The Bricklayer - Boyd Noah - Страница 46

He stepped back and tried to imagine the group’s traffic through the area. Obviously, someone used it to lift weights. A lot of men become addicted to the intensity of it in prison. The equipment upstairs indicated that they used the place as a workshop for making the punji boards. The basement was probably where they sat around drinking beer and planning whatever came next. But Vail’s eye for construction told him that something was out of proportion. Then he saw what it was—the matting, almost as if it were meant to be a distraction.

Teeth, like dovetail joints on well-made furniture, held the two-foot squares together. Vail did a quick count along two adjoining edges, determining that there were sixty sections, far more than were needed for the amount of weight equipment present. He started walking across them, looking for any further indications that they might be hiding something. In the middle of the floor, he knelt down and tried to get his fingers in between the pieces to pull one up, but it was almost impossible to get any kind of grip. He thought that one of the criteria which Radek would have set for himself was immediate access for a getaway. Maybe one of the outer pieces.

Letting his eyes trace the edges as he moved over them, he noticed an inch or so of cloth sticking out from under a stack of four twenty-five-pound plates in the corner. Vail restacked the weights to one side, exposing a sturdy foot-long black strap sticking up between two of the squares. Slowly he pulled on it. It was anchored under the middle of one of the tiles, which popped up. Under it was plywood. Vail pulled up the adjoining pieces of matting until he exposed the entire piece of wood. It was covering a three-foot-square hole cut into the concrete.

Vail lay on his stomach and lowered his face as close to the edge of the board as possible. He turned on his flashlight and lifted the plywood slightly. Under it he saw a large metal box. Slowly he lifted the cover out of the way. Scattered around the steel container were a half-dozen handguns and two canisters of what appeared to be pyrotechnics. He couldn’t tell for sure because they were wedged behind the metal chest, which had a heavy padlock on the front of it. There were also a number of boxes of different-caliber ammunition stacked around it.

Vail walked back upstairs and asked the SWAT officer at the back door to get him the largest bolt cutters they had. He then went out to the bomb unit’s van and told them what he had found.

“Well, let’s get it open,” Kaulcrick said.

“If anything’s booby-trapped, it’s that box,” Henning said. “Think you can get the robot down those stairs, Steve?”

“I think so, but I’m going to have to cut that lock, unless R2 can.”

“Unfortunately, it can’t. But once you do, don’t open the box. That’s the robot’s job.”

A SWAT officer came up to the van with the bolt cutters. “Don’t worry,” Vail said, “I can still see that flamethrower.”

Vail went back down to the basement, and after cutting the lock and carefully removing it, he went back upstairs to the robot. “Mike,” he said into its microphone, “how about retracting the arm as much as possible.” Once Henning had, Vail stood it up on its back end and bear-hugged it up off the floor. With short, measured steps he walked the device down the stairs, squeezing past the turn and then all the way down onto the concrete floor. “Okay, we’re all set here. Fire it up.”

The robot came to life, its cameras adjusting forward and the spotlight turned on. The arm extended forward with a motorized whir. Vail got in front of it and pointed at the hole in the floor. The arm and its camera craned down toward the metal box. “All set?” Vail asked.

The arm gave a short up-and-down motion, and Vail headed for the stairs. Before leaving, he walked around the first floor looking at the tools and board scraps, trying to figure out whether this was the building used to make the punji boards. If it was staged, the gang members had done a good job, because there was sawdust on the floor where the boards would have been cut. In the corner was a plastic twenty-gallon trash container. He took the lid off, hoping to find the nails used with the boards or, more likely, the boxes they came in. Immediately the strong odor of garlic became obvious. It was as pungent as the night before in the building on Seventh Street. He put the lid back on and dragged it out the door.

In the van, everyone was even more closely gathered around the monitor, but Henning was waiting to make sure that Vail had cleared the building before going ahead. When he stepped back up into the van, Henning said, “Okay, here we go.”

He maneuvered the robot back and forth until it was at the edge of the hole and its arm was directly over the hasp from which Vail had cut the lock. With microscopic movements on the joystick, Henning closed the pincers around the hasp. He raised the lid a quarter of an inch and stopped, taking his hand completely off the joystick so he wouldn’t accidentally raise it any farther. He put his hand back on the control, raising it an inch, this time keeping hold of the stick. They still couldn’t see into the box. He raised it another two inches and then maneuvered the spotlight into a lower position. The lowest camera’s image on the screen became the most vivid with the increased light. Fully illuminated were the strongbox’s contents. It was filled to the top with strapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in the same heavy plastic and tape as the recovered three million dollars.

A small cheer went up inside the van. Henning continued raising the lid. Suddenly Kate said, “What’s that on the side, a wire?”

Henning tried to reverse the robot’s arm to close the lid but it was too late. The screen went blank. “What happened?” Tye asked.

The sergeant checked a gauge on the control panel. “That’s weird. It’s shorted out. Must have been wired to fry whoever opened it.”

“What do we do now?” Kaulcrick asked.

“I’ll have to suit up and go down there.”

Just then gunfire erupted from inside the building. The SWAT officers stationed around the perimeter pulled back and took cover where they could. “What’s that?” Kaulcrick said.

Henning said, “There’s no one in there. That electrical charge must have set off the pyrotechnics Steve saw around the metal box, heating up the ammunition.”

Everyone scrambled out of the van and watched the building. Dark gray smoke started escaping around the door and window frames. Henning tilted his head back slightly and sniffed the air. “Metallic. That might be thermite,” he said ominously.

“What’s that?” Kaulcrick demanded.

“Thermite grenades are used by the military to destroy enemy equipment in a hurry. They burn at two thousand plus degrees centigrade. It’ll burn right through a tank and melt everything around it.”

“The money!”

“If that is thermite, all you’re going to have is a pile of ashes.”

“Why would anyone store something like that next to money?” Kaulcrick said angrily.

“They probably had it in the cache ready to destroy the guns and ammunition in case they were raided. They put the box in there and electrified it, thinking if they had to get out in a hurry, all they had to do was shut off the juice, grab the box, and set off the thermite to destroy all the evidence. The electrical current must have set off the thermite unintentionally.”

“What do we do now?” Kaulcrick asked.

Tye Delson lit another cigarette and, her reserved composure regained, said, “Call the fire department.”

TWENTY-FOUR

KAULCRICK ORDERED EVERYONE BACK TO THE OFFICE FOR A TWO o’clock meeting and asked Sergeant Henning to join them when he was done at the scene. Kaulcrick knew he had to break the news to the director that they had just incinerated two million dollars of Bureau money and realized there would be technical questions he wouldn’t be able to answer. Besides, it was the LAPD’s robot that had destroyed the money. And if push came to shove, Kate had actually spotted the trip wire and tried to stop it.