No Way to Die

by M. D. Grayson

  “I think there should be four left,” he said.

  “Good. Go get ’em and hand out one to me, one to Toni, one to Richard, and keep one for you and Doc to share. Make sure all the numbers are programmed in.”

  “Okay.”

  He went to get the phones.

  “Let’s think,” I said while he was gone. “What other purpose might these guys have had in our office?”

  “Might not be another purpose,” Doc said. “They might have simply wanted the device and the key.”

  “They didn’t know it at the time, but they weren’t going to get the key,” I said. “It’s not even here.”

  “What about the Starfire Protocol box?” Toni asked.

  “Presumably, they already have one,” I said. “They probably have the one that ACS is supposed to have. I imagine Holly probably gave it to them.”

  “Maybe,” Toni said. “Or maybe not. If Holly told them we have one, maybe they just figured that since they were going to break in to take the key, they may as well take the other box, too.”

  “Could be,” I said. “But after they looked around and didn’t see it, they’d have to figure we had it in the safe. And they’d figure the key was probably with it. But the problem was, they weren’t looking in the safe. I found them looking in my filing cabinet.”

  “Any way they might have already checked out the safe?” Toni asked. “Maybe they already looked inside and decided the key wasn’t there?”

  “The only way they would’ve been able to get into that safe without leaving signs of visible damage is if they had the combination,” Richard said. “And I was just in the workroom—I didn’t see any signs of damage or even tampering on the safe. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the bad news, of course, is that there are several ways they can gain access to the combination. They can use birthdays, anniversaries, and the like. Those are the most common combinations.”

  “We’re good there,” I said. “I just reset the combination last week, and it’s completely random.”

  “That’s good. And since you’ve recently reset the combination, that eliminates another way to figure it out. If you don’t change combinations, a crook can sometimes look at the digital keypad and see the wear patterns on the numbers. Knowing the numbers greatly reduces the number of potential combinations they’d have to try in order to gain access. But far and away the most common method used is simply to look around people’s desks and see where someone’s written down the combination—especially if it’s changed often. Happens all the time.”

  “Who’d be dumb enough to do something like that?” I said.

  At that moment, Kenny walked in carrying the cell phones. “Forgot you changed the combination,” he said. “Had to go to my desk to get it.”

  Everyone turned to look at him. He froze.

  “What?”

  “The combination for the safe is on your desk?”

  “Well,” he said slowly, “not really on my desk. It’s on a card in my top drawer.”

  I looked at Richard.

  He nodded. “See? That’d probably work just fine,” he said.

  I turned back to Kenny. “Please tell me that the Starfire Protocol box is still in the safe.”

  “Yeah, it is,” he said, relieved. “Relax.”

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  “Yeah. I had to move it to get to the cell phones.”

  “Good,” I said. Then I thought for a second about what he’d said.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Say what you just said again.”

  “I said it’s in there,” he said.

  “No, the other part.”

  “I said I had to move the box to get to the cell phones.”

  “What do you mean, ‘move it’?” I asked.

  He looked confused. “The Starfire box was on the middle shelf, in the front. The cell phones were on the same shelf, but behind it. I had to move the Starfire box to reach the phones.”

  I thought about this for a second.

  “Has anyone been in the safe in the last few days? Since last Monday?”

  Everyone shook their heads no.

  “That’s pretty funny then,” I said. “When I put the Starfire box in the safe, I was careful to put it at the back of the middle shelf, with the cell phones in front of it. I kind of wanted to hide it. Now, you’re saying that the box was in front of the cell phones. How’d it get there?”

  “Maybe it’s trying to escape,” Doc said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Why would someone find the combination, open the safe, and not take the Starfire Protocol box? In fact, the only thing they do is move the box from the back of the shelf to the front of the shelf? What the hell kind of sense does that make?”

  “Maybe they forgot where it went while they were looking for the key,” Richard offered. “Or maybe you interrupted them and distracted them from putting it back into its original position when you crashed their party.”

