CHAPTER 22

Agent Kearns had retired to the kitchenette of his double‑ wide mobile home to make breakfast. This left Danny Bailey sitting by himself in the parlor in his borrowed pajamas with a wicked sleep hangover, an ugly off‑ white cat, and a full‑ scale model of a small atomic bomb.

The Sunday news from some distant city lay folded at the far end of the couch. It would have been nice to see some headlines but the paper was a little too close to the cat to be safely retrieved.

“So you’ve never been to Winnemucca, you said? ” Kearns called through the narrow doorway.

Again with the frickin small talk.

“No, can you believe that? ” Danny said. He was looking over the elaborate cylindrical device in its heavy wooden cradle on the coffee table. “Never knew what I was missing. ”

“If you think this burg is dead, wait until you see where we’re going to meet these guys tonight. This whole part of Nevada was voted the official armpit of America by the Washington Post a couple of years ago. ”

“Sounds like a hoot. Hey, Stuart? ”

“Yeah? ”

“I don’t want to come off like a puss, but is this bomb‑ looking thing, like, radioactive? ”

“Nah, not too much. ” Kearns returned with their coffee and sat in a nearby chair. “The core’s inert; it’s just a big ball of lead. There’s some depleted uranium under the lining, so it’ll set off a Geiger counter in case anybody checks. Here, look. ” He flipped a switch on a boxy yellow gadget on the table and brought its wand closer to an open access panel at the fore end of the model. The meter on the instrument twitched and a rapid clicking from its speaker ramped up to a loud, raspy buzz as the tip of the wand touched an inner metal housing. “Sure sounds hot enough though, doesn’t it? ”

“But it’s not dangerous. ”

“No, but I wouldn’t keep it under my bed at night. ”

“And these dudes we’re going to see, the boys who want to buy this thing, why would they ever believe that a private citizen could get his hands on a working nuclear weapon? ”

“Okay, good, we should talk about this. Do you remember about a year ago, there was a story in the news about a live cruise missile that went missing? ”

“Of course I do. The Barksdale thing‑ I did a whole week of shows on that. Somebody screwed up and loaded real warheads instead of dummies onto a B‑ 52 in North Dakota. Six nukes left the base, but only five showed up in Louisiana. ”

“Right, ” Kearns said. “Now we both know that something like that can’t just happen, not as an accident anyway. It’s like the Secret Service accidentally putting the president into the wrong car and then nobody missing him until noon the next day. It’s impossible; there are way too many safeguards in place. Unless, of course, it was an inside job.

“So my online personality is a guy with tons of deep connections from my years with the FBI. About seven years ago I finally got disgusted with the whole crooked government, slipped off the reservation, and disappeared into my own version of the Witness Protection Program. My cover story was that, to get this bomb, I made friends with the right two people on those munitions crews through my website, one at Minot Air Force Base and one at the destination. They fudged the orders and arranged that flight, then helped me get the guts of one of those warheads onto a truck and on its way out of Barksdale half a day before anybody even knew it was missing. ”

“So you’re not trying to claim you built this from scratch, like in your backyard workshop. ”

“No, hell no, of course not. Just the mount and the housing, and I hooked up some of the electronics; that’s all I had to put together here. The warhead itself was intact. ”

Danny leaned forward and ran a fingertip along one of the smoother welds. “I’ve gotta hand it to you. It looks pretty bad‑ ass. ”

“Yeah, it does, ” Kearns said, as he stowed the Geiger counter in a gym bag next to the couch, “if I do say so myself. ”

“And how much of that’s actually true? ”

“How much of what is actually true? ”

“What you just said. That whole Barksdale story. ”

Kearns didn’t answer right away. He zipped up the bag on the floor and then sat back in his chair, frowning. “What is this, 60 Minutes all of a sudden? ”

“No, man, we’re just talking‑ ”

“I’m not here to fill in the blanks for your next conspiracy video. ”

“I’m just trying to get our story straight. ”

“Okay, ” Kearns said. “But what’s true or not true about what I just said isn’t part of the story you’ve got to get straight. ”

“Fine, okay, sorry. It just sounded so believable. This is all pretty new to me, you know, and I’m still a little groggy this morning. I haven’t slept for twelve hours like that in twenty years. ”

The other man continued to study him, as if he felt he might have made a slip and was still assessing its severity. But after a few seconds he nodded, seemed to ease down a bit, and pulled the reluctant, rumpled cat a little closer and rubbed its head.

“Yeah, okay, ” Kearns said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get my dander up. Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid in my old age. I’ve been told in the past I’ve got some issues. ”

“Hey, pal, who doesn’t, right? ”

“You said it. ”

The microwave in the other room beeped at the end of its heating cycle.

“So, ” Danny said, rubbing his hands together, “what’s to eat? ”

Agent Kearns brought in some toast and a crusty tub of margarine along with some scrambled eggs and ham from a can. The meat was spongy and slick and the eggs tasted like survival food, but with enough salt and pepper it all became passable enough.

“I only asked what I asked before, ” Danny said, “because I would have thought you guys had all kinds of labs and engineers back at headquarters that would have built a model like this for an undercover operation. You know, so someone like you wouldn’t have to bother with any of it yourself. ”

“Yeah, they do, but these last few years I’ve gotten accustomed to working alone. The less contact you make when you’re undercover, the safer it is. Hell, I’ve been out in the cold so long on this one, as far as I know only one guy inside even knows I’m still on the payroll. ”

“Wow, you must really trust that guy. ”

Kearns bent and slipped a snubnose revolver from his ankle holster, matter‑ of‑ factly, as if it had been just a pebble stuck in his shoe. He swung out the cylinder and spun it with the flat of his hand, flicked it back into place, laid the gun on his side of the table, and then picked up his plate to resume his breakfast. You’d almost think all this had nothing to do with the subject at hand.

“Sure, kid, ” Kearns said. “I trust everybody. ”

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