Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  What the average phone user didn’t know was that some telephone companies allowed businesses to charge as much as $250 per call when someone dialed their nine-hundred number.

  The service provider, usually one of the big telephone carriers, would take a small percentage, or a flat fee per call, and would forward the rest of the money earned during the month to the customer possessing that particular nine-hundred number. In Buck’s case, this was the Western States Militia, a consortium of well-armed and organized patriots. Only they didn’t use the militia name with the phone company. Instead they used something nice and respectable: “Rock Island Finance and Investment.” They would change it next week when they moved to a different area of the country and did the scam again with a different number and corporate name.

  Buck listened and waited for the taped message to end. It was very brief, something innocuous about financial planning, no more than ten words in length.

  He hung up the phone without saying a word. The girl looked over at him. She was talking to somebody else on the switchboard.

  “Busy,” Buck whispered to her.

  She read his lips, nodded, and smiled like she understood. She kept talking, forwarded a call, and picked up another.

  Buck dialed again. Did the same routine. By the time he was finished, he had dialed the number five times: $1250 on the company’s phone bill. The charges would be sent along to the receptionist’s employer at the end of the month, and unless the company’s bookkeeper was Ebenezer Scrooge, it would probably be paid without much question. The phone company in turn would send the money along to the militia under its corporate alias.

  Buck could have done it four more times, but he took pity on them. Besides it didn’t pay to be greedy with one pigeon. This was the land of opportunity. There were at least a dozen other good-sized businesses on this same street who wouldn’t notice the charges on their phone bills for at least two or three months, if ever. He would hit them all within the next two hours. Then he would move a few miles away and start over again. Tomorrow they would pull up stakes and move out to Orange County and from there down to San Diego. Welcome to the electronic superhighway.

  Buck walked back over to the receptionist. She looked up at him, still dealing with a caller on the line.

  “Can you hold a moment?” She pressed the hold button.

  “The line’s busy,” said Buck. “I don’t seem to be able to get through. Tell you what. I’ll check the information with my office from the cell phone in my truck. Have ‘em run a trace on it and call the party who sent it out. They probably either got the name or the address wrong. We’ll straighten it out, and if it’s supposed to be delivered here, I’ll come back and drop it by this afternoon.”

  “That’d be great.” The girl flashed big pearly whites at him like he’d just solved a huge problem for her.

  Always willing to help, thought Buck. After all, he shouldn’t be wearing their uniform unless he was willing to provide the service.

  He turned and headed for the door. He could see her checking out his tight ass in the dark smoked glass of the front door just before he opened it.

  He had done a quick calculation in his head before getting started that morning. If each one of the fourteen men working the scam that day averaged $1000 a hit, and they could do five businesses in an hour, they were pulling down $70,000 an hour. Times eight hours, was $560,000 for the day. The militia would take 90 percent. The other 10 percent would be divided among the fourteen men working the scam. Buck wasn’t asking any questions. No matter which way you cut it, it beat the shit out of climbing trees and whacking off limbs.

  KENT, WA

  Toothpaste and toilet paper did the job on the smoke detector in the cell. The smoke detectors were there so the guests wouldn’t light up at night and burn the jail down.

  Chaney molded a flat baffle out of a dozen pieces of the toilet paper and held it together with toothpaste and water. He fit it precisely over the smoke detector, then used more toothpaste to seal it off.

  Quickly Chaney moved to the window, removed the screw heads, and lifted the acrylic screen off, setting it gently on the floor against the wall. Taking a single match he held it up as high as his arms could reach into the well of the window and allowed the match to burn like a candle for several seconds.

  “What are you doing?” said Chenko.

  “Shut up.”

  They waited for almost two minutes. It seemed like a lifetime. Chaney was about to light another match when he heard the rustle of branches and noise outside. He looked up and saw a man’s face beaming back at him from beyond the bars.

  “What the hell took you so long?” said Chaney.

  “There was a car coming. Here, take this.” The man outside was breathless. He passed Chaney a small walkie-talkie attached by wire to a headset.

  “We got cars at each end of the street. They’re both on channel seven. They see any movement outside, cars coming by, guards nosing around, they’ll let you know. Cover the flame. You got it?”

  “Got it,” said Chaney.

  “Here. Now don’t drop it.” The guy outside carefully slid the carrying case with the Victor torch through the bars. He had tied the handle of the case onto a rope so that he could retrieve it if for any reason they weren’t able to get out that night.

  “If you need anything, holler into the headset. I’ll be in the car at the corner.” Before Chaney could say anything, the guy was gone.

  He left the other end of the rope coiled on the ground outside and headed back to his colleague in the car. For this he walked a very careful route, one that they’d mapped out earlier in the week.

  Outside the jail was a video surveillance system. Cameras mounted on rotating motors were erected under the eaves of the building and monitored by guards at a station inside.

  The system had only one problem: a noticeable blind spot in the area outside of the ground floor cell that Chaney had muscled away from Tattoo and Homer. It might have been a relatively new county jail, but it wasn’t Pelican Bay or the federal prison in Atlanta.

