“There’s been no SNAFU, but I’ll agree nothing is rational about this.” Charlie rubbed his face. “Listen, we arrest suspects, and that is why we are here. You are innocent until proven guilty. You’ll have plenty of time to tell your story. You seem like a nice enough fella; I hope for your sake you are telling the truth.”
Mike liked the sincerity he heard in the agent’s voice.
“I’ve been patient with you. Too damn patient, to be honest, but my gut tells me deep down you’re a good kid. Heck, because of your service to our country I’ll even allow you to get the contract you mentioned. I’ll take it in custody with your stuff.”
Mike turned.
Collin’s voice became hard. “But don’t get any ideas. You’re in a heap of trouble, and we’re taking you in.”
This boiled Mike’s blood while he walked to the file cabinet with an arrogant strut. He would retrieve the ‘Official Government Contract’ and force the arresting officer to eat his words. He shoved his hand into the container of marbles to grasp the key and yanked on the file cabinet drawer. His boiling blood froze when he discovered blank pages. This can’t be happening.
He dropped the blank papers to the floor. His mind raced. He thought of his contract to protect the programming code, personal stuff. Time to test my security program. He yelled. “Strawhead, my voice is my password -- self-destruct sequence -- one Alfa, three Charlie, one Zulu.” Ironic an agent named Charlie is arresting me.
The screens went dark in the kitchen when the panels slammed back in place. A Da Vinci scene in the living room flashed a warning and was replaced by a countdown sequence.
Strawhead sang a sad song. Mike’s added touch. “Thanks, Mr. O’Connor for all the things you’ve done. All the systems that you’ve won. The way you deal with bytes. And your problems with crypto types. I will miss you so much.”
Mike watched Charlie make a hand signal.
“Grab him.”
The younger male agent approached Mike.
Mike felt colossal hands clasp around each arm and shove him against the refrigerator. The bear’s voice again. “Where is it?”
Mike looked into the larger man’s face and acted confused, his lips sealed.
“Your main computer and hacking software, you little dip wad.”
This was not good. Buy time. Mike smelled stale beer on the man’s clothes, and the agent’s breath smelled like rotten hops. It was early morning, and Mike hadn’t eaten yet. His stomach tightened in a knot, the empty stomach the only thing keeping him from vomiting.
“Hey, why don’t you let me go and grab a beer from the fridge? It smells like you could use one.”
He felt the large man’s grip remove itself from his left arm. A white light mushroomed inside his head. Two heartbeats later, Mike realized he’d been slapped, and slapped hard, by a flesh sledgehammer.
His cheek caught fire. The nerve centers delivered pain to his brain in quick flashes. He felt blood trickle down the corner of his mouth. He moved his tongue to lick up the metallic-tasting blood.
In the van around the corner, two men watched on the small black and white monitors. After the slap, they gave each other high fives.
One of them said, “Wow that hadda hurt. Tony may be an idiot sometimes, but he can dish out a can of wallop. I once went against him in a combat drill, and he knocked me silly.”
“You still haven’t recovered, ha, ha.” The smile left his face. “That stunt is going to cost him big time.”
Mike was limp and recovering from the shock when he saw Lokai out of the corner of his eye. How did Lokai escape the bedroom? Oh shit!
Lokai rushed to his defense and attacked the giant agent. He crunched down on the thick leg.
Everything moved in slow motion. Mike saw Charlie pull out his gun and shoot Lokai. The dog collapsed and slid from the force of impact. On the polished floor, a trail of blood marked the dog’s wake.
The large agent still held Mike in place. If anything, the pressure was stronger on his arms. The agent looked pissed. Something inside of Mike exploded. A white-hot fury. He did not try to tap it down. He added to the force of the explosion.
He forgot what happened next, but the evidence of his actions laid in a crumpled heap. He rushed to his injured dog.
Mike turned his head in time to see the crumbled heap stir, pull out his gun, and shoot. Mike felt the impact.
Not that Mike would know it until later, but the bullet’s force diminished when it traveled through kitchen’s wooden table leg.
