Pop-pop-pop!
I ducked in panic when I heard gunfire. “Someone’s shooting at us!” I lost control of the cables and they both fell to the deck.
Behind me, Martin laughed. “Light bulbs,” he said.
I realized he was right. It was just bulbs bursting. That was a good sign that I was on the right track. I thrust the ends of the cables back to the railing and deck. There were more pops, and then one huge WHUMPF! The cables went dead.
“Generator, I’ll bet,” Martin said. “Remind me never to play Battleship with you.”
Smoke drifted from beneath the deck. Even back where we were, thirty or forty yards away, it burned my nose. I could hear people farther down the pier running toward the ship.
“Well, that’s not going to look too good for Bowdler,” Martin said.
“Nope. And we’re just getting warmed up.” I headed back to the street.
PHONE CONVERSATI ON BETWEEN
MAJOR BOWDLER AND A FREELANCE
OPERATIVE KNOWN ONLY
AS “SANTEE”
SANTEE: The targets are still in Philadelphia.
BOWDLER: You’ve located them?
SANTEE: Negative. Two were picked up by a red-light camera thirty minutes ago.
BOWDLER: On foot?
SANTEE: Exiting a bus.
BOWDLER: Good work. Tighten the noose.
SANTEE: Consider it done.
night missions
“NEXT?” MARTIN ASKED.
“Office building,” I told him. “Bowdler has a system set up in an employee interview room at Tichborne and Fawkes. It records Kirlian images of people who apply for jobs. They’re going to take people who get caught stealing from the company or cheating or anything, and compare their scans to everyone else’s, so they can figure out ahead of time who might be dishonest.”
Martin shrugged. “I could tell them that. So could Cheater. Your average five-year-old can spot a crook, for that matter. But this scanning stuff is just nonsense.”
“Yeah. And the scanner is about to malfunction big time.”
We managed to get a cab and took it over to the building, which wasn’t near any of the bus routes. It was a little after ten when we got there. The place was closed. I looked through the front doors and spotted a numeric keypad mounted on the wall. A tiny red light flashed on its upper right corner. For once, I was happy to see an alarm.
“Let’s go over here.” I headed across the street and moved behind a parked van.
“What’s the plan?” Martin asked.
“I saw this in a movie,” I told him. As we hunched behind the van, I unlocked the door to the building and pulled it open. Then I pulled it closed and locked it. I didn’t hear anything, but I figured an alarm was going off somewhere.
Two minutes later, a car from a private security force came screeching up to the curb. The guard checked the door. Then he unlocked it and walked inside. After he fiddled with the alarm, he walked down the hallway. About ten minutes later, he came back out, shaking his head. He locked the door and left.
I waited a couple minutes and set off the alarm again. It took three more tries before the guard didn’t bother going down the hall. Five minutes after he left, I did it again. But this time, we went inside before I re-locked the door. We waited in a corridor until we heard the guard come in and turn off the alarm.
We searched for half an hour before we found the scanning gear. It was set up in a room with a two-way mirror—the kind they used for police line-ups—and looked like a large, modified movie camera. There was a Psibertronix logo on the side. According to the documents I’d read, Bowdler had charged Tichborne and Fawkes $340,000 for the equipment alone, along with all sorts of charges for analyzing the data. The company had probably billed the government at least twice that much.
“Fire?” Martin asked.
I shook my head. “Nope. We need variety. Maybe if it exploded.”
“Got bombs?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Then how are you going to do that?”
Good question. Like most guys, I wasn’t unfamiliar with things that went boom. I’d played around with firecrackers, and tried a couple experiments that I was lucky to have survived. But I didn’t think I could whip up a batch of gunpowder right now.
“It doesn’t actually have to explode,” I said. “It just has to look like it. Stand back.” I pushed Martin into the hallway. Then I turned toward the scanner and started pulling small pieces off it and flinging them into the walls, ceiling, and floor. By the time I was done with the scanner, it looked like a bomb had gone off inside of it.
I stood there, panting. I could feel my pulse thudding in my veins.
“Man, remind me never to get on your bad side,” Martin said. “And I thought I had anger issues.”