  “Maybe it’s a different box?” Toni said. “Maybe they swapped it out and left us with a real modem instead of the Starfire protocol.”

  I thought about this for a second, and then I started getting worried. Maybe that third guy wasn’t in the conference room when I walked past him the other night. Maybe he’d been in the workroom opening the safe.

  “Kenny, go get the Starfire box. Let’s have a look at it.” He started to leave. “And Kenny?”

  He paused. “Yeah?”

  “Bring me yourcard with the combination on it, please.”

  * * * *

  Kenny returned a couple of minutes later with the Starfire box. He handed it to me.

  “Here’s the card, boss,” he said, handing it over and looking sheepish. “I screwed up again, didn’t I?”

  “No harm, no foul,” I said. “We learn as we go, right folks?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Let’s have a look at this thing,” I said, holding up the Starfire box and examining it. I twisted it and looked at it from different angles. “Looks like the same box I put into the safe last week.”

  “How can you tell that just by looking at it?” Toni asked. “One blue plastic box looks pretty much like the next blue plastic box, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at her. While still holding her gaze, I said, “Kenny, do you have a screwdriver?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “My Gerber.”

  I turned and handed him the device as he pulled a multi-tool from his pocket.

  “Open it,” I said.

  He looked at the box for a second, and then peeled open the appropriate screwdriver tool. He started to unscrew the little black screws holding the box together.

  “Stop!” Doc said suddenly, startling everyone. I looked at him. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Kenny started to protest, but I cut him short. Something about the urgency in Doc’s voice definitely got my attention.“Give it to Doc,” I ordered.

  Doc examined the box carefully from all angles. He slid off his chair and crouched on the floor so that he could get a close-up view of the box as it sat on the table. One by one, he carefully removed the four screws.

  “Give me your light,” he said to Kenny before he tried to lift the cover. Kenny handed over a small, amazingly powerful LED flashlight. Doc shined the light on the box and carefully lifted an edge of the plastic cover. He continued slowly lifting the edge while moving the light around to examine the interior of the box. Finally, satisfied that there were no trip wires connected to the cover, he removed it completely.

  We stared at the open box in astonishment. A block of white, claylike substance filled most of the box. The remainder of the space was taken up by a small circuit board that was attached to a battery.

  “What the fuck?” Kenny said, wide-eyed.

  “That’s a damn bomb,” Richard said incredulously. Bobby moved back instinctively.

  “Doc?” I asked.

  He nodded. “He’s right. It’s a block of C-4 wired to a cell phone trigger
. Here’s the detonator.” He pointed to a shiny brass object embedded into the explosive, attached by a wire to the circuit board, which I could now tell came from a cell phone and another wire to the battery. “They dial the phone, and ka-boom!”

  Holy crap. “How big of an explosion would this make?” I asked.

  “It’d blow off the whole end of this building,” he said.

  “Shit!” Kenny said, standing up to leave.

  “So that son of a bitch swapped the real device for this fake one that he wants us to be carrying with us when we go to meet him,” I said. I studied it for a second. “Can you disarm it?” I asked.

  Doc didn’t answer immediately. He peered intently at the bomb. “Sure,” he said. “It’s pretty simple. If a bomb-maker thinks his bomb might be found, he might wire in some booby traps. But if he thinks it won’t be discovered, he’ll skip that step. More bomb-makers get killed from their own booby traps than anything else. That’s why they don’t put ’em in unless they have to. This one is stone simple. No traps.”

  “Could they somehow track where the cellphone is?” I asked. “If we disarm this thing by turning the phone off or disconnecting the power to the phone, will they lose that ability?”

  “Good point. They can definitely track a cell phone,” Kenny said nervously. He looked at the device. “They’ve got a pretty good-sized battery in there wired to the phone. It would probably stay active in stand-by mode for maybe a week or so. During that time, they can tell where it is if they have the right software.”

