Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. It was two in the morning, for Chrissakes.

  “I’m an intern!” he stammered. “I’m cleaning the glassware. Please don’t shoot me!”

  “Oh, relax,” I said. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m in a program.”

  “You’re in a what?”

  I ignored the question. My idiotic promises to friends were my business. “I’m just here for that new-fangled drug you guys are making.”

  He paled. “No—that’s—you can’t—”

  “Shut up.” I waved my gun at him. “I’m only not supposed to kill people. I’ll still shoot you in the leg if you annoy me too much.”

  I was lying a little bit. The kid wasn’t a threat, and I wasn’t about to shoot some poor low-paid intern who wasn’t in my way anyway. But he didn’t know that. He buttoned his mouth in the terrified kind of quiet and sank down onto a lab stool.

  I moved to the back of the lab. The intel I had was correct: the industrial-strength lab freezers stood against the wall, heavy and solid and very securely locked.

  I stepped over to the third one from the left. My usual MO when committing high-end theft was a judicious application of C-4, but lab freezers were built to be explosion-proof, and a blast big enough to get in risked damaging the samples anyway. Besides, blowing holes in things was a good way to set off a security alert.

  “Hey,” I said to the intern, examining the keypad. “You know the code for this?”

  “I—uh—no—I’m just an intern—”

  I fired without looking. The bullet zipped down its velocity vector and pinged right where I’d aimed, taking a chunk out of one of the legs of the kid’s lab stool. He shrieked.

  “You sure you don’t know the code?” I asked.

  “I swear! I swear! They don’t tell me anything!”

  “Okay,” I said. Back to Plan A. My employer had told me the code was only four digits long. I started with 0000.

  I was on 2491 when the intern, who must have had a death wish, burst out, “You’re seriously brute-forcing it? Won’t that take forever?”

  My fingers didn’t stop twitching through the combinations. “‘Forever’ is a gross exaggeration,” I said. “My upper bound is less than eighty-seven minutes.”

  Which could result in an unexpected problem, I reflected, if someone noticed my friend the security guard was missing. Oh, well. I’d deal with that eventuality if it happened.

  A touch before the hour mark, the keypad light flashed green on 6720, and the lock clunked. I heaved open the freezer. The shelves were filled with neat phalanxes of vials, the liquid inside each a pale yellowish color. I slid a small insulated metal case out of the bag I had snugged across my shoulder, unscrewed the top, and transferred a rack of the vials to the padded interior. Then I twisted the case shut and pushed the freezer closed again.

  “I swear I won’t say a word about you,” said the intern, his words coming out so fast they tumbled over each other.

  “Well, not right away, you won’t,” I answered, re-stowing the case in my bag and zipping it secure. “You’ll be unconscious.”

  He squeaked and tried to back away from me. Not that it would do him much good. I’m very fast.

  The alarms went off.

  Sirens wailed through the corridors, with red lights flashing on all sides and an automated voice repeating “security lockdown” in three languages. This was Mr. Intern’s lucky day—no need to deal with him now; I was already blown. Someone must have found my trussed-up guard buddy. I skidded to the door and tried my stolen ID, but nothing happened.

  “It’s a lockdown,” stuttered the intern from behind me. “Nobody in or out; that’s how it works—”

  Good for them, but this lab had outside windows. I turned, picked up the nearest piece of ridiculously expensive lab equipment, and sent it smashing through the nearest one. The intern squealed again.

  I pulled a coil of Tech line out of a pocket of my pack. Almost as thin as wire, it was more compact than rope and just as sturdy. I threw the coils into the air as I sprinted for the window. The mathematics coalesced in my senses without effort: the line bloomed out from my hand, wave equations propagating down its length, the parametric function dropping a wide loop neatly around one of the huge industrial freezers just as I hit the window.

  I pulled my jacket sleeve over my hand, gripped the line, and jumped.

  I slid down the line into the night at breakneck speed, the floors flashing past. Tech line is slicker than most rope, but the strength of my grip created normal force sufficient to slow me—just enough. I stuck out a foot, leveraging the sole of my boot against the side of the building as it flew by, giving myself a touch more friction. A long skid of black spiked in my wake as the brick took off the rubber.

  The asphalt rushed up, swallowing my vision. I looped my other arm into the line and the friction surged as my flesh got tourniqueted through my jacket.

  I hit.

  My boots made contact first, my knees crumpling to absorb the deceleration as I tucked into a roll. Even so, the impact jarred through me, a thunderclap in every joint. I sprang back to my feet and shook it off.

  Sirens rose in the distance, headed my way, but I flipped the sound waves through a quick Doppler calculation—they wouldn’t come close to catching me.

  Less than a minute later, I roared away over the ridge behind the lab on the dirt bike I’d stashed there, shrouded by the night as the police wailed into Swainson Pharmaceuticals behind me. I kept my eyes wide in the darkness as I whipped around the gray outlines of trees and rocks, neat four-dimensional matrices of velocity and position vectors flickering through new values every split-second and making the ride easy. With my right hand, I anchored the throttle open while I fished into my pocket with my left for my cell phone.

