01 Babylon Rising (23 page)

“Just one…” He put a foot on the next step and pushed
upward, straining like a weight lifter. “And…uh…another,” he grunted.

He had his eyes closed and realized he was at the top only when his foot hit the bottom of the door with a clang. Maneuvering around so he could grasp the handle while still keeping hold of Paul, he gave it a firm tug. Nothing. He paused to get a good lungful of air and gave it everything he had. It wouldn’t budge. Either it was locked or the explosion had somehow jammed it shut.

He pulled back, mind racing. No point in wasting his last reserves of energy pounding on the door. He’d have to go back the way he’d come and hope the fire hadn’t cut them off and they could somehow get through the hole in the floor before the whole structure collapsed on top of them.

He turned to go back down the steps, and suddenly there was a roar of screaming metal, and then a rush of cool air as the door was torn off its hinges and he found he was looking into the face of a young firefighter.

“All right, Mr. Murphy,” he said, arms outstretched toward Paul. “Let’s get you the heck out of there.”

Two paramedics took Paul’s weight and carefully laid him down on a stretcher. Murphy’s arms suddenly felt as if they were floating upward and all his muscles seemed to relax at once. He sank to his knees, closed his eyes, and was about to give thanks that he’d managed to get Paul out, when the thought struck him like a sudden blow to the temple.

Paul looked like he was dead.

BY THE TIME
dawn broke over Preston, the fire trucks and the paramedic vans had gone, leaving only a cluster of police cruisers at the front of the church.

FBI Agent Burton Welsh pulled up the collar of his raincoat against the morning chill and breathed in the sickly smell of wet ashes. The wood-frame structure was still intact, the spire standing proud against the rose-tinted sky, but he guessed it would be a while before the sound of hymns came from the blackened husk.

Because of the unknown nature of the explosion, a bomb was suspected, which led to the FBI’s being called in. Hank Baines had been the first agent sent to the scene, making the return trip from Charlotte to Preston. Then, when his preliminary search of the church basement yielded some suspicious
material, Welsh got an emergency summons from his U.N. investigation.

Chief Rawley of the Preston police force was waiting when Welsh arrived. “Your man’s down in the basement.”

“Body count change in the last hour?”

“Yeah, one more. Don’t know who yet, he must have been practically right on top of the blast. Then two more downstairs and two upstairs. Those are the dead. By some miracle, even though there was a pretty good crowd attending church tonight, there were not too many others really badly wounded. Except for the kid they pulled out of the basement, Paul Wallach.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Last I heard, he still hadn’t regained consciousness.”

“Well, let’s get to it.” Welsh followed Rawley down the steps into the basement. They had pumped most of the water out, but the retreating tide had left a scum of sodden ashes under their feet as they made their way to the site of the explosion.

They stopped by the scorched and twisted remains of a steel table that had been blown off its legs. Folding chairs that had fused together in the blast like modernistic sculptures lay around it, along with a scattering of broken power tools.

Welsh leaned closer until his face was just inches from the tabletop. The scorch marks etched deeply into its surface were unmistakable. Baines was studying the marks as well. “Baines. Good work on your phone report.”

“Agent Welsh. It’s good to see you again, sir. Quantico seems like a lot of cases ago. What do you think? Was I right?”

The chief wrinkled his brow. “Right about what? Explosive?”

Welsh snorted. “Chief, you don’t get these from a gas leak.”

Rawley was keen to show he was no hick. “You mean C-four?”

“Ten. Makes these green striations.” Welsh started to examine the floor around the table. “Let’s see what else we’ve got here.”

He bent down by a paper supermarket bag in the corner and pulled a wire that was hanging over its top. “My, my.” He sifted through spools of telephone wire, then held up a pair of detonators. He mimicked pushing the spiked probes into a block of plastic explosive.

Rawley stood with his mouth open as Welsh rummaged some more and came up with a charred circuit board and the half-melted cases of two high-tech cell phones.

