The Merchant’s War

This was getting harder to deal with by the minute, Margaret realized. The woman was clearly close to the end of her tether. She'd put a good face on things at first, but there was more to this than met the eye. "I've seen Erasmus," said Margaret. "He told me about the medicine you procured for him." She watched the Beckstein woman closely: "and he showed me the disc-playing machine. The, ah, DVD player. One miracle might be an accident, but two suggest an interesting pattern. You needn't worry about me mistaking you for a madwoman.

"But you must tell me exactly what has happened to you. Right now, at once, with no dissembling. Otherwise I will not be able to save you..."

* * *

BAM.

Judith Herz tensed unconsciously, steeling herself for the explosion, and crossed her fingers as the four SWAT team officers swung the battering ram back for a second knock. Not that tensing would do any good if there was a bomb in the self-storage room...

"Are you sure this is safe?" asked Rich Wall, fingering his mobile phone like it was a lucky charm.

Herz look a deep breath. "No," she snapped. What do you expect me to say? "According to Mike Fleming, the asshole who sent us on this wild goose chase has a hard-on for claymore mines. That's why-"she gestured at the chalk marks on the cinder block wall the officers were attacking, the heaps of dust from the drills, the fiber-optic camera on its dolly off to one side"-we're going in through the wall."

BAM.

A cloud of dust billowed out. There was a rattle of debris falling from the impact site on the wall they'd started by drilling a quarter-inch hole, then sent a fiber-optic scope through with the delicacy of doctors conducting keyhole cardiac bypass surgery. The black plastic-coated hose had snaked around, bringing grainy gray images to the monitor screen on the console like images from a long-sealed Egyptian royal tomb. The dust lay heavy in the lockup room, as if it hadn't been visited for months or years. Something indistinct and bulky, probably a large oil tank, hulked a couple of feet beyond the hole, blocking the line of sight to the door to the lockup. The caretaker had kicked up a fuss when she'd told him they were going to punch through the wall from the other side-after unceremoniously ejecting the occupants' property-until she'd shown him her FBI card and the warrant the FEMA Sixth Circuit court had signed in their emergency in camera session. (Which the court had granted in a shot, the moment the bench saw the gamma ray spike the roving search truck had registered as it quartered the city, looking for a sleeping horror.) Then he'd clammed up and gone into his cubicle to phone the landlord.

"I think we're gonna need that jack," called one of the cops with the ram. His colleagues laid the heavy metal shaft down while two more cops in orange high-visibility jackets and respirators moved to shovel the rubble aside. "Should be through in a couple more minutes."

Judith glanced at Rich, who grinned humorlessly. "This is your last chance to lake a hike," she suggested.

"Naah." Rich glanced down. He was fidgeting with his phone, as if it was a lucky charm. "Let's face it, I wouldn't get far enough to clear the blast zone, would I?"

Judith suppressed a smile: "That's true." Go on, whistle in the dark. She shivered involuntarily. The guys with the haltering ram didn't know what they were here for: all they knew was that the woman from the FBI headquarters staff wanted into the storage room, and wanted in bad. She'd done the old stony stare and dropped an elliptical hint about Mideast terrorists and fertilizer bombs, enough to keep them on their toes but not enough to make them phone their families and tell them to leave town now. But Rich knew what they were looking for, and so did Bob, who was suiting up in the NIRT truck in the back parking lot along with the rest of his team, and Eric Smith, back in Maryland in a meeting room in Crypto City. "You could always step outside for a last cigarette."

"I'm trying to give up. Last cigarettes, that is." Rich shuffled from foot to foot as two of the cops grunted and manhandled a construction site jack into place beside the blue chalk X on the wall, where it was buckling ominously outwards.

"Okay, one more try," called one of the cops-Sergeant McSweeny, Herz thought-as the ram team picked up their pole and began to work up their momentum.