A Dangerous Breed

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “That’s completely false.” The candidate’s brow furrowed. His makeup would definitely need a retouch.

  “I don’t care. I have enough provable facts to point CNN and Fox and everyone else in the right direction. Like you said, I’ll find a way to make it stick.”

  He crossed his arms. “There’s a natural reaction to that action. State investigators will rake over everything you’ve done and everywhere you’ve been since the Army kicked your ass home. Including whatever went down in Oregon last year. Griffon County still has a few unanswered questions.” He nodded. “There’s no need for us to be on opposite sides. Give me what you have, and I’ll do everything I can.”

  “Including the WITSEC deal in writing. If I locate Liashko’s stash, I’ll give you all you need to nail him. If I can’t find it, you’ve lost nothing.”

  “Don’t play brinksmanship with me, Shaw. You’ll lose.”

  “We’ll both go down.” I knocked on the door, and the guard dutifully opened it. “You just have farther to fall.”

  Forty-Eight

  The guard escorted me around the back hallways of the Alexis, emerging at the lobby. Wren met me by the revolving doors.

  “Well, you’re not in handcuffs,” she said, “and I didn’t see a SWAT team run past while they were passing out the salads. Was it a win?”

  “It was a draw,” I said.

  “Always take the draw. Tell people the refs made bad calls.”

  “Sorry if they hustled you out.”

  “They were very polite. The blond woman with the diamond studs and the DNC pin told me you’d be in the lobby in five minutes. I saw the entrees on a tray as I left. I’m sorry to miss out on the salmon.”

  “I’m hungry, too.”

  “Which raises the topic of my second condition for attending this crazy night with you.”

  “You want to pick where we have dinner?”

  “I want room service.”

  “From the Alexis? I’m not sure we’re persona grata here anymore.”

  “From another place. The Hotel Max is nice.”

  “So to get room service, we’d have to have . . .”

  “A room. Yes. You said your place is kind of trashed, and I share my house with three other people. You’re grinning. Is that good?”

  “I told Addy you were direct. That’s good.”

  “Then let’s go. The sooner we’re checked in, the sooner we order. I’m famished.”

  Dinner was delayed. By the time Wren and I walked to the Max and got a room and exchanged jokes about the dramatic black-and-white photographs that swathed every door on the hallway of the fifth floor, we’d distracted one another from the idea of food. Those intentions were sidetracked even further once she passed close to me entering the room, and I kissed her. Then all other plans went completely off the rails, as her dress slid off in one soft rustle to form a midnight-blue pool around her heels.

  Later, lying atop the bedspread we’d never gotten around to pulling down, I discovered that Wren’s spiral of eponymous tattoos ended at her shoulder blade. I touched the last bird in the line—intentionally blurred ink mimicking watercolor paint—and traced the natural evolution of where future birds might join the procession. The line made a path down and across her spine, nearly touching the top of her childhood scar.

  “If you left Seattle, where would you go next?” I said.

  “Getting rid of me already? I see how this is,” Wren murmured into the sheet.

  “Do you keep heading west? Hawaii? The Philippines?”

  She laughed. “I’ve never been to Alaska. Not sure what medicines I could grow there.” She rolled onto her side and moved back to lean against me. “You came back to Seattle after the Army.”

  “Yeah. That was almost happenstance. I came home on leave, took up with somebody when I was here. So when my time was up, I came back to Seattle to keep seeing her.”

  “Are you still?”

  “No.”

  “But you call it home.”

  “I guess I do. I never thought about where I’d settle once I was a civilian again, because I never thought I’d be a civilian again. Now that I’m here . . .” I shrugged. “It feels right. I like the city. I like how I can find almost anything but still run across people I recognize every day, like it’s a small town. I like how insane the landscape is.”

  “Lettie says it’s changed so much just in the past few years. All the industry coming in, people who started here can’t afford to live here anymore.”

  “True. I sold a plot of land in the city last year for what would buy a new house most places.”