The table teetered, then fell over. In life, as in physics, a rule was enforced: for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. The agent’s violent reaction caused the vertebrae of Mike’s spine to bend from the force of the bullet. The vertebrae bent in an in angle God did not intend.
Mike felt pain, intense molten-hot pain. The misshaped bullet and a large splinter lodged in his back. Opposite of the heat, an ice-cold chill engulfed him. He managed a feeble grunt.
Another lightning bolt flashed illuminating his apartment. He winced at the reminder of his rainy day luck.
The pain dissolved with the rush of endorphins. Panic overwhelmed him when he lost feeling in the lower half of his body--amidst the panic, a strange peace.
What the hell just happened? Kim knew Tony was trouble, but not this. Never this.
Her training took over. She raced to Mike’s side and knelt next to him. “The bullet’s half-way logged in his back.” She saw where it poked out. Blood pooled around the hole. Not dangerous yet.
She left the large splinter to prevent further damage. Blood poured from the wound. She ripped Mike’s shirt and circled the splinter with it. With both hands, she applied direct pressure to stop the bleeding.
Kim had excelled in her first aid class and did her best to keep the perpetrator from exsanguinating. She’d seen plenty of men, and a few women, dead where they’d been shot, with sticky, semi-dried blood pooled around them, sometimes from her own gun, but this was different. How many more times am I going to see someone shot when they shouldn’t have been? Come on, you bastard, stay with me.
Mike, voice raspy, opened his eyes. “You believe in love at first sight?”
Thank God. “I do, but it usually involves chocolate. Now shut up. I’m trying to keep you alive.” She watched his eyes blink slower and slower. He’s slipping. Shit.
Mike’s eyes widen, the blinking gone. He tugged on her sleeve. “Please make sure… Lokai. My dog. Make sure he’s cared for?”
“Dog. Right. I promise.” Tears welled up in her eyes. I am so fucking over this job. “It’ll be alright, you’ll see.” It damn well better be. She heard a voice over a set of speakers.
“Mike, it’s time to wake up... wake up lover boy.”
Mike’s head went slack.
Kim looked at Tony. “You asshole! Why’d the hell you shoot him? And forget about your damn leg. Get an ambulance! Now!”
She turned toward Charlie. “Bring your trigger-happy ass over here and keep pressure on this wound. Keep his head elevated and don’t move him. You know your shit, act like it.”
Charlie growled. “Remember who’s in charge here, Agent Maat.”
Kim raised a bloodied hand and pointed toward Charlie. “Move!”
Charlie put his gun away and knelt by Mike’s side. “He’s in shock.”
“No shit! If this guy or his dog dies.” She growled, and Charlie flinched. “Words won’t describe the pain I’ll inflict.”
“Wake up, lover boy...”
Satisfied that Charlie had taken over attending to Mike’s gunshot, Kim stood up. “Tony, turn off whatever the hell that is. I’m taking the dog in the van to the hospital. Don’t move Mike until an ambulance gets here.” She grabbed the keys out of Tony’s jacket pocket. “And don’t try to stop me. I don’t give a two shits if I am fired.”
She searched, found and grabbed towels to fashion a crude bandage for Lokai. Once the makeshift bandage was in place, she charged
out of the apartment, dog in her arms, both she and the dog a bloody mess.
Outside in the communications van, the older agent watched the younger technician freak out.
“Man-o, Man-o, Man. What do we do?”
The older agent, who had been through clusters like this before, stopped the tape. He retrieved a hidden bar magnet, hidden for this purpose and this purpose alone.
With a practiced hand, he moved the magnet over the videotape. He looked at the younger agent. “We had an equipment malfunction; you don’t know what happened. Understand?”
CHAPTER 9
Russia's Little Surprise Gift
Kim Maat shut the door behind her.
Charlie guessed her mood to be piss and vinegar. He was proven right.
