Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2)

by Jack Lively

  She said, “Now I’ve switched the selector to find alpha rays.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “There is an elevated concentration, but we are still outside the building.”

  Chapman teased open the door and we went in. Darkness until our eyes could adjust. Then I could see. No machinery like in the first building. I thought I was looking at an empty space, but then I saw what was in the middle of it. A cube the size of a large room. It looked solid. Like you couldn’t move it with a tank. Chapman ushered me to a round door, like a submarine hatch. She held up the lipstick device and showed me the reading. More numbers, higher than before.

  She said, “Right now, standing here, we’re being exposed to about the same amount of gamma radiation as we’d get from a full body CT scan.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “Not too bad, but you wouldn’t want to stick around long. That’s out here. Inside that we’d be toast in an hour. Look at that door. It’s a military grade seal. You open that and step inside, you got a fifty percent chance of dying within a month.” She looked at me critically. “Personally, I think you’d survive, Keeler. You seem like a resistant organism.”

  I said, “I’ll take that as a compliment. What is it in there, a storage facility?”

  She shook her head. “They’ve extracted the reactor from the submarine. From the descriptions I gathered from those people, I’m willing to bet that they’ve managed to create a high neutron flux reactor in there.”

  I said nothing.

  Chapman turned the selector on her radiation detector once more. She got down low to the ground and waved it over the floor. Then she stood up and showed me the reading. I had no idea what the numbers meant, but they were high.

  She said, “Alpha particles. Extreme concentration.”

  “What does that mean?”

  It’s a radioactive substance, mostly comes off of decaying radioactive materials, uranium for example. It isn’t dangerous to us, being on the floor. That’s because alpha particles don’t travel well. But if it gets inside of you it is dangerous. If it gets in you, then dangerous is an understatement.”

  I said, “So?”

  “So, this is not just the traffic in nuclear materials anymore. I think they’ve been using the salvaged reactor to produce Polonium-210. You know what that is?”

  “Assassination weapon used by your countrymen. Killed some guys in London. But the assassins got caught. Polonium has killer stats, 250 billion times more toxic than hydrochloric acid, if I remember correctly.”

  Chapman said, “Your recall is fine. Technically, one gram can kill fifty million people. If you can get it in them, because the other thing about Polonium-210, it needs to be put into a body. Like I just said. The particles can’t penetrate skin.”

  I said, “As far as I know, it’s only produced in Russia.”

  Chapman said, “Yeah, until now that is.”

  I was thinking about the sick people I had seen, and the ones who remained. The cube had rust build up from the humidity of ocean air. This was not a recently installed facility.

  I said, “They got the reactor out of the sub a while ago. This looks well established.”

  “They told me it was finished a year ago. Which means they’ve had a year to harvest polonium.”

  “How much of it could they make in a year?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe half a gram. They would have it stored in here. Something like a tiny vial in an extremely secure case. Once in a while they get to add a milligram. One milligram, enough to kill 50,000 people.”

  “How much can they sell a gram of that stuff for?”

  She shrugged. “Priceless. Thing about Polonium is that it is virtually undetectable. That case in London was the exception, and they wanted the British to know about it. Like a warning. But other incidents go undetected. Very few people will have the interest or ability to look for alpha particles when a dead guy turns up, unless he’s an oligarch or a known spy in some major city like London.”

  “How much could they get for that stuff?”

  She smiled. “How much is it worth to kill your enemies without anyone being able to prove it was murder?”

  I said nothing.

  Chapman said, “Legitimate polonium for research labs goes for five grand per micro-curie, which is one millionth of a gram. Non-legit stuff would go for five times that at least.”

  I did the mental math. “Which makes it 25K per millionth of a gram. You’re talking billions.”

  Chapman nodded. “The perfect assassination tool, Keeler. Accessible only to the nuclear powers, and they aren’t selling. How much would everyone else pay for it? Billions.”

  I thought aloud. “This has been completed for a year, which means that nobody needs to handle nuclear materials anymore. It’s all safely tucked away inside that new thing they built.”

  Chapman said, “High neutron flux reactor”

  “Whatever.” I was thinking about the group of toothless people, the radiation sickness. “A year is a long time. Those people couldn’t have gotten radiation sickness from handling the nuclear materials. They’d be long dead.”

  Chapman looked at me, surprised. “Who said that they got sick from handling materials?”

  “It’s what I figured.”

  She shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on mine. “Oh no. These people got sick because they’ve been used as human guinea pigs to test the product. They were drifter types picked up by a team of recruiters. People who could just be disappeared without issues. Some of them were used to demonstrate it to clients.”

  I said nothing for a while.

  She nodded. “They used it on George too, as a demonstration to a buyer. I asked about him and it’s what the sick people said.”

  I said nothing.

  Chapman was nodding at me. We were on the same page, as usual.

  I said, “Time for that board meeting.”

  We came at the house from an oblique angle.

  We approached through the trees on the opposite side of the yard. As I got closer, I could see the building well. It was a modern design which had been all about the windows. These were massive glass panels, flattened out like black ice. It wouldn’t be easy to put a bullet through that glass. You could see by the way it absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. There were micro particles in there—it wasn’t the same material as regular window glass. That was for damn sure.

