After the Rain Page 3

  Dropped it and left it and now a mob of big sturdy black ants swarmed on it.

  He wondered how long that doughnut had been out there. Probably only an hour or so, it didn’t look that old. Self-consciously, he looked around. The urge started in his eyes and descended into his mouth, and he felt the saliva start at the back of his tongue.

  He licked his lips and stared at the pastry.

  The insect activity seemed to burst from a bulge of jelly on the side of the pastry. He squinted. The way the thin light hit the jelly made it look almost voluptuous, like a naughty fat lady’s red titty nipple.

  He pulled his eyes away. He had to control himself. Like the Mole said. Concentrate on the Big Picture. Charon grinned, remembering an old line from that TV show, where David Carradine played Kane, the kung fu pilgrim. The greatest compliment a student can pay his teacher is to surpass him. The man he called the Mole had admitted that Charon had surpassed all his expectations.

  The phone rang, right on time. The Mole was punctual, as usual. Charon got out of the car, carefully stepped over the jelly doughnut, entered the booth, and picked up the receiver.

  “This is Charon,” he said.

  “Listen, we have a problem,” the Mole said.

  “You mean the rain; I know. We got it to the site. But we’ll have to wait for the rain to stop to get it in position.”

  “I mean in addition to the rain.”

  “Okay, what kind of problem?” Charon asked.

  “Remember Rashid? You met him in Winnipeg for the demonstration.”

  “Sure. Rashid.” The Saudi prick. “He didn’t particularly like me, but he liked what I had to sell.”

  “Listen. He was taken in Detroit…”

  “Taken?”

  “Captured, arrested. He knows a lot.”

  “He doesn’t know where. And he doesn’t know when.”

  “But he knows about the weapon and the kind of target. He met us. He gave us an advance. He was trained in the camps, he should be tough. But it’s been my experience they start to go soft once they get over here.”

  “Unlike you,” Charon said.

  “That’s right. I’m a student of history, not the Koran. History tells me that one out of three talk during interrogation. And remember, we’re not among the faithful, we’re just the hired help. He may give them something; a place, a name, to protect his other operations.”

  “If he talks, how much time have we got?” Charon asked.

  “No telling.”

  Charon’s breath came more rapidly. The idea of the government sending agents after him increased his heartbeat. Looking down, he saw that the black ants had started climbing over his boots. Methodically, he stomped on them. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Then he said, “Are you getting scared?”

  “This isn’t funny. You should leave now, get in position near the target. Just meet me on the road,” the Mole said.

  “Okay, okay. But I get to do another one. That was the deal.”

  “That was the deal,” the Mole said with an audible sigh.

  “You don’t sound real sincere. I can still pull the plug on all this. One phone call and it’s all over,” Charon said.

  “A deal’s a deal,” the Mole said more firmly.

  “Okay. So when we go do it, I want to take another one along.” Charon’s voice sped up. “To celebrate.”

  On the other end of the phone connection, the Mole marveled at the total imbalance, the complete lack of proportion. Giving credit to a Jew had never been his style, but Hannah Arendt certainly summed it up when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” In his youth, he had killed out of political conviction. But now his former Marxism and Arab nationalism were seen as just another infidel pose. Jihad was the new battle cry back in the region of his birth. He had become a contract man. In the eyes of the jihadists he was a contemptible, but useful, smuggler of Western poisons: drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.

  In turn, he held the jihadists in contempt: primitive fools, like the cleric in Egypt who urged his followers to go out and tear down the pyramids. But beneath the guise of his U.S. citizenship, he was still an Arab radical and was not opposed to killing Americans for money.

  A lot of money.

  But not for pleasure. He’d thought he’d seen it all. But he’d never believed in monsters, until now. And he had basically created this one.

  “Well…” Charon demanded.

  “Take your pick.” He could not quite disguise the disgust in his voice.

  “Good. Okay. So that’s it,” Charon said.

