Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  Yousaf was silent. The president’s forces, he thought. How aptly put. It was only their potential deployments that were of concern to him. For if all did indeed go as he’d planned, there would be no need to cram into some deep stone cranny and hide away like a scurrying rat. Not once his column reached the border, at any rate.

  Ahmad tapped him on the shoulder now and nodded back in the direction of the hut they had left moments earlier.

  “Our Bakarwal hosts have prepared some jerked lamb for us, and put fresh, spiced coffee up to brew over their flame,” he said. “Given the immoderate cost of their hospitality, you might wish to join me in partaking of it in the time that remains before you leave.”

  Yousaf looked at him, smiled, and nodded.

  “Yes, Ahmad,” he said, as they started toward the barn’s door of bound saplings. “That is truly something I would enjoy.”

  * * *

  “If you’re moving from a one-bedroom apartment, I usually recommend either the ten-foot truck or that cargo van over where your friend’s waiting in his car,” said the man at the U-Haul reservation counter. He nodded toward the wide office window behind Earl to indicate the rental vehicles out in his lot. “Which one’s best depends on your needs.”

  Earl stood looking at him across the counter. “How’s that?”

  “Basic rate’s the same for both — twenty bucks a day, seventy free miles, though added mileage is a few cents higher with the truck,” said the U-Haul rep. “If you’ve got large pieces of furniture, it gives you a little more space. Van’s new, comfortable, handles nice and smooth. But company policy’s that it’s only available for local moves — that’s defined as the tristate area, and no out-of-town dropoffs. You’d have to return it to me at this center within forty-eight hours.”

  Earl glanced over his shoulder at the van parked near Zaheer’s Mercury. Then he turned back to the U-Haul rep, took his cigarettes from his coat pocket, and flashed them above the counter.

  “Okay with you that I smoke while I give it some mind?” he said.

  The rep shrugged, a stubble-cheeked, potbellied man in his fifties wearing a green-and-black buffalo-plaid hunting shirt and oversized work dungarees.

  “Doesn’t bother me, and only brings out the summons books across the Hudson,” he said, his hand appearing from under the counter with an ashtray.

  Earl tapped a cigarette from the pack, lit it with his Bic, and took a drag.

  “That van ought to be fine,” he said. “Got enough room, and I don’t expect to be running up too many of those plusmiles before I’m back to you.”

  The U-Haul man eyed him a minute, scratched his unshaven chin.

  “Maine,” he said. “Bet anything it’s what I hear.”

  Earl plucked the cigarette from his mouth, held it between his thumb and forefingers.

  “Ayuh,” he said. A smile traced his lips. “Must be the accent, hey?”

  The rep nodded.

  “My sister’s lived there since she got married — husband’s ex-navy, used to be stationed at that base in Brunswick, bought a home and farm-equipment business a ways inland when he got out of the service,” he said. “Whereabouts in the state you from?”

  Earl pondered that, smoking. Whereabouts? It was a question easier asked than answered. There had been Aroostook, so near the Canadian border the geese flying by overhead would cuss you out in French when you shot at them, and then get the Royal Mounties on your ass for doing it without a license. There had been the bunch of years he’d worked at that poultry-processing plant in Belfast, renting a dump of an apartment on Union Street down the hill near the harbor, where the white trash tenants upstairs would pool their food stamps every Friday to pick up a few six-packs of cheap beer at the grocer’s, start drinking after supper so they’d be bombed out of their skulls by midnight, good and lubed for the fistfights you could always expect to break out between them, and that would often as not spill out onto the road — especially on those hot summer nights when they’d get irritable, peel off their shirts, and wail on each other so hard he could hear the sound of flesh being pounded like raw slabs of beef through his open window. Brother on brother, father on son, husbands on their cheating women’s boyfriends, they’d have all kinds of drunken grudge matches going on till the local cops came to dampen the entertainment.

