The guard turned the radio back on. Squawks of confusion crackled from its speaker.
“Goddammit! I can’t see!”
“Bars—”
“Fall back! Fall—”
“—cage—”
“—Back!”
“—shot—”
“Help with Jennings!—”
All the Williams & Crowe people were still inside. Not a single one had emerged.
Alix leaned forward, staring. Realizing what was happening.
In the distance, sirens wailed.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
“Check it out!”
Tank was pointing to one of their distance cams. It gave a wide view of the factory, and now a tricolored cloud was rising fast and huge from it, a billowing stream that kept on roiling.
Moses stared at the rising plume. “Damn! That’s really big.”
“It should be,” Tank said with satisfaction. “Half the factory is a smoke bomb. It was like ten tons of saltpeter.”
Cynthia came up beside him, toweling the workout sweat from her face and neck. “Wow. It’s pretty.”
Moses smiled sadly. “Yeah. It is.”
“Here comes the rest,” Kook said. She pointed at another monitor where more people were carefully approaching the smoking factory. “There’s your girlfriend,” she said.
“My, my.” Adam laughed. “She does look pissed.”
She sure did. Moses watched as Alix approached the building. She was fighting to get close, being held back by her father and some Williams & Crowe goon. Alix looked shocked as she stared up at the smoking building. He thought he could read every emotion on her face. The surprise at all the smoke pouring out. The confusion of trying to figure out what had happened. Smart rich girl trying to figure out why everything had gone sidewise for her.
She looked shocked and pissed, for sure, but he thought he could make out another expression there, too—a glint of tight-lipped admiration as she put the pieces together. Realizing that she’d been played.
Now you see it, now you don’t. Like a magician whipping aside a cloth to reveal the white rabbit where the snowy dove should have been. Moses’s uncle had loved magic almost as much as he’d loved graft. The delight of the switch, the gasp of amazement as someone realized that they’d been fooled, as the world seemed to tilt off its rails and did something that was simply impossible—
“I should have called Guinness Book of World Records!” Tank said. “I’d be famous!”
“You’d be famous in jail,” Kook said fondly.
“How long before the newspeople arrive?” Cynthia asked as she clipped her hair up off her sweaty neck.
“Can’t be long now,” Adam said.
“Hell of a lot better than a press release.”
Kook said, “I still wish we could have gotten into Banks’s computers. Would have loved to see what’s going on behind BSP’s firewall.”
“Take the win,” Cynthia advised. “With that much smoke and everything we rigged inside, we’re on the five o’clock news, for sure.”
“Still…”
“Oh, stop it. We agreed that whichever way things went, it was a win. This isn’t hacking some Russian mafia credit card ring. We’re probably already on the NSA’s radar as it is. As soon as the news crews get there, let’s get this thing triggered and call it a day.”
Smoke continued to rise, a tower of color so big it looked like the city of Hartford was going up. Moses watched the monitor that had Alix in it. She was still staring at the scene that she had helped trigger.
Sorry, girl, he thought. You can’t believe in anything, and you sure can’t trust.
The only thing you could do was test.
Cynthia touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry about Alix,” she said softly. “I sort of thought she’d…” she trailed off.
Moses remembered being brought up to trust. To think that people would do the right thing. His dad had always believed that people would do the right thing and play straight with you if you asked them to. It was another thing his uncle had always scoffed at about his dad.
You know who you can trust? his uncle had once said. Nobody. En-Oh-Body. You trust yourself, and you watch your back, and everything else, you test.
“I saw her coming a mile away,” Moses lied.
25
THEY FOUND THE WILLIAMS & Crowe team in cages.
Every door that the security teams had charged through had turned out to be elaborately booby-trapped. As the last men ran in, the cages clanged down and locked with huge heavy iron latches.
There was no mechanism to open them.
Alix had to stifle her amusement at all the security teams sitting in their cages, sweaty and demoralized. About a million fire and police department people were standing around the cages, scratching their heads and trying to figure what kind of tools they’d need to get the cages open.
Alix remembered Tank standing outside her own cage, inspecting it and saying, “Told you I could figure out welding!”
You sure did, kid, she thought. You sure did.
They’d all known what they were doing. All the way. And she’d helped them pull it off. Moses had played her. Right from the start.
If she thought back about it, she should have seen it coming: Moses’s comments that he didn’t believe in things, he only tested. Saying that he’d poked her dad enough that he thought he knew what he’d do when Moses grabbed his daughter. She’d thought Dad would move heaven and hell to get her back. Moses had banked on his using Williams & Crowe for revenge.
Moses had played her.
Or did you try to play him, and lost? a voice snarked in her head. She’d said she’d help him, and then she’d changed her mind. What would Moses have done if she’d followed through with her promise? What would that have meant to him? What would it have meant to her?
The whole factory smelled like caramel. A byproduct of the burning sugar that the 2.0 crew had used to construct their massive smoke bomb. Alix could construct the chemical reactions in her mind. The sugar, the saltpeter, all of it going up through elaborate, perforated iron tubes that Tank had likely constructed and were still baking with the heat of all that massive smoke bomb burn.
Alix caught sight of her father talking to Lisa through the bars. Death Barbie glanced over at Alix, and Alix thought she could detect her disappointment.
It wasn’t my fault.
Of course, no one was going to come straight out and blame her. It wasn’t like there weren’t screwups galore to go around. Williams & Crowe had completely underestimated 2.0 again. Fire trucks and police cars and hazmat vehicles filled the parking area outside, all of them scrambled to the scene by the insane plume of smoke that had risen over the city.
Lisa was looking pissed, talking into her radio, and listening to whatever it was that was coming back from her bosses as she paced back and forth in her cage. Her squad sat glumly around her, staring out from the bars like gorillas at a zoo exhibit.
Homo securitus, Alix thought. Or maybe, if you were feeling really snarky…
Homo suckerus.
All of a sudden Lisa was hurrying to the bars and calling to the cops. She seemed agitated. A second later Alix saw why. News vans had started pulling up, and camera people were climbing out to survey the scene. Channel 3 already had a crew panning the factory. Blow-dried talking heads started touching up makeup and setting up for shots.