The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (46 page)

‘Okay,’ said Beckstein. Margaret made a mental note –
What does that word mean
? – then nodded encouragement. ‘I think you’re a member of the
Levelers’ first circle. Probably involved in strategy and planning. And Erasmus was thinking about brokering a much higher-level arrangement between you and my, my, the people I represent.
Represented.’ She swallowed. ‘Are you going to kill me?’ she asked, only a faint quaver in her voice.

‘If you were entirely right in every particular, then I would absolutely have to kill you.’ Margaret smiled to take the sting out of her words before she continued. ‘Luckily
you’re just wrong enough to be safe. But,’ she paused, to give herself time to prepare her next words carefully: ‘I don’t think you’re telling me the entire truth. And
given your suspicions about my vocation, don’t you think that might not be very clever? I want the truth, Miss Beckstein. And nothing but the truth.’

‘I – ’ Beckstein swallowed. Her eyes flickered from side to side, as if seeking a way out: Margaret realized that she was shaking. ‘I’m not sure. Whether
you’d believe me, and whether it would be a good thing if you did.’

This was getting harder to deal with by the minute, Margaret realized. The woman was clearly close to the end of her tether. She’d put a good face on things at first, but there was more to
this than met the eye. ‘I’ve seen Erasmus,’ said Margaret. ‘He told me about the medicine you procured for him.’ She watched the Beckstein woman closely. ‘And he
showed me the disc-playing machine. The, ah,
DVD player.
One miracle might be an accident, but two suggest an interesting pattern. You needn’t worry about me mistaking you for a
madwoman. But you must tell me exactly what has happened to you. Right now, at once, with no dissembling. Otherwise I will not be able to save you . . .’

*

BAM
.

Judith Herz tensed unconsciously, steeling herself for the explosion, and crossed her fingers as the four SWAT team officers swung the battering ram back for a second knock. Not that tensing
would do any good if there was a bomb in the self-storage room . . .

‘Are you sure this is safe?’ asked Rich Wall, fingering his mobile phone like it was a lucky charm.

‘No,’ she snapped.
What do you expect me to say?
‘According to Mike Fleming, the asshole who sent us on this wild goose chase has a hard-on for claymore mines.
That’s why –’ she gestured at the chalk marks on the cinder-block wall the officers were attacking, the heaps of dust from the drills, the fiber-optic camera on its dolly off to
one side ‘– we’re going in through the wall.’

BAM
.

A cloud of dust billowed out. There was a rattle of debris falling from the impact site on the wall. They’d started by drilling a quarter-inch hole, then sent a fiber-optic scope through
with the delicacy of doctors conducting keyhole cardiac bypass surgery. The black plastic-coated hose had snaked around, bringing grainy gray pictures to the monitor screen on the console like
images from a long-sealed Egyptian royal tomb. The dust lay heavy in the lockup room, as if it hadn’t been visited for months or years. Something indistinct and bulky, probably a large oil
tank, hulked a couple of feet beyond the hole, blocking the line of sight to the door to the lockup. The caretaker had kicked up a fuss when she’d told him they were going to punch through
the wall from the other side – after unceremoniously ejecting the occupants’ property – until she’d shown him her FBI card and the warrant the FEMA Sixth Circuit court had
signed in their emergency
in camera
session. (Which the court had granted in a shot, the moment the bench saw the gamma ray spike the roving search truck had registered as it quartered the
city, looking for a sleeping horror.) Then he’d clammed up and gone into his cubicle to phone the landlord.

‘I think we’re gonna need that jack,’ called one of the cops with the ram. His colleagues laid the heavy metal shaft down while two more cops in orange high-visibility jackets
and respirators moved to shovel the rubble aside. ‘Should be through in a couple more minutes.’

Judith glanced at Rich. ‘This is your last chance to take a hike,’ she suggested.

‘Naah.’ Rich glanced down. He was fidgeting with his phone, as if it was a lucky charm. ‘Let’s face it, I wouldn’t get far enough to clear the blast zone, would
I?’