  Earl looked at the U-Haul man in silence, squinting through the cigarette smoke streaming from his nose and mouth. Where did he consider himself from? Aroostook with its cranberry bogs and dead things? Belfast with its bloody chicken guts, and feathers blowing in the streets? Or Thomaston state penitentiary, maybe twenty, thirty miles farther south? A dark and comfortless abode of guilt and wretchedness, that was what the lawmakers who’d ordered it built in the 1820s had wanted for its inmates on the charter they drew up, and they’d absolutely gotten their wish. Three-foot-thick granite walls, nine-by-four max security cells with layers of stone covering them top and bottom, the yard a deep limestone pit quarried out by prison laborers. All that rock, its weight could grind the soul out of a man in no time, and Earl guessed he’d have hung himself long before his dime-and-a-half stretch there was done if not for having kept busy with his wall art. He also guessed it had gone more toward making him what he was than anything or anywhere else he could think about.

  The state pen, see ya when I see ya—ayuh, ayuh.

  “Come from a spot on the coast called Thomaston,” he said now. “Quiet. Big white Yankee houses, churches, trees, and the quarry on old Limestone Hill. A town where you’d think time was standing still if it wasn’t for the change of seasons.”

  The U-Haul man scratched his stubble again.

  “Sounds like the kind of place somebody would have a hard time leaving… but then my brother-in-law tells me it’s tough earning a decent wage up there.” He slid a clipboard with an attached pen in front of Earl. “Anyway, here’s the rental application. You want to show me a charge card and your driver’s license while you’re making it out, I can go right ahead and give you the keys to the van.”

  Earl took his wallet out of an inner coat pocket, removed the two pieces of ID he’d obtained from Hasul, and passed them over the counter. He didn’t know or care whether Hasul and his people had stolen someone else’s identity, replacing the original photo on the driver’s license with his own, or if they’d somehow had a forgery made to order. The important thing was that the license number and Visa account for a strawman who happened to look exactly like him were both valid, and that the credit line on the plastic was around twenty thou.

  Earl was filling out the requested information — his newly acquired name of Gerald Donovan, his bogus address and phone number, this and that — when it occurred to him there might be a thing or two Hasul hadn’t provided that he could pick out of the U-Haul man’s brain.

  “Me ’n my friend had to circle around a bit trying to find your lot, noticed all those chemical tanks behind the plant across the intersection,” he said in an offhandedly conversational tone. “You know which factory I mean?”

  The U-Haul rep nodded.

  “That’d be Raja.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Raja Petrochemicals,” the rep said. “It’s a fuel refinery… Indian outfit, you’re wondering about its funny handle.”

  “Indian like Sioux and Apache?”

  “Indian like an order of tandoori chicken and curried rice to go.” The U-Haul man’s whiskered face hung a frown. “What they’ve got in the tanks isn’t anything you’d want on a takeout menu, I can tell you that.”

  Earl glanced up from the application form.

  “You don’t seem any too thrilled about having them for neighbors.”

  “Won’t argue it, Mr. Donovan,” the rep said, reading the name on the driver’s license he’d been handed. “Not with a few hundred thousand pressure pounds of HF stored out there in those tanks you saw driving past the plant.”

  Earl put on a mildly inquisitive look.

  “HF?” he said.
“What’s that?”

  “Hydrofluoric acid,” said the U-Haul man. His frown had deepened. “If you were from right around here, or read the same newspaper story I did a while ago, I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

  Earl waited for more.

  “Stuff’s what they use to make high-octane gasoline, and it’s toxic as hell,” the U-Haul rep said. “Stays a gas when it’s sealed in those tanks, but they ever get ruptured, let it out into the air, it would condense into clouds, even rain, that can eat through glass and concrete. And if you don’t think that sounds bad enough, there’s something about HF that makes human skin absorb it real easy. Soaks right up through the pores into the bone, eats away everything in between. Say it gets inside your eyes, nose, mouth… or you breathe it… I don’t want to be gross, but it’d turn a person’s insides to slush.”

