The Night Cafe (32 page)

Teagarden was a mite vain about his own night vision. For a man his age, it was remarkably good. His hearing, however, was another matter. Although he could make out the murmur of conversation, he was unable to understand the gist of it. He checked to see that the Beretta’s safety was off, then edged forward, staying well under the dappled cover of the trees. Two men stood in the light spilling from the open van, the tattered portfolio propped against one of the bumpers. Inside the van, a mounded mass was staked down under canvas and secured with bungee cords.

From where Teagarden came to a stop, the light was angled enough to finally make out the faces of the men. One was Gladding. The other, dark haired and dark complexioned, was definitely not Liggett. Teagarden scanned the perimeter. So where was that young scoundrel? It was he, Teagarden was fairly certain, who had attacked Hannah. It made sense that he was still in the vicinity. Gladding would not have come out here alone—and neither, come right down to it, would the other man have been likely to.

The men’s conversation was pitched low, muffled by wind in the branches, by the chirping of crickets and frogs, and by the occasional coyote howl. It should have made for good auditory cover for his own movements, but night sounds were eerie and unpredictable. Tempted as he was to crouch low to reduce his mass, he daren’t risk his creaky knees, Teagarden thought. In any event, there were rattlesnakes in this part of the country. He could only hope they were napping or hibernating.

Suddenly the conversation by the van rose to the pitch of argument. He caught only snatches of phrases, but the words
double-cross
and
villa
came through loud and clear. Bloody hell, Teagarden thought—a falling-out of rogues. He predicted there was about to be big trouble here, and he and Hannah had the very bad luck to be caught in the middle of it.

He could only guess that the reason Gladding and Liggett hadn’t finished her off as soon as they had the painting was that the other party to this transaction had chosen that precise moment to arrive. Should all hell break loose and they emerge triumphant, however, they would no doubt circle back and finish what they had started.

Which still begged the question, where was Liggett? Had he already gone back for Hannah?

Teagarden was just turning to go back for her when a muffled shot sounded—more flash than crash—and the man with Gladding slumped to the ground. Then feet were running in every direction and Teagarden heard the eerie, muted pops of silenced weapons. Those reports hardly seemed decent, given their deadly effect.

It lasted ten, fifteen seconds, no more, and when it was over, the slight form of Kyle Liggett emerged from the trees. He walked toward the van, stopping occasionally to kick the lifeless forms of the other men who’d materialized in the clearing when the shouting started.

“Is that the bomb?” Liggett asked.

Gladding nodded and cocked a thumb at the tarp, utterly indifferent to the dead man lying at his feet.

Liggett pulled the canvas aside and peered at the mass beneath, his fingers lightly surveying the components. “Looks good. Detonator, timer. Better than I’d even hoped.”

“It
should
be good, for the price,” Gladding muttered.

The portfolio with the painting was still propped against the van’s bumper. This, Teagarden thought, was a debt the man had never intended to pay.

As she made her slow progress up the track, Hannah forced herself to tread lightly, her head reverberating painfully with each agonized step. She still had Gladding’s throwaway cell phone. She’d tried to see if she could make a quiet 9-1-1 call, but the icon on the screen told the tale, the “no service” signal flickering uncertainly.

She ducked instinctively when she heard the first
whap
echo through the trees. Almost before her brain could register the meaning of a sound that was all too familiar to her, it came again, and then was repeated over and over—the quiet staccato of an efficient massacre. Her hand reached to steady herself on the trunk of a eucalyptus, her mind willing the pounding of her head and heart to stop, certain that the whole park had to be hearing the din she was.

Suddenly, as abruptly as the fusillade had started, it stopped. In its place came male voices, a few short sentences. There was silence for a moment, only the wind in the trees, before a single, deep, outraged shout. Another
whap!
sounded, and then two more shots.

Tap, tap
. An execution.

She started to run, knowing Will Teagarden was up ahead somewhere, praying he was well hidden and that none of this had anything to do with him. No such luck. There came a distinctive bang, one she’d heard many times before, both on the firing range and out in the field. It was the sound of her own Beretta.

