Hot Wire

by Carson, Gary

  "Jesus Christ," Brown said in a strangled kind of voice.

  It was a bomb. A monster bomb. Lying across a row of heavy iron mounts on top of the concrete pedestal, the thing looked like a propane tank with box fins on one end and it must've been twenty feet long and four or five feet in diameter. Flat black with faded serial numbers stenciled along its sides, it was surrounded by scaffolds and portable aluminum work platforms that gleamed under the lights and the whole assembly gave off this kind of deadly halo. The bomb casing had been removed in places and there were cables hooked up to the thing, all kinds of wires that ran down to the floor, leading off to computers and oscilloscopes set up on rolling carts arranged around the pedestal. A couple guys in lab coats were standing on the platforms, working on the bomb, making adjustments while their partners checked the computers down below. Looking up at the thing, I got this rush of cold terror like nothing I'd ever felt before.

  "Move it." No-Neck gave Brown a shove and Baldy grabbed my elbow. They walked us past the bomb – it was so big we had to look up at it as we went by – staying outside the circle of arc lights and picking their way through the cables snaking across the floor. A forklift rolled out of a wide corridor on the other side of the space, its warning lights flashing. The driver looked like a Marine dressed in overalls with a cigar stuck in his mouth. He wore a headset mike and he was carrying a piece in an armpit shoulder holster. Everybody was armed. Even the lab-coat guys were packing.

  Baldy pushed me along. He looked kind of tense.

  "Hooking up with the press," he said as they walked us over to the office. "Bad move, squirt. That was a real bad move."

  No-Neck unlocked the office door and they shoved us inside, locking the door behind us without a word. Brown looked like he was in shock and he couldn't see too hot without his glasses. He tripped over something and banged into a metal folding chair, but I grabbed his arm and kept him from falling down. Coughing and wheezing, he sat on the chair and slumped over, putting his face in his hands while I checked out our prison. The office had a faded carpet, water-stained walls, a desk with a filing cabinet and a conference table in the middle of the room. Arn sat at the other end of the table, surrounded by fast-food bags and bottles of water.

  He gaped at me and I just stood there for a minute, staring at him like I'd never seen him before. He didn't register.

  He didn't register at all.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Arn looked like a hostage in one of those terrorist videos they were always showing on the news. Scratching a ratty beard, his hair greasy and snarled, he didn't say jack for a while, didn't smile, didn't do anything. He just sat there staring at me with this dumb hostility that made me want to punch him in the mouth, then he looked away like he couldn't be bothered talking to the runty chick who'd ditched him in the bottoms.

  I got the message, all right. He grabbed a plastic bottle off the table and slurped at it like he was dying of thirst, spilling water on his shirt, then he tossed the empty bottle on the floor and dragged a sleeve across his mouth, his eyes sliding from me to Brown, then back to me again. He had scrapes and bruises all over his face and he moved like an old man with arthritis when he got out of his chair, bracing his hands on the armrests and pushing himself to his feet.

  "What's he doing here?" he asked, lifting his jaw at Brown. The reporter was sitting up in his chair now, staring into space.

  I didn't say anything. Didn't know where to start.

  Arn scowled at me for a minute, then he limped over to Brown.

  "What're you doing here?" he asked, then he started coughing and walked back to his chair, flinching when he sat down again. "Somebody going to tell me what's going on? Who are these bastards? What's that thing they got out there?"

  "Arn..." I couldn't take it anymore.

  "Shut up, Emma." He shook his head, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. "Just shut up a minute."

  I dropped into one of the chairs and nobody said anything for a while. We just sat there, staring at each other like idiots, listening to the rain and the voices in the warehouse and the forklift beeping as it moved around outside. Brown kept his mouth shut the whole time, squinting at us without his glasses, his eyes swollen and bloodshot. Finally, he lit a cigarette, got to his feet and gave one to Arn, who lit up with a sigh of relief. He was a heavy smoker and he must've been going crazy.