  Earl’s writing hand had dawdled over the rental application. “I can see how you wouldn’t forget that article,” he said.

  The rep nodded.

  “And I haven’t told you the half of it,” he said. “According to what I read, a couple, three years back, dozens of families had to be evacuated from some town in Texas because of a refinery fire that let HF out into the air. Also right around then, Russia had to resettle a few thousand people because it’d been leaking from a government factory… and add those situations together, the amount of HF I’m talking about doesn’t come to a fraction of what’s in Raja’s tanks.”

  Lifting his cigarette from its ashtray rest, Earl sucked in a chestful of smoke.

  “I expect there’d be some serious precautions against anything happening to the tanks,” he said on his exhale.

  “Should be, but aren’t,” the U-Haul man said. “After those psycho terrorists drew a bull’s eye around New York, Homeland Security pushed through a bunch of laws that said chemical companies had to beef up their safeguards. But it hardly bothers to enforce them — you know how it goes. Time passes. Everybody bitches about costs. The cops and feds get busy with other things. Elections come and politicians move on to talking about ‘the children’ and teachers and classroom sizes, like they really give a damn about anybody’s brats but their own. Meanwhile the chemical outfits hire shysters to find all kinds of loopholes and get their lobbyists in Washington to make sure they can relax and sit pretty. Couldn’t be gladder that nobody’s paying attention to them, since improvements cost money, and they’d rather gamble with people’s lives… and I mean millions in Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York just worrying about Raja Petro alone… than spend a nickel.”

  Earl was shaking his head in feigned disbelief.

  “Sounds damned unbelievable,” he said.

  “It does, I know,” said the U-Haul man. “But how the newspaper reporter figured it, the amount of HF gas in Raja’s tanks is enough to kill off not one, two, or three, but four million people, depending on which direction the wind blows.”

  Earl had continued to shake his head as he went on writing up his paperwork. He was thinking about what Hasul had said to him earlier on that day: I am the clock whose hand marks the hour. He was wondering, besides, whether that made him the finger that would push the button.

  He pulled the ashtray closer, crushed out his cigarette, and returned the clipboard to the man behind the counter.

  “Done, I guess,” he said. “Hope my questions didn’t spin your wheels overmuch.”

  The U-Haul rep shrugged, scanning the application.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said enduringly. “I’m still alive and kicking, so why complain?”

  Earl smiled.

  “That’s the attitude,” he said. “All you can do’s control what you can, and let the rest work itself out.”

  The U-Haul man nodded, glanced up from the completed rental form, and smiled back at him.

  “Everything looks good, buddy,” he said. “Give me a minute to process this, and I’ll bring you the keys to the van.”

  * * *

  “I don’t think we should try to do too much,” Noriko Cousins said. “The simpler we keep things, the better they’re going to work out for us.”

  She looked across her desk at Tom Ricci and Derek Glenn, thinking Ricci certainly did not look like he had the slightest intention of making things complicated. If his silence was to be taken as evidence, he’d shown little or no interest in a single word she’d uttered about the Case of the Vanishing Husband — which, practically speaking, had now expanded to include hubby’s vanished playmate, both for Sword and the New York and Nassau County police departments, since it seemed reasonable to assume that finding out what happened to her would be a big step toward solving the mystery of his status, be it fair or foul.

  Noriko had been hoping that she was on the money about Ricci’s apparent indifference, which might, just might, translate into a sign that he’d stay well out of her way, and possibly be westward bound before too long, adios, hombre. The read she’d gotten on Glenn, by comparison, hadn’t left her as encouraged that he’d be easy to shake off. There had been too many probing questions and attentive comments from him during this afternoon’s let’s-get-introduced-andup-to-snuff session. Also way too much direct eye contact, though Noriko had been around the block often enough to tell some of that was because he happened to find her attractive, and had maybe picked up on a mutuality — using a term she’d recently found in her New York Times crossword puzzle dictionary — that she had been struggling to nip in the bud. In both principle and practice, Noriko was opposed to mixing business with pleasure. Very often.

