Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

“Were you with him all day? Do you remember?”

“No, I wasn’t. That was a Wednesday and I taught at 10:00.”

He tapped the picture. “And you? Do you know where you were on that Wednesday?” He leaned forward and read the date stamp. “At 12:30 in the afternoon?”

“Hell, I probably slept in.” I took the picture and studied it. The guy was wearing clothes that could have come out of my closet, which proved nothing: jean jacket and blue jeans, white shirt.

“I don’t have boots like that,” I said, not expecting him to be impressed. “Wait, though… I looked it up, and a gun like this costs $2,600 new. I don’t have that kind of money to spend on anything. You can check my bank and credit card records.”

“We have, of course.” He slid over another sheet, with a scanned copy of a receipt. “You paid cash. There’s no record of your having withdrawn that amount, but…” He shrugged.

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” I supplied. “But if this were a publicity stunt, why didn’t I try to get some publicity?”

“I never used that word,” he said. “Many of the people who come through this office have done things for reasons I don’t understand—reasons they don’t understand.”

“So now I’m crazy.”

“That’s a layman’s term, Mr. Daley. Not very useful to us.”

“Who is ‘us’? Are you a shrink as well as an agent?”

He almost smiled. “In fact, I am an ‘analyst,’ but not a psychoanalyst. And all I meant was that perfectly reasonable people do things that are not reasonable—literally not for reason.

“In the absence of further evidence…” He took a business card out of a tray and handed it to me. “I’m afraid Mr. Occam has raised his razor. Do contact us if you have evidence of a law being broken.”

“It’s a sniper weapon, for Christ’s sake! You’re not concerned about a sniper weapon appearing and disappearing?”

“It’s a hunting rifle, a very popular model.” He leaned forward and put the card in my shirt pocket. “It has been returned to your trunk.”

“Along with a bug of some kind, I trust?”

“That’s not my department, Mr. Daley, but I sincerely doubt it. We have a lot of work to do without making more.” He peered into the desk screen. “Do let us know if you have a change of address or phone number. Good day?”

“You think this is some kind of a gag I set up?”

“Your words, Mr. Daley. Do you need help finding your way out?”

“You can’t…” A big black guy in a tight dark suit was walking toward us. “No. We’re outta here.”

“One thing, please,” Kit said in a strained voice. “How can you say for sure that this photo isn’t a fake? Please?”

He picked it up and scowled at it. “Any electronic image could be manufactured from the ground up, Ms. Majors, pixel by pixel.” He tapped the date stamp in the corner, with its bar code. “This part would be almost impossible, though. You would have to know the security protocols of the company that made the camera, just to start.”

“ You could do it.”

“Homeland Security? No, we don’t have any facilities for that—or none that I know of. I suppose some other agency might—but the cost, to make a counterfeit security image that we couldn’t detect? Unless you’re a closet millionaire, or indeed some kind of super spy, no.” The black guy loomed next to him. “Thank you for your concern. You have been good citizens, bringing this to our attention. We’ll keep our eyes open.” His own eyes looked back down into the screen. The black guy’s eyes gestured toward the elevator.

The shimmering oven of the parking lot was momentarily a relief, after that huge tax-funded refrigerator. The asphalt was so hot it felt spongy.

“Do you think that’s it?” Kit said.

“I hope not. I mean, the guys who’re after us must know we’ve been here. That might up the ante.”

“Or they might decide to give up,” she said. “Rather than risk the wrath of James ‘Pepper’ Blackstone.”

“Whatever. I guess we want to drive slowly and leave a trail of bread crumbs.”

We paused in the shade of a tree, incongruously planted in the middle of the lot, and stood on its grass. “Suppose we’re wrong,” I said, “in assuming that your car is bugged.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, how could they have bugged it in Iowa City? They might have followed me to the Hamburger Haven. But there’s no way they could’ve known you’d stop there and drive off with me a few minutes later. Mess with your car in broad daylight. So it’s me they’re following, my body.”

“Or they were at the time,” she said. “They’ve had plenty of time to work on the car since.”

“Yeah. They probably buy bugs by the six-pack.” I suddenly felt nauseated. “What if it is my body? Like they put it in my food and it attached itself to my stomach.”

“Could they do that?”

“I don’t know. They can make them really small.”

“I mean, it would pass on through. Really. If something attached itself to your stomach or intestines, it would make you sick, wouldn’t it?”

I was dangerously close to demonstrating it. “The idea does. But hold it.” An idea was crystallizing. “You wouldn’t do that. You’d hide it in a muscle mass.”

“How could they do that without your knowledge?”

“In the hospital. Not here, but in fucking Germany!” She shook her head slightly, not following me. “When I was in the army—when I was wounded !”

“But that was years ago.”

“See, that’s the mistake I’ve been making. This shit didn’t start a couple of weeks ago—it was set up while I was still in the army. They just didn’t activate it until they needed me.”

“‘They’? You think the army’s behind all this?”

I actually went cold in all the rippling heat. Some ductless gland that had evolved in order to deal with agencies that had three initials. “No. Huh-uh.” I pointed toward the car.

While we walked I asked about her aunt, who was dying of cancer. She made up a sob story that would melt the ice-cold heart of whoever was listening to parking-lot conversations.

As we approached the car I asked her to pop the trunk. “I want to take a look at the rifle,” I whispered.

“They’ll be watching.”

“Probably.” The trunk sprang open and I reached past the rifle box to a tackle box that I knew was full of tools. I selected a pair of pliers and slipped them into my front pocket while I was lifting the clumsy rifle box and struggling to open it.

I set the rifle on top of the box, still hidden to outside eyes. While running my left hand over the stock, I used my right to gently press the magazine release button. I slipped the top round off and then slid the magazine partway back, and returned the rifle to the box. But one round was in my shirt pocket now, and the magazine was loose, not pushed in. Kit looked mystified; she knew I had done something fishy but hadn’t followed it.

I scribbled a note, GUN WON’T WORK, though I was still a step away from that.

When we were up to speed on the highway I took out the cartridge and used the pliers to wiggle the bullet and separate it from the brass casing. While Kit chattered about music I emptied the powder out of the cartridge and rolled the window down and let the breeze blow the grey powder away. Then I reassembled the bullet, tapping it home firmly with the pliers, and put it back in my pocket.

It was an old saboteur’s trick. With the cartridge back in place, the emptied top round in the magazine, the rifle was a passive booby trap. If someone pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on the empty cartridge’s primer, which would make a small explosion—just enough force to drive the bullet partway up the barrel and be stuck. When the next bullet was fired, full power, it would strike the first one, and the gun would blow up in the shooter’s face.