Going Dark(73)

“Yes, like those fish, you get one shot. But if you spook them, they’re gone and you won’t see them again for a long damn time.”

To Sheffield it looked as if the group had made an orderly exit. No sign of panic, nothing silly left behind. They’d had enough time to gather their clothes, pack their valuables, probably enough time to wipe the place down. Though there’d be DNA. Sweat, hair, flakes of skin. There was always DNA. Maybe it would tell them something they didn’t know, but he doubted it.

Nicole made one last circuit of the room, stopped beside the ice chest, and reached out to shut its lid, but Frank swung around and knocked her hand away.

Nicole jerked from him, grabbing her wrist. “Jesus, Frank!”

He stepped to the side of the ice chest and squatted down, took out his flashlight, and shone it in the narrow gap between the chest and the tent. “Aw, shit. Here we go.”

Magnuson and Nicole stood at his shoulder and leaned in.

“Holy mother of Christ.”

“Is that what I think it is?” Sheffield said.

“The right color, yes,” Magnuson said. “I’d say a quarter of a pound. Roughly the amount that took out that retaining wall in the video.”

Sitting on the bare ground, a sealed plastic container was filled with what looked like lime Jell-O speckled with BBs. A rack of nine-volt batteries were attached to the lid, red and black wires running from the battery pack into the container, and a white wire was strung tight between the triggering device and the lid of the ice chest.

“The detonator,” Frank said. “It’s that simple?”

“It’s a trip switch. Those insulated wires are attached to a high-resistance bridge wire. It acts like a match head. The pyrophoric material is almost certainly a mixture of azide, lead styphnate, and aluminum. Hit the switch, the bridge wire heats, ignites the pyrophoric material, which then sets off the explosive. One of the virtues of HpNC. Once the compounds are assembled properly, it’s very easy to rig the trigger.”

“Jesus,” Nicole said. “How’d you know, Frank?”

“It’s why they left it open,” Magnuson said. “They wanted to take out as many of us as they could.”

Nicole was staring at the ice chest, rubbing the spot on her wrist where Frank had smacked her.

“So much for this being a bunch of pacifists,” Magnuson said.

“As long as we’re writing the history of this,” Nicole said, “just for the record, okay, I’m here as an observer. I had no input on the plan or the execution of the plan. Are we in agreement on that?”

Frank turned to her, held her eyes for a moment, seeing only a cold light, her mouth hard and impersonal, a woman he barely recognized. He felt a lightness in his body as if his personal share of gravity had been suspended for a half second. Then he nodded to this woman, Nicole McIvey, that, yes, she was off the hook. Completely off the hook.

“The lady is muy ambitious,” Marta had said. “Muy.”

Outside, Frank instructed the men to retreat from their current position. Assemble near the obstacle course and stay put. When Dinkins asked what was going on, Frank told them straight out. A booby trap in the tent. Same kind as destroyed the retaining wall in the video. Stay at a safe distance while Frank and Magnuson made one more quick pass around the premises.

“Shouldn’t you wait for the bomb guys?” Dinkins said.

“Yeah, probably should,” said Sheffield, and headed off.

They left Nicole behind and walked to the cove, picking their way carefully, seeing nothing unusual. At the small beach, in the rising light, the sky was overcast and the water in the cove was the color of drying cement. Fallen branches littered the beach, and the wind was still rattling through the tattered leaves of the mangroves, bringing with it a whiff of ozone, the last traces of the storm.

In a wooden storage rack seven black kayaks were lined up neatly. By the water’s edge, half a dozen depressions in the sand might have been footprints, but the rain had eroded them to little more than dents.

Magnuson said the obvious. The ELF group had escaped in powerboats. Sheffield confirmed that he’d seen a white fishing skiff in the flyover photos his agent had shot the day before. Maybe later on they could identify that boat—clean up the photo, see if they could read the registration ID on the hull.

Magnuson was quiet. He kept rubbing at his thin lips, grinding his palm back and forth across his mouth as if trying to wipe away a sour taste. “He’s getting away. Right now.”

“They knew we were coming.” The quiver inside Frank was gone. Something else was missing, too, something he couldn’t name. In its place a familiar hollow was taking shape.