  I spoke into Chapman’s ear. “Special glass.”

  She nodded.

  Through the windows, corridors could be seen running the width of the building on each of the two floors. The steel structure was black. The interior walls were dark wood. Wall sconces glowed, dim and discreet. Bottom floor, a guy stood guard next to the steel staircase. Top floor, a guy stood next to a door. Two guards, both in tactical black, both holding assault rifles, both with trigger fingers along the trigger guard, rifles up and ready. Both men were sweeping their eyes left and then right. Slow and regular, like automated lawn sprinklers. Sweep left, sweep right. One covered the stairs, the other the second floor door. Which meant that something important was happening inside that door.

  Which made it the primary target.

  I spoke softly. “Tell me how you got out of there.”

  Chapman turned her head so that her mouth was close to my ear. “I was in the back. Second floor, like I said. I climbed through an air conditioning duct from the attic to the roof. Shimmied down the corner. Same as you see there.”

  I was looking at the corner. A single steel beam painted in black. I was thinking that we might go in the way she’d come. But then I started to feel a stiffness building up where the bullet had grazed me in the side, which was wet with blood. Chapman was looking at me. My face was feeling the birdshot. She must have been reading my mind because she reached her slender fingers to picked out a pellet and flicked it into the dirt. "Too many to take out now. We’ll have to wait.”

  I grunted.

 
Being wounded made me prone to a short temper. The idea of climbing up that building was aggravating me.

  I said, “Where’s the bus?”

  Fifty-Five

  The Green Gremlin mini-bus was parked two hundred yards away in a half-circle cul-de-sac. It was the same vehicle I’d seen over at the cruise ship. It had been transporting sick people on wheel chairs. Now I knew where they’d come from. Here, the mini-bus had been set to do the same thing again, transport the remaining group to the cruise ship. My best guess was that the Mister Lawrence people had planned to ditch them in international waters, presumably the colder and more remote the better. They’d probably planned a special excursion.

  Chapman had put a stop to that plan. Which made her a hero in my eyes.

  When we arrived at the bus I could see one of the mercenaries was slumped in the driver’s seat, his head distorted by a single gunshot wound high on the temple. The driver’s side window was starred around the bullet hole. Good shot. The passenger door was open. Another gunman’s body lay sprawled across the steps leading to the interior. Chapman hadn’t been fooling around. I counted two entry wounds in the body.

  The Gremlin grinned broadly above the tour bus logo.

  Which reminded me of the first time I had seen it, back at the airport. The passengers coming off the silver Lear jet. I realized that they had been the board members. Arriving to finalize the project, no doubt.

  A weak voice spoke from inside the bus. “Don’t shoot. We’re in here.”

  I stepped over the corpse and boarded the vehicle. It was very hard to see anything, but I made out dim figures sprawled over luxury seats. If I hadn’t been able to hear them breathing I would have assumed that they were corpses. They would be dead soon enough, so they’d have an interest in the time that remained.

  One of the walking dead men had looted a Tavor assault rifle from the mercenary’s corpse. He sat up front with it. His face was slick with sweat and glowed like an irradiated clock dial. Chapman stepped forward and waved her lipstick cylinder above the seats. She moved slowly and carefully. Then she stepped back outside and motioned for me to follow.

  Chapman spoke softly. “Don’t go in the back with them for long. It isn’t safe. They are soaked in it.”

  “The big guy said that you don’t need product, or the submarine returned. That right Chapman?”

  Her voice came clipped and precise. “We need to end it. That’s all. Just a guarantee that the product and the reactor are taken care of and made safe by a reputable authority, like the United States of America.”

  I said, “Okay, Alaska is American now. You sold it to us, remember that.”

  Chapman smiled. “No doubt. What’s the plan?”

  I said, “The plan is simple. Bullet-proof glass works both ways. They won’t be able to fire out. We’re going to ram it with the bus.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll take it from there. Nobody expects to be rammed by a Green Gremlin mini-bus. It’s blue sky thinking. Innovation in action. We’ll break the box open, then we’ll see. Surprise is on our side. The remaining enemy will be tired and fearful. We’ve delivered all of their friends to the other world. Never underestimate chaos and fear.”

  Chapman grinned. “Why I wanted you here in the first place.”

  “You did the right thing. That was out-of-the-box thinking.”

  She said, “Good. I have high expectations of the future. I’m full of hope.”

  I said, “So am I.”

  I pulled the dead guy off the driver’s seat and onto the grass strip bordering the driveway. Then I did the same with the other corpse. The coming dawn was visible on the higher tree branches, the blue hues of impending sunlight, distant but making an initial announcement.

  I turned to the passenger area. The doomed sat back, watching me. I said, “We’re taking a ride. It’s going to be dangerous. There is a serious risk of injury or death. Maybe both. If you want to get off the bus, now’s the time. Otherwise, welcome on board.”

  Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Not even a whisper or a grumble. I hadn’t expected them to. They had skin in the game. For them, it was the only game in town. Plus, the extra weight wouldn’t hurt.

