Noah Boyd - Last Chance to Die

“Pretty silly, huh? Can you imagine being that paranoid?” Vail walked along a short hallway into a room that looked like it was furnished and set up for meetings. He examined one wall closely, slowly sweeping his light across it. “There,” he said. “Do you see it?”

Kate stepped closer. “A pinhole camera.”

Vail patted the wall the camera was embedded in. “Did you notice how thick this wall is?”

“No.”

He led the way back into the room on the other side, and Kate said, “Now I see what you mean. It’s got to be four feet wide.”

Vail started checking the narrow panels that covered it. He tapped along the wall, looking for an access point. Using both hands, he pushed against each panel. The third one clicked open an inch or so. Behind it was a four-by-six-foot room that had been soundproofed. On a shelf were a series of audio and video recorders.

He could now see the pinhole camera attached to the interior of the wall, a lead running to a video recorder and then to a small monitor, so that the asset being paid off could be carefully watched and recorded as the event was occurring.

On the sidewall was a circuit-breaker box for the entire house. Vail guessed that it had existed before they built the narrow room around it. He turned on the DVD recorder and pressed the Eject button, but the carousel was empty. On top of the monitor was a plastic kitchen bowl that seemed out of place. Inside it was a sealed paper packet. Directly above it was another sprinkler head, presumably to protect the equipment should anything happen. Instead of taking the packet out, Vail picked up the bowl and examined the paper envelope without touching it.

“What’s that?” Kate asked.

Handwritten in the bottom right corner was the name “Ariadne.” Vail bent closer to it and held the flashlight at an angle so he could see the paper around the writing. He looked up at the sprinkler head again. “It’s good news and bad news. See if you can find a plastic bag somewhere, something big enough to carry this packet in.”

Kate wanted to ask Vail what he thought was inside the envelope, but she also wanted to spend as little time as possible inside the house. She hurried to the back, and Vail could hear her opening and closing drawers. She returned and handed him a torn plastic grocery bag. “This is all I could find. What is that?”

He picked up the packet, using the bag to grip it. “Something I suspect I don’t want touching my skin.” He flexed the packet. “It feels like a disc packed in powder.”

“Do you think Calculus left it?”

“I know he did.”

“How?”

Just then they heard a car pull up next to the house. “Go see what that is,” he told her while he carefully wrapped the envelope in the bag. Cautiously, Kate went to the window and peeked outside. “This can’t be good,” she said in a strained whisper.

“Who is it?”

“Best guess is the Russian embassy’s SWAT team. Three guys in cheap suits and bad haircuts, pulling down ski masks and carrying large black automatics.”

Vail reached over to the circuit-breaker box and threw all the switches to the “off” position. “Quick, go turn on all the light switches.”

“What?” Kate asked in an incredulous whisper.

“I’ve cut the power. Go!”

Vail headed in the opposite direction, flipping up wall switches. Just as the house door opened, they both had made it back to the concealed room, and Vail closed the panel door quietly. Kate drew her weapon and eased back the slide far enough to confirm that a round was in the chamber.

Even though the small room was soundproofed, they could hear the three men moving roughly through the house, occasionally calling out to one another in a foreign language. Their footsteps eventually slowed, and they started talking in lower tones. It sounded like they were now just outside the hidden room. Kate knew that if they were from the embassy, they would be aware of the room and would check it before leaving. A set of footsteps started toward them, and Vail wrapped his arms around Kate, pulling her over to the wall where the circuit breakers were located. He held her a little tighter and then flipped all the circuit breakers as fast as he could.

Instantly there was a series of explosions, and fire flashed under the panel door briefly. The men screamed and ran for the front door. Still holding Kate, Vail punched open the panel entrance and said, “Out the back window.” Suddenly the overhead sprinklers kicked on and soaked both of them as they ran to the rear of the house.

Kate reached the window, pulled it open, and climbed out. Vail followed her and closed it behind them. They hurried into the cover of the woods. The night air seemed twice as cold now that their hair and clothing were wet. As soon as they got into the car, Vail started it, revving the engine to boost the temperature. He went to the trunk and retrieved Kate’s sweat suit and then waited outside while she changed. When he finally climbed back in, he was shaking. Kate said, “Tell me that part again about how nothing can go wrong.”

“They got there fifteen minutes after us, so they didn’t come from D.C. That leaves a distinct possibility that Calculus is talking. They must have come here to retrieve the disc.” Vail turned the car around and headed back toward the highway.

“Then why would they come with ski masks and guns drawn?” she asked.

“If Calculus talked, he had to tell them that he’d left a clue for us. Maybe they were just being overly cautious in case we were there.”

“Well, they’ll know we were there now that we tried to blow up the place.”

“Especially when they don’t find the disc,” Vail said. “That’s why we have to get this package processed as quickly as possible. I assume you can have someone from the lab meet us as soon as we get back.”

“What kind of examination are you talking about?”

“Chemical.”

They pulled onto the highway, and Kate adjusted the heater. “Okay, now that we have time, what’s with the packet? ‘Good news and bad.’ What did you mean? And how did you know that Calculus left it?”

“The first clue was the gunpowder in the lights. Since he’s an engineer, Calculus would have known that as an antipersonnel mine it would inflict just minor wounds, because the only projectiles would have been the bulb’s glass, which would have broken into very small fragments.”

“Then why would he rig them?”

“Besides the explosion and the flying glass, what else happened?”

“The fireball from the explosion, which would probably have caught some things on fire if it hadn’t been for the sprinklers.”

“Exactly, the sprinklers. That was his purpose. When I saw the bowl directly under the heads in that hidden room, it didn’t seem right. The ink on the outside of the packet had caused the paper to deteriorate slightly. I think it’s made of water-soluble paper, so when it got wet, it would expose whatever powder is inside to more water. I think his intention was for us to destroy the disc.”

“Why would he direct us to the disc and then want to destroy it?”

“If he was still here to work with us on the list, he would have told us about the booby-trapped lights and the powder. But he put them in place so if the Russians somehow got onto him, we would hopefully beat them to the disc and unwittingly destroy it so they would have no proof against him. And if the Russians got there first, and he didn’t tell them about the lights, they would destroy it.”

“How’s a plastic disc going to be destroyed by water?”

“There’s also the powder. Did you have high-school chemistry?”

“No.”

“I think it’s potassium, which when exposed to water has a violent chemical reaction. It would have turned the disc into liquid plastic. That was the bad news, but since we got it without any damage, that leaves the good news.”