Legends

The man counting the wads of bills, wearing a corduroy sports jacket with the butt of a pistol visible in a shoulder holster, looked up from the ground. “If there are a hundred bills in each packet like they say,” he told Lincoln, “the count is right.”

“The last thing we would do is cheat you,” Daoud said. “We still have unfinished business in Boa Vista on the night of the new moon. Have you made progress with the problem of radioactive waste?”

“I have located twenty-three-thousand spent plutonium pits stored in two sheds at a secret military site. Security is insignificant—it consists of barbed-wire around the sheds and padlocks on the doors.”

Daoud was someone who didn’t display emotions easily. Now, unable to contain his excitement, he danced a little jig on the cement floor of the hangar. “My Saudi friend will be extremely pleased. In what area of Russia are these sheds?”

Lincoln only smiled.

Daoud said quickly, “It was not my intention to be indiscreet. I am trying to calculate how difficult it will be to retrieve a quantity of these pits and transport them across the various frontiers into Afghanistan.”

“It can be accomplished. I shall require a down payment of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars U.S., in used one-hundred-dollar bills, payable when I meet the Saudi in Boa Vista on the night of four February.”

Daoud started to say that the down payment would be waiting at Boa Vista when everyone was distracted by a commotion at the rear of the hangar. Daoud’s fat grandson could be seen squirming through a gap in the corrugated roofing. Crying out in Arabic, he came padding toward his grandfather. Daoud plunged a hand into the deep pocket of his raincoat; it emerged clutching a pistol fitted with a silencer. “My grandson tells that the men around the camp fire in the field are armed with automatic rifles—he crept close and saw people distributing them from the back of the panel truck. It appears we have walked into a trap—”

The headlights of a dozen automobiles, glimmering in the predawn mist that clung to the ground, materialized on the ramp coming off the Pulaski Skyway half a mile away. The cars formed up in a line abreast and headed in the direction of the hangar.

Leroy cried, “Give me the detonator—I’ll set off the sacks and blow ’em all to hell,” but before he could do anything the wiry man who was counting the money scooped up the valise and darted out the side of the hangar, disappearing into the darkness. Daoud pulled his grandson under the moving van. Leroy grabbed Lincoln’s arm and drew him toward the fallen squares of corrugated roof as the headlights began to play across the interior of the hangar. “Goddamn,” Leroy muttered, hauling a shiny wooden-handled Webley and Scott from his belt and spinning the chambers angrily. “You was followed here, Lincoln,” he said in a harsh whisper.

“You or Daoud were the ones who were followed,” Lincoln retorted.

Behind them they could make out the distant shouts of men coming across the field from the direction of the campfire.

Leroy crouched behind a sheet of tin. “My daddy died in one of their jails,” he said. “Listen up, Lincoln—it’s still night out. All we got to do is shoot down one or two of ’em—when the others panic an’ go to ground, we can squirm off into the field and make a run for it.”

The automobiles, with their headlights flickering over the moving van, pulled up around the hangar. Silhouettes could be seen running in front of the headlights as men took up positions on the hangar’s perimeter. Some of them were armed with rifles, others carried plastic shields. A voice Lincoln thought he recognized came echoing over a bullhorn. “This is the FBI. We know you’re in there. You are completely surrounded. You have two minutes to come out with your hands raised over your heads.”

In the middle of the hangar Daoud rolled clear of the moving van and rose to his feet. He raised one hand to shield his eyes from the headlights and started to walk in the direction of the bullhorn. When he was halfway there the hand holding the pistol emerged from behind his back. Lincoln could hear the hiss of two silenced shots before several rifles firing on automatic cut him down. The Egyptian, propelled backward by the bullets slamming into his chest, crumpled to the cement. Sobbing like a baby, the fat Egyptian boy crawled from under the van to his grandfather’s body and flung his arms around him. Then the boy stumbled to his feet and, peering through his tears into the headlights, tugged the pistol from his shoulder holster. Before he could get it clear, high powered bullets burrowed into his chest.