Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) (29 page)

So saying, she strode off the porch and into the living room.

“Is that,” Liz asked, “the woman who met you?”

“Yes.”

“Then what the hell…”

“I don’t know, Liz. But let’s look up SEMTEX.”

They bent together over the computer.

As they did so they head a car door slam.

Then they heard the motor start.

Then they heard the car pull away.

“Where did she…”

“She’s gone,” said Liz, quietly.

“But I want to…”

“She’s gone…whoever she is…and we’ll never see her again.”

They were silent for a time.

Then they looked at the computer screen.

Which said:

“SEMTEX is a brand of plastic explosive widely used for industrial purposes. Also known as C-4 or ‘plastique,’ it…”

Plastic explosive

Plastic

Explosive.

Liz bowed her head, and, as though praying, said:

“Oh my God.”

And then again:

“Oh my God! They’re going to blow up Aquatica.”

And then again:

“Tonight. At eight o’clock. With all the world watching.”

And one final time:

“They’re going to blow up Aquatica.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE MANY USES OF PLASTIC

They sat in silence for some seconds.

“So what is this plastique, Liz?”

“It’s bad stuff. I got to know about it in Iraq. Lot of missing legs because of plastique. It’s kind of the weapon of choice in roadside bombings. You only need a tiny amount. Use just a bit more and you’re blowing up buildings.”

“Or oil rigs.”

“Yes.”

More silence.

“Do you believe this woman, Nina?”

‘Yes.”

‘Why?”

“Can we not believe her?”

“No.”

“So what do we do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Call the police?”

“The Bay St. Lucy Police?”

“We’re back to Moon Rivard, and that’s crazy.”

“State police? FBI?”

“I’m always in this position,” said Nina, softly. “I think I know something. And it’s important. And nobody will listen to me. You can’t call your paper, I guess.”

Liz half smiled.

“Right. Call
The New York Times
, who have just rehired me after I filed a crazy story about Aquatica, with another crazy story about Aquatica.”

“So how many assistant managers have you slept with?”

“Not enough.”

“OK. I have one contact that I always trust. I have my new little phone here. I’ll try him.”

She called Jackson Bennett’s office; no answer. Jackson Bennett’s home; Sonia answered:

‘Bennett residence.”

“Sonia?”

“Ms. Bannister?”

“Yes. Sonia, is Jackson at home?”

“No, ma’am, he isn’t. He’s one of the guests at the big gala on the oil rig. He left an hour ago. I think they wanted to fly him out a little early, because there was some legal problem between the company and Bay St. Lucy. I guess he should be on the helicopter now.”

Nina felt her heart fall.

She was silent for a time.

Finally, Sonia said:

‘It’s really exciting, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Nina answered, quietly, envisioning Jackson getting off the helicopter.

All of them, all the guests, getting off the helicopters.

Drinking champagne.

Having a good time.

Seven o’clock.

Seven thirty.

Somehow she knew eight o’clock would be the time.

She knew this.

“Thank you, Sonia.”

“Sure. Shall I take a message?”

A message
, she found herself thinking.

Jackson, you’ve just stepped onto a time bomb.

And I know this, and I know when the bomb is going off.

And I can’t do a damn thing about it, because most people already think I’m crazy.

“No, Sonia. No message.”

And she clicked the phone closed.

So they sat for a moment or so more.

Then Nina:

“Ok, so let’s go to the airport. We’ve got to tell somebody about this.”

“You want to take my rental car?”

“Let’s do it.”

And they did.

Ten minutes later they were navigating the streets of Bay St. Lucy, watching the huge beige helicopters land at the airport a mile in front of them.

“It’s brilliant, when you think about it,” said Liz, gripping the wheel hard.

“I don’t know. I’m still confused.”

“Well, they’re not. Whoever ‘they’ happens to be.”

“So explain all of this to me.”

“From what the woman told us, I would say we’re dealing with a highly professional group that works for some international terrorist organization.”

“Which organization?”

“I don’t know. There are a lot of them. But they’re often tracked by the FBI, and they have difficulty getting access to planes or buildings. So other organizations spring up to help them. The terrorists pay these organization huge amounts of money. And the organizations, in turn—being comprised of faceless people with no criminal records––”

“Blow up buildings.”

“Or they blow up Aquatica. What a terrorist coup this will be, Nina. And we helped them put it together.”

“I still don’t see…”

“I know, and I’m only beginning to. But let’s say there’s a team of pro’s out there, working on the rig. Somehow they’ve gotten hired, despite Aquatica’s security.”

“Well, that’s conceivable. Brewster Dale, would-be Faulkner expert and security man. What a joke. They’ve gotten him to believe––him as well as the people working for him—that this whole thing has to do with drugs. Which we know now, is ridiculous, and at most a cover up for what’s really happening.”

“Okay, so they’ve gotten through Mr. Dale. From what I know of these rigs—and I’ve had a little experience with them—the drilling tubes have to be lined with cement. Some of the spillage problems in other rigs have happened because the company used a lower grade cement than is recommended. Also, sometimes water gets mixed with the cement, and the resulting mixture—impure and too soft—has to be chipped away. A guy has to be physically lowered into the tube to do this.”

