On the roof of a three-storey building behind the apartment block a man squatting behind a row of air-conditioning units answered his cellphone. Then he crouched lower and concentrated on the windows of Stratton’s apartment across the alley and a floor higher than him.
The elevator arrived on the fourth floor and Stratton and Vicky stepped out of it. There was no one else around and as they walked towards his door Vicky stopped to enjoy the view from the corridor window.
‘This is beautiful,’ she said. ‘You can see all the way up the coast to Malibu. Do you have this view from your apartment?’
‘No,’ he said, coming alongside her and taking in the view himself.
The moon was up, half of it at least, its white light bathing the sea between the tall palms. Vicky moved close to Stratton and looked up at him. He faced her and moved his lips to meet hers. They kissed gently, her hand coming up to touch his face.
Their breathing quickened. Stratton moved back and held Vicky’s hand as he retrieved his key from his pocket with his free hand and led her towards his door. As he reached it he let go of Vicky and gripped the doorknob while inserting the key into the lock. He stopped before turning it. Some kind of soapy film was smeared on the doorknob. He put his hand to his nose and smelled it. Marzipan. He tensed as every one of his senses screamed to full alert. There was only one thing he knew that smelled of marzipan – besides marzipan itself – and that was plastic explosive.
‘What is it?’ Vicky asked.
Stratton shot a glance up and down the empty corridor, then took hold of her hand again. ‘Come with me,’ he said softly as he led her quickly back down the corridor.
She could sense the tension in him. ‘John, what is it? Are you going to tell me?’
‘Just stay there,’ Stratton said as he steered her around the corner to the small alcove in front of the elevators where there was also an emergency-exit door. Beside it was a small table with a pot of plastic plants and an ashtray on it. Stratton took his notebook from his pocket, tore out part of a sheet, wiped his hand, went to the small table and, keeping his back to Vicky, undid the fly of his trousers and peed into the ashtray. She leaned a little to try and look past him, wondering what on earth he was doing.
Stratton dipped the paper in the urine, shook off the excess liquid, took a lighter from his pocket, lit it and held the flame under the paper. As the paper began to turn purple it crackled, giving off tiny sparks. Stratton dropped it in the urine and went back to look at the door. The small test had proved his suspicions correct. Someone who had handled plastic explosives had been in his apartment.
Stratton’s immediate fear was for Vicky but he couldn’t let her go until he knew precisely where the focus of the attack was. Someone wanted to kill him and he had to assume that they were professionals and had a back-up plan – which meant that Vicky was in danger whether or not the apartment was the target.
He opened the fire-exit door carefully and looked up and down the dingy, poorly lit metal and concrete stairwell. There was no sign of life and he came back to Vicky’s side.
‘Stay here. If I tell you to go I want you to take those stairs down to the bottom and then get away from the building as fast as you can.’
‘What’s wrong? You’re scaring me.’
‘Please, Vicky. Trust me.’
She looked at him strangely but there was nothing else that Stratton could say. ‘Just stay here and don’t move,’ he said, holding her shoulders firmly. Then he released her and walked back down the corridor to his apartment.
He took out his key, placed it in the lock, turned the handle slowly and pushed open the door just enough to allow his fingers inside. He ran his hand along the top of the door, down the edge and along the bottom. If there was a trigger, whoever laid it would have had to be able to set it and remove their hand before closing the door. Stratton could feel nothing unusual and so he opened the door carefully and looked around the immediate area. He dropped to his knees and crept inside, all the time scanning for anything out of place. There were several types of improvised explosive devices or IEDs that could be used in a situation like this. Mechanical triggers could be either a ‘push’, activated by pushing something like a door against it, a ‘pull’ such as a trip wire, a pressure-activated mechanism set off by, for example, stepping on something, or a pressure-release contrivance detonated by lifting a weight off the device. Another type was a command-detonation charge such as a radio-controlled unit.
Stratton moved carefully through the room, keeping low in the darkness. The moonlight shone through the windows, which helped a little. But he did not want to turn on the lights in case a bomb was wired to the electricity or was light-sensitive. Also, someone could be outside, waiting for a sign that the apartment was occupied.
The living room and adjoining kitchen appeared to be clear as far as he could tell from his position on the floor. He kept on his hands and knees as he headed towards the bedroom and bathroom. As he reached his bedroom door he immediately noticed that the counterpane on the bed was not as neatly spread as he had left it. He lowered his face to the floor. He could not see underneath the bed since the counterpane touched the carpet on all sides so he crawled forward and slowly raised an edge to reveal a box set squarely beneath the bed frame. It was sealed, had no protrusions and in its location was unlikely to have a mechanical switch since he was clearly not expected to find, let alone touch it.
Stratton moved a little closer, stretched out a hand, gently took hold of the box and slid it out from under the bed. It was a shoebox with no lid and inside was a large cube of white plastic explosive wired to a battery and a cellphone. There was a good pound and a half of the stuff, Stratton estimated, enough to completely gut the room and shred anyone inside. It was a classic terrorist device of moderate sophisti cation, intended to detonate when the cellphone was called. It told him a little about its creator insofar as it had been handmade in a garage rather than mass-produced in a factory.
Stratton disconnected one of the wires from the detonator, thereby rendering the device safe, and took a moment to consider his options. ‘Who?’ and ‘Why?’ were the burning questions. The most obvious links were with the two Albanians he had killed. How their colleagues had found him was the next question. He had slipped up somewhere – seriously.
Thinking about the cellphone Stratton realised it was highly likely that someone was watching the apartment, waiting to dial the number and detonate the device. Stratton had obviously not been seen entering the apartment itself, suggesting that the bomber was outside somewhere and watching the windows for the lights to go on or some other sign of life inside.
Stratton crept around the bed to the window and raised himself sufficiently to see over the sill. It was not a good enough position and he moved to the edge of the window, got to his feet and stood back. A brief scan of the nearby rooftops through the blinds revealed a man doing a bad job of concealing himself behind a row of air-conditioning units and looking in Stratton’s direction. The man then put something to his ear, a cellphone perhaps, and moved to the parapet to look below.
Stratton pulled a chair over to the window and climbed onto it, enabling him to see down into the alleyway. Halfway along it, towards Santa Monica Boulevard, he saw a car with a man standing outside it with his hand to his ear, the rear door open beside him.
The man climbed back inside the saloon and closed the door. ‘Guy ain’t in his room yet,’ he said to the two men in the front.