  Chaney got the sparker out of the box, adjusted the oxygen and acetylene for the right mix, and sparked the torch. He adjusted the nozzle until there was a blue flame and the steady hiss of gas.

  Inside the box was a set of welder’s glasses. Chaney put them on and went to work. It was a long and awkward reach, eighteen inches up into the open well of the window. He stood on the rim of the commode that was directly beneath it, and several times almost slipped and stepped into the open toilet.

  Chenko held a blanket over the window in the cell’s door so the flash of sparks from the torch cutting steel wouldn’t be reflected outside into the partially dark corridor. Occasionally he peeked behind the blanket to be sure the guard wasn’t making his rounds.

  Smoke from the torch began to waft back into the cell and up toward the ceiling. Chenko looked nervously at the smoke detector wrapped in toilet paper and hoped that it would hold.

  “Are you almost finished?”

  “Shut up and watch the door,” said Chaney. He’d cut through one of the bars and was halfway through another when the guys outside in the car whispered into the headset of the walkie-talkie.

  “Cool it. Pedestrian coming up the street.”

  Chaney removed the torch from the window and held it down near the floor so that it wouldn’t be visible from the outside. He waited a couple of minutes until he was given the “all clear.”

  Chaney was hoping the guys outside had remembered to bring the pry bar. The plan called for Chaney to cut through each of the bars one time near the bottom. Using the pry bar, they would then bend the steel bars out of the way, enough so that Chaney and the Russian, using the bars as handholds, could shimmy up and out through the window.

  He hadn’t quite finished the second bar when the torch began to sputter and showed a yellow flame. The first acetylene bottle was empty. Chaney began to worry that maybe he hadn’t brought enough. If they couldn�
�t cut the other bars, he would have to push all the tools out through the window, have the guys in the cars pick them up, then put the acrylic screen back in place and wait until tomorrow night to finish. If the guards checked the window and saw the burned bars or checked the acrylic screen, it would be all over.

  He disconnected the first acetylene bottle and hooked up the second, sparked a flame, and went back to work. Chaney was almost through the third bar when Chenko snapped his fingers twice. “Guard.”

  Chaney whipped the torch out of the window and doused the flame. He dropped the torch into its case and with one foot kicked the whole thing under the bunk.

  The Russian pulled the blanket off the window and dove for the upper bunk as Chaney replaced the acrylic screen. He didn’t have time to mess with the screw heads. He fell on his bunk just as the guard’s flashlight beam reflected off the glass window in the cell door.

  Chaney lay like a dead man in his underwear on the bunk as the guard’s light flashed around the room and flickered off the acrylic panel in the window. He prayed that the guard wouldn’t notice that the six screw heads were missing.

  Chaney’s head was turned away from the wall toward the door. His eyes were open enough for peripheral vision to pick up something on the floor. It was a loop of red rubber hose from the torch, sticking out from under the bunk.

  The flashlight beam moved around the walls of the cell like Tinker Bell. Chaney flopped over on the bed as if shifting in his sleep, dangled one arm over the edge of the bunk, and with his hand scraped the floor, catching the hose in a single fluid motion, sweeping it under the bunk.

  The flashlight traced his movements just a half second too late to pick up the hose, which by then had disappeared under the blanket hanging over the edge of Chaney’s mattress. He held his breath as the light swept the wall above the bunks. It passed over the toilet paper cocoon covering the smoke detector so quickly that the guard didn’t notice. He also failed to pick up the hazy cloud of smoke that floated lazily just beneath the ceiling of the cell like mist over the Blue Ridge Mountains. The guy was either blind or going through the motions of a bed check while his mind was off duty, probably thinking about humping his wife or his girlfriend or somebody else’s wife.

  The light disappeared from the cell door window. Chaney and the Russian waited several seconds until they heard receding footsteps back down the corridor outside.

  Chaney got up and checked the window. “Go.”

  The Russian grabbed his blanket, jumped off the bunk, and covered the window again. This time he kept a careful eye peering behind it.

  Chaney went back to work with the torch. “Just one more.” He cajoled and coaxed the little torch, babying it to conserve fuel. He kept checking his watch. Eighteen minutes later, he was through the last bar.

  “Done,” he whispered into the mouthpiece of the headset and a second later heard a car door slam some distance away outside. A minute later there was rustling in the bushes beyond the window and Chaney saw the business end of a long steel pry bar poking into the window from outside. Using the hard frame of the masonry around the window, the man outside leveraged his weight against the cut bars one at a time until each of them was bent almost ninety degrees and lay nearly flat against the well on the inside of the window.

  “Time to go,” said Chaney.

  Chenko went first. He didn’t bother with clothing. In his underwear he put one foot on the edge of the commode, then pulled himself up using the bars inside the window. He slid through the window easily and disappeared through the bushes outside.

  Chaney started to go, then looked back. He stepped back down off the commode, disconnected the twin hoses from the bottles of oxygen and acetylene, and flipped the bottles up and out through the window. Then he assembled the torch back in its box and placed it on top of the commode. Only then did he pull himself up through the window and out. He used the rope on the outside to lift the case with the torch out through the window. There was no sense leaving it behind for the cops to trace. A Victor Portable torch was an item that a hardware dealer would remember selling. He might remember Chaney’s face. Why have a bad portrait hanging in the post office when you didn’t have to?