“So if the guy is one of these…”

“…these ghosts, for want of a better word.”

“Good,” said Nina. “These ghosts, then. If he’s working for them…”

“He simply attaches, somehow, a small packet of plastique in the well wall and plasters it over with cement.”

“How large a packet?”

Liz merely shrugged.

“I’ve seen four ounces destroy a building.”

‘Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“How does the plastique get set off?”

“A detonator of some kind. It can be very simply rigged. If they know what they’re doing…”

“And they seem to.”

“Yes, they do. At any rate, you can detonate the explosive with a cell phone. That’s how it’s usually done in Afghanistan.”

“But wouldn’t you have to be close by?”

“Within half a mile.”

“So what are we saying? One of them is out there now.”

“Probably,” said Liz, “The leader. The woman you knew as Annette referred to him as ‘the tool master.’”

Nina nodded.

“I know the tool master. Tom Holder. He’s got a kind of cockney accent.”

“For the time being. Actually, he probably is no more British than ‘Annette’ was Cajun.”

“So our job,” Nina continued, “is somehow to get out to Aquatica and unmask this guy.”

“Yes.”

“But Liz, what did you mean about our being ‘used’ in all of this?”

“Don’t you see? The way everything worked out—it turned out perfectly for them.”

“Go on.”

“Edgar found out about the plastique. I don’t know how. Maybe those bewildering numbers on the disk were the answer all the time. Maybe, chemical engineer that he was, he could get a reading back from the ‘cement’ that was being put in, that didn’t match the viscosity reading of actual cement. At any rate, he figured out what was going on, and he may have also figured out that a team of…”

“Ghosts,” said Nina, quietly.

“Yes, ghosts, were responsible for setting up the whole scheme, getting the plastique on board Aquatica, plotting the explosion.”

Nina continued:

“He was terrified though, because he didn’t know which people out there he could trust.”

“Right. There was only one man he actually did think he could trust.”

“And that was Holder, Liz. The tool master is, I think they said, the second highest-ranking man on board—but the one most likely to understand about cement and its application.”

“Right.”

“So Edgar flew into town. He wanted to get off the vessel, maybe not sure if the gang was onto him or not. He called Holder, who had also flown in, probably on a separate helicopter flight, and set up a meeting in the early morning hours.”

“The meeting took place,” said Liz. “And exactly where it took place we’ll never know.”

“But Holder—of all of these people, if truth be known—was and is a professional assassin.”

Liz shook her head:

“Edgar never had a chance.”

“All right, but then…”

“Then comes the beautiful part, Nina, if you want to look at it that way. Edgar, you have to understand, had been calling Holder off and on during the night. On one of these calls he might have said that he didn’t understand the readings. Might have suggested to Holder that the two of them get in touch with the brilliant professor Daruka Narang.”

“So when I called Holder…”

“He was probably shocked to get the call. But he’s not dumb. And immediately it came to him. He imitated an Indian accent…”

“…we know these people can imitate any accent…”

“…pretended to be Narang, and suggested you fly to Lafayette.”

“Why didn’t he just meet me in Bay St. Lucy?”

Liz shook her head:

“No, no, it wouldn’t have worked. You were already suspicious of anybody working for LP so you wouldn’t have given the disk to Holder himself. And a professor of Narang’s rank was probably not going to go flying off around the country to look at some phantom disk.”

“So I went to Lafayette. And met two ghosts.”

“Whom, like the fake Annette said, we’ll probably never see again.”

“And once you did that, Nina, everything fell into place for them.”

“They got the disk.”

“Which was their first priority. But once they had the disk, they had the chance to take what could have been a monstrous, disastrous, terrorist attack…and make it infinitely worse.”

“The fake Narang…”

“..or somebody, we’ll never know who.”

“Wrote a story so horrific, with such urgent overtones, that you would have to write it, and
The Times
would have to print it.”

“And, of course, I would write it and vouch for it, because I had the word of …”

“Me.”

“You. The solid and dependable Nina Bannister, solver of the Robinson Case and The Reddington murder.”

“The data couldn’t be false, at least in your mind, because I had gotten it directly from Aquatica’s computers.”

“So
The Times
printed it, and all hell broke loose.”

“Now,” Nina continued, “let me be sure I understand this. The ghost team knew, first, that the environmentalists would demonstrate all over the country, insisting that big oil rigs were inherently dangerous and should be shut down. But the ghosts also knew that engineers and scientists would descend on Aquatica…”

“…looking not for the subtle marks of plastique being somewhere hidden by cement…”

“…but for the problems,” Nina continued,
 
“outlined in
The Times
story.”

“Which were fake problems to begin with.”

“So Aquatica would get a clean bill of health, in the spotlight of world attention.”

Liz nodded:

“And so Aquatica would also do something very stupid.”

“Like plan this gala.”

“Making them the most juicy terrorist target in the history of the world.”