  “Which we must assume that they do,” I said.

  Doc looked into the bomb case. “Kenny,” he said, “I need a second opinion. To me, I say this looks like the cell phone and the detonator are wired into the battery circuit in parallel—independently. Do you agree?”

  Kenny studied the bomb. “Yeah,” he said. “The detonator power lead has a relay in it that’s controlled by the phone. You can see where they soldered a couple of wires to the cell phone’s vibrator. Damn, this thing is really simple. They must have the vibrator function turned on. If this phone gets a call, instead of ringing, it vibrates. Since they’ve tapped into the vibrator, it sends a current down these two lines. This closes the relay and allows current to flow from the battery to the detonator. Boom. Bomb goes off.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Doc said. “But if you cut a power lead to the detonator, there’s no way it can blow even if the relay triggers. At the same time, the phone keeps working. They’ll never know it’s been disabled.”

  “Agreed,” Kenny said.

  “Anybody feel like sitting around with a live bomb?” I asked.

  No one said yes, so I said, “Me neither. Let’s cut the lead and disarm this son of a bitch.”

  Doc picked up Kenny’s multi-tool and peeled open a tiny pair of scissors. He held up the tool and inspected it.

  “This ought to work,” he said. He looked inside the case. “This one,” he said to Kenny.

  “Agreed,” Kenny said.

  “Here goes.” Doc reached in and, without hesitating, cut the line. It was suddenly so quiet in the room that when scissors made a quiet little snip, the sound, it seemed to echo off the walls.. This was our signal to start breathing again. "We're good," he said.

  “Whew!” I said.

  “Holy crap,” Toni said. “That was pretty intense.”

  “I should say so,” Richard agreed.

  I thought for a minute and said,“Okay. It seems like for now, back in the safe is the best place for this thing. If we move it, they’ll be able to tell.”

  “And they’ll get suspicious and likely call off the swap,” Toni said.

  “Right,” I said. “So that means we’d better stick to the schedule.”

  “Don’t worry,” Richard said. “I think it’s unlikely that Marlowe would try to blow us up until he has the key, anyway. Why would he?”

  “There’s that,” I said. “But I still think this thing is better off in the safe.”

  “Agreed. Definitely.” Richard said. “Anyway, I’m glad that the bomb you’ll carry with you to your meeting tomorrow will be disarmed. As for me, I'm glad I’ll be home drinking a beer with Bobby.”

  I looked at Bobby. He was white as a sheet.

  “You okay, Bobby?” I asked.

  “Fuck me,” he said. “You guys do this kind of shit all the time?”

  I smiled and said, “Hooah.”

  * * * *

  After our meeting finished, I met with Doc and Kenny for a few minutes to go over some ideas I had for the bomb to make it a little easier to control. Then, Toni and I met in my office.

  “You see your bat?” she asked. She picked it up and handed it to me.

  I looked it over. It was my Edgar Martinezsouvenir bat. Except for being used to bash me in the head, it had never actually been used to hit anything. It looked brand-new.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said, turning it in my hands. “I thought there’d be a dent or something.”

  She laughed. “Your head’s not that hard. Actually, I cleaned it up when I cleaned your office.”

  “Was it . . . bloody?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “You were right, you know,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “About what?”

  “About Marlowe doing the unexpected. I sure didn’t see this coming. And I wouldn’t have either if you hadn’t given me a little food for thought. Thank you.”

  She smiled. “Don't forget about Richard,” she said. “That thing about not forgetting the defense.”

  “And Richard, too,”I agreed, nodding. “As a matter of fact, before our meeting, Richard said something else to me that made a lot of sense, especially in light of what we just found. I don’t think you’re going to like it much, but you’re the only one of us who can do it.”

  She looked at me. “What?” she asked skeptically.

  “Richard said that we need to take care of our witnesses.” I looked at her. “Who are our witnesses?”

  “Katherine, but she’s out of the city. Your dad, but he’s out of the country. Us.”

