When the night was late and the moon was low, he climbed the back wall of Faris Hamzah’s compound and walked up to the house. He poured gasoline along two sides of the house and had started along the third when he ran out of gasoline. He was careful to keep the entrance and the front door clear, so any people inside could get out.
He left the bucket, but kept the hammer and nails. When he judged the time was right he crouched to move forward and dragged himself under the first Range Rover. He reached up from below, disconnected the battery, and then cut one of the cables. Then he removed the pair of metal jerry cans for extra gasoline mounted on the rear door of each Rover, went under the vehicle, punched a hole in the gas tank, and filled the cans. He repeated the process with the other two Range Rovers. He hid the six twenty-liter cans at the back of Hamzah’s compound.
He retreated, and began to walk through the darkened city. When he reached the police station he got into his white pickup truck, drove it to Hamzah’s neighborhood, and parked it at the rear of his compound with the motor running. He loaded the six gasoline cans from the Range Rovers into the back of his truck.
He walked around the perimeter. When he reached the spot where the Range Rovers were parked he could see that the draining of their tanks was complete. They were sitting in a narrow lake of gasoline that reflected the light of the stars. He climbed the wall and locked the gate from the inside.
He stepped close to the rear of the house, lit a match, and started the first fire, then ran up the woodpile to vault over the wall to his truck. Within seconds the flames were licking up the sides of the house, and then billowing above it, throwing light throughout the compound. Soon he knew the guards had noticed the fire, because they began rattling the gate, then pounding on it, then throwing themselves against it. Finally they began to fire their guns at the lock. That seemed to work, because the shooting stopped and the two men ran inside to wake Faris Hamzah. Chase stood by the wall and waited.
The two guards had awakened the household with their gunfire. There was already a woman in the house screaming and shouting, and in a moment she emerged with two children and an elderly woman. They ran out under the sun roof that provided shade for the doorway during the day, and then out the gate.
Faris Hamzah came out a minute later carrying a sealed cardboard carton. His two guards came out after him, each carrying two more cartons, which they started to carry toward the gate, but Faris Hamzah yelled something in Arabic, and they put them near the woodpile instead. That way they wouldn’t be tempting to neighbors who were attracted by the commotion and the fire. Faris Hamzah ran back inside to get more, and the two guards followed.
Chase recognized those five boxes, because he had packed them in Luxembourg. He took two of them and tossed them over the wall, and then the other three. He emptied the boxes into his truck’s bed, closed them, brought them back into the compound, and placed them where Hamzah’s guards had left them.
This time when Hamzah and his guards returned with five more cartons, they looked relieved and their confidence seemed to have returned. In the darkness, the fire, and the moving shadows, they could see the growing row of cardboard cartons and seemed to think that they had saved all the money. They ran back into the house, whether to save other valuables or to get water to fight the fire, it didn’t matter. For the moment they were gone.
Chase hoisted himself back over the wall, threw the five full boxes over the wall into his truck and climbed after them, then covered the bed with its canvas tarp. He got into the driver’s seat, lit a cigarette, and drove. He swerved close to the three Range Rovers. He stopped, tossed his burning cigarette into the pool of gasoline under the vehicles, and accelerated. In the rearview mirror he could see the fire flare into life, then streak along the row of cars, engulfing them in undulating light and flames twenty-five feet high.
Sometimes when he remembered the night, he imagined that he had seen Hamzah and his guards come out of the house to find that five boxes were empty and five gone, start shouting in amazement and anger, and then run to the gate to see the three vehicles aflame. He actually never saw that happen, because he was too far away by that time, and had already turned the corner at the first street. But his imagination had supplied the details, so they had become part of the story he had told only twice—once to Anna and once to Emily.