Stone - 25 - Collateral Damage

guy Barrington do?”
    “He has a cover as a lawyer, but he’s CIA.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because the assistant director of the CIA is living there with him.”
    “Habib, did it ever occur to you that they may just be fucking?”
    Habib stopped eating. “No,” he said. “A prominent woman like that?”
    “Your thinking is very old-fashioned,” Jasmine said. “Prominent women need sex just as much as everyone else.”
    “Well, we have a photograph of him entering the CIA office building with her. That says to me that he’s CIA.”
    “Okay, so he’s CIA, but that helps make my point. If he is with the Agency, that house is going to be a fortress. Look at what happened when we tried to blow up the CIA building—almost nothing.”
    “Do you have a solution to this problem?”
    “How much of the plastique do we have left after the other two explosives?”
    “A little over a hundred kilos.”
    “That’s about two hundred and fifty pounds.”
    “Yes, enough for many more jobs. We used only a kilo on the restaurant explosion.”
    “Then we’ll use all of it for the Turtle Bay job.”
    Habib’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”
    “Entirely. How do we move it?”
    “In a van. It’s in one-kilo blocks. We’d pack them into boxes holding about ten kilos and stack them together.”
    “How do we detonate them all at once?”
    “The detonators we have will set off a kilo block, then the resulting shock and heat from that explosion would be more than sufficient to set off the whole lot. It would happen so fast as to seem like one huge explosion.”
    “And we can set off the one-kilo explosion with a cell phone?”
    “Correct. The small electrical charge is enough to set off the blasting cap or detonator, which sets off the plastique.”
    “I see.”
    “Do you? I mean, do you have any idea what a hundred kilos of that stuff will do?”
    “A very great deal, I should think.”
    “It will take out not only Barrington’s house but at least half the houses in the block. Maybe all the houses in the block. The fireball created would set anything standing on fire.”
    “How do we get it in place?”
    “We drive a van into the block, already loaded and prepared, then we retreat several blocks away and call the number of the cell phone connected to the detonator.”
    “Or we have a suicide bomber do it.”
    “I’m not sure that the people available to us can be trusted to go through with it.”
    “The others did it.”
    “We used the best candidates first.”
    “All right, we don’t need them, we’ll do it ourselves.”
    “It’s entirely possible,” Habib said.
    “We set it off from our escape car, then we head west.”
    “All right,” Habib said.
    “You still sound doubtful.”
    “It’s just that I’ve never made and detonated a bomb this big before.”
    “The bigger the bomb, the bigger the effect,” she said.
    “If you like.”
    Jasmine smiled. “I like.”

Lance Cabot stood on the far side of the Oval Office from the president’s desk and listened as he made his address to the nation. Once again, he was impressed at how Will Lee could project informality and sincerity in a talk on television. The president always spoke perfect standard English but still managed to engender an intimacy with his audience. Lance noted that there was no teleprompter present. Finally, he said good night, and a moment later the lights were turned off and the crew began removing equipment from the large room.
    Kate Lee, who had been standing closer to her husband, in the doorway to his secretary’s office, walked over, kissed him on the lips, and whispered a few words in his ear, then the two of them, holding hands, walked across the room to where Lance stood.
    “That was a remarkable job, Mr. President,” Lance said, offering his hand.
    “Thank you, Lance. Hungry?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Then let’s head up to the quarters.”
    “After you, sir.” Lance followed them out of the Oval Office and to the elevator. Once in the living room of the quarters, the president shucked off his jacket, and Lance was surprised to see that his shirt was soaked through with sweat.
    “Let me slip into something more comfortable, and I’ll be right back,” the president said, then left the room.
    “Let me get you a drink, Lance,” Kate said. “We’ll be having one.”
    “A scotch on the rocks would be welcome, ma’am.”
    “A blend or a single malt? We have, let’s see, Laphroaig and