  "I think we met at the Hot Box," Brown told him in this dull kind of voice. "My name's Adam Brown. Berkeley NewsWire."

  "I know who you are." Arn studied me through a cloud of smoke. "What's the deal, Emma? I thought you were dead or busted or something."

  I told him what had happened since the night with the Lexus, but I left out the parts where I shot the fed and tried to split with the money, and I didn't even try to explain the stuff Brown had told me. Arn didn't say a word when I got finished, just sat there looking at me like he'd never seen me before. It wasn't my fault I'd left him behind, but I got this rush of guilt all mixed up with flashbacks of Steffy and Vincent and this weird choking deal in my throat. But screw Arn. Screw him if he blamed it on me.

  "It just happened too fast," he said after a while. "You got in the car and I saw them come out at the same time. I should've got the hell out of there, but I was like frozen or something. They pulled me out of the car and started wailing on me, man." He coughed, rubbing his chest, then he took a drag and slumped over in his chair, blowing smoke at the floor. "I gave them your name," he said, glancing at me with these haunted eyes. "They had a gun to my head and that bald guy was ready to use it. I told them everything we did that night. The cars. Everything. I told them where you lived."

  We locked eyes for a minute, but I had to look away.

  "What else could you do?" Brown asked morosely, hunched over his smoke. "They would've forced it out of you one way or another." He didn't mention the thing at Yah Joe – how I'd pulled a gun on him and wanted to take off after we found the money. He looked so dazed I wasn't even sure he remembered it.

  "Who asked you?" Arn stomped out his cigarette, then turned back to me. "I thought they were pigs at first, then they tossed me in here. I didn't know if you got away or what and I've just been sitting around, listening to them doing whatever they're doing. Must be ten or fifteen guys off and on. Trucks coming and going. They brought me some junk food and stuff, but nobody told me crap."

  An engine started in the warehouse. Footsteps passed the door and static hissed on a walkie-talkie. The sudden crackle made me jump.

  Arn looked at me. Looked at Brown.

  "Somebody say something," he yelled. "What the hell are they doing? What's that thing they've got out there?"

  Brown stared at him, his eyes unfocused.

  "It's a bomb," he said after a while. "A hydrogen bomb."

  #

  "This is crazy." Arn limped around the room, clutching at his ribs, flinching every time he set his weight down on the wrong foot. I just sat there, watching him. I was messed up in the head somehow. Shock, probably. I couldn't tell. "You're full of it, man!" Arn shouted. "What do you mean it's a bomb? It can't be a bomb!" He went on and on. "You telling me that's some kind of nuke? What the hell's it doing here? What're they going to do with it?"

  "They're going to set it off," Brown said quietly. "Right here."

  "Here?" That jolted me out of my stupor. "How can you tell?"

  "You saw it." He settled back in his chair, blowing smoke at the ceiling, his forehead glistening with sweat. "It's permanently mounted. They're not getting it ready to ship somewhere. I don't know much about nuclear weapons, but it looked like they were wiring it up so they could detonate it in place."

  "You're tripping," Arn yelled. "There's no way."

  "Why would they set it off in the city?" I asked.

  Brown shrugged. "Who knows? There could be a lot of reasons." He pulled at his cigarette, his hand shaking a little. "Whatever's going on, this isn't some rogue operation that Oliver's running on his own. It
's too open. He has to keep the police away from the warehouse. Homeland Security. Customs. The FBI. There's no way he could've set this up without official cover."

  "What're you babbling about?" Arn asked. "Who's Oliver?"

  "The guy with the crewcut," I told him. "He's supposed to be this spook works for the CIA."

  "The CIA?" Arn blinked at me. "You're crazy."

  "Maybe it's a dummy," I said desperately.

