Rolling onto his side, then face down, he struggled to his hands and knees. Somehow it was easier to breath from this position. He started to crawl toward the shelf. From his peripheral vision he saw Lina still tied in the chair. She was speaking to him, but he couldn't understand what she was saying. He thought it was gurgling until he realized it was his own gurgling he heard.
His shoulder hurt and his breath came in shorter gasps as he crawled toward his phone, but now he had only one goaclass="underline" detonate the bomb. He would wipe out the city of Houston. In the bargain he would catch the clever but treacherous Pelly as well as Lina.
After what seemed like an hour, he found himself at the base of the shelving unit. He used his hands to start to lift himself upright. Pulling his feet beneath him, he could stand under his own strength. Breathing was much easier, too.
His hand shook as he reached for the phone.
Now he heard Lina. She was pleading. "Don't do it, Lázaro. Think about the children in the area. Please don't."
He ignored her as his shaking hand picked up the phone. He reached into his pants pocket to recover the phone number provided by the Ukrainian. His vision was blurry, but he could still read the number. His thumb mashed button after button on the small Nextel phone. He double-checked the number before he hit the "send" button.
All was in order. He glanced around the warehouse and saw only Lina in the chair and a body near the main storage shelves. He didn't even care who it was. All evidence of their struggle would be swept clean in a few seconds.
He took a second to consider his life, feeling it leak out of him as he stood with the phone. He said a short prayer, asking God for strength. Now he understood what a Muslim suicide bomber might feel like, defending his country's honor.
Staub hit "send" and put the phone to his ear. He heard one ring. Then another. His heart continued to beat, but he felt it fading. Would he even live to feel the heat of the blast?
The third ring tone came through, and he checked the paper for the code to press in: 1-2-3-4. Now his clouded mind remembered. Then, as he was about to remove the phone from his ear to enter the code, he heard a voice.
"Hello."
He was stunned. "Who is this?" His voice was weak, but he still conveyed his outrage. Had he dialed the wrong number?
The voice said, "This is Alex Duarte of the ATF. How are you, Colonel Staub?"
"Duarte! How did you…" Staub would have continued, but he felt his consciousness start to slip as he lost his grip on the shelf and headed for the cement floor like a brick.
He had failed.
57
ALEX DUARTE LISTENED ON THE PHONE HE HAD YANKED OFF THE nuclear weapon. He could tell the line was open by the sound of the other phone falling on the ground and what he took to be a few seconds of heavy breathing or wheezing, but now there was just silence.
Then, away from the phone, he heard Lina shout, "Alex, it's clear here. I think Staub is dead."
He tried to shout back but knew the tiny phone speaker wouldn't broadcast his words clearly. He knew he had to get back to her.
Duarte loaded the cowed William Floyd into the cab of the truck and drove as carefully and defensively as he ever had back toward the warehouse. He felt confident he had disarmed the weapon, but he was going to have plenty of professionals looking it over in the next hours. The warehouse sounded safe now, and it provided some cover for the truck.
At the warehouse he shoved William Floyd in front of him and immediately saw Lina, apparently unharmed, still tied to a chair. He ran to her and saw Colonel Staub's body near the office and the small phone on the floor near his hand. The colonel's pistol lay on the ground near Lina. He snatched it up, then started to untie Lina. "Where is Pelly?"
"Gone," she paused and said, "Félix is dead."
"Where? How?"
"He and Pelly shot it out. He's over there." She nodded toward the main shelves.
"Where'd Pelly go?"
"Don't know. He left with a crate of cash."
He finished untying her. "Call for the cavalry, then keep an eye on your Pale Girl," Duarte said, pointing at William Floyd, sitting sullenly on the concrete floor.
He spun and raced to the body of Félix Baez. Before he reached his friend, he could tell he was dead from several major wounds. Duarte checked his pulse still. As he did, he noticed the wound on his arm. The long-sleeved shirt Félix had been wearing covered it. Now the sleeve was ripped, and the wound just below the elbow was exposed. It was a gunshot that had passed through his forearm. Immediately, it occurred to Duarte how he had been wounded. It made everything fall into place.
Félix had killed Cal Linley and Forrest Jessup. Duarte should have figured it out by how the DEA man had taken his informant's death. He had seen the signs when Félix lost control at the Ryder manager in Lafayette. His obsession had gotten the best of him. His questioning had gotten out of hand. Way out of hand. On the night that Duarte had tried to see Forrest Jessup, he had fired at the man's killer. Félix had taken the bullet in the arm and kept running.
To be certain, Duarte used a box cutter on the lowest shelf to cut a small clump of hair from Félix.
As he walked back to Lina and Floyd at the office, he took an envelope from the manager's desk and saved the hair.
He sat down on a plastic chair as if he had lost all energy in his body.
The pickup truck with the weapon was just outside, and the men involved were largely neutralized. This was not his normal day at work. This would be something to tell his father.
58
THE SCENE AT THE WAREHOUSE HAD REMAINED ALMOST UNDISTURBED after more than four hours. Alex Duarte had settled into the manager's chair inside the office, answering any questions the local homicide detectives or FBI agents had. Although the FBI agents spoke mostly to Lina.
The Houston bomb techs did a lot of staring at the weapon after carefully removing it from the crate, but they were professionals and admitted they had never even seen a nuclear warhead. They wanted nothing to do with it.
Duarte had noticed several of the cops make quick phone calls to their homes insisting that their spouses take the children and start driving. One burly young man ended the conversation with a loud "Now!"
They had removed Félix and Staub, maybe because they looked like there might be a chance to revive them. There wasn't. Duarte wondered how he would handle his friend's involvement in two unsolved homicides. That was for later.
No one had touched the body of the naked female physicist in the trunk of the Audi. They had photographed her and sketched that part of the crime scene, but she had apparently looked dead enough and spooked the paramedics that they were waiting for the medical examiner's team, which was tied up on another death in a different part of the city.
William "Ike" Floyd had been sequestered by local FBI agents as soon as they arrived. He sat in a chair surrounded by young, clean-cut agents in the far corner of the warehouse. Lina supervised to ensure no one talked to him and he didn't say anything.
At the open bay door, several Suburbans pulled up, and there was some commotion. By this time, Duarte was too tired to care who was arriving but could tell it was a boss.
Out of the newly arrived crowd he saw Meg Ruley emerge. Even though it was early in the morning and she would've been traveling most the night to get here from New Orleans, she looked like a recruiting poster for the federal government. Tall, attractive, professional, with the perfect combination of business suit and hairstyle. Now she wore an FBI badge clipped to her belt, with a small automatic pistol just behind it. That was an old trick to ensure the local cops knew you were also a cop and not just some administrator here to screw things up.