She sat across from him. No minced words, straight to the point. “No, Charlie, I won’t change my mind. Mike O’Connor’s been in prison now for two months, and every day, I take his dog for a walk. And that’s new. I used to take him to the yard in a wagon. I don’t know how he survived much less can walk now. A few inches any direction and Lokai would be crippled or dead.” She took a moment to gather courage. “I look at that dog, and I see two unnecessary gunshot victims. I keep wondering when will I ever love my job again, and I won’t. I just won’t.”
Charlie, his fingers resting on Kim’s resignation, leaned back. “I’ll hang onto this. Think it over. All your training. All that time you spent proving yourself to the guys here. Don’t waste all that. You have a good career ahead of you.”
“The guys here... like who, Tony? Tony just about killed a suspect, not to mention all of us on the way over in the van. O’Connor wasn’t a threat, but Tony puts a hole in him. What a dipshit. Then magically, the surveillance recorder malfunctions, and then you, Charlie, the one man I respected here and why I stayed as long as I did, defend Tony. You told him all kinds of crap before we went into O’Connor’s apartment that his ass was on the line if he screwed up, and nothing winds up in the case file. Why?”
Charlie's lips remained sealed, just stared at his wall clock. He watched the downward motion of second-hand slide past three, then four, then five. “Kim.” He met her eyes. “You’re a professional, but you can’t go here with it”--Charlie put two fingers on his heart--“you’ll drive yourself nuts. You can’t walk away from every arrest soul-searching what happened.”
“I said it weeks ago. Tony should be unemployed right now, or worse.”
“I put him behind a desk. Be happy.”
Kim’s teeth hurt from clenching her jaw. “Is Tony your secret son-in-law? Why the hell protect him? What is it, Charlie? The good-old-boy network?”
“His ex-wife’s father is a Deputy Chief. He told me in uncertain terms to keep the alimony flowing.”
“No shit.” She threw her hands up in the air. “Unfucking believable.”
“Tell me about it. You’ll be behind a desk just like this someday. Maybe it won’t have so many scratches. A young person’s going to walk into your office and plop himself or herself down, all conflicted because some asshole got shot. It’s the way of things, Kim. I’ll turn fifty-three next week. Mandatory retirement at the FBI is fifty-seven. The last thing I need now--”
“You can take retirement and cram it up your butt kissing ass, Charlie! When does it stop?”
“The right man is in the pen for a solid reason, Kim. That’s all you need to care about.”
Kim stood. “You know, I visited Mike O’Connor in prison yesterday. He just sat there in his wheelchair, didn’t react to me, didn’t look at me. Then he asked, ‘How’s Lokai.’ How’s his dog? The only damn thing out of his mouth. I sat there on the other side of the glass, holding the phone, blubbering my ass off. I’m gone, Charlie. Have a nice retirement. I’ll try to forgive you because you didn’t have a choice. But damn, you’re making it hard. You won’t see me for a while.”
Charlie watched her walk out. Please forgive me.
Isaac Papinov laid his bloodied straightedge razor on his bathroom sink. The blood and sharp edge raised a dark thought. He picked the razor and positioned it across his wrist. The hand that held blade started to shake. He flung the razor in the sink.
To the man in the mirror. “You coward.” He lowered and raised his head. “No, maybe I am too young to die?”
He snatched a nearby towel, regretted that it was white, soaked it in hot water, and applied it to his nicked jaw. “Forty-seven isn’t so old”--blood seeped into the towel--“just not young. Definitely...not young.”
Satisfied after a while that he wouldn’t bleed to death, he rinsed the razor and flipped off the bathroom light. “So much for killing yourself and all that.”
He shuffled into his combination living room and kitchen, past the wall where his engineering diploma from Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute hung, and stopped. As a master engineer at the nuclear plant, just south of Moscow, his eagerness to serve his country had vanished with age. “So much for that, too.”
He eased himself into a chair at his tiny kitchen table where it nestled between one lonely window and a small, rumbling refrigerator. Bills on the table mocked him. He pulled one to him and opened it up. “Not now.” He grabbed another. “Not now.” I used to plan my budget six months in advance, and now this. Reforms, my ass. Blyad. (Fuck.)
