Ted Bell - Tsar

“Yeah, you two are lucky to be standing here. John Henry, I want to talk to the manager of the motel where Paddy was staying. See his room.”

“That’s easy. You’re staying there. Motel 6.”

“Let’s go.”

JOHN HENRY HAD parked the FBI car at the same overlook where Paddy and the two cops had watched the town blow up.

“This is where the three of them, the suspect and the two officers, observed the explosion. The bakery truck was parked right where you’re standing.”

Stoke walked to the edge of the cliff, looked down at the smoking, glittering remains of Salina. Then he turned around and stared at the dense woods behind him. He saw a couple of dirt roads, almost overgrown, leading into the park’s interior.

“Where’s the motel? Up here on the cliff somewhere, I’d guess?”

“Yessir. It’s just on the other side of those woods. Right on the state highway. Maybe a mile, mile and a half. Nothing up here on the bluff was touched. Only reason the motel and the park survived.”

“Can you drive a car through that stuff? Or do we have to drive around to get to the highway?”

“I don’t know that you could get a car through there, sir. Those are nature trails. Pretty thick.”

“Let’s take a walk, John Henry. I love nature.”

Five minutes later, glancing up as he walked, Stoke said, “Lots of broken branches back in here. Both sides of the trail. High up, too.”

“Yessir, I noticed that.”

“Looks almost like a damn truck came through here recently, doesn’t it, John Henry?”

“There it is. Down in that ravine.”

Stoke looked to his left. At the bottom of a very steep ravine, he could see the white bakery truck. It was on its side, the cab partially submerged in a swiftly running creek.

“Let’s go,” Stoke said, and ten minutes later, they’d managed to work their way down to the truck. It was banged up pretty bad, glass gone from the windshield, water running right through a portion of the cab. One of the two rear doors was hanging ajar.

“Accident?” John Henry asked.

“I think he ditched it. Long gone, I think, probably hiked through the woods to the motel, changed clothes in his room, and then stole one of the abandoned cars in the lot and boogied. But go through the cab, okay? Best you can. Check the glove compartment, and check under the seats. Might find something helpful, though I doubt it, many times as this bad boy’s been around the block. I’ll look in the back.”

He lifted the rear door and looked inside. Doughnut boxes, a lot of them, as if they’d been through a cement mixer. Most of them still sealed, but a lot had popped open, and there were hundreds of gooey cream, chocolate, glazed, and jelly doughnuts stuck to the ceiling, the walls, lying around. Stoke resigned himself to going through every last one of the damn boxes. After all, it was Happy’s MO, wasn’t it? The last time he had delivered a bomb, it had been inside a bakery box.

“John Henry,” he called out ten minutes later.

“Yessir,” came the reply from the cab.

“Come back here and take a look at this, will you?”

“Nothing in the cab, sir,” John Henry said a minute later, peering into the gloom inside the truck. He could see Stokely sitting in the midst of hundreds of opened doughnut boxes. Gooey stuff all over him.

“Gimme a hand in here, John Henry,” he said. “Help me get out of all this crap. Can’t even stand up, the floor’s so bad.”

“Disgusting.”

“That’s one point of view. Elvis would’ve thought he’d died and gone to heaven in here.”

Agent Flood took Stoke’s hand and helped the big black man scramble out of the upended truck. Stokely stood with one foot in the icy creek, his entire body covered in creamy caramel icing and sprinkles from head to toe.

“Check this out,” Stoke said, wiping icing from his eyes with his one free hand.

He held up a small, silvery object, like a desktop sculpture of a human brain, stem and all. But the thing about it that caught John Henry’s eye was that it was as shiny as a brand-new mirror. Like the little piece of metal he’d seen back at the trailer. And the stuff sprinkled all over his dead town.

“What the heck is it?” Flood asked.

“It’s a Zeta computer. Called the Wizard. Sell ’em all over the world for about fifty bucks apiece. Even cheaper in Third World countries.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen those.”

“Damn right you have. Millions of them have been sold in the last few years. We’ve got to get back to the trailer and show this thing to that bomb-squad guy. What’s his name?”

“Robb. Peter Robb.”

“Yeah, Robb. Show it to him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, John Henry, I think this computer’s got a bomb inside it. Hell, more I think about it, maybe this isn’t the only one.”

“Bombs in computers.”

“That’d be my guess, yeah. I could be wrong.”

John Henry was turning the thing over in his hands, staring at it in disbelief. “My kid’s fifth-grade computer class uses these.”

“Scary thought, ain’t it?” Stoke said. “We’ve got to talk to Robb. Get the whole damn FBI on this. Find out how many of these damn computer bombs might be out there.”

Stoke’s cell hummed in his pocket. He whipped it out and flipped it open.

“You’re talking to him,” he said.

“Stoke, it’s Luis.”

“Shark. What’s up?”

“Miami Dade PD just called two minutes ago. Friend of mine there picked up on some info he thought we should know about. They tracked our baker boy, All Beef Paddy Strelnikov. He’s back in Miami, all right. One of the local officers who had seen the APB photo made him at the Miami Herald building. Dressed as an exterminator. Carrying two large canisters on his back, like oxygen tanks or something.”

“He’s back in Miami?”

“Not anymore. He gave them the slip. They searched the building top to bottom. Nada. They think he might have gotten aboard the airship, the Pushkin. ”

“Listen to me. Did anyone actually see him board?”

“No. But he was in a stairwell to the roof minutes before that thing was getting ready to go.”

“Tell me it’s not gone yet, Shark.”

“Left for Stockholm hours ago. Man, I woulda called you sooner, you know, but I just found out myself.”

Stoke snapped his phone shut.

“Canisters?” he said, looking at Flood. “Oxygen tanks?”

“What?”

“Those tanks were full of gas, not oxygen. He was experimenting with poison gas on the mayor and her family. See how much it would take to put them to sleep before it was lethal. What the Russians did at that theater rescue in Moscow, pumped gas through the AC to put everyone to sleep. But they got the formula wrong, and most of the hostages died. Happy may have smuggled his goddamn poison gas aboard the airship.”

“I’m sorry, but what are you talking-”

“Fancha,” he said under his breath, and then he started scrambling up the steep ravine faster than John Henry Flood would have ever believed a man his size could move.

Early-morning bars of gold light streamed across the gilded furniture, the sumptuous bed, and the Persian carpets. Anastasia swept into the room and found Hawke alone in her big canopied bed. He had the quilted blue silk duvet pulled up under his neck, wearing nothing but a grin.

“Hawke, get up!”

“Are you quite sure I’m not up already, darling?”

He’d barely managed to reach down and slide his portable sat phone under the bed without her noticing. He’d just rung off with Harry Brock. It had been a most disturbing conversation. He’d told Brock about last night’s confrontation between Rostov and Korsakov. And thanks to Harry, he now knew what President Rostov had been so angry about the previous evening. What the “insanity” had been. An entire American town had been obliterated. Rostov’s rage could mean only one thing, however far-fetched it might seem. The Russians had been behind the bombing of an American city. Which meant they were clearly willing, ready, and able to risk all-out nuclear war with the United States.