He got off one shot, and only one.

It was answered by two retorts, fast and loud from a weapon without noise suppression. Clearly, someone had changed guns, and the time for stealth had passed. Her heart sank.

A few seconds later she heard one final shot, and she felt the sickening realization that it hadn’t come from her gun.

William Teagarden, former Detective Superintendent, Scotland Yard, had gone down.

When she got to the clearing, she spotted Kyle Liggett. He was silhouetted in the light of an open van as he wrestled with bungee cords to tie down a tarp, grappling the hooks into rings in the floor. Whatever was underneath there was bulky, about the size of an ottoman.

Hannah crouched low in the shadows, still as the death all around her, while he finished the tie-down. He stepped over a body to retrieve the battered leather art portfolio she’d carried into the park. Another body lay faceup a short way away, this one larger, the belly mounded, the interior lights catching silver-white hair. Moises Gladding.

Liggett slammed the rear doors of the panel van and walked around to the driver’s side, where he put the painting inside and climbed in behind it. She heard him curse. Climbing back out, he moved from body to body on the ground, rifling pockets until he found the keys.

When it finally roared to life and the back-up lights came on, Hannah shrank deeper, praying he wouldn’t spot her in the rearview mirror. The tires spun on gravel as he careened back in a tight circle, one of the wheels bumping over a man’s leg. As the headlights panned over the clearing, Hannah saw the rumpled tweed coat of Liggett’s last victim and tears sprang to her eyes. Then Liggett shifted gears and the van roared back toward the main road.

Eyes readjusting to the dark, she got to her feet and hurried over to Teagarden. She crouched next to him and reached out to his still form, feeling for a pulse, knowing she wouldn’t find one.

“Oh, Will—I’m so sorry.”

Sorry he was gone. Sorry to be patting down his pockets for the cell phone she hoped he was carrying. Sorry he’d ever followed her out here.

She found a cell phone as well as the Beretta that had fallen from his hand. After one last, regretful squeeze of his arm, she got to her feet and ran to check the other car in the clearing, a big white Toyota Highlander. The keys were in the ignition. She jumped in and fired it up, heading back toward the main road and turning in the direction she’d seen the taillights of the panel van disappear.

As she drove, she dialed 9-1-1 and called in the scene on the service access road. “You need to let Special Agent Joe Towle of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office know about this, too,” she added.

“Officers are on their way,” the dispatcher said. “I want you to stay—”

“Call Towle. He’ll bring the cops up to speed.”

“Ma’am, you need to remain—”

But Hannah had already disconnected. Then she dialed another number from memory.

Russo bellowed as soon as he heard her voice. “The GPS on your bloody car isn’t working!”

“I know. I chucked it. Were you there at the diner? I spotted Lindsay.”

“Yeah, but we got caught up in that damn diversion. Why did you throw the GPS away?”

“Did they find the instructions Gladding left me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then you know why. He knew there’d be a bug on the car. I was worried he’d have eyes on me the whole time. The instructions were specific.”

“Teagarden took off after you in a Bureau SUV.”

She was silent for a moment. “He’s dead, John. Liggett killed him.” She told him about the ambush in the park.

“Liggett killed Gladding, too?”

“I think so. Or one of the other guys, I’m not sure. There was a falling-out, by the look of things. Now Liggett’s on the move and he’s in a hurry. I’m trying to catch up to him and figure out where he’s going.”

“No! Dammit, Hannah, just pull over and let us take it from here. We’ll find Liggett. Tell me what he’s driving.”

“You don’t get it, Russo. He’s got a bomb. You know what they said about the guy—he likes to blow things up. Well, he sure as hell looks like a man on a mission now. He didn’t even bother to go back and finish me off, on the off chance some campers or something heard that massacre back there and called it in. He was hurrying to make tracks when I last saw him. To me, that says he’s determined to see this thing through.”

“Okay, try to see if you can spot him,” Russo agreed reluctantly, “but stay well back and keep the damn phone on. I’m going to call it in to Towle and then I’ll get right back to you.”

