John Abbott - Scimitar

At Kufra, they had taught him how easy it was to obtain the ingredients essential to the manufacture of sarin — especially in a democracy, where few questions were asked and most questions were easily parried. Dimethylsulfoxide difluoride — or DF, as it was commonly called — was an admittedly dangerous insecticide, but when mixed with alcohol it became lethal. The beauty of sarin, in fact, was that its reagents could be stored separately, reducing the risks of corrosion or weeping, until it was time to unite them. This meant that it was possible to place the separate chemical components into cannisters kept apart by a membrane that would rupture when a bomb was dropped or a shell fired, thereby mixing the separately innocuous chemicals to form a new and deadly chemical.

Sonny had been taught to do this on a smaller scale.

No bombs, no shells.

Just a rat trap and a pair of test tubes.

Isopropyl alcohol and isopropylamine in one of the tubes.

DF in the other.

Tape both test tubes to the wooden base of the trap, side by side.

Set the trap, pulling back the bow and fastening it in place with the locking bar.

Toss the trap at your target.

The locking bar would be jarred loose, and the powerful spring would release the bow, shattering the test tubes, combining their contents, and splashing the created sarin into the air.

Simple, inexpensive, and effective.

The only risk was breaking your own finger while you were setting the trap.

Or getting caught in the lethal splashout.

But this delivery system had been designed for use in a crowd. Drop the trap from above, let it fall where it might, spattering the sarin onto random victims. His target tomorrow night would not be a random one. Accuracy was imperative; this was a No-Fail mission. So whereas the thought of using a rat trap on a rodent like Bush seemed appropriate, he decided against it.

In the gardening section of the store, he found a pump-top spray container that looked like a fat flying saucer. The little advertising placard on the wall behind it advised him that the grip was shaped to fit the hand, and the spring-loaded thumb plunger allowed for tireless operation. The nozzle was adjustable from a fine-spray mist to a 25-foot jet stream. His gaze zoomed in on the last two lines of copy:

Made of shock-proof, non-corrosive, injection molded plastic.

The shape of the container was awkward, making it enormously difficult to conceal. But the plastic was what he wanted, and if he could find nothing else, it would have to do.

He kept searching.

She stood at the kitchen counter looking down at whatever the hell it was inside that glass tube that didn’t have any kind of stopper on it, just a tube sealed all around, wondering why Scott Hamilton was having a hazardous, corrosive material dangerous to the eyes and lungs delivered here to Martin Hackett’s beach house. She wondered, too, if Martin Hackett knew Scott Hamilton was here in his house, knew in fact that anyone was staying here. She hastily put the little plastic packet with its glass vial back into the paint can, and replaced the lid, and put the can back into the carton. The other carton contained a bottle of alcohol and a bottle of something called isopropylamine, which she couldn’t even pronounce.

She wondered if she should call Martin Hackett at his office, ask him if he knew anyone named Scott Hamilton.

She wondered where Scott was now.

Wondered when he’d be coming back.

And decided to look around the house a bit, see if there was anything that would connect Scott to Martin, a personal note of some kind, telling him where to leave the key or how to start the generator, anything that might spare her the embarrassment of a possibly foolish phone call.

As she started for the upstairs bedroom, Sonny was looking down into a basket brimming with dusty plastic bottles.

The basket was on the floor in a far corner of the hardware store, and it contained what had to be at least fifty plastic spray bottles of varying shapes and sizes, some with pump-top plungers, others with triggers, all of them less awkward than the one he’d earlier considered — but all of them most certainly vulnerable to the materials he’d be mixing.

Disappointed, he began looking for some of the other items he wanted. A penlight. Two batteries in it. A roll of monofilament fishing line, forty-pound test. A glass cutter. Should he buy the injection-molded bottle, after all? Find some way to conceal it? It cost only six dollars, which wasn’t very much to spend for insurance. He was starting back toward where he’d seen it in the store, when suddenly he passed...

This had to be fate.

This had to be written on his forehead.

A shelf displaying insecticides.

And on that shelf a white plastic bottle with a green-yellow-and-black label, a green plastic screw cap, and a green nozzle. The label gave the name of the product as Raxon’s Multi-Bug Killer, guaranteed that it would kill house pests and garden pests, and told him that the nozzle could be adjusted to either a spray position or a stream position that would squirt for a distance of fifteen to twenty feet. The label also mentioned that 99.6 percent of the active ingredients were inert. He turned the bottle to look at the label on the back. In tiny print at the bottom of the label, he read:

ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS: This pesticide is toxic to fish. Keep out of lakes, ponds or streams. Do not contaminate water when disposing of equipment washwaters. For additional information write Roweena Walsh, Raxon Products, Inc. P.O. Box 732, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, or call toll free...

The twelve-ounce bottle cost five dollars and twenty-nine cents.

He had nothing to lose.

He studied the bottle carefully, examining its cap, examining the nozzle. If he did in fact use it later on, he would also need a roll of transparent tape and a fast-drying glue. He went looking for them.

What the hell was he?

Who the hell was he?

Different names on each of the laminated ID cards she’d found in the leather Mark Cross portfolio. Gerald Ramsey on the Plaza Hotel card with the word SECURITY printed across its bottom. A driver’s license with the same name on it. Detective Second/Grade James Lombardo on a card for the NYPD’s First Detective Squad. Same name and same photograph — Scott’s — on another card for the Eighteenth Detective Squad. And lastly, a Federal Bureau of Investigation card with the name Frank Mercer on it.

Why all these different means of identification?

The Plaza.

Hadn’t Elita told her...?

She was suddenly frightened.

Hastily, she began putting the cards back into the leather folder.

That was when she heard the key turning in the door downstairs.

His trained eye immediately caught the black plastic garbage bag sitting on the floor in the kitchen. He had not left the kitchen that way.

He listened.

A trained listener could hear a flea breathing.

He heard nothing.

But someone was in the house, of that he was certain.

His gun was upstairs, in the night-table drawer on the right-hand side of the bed.

“Scott?”

Carolyn’s voice. Calling from the bedroom. What...?

He went up the steps. She was lying on the bed naked. Black shorts and bikini panties thrown onto a chair together with a white T-shirt. Sandals on the floor beside the chair. She was lying on her side, one elbow bent, head propped on her hand, long blond hair trailing.

“Hi,” she said.

Smiling.

“Hi,” he said.

Eyes flicking the room.

The closet door was ajar. He hadn’t left it that way.

“I thought you’d never get back,” she said.

“How long have you been here?”

“Oh, five minutes or so.”