Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

From a pocket in the jumpsuit, he took a butane wand—the kind sold for use in fireplaces and charcoal grills—and thumbed on a shaft of flame that he touched to the gasoline rivulet snaking toward the creek below. There would be no incriminating matches left behind. The gas went up with a whoosh, and the jumpsuited figure scrambled back up the embankment.

The van pulled away as the flame reached the Chevy’s gas tank, which exploded in a fireball. The van was well away from the scene, hidden in a dark, tree-lined driveway a mile to the east, when the first police car flashed by, siren screaming.

“Suppose that’s about that poor fellow back there?” the driver of the van asked. His name was Sylvester Bonaro, and although his name and his swarthy, olive complexion suggested Italian ancestry, Bonaro actually was the product of a Greek-Turkish liaison, a bloodline in conflict, to which he always attributed his mean streak.

“I hope not,” replied the passenger, a burly man named Wade Stock. “I hope they don’t find that bastard until he’s nothing more than cinders. He like to tore my arm off.”

“Yeah, well, the night’s not over. Get the camera ready, and tomorrow you can whine all the way to the bank.

McGill paced beside the Toyota. It was 1:15, and there wasn’t a sign of anybody who wanted to have a meeting at that hour. The anonymous caller was fifteen minutes late.

“This is your town, Steve. Are we at the right place?”

“According to the directions, this is it,” the reporter said quietly from the backseat.

“Goddamn, I was almost ready to believe this guy was for real,” McGill cursed. “There was something about his voice.” He shook his head. “I can’t place it.”

“You think you know him?”

“I think I should. It was the accent. Nothing I can identify, but it was familiar.”

A screaming police car raced up the highway past their turnout, and the TransAm pilot instinctively turned away from the road. “Christ, I’m acting like a criminal,” he said with a short laugh. “Whadda you think, hotshot? Have we been had?”

Pace had a sickening hunch. “Mike, get in and follow that cop,” he suggested.

Ten minutes later they witnessed the last of the firefight on the Chevy. They had pulled off the road as if they were casual passersby come to watch the action. At least, Pace thought, it wasn’t as ghoulish as the two guys from the blue van who pulled off ahead of their rental car and ran across the road to shoot videotape. Pace and McGill stayed with their car, away from the action. They saw all they needed to half an hour later, when four medics labored up the hill with a stretcher containing a black, zippered body bag.

“You don’t suppose that’s him, do you?” Pace asked.

“If the fear I heard in his voice was well-founded, I’d say it very likely is him, or whatever’s left of him,” McGill answered. “Jesus, what in hell have we fallen into?”

“This is no proof of anything, Mike. It could be nothing more than a Saturday-night drunk who couldn’t manage the road. Maybe we should go back to the bridge for another hour or so. Maybe your guy was held up.”

“Tell me the truth, hero. If you had to make a guess, would you say our chances are better of meeting my tipster at the bridge or saying good-bye to him right here?”

The question was met with silence.

The battered blue Ford van pulled into the parking lot at the Dulles Marriott, squealing as it turned into a parking space because somewhere under the newly caved-in right front side, metal was scraping metal.

Bonaro and Stock got out, stripped off their jumpsuits and threw them into the back of the van. Stock reached in and pulled out two cases, one containing his video camera, the other a VCR with an assortment of cables. He was a bulky man with a beer gut, but a lot of what looked like flab was steroid-enhanced muscle. He’d gotten hooked on the stuff while playing high-school football in Jersey City, and he’d stuck with the drugs when he entered his present line of work. They let him maintain maximum strength with minimum effort. Stock didn’t think of himself as lazy or as a junkie; it was more a conservation of his time.

Under the discarded work clothes, both men were dressed in jackets and ties and looked wholly respectable, perhaps two businessmen returning after a long sales session. The disinterested fellow pulling the graveyard shift at the front desk looked up briefly, but he had his nose back in an old Louis L’Amour western before they disappeared down the corridor that housed rooms 101 to 148.

Bonaro knocked twice on the door to 122. They could hear the sound of a television set. When the door opened, Elliott Parkhall stood there in his bare feet, dressed in an old pair of blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt. Parkhall motioned them in and closed and locked the door. Stock went directly to the television and unplugged it reluctantly. Parkhall had been watching an adult movie on one of the hotel’s cable channels. Stock set up the VCR. Bonaro scanned the hotel room. If he was looking for anything special, there was no sign he found it.

“Went off without a hitch,” he said when he saw his partner reconnect the TV to the wall outlet. “We blew him off the road, and Wade torched the car. They’re gonna be a while coming up with an ID. Fuckin’ gas tank must have been full. Looked like the Fourth of July.”

“Witnesses?” Parkhall asked.

“Not another soul on the road. We saw one car go by us when we were headed east after we did the job. That musta been the guy turned in the alarm. We waited for a cop to show before we went back. That way, cops were there before we showed up again. We shot the thing like tourists. Another car with two guys came by and stopped to watch. Got them on tape, too.”

Stock slid the videotape cartridge from his camera, slid it into the VCR, and clicked the play bar. There was the usual delay while blank leader wound through the heads.

What Parkhall saw over the next half-hour was riveting. His assassins had shot vivid action footage of the fire and the efforts to put it out. But his biggest reaction came when the video camera panned to a silver Toyota that pulled up behind the blue Ford van. Two men got out. One of them Parkhall knew on sight.

“McGill,” Parkhall whispered. “So you’re the one.”

“The one what?” Bonaro asked.

“He’s the one Antravanian called, was going to have the little meeting with. I don’t know the other guy. Either of you recognize him?”

Bonaro and Stock both shook their heads, neither moving his eyes from the television screen. When the fire was out, rescue workers extricated what was left of the driver from the burned ruins of his car. When the victim was carried in a black body bag up the hillside, the police could be seen ordering the spectators to leave. And the tape ended.

Parkhall realized his hands were sweating and wiped them up the thighs of his jeans. He was an engineer by trade, and he had little appetite for the work done that night. But his distaste was overcome by his greed. His pot at the end of this rainbow held both gold and revenge.

He’d spent twenty-four years of his career at Warner Woolcott, a small, innovative company doing remarkable work on aviation and space programs. He’d quit abruptly seven years earlier after being passed over for promotion. WW executives told him he wouldn’t be promoted until he learned to get along with his peers and supervisors. He was frequently arrogant and often preposterous, and other engineers went out of their way not to work with him.

Parkhall had walked out with nothing but his vested pension and an expression of interest from the NTSB. Although agency officials were aware of Parkhall’s reputation, they’d lost so many people to the glamour, prestige, and salaries of the private sector that the temptation to take a little back was great. Parkhall accepted the government job at a significant cut in pay in the belief another private company would snatch him up as soon as his departure from WW became known. He even fancied a bidding war for his services. It didn’t happen.