He took a plastic evidence bag out of his jacket pocket and slipped the remains of the phones inside. “Baines, get the lab working on these right away. I’m not a technician, but either folks around here leave some very strange items in the pockets of their old suits or this is no ordinary clothing drive.”

Rawley looked sickened. “I know what I’m looking at, but I’m telling you, it just can’t be.”

“Chief, so far every sign I’m seeing down here is pointing one way. Somebody was using the church as a bomb factory. At least for tonight.”

“Welsh, that’s impossible. These people are my neighbors. They’re no more bombers than I am.”

Agent Welsh eyed the chief as if to say that was a less than
convincing argument. “This was not some penny-ante operation either. They weren’t making cherry bombs.”

“So, what, you think this C-ten stuff went off accidentally?”

“Sure. Terrorists are always blowing themselves up. Comes with the territory.”

“Terrorists
. I can’t believe I’m even saying the word. Not in this place.”

“Rawley, terrorists can be anywhere these days. From just a quick look down here, you got yourself a flea market of stuff that can go boom. With a few different kinds of ways to blow people up, it doesn’t look like a terrorist bombed this place. Or maybe I should say that some of the neighbors you’re swearing by were playing the terrorist home game and blew up the basement by mistake. Happens often enough, especially when you have rank amateurs messing with this stuff.”

Agent Welsh picked up a charred flyer from the floor and read out loud. “‘Will you be left behind?!?!’”

“For what it’s worth, the reverend of the church says he never saw that flyer before, nor any of these others.” Baines pointed to some bundles of now-drenched flyers and brochures on the floor.

“Yeah? I was beginning to think I was the only man in America not on the subscription list for this religious hooey. But it looks like the reverend needed to check down in his basement a little more frequently. Were the dead and wounded all locals?”

“As far as I know. Except for the kid, Paul Wallach. He was from the university, but I don’t know where he comes from.”

“Chief, does a small-town college like this get a lot of
weirdos, freaks, and troublemakers hanging around campus? I mean, you don’t know this kid Wallach, I bet. What’s to say he’s not some out-of-towner down here to shake things up?”

“Well, all I know about him is he’s a friend of Nelson, a coed who works for Michael Murphy. She’s a great kid, and I couldn’t imagine her getting caught up with anything fringe.”

“Fringe. That’s a quaint term. She a good member of this good church?”

“Yeah. Welsh, you can’t be serious that somebody like Nelson or any of these people could actually have been making bombs down here.”

“Chief, until we can trace every step of every bit of this stuff and solve this bombing, the only person who’s not a suspect is me—and that’s only because this is the first church I’ve set foot in since I was fifteen.”

TALON PREFERRED BEING
close in, looking at his victims face-to-face. It was neater, riskier, and always more memorable to look at their fear just before he slashed them. Of course, he also derived extreme pleasure from the deadly precision of the falcons he had trained for so many years.

Explosions were so messy, even with these new thin, ultra-high-powered bombs.

But tonight’s was effective. He admired the scene from the shadows of the parking lot. There was enough explosive force in that backpack to bring down half the building, and it had been packed into a plastic sheet that looked like a laminated pocket protector. There were also other explosive materials packed in the bags he and Chuck had planted around the basement, but it would not take the FBI long to determine that those were just window dressing.

It did satisfy him to be perpetrating an act of major mayhem, with a real body count, as opposed to all his work up in New York.

Too bad the oaf Chuck could not have lived to see the results of their setup. Once he had killed Chuck in the basement, he had packed the C-10 explosive sheet into the backpack, since he hadn’t wanted Chuck walking around with it, then put the wired backpack back on Chuck and left him in the basement. Talon had checked to make sure that Chuck had left Paul Wallach far from the explosion so that he would survive.

Chaos and fear, those would be the legacies of tonight. Terror coming to a small town, not a big city, and to a church, no less. Making it look like the accidental explosion of a basement bomb factory run by evangelical Christian extremists would not hold up for long under the scrutiny of the FBI. Just like the vapor-thin trail he had left behind with his New York stunt to make it look like extremists were plotting to blow up the
U.N.

