Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"You can call it what you want, Chief Lockwood, but it means there is a high risk of terrorist activity in the homeland at the moment. That's something we take very seriously. You should, too."

"I'm old-fashioned, Agent Saxby. What my dad used to call a bonehead, a practical guy. So listen up when you're in my town, all right? I was a quarterback in football because I wanted to impress the girls. When I went to Vietnam I realized the idea wasn't to kill Vietcong; it was to survive the tour. When I went back for the second tour it was to get rank and up my pension.

"When I came back here it was to give out parking tickets and go fishing. The last murder we had in Winter Falls was twenty-five years ago when one of the cottagers found out her husband was screwing a girlfriend back in New York. She got off with provoked manslaughter and three years' probation. She's one of the school trustees to this day.

"I'm not going to get all hot and bothered about your Code Reds or whatever you call them. The game is being played on the Abbey School rink, not the World Trade Center, and the president will only be here for a couple of hours. If you can't spot a jihadist in this crowd, then you don't deserve your job."

Saxby gave him a sour look. "Do you know why those planes flew into the Trade Center towers, Mr. Practical Policeman?"

"Why don't you tell me, SAC Saxby?"

"They were a target, Chief Lockwood," said Saxby. "And they were easy. The two tallest buildings in New York City. They were also arranged so that when you looked at them from due north or due south, which was how they were attacked, they looked like a solid slab. Even with that the first one almost missed. A practical target. And that's what you are, parking tickets or not, fishing or not. This place, with the president in it, has a target painted on its back whether you like it or not. You're the safest town in America with the President of the United States in the bull's-eye. Osama bin Laden couldn't have had a better wet dream."

"Let's hope you're wrong, Agent Saxby," he said. "I've done the best I could under the circumstances. I've got both shifts of my men out; I've given half of them to the Secret Service guys and your people to pair up with. Everybody knows everybody else in town. Strangers stand out like sore thumbs.

"It's not like its summer, with tourists coming and going all the time. They brought in sniffer dogs to check out the seats at the rink for bombs; they've put up metal detectors anywhere His Honor will be going. They've cleared a landing spot for the chopper in the park in front of the Municipal Building, there's two Secret Service Escalades waiting that arrived this morning and your guys have had that little helicopter of yours buzzing around all day, looking for snipers on rooftops. I'm not sure there's not a hell of a lot more we can do."

Suddenly Saxby's expression changed. From sour it went to worn and barren. He looked as though the weight of the world was bearing down on him, grinding him down, making him old before his time. "That's always the problem, Chief Lockwood. You always do whatever you can, you cover every base, you look in every nook and cranny but it's never enough. Most of the time this kind of thing is the most boring duty in the world.

"You read all those Tom Clancy books and watch all those hard-ass shows on TV but it's all a load of crap; looking for terrorists is a lot of crap. I've been doing this job for thirty-two years and seven months. Five months away from mandatory, and from day one it's been nothing but nerves because sometimes it's just never enough, and sometimes you overlook something, and sometimes before you know it, the whole thing blows up in your face and you're half a second too late. You oooh when you should have ahhhed, you go left when you should have gone right, and for thirty-two years and seven months my nerves have been cocked like a loaded gun, just waiting for that one mistake."

He paused. "My insurance agent once told me that everyone has a freight train and a railroad crossing in his or her life and you never see it coming until its too late."

"Nice, uplifting insurance agent you have," said Lockwood, trying to lighten things up. But he knew exactly what the gray-haired FBI man meant. You never knew where the bullet that hit you came from. One of these days he could stop a rowdy summertime DUI and find himself looking down the barrel of some punk's Saturday-night special and wind up in the uniform he was wearing right now, except flat on his back in a satin-lined wooden box. Outside the front of the building a big Sandri Sunoco fuel truck rumbled by on its rounds. The wind was rising and the snow was falling even more heavily. It was going to be a nasty night in Winter Falls.

Saxby gave a twisted little smile. "I just want this whole thing to be over and the ex-president to be on his way, and then, Chief Lockwood, maybe you and I can find a place to have a cold beer and a big steak and tell each other old war stories."

"Amen to that," agreed Lockwood.

Malcolm Teeter, who liked his friends to call him Stryker, his favorite character from the video game Mortal Kombat, sat alone at the wheel of the Sunoco oil tanker parked behind the Winter Falls Shopping Center on Crooked Pond Road. The detonator for the nine-thousand-gallon, twenty-eight-ton ANFO bomb that filled the red, white and blue tank was on the dashboard in front of him. Made up of a radio-controlled servo from a toy motorboat purchased at a RadioShack in Portland, the detonator was connected to four six-volt batteries and a PerkinElmer slapper blasting cap like the kind used in antitank rockets.

The new dude had showed them how to order things like that online. He'd even managed to get them all what appeared to be perfect replicas of New Hampshire National Guard uniforms so they'd fit in during the Winter Falls operation.

He called himself Barfield, and he was nice enough but he was too quiet. And, anyway, Malcolm wasn't stupid, was he? In no more than a week, even though nobody said anything, you could tell who was boss now and it sure as hell wasn't Wilmot goddamn DeJean anymore. He had the rank, sure, and walked around the compound with that "I am the principal of this school" look on his face, but it was Barfield who showed them all the new tricks-like getting rid of all that hot-dog stuff, about shooting pistols on the side, like how to mix in and not give people clues like showing your tats or wearing shit-kicker boots, like the difference about looking and actually seeing, and most of all about patience.

Malcolm didn't like driving in the smallest load, but just like this Barfield guy said, it was the most important because it was the first. It would draw away the heat from the real ground zero-the school-and bring it up here, to the north of the town. According to Barfield, there was going to be a lot of heat in town, and driving down Main Street you could almost feel it.

Going by the park in front of the cop shop and fire hall, you could pick them off everywhere. Like, what kind of idiot wears a topcoat and carries an attache case and just stands on the corner in the middle of a snowstorm? Secret Service or a Fed, that's who. Nobody noticed Malcolm, of course, which was the whole point. Sunoco was just about the biggest heating oil distributor in the state and there were Sunoco stations all over the place. Who saw a fuel truck in the middle of winter? They were supposed to be driving around at all hours of the day and night.

But still, he didn't like the waiting around. Of the six trucks his was the only one that wasn't going to be close to the rink. It was fine that he was key man or whatever Barfield called him, but it didn't do much for his-what was it?-his self-esteem. He felt a bit like the odd man out.