‘That’s true.’
Go on, whistle in the dark.
She shivered involuntarily. The guys with the battering ram didn’t know what they were here for: all they knew was
that the woman from the FBI headquarters staff wanted into the storage room, and wanted in bad. She’d done the old stony stare and dropped an elliptical hint about Mideast terrorists and
fertilizer bombs, enough to keep them on their toes but not enough to make them phone their families and tell them to leave town
now.
But Rich knew what they were looking for, and so did
Bob, who was suiting up in the NIRT truck in the back parking lot along with the rest of his team, and Eric Smith, back in Maryland in a meeting room in Crypto City. ‘You could always step
outside for a last cigarette.’

‘I’m trying to give up. Last cigarettes, that is.’ Rich shuffled from foot to foot as two of the cops grunted and manhandled a construction site jack into place beside the blue
chalk X on the wall, where it was buckling ominously outwards.

‘Okay, one more try,’ called one of the cops – Sergeant McSweeny, Herz thought – as the ram team picked up their pole and began to work up their momentum.

BAM.

This time there was a clatter of rubble falling as overstressed bricks gave way. The dust cleared and she saw there was a hole in the wall where the ram had struck, an opening into the heart of
darkness. The battering ram team shuffled backwards out of the way of the two guys with shovels, who now hefted sledgehammers and went to work on the edges of the hole, widening it.
‘There’s your new doorway,’ said one of the ram crew, wincing and rubbing his upper arm: ‘kinda short on brass fittings and hinges, but we can do you a deal on gravel for
your yard.’

‘Ri-ight,’ drawled Rich. Judith glared at him, keeping her face frozen.
That’s right, I’m a woman in black from a secret government agency,
she thought.
I’ve got no sense of humor and you better not get in my way.
Even if the black outfit was a wind cheater with a big FBI logo, and a pair of 501s.

The cop recoiled slightly. ‘Hey, what’s up with you guys?’

‘You have no need to know.’ Judith relented slightly. ‘Seriously. You won’t read about this in the newspapers, but you’ve done a good job here today.’ She
winced slightly as another sledgehammer blow spalled chips off the edge of the hole in the wall. Which was growing now, to the point where a greased anorexic supermodel might be able to wriggle
through. A large slab of wall fell inward, doubling the size of the hole. ‘Ah, showtime. If you guys could get the jack into position and then clear the area I think we will take it from
here.’

Ten minutes later the big orange jack was screwed tight against the top of the opening, keeping the cinder blocks above the hole from collapsing. The SWAT team was outside in the parking lot,
packing their kit up and shooting random wild-assed guesses about what the hell it was they’d been called in to do, and why: Judith glanced at the wristwatch-shaped gadget strapped to her
left wrist and nodded. It was still clean, showing a background count of about thirty becquerels per second. A tad high for suburban Boston, but nothing that couldn’t be accounted for by the
fly ash mixed into the cinder blocks. The idea of wearing a Geiger counter like a wristwatch still gave her the cold shudders when she thought about it, but that wasn’t so often these days,
not after three weeks of it – and besides, it was better than the alternative.

A big gray truck was backing in to the lot tail-first. Rich waved directions to the driver, as if he needed them: the truck halted with a chuff of air brakes, five feet short of the open door to
the small warehouse unit. The tailgate rattled up to reveal a scene right out of
The X-Files
– half a dozen men and women in bright orange inflatable space suits with oxygen tanks
and black rubber gloves, wheeling carts loaded with laboratory instruments. They queued up in front of the tail lift. ‘Is the area clear?’ Judith’s earpieces crackled.

She glanced around. ‘Witnesses out.’ The SWAT team was already rolling up the highway half a mile away. They were far enough away that if things went really badly they might even
survive.

‘Okay, we’re coming in.’ That was Dr. Lucius Rand, tall and thin, graying at the temples, seconded to the Family Trade Organization from his parent organization. Just like
Judith, like Mike Fleming, like everyone else in FTO – only in his case, the parent organization was Pantex. He was in his late fifties. Rumor had it he’d studied at Ted Taylor’s
knee; Edward Teller had supervised his Ph. D. The tailgate lift ground into operation, space-suited figures descending to planet Earth.

‘We haven’t checked for booby traps yet,’ she warned.

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ Rand sounded impatient.

Judith nodded to Rich as she pulled on a pair of disposable plastic shoe protectors: ‘Let’s go inside.’

The hole in the wall was about two feet wide and three feet high, a jagged gash. She switched on her flashlight – a tiny pocket LED lantern, more powerful than a big cop-style Maglite
– and swept the floor. There were no wires.
Good.
She ducked through the hole, coughing slightly. Her Geiger watch still ticked over normally.
Better
. She stood up and
looked around.

