Never draw attention to your weapon...
LeClaire was looking toward an open attaché case. Inside was a gray metal box measuring fourteen inches by ten by two. From it sprouted a half-dozen wires, each a different color. To Shaw he said, “He knows? About me? Mr. Harmon knows?”
Colter Shaw rarely responded to questions whose answers were as obvious as the sky.
And sometimes you didn’t answer just to keep the inquirer on edge. The businessman rubbed thumb and index finger together.Both hands. Curiously simultaneous. The misery factor expanded considerably.
Ahmad looked at the phone. “Passcode.”
Rass lifted the gun.
One wouldn’t be much of a survivalist to get killed over a PIN. Shaw recited the digits.
Ahmad scrolled. “Just says he’s coming to the factory to check out a lead. It’s sent to a local area code. Others to the same number. He has our names.” A look to LeClaire. “All of ours.”
“Oh, Christ...”
“He’s been onto you for a while, Paul.” Ahmad scrolled some more, then tossed the phone to a desk. “No immediate risk. The plans still hold. But let’s get this over with.” He removed a thick envelope from his pocket and handed it to LeClaire, who, not bothering to count his pieces of silver, stuffed it away.
“And him?” LeClaire’s strident voice asked.
Ahmad thought for a moment, then gestured Shaw back, against a wall.
Shaw walked to where the man indicated and continued to massage his shoulder. Pain radiated downward, as if pulled by gravity.
Ahmad picked up the wallet and riffled through the contents, then put the billfold in his pocket. “All right. I know who you are, how to find you. But I don’t think that troubles you so much.” He scanned Shaw, face to feet. “You can take care of yourself. But Ialsohave the names of everyone on your in-case-of-emergency list. What you’re going to do is tell Harmon you tracked the thief here but by the time you managed to get into the factory we were gone.”
LeClaire said, “But he knows it’s me!”
Ahmad and Rass seemed as tired of the whimpering as Shaw was.
“Are we clear on everything?”
“Couldn’t be clearer.” Shaw turned to Paul LeClaire. “But I have to ask: Aren’t you feeling the least bit guilty? Thereareabout two million people around the world whose lives you just ruined.”
“Shut up.”
He really couldn’t think up any better retort?
Silence filled the room... No,nearsilence, moderated by white noise, unsettling, like the hum of coursing blood in your skull.
Shaw looked over the configuration of where each man stood and he realized that examining the wallet and the in-case-of-emergency threat were tricks—to get him to move to a certain spot in the room, away from the drums that had tumbled to the floor when the trap sprung. Ahmad had no intention of letting him go. He simply didn’t want to take the risk of his partner shooting toward canisters that might contain flammable chemicals.
Why not kill him and buy time? The Saudis would be out of the country long before Shaw’s body was discovered. And as for LeClaire, he’d done his part, and they couldn’t care less what happened to him. He might even be a good fall guy for the murder.
Ahmad’s dark eyes turned toward Rass and his shiny pistol.
“Wait,” Shaw said harshly. “There’s something I—”
2
You’re a lucky SOB, Merritt.”
The pale and gaunt prisoner, unshaven, brows knit, looked at the uniformed screw.
The guard glanced at Merritt’s balding head, as if just realizing now that the man had more hair when he’d begun serving his sentence than now. What a difference a near year makes.
The men, both tough, both fatigued, faced each other through a half-inch of bulletproof glass, a milky sheet as smeared as the walls were scuffed. The business end of eighty-year-old Trevor County Detention had no desire, or reason, to pretty itself up.