  TEN

  YEKATERINBURG

  It appears the problem may be double what we originally thought.” Gideon van Ry found himself shouting into the mouthpiece of the telephone. “No, I said double.” He worried that his accent along with the bad connection was making it more difficult for him to be understood back in Santa Crista, where Caroline was taking notes.

  He also spoke in cryptic terms. He was sure they were listening somewhere, probably down the hall from Mirnov’s office.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s what I said.” He was hoping Caroline would get the message without his saying it: that whoever took the devices took two of them. He worried that if he got too specific, the Russians would cut the phone connection. He’d already lost contact twice. Gideon waited for the deadening click, but it didn’t happen.

  Mirnov looked at him from across the desk. Gideon offered a harmless smile, shrugged his shoulders as if to say “bad connection.”

  “Oh, they’re being very helpful. The Russian government is most cooperative,” said Gideon. He hoped this might buy more time on the line. For the most part, it was true. The problem was that in the new Russia no one quite knew precisely where to draw the line on security.

  “The facility here is everything we thought it would be,” said Gideon.

  This had a double meaning. He and Caroline had discussed what they knew about Sverdlovsk before Gideon left Santa Crista, and it was not good.

  “Yes, you can put that in the report,” he told her.

  Mirnov smiled at him, and Gideon smiled back. He would call her once he left Russia and edit the report before it was released; otherwise they would never allow him back in. Diplomacy was always important if you wanted continued access to information. While sunshine was the institute’s business, they were not out to embarrass the Russian government. Poking the light of public awareness into dark crevices containing arsenals of mass destruction was the institute’s stockin-trade. There was nothing the Russians would hear or read that they did not already know. Parts of their weapons storage and disposal system were in serious trouble. The problem was that neither the Russian nor the American governments were telling their people about this.

  “One other note,” said Gideon. “The items in question. They were not taken at the same time.” He listened. They did not cut him off.

  “That’s right. Both of them shipped through Vladivostok. Right… Say again? … No. No. Different bills of lading. Both labeled machine tools. Some ultimate point of delivery. Yes.”

  Caroline was now probing him, trying to get everything she could. In an hour, the bare outline of information would be on their database. The details they could disclose publicly would follow in a few days. Clients around the world would be on the alert, mostly government security services. They would want as much information as possible. No doubt they would be querying the institute by phone, fax, and E-mail. It was a major story for a very select audience.

  “Let me spell it. That’s Belden Electronics. B-E-L-D-E-N. A Washington State address. Check with information,” said Gideon. “It appears to be incorporated, if the address means anything. It’s a P.O. box. A place called Friday Harbor. Probably an address of convenience. You can be sure they did not ship the devices there. That’s right.” He held one hand over his other ear to hear better over the faltering phone line.

  “What? Say again? … Do I know when the last device was taken?” Gideon looked over at Mirnov. His superiors had instructed him to cooperate as much as possible. The Russian shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t sure. Or perhaps he was just in shock. No doubt he would be on a plane to Moscow by nightfall to answer a lot of questions.

  “We cannot be sure when the last one was taken … Specifications, you say?”

  Caroline wanted to know precisely the
type of devices missing.

  “Artillery shells. One-hundred-and-fifty-three-millimeter artillery. Hello. Caroline, are you there?”

  He listened for a second. “Hello. Hello.”

  Apparently he’d gone too far. He could hear clicking on the line. They’d cut him off.

  He held the receiver away from his face for a second and looked at it as if Caroline might actually crawl through the wire. Then he placed the phone into its cradle on Mirnov’s desk.

  “Ah. Telephone service. What can I say?” said Mirnov. “Like everything else in the new Russia. Only the new entrepreneurs have good phones.”

  Gideon looked up at the ceiling in frustration and ran the fingers of both hands through his long blond hair. It was usually parted in the middle and full. This afternoon it was a mess. He hadn’t shaved or showered in more than two days. He and Mirnov had been camped at the Russian’s office trying to assemble what information they could. Mirnov was constantly called out to confer with superiors. Gideon wondered if he was being told everything.

  He worried that maybe the Russians would hold him, if not here, then upon his return to Moscow. The Russian government might be the least of his concerns. There were darker forces at work in Mother Russia. The Mafiya, as it styled itself, was more violent there than anyplace else on earth. They did not mind murdering foreigners, particularly those who threatened their interests.

  Gideon pushed himself off the corner of Mirnov’s desk, where he’d been leaning on the edge since his call went through to Caroline.

  “We’ll have to wait and see if our people can put the call through again,” said Mirnov.

  “Two devices,” said Gideon.

  “Yes.” Mirnov lit a large Cuban cigar and offered one to Gideon.

  The tall Dutchman shook his head. “Both artillery shells,” he said. “I understand why they would take two of them. They could sell them both on the black market, Libya, Iran, Iraq. There are plenty of potential buyers. But why ship them to the same point of destination? That does not make sense,” he told the Russian.