  Harrington’s voice when he answered was entirely unruffled, despite the late hour. Just once I would have liked to hear the man off-balance.

  “Hi,” I said, swerving one-handed to avoid a tangle of brush. “It’s Cas Russell. I have your merchandise. I understand it’s environmentally sensitive; when would you like it delivered?”

  Chapter 2

  “Trade you,” I said four hours later, putting my insulated case on the table in front of me.

  The man sitting across the table slid the case toward himself and twisted it open carefully. At six and a half feet tall, with the frame to match, Emmett Paul Harrington III was the sort who dominated a room—especially with his perfectly groomed white hair and three-piece suit. I, on the other hand, barely inched over five feet, and my idea of dressing up tended to involve Kevlar. Harrington had given up early on trying to meet me in his fancy clubs, and we were on his yacht in Marina del Rey, which was both a pleasant and private place for a business transaction.

  Harrington surveyed the contents of the case and smiled. “Miss Russell. You always come through.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” I said.

  He retrieved a metal briefcase from under his chair and laid it on the table, pushing it across to me. “As agreed. You’re sure I couldn’t persuade you to take a cashier’s check next time?”

  “Aw, Harrington, you know me,” I said, flipping open the briefcase to reveal satisfying stacks of hundreds. I measured the bills with a glance and did some quick multiplication; the amount was exactly as agreed. “Cash is king.”

  Harrington shook his craggy head fondly. “You’re the only person I know who still insists upon it.”

  “Not in my world,” I said. “You just live in corporate America.”

  He waved a hand. “Ah, well. Somewhere in the budget is a line item labeled ‘acquisitions’ that is going to drive a poor accountant up the wall.”

  I laughed. “Acquisitions. I like that.”

  “Yes, my clients will be quite pleased with this. Quite pleased.”

  I vaguely remembered Harrington telling me something about the situation when I first took the job; apparently his client
s and Swainson were locked in a massive industrial espionage war, with nobody sure anymore who had stolen what from whom. I didn’t care. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “I will certainly call if there is,” said Harrington. “Can I offer you a drink before you depart?”

  “Not while I’m working, thanks.” I nodded at him and stood. “Good doing business with you, as always.”

  “Miss Russell. Before you leave…may I ask you something?” The avuncular lightness had gone from his tone, replaced with something I could only call gravitas. Hmm, serious. His hands, each the size of a small ham and with perfectly manicured nails, were folded on the table in front of him, and he was studying them intently. “I…apologize in advance if you consider this a breach of etiquette, but I must know.”

  I was suddenly wary. “Know what?”

  “You are quite well-known, at least by those of us who make it our business to know such things, as being…a person who can attain things.”

  “Uh, good,” I said. “That is, you know, what I do.”

  “Has anyone come to you of late with a request for something…dangerous?”

  “You know I can’t reveal what my clients—” I started.

  “I am not speaking of ordinary danger. I’ve heard…” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “I have heard rumors. Someone out there is seeking to build something.”

  I wondered if he really expected me to get anything from that. “Your vagueness does you credit, good sir.”

  He heaved a great sigh. “The word is,” he said, “that some unknown party is seeking plutonium.”

  I stared at him. He stared at me. The only sound was the cry of seagulls and the creaking of the boats in the dock.

  Oh-kay.

  Wow.

  “You think someone’s building a nuclear bomb,” I said.

  “In the current climate, the terrorist threat—”

  I barked a laugh.

  His mouth turned downward. “I assure you, this is not a joke.”

  “No, no, sorry. It’s the whole terrorism thing,” I explained. “Terrorism is a statistical anomaly. You have a greater chance of being crushed under your own furniture than of dying in a terrorist attack. Terrorism is—well, it’s just not mathematically viable enough for me to take seriously.”

  Harrington’s eyebrows had drawn down into a bushy white V, and he was regarding me as if I had declared playing with pure nitroglycerin to be perfectly safe. I huffed out a breath.

  “Look, I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” I assured him. “I don’t think anyone in LA is building a nuclear bomb. Even if someone’s getting grabby for plutonium, there are plenty of other uses for it. Maybe they just like shiny things.” He was still looking at me like I had boarded the train to Crazytown. “I promise, if I hear of anyone building a bomb, I’ll jump in and stop them. Pro bono. Okay?”

  He sighed again. “I cannot help but feel you are not taking me seriously.”

  I wasn’t, but I should have been trying harder to be nice to a client. Especially one who had just paid me a vast sum of money. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” I soothed him. “Full alert. Promise.”

  His mouth still had a distinct downturn to it, but he nodded.

  Before I lost my last veneer of professionalism, I bid Harrington good day and extricated myself with my briefcase full of money. Dawn was breaking as I disembarked down the yacht’s ramp. The harbor smelled like wet socks, but the rising sun’s rays stabbed upward over the city and cast the sky above the water in tinctures of gold and pink, and the docks were pleasantly cool and empty this early in the morning. I started back along the water on foot, reflecting that my day wasn’t going too badly so far.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out and answered. “Arthur. You’re up early.”