  "Not a chance," Brown said. "That's an old Russian city-buster. Ten or twenty megatons. If it goes off, millions of people will die." He looked like he wanted a drink bad. "They've been warning about domestic terror attacks for years. Maybe they need another 9/11 for some reason. Something bigger this time: something that will really scare the hell out of people." He leaned forward, staring into space. "If a nuclear weapon went off in the United States, people would be so terrorized they'd go along with anything. The administration could start World War III, suspend the constitution, impose a full-blown police state. They could round up anybody who got in their way, stick them in FEMA camps. They could do anything they wanted."

  "Screw that." Arn was going nuts. "What do they want with us?"

  "Nothing," Brown said grimly. "You're witnesses, that's all. Pests. They recovered Chase's documents, so they don't care about you anymore. I work for the NewsWire, so they'll probably question me about my contacts – make sure they haven't missed anybody – but they're just cleaning up loose ends." He looked over at me. "Did you notice the labels on those crates out there? This must've been Ligar Shipping's warehouse."

  "So what?" I didn't like his expression. "What's in them?"

  Brown shrugged. "Stuff they were shipping," he said. "Legal cargo. It doesn't really matter. Ligar Shipping was a front, an import-export company. They set it up so they could ship the bomb from their stockpile on the east coast, but the company had to appear to be legitimate. It had to be involved in legitimate business." He took one last drag, then dropped his butt on the floor and ground it out with his shoe. "They have to shut it all down now. Destroy all the evidence."

  "What's that mean?" I was getting this nasty chill.

  "They moved the Lexus here," he said. "Why do you think they did that?" He gave me this twitchy smile, then started digging around in his pockets for another smoke. "They didn't care if we saw their faces and they didn't even care if we saw the bomb. Get the picture?" He found a cigarette, lit up and blew a thin stream of smoke at the floor. "They've probably got a plane waiting somewhere. Oakland Airport, maybe. They'll leave us here with the rest of the evidence, then get as far away as they can and push the button."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Footsteps approached outside, then the lock on the door rattled and I almost peed my pants. Arn clenched his fists, his face drawn and pale, but Brown just stared at the floor, resigned to whatever was coming, I guess. A couple seconds passed, then the door opened and Baldy walked in with a revolver in his hand, looking us over.

  "All right," he said, his eyes bored. "Let's go."

  "Where are you taking us?" I asked.

  "Come on." He waved his gun at the door.

  We shuffled into the warehouse and he made us stand by the Lexus with our hands clasped behind our heads. They'd left the keys in the ignition. Deja vu. Chase's briefcase and the suitcase full of money were still sitting on the table on the other side of the car, but they might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Forty or fifty feet away, the circle of arc lights glared down on that giant bomb.

  Baldy ignored us for a while, talking to somebody on a walkie-talkie while a couple thugs covered us with sub-machine guns. The warehouse stretched away in front of us, the dock off to our right somewhere, and I could just see the rain falling outside a window in the distance. Goons with dollies were moving around in the narrow aisles that ran between the stacks of cargo and I could hear more of them yelling back and forth on the other side of the building. On our left, behind the Lexus, a passage wide enough for a car led to another open area with some gas pumps and a garage door that probably opened onto a service alley behind the warehouse.

  Some guy wearing a headset mike walked by with a clipboard, ignoring us completely, then he turned down one of the aisles and headed into the maze of crates, getting smaller and smaller. A train whistled somewhere. Crossing bells chimed in the distance. Looking down an aisle in front of us, I could see a couple suits loitering around a forklift about fifty feet away. They were smoking. Came off relaxed. Brown was right: no one seemed very worried about being discovered, so they must've had some kind of official protection. I couldn't tell how many people were in the warehouse, but there were a lot of them.

  Arn was staring at the suitcase on the table.

  "That's the money?" he whispered.

  "Yeah," I said, feeling sorry for myself. I'd had it in my hands for a couple minutes. Back at Yah Joe. That was the closest I was ever going to get to so much cash.

