Ted Bell - Tsar

“Gone green, huh, warden? All-natural sponges?”

He smiled. “Lethal injection is much more humane, as you’ll see down the hall in a few minutes,” the warden said, glancing up at the clock, eager to move on.

“Humane, huh? I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, warden, some of these animals you got sitting on Death Row don’t deserve humane.”

“Well, there is that,” he said, coughing into his fist.

Strelnikov got to his feet.

“Anyway, I won’t be sticking around for Stumpy’s send-off, warden. I’m only here to make a delivery from my employers and your benefactors.”

Paddy reached down and picked up the alligator case. Then he walked around the desk and placed it right in front of Warden Garmadge.

“Our organization is very grateful for your help over the years and especially your work with the governor in expediting tonight’s main event, warden. The management asked me to personally show their appreciation with this little memento.”

“Beautiful hide, absolutely gorgeous.” He was feeling up that case as if he had a raging hard-on under the desk.

“Isn’t it?” Paddy said. “Genuine alligator. Go ahead, open her up, warden.”

“This is for me? What the heck…”

The guy’s fingers were trembling as he twisted the gold-plated clasp on the top and finally pulled the case open. The case was lined in black velvet. The object resting inside caught the light and sent silvery shimmers across the walls and ceiling. Garmadge sat back and stared.

“Omigod.”

“Yeah. Something else, ain’t it? Here, let me remove it and place it on the desk for you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a computer, warden. The Zeta. The Platinum Edition, by the way.”

“You’re kidding me. Looks like a sculpture of a brain or something.”

“That’s the idea. It’s our most popular design. You’ve seen the ads. ‘Zeta, the last word in computers.’ Get it?”

“No.”

“Zeta’s the last word in the Greek alphabet, I understand, but what the fuck. Some marketing bullshit. Kids have nicknamed it the Wizard or the Wiz, for short. See, the cord pulls out of the base of the brain stem. Let me plug it in for you, and I’ll show you how it works.”

“Where’s the keyboard?” the warden asked.

“Wherever you want it,” Paddy said. “Watch.”

Strelnikov found an outlet and plugged in the silvery machine. A small hidden lamp in the frontal lobe projected a virtual keypad onto the warden’s desktop.

“Holy smoke,” the guy said, tapping his fingers on the nonexistent keyboard.

“Hit enter,” Paddy said. “And there you go, you see the screen? It’s a holographic image. See? Kinda floats in the air above the brain.”

The Zeta machine was a piece of work, all right. From the supernaturally brilliant mind of Paddy’s ultimate employer, a very reclusive Russian multibillionaire who didn’t even have a name. Less expensive editions of the Wiz (with hardware made of mirror-polished aluminum, not platinum) would retail for about sixty bucks worldwide. Whole countries were already back-ordered for millions of these machines. India alone had ordered 10 million units at a discount price of fifty bucks. You didn’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure the margins, how much that did for the company’s bottom line.

“It’s engraved,” Paddy said. “Right here. ‘To Warden Warren Garmadge, with everlasting gratitude.’”

“The most fantastic-looking thing I’ve ever seen,” the warden said, stroking the sculpted brain’s polished surface.

“Yeah, well, the quesos grandes I work for can be very generous when people see things their way. In your case, it’s keeping these wild animals caged up. And taking a personal interest in Mr. Stump’s going-away party. Nice meeting you, warden. I’m going to take off now. Sorry to miss the big bang tonight.”

“Will you give your employer my deepest thanks when you see him?”

“See him?” Paddy laughed. “Nobody sees the big man. Nobody even knows his name.”

“Why not?”

“He’s the guy behind the curtain, warden. Like in that old movie, The Wizard of Oz? The boss of our operation? He’s the friggin’ Wizard himself.”

PADDY DROVE SLOWLY through the crowd gathered outside the prison gates. It seemed to have grown larger during the short time he’d been inside. The snow had let up some, now it was just cold, and hundreds of people were holding candles aloft, chanting some fruitcake-brotherly-love-a-weem-away song he couldn’t hear the words to because he had the windows up and the radio on.

WKKO Chicago was still on the air, and the airy-fairy tree huggers and Stumpy supporters were still calling in, some of them wailing in despair as the final minutes approached. He looked into the rearview mirror and carefully peeled off his walrus mustache and the bushy eyebrows. He left the white wig atop his bald head, thinking it wasn’t half so bad-looking as most of his wigs.

The show’s host, the hyperkinetic night owl Greg Noack, was going back and forth to a WKKO reporter he had standing with the crowd at the gate, and now Paddy could hear the song. It was “We Shall Overcome,” which Paddy thought was a slightly weird choice, since Stumpy was pure white trailer trash, not even a poor black dude who needed to overcome anything. But who could tell anymore what was correct or incorrect with these fruitcakes. In a country where “Merry Christmas” had replaced the F word as a big no-no, who could figure?

And Paddy wasn’t even a Baptist, f’crissakes. He was Russian Orthodox!

Then Noack broke in all excited and said there was breaking news coming out of Bismarck, and they were going live to their man Willis Lowry, standing with the press corps just outside the governor’s office on the capitol steps.

Lowry said, “In an amazing turn of events, Channel Five News has just learned that the governor has issued a last-minute stay of execution for Charles Edward Stump. Everyone here at the capitol is stunned at the news, because as late as eight o’clock this evening, the governor’s office was insisting there was no chance of a pardon. But now we’ve learned that-”

“Fuck me,” Strelnikov said, and turned off the radio. He reached over and grabbed his cell phone from the seat beside him. Flipping it open, he speed-dialed a number in New York.

“You watching TV? You believe this shit?” he asked Ruko, the guy who answered. “The asshole governor just pardoned the Stump. Hello?”

“Tell me you made the warden’s delivery,” the voice at the other end said.

“Done.”

“Good. Do what you gotta do, Beef.”

Because of his size and muscular build, all the boys in the old neighborhood had nicknamed him All-Beef Paddy. Pretty funny, right? Not.

The line went dead.

Paddy looked in his rearview. He could still see the prison back there, searchlights lighting up the sky. He pulled over onto the shoulder and set the emergency brake.

From his inside pocket, Strelnikov withdrew a small black radio transmitter. A tiny green light was illuminated. Paddy pushed one button, and the light turned red. Then he pushed a second button and held it down for three seconds. A signal went from his black box to a company Comsat satellite orbiting high above central North America.

The whole world lit up behind him, and a second or two later, the shockwave of the massive explosion rocked his rented Mustang nearly off its wheels.

Wing Block D, the toady warden, and all of the other illustrious doomed inhabitants no longer existed. It had been reduced to a pile of rubble by eight extraordinarily powerful ounces of Hexagon-based explosives carefully molded inside the hard drive of the Wizard computer Paddy had recently placed on Warden Garmadge’s desk.