In the wee hours of the morning, with Sully standing guard on 2nd Street to let them know when it was clear of security guards, they’d rehearsed throwing the metal drain-cover doors open wide and crowding into the six feet or so of space to fire their weapons. The limo letting Advisor Omura out on this north side would be stopped less than twelve feet away. All the boys would be wearing ski masks, just like real terrorists. Coyne had bought Palestinian keffiyeh scarves for everybody, but Val definitely thought that this was a bridge too far. Too cute.
After they all blazed away, semiautos and flechette guns, the plan then was to run like hell. A curve in the sewer path just twenty feet from the opening would give them cover, although Coyne warned them to stay away from the walls. Ricochets would travel far down there. The inner grate would keep the cops or security people from sliding in to chase them and all the nearby manhole covers and storm sewer entrances were firmly welded shut. The cops wouldn’t know which direction to hunt for them. The first exit from the sewers was more than a mile east of where they planned to do the shooting, but Coyne’s plan was for them to run almost half a mile north and then west through the ever-twisting maze before coming up and out near Cigna Hospital. They’d hacksawed and cut that storm sewer door open as well. There was a Dumpster for biohazard materials next to the storm sewer behind that hospital—Coyne had carefully cut through the padlock chain so that the cut shouldn’t be noticed—and all their guns would be tossed there. They’d wear gloves during the shooting.
The I-10 Open Air Market
“We’ll all be in our own homes watching the replay on CNN before the cops and Jap security guys pull their thumbs out of their asses,” said Coyne.
“What if some of us get wounded or killed?” asked Val. “Then it’s just a matter of time before the cops and FBI find the names of the rest of us in the flashgang.”
Coyne had scowled furiously at Val. “
Val’s phone later told him that the Russian meant, roughly, “you asshole.”
The leering face of Vladimir Putin also scowled at Val but seemed to be speaking to Coyne. “
Val hadn’t used his phone to translate that. He got the general idea and knew that the Putin T-shirt would love to see him dead.
Coyne had come over and put his arm around Val, gesturing the others closer until it had turned into a goddamned group hug. “Nobody’s gonna get wounded or dead, Val my droogy pal,” Coyne said confidently. “This is a lark. We’re gonna flash on this for the rest of our lives.”
“As long as the rest of our lives isn’t counted in minutes,” muttered Val.
Coyne had laughed and punched Val in the upper arm. “No guts, no glory. You wanna be like the rest of the walking dead up there in the world?”
“No,” said Val after a few seconds of thought. “I don’t.”
Val spent the week trying to figure out what to do. He was neither an idiot—as Dinjin, Toohey, Cruncher, Sully, Monk, and Gene D. increasingly seemed to be—or crazy as a shithouse rat, which he was all but sure Billy Coyne was. Shooting at a Nipponese Federal Advisor these days was as serious (and probably more serious) than shooting at the president of the United States. The FBI and Homeland Security would become involved
Even the hardcores like Aryan Brotherhood and al Qaeda–America knew better than to try to kill a Japanese Advisor.
Val knew that something was behind Coyne’s certainty—nuts or not—and he poked around on the Internet with his phone computer for three days before he found it on a city-Advisor liaison bulletin board site: Ms. Galina Kschessinska—formerly Mrs. Galina Coyne, according to archived bulletins going back six years—a much-lauded executive assistant in charge of liaison between the City of Los Angeles Transportation Department and the office of Federal Advisor Daichi Omura for the past nine years, was taking early retirement so that she could return to Moscow to be with her extended family. Friday, September 17, was her last day and she planned to leave for Moscow on Saturday the eighteenth. Ms. Kschessinska would be taking her sixteen-year-old son with her. Plans for a return to the U.S. were indefinite. “I just want to see my family—get reacquainted,” Ms. Kschessinska told the Transportation Department’s bulletin reporter, “and then, of course, we’ll be coming back so my son can fulfill his Selective Service obligation.”