  Baldy sat down at the table, turning his chair around and folding his arms on the backrest with his gun pointing in our general direction. We stared at each other for a while, then Crewcut walked out of the stacks, smoking a cigarette. He stopped to talk to one of the guys working on the bomb, checked his watch, then came over to us and walked up to Brown, studying him like he was some kind of fungus.

  "Adam Brown," he said. "I knew I'd heard that name before."

  "We checked you out." Baldy scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. "Dickwad."

  "You used to work for the L.A. Times," Crewcut went on. "You were Matthew's bottom boy in the Washington Bureau until they caught you selling kiddy porn."

  "That's a damn lie." Brown flushed, dropping his hands.

  "Keep them up, scumbag." Baldy gestured with his gun and Brown clasped his hands behind his head again, breathing hard, his left eye twitching. He looked like he was about to bust a gut.

  Crewcut smiled.

  "The drunk of the Bureau," he said. "Sheet for contempt, lewd/vag, DUI. You tried to pass yourself off as one of those old-school reporters, but you were just another left-wing whore printing classified material leaked by unnamed sources in violation of a dozen federal statutes." He blew a cloud of smoke in Brown's face. "Now you're a hack for some no-name scandal rag and you've been feeding dirt to Matthews on the side: politicians screwing male hookers, junky executives, bureaucrats on the take. It's good shakedown material if Matthews wants to smear a candidate or rig a city contract. Isn't that right?"

  "I haven't see him in years," Brown said.

  Crewcut shook his head.

  "We know you work for him," he said, his eyes flickering over me and Arn, then focusing on Brown again. "I know your kind, all right. You're a typical product of government-media incest, a front for criminals and subversives. You specialize in blowing assets and undermining national security and you'd screw a dog for access."

  "I told you," Brown said. "I haven't talked to Matthews for years. The first time I saw him since I left Washington was at the Emeryville police station the other day."

  "Bullshit," Baldy said, frowning at one of his fingernails.

  "Who else have you discussed this with?" Crewcut asked mildly. "How did you learn about Chase?" He glanced at me. "Someone must have tipped you off about Little Miss Muppet here."

  Brown was about to answer when a voice jabbered over Crewcut's walkie-talkie. He raised it to his ear, listened for a minute, then tried calling somebody else. When they didn't answer, he pulled out his gun and turned to Baldy.

  "That was the dock," he said. "We've got traffic on the access road."

  "What kind of traffic?"

  Crewcut shrugged. "It's probably nothing, but you better check it out." He glanced over at the bomb. "I tried the gate, but they didn't answer."

  "It's the goddamn weather."

  Baldy headed back through the stacks and Crewcut sat down at the table, holding his gun on Brown, his face flat and hard under the track lights. The two guards looked uncomfortable. Ke
pt shifting around. Brown stared at Crewcut like a rat trapped by a snake and he didn't look too steady.

  "What was that about?" Arn whispered.

  "They think Brown works for Matthews," I said.

  "So?" He gave me a dirty look. "So what?"

  "They've got it all wrong," Brown said hoarsely.

  Time dragged by, the rain beating on the metal roof. Crewcut just sat there for a while, blowing smoke rings and checking his watch, then he got another call on his walkie-talkie. It didn't look like good news. He talked to whoever it was for a minute, then turned to the guards.

  "Check with Three," he told them. "We might have visitors."

  They glanced at each other, then ran off, heading for the back of the warehouse and leaving us alone with Crewcut. He stood up and called to the guys working on the bomb: "What's the status?"

  "Final diagnostics," one of them shouted back.

  "Make it fast." For the first time, Crewcut looked nervous. He paced around, scanning the stacks of cargo, then he called somebody else on his walkie-talkie. "Can you hear me all right?" he asked when he got through. "Yeah. It's the same here. Dead spots and interference. What? I don't know yet. They're checking it out right now. Keep your eyes open and make sure everybody's still in contact. We're almost ready to clear out." Voices called back and forth on the other side of the warehouse, but it was impossible to tell what was going on.