Authors: Tod Goldberg
I picked up the book on underground dwellings. If you want to find out what pages of a book have been read the most, you can do a simple fingerprint test using a variety of chemicals, but in a bind you can just use iodine and an oven. After the iodine is heated, the prints will be revealed, but only for a short period of time—just a matter of minutes. More effective is a brushing of silver nitrate followed by some good old-fashioned ultraviolet light, better known as black light to anyone who happens to watch too much television.
Or, if you simply don’t have the time to do a fingerprint test, you can figure it out the old-fashioned way: Look for the dog-eared corners, which, in this case, led me to page sixty-seven, a chapter titled “How to Build False Walls, Floors and Crawl Spaces.”
“Your dad do any redecorating, Brent?” I asked.
“His bedroom and his office used to be one big room,” Brent said.
“When was that?” I asked.
“A couple of months ago.”
“The bookshelves,” I said. “Those new?”
“Yeah,” Brent said. “He used to just stack his books up all around the house, but then he got those built-in shelves. He was pretty proud of them.”
“I’m sure he was,” I said. “Brent, would you mind getting me another beer?”
Brent, not surprisingly, shrugged and then headed off to the kitchen. I handed Fiona the open book and pointed at the photo of a small room built behind bookcases on page sixty-eight. Fiona made a grunting noise, as if viewing the page actually pained her—it had been a long day already for her, clearly—and then handed the book to Sam, who looked at the page with a slight air of bewilderment. “What am I looking at here?” he said.
“Henry’s in the house,” I said quietly.
“What’s our move?” Sam said.
“You and I are going to stay here,” I said. “Fi, I want you to take Brent back to my mother’s. Make sure no one tails you out of the neighborhood.”
“You’re aware that I’ve done this before?” Fiona said.
No one likes to be ordered around. Fiona likes it even less. “Yes, I know,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “And can I pick up your cleaning?”
Brent walked back into the living room, saving me from my own likely response. “Brent,” I said, “Fiona is going to take you back to my mother’s while we finish up here.”
“Can’t we just go back to my dorm?” Brent said.
“Your dorm isn’t safe,” I said. “I don’t think your vampire friend King Thomas will actually bite anyone if they come looking for you.”
“Your mom has a shotgun,” Brent said, but not in a positive way.
“I know,” I said. “But she knows how to use it.”
“I’ve got class at nine a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “I really can’t miss again.”
“Uncle Sammy will write you a note that says hired killers are looking for you,” Sam said.
“My professor said if I miss one more class I’ll get an F,” he said.
“Then tomorrow we’ll go to school,” I said.
“We?” Fiona said.
“You,” I said.
“Me?” Fiona said.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said.
After Fiona and Brent left, Sam and I stood in Henry’s office and examined his workmanship.
“Nice shelves,” Sam said. “Oak?”
“I believe it is,” I said.
“Be impossible to rip those out,” he said.
“It would,” I said. We examined the shelves closely and my assessment was correct: They’d been bolted into the wall and reinforced with steel cross-supports. The door that had been created by the shelf opened out, which meant that it locked from the inside, just as the handy guidebook had suggested.
We stepped out of the office and walked down the hall to the bedroom and examined the wall that Henry had erected. It was just plain old drywall. Wallpapered drywall, but drywall nonetheless.
Drywall comes in a standard size. Half an inch thick and four feet wide. You don’t need to be a spy to know this. You only need to spend half of your childhood kicking and punching walls out of frustration to learn specifically what home improvement stores keep in stock. You can get thicker drywall for soundproofing, or for fire retardation, but if you just want to build a wall and you have limited resources and ability, a nice ten-foot length of drywall can be turned into a very flimsy wall in a day.
You don’t need a battering ram to break down a wall made only of gypsum, which this one was. You just need a good pair of shoes and a strong side-leg kick to the weakest seam—which would be the first panel on a three-panel wall.
Neither Sam nor I was wearing particularly good shoes for the deed, so we went back to the office. I knocked on the wall.