The room was maybe twenty feet long and eight feet wide, with a ten-foot ceiling. Naked unpainted cinder-block walls, a galvanized tin roof, and a concrete floor completed the scene. There was a
big rolling door at one end and dust everywhere. But what caught her attention was the sheer size of the cylinder that, standing on concrete blocks, dominated the room. ‘Sweet baby
Jesus,’ she whispered. It was at least ten feet long, and had to be a good four feet in diameter. There was barely room to walk around the behemoth. She shone her torch along the cylinder,
expecting to see – ‘What the hell?’

‘Herz, report! What have you seen?’

‘It’s a cylinder,’ she said slowly. ‘About ten, twelve feet long, four, five feet in diameter. Supported on concrete blocks. One end is rounded; there’s some kind
of collar about three feet from the other end and four vanes sticking out, sort of like the fins on a bomb . . .’ She trailed off.
Like the fins on a bomb,
she thought, dazed.
Jesus, this
can’t
be here!
She shook herself and continued, ‘There’s some kind of equipment trolley near the back end, and some wires going into the, the back of
the bomb.’ She glanced down at her watch. The second hand was spinning round. It was a logarithmic counter, and it had jumped from tens of becquerels per second to tens of thousands as she
crossed the threshold. Gamma emission from secondary activation isotopes created by neutron absorption, she heard the lecture replay in her mind’s eye; Geiger counters can’t detect
neutrons until the flux is way too high for safety, but over time a neutron source will tend to activate surrounding materials, causing them to emit gamma radiation. ‘I’m reading
secondaries. I think we’ve got a hot one. I’m coming out now.’ A quick sweep across the screen door in front of the gadget’s nose revealed no telltale trip wires. ‘No
sign of booby traps.’

‘Acknowledged. Judith, I want you and Rich to go back into the van and wait while I do a preliminary site survey. Don’t touch anything on your way out. I want you to know,
you’ve done good.’ She realized she was shaking.
Don’t touch anything. Right.
She clambered out through the hole in the wall, blinking against the daylight, and stood
aside as two figures in bright orange isolation suits duckwalked past her. The cylinders hanging from their shoulders bounced under their rubber covers like hugely obese buttocks as they bent down
to crawl through the hole. Two more suits waved her down with radiation detectors and stripped off her shoe protectors before pronouncing her clean and waving her into the truck.

The back of the NIRT truck was crowded with consoles and flashing panels of blinkenlights, battered laptops plastered with security inventory stickers, and coat rails for the bulky orange suits.
This was a NIRT survey wagon, not the defuse-and-disarm trailer – those guys would be along in a while, as soon as Dr. Rand confirmed he needed them. Too many NIRT vehicles in one parking lot
might attract the wrong kind of attention, especially in these days of Total Information Awareness and paranoia about security, not to mention closed-circuit cameras everywhere and journalists with
web access spreading rumors. Rumors that NIRT were breaking into a lockup in Boston would be just the icing on a fifty-ton cake of shit if Homeland Security had to take the fall for a botched
Family Trade operation. Rumors of any kind about NIRT would likely trigger a public panic, a run on the Dow, and a plague of boils inside the Beltway.

‘Coffee?’ asked Rich, picking up a vacuum flask.

‘Yes, please.’ Judith yawned, suddenly becoming aware that she felt tired. ‘I don’t believe what I just saw. This had better turn out to be some kind of sick
prank.’ Low-level lab samples of something radioactive stashed in an aluminum cylinder knocked together in an auto body shop, that would do it.
But it can’t be,
she realized.
Nobody would be that crazy, just for a joke.
Charges of wasting police time didn’t even begin to cover it. And it wasn’t as if some prankster had tried to draw attention to the
lockup: quite the opposite, in fact.

‘Like hell. That thing had fins like a fifty-six Caddy. I swear I was expecting to see Slim Pickens riding it down . . .’ Rich poured a dose of evil-looking coffee into a cup and
passed it to her. ‘Think it’ll go off?’

‘Not now,’ Judith said with a confidence she didn’t feel. ‘Dr. Strangelove and his merry men are going over it with their stethoscopes.’ There was a chair in front
of one of the panels of blinkenlights and she sat down on it. ‘But something about this whole setup feels wrong.’