  Now Glenn looked at her from where he stood leaning against a file cabinet, his broad arms folded over his chest, wearing a gray wool sportcoat, light blue turtleneck, and gray pleated trousers.

  “When you say ‘simple,’ I’m guessing you really mean separate,” he said. “Or am I wrong about that?”

  Noriko looked at him a moment and flashed a smile that he returned at once and in full, beaming it across her office, the nice, even whiteness of his teeth an appealing contrast to the equally nice and even brownness of his skin.

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said, and wondered what the hell kind of bud-nipping she meant to accomplish by swapping smiley faces with Glenn. “Whatever attention I’ve been paying to Armbright Industries, and the Kiran Group in particular, is fairly routine corporate intel. Sullivan is a woman asking for help, and the boss wanting to give it as a personal favor. I see no reason to wrap them together.”

  “Except when you consider he’s a top salesman for a division that’s maybe exporting restricted technology to foreign countries, something that would involve the kind of shady people who can do worlds of bad.”

  Noriko shrugged her shoulders.

  “You won’t get an argument from me,” she said. “All I want is to make sure we don’t get our paths twisted when they really should be kept clean and distinct from each other. Separate. Minus conjecture, that’s how they are so far. And that’s how we should work them unless they naturally connect.”

  Glenn stood with a thoughtful expression on his face. In a chair he’d pulled up into the opposite corner of the office, Ricci maintained the virtually unbroken silence he’d brought on arrival, his hands meshed on his lap, his left foot balanced over his right knee.

  “You talk to any of the cops that are looking for Sullivan yet?” Glenn said after a minute.

  Noriko shook her head.

  “The detective in charge is named Ruiz,” she said. “I don’t know him, but I have an open line to Bill Harrison, which means I can be put on to him easily enough.”

  Glenn raised his eyebrows.

  “The Bill Harrison?” he said. “As in the ex — police commissioner?”

  “Right.”

  “Impressive,” Glenn said. “I read that bio he wrote after the terrorist hit. Lost his wife when it went down, almost his daughter, too, and still managed to carry this town on his shoulders while the Washington politicos were hiding out in silos somewhere under the Great North A
merican Prairie.”

  Noriko nodded.

  “Bill’s a good guy and a friend,” she said.

  “What white people call a positive role model for us black people,” he said.

  Noriko looked at Glenn, catching his droll tone, noticing the smile that had reappeared on his face.

  “A friend,” she repeated with a shrug.

  His smile grew larger and brighter.

  Noriko willed herself to look away from it and cleared her throat.

  “So,” Glenn said. “I figure we should start by spending some time with Ruiz.”

  “That’s what I had in mind.”

  “We play straight with him far as Sullivan’s concerned, tell him how the whole thing came to our attention, see if he wants to share and share alike.”

  “Right,” Noriko said. “My guess is he’ll be more than helpful.”

  “After Harrison gives him a ring.”

  “Right,” Noriko said again. “I just want to make sure that any inklings we have about Kiran are kept out of the conversation.”

  “Separate and distinct.”

  Noriko nodded.

  “It’s almost five o’clock, a little late in the day to start making arrangements,” she said. “I’ll get on the phone first thing in the morning. Shoot for a meeting with Ruiz as soon as possible.”

  At the opposite corner of the room, Ricci leaned forward in his chair and planted both feet on the floor.

  “Your crew been keeping up an onsite surveillance of Kiran?” he said, lensing her with his pale blue eyes. “I mean, at its main headquarters in the Catskill mountains.”

  Noriko looked at him, her lips pressed together. The sudden end to his silence had surprised her, as had the change of subject that came with it.

  “There was an intelligence summary in the files I e-mailed to SanJo,” she said. “We do what’s legal. And viable.”

  “And I’m asking if that includes staking a continuous post there at night,” Ricci said.