  “And?”

  She thought for a second and said,“And Holly Kenworth. What are we supposed—” She stopped and looked at me. “You’re going to ask me to babysit Holly Kenworth, aren’t you?”

  I knew she’d figure it out pretty quickly. “She needs protection, don’t you agree?”

  She looked at me but didn’t answer. Her eyes told me two things. First, she saw the logic in this train of thought. Second, she didn’t like it.

  “Come on, Toni. If not you, then who? Kenny?”

  “Yeah, right.” She thought for a second, and then smiled. “Actually, that might be interesting—Kenny and Holly.”

  “No,” I said.

  “But—”

  “No,” I repeated.

  “How long are you thinking? Until just after tomorrow’s meeting, right?”

  “That’s right. Less than twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours. Meaning you want me to start now. Not tomorrow morning, but now.”

  “What good would starting tomorrow morning do? They could hit her tonight. Yeah, you need to pick her up and move her somewhere safe now. I don’t want to take any chances with her.”

  “What about the buddy rule?” she asked.

  “If you take her to an unknown location and disappear, you'll be out of the action. I think it doesn’t apply.”

  “Where do you want me to take her?”

  “Why don't you should swing by your apartment, grab a bag, go pick her up, and then go to a hotel. Tomorrow, you guys can go to a spa, on the agency.”

  “Woodmark,” she said almost immediately, naming an expensive hotel on Lake Washington with a well-known spa.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  She stared at me. “There’s always Kenny,” she said. “He’d probably be happy to watch h
er at his place.”

  “All right, the Woodmark,” I agreed.

  She gave me a smile, followed quickly by another frown. “Even with the Woodmark, it still sucks, you know.”

  I nodded. “I know. Can’t be much fun to spend the night with a mathematician.”

  “True. But not just that,” she said, standing up and walking toward me. “It means no romantic evening together tonight for us. After all these years, I was finally going to get to spend the night with Danny Logan.” She said it with a seductive little pout.

  My heart started beating a little faster. What was this? Toni Blair flirting with me? I thought about this for a second. She had to be joking. “Stop playing with me,” I said.

  “Am I?” she asked, smiling coyly, taking another couple of steps closer. “Am I playing?”

  Toni doesn’t flirt with me all that often—hardly ever, actually—and I’m not at all used to dealing with it. I know that at that moment, I went to full alert. No one, and I mean no one—not even Jennifer—has that effect on me.I wasn’t sure how to react. Was she sincere? Or was she pulling my chain? More likelythe latter.I decided to call her bluff. “You’re right. I think Kenny can handle it, after all,” I said.“Let’s make a night of it.”

  She laughed. “Psych!”

  Shit! She was just playing with me all along.

  She giggled for a second, and then she stopped. She stared at me. Her look wasn’t angry and it wasn’t upset. Instead, it was a fleeting, pensive look she has that pierces right into the middle of me, right to the core. She has the singular ability to peel me open and look inside whenever she wants—kind of like a Vulcan mind-meld gut-check sort of thing. I don’t think I could ever hide anything from her, even if I tried.

  “You owe me, Logan,” she said. “Let’s call her up and tell her.”

  Chapter 18

  WITH TONI GONE, I was forced to spend the night with Kenny and Doc at Kenny’s condo on Capitol Hill in order to comply with my own buddy rule. Fortunately, Kenny has a roomy three-bedroom place. I got there about eight. Kenny and Doc were already there. Kenny sat in an overstuffed chair, going through a collection of video games. Doc was loading AR-15 magazines.

  “I went home, and then I had to go back to the office and pick up the bomb,” I said as I walked in. “I changed my mind and didn’t want to leave it at the office, seeing as how we’re not exactly secure over there.” Kenny eyed my duffle bag as soon as I said the word bomb. I looked around for a place to unload and saw an empty corner on the floor. I swung the bag off my shoulder and tossed it in the air in that direction.