At the end of the five weeks, he and Coleman had gone out of town to do a minister. It had struck Varney as a joke. The man was the pastor of a huge congregation in Kansas who had a foundation devoted to lobbying for laws to outlaw the teaching of evolution, and it brought in millions of dollars a year. Most of the donation money came from a few rich men who were bent on raising the issue once again in a series of trials that would be made into a feature-length documentary film. But the real prize was still in the future. The minister had just signed a contract to put the church’s weekly service on television.
This had been a problem for another preacher who already was on television in that part of Kansas. He didn’t want the competition, so he had visited one of his parishioners in his temporary home in Leavenworth, Kansas. The parishioner was a reformed man doing long time, but the word Varney got from Coleman was that his preacher had convinced him that the other preacher was a heretic and false prophet, and probably a precursor for the Antichrist. The prisoner had gotten the word to the right people, and those people had gotten to Coleman.
Varney had gone to the preacher’s big brick church at night and seen moving shadows on the ceiling of an upstairs office. He had found the outer doors locked, but he had used his new skills to pick the lock on a maintenance door that led into a small room just off the sanctuary that was full of folding chairs and tables. He had pulled his gun and made his way upstairs to the office, quietly placed his hand on the doorknob, and found it locked. He had picked that lock too, swung the door open quietly to reveal a reception area, and had seen the preacher, a tall, heavy man in a pair of suit pants and white shirt but no coat, forty feet away inside an inner office. The preacher had looked at a sheaf of papers he held in his right hand, and then begun to speak and wave his arms with animation. Varney had crouched in alarm, then realized the man was rehearsing a sermon in front of a mirror. He’d watched the preacher raise both hands, his hair in disarray and his eyes wild, and say, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” before he’d fired a shot through both doorways into his right temple.
The day after he and Coleman had returned, Varney had gone back to his locksmith lessons for ten more weeks. He learned about house locks, car locks, commercial locks, and dead bolts. It was only after he had mastered the traditional skills that they had introduced him to electronic pick guns and magnetic bolt-sliders that could do the same things more quickly.
He opened the shiny new locks on Prescott’s office door in seconds. He pulled the door open and slipped inside, then let the door swing gently shut without touching the inner doorknob. He walked directly to the back of the dark room, found the desk by the glow of the answering machine, set his backpack down, and looked around him, waiting for his eyes to reach their maximum adjustment to the near darkness.
Everything about this place was right, as though Prescott had been on Varney’s side. The front window was covered with brown butcher paper, so very little light came in or escaped, and a passerby would not see Varney unless he put his eye to the uncovered edge. The back window had been boarded even though it had bars on it. Only the single side window was functional, and it was covered with blinds.
He decided there really was no reason he had to work in complete darkness. He reached into the backpack and took out his Mag-lite, adjusted the beam so it was narrow and bright, and let it play along the floorboards and the baseboards and the suspended acoustic ceiling tiles, then over the desk itself. It was perfect: one room, twelve feet by fifteen feet, with only the desk and chair in it. Even better, there was only one entrance. Varney rigged the pipe bombs very carefully. There was one taped under the center of the desk, with the switch set against the back of the top center drawer, and the drawer a little bit open. If Prescott sat in the chair to listen to his phone messages, he would push in the top drawer of the desk, complete the circuit, and the bomb would cut him in half.
Varney armed the bomb, then went to work on the main charge. This one was set at the edge of the floor, covered only by a paper wrapper left over from the already installed wallboard. He ran the wire around the room, pushed it into the space below the baseboard, where it was covered by the new industrial carpeting and could not be tripped over. Then he set the end of it to a pair of magnetic sensors made for a burglar-alarm system. One would go on the door and the other on the jamb. When the door opened, the magnetic contact between them would break. That would permit a magnetic switch to trip, giving the electrical current a path down the wire. A less thoughtful man would have wired the blasting cap right into the circuit, but Varney had imagined the entire sequence. He had put the blasting cap into a parallel circuit with a time-delay relay. The door would open, five seconds would pass while Prescott stepped inside, closed it, took a couple of steps toward the desk, and then the cap would initiate the bomb. The narrow room would be filled with flying bits of the metal pipe, mixed with a pound of nails.
As he thought about it, Varney wondered if five seconds were enough. Maybe he should set the relay to ten. That way, Prescott could get all the way to the desk and close the drawer to set off that bomb first. Most likely, the main charge would go off after Prescott was dead, but that would be fine. He decided against the change. Prescott was not a stupid man. In ten seconds, he might have time to see that something had changed, and maybe even to disarm the charge.
Varney took his backpack, ran his light around the room one last time to be sure he had not left anything showing, then walked to the door to pull the two wires under the lower hinge. That way, he could connect the two wires to arm the circuit only after he was outside. He brought them to the spot, then reached up to put his hand on the knob, and knew there was a problem. The knob was a simple brass one, with no inner lock button or keyhole. It turned, but when it did, there was a spongy, unchanging resistance, not a spring pushing it back to its original position. He rotated it a full turn without feeling any effect. He switched on his flashlight again. The knob was a dummy. It was mounted on a steel plate that was welded to the steel door.
He stood and tugged, but it had no effect. The front door had been rigged so that it would not open from the inside. Varney felt a growing sense of alarm, but he knew what to do. He would take the pins out of the hinges and get out of here. He shone his light on the center one. The head of the pin was welded into the top bracket. He moved the flashlight. They were all dummies, welded in place. The real hinges were invisible and beyond his reach, built into the jamb.
Varney examined the parts of the front window that were not covered with butcher paper. He looked at it from an angle, then shone his flashlight along the edge. The glass wasn’t the regular kind. It looked about three quarters of an inch thick, and the edge was set deep into the steel frame. The outside had the same steel grating across it that the windows of the other storefronts had. He moved quickly to the smaller window at the side of the building. It was the same.
Prescott’s little office was not an office at all. It was a trap. Once a man was inside it, there was no way out. He would have to sit in here until Prescott came for him and opened the front door. Varney’s eyes went narrow with anger and hatred. His breaths came in short, rough rasps that dried his mouth. He felt as though the veins in his arms were swelling with the blood surging into them. He wanted to tear his way out of here, punch and kick his way through the wall, but he had to think. Prescott might already be on the way. Whatever Varney did, it had to be now, and it had to work.
The outer walls of the building were brick. But maybe the wall that separated this small room from the grocery store was just the usual frame of two-by-fours covered with wallboard. He took out his knife, selected a spot a yard from the corner of the room, and carved away a bit of wallboard. He worked in a circular motion, making a little pile of gypsum and plaster at his feet. Finally, the blade went through. He worked the knife around to make a bigger hole, his heart beginning to beat with anticipation. All he had to do was cut away a foot and a half between a pair of studs and the same size hole in the wallboard nailed on from the other side, and he would fit through. He could arm the circuit of the main bomb without the bother of connecting the last wires from outside. He would slither into the grocery store, go out the rear door to the parking lot, and he would be gone. Then Varney’s blade hit something that made a skritch sound.