  The bus fired up. A strong German engine under the hood. As powerful a battering ram as a guy might hope for. I tucked the two Breachers behind my back and kept the headlights off. I made the turn in the cul-de-sac. The house was straight ahead, two hundred yards. No hesitation, no pause. The end was in sight, right there in front of me. My foot pressed steadily down on the pedal. Nice and easy, but relentless.

  The engine began to growl hungrily. Momentum was building up.

  I hollered to the back, “Assume a brace position, folks.”

  Chapman was in the passenger seat. She glanced at me sharply before lowering her head to her knees.

  The driveway tore by. We were picking up speed. I could see the building approaching rapidly. The mercenaries on guard were noticing. The familiar form of the Green Gremlin bus, approaching in the half light, rapidly building up momentum.

  The guy on the bottom fully realized what was about to happen. He moved indecisively, left, then right, then left again. It was like watching insects in a glass-walled ant colony. Scurrying this way and that way, alarmed but helpless.

  The guy up top started agitating in the same way. But he was oscillating between the door behind him and the railing looking out front of the house. He finally turned and opened the door. I figured he was asking a question. It was too late for a satisfactory response. We arrived.

  The bus hit the glass-fronted building. We were doing around sixty miles per hour.

  The impact made a noise like a giant thunderclap. The whole facade cracked as the vehicle shot through. Like the sheet ice on a frozen lake hit by a meteor. I raised my head. We had come parallel to the guy who had been guarding the bottom stairs. The bullet-proof glass fell in sheets, like guillotine blades.

  The guy had ducked for cover and fallen short. He was trying to get under the stairs. He would have made it if he hadn’t slipped on the marble floor. His weapon had come out of his hands and he scrambled for it. I was pulling a Breacher out from behind me. The sheet glass swayed from the steel framing and came loose. The whole thing took maybe two seconds. The guy was scrambling for a weapon. I watched, fascinated. He wasn’t doing badly, a focused operator in condition black. Verifying his weapon, about to be legitimately shot. Like a hero. I had the Breacher up and ready, resting on the driver’s side window frame. The sheet of thick glass came off in one piece, about the size of a small car. It fell off at an oblique angle and sliced him in half from the shoulder down through the groin.

  One down. One to go.

  I came off the bus with the two Breachers held ready. Chapman was right behind me. I bounded up the stairs. The guy up there fired at me, a triple burst from his Tavor that pinged off the steel beam, like knuckles rapping impatiently on a bar counter. I ducked down and a second burst buried itself in the wall. Chapman raised and fired two bursts in the guy’s direction. I used her fire as cover to vault up the stairs.

  The second floor had a little lobby area which fed into a conference room. I could see people in there, at a big wood table. The guy protecting them was down on a knee taking cover from Chapman’s suppressing fire. He came up and we made eye contact. I saw the Tavor muzzle rise. He was doing well. In a second or two he’d be in position to take me out.

  The Breacher spoke first.

  A slug this time. It caught him below the shoulder and punched a hole through him, showering his viscera and blood in through the open door. I came into the board room. There were six members of the Mister Lawrence executive board. Four men and two women. All of them looking like they’d been roused from bed, wearing pajamas or robes. Like a perfect picture of privileged comfort. The board members sat glumly around the big table with their hands in the air, as if I were going to read them their rights.

  The woman spoke first. Same command
ing voice as before. She was in her early forties with well-preserved hair. She was examining me with a jaundiced eye. It didn’t surprise me that she'd had the gumption to fix her hair during the emergency. Her face was streaked with blood from the guy I’d shot through the door. She didn’t seem to mind.

  The woman said, “Sir, I must inform you that this is an illegal intrusion. The governor is on the way down from Juneau. We are in telephone contact with the mayor, who is at this moment dealing with the federal officers at the front gate. There is no jurisdiction for the FBI here. This is private property, and private property remains sacred, at least in the state of Alaska. That said, we intend to cooperate fully with the authorities.”

  I said, “You’re wasting your breath. Save it for God.”

  “What?”

  “I advised you to commit collective suicide. You didn’t listen.”

  She looked up at me. “You must be Keeler. Did you actually imagine that we haven’t planned for this possibility? What do you think is going to happen to us in the hands of law enforcement? Do I look to you like a woman who is destined for prison?”

  Chapman said, “You think your lawyers and lobbyists can help you?”

  A guy spoke up from the back of the table. I recognized the voice. The woman had called him Frank on the phone. He said, “We own the state, bitch. So just shut your trap and let the cops come. The FBI has no jurisdiction here.” He addressed the woman in front. “Jill, Cory’s on the line. Cory, are you there?”

  A voice crackled from the telephonic device built into the middle of the table. “I’m here.”

  I raised the Breacher and put a load of buckshot into the speaker. Which shattered into a thousand pieces and ceased to exist as a discreet object. Most of it went into the face of a small man across the table. His face had been surrounded by a white beard, with a magnificent head of white hair. All of that disappeared fast when the blast ejected him violently from the comfortable chair and sent him across the floor. I didn’t bother to check if he was alive or dead, or if he still had a face.