“Henry,” I said, “my name is Michael Westen. I’m helping your son, Brent, out. I know you’ve heard us in here for the last hour, so you know it’s safe. I’d like to talk to you. I mean you no harm.”
When no answer came, I said, “Henry, either you come out or I’m leaving here with all of your Boba Fett dolls.”
That did the trick.
I heard three different sliding locks being moved, and then, oddly, both televisions in the office turned on and shortly thereafter I heard noise coming from the living room and from down the hall as well. The bookshelf made a creaking sound and then it popped open to reveal a small, well-appointed room with a single bed, a dresser, a recliner, a television and several framed family photos on the wall. Standing in the middle of the room was a man wearing white boxer shorts and a tank top that barely covered his potbelly. His hair was messed up and he had at least a three-day growth of beard, but otherwise he looked just like the photos of Henry Grayson that could be found around the house.
Really, if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought Henry had just woken from a Sunday nap. Sure, he was a bit unkempt, and there was the fact that he was inside a hidden compartment inside his house, but he looked otherwise very normal if you were able to discount the fact that he was holding what looked like an ignition switch for a bomb in his hand. I now had a pretty good idea why he had so many plasma televisions in his house, too.
“I will blow up this entire house if you touch my son,” Henry Grayson said, “or any of my toys.”
“Your son isn’t here, Henry,” I said. “I just sent him somewhere safe. It’s okay.”
“Who are you?” he said to Sam.
“I’m Sam,” he said.
“Sam,” he said. “That’s a friendly name.”
“I’m a friendly guy,” Sam said.
“If you touch my toys,” Henry said to me, “I will blow up the entire house and Sam.”
“Actually,” I said, “you’d probably kill everyone in about a two-block radius.”
This gave Henry some pause. “Two blocks?”
“You have the televisions rigged?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I’m going to guess that you’ve rigged a heating line to them. Would that be accurate?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Pump a little heat into each television and the xenon, neon and helium in the plasma cells will act like hundreds of tiny bombs. How hot does it need to be? Three hundred degrees for, what, ten seconds? That sound about right?” I stood back and examined his bookshelves again for a moment until I found the right book:
Your House Is Your Kingdom: How to Stop Radical Islam and Communism at Your Door, Literally.
I pulled it off the shelf and handed it to him. “You find that recipe in here?”
“It’s in a couple books,” he said. “All from very reputable sources in the counterterrorism community.”
“See, the problem is, Henry, you can’t just turn off three hundred degrees of heat. You didn’t figure in cool-down time, did you? And that ignition, where’d you get that? A fireworks store? You’re more likely to explode yourself than the televisions, but say you’re lucky. Say everything works perfectly. Odds are still fair that you broil alive and so do a bunch of innocent people you don’t owe money to.”
“Who are you with?”
“I’m with your son,” I said. “You’ve left him in a very tight spot, Henry.”
“I mean, who are you with? What agency?”
“I’m not with any agency,” I said.
“You haven’t been watching me?”
“No,” I said.
“Because many people are watching me,” he said.
At that moment, I realized how very lucky we were that Brent was gone. Because his father had gone mad. Plain and simple. My second-worst fear had been realized, at least as it related to Henry.
“My name is Michael Westen,” I said. “And he is Sam Axe. Your son, Brent, has been staying with me since you disappeared. He sent us to help you. Do you want help?”
“Can I Google you?”
“You can,” I said. “If you hand me that ignition switch I’ll let you do whatever you want to do.”
When you’re negotiating with a crazy person, the best thing to do is let them feel like they are in charge of the situation, while still maintaining the position of mental and physical power. In a hostage negotiation, this is usually done by accepting whatever condition the hostage taker wants.
They want a plane that will fly them to Beirut? Roll a private jet onto the street in front of them.
They want eighty million dollars? Make an electronic deposit in their foreign bank account.
They want to talk to their dead mother? Find a Ouija board.
None of it matters in the long run because what you have that the hostage taker doesn’t is, invariably, overwhelming firepower and operational intelligence. They know this, too, but usually are under the impression that the human life that waits in the balance is too much to risk.
“How do I know I can trust you? That you’re not with . . .
them
?” Henry asked.
“For one,” Sam said, “we don’t have any black helicopters.”
Henry nodded. “What about the fluoride? Are you doing anything with the fluoride in the water?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “Not us. We’re promoting tooth decay and other freedoms.”
Henry looked at me and I could tell he was waging a war of many voices in his head. Sam’s probably wasn’t helping.
“You’ll just have to take my word for it, Henry,” I said.
I decided I’d wait five more seconds and if Henry didn’t hand me the ignition, I’d punch him in the face and take it. It wasn’t personal. I just didn’t want to die.
Apparently, Sam felt the same way, since I only made it to three in my head before Sam punched Henry flush on the chin, knocking him out cold. I reached down and picked up the ignition.
“Sorry, Mikey,” Sam said. “He was sweating an awful lot and I didn’t want him to short out the system and cook us.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I was about to do it, too.”
Henry opened his eyes, but they clearly weren’t focusing yet. “Mom?” he said.
“Oh, Mikey,” Sam said, “this isn’t good.”
9
Weapons of mass destruction aren’t all that difficult to build. If you really want to kill hundreds of people at a time, all you need to do is go to the grocery store and purchase a few different cleaning agents, a box of nails, an artificial fire log, a few pressure cookers and, if you really want to cause problems, put all of those items into a car loaded with containers of hydrochloric acid. And then if you really want to make an impression, park the car next to a convention center hosting a gun and ammo show, and when it blows up, well, you’ll also have people against the Second Amendment up in arms, too, since in this case unchambered ammo would kill an awful lot of innocent bystanders.
To cause a horrible, tragic and ultimately doomed catastrophe, follow the steps found in most “how-to” books produced by those concerned citizens who think every helicopter is black and every government worker is secretly a member of the Trilateral Commission. Getting advice on how to kill from the paranoid and delusional is never a wise decision, a point I didn’t try to elucidate to Henry after we’d convinced him we were the good guys, since I wasn’t sure just yet where he fell along the continuum between paranoid and delusional. It was hard enough to convince him that no one was going to touch his dolls—which he preferred to call his “men.”
I carefully explained to Henry that the setup he’d rigged with his plasma televisions hooked to the house’s gas line was likely to trigger an underground explosion that would crater around his home. He seemed oddly elated, which I found disturbing.
I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the level of his loss of sanity—at some points he seemed fine, and at others he seemed . . . lost. It was evident that he’d had some kind of break from reality. Nevertheless, I wanted him to know that he could have taken out a lot of innocent people.
“Really?” he said. “That big?”
“That’s why I had to hit you,” Sam said.
“I’m a pacifist,” Henry said, just like his son.
“Do you hate your neighbors, Henry?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no, they’re all very nice.”
“Then why would you want them dead?”
“Oh, oh, I wouldn’t,” he said, serious now. “I just think it’s very interesting how these sorts of chain reactions occur. One person with a desire to keep his house protected could, with a push of a button, take out a city block. It’s chaotic, isn’t it?”
Henry and Sam and I were sitting in his bedroom, the only room in the house that didn’t have a window easily accessible to the outside world, as it looked out to the side yard, and even then the window was largely blocked by an armoire that Henry had moved almost directly in front of it. Not exactly design 101. But then Henry was probably more concerned about the black helicopters than the editorial staff of
Architectural Design.
“No,” I said, “it’s not chaotic, actually. It’s dangerous, Henry. Can you appreciate that?”
“You can’t appreciate the synchronicity?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a theoretical synchronicity that I find fascinating,” he said. “Now, where’s my son? Have you told me where my son is? You did, didn’t you? You said he’s working for a Russian syndicate?”
I had, in brushstrokes, explained the situation to Henry, but this time I went into a bit more detail, including that Brent had tried to pay off Henry’s debts, that he’d duped Yuri Drubich and that Henry’s notary office had been destroyed. The problem was that everything I said essentially fed directly into Henry’s current delusions. I needed to see how he handled the information in order to gauge a bit more accurately where he fell on the scale of things.