Isaac put the bill down and reflected on the wooden chess sets carved by his father. They’d been his father’s prized possessions, testimonies of his craftsmanship and attention to detail. Before his kidneys stopped working, his father had passed the four remaining sets onto him. Working weeks at the processing plant with erratic pay, Isaac had stood on the streets of Podolsk among common peddlers and sold the best of the chess sets to American tourists. He eventually sold two more. His pride buried inside slithered away, not to be found again, each time he placed one of the carved sets into a stranger’s hand.
In the silence of his small apartment, Isaac crumbled a nearby dirty shirt and wiped away tears that had fallen on the table. He swore he would die before he sold the last set. “But what to do. These damn bills. No money. Blyad.” And it’s never going to change.
His grandfather’s rusting pistol from World War Two laid dormant in a box beneath his bed. The chambers were empty, no bullets. I’d only need one. Who you kidding? You failed just minutes ago.
Isaac yielded himself a slight smile. “There is another way out of this.” He reached for a pen and flipped over one of the bills. He drew lines. Surmised measurements. Listed equipment. “The one currency I have access to that doesn’t lose six percent of its value every day.” He wrote the periodic symbol for uranium at the bottom of the page and drew a box around it. “Yes. Just a small amount from the plant every day. No one will notice. Then I’ll sell it. Yes.” The safety inspector tells us to keep a watchful eye for workers trying to steal uranium. So. I will watch myself take the uranium.
Isaac knew how much uranium to capture without notice. Upper management kept track of every gram, but a process is a process: spills, losses, and overflows occur. Four percent of one gram would not trigger an alarm.
Against one wall, several thick lead-lined glass plates with portholes carved in them reflected his image. Special gloves, interwoven with materials resistant to radiation, lined the portholes. Workers were required to wear a second pair of inner gloves for reinforced protection.
An intelligent engineer had designed a box-shaped hole with a sliding tray that allowed materials to be removed for inspection, testing and transportation to other sections of the plant.
Isaac gazed at the conveyor belt, storage lockers, and other machinery on the other side of the lead-lined glass. The belt and small lead-lined lockers transported and stored the nuclear materials during the refinement process. A series of electrical switches on a control panel below the glove holes controlled both the lockers and the belt.
He waited while his co-workers rushed out of the room to go on their smoking break. Just act normal. It’s just another day at work. Ju
st be normal.
He knew his co-workers entered a well-ventilated room at regular intervals and were usually gone around fifteen to twenty minutes. Russia had the most smokers per capita in the world, and the designers of the plant understood this when they built the break room. Isaac didn’t smoke and never shared any of their breaks, remaining behind when they left was perfectly natural.
He slid his hands into the cumbersome inner gloves. Just like any other day, Isaac, minus one little detail. His head moved in both directions to ensure he was alone, Isaac put his back to the security camera, blocking his hands while he pulled the special tool tray toward him and placed a twenty-milligram vial into it. He gently guided the tray back into the chamber.
His hands trembled. He measured off a little of the uranium powder from the ceramic-and-lead container box on the conveyor belt and placed it into the vial.
There, see, no spillage. No errors. No witnesses. Moments later, Isaac carried out his regular job duties, putting a larger quantity of uranium into a second and much larger vial that the plant used for transporting material to another location for additional testing and storage.
He vigorously shook both vials, causing the charged radioactive powder to settle onto the bottom, forming a small dot. He wrapped and sealed it before using the tray to remove it. There. It’s a start.
With his heart rate spiking, he placed the small vial in a tungsten medical transport container to protect himself from radiation. He secured the container in a hollowed-out coffee thermos, the same thermos he’d always brought to work and used on coffee breaks. Security was used to seeing him with it.
He turned, allowing the camera to see him seal the large transport container and place it on the sliding conveyor belt for removal from the processing area. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Once the larger transport container was removed and placed on a transport table, he checked his work with a Geiger counter. He attempted to nonchalantly wave the counter by the thermos but wound up being more obvious about it than he would have preferred.
I Will Not Yield Page 6