  “Unless the FBI comes knocking on our doors, it all depends on the weather…”

  “I’ll keep an eye out, okay? And some of it depends on the weather. Most of it depends on me,” Charon chided him.

  “Yes,” the Mole said carefully. Dealing with Charon was like walking on eggshells. Or live grenades. “Most of it depends on you. We need two days for the ground to firm up once the rain stops.”

  “That’d be my estimate. It’s starting to clear to the west,” Charon said.

  “That’s what I figure. But you should get moving. Your security’s on the way.”

  “Oh, I see. You want to keep an eye on me? Whatsa matter, you don’t trust me on my own?” Charon’s voice cracked into a laugh. It was their personal joke. But the serious fact was, the operation was put together in such a way that only Charon could pull the trigger. The Mole wanted to make sure that nothing interfered with the rendezvous of Charon’s finger and that trigger.

  “Just as long as you keep your impulses under control,” the Mole said, trying for humor.

  “No problem there. See ya.” Charon hung up the phone, exited the booth, and, without missing a step, leaned down and snatched up the debris of the jelly doughnut. He wiped the smear of mud away and most of the ants and took a bite. The jelly squirted out and he had to lick the sticky goo from his fingers.

  Definitely a sugar rush!

  On the Minnesota–North Dakota border, the man Charon referred to as the Mole walked away from his remote phone booth of choice. He got back in his vehicle and headed north along rainswept Interstate 29. He hoped Charon was right, that this was the last of the front moving through.

  But every time he saw a shudder of lightning on the horizon he flinched.

  Not good.

  It was still raining back where the weapon had been delivered. He imagined the tendrils of lightning sending out impulses that tickled the circuits in the power source attached to the blasting caps they’d set so lovingly in all that Semtex.

  A ton of it.

  Semtex, the Cadillac of explosives. A push to get the ball rolling.

  Far to the east the sky flickered, and he braced behind the steering wheel as he counted the seconds until he heard a low rumble. He didn’t think that an electrical storm could prematurely power the detonators. But the technology was new to him; the combination of frequency and carrier-coded signal…

  So he wasn’t 100 percent sure.

  Damn.

  The weapon sat in the rain, mired in the mud.

  Simplicity itself. It hid in plain sight. Poised. Washed clean. A gleaming tribute to Al Qaeda’s brilliant high-concept, low-tech philosophy.

  The things the Americans see every day will be the tools we use to kill them.

  In very large numbers.

  But the religious fanatics lacked the Mole’s cold vision. They thought it was a great victory to knock down a few buildings, to wipe out a few thousand city dwellers.

  He had enhanced Charon’s original concept into something as grim as the plagues in the Bible. And, best of all, the whole world would get to watch it unfold live, in full color, on television. Unfold over days, weeks, and months.

  There was only one complication.

  The components for the weapon had traveled halfway around the world. They had been painstakingly configured, everything had been calculated for maximum impact.

  The Mole hated leaving anything to chance. He had fol
lowed the weapon and had seen it delivered with his own eyes. Four hundred crucial yards now separated the weapon and its target.

  After all the planning and work, there was one last ancient and durable obstacle to overcome. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they had to delay their attack, confronted by a sea of mud.

  They were waiting on the weather.

  Chapter Three

  Ace Shuster woke up feeling lucky.

  And he’d be the first to tell you, it was a feeling that slanted uphill against the odds.

  So he kept his eyes clamped shut and tried to hold on to the feeling, which was a challenge considering the ache that wrapped his body. But after a few moments he ascertained that the pain was all surface, the fatigue of a hangover, not a specific injury. And that was a good sign.

  For five long minutes he explored the velvet throb on the back of his eyelids. He’d wait a while, get real prepared before he opened his eyes. This was a habit from the old days when guaranteed trouble would be perched on his bedpost, waiting to pounce.