  “Mornin’,” said Arthur Tresting’s voice. Arthur had the distinction of being the only person in the entire world who called me on the phone just to talk. He sounded cheerful today, though his breath kept hitching quickly. “Hope I didn’t wake you. Figured, hours you keep, I’d be as like to catch you now as at high noon.”

  He wasn’t wrong. “You sound funny,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Just on a run, thought I’d check in. How’s it going?”

  “Sixty-three and two-thirds days and counting,” I said.

  “Hey, good girl,” said Arthur. “Don’t it feel great?”

  Well, me not killing people made him happy, and for some reason I couldn’t figure out, making Arthur happy was important to me. Besides, being nonlethal was turning out to be an interesting mathematical challenge in an existence that got boring too quickly. An experiment.

  “Sure,” I said. “If you say so.”

  He breathed out a sigh that was half a chuckle. “All right, Russell. So, what you been up to?”

  “I’m just finishing a job,” I said.

  “Anything good?”

  “Oh, the usual. You know. Getting stuff for people.”

  “Hope you mean getting stuff back for people.”

  “Right,” I said. “That.” It was possible I occasionally stretched the job description of “retrieval expert” to be more along the lines of “procurement expert.” I thought of Harrington’s “acquisitions” label and smiled to myself. “You can’t ask me to give up more than one of the Seven Deadly Sins all at once, you know.”

  “Think you’re thinking of the Ten Commandments.”

  “Those, then. Hey, I didn’t know you were religious.”

  “Episcopalian. Don’t change subjects.”

  I wasn’t going to let Arthur’s moralism spoil my good mood. “They paid me a lot of money,” I explained pleasantly. “A lot of money.”

  He paused in that way I recognized as disapproving-but-not-going-to-push-it. He was lucky I’d decided I liked him. “Okay,” he said.

  “Damn right it’s okay.”

  “So, you got something lined up after this?”

  I heard what he wasn’t saying. Arthur’s one of the few people who knows how I get when I’m not working. It isn’t pretty. “Not yet. I have client meetings all day.”

  “I know you gotta take the work. But if you got some options, just give it some thought, all right? For me?”

  Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure I had any choice. In associating with Arthur over the past year, I’d somehow let his ethics worm their way into being some goddamned miniature angel on my shoulder, chirping in my head in place of the conscience I’d never had. Not that I listened most of the time, but still, it was irritating.

  “I promise I won’t steal some little elderly grandparents’ heirlooms as my next job,” I recited. “Happy?”

  “Gonna start singing, girl.”

  “You are so bizarre.”

  He huffed a laugh. “Check in with you later?”

  “Hey, wait,” I said, the thought almost slipping my mind. “Quick question. Have you heard of anyone scrounging around for plutonium lately? Or any other nuclear material?”

  This time the pause was weighty. Arthur’s breath had ceased its steady rhythm, as if he had stopped running. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said hastily. “At least, I think it’s nothing. I just heard something, is all.”

  “If you think someone is building a—”

  Really? Arthur, too? “Nobody is building a nuclear bomb. Forget I said anything.”

  “If you heard something—”

  “The likelihood of terrorism is so remote that it’s downright idiocy even to include it on a risk assessment,” I said. “Be worried about driving on the 101, if you want something genuinely dangerous.”

  “But if you heard something about plutonium…” objected Arthur. “Ain’t there something—I dunno, if you’ve heard of something happening already, don’t that make it more likely?”

  “You’re really trying to use Bayesian reasoning on me?”

  “I’m using what?”

  “
Jesus Christ. All I heard was that someone might be looking for plutonium. It could be for anything. Or it could be a rumor.”

  “You want me to ask around?” Arthur was a private investigator, and a damn good one.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Can at least make some calls, see if anything pops.”

  I had promised Harrington I’d look into it. “Only if you feel like it. My source is in the corporate world, if that helps at all.”

  “I’ll give you a buzz later today.”

  “Sounds good. I’d better get to my client meetings.”

  “Should get yourself an office for that.”

  “Why?”

  Arthur let out a long-suffering sigh that told me exactly what he thought about my propensity for exchanging large sums of money in coffee shops and dive bars. “Later, Russell.”

  “Bye, Arthur.”

  I always got the feeling he didn’t know quite what to do with me.

  Of course, I didn’t know what to do with him, either. By early afternoon, I was sitting in a Starbucks sorely regretting having talked to Arthur that morning.

  Chapter 3

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the determinedly stoic man across from me. “I don’t think I can take your case.”

  I winced as I said it. He was my last meeting of the day, and I’d turned everyone else down.

  It was Arthur’s fault, really, because wouldn’t you know it, but the first potential client turned out to be a woman who literally was trying to steal her grandparents’ heirlooms, and I almost took it, except I wouldn’t have been able to look Arthur in the face for a month. After that I had a no-show and a person who was trying to con me—seriously, you don’t pitch a variation on a pyramid scheme to someone who eats exponentiation for breakfast—and that brought me to Noah Warren, my fourth and last potential client scheduled. I had hoped he would be an arms dealer looking to score a case of illegal weapons or something. Those always paid well.

  Instead, he was crazy.