  Wren turned her head. The sharp outline of her profile looked like a cameo against the snow-white pillow we’d tossed aside earlier. Her hair smelled of limes and something like honey.

  “You don’t have to worry I’ll vanish,” she said. “If that’s what you were asking.”

  “Good to know. Who would pay the hotel bill?”

  “Not tonight.” She laughed. “I mean Seattle. I don’t do that, leave all at once. There’s a whole decision tree and a lot of conversation with my tribe.”

  “Tribe?”

  “My friends. You call your Rangers brothers, my friends are my tribe. Occasionally people decide to move together. A built-in support network when you get to wherever you’re going.”

  “I hear Montreal is nice.”

  “It is. Parles-tu français?”

  “Not a word,” I said. “The Army had no plans to send me and my brothers into Quebec. At least not that they shared. How many languages do you know?”

  “Five if I stretch the truth. My Spanish didn’t get far after we left Morocco. Speaking of stretching . . .”

  My hand had been cupping Wren’s breast, and she unfolded her arms to reach splendidly toward the headboard. I trailed my fingertips lower.

  “That’s nice,” she whispered after a few moments. “A little harder.”

  “Like that?” I said into the nape of her neck.

  Wren hummed assent. “I’m getting the strong impression”—her breath hitched and gasped before continuing—“that we’re postponing dinner for dessert again.”

  “I can wait.”

  She rolled over so that we faced one another. Her pupils so wide and dark, the irises showing around them were mere halos of chestnut brown, sparkling with amber.

  “Prove it,” she said.

  Forty-Nine

  At three minutes to midnight, the only sounds in the boatyard of the Oxana M were the deep rumble from a recycling plant farther up the stunted street and the almost musical clink created by the chain-link fence each time I cut one of its wires. Past the fence, towers of shipping containers in the gloom made a kind of huge metal maze, with each stack standing in for a hedge. Or a tombstone.

  The tiny snap as the last wire parted was lost in the echoing boom of an explosion from the far side of the freighter. A rage of light threw the massive span of the Oxana M into dark relief and deepened the shadows for a quarter mile, including those around me.

  Perfect. In black clothes and a balaclava over my head to hide my face, the dark was on my side tonight.

  It wasn’t much of a blast in terms of concussive force. But it was loud and blindingly bright, thanks to the flammable slurry I’d cooked up filling half of my new rowboat. New, and now destroyed. The fireworks had provided the boom and enough flame to ignite the rest of the boat into a miniature but very garish Viking funeral, lacking only the corpse.

  Crude, but I’d needed something quick and easy for Jaak and his buddies. When we’d met that afternoon to discuss my idea over a lunch of meat pies and beer, Jaak’s shipmate Harri had done the translating. The sailors couldn’t keep the grins off their faces, and they toasted the audacity of the notion, or maybe just the chance to raise some hell.

  His crew had used my speedboat to tow the rowboat up the Duwamish. When they were a few dozen yards off the Oxana M, they’d lit the long fuse on the giant firecracker, cut the ro
wboat loose, and hauled ass out of there. Right on time.

  I twisted the fence aside and wormed my way under, ducking low to keep my small rucksack from catching on the cut wires. Then I ran like hell through the towers of cargo containers toward the looming hull of the ship.

  The first burst of light from the explosion had dimmed into a flickering glow that danced off the Oxana M’s twin cranes. By now the freighter’s crew would be gathered at starboard, staring at the impromptu show. I hoped. The fire wouldn’t burn forever. Speed was as important as silence in getting aboard unseen. I took the steep gangway stairs to the deck three at a time.

  At the top, the passage was clear. I could see the heads of crew members twenty yards across the deck at the far rail. Words in a Slavic language drifted my way in between laughter and shouts of encouragement to the blaze.

  Between us, the broad gap of the aft hold yawned. A sharply sloped lip as tall as my shoulder ringed its edge, prevention against any sailor stumbling and falling a hundred feet from the deck to the very bottom of the open hold, well below the ship’s waterline.

