Big Trouble (26 page)

IN the front of the Kia, Matt had his eyes closed completely. In the back, Eliot had his arm around Anna, hugging her tight; Nina was looking down at her hands and praying.

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 mass.

“You see what the problem is?” asked Leonard, peering ahead through the windshield.

“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 knob.

. . .
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 knob 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 fucking 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 Hiroshima bomb, which looked like a small submarine.

“Not all of 'em,” said Greer.

“Jesus,” said Baker. “Where'd it come from? What the hell is it doing
here?
”

“Long story,” said Greer. “Which I will try to make short. In what now passes 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, Wernher Fucking von Braun,” said Greer. “Anyway, these parts are exactly what you need if you are a low-level international asshole like Saddam Hussein looking to get hold of some serious missiles and rise to the position of high-level international asshole. 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 bullshit 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, nobody 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 shit. 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 eyeballs at ten miles.”

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

“What I'm saying,” said Greer, “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 dickwad 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 fucking jurisdiction,” noted Seitz.

“. . . which, as Justice Rehnquist here points out, don't even have fucking 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 halftime show,” noted Seitz.

“So there we are,” said Greer, “we're within sight of the fucking 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 shit. 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 hell 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 hell 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.