Conspiracy by Dana Black Read Free Book Online

pull over, slam the top back into the well, and check to make certain the grenades had not been disturbed before he pushed on. 
    The jeep was another detail he had missed. He had tried to check them all, but he had failed in the most important, that of choosing the people he worked with. Now the whole operation was coming apart on him just like the top of the damned jeep. If only he hadn’t panicked, he thought. For the first time he began to worry that this job might be too big for him. He tried to dismiss the fear. The Patrón had forced him to do the job, so the Patrón must have believed. In Groves’s business, you could tell when someone had lost the touch.
    But the question still haunted him. Four years ago, would he have been so unsettled by those unplanned killings? Four years ago, would he have fled away from the road, abandoning his carefully positioned car? He thought of the change of clothing, the ID, the cash he’d brought along to pay off the other two—all waiting in that inconspicuous little station wagon. Stupid, he whispered under his breath. Really stupid.
    And now he was out on the highway in an open jeep.
    He had started watching the truck stops an hour earlier, but had no luck. He allowed himself only fifteen minutes at each one, not leaving the jeep at any time, because he wasn’t about to risk going inside and then finding the highway patrol waiting for him around the jeep when he came out again. He just sat there watching the restaurant entrance, as though he were waiting for a traveling companion to come back out from the men’s room or the coffee counter.
    In a way, of course, he was waiting for someone. But he could not stay long, because he could not afford to call attention to himself. So when fifteen minutes passed and he had not seen what he was looking for, he would start up the jeep again and move on east.
    As he waited, he grew progressively more nervous. Every minute he spent here in the jeep, the chances of his capture increased. Unquestionably he would have to make his move in the next hour; one hundred fifty miles back, there were four dead bodies. They would be discovered—if not by the soon-to-arrive inspection team, which he and LeBow had impersonated in order to get through to the guard station, then to get past the afternoon guard shift. Or, if there had been unanswered radio traffic and an investigation had already been made, the army might even now know what they had lost. An all-out search would be inevitable. They would start by trying to locate the jeep that had made the only tire tracks leading away from the dead men.
    To calm himself, Groves tried to focus on the things that had gone right with the operation so far. He had the grenades, his main objective. He had the keys to his equipment in New Orleans. And now the worst was over because he no longer had to depend on other people. LeBow, who had panicked and shot the guard at the watch station, was gone. Scofield, who had failed to get control of the other guard, was gone too. Both men should have been fading from Graves’s memory, because they had bungled. The others, the two legitimate guards, were of more concern. Their deaths would intensify the search for him. At least the fat one had used good enough marksmanship to cripple LeBow without damaging the grenades.
    But was there anything else that hadn’t gone wrong? Groves tried to take the bad luck as an omen that things would now begin to fall into place for him. He would need good luck to make his delivery before his deadline. If he was delayed somehow—he did not want to think of the consequences. He closed his eyes, shook his head, as though by movement he could drive the offending fears away.
    When he opened his eyes, he saw what he had been looking for. Climbing out from behind the wheel of a blue Chevy sedan was a sandy-haired salesman type in a short-sleeved white shirt and loosened tie; the jacket to his blue suit, on a hanger in the back, looked like