In a cabinet beneath a worktable, Kowalski found a cheap but usable hacksaw. The blade looked like it had never been used.
He’d hoped for a power tool of some sort, but nothing doing. Ed wasn’t into home repair, obviously.
Kowalski’s arm was going to be sore later. He just knew it.
As for destroying the house—and what a shame; it was a nice house, with hardwood floors and a kidney bean-shaped pool out back, complete with hot tub, surrounded by pine trees—that was easy enough. It was a stand-alone, so no neighbors to worry about. The explosion could be devastating, and it would stay limited to these grounds.
He’d use his favorite: the timed-spark gas-line burst. Enough accelerant spread around here and there, the structure would be obliterated within minutes. As would most forensics. Not that it mattered; nothing here could be tied to Kowalski. He was an investigatory dead end. A ghost.
As Kowalski walked upstairs, he thought about Claudia Hunter and how she’d fought her own death. She’d so desperately wanted to live. And for a strange moment, Kowalski found himself weak. Did Katie fight like this, at the very end? he wondered.
He looked at framed photos of Ed and Claudia. She was the strong one, no doubt about it. Ed looked vaguely uncomfortable in every shot, as if he were thinking, Do I really have to be here for this? And Claudia was kicking him in the shins, telling him, You not only have to be here, you have to fucking look like you’re enjoying it.
Ed, kissing a stranger at the airport, hoping for a quickie instead of working shit out at home with his wife.
Kowalski carried the Adidas duffel, Glad freezer bag, and hacksaw into the bathroom. It was time to see how thick Ed Hunter’s spine was.
The skin and muscle were easy. Sawing through the neck bone was a real effort. With every push and pull of the hacksaw, Kowalski found himself silently repeating a sentence, one syllable at a time. Can’t [push] be [pull] lieve [push] I [pull] do [push] this [pull] for [push] a [pull] live [push] ing. …
12:32 a.m.
Sheraton, Room 702
Ready, Jack? Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have an experimental tracking device in my blood. Not one device; thousands of them. Nanomachines. You familiar with the term? Microscopic, undetectable by the human eye. I’m simplifying when I say that they’re in my blood. They’re in every fluid system in my body—my saliva, my tears, my lymph nodes.”
Jack blinked. He looked at Kelly, then at the nightstand across the room.
“Mind if I write this down?”
“I was hoping you would.”
There was a Sheraton pen and a scratch pad on the nightstand. He picked them up and took them back to the couch. He wrote “nanomachines.” Just in case this was leading somewhere.
Or if he should need evidence for the prosecution.
“Okay, so you’ve got these tiny machines inside of you.”
“Is this you being a reporter?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, stop. Let me tell it.”
Jack put down the pen and paper. “Keep in mind I only have seven hours to live.”
Kelly tightened her lips for a moment, then continued. “The machines are tracking devices. They constantly feed information to a satellite: body temperature, heart rate, global position. And that information is relayed to a tracking station.”
“Sounds very Big Brother.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But think about the possibilities of tracking criminals or terrorists. Another is—wait, you said you have children?”
“A daughter.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’m not sure I want to tell you.” Jack looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was 11:30 back in Gurnee. Callie was no doubt asleep, clinging to her pink bear, which was also a miniblanket. The thing looked like a mutant tree sloth, but she’d had it since birth and refused to part with it.
“Don’t be a baby. How old is she?”
“Callie’s four.”
“Well, imagine, God forbid, if some sick bastard grabbed Callie from a shopping mall one day. You’d have no way of finding her, unless the kidnapper was stupid enough to walk past a surveillance camera.”
The very thought of it formed a cold, dark knot in Jack’s stomach.
“With this system, it would take a second to pinpoint Callie’s position, and the police would be able to recover her minutes later. Abductions would become a thing of the past.”
Jack thought about this. “Unless the kidnappers got smart and learned how to turn these nanomachines off.”
“Not possible. There are too many of them. Self-replicating, using blood waste as raw material. All the benefits of a virus, none of the weaknesses. Except if they leave the body. With nothing to feed on, they die. But once inside, there’s no getting rid of them.”
“You seem proud of these things.”
“I worked in the lab that created them. That’s my job. Was my job, back in Ireland.”
“You don’t have the accent. Though you did slip and say ‘flat’ a short while ago.”
“I’m trying to blend in, boyo,” she said in a thick brogue. “But now you’re here. And now it’s only you and me and the Mary—you know what I call these things?”
“No, what?”
“The Mary Kates. You know … those blond twins? The Olsens? They’re just like these little things. They’re everywhere.”
So Kelly here has tiny machines named after a pair of barely legal blondes running around in her blood. Right.
“There’s one more special feature, and this impressed the shite out of everyone. The Mary Kates, you see, can not only track your location; they can tell us if there’s someone in the room with you. The abduction angle again. It’s meant to help rescuers pounce on the kidnappers, not the victim.”
“So right now, these Mary Kates know I’m here with you.”
“Yes. They detect you’re less than ten feet away from me. They’re picking up your brain waves and heartbeat. Very sensitive, these girls.”
“Fucking creepy.”
“Not as creepy as what I’m about to tell you. Remember?”
“What?”
“If the Mary Kates detect that I’m alone, they’ll travel to my brain and make it explode.”
12:42 a.m.
Edison Avenue
The bag was not as heavy as he’d thought. The average human head was about six pounds—two for the skull, a quarter for the skin, and three for the brain, and spare change for water and fat and such. But this Adidas bag definitely felt lighter than six pounds.
Maybe it was all the blood and brains that had spurted out.
Nice, huh?
Kowalski wondered how far he’d have to travel with it. A plane was out of the question. Homeland Security would x-ray his $19.95 bag and see Ed’s goofy mug staring back up at them. Most likely, CI-6 would dispatch someone local to recover it, analyze, do whatever they wanted with it. That’s DHS, folks. Keeping America Safe, One Decapitated Head at a Time.
He placed the bag on the floor of the backseat, propping it up on one side with a box of Kleenex and on the other with a hardback copy of a fitness book called The Lean Body Promise. Weight loss wasn’t going to be a concern for Ed anymore. He’d already lost about six pounds today.
Ah fuck it. Katie would have laughed.
After double-checking his exit route on the Tribeca’s GPS system, he opened the garage doors and drove down the driveway to the street. He pulled Ed’s cell phone out of his pocket— he’d found it in Ed’s bag. Then he dialed the Hunter’s home number, helpfully written in pen on the kitchen wall phone. The home line was wired to his jerry-rigged gas-main detonator. Simplest thing in the world. One phone call, one massive basement explosion.