“He’s in a white panel van. Towle will probably want to lay in roadblocks north and south. And by the way, I’m in a white Toyota Highlander at the moment. The keys to my car disappeared, so I had to commandeer this boat. Tell Towle what I’m in so his guys don’t decide to get trigger-happy.”

“Roger,” Russo said.

Hannah frowned. “John? He’s gonna go south.”

“What?”

“Liggett. Think about it. What’s down here that would make a good target for a nut job like that?”

Russo hesitated only a split second—it was that obvious. “The San Onofre nuclear power plant.”

“Bingo.”

“Okay, let me call it in to Towle. I’m on the 5 South now, so I’m not too far from your position. And Hannah? Try to spot him, but do not put yourself in harm’s way. Got it?”

“Yes, boss.”

“You got anybody on base with experience disarming bombs?” Agent Towle shouted over the noise of the rotors. He and Ito had been picked up by an FBI chopper.

“We’re the United States Marine Corps, sir,” the major from Camp Pendleton said dryly. “We do it all. What kind of bomb you got?”

“Not sure. Conventional? Nuke? Dirty, maybe?”

“How soon you want the team, and where?”

“In your backyard and
now
. We think the target might be San Onofre, so one way or another, it could go hot fast.”

“Roger that.
Semper fi
.”

“Semper fi.”

As Towle signed off, Ito, sitting behind the chopper pilot, tapped his boss on the shoulder. “You’re an ex-Marine?”

“
Former
Marine,” Towle corrected, “never ex. How much longer?” he asked the pilot.

“Not long. You know where you want to set down?”

“Stand by.”

By the time Hannah caught up to the white van, it was back on the freeway and almost at the San Diego County line. Russo had called her back after speaking to Towle.

“He’s a couple of car lengths ahead of me,” she said.

“I’m about five miles back. Stay on him. Towle’s on his way in a chopper and he’s got a crisis response team mobilizing out of Camp Pendleton.”

“Good.”

The nuclear plant was cheek by jowl with the Marine base. At this point, Hannah thought, she’d take her breaks where she got them.

“Hold it…” she said, and then, “he’s exiting the freeway. Picking up the old coast highway.”

“Okay, so that pretty much clinches it. Try to keep him in sight as long as there’s other traffic, but if it comes down to just you and him, back off. I’ll call it in to Towle now and get right back to you.”

But Liggett was moving like a bat out of hell now. What she hadn’t told Russo was that there’d been next to no traffic from almost the moment they’d turned onto the back road, so Hannah had zero hope she hadn’t been made.

A couple of minutes later the van’s red taillights disappeared.

When Russo called back, she tried to describe exactly where they’d been when Liggett had killed his lights. “He turned up a sand track about a quarter mile later. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t seen his brake lights flash. He obviously knows exactly where he’s going.”

As Hannah had followed Liggett around the turn, she’d wrestled out of her jacket and tossed it out the window. “I left you a bread crumb, Hansel,” she told Russo now, describing what she’d done. “I love that jacket. Pick it up when you see it, okay?”

“Forget it. I’ll buy you a new one.”

“Big spender. I’ve gotta hang up now, John. I need both hands to drive.”

“Hannah—”

Two could play this game, she thought, killing the Highlander’s headlights. She took the bumpy trail at a snail’s pace to avoid hitting her brakes and giving him a red glow to more easily spot her in the rearview mirror as he moved toward the power plant. Distances were tough to judge in the dark, but the white panel van picked up and reflected what little light there was, so she spotted him periodically a few hundred yards up ahead. She rolled down the windows to listen for his engine, but all she heard was the Highlander. Another argument for driving a hybrid.

Over the next half mile, the road turned more and more hilly. She had backed off the accelerator, afraid the heavy SUV was getting too close to the van, but as a long hill rose ahead of her, her speed dropped so precipitously that she feared bogging down in the sand. She gunned it a little going up the incline, but just as she topped the crest, a spectral gleam appeared in front of her.

“Dammit!”

She slammed on the breaks—too late. The Highlander plowed into the van, the airbag exploding in her face, knocking the wind out of her and pounding her aching head into the headrest.