrs. Dole!"

Roger, thrilled at the attention, trotted over to Walter and jumped up, putting his front paws on Walter's chest.

"SHE WANTS YOUR SOUL!" screamed Arthur.

"Down!" said Walter. "Get down, Mrs. Dole!"

"A nuclear bomb in a suitcase?" said Harvey Baker.

"Yup," said Greer.

"I thought nuclear bombs were big," said Baker. He recalled an old newsreel showing the Hiros.h.i.+ma bomb, which looked like a small submarine.

"Not all of 'em," said Greer.

"Jesus," said Baker. "Where'd it come from? What the h.e.l.l is it doing here?"

"Long story," said Greer. "Which I will try to make short. In what now pa.s.ses for Russia, they got nuclear missiles left over from the Cold War, OK? A lot of missiles. Under a treaty, which I won't go into the details, the Russians are supposed to take a lot of these missiles out of service, which is called decommissioning. Problem is, a lot of the parts on these missiles-things like gyroscopes, position indicators, accelerators ... "

"Accelerometers," interrupted Seitz.

"Excuse me, Wemher f.u.c.king von Braun," said Greer. "Anyway, these parts are exactly what you need if you are a low-level international a.s.shole like Saddam Hussein looking to get hold of some serious missiles and rise to the position of high-level international a.s.shole. These missiles are new Corvettes in a bad neighborhood. Lotta people want 'em for parts."

"Doesn't the Russian government have, like, controls on this stuff?" asked Baker.

"Sure they do," said Greer. "Same as the city of Miami has controls to keep building inspectors from taking bribes."

"That's different," said Baker. "That's just bulls.h.i.+t graft. You're talking about nuclear weapons here."

Seitz snorted. "Only difference," he said, "is how much money."

"So anyway," continued Greer, "the really scary part of the missile, obviously, is the warhead, the part that goes bang. And the Russians actually have been pretty good about keeping track of those."

"Pretty good?" asked Baker.

"Right," said Greer. "In other words, not good enough. About two years ago, somebody got two warheads, we still don't exactly know how, out of a missile dismantlement facility in a place called, um ... "

"Sergeyev Posad," said Seitz. "Not far from Moscow. Used to be named Zagorsk. Very beautiful churches there."

"Thank you, Mr. Michelin," said Greer. "So anyway, this person gets these warheads, which disappear for a while, n.o.body in the world can find 'em. And then one of them shows up-guess where-the Middle East, Jordan to be exact."

"Jesus," said Baker.

"Exactly," said Greer. "Only now, the warhead's been modified, by somebody who knows his s.h.i.+t. Now it's in a metal suitcase. One strong man can carry it. You put it somewhere, set the detonation timer, walk away. Timer goes off, boom, wipes out your whole downtown. Makes Oklahoma City look like a cherry bomb."

"From something the size of a suitcase?" asked Baker.

"The actual warhead part is a lot smaller than the suitcase," said Greer. "It looks kind of like a garbage disposal. The real weight of the suitcase is a big wad of conventional explosive that sets off the warhead. The explosive is set off by a detonator with a timer, which is no big deal, like something you could get at Radio Shack. But forget about the size. This thing will blow away all your big buildings, bucko. This thing will fry your eyeb.a.l.l.s at ten miles."

"And you're saying the other suitcase is here in Miami," said Baker.

"What I'm saying," said Greet, "is that when they found the one warhead, in the suitcase, it was in the hands of some people who are not real big fans of the United States. These people were taken into custody."

"By whom?" asked Baker.

"That I definitely can't tell you," said Greer, "except to say that they don't waste a lot of time advising suspects of their Miranda rights."

"The Israelis," said Baker.

Greer nodded. "Like I say, I can't tell you," he said. "Alls I can tell you is, they are very good at getting information from people who don't feel like talking. And the information they got is that the other suitcase was supposed to go to New York City, where it was gonna be picked up by a True Believer, who was gonna express his beliefs by turning Times Square and the surrounding area into radioactive grit."

"No great loss," said Baker.

"Hey, it's a lot nicer," said Seitz. "They fixed it up."

"Anyway," said Greer, "this point, we still don't know when or how the suitcase is going to New York. But we do know who the True Believer is, so we got him under surveillance. We got this guy under a blanket. We know if he farts. So when he gets in a cab and heads toward Kennedy airport, we are on him. Except, guess what, some d.i.c.kwad Secret Agents from a federal agency that I will not identify here except by the initials C, I, and A ... "

"Which don't even have f.u.c.king jurisdiction," noted Seitz.

" ... which, as Justice Rehnquist here points out, don't even have f.u.c.king jurisdiction," said Greer. "These morons have also, without telling anybody, been watching the True Believer, who they think is about to flee the country, so on the access road to Kennedy they run the cab off the road and grab the guy in what they call a Clandestine Operation."