  First he moved his tongue around in his mouth and found all his teeth were still where they should be. Then he moved his fingers and toes; then his neck, his arms, and his legs. Nothing hurt, so he was pretty sure he had come through the previous night reasonably unscathed. Tentatively, he snaked out his hand and prodded around in the bed and determined he was the sole occupant. He thought on it and assumed he’d been mostly drinking beer last night. He allowed that he’d made a few passes at the hard stuff around midnight.

  Yesterday, his younger brother, Dale, had given him this rock-bottom nugget of wisdom about drinking: Don’t put it in your mouth, dummy.

  Check it out. Reduced to sitting still for advice from his concerned but severely limited nerd kid brother.

  It wasn’t out of the question to wonder where he was, so he braced himself and finally opened his eyes. A curling baseball poster was Scotch-taped to the wall. Slowly Ace raised a slightly shaky hand and saluted Roger Maris. Same poster had hung over his bed back on the farm when he was in high school.

  So far, so good. He recognized the room. He’d managed to make it home. Then, as his senses unclogged, he heard the familiar sounds that he’d heard all his life. The wind doing its low howl down from Manitoba. The steady backbeat chug of a tractor somewhere out in the green grain ocean. Another enslaved North Dakotan, addicted to adversity. Dumb shit. Probably trying to pull a swather through his flax in this weather. Ace shook his head. The goddamn wind and the goddamn wheat and the goddamn tractor going on forever.

  He saw a corner of clotted gray sky in the window over the bed. He smelled a moody ferment of rain in the air. Barley, durum wheat, and the pungent perfume of canola. God, would it rain again today?

  As if on cue, the tractor stuttered and then quit.

  Had it rained last night? He couldn’t remember. Which meant he drove home blacked out. From where? Okay. Work it back. He got a snapshot of a dark-haired woman with a pretty face, except when she opened her mouth her teeth were too big. There was an Old Milwaukee beer sign over her shoulder. He didn’t remember the woman but he recognized the sign.

  At the bar in Starkweather.

  Where else.

  Ace shook his head. Dumb to go back there. Like picking at a scab.

  Then he got the flash again. Why not something fast and pretty just for him? Why not today?

  Damn. Just something…

  Ace rolled over and planted his bare feet on the floor. Originally this room over the bar had been his dad’s office, then it was a storeroom. Next they’d converted it to a one bedroom apartment, then a hangout for Friday-night poker games. Then they’d rented it out again. When they ran out of renters it was converted back to a storeroom. Ace rubbed his eyes. Since he and Darlene split up he’d been storing himself here.

  He stood up and tested his balance. He had talked Darlene into no lawyers—a friendly separation and division of resources, she getting the lion’s share, of course, plus alimony and child support. Like in the old joke about fires, floods, and twisters. Hurricane Darlene got the house in the end. She promptly sold the house and moved back to Bismarck, where they had malls and designer coffee.

  Downstairs, he heard Gordy working at the hyper rate of a meth-addicted beaver—stacking crates of booze for pickup on the loading dock in the back of the storeroom.

  Gordy Riker was the dark side of the relentless prairie work ethic. He labored to consolidate a corner of the smuggling in the county. Ace’s dad’s network was his present coup. Ace didn’t care to continue the family franchise, so Gordy worked hard, selling off the equipment, cleaning out the last of the inventory. Through hard work and attention to detail, he was inheriting the network of Canadian drivers who ran the booze and cigarettes north, and folding them into his plan to bring drugs south. Ace just signed off, took his cut, and sent the rest to Dad in Florida. The plan was to sell everything. After four generations, the Shusters were leaving North Dakota.

  The feeling came back, a warm honey spiral in his chest, a sensation of sparkly gold dust—snap—just like that, in his fingertips.

  Lucky.

  But reluctantly now, reality came creeping in and he admitted to himself that he started every day like this, wanting to believe that something different would happen. Something just for him.

  He got up and went into the shower and sloughed off the top layer of hangover in strong jets of hot water. Eyes shut, he shampooed and shaved by feel. Then he toweled off in front of the wash basin. The mirror was a murky cloud of steam, like his memory of last night. He rubbed a tiny circle in the fogged glass. Just enough to see one bloodshot blue eye staring back at him, like coming from way off there in some deep shit. Which pretty much summed it up.