  That was where I needed to be. I slipped away toward the bow, in search of the nearest stairwell.

  Most of the ship’s living and working spaces were housed in the three-story superstructure at the stern. Any crew not watching the burning boat from the deck should be there. Nevertheless, I cat-footed my way down an access corridor and four spiraling flights of stairs, then softly twisted both handles to unlock a watertight door to the aft hold.

  It was like opening the door to a cathedral. A vast vertical emptiness seemed to extend high enough to touch the overcast sky. The lowest levels of the hold were stepped, three gigantic stairs on each side climbing the curve of the hull, adding to the sudden feeling of insignificance. I held on to the door for an extra moment to steady myself. Voices from the men high overhead might as well have been jeering at me.

  This hold was empty, save for stifling vapors of fuel and oil that had sunk to the lowest part of the vessel. The Oxana M had two more holds the same size, each large enough to carry nearly a hundred forty-foot shipping containers in tight stacks.

  I didn’t need a hundred, just one, half that size. So long as it was the right one.

  At the forward end of the immense interior was another watertight door, to allow crew to move between holds without retreating to the upper decks. I ran to it, conscious of the fact that any sailor who grew bored of watching the blaze outside might cast his eye downward into the hold and spot me scurrying around its sides like a mouse in an empty trash dumpster.

  The door opened into a passageway cutting across the ship. I shut it behind me and tried the one opposite, to enter the midship hold.

  There. One twenty-foot steel box, painted dark green, alone in the cavernous space. Liashko’s smuggled container. I was sure I’d found it, even before my eyes had pieced together the identification code stenciled on its door. The white paint of each letter and number virtually glowed through the murk.

  A C-shaped padlock sealed the container. I felt in my sleeve for the leather wrist brace I’d fashioned recently. The brace held my basic set of lockpicks on the inside of my forearm, for quicker access than fumbling in my pocket. I selected the right pick and opened the lock purely by feel.

  Before touching the twin handles on the container door, I paused to listen. The voices above had quieted. The fire would have burned out, maybe even sunk the sorry rowboat entirely. I cautiously pulled at the handles to turn the door’s lock rods, grateful to whatever dockworker had greased the rods half a world away.

  The door came loose with a hollow reverberation, signaling that the steel box wasn’t completely full. I entered and pulled the door closed behind me.

  My arm brushed something flat and solid as I removed my flashlight from my belt. The beam bounced off long black crates stacked high on both sides. Plastic straps secured each individual crate to the container’s sides, proof against foul weather. A gap down the center between the two stacks let me estimate their dimensions. Each crate was about seven feet long and eighteen inches square at the ends.

  Just about the right size to hold what I’d expected.

  I pushed the crate at the top, testing its weight. It shifted, barely. Two quick slices and its plastic restraints fell aside, allowing me to ease the crate—well over a hundred pounds, the cords in my neck standing out with the strain—silently off the stack to set it on the floor.

  Twists of wire sealed the crate’s latches. My blade cut those nearly as fast as it had the straps. I opened the lid.

  The six-foot tube of the Verba missile launcher cushioned in molded foam padding looked deceptively innocent. Not much different than a length of metal pipe painted olive green. A trigger mechanism like an oversized pistol grip was detached and waiting in its own foam slot.

  I lifted the tube out to look into its muzzle.

  There was no mistaking the intent of the slim gray dart housed within. The surface-to-air missile was nearly as long as the launching tube itself, a malevolent needle packing enough speed and power to bring down damn near anything flying below fifteen thousand feet.

  Under the tube, the crate held two more missiles just like it. Three to a box. Forty crates. One hundred and twenty in all.

  That was three times as many as Burke had said the task force was buying. Which meant Liashko must have other customers. Jesus. Did Burke know?