"Which was as clandestine as a Super Bowl half-time show," noted Seitz.

"So there we are," said Greer, "we're within sight of the f.u.c.king terminals, and we're about to shoot these morons who are supposed to be on our side, and of course now the True Believer is not gonna lead us to s.h.i.+t. We search the international arrivals, but we don't find the suitcase. Whoever had it, something spooked him, we're betting the Secret Agents, so he's outta there. We do some checking around, we think probably our guy took a cab from Kennedy to La Guardia, jumped a plane, and got the h.e.l.l out of New York, we think maybe either to Atlanta or here."

"Or Houston or New Orleans," said Seitz.

"Or them," agreed Greer.

"Way to narrow it down," said Baker.

"Hey," said Greer, "all we got to go on is a very vague description. Basically, we got, 'It's a guy with a suitcase.' But we keep asking around, and we hear, various sources, that this guy is scared now. He just wants to get rid of this thing and get enough money to get the h.e.l.l back to True Believerland. What we think he did, he sold it cheap to some illegal-arms dealers, guys who mainly deal in machine guns, things like that."

"Why would they want a nuclear bomb?" asked Baker.

"We think they didn't really know what it was," said Greer. "The reason we think this is, far as we been able to trace it, they sold it to some other guys, who sold it to some guy runs a place here called the Jolly Jackal."

"The bar?" said Baker.

"That bar," said Greer, "has more AK-47s than Budweisers."

"Jesus," said Baker. "This town."

"Thing is," said Greer, "we could be wrong about all of this. This could be another suitcase, unrelated. Could be drugs, could be counterfeit money. We also got guys looking in Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans, some other places. But based on the conversation we had earlier this evening with the guy who runs the Jolly Jackal ... "

"Who will not be runnin' anywhere in the near future," noted Seitz.

"No, he won't," agreed Greer. "Anyway, based on our conversation with him, we think this is the suitcase we want, and that it is now going to MIA with these local sc.u.mbags."

Baker sat back in the seat and looked out the window for a few moments. He leaned forward again and said, "Here's what I don't get."

"Lemme guess," said Greer. "You don't get how come, if we think there's a chance the suitcase is here, we don't tell the cops, make some kind of announcement, evacuate the public outta here. That it?"

"Basically, yeah," said Baker.

"Several reasons," said Greer. "Number one, these a.s.sholes don't know it, but we got 'em trapped at the airport."

"What do you mean?" asked Baker.

"I mean," said Greer, "just before we ran into you, I made a phone call." He held up what looked to Baker like a cell phone, except it was on the thick side, and it had a short, fat antenna. "Until we say otherwise, no plane is takin' off from MIA. There won't be any announcements; the planes'll be boarded as usual, but they won't get clearance to push back from the gates."

"You can do that?" asked Baker.

"You'd be surprised," said Greer. "Point is, we got these a.s.sholes bottled up."

"Then why don't you evacuate the area around the airport?" asked Baker.

"That's the second reason," said Greer. "Think about it. If word gets out, which it would, there's a nuclear bomb practically in f.u.c.king downtown, what do you think would happen to this city? Do you think there would be an orderly evacuation? Women and children first? Cooler heads prevailing? You think that's how the citizenry of Miami would react?"

Baker thought about it.

"What would happen," continued Greer, "is that every idiot in this town who owns a gun, which is basically every idiot in this town, would grab his gun, jump into his car, or somebody else's car, and lay rubber for 1-95. Inside of ten minutes the city is grid-locked, and what happens next makes Iwo Jima look like a maypole dance. This whole town turns into the end of a Stephen King novel."

"Good point," said Baker.

"Number three," said Greer, "if word gets around about what's in the suitcase, it eventually gets to the morons who have the suitcase. Long as they don't know what they got, which apparently they don't, they ain't gonna think about trying to use it, like as a bargaining chip."

"Could they set it off?" asked Baker. "I mean, doesn't it have, like, whaddyacallem, fail-safe things?"

"This thing wasn't built by good guys," Greer said. "It's not like in the movies, where the president has to give the Secret Code and two trusty soldiers have to turn their keys simultaneously. This thing was built by bad guys who wanna be able to set it down in a public place in a crowded city and arm it quickly. We don't know for sure about this suitcase, but the other one? The one they recovered? All you had to do there was open it up and flip three electrical switches, and that starts a forty-five-minute timer."

"Forty-five minutes?" said Baker.

"Forty-five," said Greer. "We think the True Believer was planning to hop a subway, be up in the Bronx, facing north, by the time it blew."

"And now it's here," said Baker, staring out the window.

"Looks like it," said Greer.

"Jesus," said Baker, shaking his head. "I mean, you see this s.h.i.+t in the movies, and you think it's fiction, but I guess it was bound to happen one day."