There would be days of hysterical news reports following the connections of the church members, of Murphy, and of once they found enough of her brother to make an identification, and her connection to her transfer-student friend, Wallach, who would be cast as an out-of-town troublemaker. And that mystery man who had been seen with Chuck. By the time the FBI saw that the bomb factory “evidence” was just window dressing, the media would have moved. In its wake would be a time of noise and confusion, and people would recall mainly a bunch of crazy evangelicals to be afraid of. Not a bad night’s work.

Then it hit Talon. Hard. Chuck, that miserable loser, had managed to screw up things even after he was dead! His stupid jacket that he got stuck in, so Talon had to cut him out of it. It had fallen to the floor, and with all he had had to do by himself to finish off the ground-zero site in the church basement, he had forgotten to grab it. And in the pocket were the car keys, which also had Talon’s prints, plus he had seen Chuck stuff the last shopping list in his jacket pocket. The chances of the jacket surviving the blast, and of the FBI tracing him from what was left in the pockets, were minute.

But that was enough to make Talon uneasy. He would have to go back, which shouldn’t be too hard with all the rescue teams going in and out.

Talon slipped into the church through what had once been the basement door.

As he did so, Laura Murphy circled the side of the building on her way to the Dodge, in which she always had a trunk full of drinks, a first-aid kit, blankets, and other supplies in case she and Murphy decided on a whim to go off exploring. She got a good look at the figure entering the basement, and he did not look like one of the rescue workers, and he certainly was not a church member. Nor did he look like anyone she knew from Preston, but she was positive that she did recognize him as a face that had been hanging around.

The creep who had been hanging around with Shari’s brother.

Laura forgot about going for the supplies and decided to
follow Chuck’s companion and see why he would be going into the bomb site.

Could it be?
She was horrified at the thought that struck her. Could this stranger and poor, angry, lost Chuck have been involved in this bombing?

She walked down the basement steps, wincing as her wounded knees felt the impact. There was a sound in the darkness ahead, and she limped toward it. The pain in her legs was going to stick with her for a while, it seemed.

But she instantly forgot that pain, because an intense, far greater pain rippled through her as a pair of incredibly strong hands grabbed her arm and throat in the darkness.

“Hello, Mrs. Murphy. It must be bingo night at church, because I’ve just got the big prize.” The voice was hoarse. “I can’t do anything to that husband of yours while he’s still useful to us. But nobody said anything about needing you. And without you, maybe your husband will have more time to work a little quicker.”

Laura did not know what this madman was talking about, but she could not speak, so powerful was the pressure of his hand on her throat. It began crushing her windpipe.

Talon kept pressing, deciding not to use his razor again. The result would be the same.

Laura Murphy looked into the face of Talon, refusing to give him the satisfaction of averting her eyes even though she was shocked by what pure evil could look like.

She started to pray in her silence and she showed him no fear.

CHIEF RAWLEY USHERED
them into the interview room and indicated three chairs on one side of the steel table bolted to the bare floor.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t use my office. I don’t think I could have fit you all in comfortably. Not with all this…” He indicated the two large carboard boxes in the center of the table without looking at them. On the other side of the table, Baines stood up and offered his hand with a neutral expression.

“Reverend Wagoner. Professor Murphy.” He shook hands solemnly with each of them before sitting down again, and his gaze returned to the boxes.

Rawley seated them like an attentive maître d’. “How’s the arm, Bob? You know, folks are saying it’s a miracle you’re alive.”

Wagoner winced as he eased into the chair and adjusted the
cast on his arm. “I can’t feel a whole lot, to be honest, Ed. And that goes for my head too.” He tapped the bandage around his forehead. “Alma says it just goes to show that the Lord knew what He was doing when He made it out of solid maple.”

“And how about you, Murphy?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Ed. Just a few cuts and bruises. I guess I’ve got some maple in me too.”

With a tight smile Rawley went and stood awkwardly to one side of Welsh. He seemed reluctant to occupy the empty chair next to him, as if he wanted to distance himself from what was about to happen.