  There was something else here, too, at the very back of the container between the stacks. A silver metal case, smaller than the crates holding the missiles. Not much larger than my rucksack. I left the Verba to cut the case’s straps and latches, then opened the lid for a look.

  And nearly choked. I removed my hands from the case and stepped back immediately. A reaction as instinctive as if I’d opened the lid to find a cobra.

  Nestled within the foam pads were twelve slim canisters of light, clear plastic. Every one of them bearing a large red-and-white label with the unmistakable tripod symbol for chemical weapons.

  Nerve gas.

  I told myself that it was safe to breathe. That the canisters couldn’t be armed. My body didn’t seem convinced, and my next few inhalations came shallow and quick.

  Each canister was bisected by a slim metallic layer, with a pull-tab extending from it like a stubby tail. Their tops contained a blue-tinged liquid. At the bottom, a gray granular substance.

  I remembered a few basics of bioweapon chemistry from the Army’s defensive training. Nerve agents had a limited shelf life. Their components would have to be combined shortly before use. Pull the tab, allow the two halves to mix, and the canister was armed and ready to be deployed.

  Deployed by missile, maybe. I comprehended an even more horrific use for the Verbas resting in their dark beds.

  Anatoly’s looking to close up shop, Burke had said. Everything he stole, in one go.

  The task force had assumed they were buying Liashko’s entire job lot. They weren’t even close. The arms dealer apparently had other deals to make, other customers here in the land of opportunity. He’d kept Burke in the dark because that was the paranoid’s MO.

  What was the chemical? Sarin? VX? My stomach twisted, imagining how many dozens or hundreds of people would die in agony if even one of these canisters was detonated and dispersed over a crowded area.

  Screw the arms deal. Time for the cavalry—ATF, National Guard, whoever could secure the nerve gas and transport it to where it could be safely destroyed.

  I checked my phone. No signal. The steel container and the ship’s hull beyond were impenetrable.

  The whirring of an engine from above brought me out of my shocked reflection. I closed the case just as a second noise followed, a heavy reverberating clank of metal on metal. Close. Closer than something moving up on deck. I killed the flashlight.

  Pushing the container door open an inch, I looked up toward the open hatch. The heads of crewmen at the lip of the hold showed as silhouettes against the deck lights an
d the night sky. I ducked back and silently shut the door again.

  Shit. I would have to wait until they’d finished whatever work had them so busy at midnight. Maybe setting the rowboat on fire had prompted some kind of safety drill—

  BANG

  I flinched and nearly stumbled. The impact had been right over my head, on the roof of the container.

  Oh, hell no. I realized what the sound meant, even as the sides of the container creaked with sudden pressure. I reached for the loose door and grabbed the retaining straps of the stacked crates with my other hand. Only an instant before the container with me inside it soared skyward, borne by the crane that clutched the big steel box like a scorpion claw on a doomed cricket.

  Fifty

  The abrupt acceleration threatened to swing the container’s heavy door open. I threw all my weight into holding it shut. The missile crates shifted against the straps, mashing my hand. I gritted my teeth until the pain in them matched that in my finger bones.

  In another five seconds the vertical motion abruptly stopped, only to be replaced by a seesawing tilt and a feeling of acceleration that dropped my stomach down to my knees. The Stygian dark inside the container added to the sudden vertigo. But the slant of the huge steel box kept the loose door closed. For the moment. Any tip in the other direction, and the door would fly wide open, with me sailing out after it.

  The container dropped in a barely controlled descent. I had an instant to brace myself before it hit the deck of the Oxana M with a scraping thud that must have removed metal along with paint. With another creak and the whir of moving cable, the crane released its hold on the roof.

  I yanked my hand out from under the crushing straps, flexing my fingers and willing some feeling back into them. A slender glowing line appeared at the top of the container door, drawn by powerful deck lamps high on the comm tower at the ship’s bow.

  Almost taunting, that sliver of light, with the rest of the interior so dark I couldn’t see the wall inches from my face.