  But thirty minutes into the day, the good feeling accompanied him into the small living room. His space was sparse and tidy; short on furniture and long on books. As a young man he became a dedicated reader; during a twelve-month stay at the James River Correctional Center at Jamestown, the state farm east of Bismarck. Wrapped in a towel, he sat down at his desk, opened the middle drawer, and took out two items; just like he’d done every morning for the last month. It was his little comic ceremony, which, nevertheless, contained a dark grain of truth.

  First: he placed the well-worn Vintage paperback on the desk. Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus.

  Second: next to the book he placed the old .38-caliber pistol Dad used to keep under the bar. The pistol was not real clean but it was real loaded.

  He open the thumbed pages to the first chapter and read the first couple sentences: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

  The lucky feeling was still cooking in his chest as he closed the book, so he put it and the pistol back in the drawer and stood up.

  Ace dressed in faded jeans, a faded red T-shirt with the neck and sleeves scissored out, and a pair of old running shoes. He came down the stairs into the main room of the bar, which was a dogleg that wrapped around the old kitchen, now an office space. The booths had been removed and sold to a new malt shop on Main Street. The place had been stripped bare, just an empty mirror and three bar stools. One table and some chairs remained in the main room where Ace usually had his coffee and read his morning paper. And there was the old pinball machine. Ace wasn’t going to sell that. No way. That would go with him.

  A dozen framed newspaper photos hung on the wall in the alcove off the bar. A small flag. Ace made a mental note to take the pictures and the flag off the wall and box them. He’d promised them to the North Dakota Room at the county library.

  He nodded to Gordy, who was behind the bar drinking a can of Coke for breakfast. Sweating standing still, Gordy was strapped into a black Velcroed back brace. Square and muscular, always unshaven. Even as a little kid, Gordy had lots of hair; a cross between the Energizer Bunny and a werewolf.

 
“Late night, huh?” Gordy asked. Friendly enough except for his restless, calculating eyes. He was, still, for all his ambitious plans, the hired help. And you could never tell when this hung-over shadow of Ace Shuster would experience a lethal two-minute relapse back to when he was the baddest thing in three counties.

  Ace nodded and climbed on a bar stool. Gordy put two Alka Seltzers in a glass, poured in some water, and pushed it across the bar. Ace drank his breakfast. Gordy poured a cup of black coffee, slid it over along with a copy of the Grand Forks Herald.

  “So what’s going on?” Ace asked.

  “Nothing much. Just the last few pickups tonight, tomorrow.”

  Ace nodded. They were cleaning out the last of the booze. Pickups after ten. There were only three full-time deputies and one highway patrol in the county. They seldom staffed from ten at night to six A.M. There was more Border Patrol around since 9/11, but they seldom patrolled the prairie roads the Canucks used when they came down to shop for the whiskey.

  “Don’t suppose anybody called?” Ace said.

  “Nah.”

  Figured. Liquidation. Ace thought it a fitting word to describe the demise of a drinking joint. Everything must go. The license, the building, the chairs, the cash register. Ace himself. Ace’s function was to preside over the dismantling of the Missile Park Bar. Just like Dale was selling off the last of Dad’s heavy equipment at the shed across the road. Dad moved to Florida, picked up a golf club, and never looked back. Ma, expert at denial and rationalization, went to church and played bridge.

  Ace sipped his coffee, lit his first Camel of the day, and opened the paper.

  “I already looked, nothing new on Ginny,” Gordy said. Ginny Weller, a town girl who’d moved to Grand Forks, had gone missing last month.

  Ace nodded, scanned the section anyway, and turned to the commodities markets in business. “Three-dollar spring wheat,” he said and shook his head.

  “Umm,” Gordy mumbled. He was a town kid whose father ran a string of failing gas stations. He’d never sat on a tractor in his life.