“I’d like that,” Tillman said. “I’d like that very much.”
13
POCATELLO, IDAHO
It’s over! We’re going home!”
It took Amalie a moment to get her bearings. She woke feeling groggy, slightly nauseated, and with a pounding headache. The sound of the other women laughing and exclaiming was like knives piercing her head. She sat up and looked around, still feeling disoriented. She had been lying in her bed in the windowless dormitory where she and the other Congolese women had been housed.
“Sleeping beauty rises,” said Estelle Olagun, the oldest woman, looking at Amalie with her lips pursed in her usual attitude of disapproval.
The other women laughed. All the women from the factory were in the dormitory, a palpable air of jubilance about them.
One of the younger girls held up a fan of money, American hundred-dollar bills. “Monsieur Collier paid us!” she shouted joyfully. “Look! He even gave us each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. We’re going home rich!”
The women began to dance. “We’re going home! We’re going home!”
Amalie shook her head—partly to clear the cobwebs and partly in disagreement. It was coming back to her, her exchange with Collier, the pinch he’d given her. It had made her sleep—she saw that now. He’d been shutting her up. He’d lied about taking her to see Christiane at the doctor.
“No!” she shouted. “He lies!”
The women stopped dancing and stared at her accusingly. “Why must you always be so negative?” Estelle said.
“He told me he was going to take me to Christiane!” Amalie said hotly. “But he didn’t. Instead he gave me a poison that made me sleep.”
One of the women pointed at the little table next to her bed. A thick envelope lay on the table with Amalie’s name written on it. “And I suppose the one thousand five hundred dollars he left you is poisoned, too?”
Amalie grabbed the envelope and held it over the bed. Sure enough, a thick pile of money fell out onto the blankets. She picked up one of the bills, held it against the light. Even in the Congo, you learned how to spot real American money—the watermarks, the little security stripes, the shifting colors. The rebels from Burundi and Rwanda were always printing fakes, so you had to know. It was obvious: The money was real.
For a moment, doubt infected her.
“Look at her face!” one of the other girls hooted, pointing at her. “She’s been so sure that something horrible is going on, that when something good actually happens, it makes her angry.”
The other women laughed.
The laughter continued until the loud, ominous hissing noise started in the far corner of the room. She smelled something odd, too, the faintest tinge of a sour, nutty odor.
Everyone turned to look. It was a noise unlike anything she’d heard inside the big metal building before.
“The heating is making a strange sound,” Estelle said, frowning.
But Amalie knew it wasn’t the heating. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew something was wrong, and she didn’t want to be here anymore. She ran toward the door and twisted the handle. But the door wouldn’t open. She scrabbled at the lock and shouted, “Ouvrez! Ourvrez la porte!”
The other women had begun screaming. Then one woman fell. Then another. Two more began clawing at their throats and foaming at the mouth. Another began raking her face with her own fingernails, slashing so hard that blood began trickling down one side of her face before she fell.
At last only Amalie was still alive.
She continued to pound on the door. “Tu bâtard! Monsieur Collier, tu putain bâtard!”
The girl’s anger turned to panic. She began shrieking—a horrible inhuman noise like the grinding of some unoiled engine. Then she fell to the floor, where she began spasming, slamming her head into the door so hard it boomed.
From the other side of the one-way glass, Collier and Wilmot observed the dying women.
“According to my model, there’s a little air pocket around the door,” Collier said. “It creates a sort of whirlpool effect and it takes a while before the gas reaches the door. Whoever gets there is the last to die.”
Wilmot watched Amalie writhing in agony.
“She’s tu-toyezing me,” Collier said. “It’s very disrespectful. Frankly I’m a little hurt.”
Wilmot didn’t think it was funny. The glee that Collier took from poisoning and killing sickened him. But that was the cost of enlisting a sociopath. Wilmot still had enough humanity, however, to feel pained at the death of these innocent young women. But collateral damage was an inevitable part of war, he told himself, and the innocent were often sacrificed for the greater good.
“Cyanide gas liquefies at seventy degrees Fahrenheit,” Collier said. “The moment that the jets come on the liquid sodium cyanide turns to gas.” He looked at his watch.
Amalie was foaming at the mouth. Her body twitched with one last spasm, and then went still.
“Eighteen seconds,” said Collier.
The fans continued their work, but the cyanide had already been dispersed. There was no movement behind the glaain widss.
Collier handed Wilmot a respirator, and the two men placed gas masks over their faces. Then Collier unbolted the door, and the two men stepped inside.
The dormitory in which the women were housed had not been constructed randomly. Its dimensions were carefully chosen: 181 feet by 209 feet, with a 47-foot ceiling. The contours of the walls, the height of the ceiling, designed precisely according to plans revised and signed by the architect Thomas Walter in 1851 when he expanded the US Capitol and added its famous dome. The air volume of the room was precisely 1.777 million cubic feet.
Wilmot had secured the new heating and air contract at the Capitol last year. The idea had been Wilmot’s, but the plan was Collier’s. It was the only reason Wilmot had gone to West Virginia to find him. After Collier poisoned Evan’s horse, Wilmot banished the boy from his home. He never expected to see him again. But in war, as in politics, you couldn’t always choose your allies, and Wilmot needed someone with Collier’s expertise and loyalty.
Gideon's War and Hard Target
Now Collier pointed to the massive set of fans and ducts...
Wilmot pushed at one of the bodies with his toe, suddenly anxious to get out of there.
“I’m sorry. I’m talking too much.” Despite the frigid air inside the building, Collier’s upper lip glistened with sweat and his hands shook slightly. A terrible, empty smile came and went briefly.
“Why don’t you just give me the bottom line?”
Collier cleared his throat. “Bottom line? When we override the system we’ll have about forty-five seconds before the ignition turns on, then another thirty seconds until the gas jets fire. By the time they realize what’s happening, it will be too late.”
Because cell phone and most radio transmissions were jammed, they would have to go into the belly of the beast themselves and trigger the ignition manually. There would be no coming back, but they were willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater cause.
As he surveyed the corpses—the panic of the women still reflected in their lifeless stares and in the impossible angles of their limbs—Dale Wilmot realized he had crossed a line from which he could no longer step back. Before now, their plan had been an abstraction, but for Wilmot, killing these women had made it a flesh-and-blood reality. As he watched the life draining from their bodies, he felt draining from his own body whatever residual uncertainty remained. Flashing in his mind’s eye like a rapid-fire slide show, he saw the faces of the hypocrites—the politicians and the corporatint re.e titans—whose photographs hung on his wall.
“Take care of the mess,” said Wilmot. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
14
FBI HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC